France's ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy has supplied judges probing illegal campaign financing claims with his 2007 diary to prove he did not receive funds, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Magistrates are investigating claims that staff for Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the L'Oreal cosmetics empire and France's richest woman, handed over envelopes stuffed with cash to Sarkozy aides to finance his 2007 campaign.

Sarkozy, who has denied any wrongdoing and whose presidential immunity from prosecution expired on Friday, supplied the diary to judges in Bordeaux to disprove claims from witnesses that he attended meetings in the Bettencourt household, newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche reported.

Tanks are designed to do many things: to shoot, to run unstoppably over fields, to intimidate the enemy; in Russia, they are also designed to dance.

Russia marshalled five of them last week to perform in a "tank ballet", humbly entitled Invincible and Legendaryand choreographed by Andrei Melanin of the Bolshoi Theatre. As one of the main attractions at a new annual arms fare designed to boost Russia's standing in the global arms trade, they swayed and waved their gun turrets like limbs to the thumping beat of a Carmen aria souped up on techno .

President Vladimir Putin said on Monday Russian arms export deliveries for the first six months of 2012 had reached over $6.5bn (£4.1bn), a 14% increase on the same period last year. That figure put Russia on track to beat last year's record-breaking total sales of $13.2bn, analysts said.

BRUSSELS - Just days after being hailed as solved, the EU decades-long quest for a single patent hit an unexpected snag on Monday evening when MEPs postponed a vote on the draft patent claiming member states had "emasculated" the proposal.

Eurodeputies are up in arms about a late-minute deal - struck at last week's EU summit - with France, Germany and the UK on where to house the patent court.

In a typical compromise - after all sides refused to back down - each country received a slice of the host duties. But it was the concession to British leader David Cameron, reducing the competence of the European Court of Justice in patent litigation matters, that has caused the outrage.

"If Council is working to delete articles 6-8, it would emasculate the proposal," said German centre-right deputy Klaus-Heiner Lehne, head of the legal affairs committee.

"We want clear confirmation that these three key articles are to be deleted. If so, this will go straight to the European Court of Justice as a 'crash test' case."

European Commissioner Michel Barnier proposed today (3 July) new rules to dismantle shoddy practices amongst investment and insurance brokers in the financial sector, another building block in the EU's implementation of the global financial regulatory reform agreed by the G20.

The package of measures is designed to tackle low consumer confidence in financial products resulting from lack of transparency and conflicts of interest amongst salesmen, who sometimes sell inappropriate products to clients.

The new regulation would demand finance retailers to publish key information documents (KIDs) when selling complex packaged retail investment products (PRIPS) directly to the public.

New changes to the Insurance Mediation Directive will require insurance sellers to provide clearer information about the products they sell and be up front about any third party payments they receive - which can reveal conflicts of interest. That is supposed to protect consumers from fraud, no matter who sells them the products.

Consumer protection in the investment funds market will also be protected by tightening of the Undertakings for Collective Investments in Transferable Securities (UCITS) Directive.

Spain needs a bailout of its banking sector and it needs it to be done well. What happened three weeks ago was such a disaster that it made things worse. The agreement coming out of the recent summit looks more like a proper rescue for banks facing problems: risks are shared and not just assumed by the Spanish government alone. But that doesn't solve the problem. I also don't think that a sovereign bailout is the answer -- you just have to look at what is happening in Greece and Ireland, where there is not even the hint of a recovery. I don't even think there is enough money for a Greek-style rescue for Spain. What Spain needs is a change in European macro-economic policy, and for the ECB to purchase bonds to reduce its yields. Spain is not "come and rescue us" but rather it needs a change in monetary policy.

IMF chief says rate cuts help some but not other, while asset purchases would have overall more effect; eurozone producer prices drop 0.5% in May, bringing the annual rate to 2.3%; data are seen as supporting an ECB rate cut tomorrow; the ECB has capped use of government guaranteed bonds as collateral; Mario Monti seeks to impose more austerity in Italy through a comprehensive spending review; in an attempt to make up, Monti says he totally agrees with Angela Merkel on virtually everything; the CSU threatens Merkel that it may not support her latest euro concessions, and threatened to leave the coalition; the Dutch say ESM equity injections into banks may require treaty change; after the June 17 elections, deposits have returned to Greek banks; Ireland to test capital markets with €500m short term bills; Portugal plans to sell €3.75bn in longish bills in third quarter; Finland to push for collaterals against bank loans; French PM Jean-Marc Ayrault revises French growth further down; El Pais says French and Italian banks may also need large capital injections if the eurozone crisis were to deteriorate further; S&P says summit deal may have been a breakthrough, but implementation risks are significant; Paolo Manasse says price-fixing deals must have unlimited resources to work; FT Alphaville says bond purchases will never even get off the ground; Amartya Sen, meanwhile, criticises the intellectual confusion between austerity and reform in the eurozone.