Plans to reform the House of Lords are being abandoned after Conservatives "broke the coalition contract", Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has announced.

Agreement on an elected Lords could not be reached with Tory opponents, he said, and the plans would be shelved rather than face a "slow death".

As a result, he said Lib Dem MPs could not now support Conservative-driven changes to Commons boundaries in 2015.

Labour said the Lords climbdown was a "humiliation" for the coalition.

Conservative politician and novelist Louise Mensch is to stand down as an MP, the party has announced.

The MP for Corby is moving to New York with her three children to be with her husband of a year, Peter Mensch, who is manager of rock band Metallica.

Her decision to quit will trigger a by-election in the Northamptonshire constituency, a marginal seat.

Before entering politics she made her name as a best-selling chick-lit author, under her maiden name Bagshawe.

A graduate has lost her legal challenge to a government scheme which she says forces people to work without pay.

Cait Reilly, a University of Birmingham geology graduate, had argued that making her work unpaid at a Poundland store for two weeks or risk losing her benefits was a breach of human rights.

The scheme was ruled lawful by the High Court, but letters setting out possible sanctions should be clearer, it said.

The government said its letters were clear and would contest that finding

Italy needs moral support from Germany but not its cash, Prime Minister Mario Monti said in an interview published on Sunday as German conservatives renewed calls for Greece to leave the euro zone.

The Italian leader also told weekly magazine Der Spiegel that he was concerned about growing anti-euro, anti-German and anti-European Union sentiment in the parliament in Rome.

The German government has resisted calls from Italy and struggling countries to introduce common euro zone bonds or take other action to help alleviate the bloc's sovereign debt crisis, saying it would remove pressure to enact painful reforms.

On Sunday, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative alliance, Bavaria's finance minister Markus Soeder, said Greece would leave the euro zone by the end of 2012.

AFP - Romanian Interior Minister Ioan Rus resigned Monday, citing "unacceptable" pressures amid controversy over his ministry's organisation of an impeachment referendum against president Traian Basescu.

..."We have been subjected to multiple forms of pressure, discussions, and criticism, coming from Romanian political figures from Traian Basescu to Crin Antonescu," he said.

...Antonescu, who took over as interim president after Basescu was suspended last month, is a leading figure in the USL, which contested the accuracy of electoral registers after the referendum failed to meet the 50-percent turnout threshold required to oust arch-rival Basescu.

Romania's Constitutional Court last week delayed its ruling on the validity of the impeachment referendum, which has been sharply criticised by the European Union and the United States.

The court asked the government to update the lists of eligible voters, saying "contradictory data from state institutions" had forced it to delay its decision to August 31.

Athens police staged a mass sweep of undocumented migrants over the weekend, questioning some 6,000 people and pledging to deport nearly 1,600. A conservative government minister described the country's influx of foreign nationals as "an invasion".

You need a diversion. One solidifying the framing of the fascists...

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Turkey's top military council on Saturday ordered the retirement of dozens of generals and admirals who are currently being held on charges of coup plotting, the army announced on its website.

Fifty-five generals and admirals are required to retire due to a lack of vacancies in their positions, and one admiral due to an age limit as of September 1, the army said in an online statement.

Among them were 40 generals and admirals in detention in connection with several probes, including the so-called Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases into alleged plots to topple the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reported local media.

The jailed generals had been awaiting promotion after it was suspended at last year's meeting. But the military council's statement said the one-year waiting period for the generals had expired, ordering their retirement instead.

The latest announcement comes as the Supreme Military Council (YAS) began its meeting on Wednesday to discuss promotions and dismissals within the army. The decisions were made public Saturday after being approved by the president.

The surveillance and blacklisting of thousands of workers, including some suspected by construction companies of being left-wing troublemakers, should be immediately investigated by the privacy watchdog, it was urged last night.

More than 40 major firms referred to the secret database, which listed thousands of people's details, including their involvement in union activity, before hiring staff. Workers who were on the list allege they were deprived of their livelihoods as a result of their inclusion, with supporters claiming their human rights have been breached.

Liberty has written to the Information Commissioner, Sir Christopher Graham, accusing him of inaction over a privacy scandal that it compares to phone hacking. Liberty is threatening to go to court to force him to investigate the case.

In the 1860s, one of the established columnists working for the New York Tribune, a certain Karl Marx, wrote that Japan was "the only truly feudal state, with all of its irrationalities and divisions" (of power). Today the European Union is reminiscent of this Japan, with Angela Merkel in the role of shogun.

...

The Japanese elite spent a lot time at Edo (Tokyo/Brussels), spending the bulk of tax revenues on their expenses. The man in the street had absolutely no interest in the Emperor or the shogun (the leaders in Brussels). So in his column for the New York Tribune, Karl Marx expressed what was, at the time, a widespread disdain for Japan: a backward country whose political organisation was too fragmented to enable it to resolve its problems.

...

Today Europe is in the throes of a similar crisis. Southern European countries have yet to adapt their economies to  the reality of an industrialised China. Worse still, they have been caught in the trap of a currency that has enabled them to borrow cheaply, but which has also pushed up the price of the goods they produce.

...

Thereafter, Brussels will have to punish the provinces, which are still caught in the noose of the euro. Blinded by its fixation on the most recent cataclysm in living memory, that is to say on WWII, the EU sells the European project as a peace plan. However, in so doing it conveniently ignores a significant number of conflicts that began as protests against the decrees of a central power, for example the Thirty Years' War [1618-1648].