The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

Haw: why I won't ballot to see Blair
Brian Haw is Britain's most indefatigable anti-war campaigner. For eight and a half years he has lived in a tent in Parliament Square.

Soon the man who responsible for taking the country to war will appear in front of the Iraq Inquiry. But Haw is not interested in seeing Tony Blair.

"I think ad nauseum the world and the country has seen enough of Blair. The problem is he speaks to a certain script. He won't be asked anything he feels too uncomfortable with. It's a joke. I want to ask him questions, real questions."

Mr Haw, 60, is a divorced father of seven who has been camped outside Westminster since June 2002. He remains unmoved the former prime minister will soon be questioned about the war just across the road from his protest.

"The Inquiry is a farce, it is an exercise for the British establishment's ego" he says. "He should be at the Hague."

Irish police have released a man held over an explosives find, after Slovakian authorities admitted planting them in his luggage.

The explosive was one of eight pieces of contraband placed with unsuspecting passengers at Bratislava Airport last weekend, broadcaster RTE reported.

The 49-year-old unwittingly brought the material into Dublin when he returned from his Christmas holidays.

Iceland's president has refused to sign a controversial bill to repay $5bn (£3.1bn) to the UK and the Netherlands.

President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson said he would instead hold a referendum on the bill, following public protests.

The legislation was designed to compensate governments forced to bail out their savers with Icesave accounts following Iceland's banking collapse.

Opponents argue the terms of the payments will unfairly hurt Iceland and its recovery from economic crisis.

Boris "Bobbie" Tsankov, a prominent crime journalist who reported on the mafia in Bulgaria, has been killed by gunmen in the capital, Sofia.

The 30-year-old, who was also a popular radio host, was attacked on a crowded street in the city centre, police said.

Two men who were with him were also shot and critically wounded, before the gunmen escaped on foot.

In 2008, Georgi Stoev, the author of several books on Bulgarian organised crime, was killed in a similar attack.

Months later, Bulgaria lost access to more than 500m euros (£430m) of EU funding for failing to deal with corruption and organised crime

The EU will host talks on Thursday on the use of body scanners at airports, in response to the Christmas Day attempt to blow up a US-bound jet.

The European Commission will host the Brussels talks with aviation security experts from the EU member states.

The Commission says the 27 member states are free to use body scanners, provided the security checks do not contradict national or EU legislation.

The Netherlands and UK are introducing them for US-bound flights.

The Commission withdrew a draft EU regulation on body scanners in 2008, following objections from the European Parliament.

MEPs raised concerns about passengers' privacy and health, so the Commission decided that further technical analysis was required before EU-wide rules could be adopted.

Spain has complained to Cuba about its refusal to let a Spanish Euro MP visit the island - but Madrid says this will not obstruct efforts to improve ties.

Socialist MEP Luis Yanez was denied entry at the weekend. He said it was a private trip, but admitted he had plans to meet pro-democracy activists.

Spain summoned Cuba's ambassador on Tuesday and expressed its dismay.

But Spain - currently holding the EU presidency - said it would still try to get the EU to ease its stance on Cuba

Visitors to Spain's EU presidency website have been greeted by an image of hapless fictional character Mr Bean instead of Spain's Socialist leader.

An unidentified hacker briefly hijacked the site on Monday, replacing Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero with that of a bumbling comedy buffoon.

In Spain, the similarity between Mr Zapatero and the Mr Bean actor Rowan Atkinson, is a long-standing joke.

The government said the site itself, www.eu2010.es, had not been attacked.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, today ruled out doing any "backroom deals" with Labour or the Tories about a coalition before the general election.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that he and the other party leaders ought to let the voters say what they wanted at the election.

"I'm not a kingmaker ... The people are the kingmakers," he said.

A group of Israeli military officers have delayed an official visit to Britain over fears they could be arrested on war crimes charges.

Danny Ayalon, Israel's deputy foreign minister, said on Tuesday that four officers invited to the UK by the British army would not be travelling "as we do not have a 100 per cent guarantee that they will not become objects of criminal lawsuits".

The officers, who hold ranks from major to colonel, are the latest in a string of Israeli politicians and military officials to call off travel to Britain due to fears over possible legal action.

Several European governments are trying to resell millions of doses of swine flu vaccine. So was the threat exaggerated after all? The press takes the authorities to task.

After the panic, the polemics. Now that the H1N1 flu looks to be less serious - and Europeans less keen on vaccination - than expected, several governments are looking for a way to unload surplus stocks of vaccine. On 7 January, the health ministers of the German Länder will begin negotiating with GlaxoSmithKline labs to cancel half the German government's order for 50 million doses all told. To date only 10% of the country's population has been vaccinated. According to the Tagesspiegel, Berlin is thinking of unloading surplus stocks on countries like Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Ukraine and Turkey.

Spain has launched a series of ambitious goals for its six-month leadership of the European Union, but faces hurdles at home and in Brussels if it is to make its mark on the first presidency of post-Lisbon treaty era.

There has already been private dismay in Madrid that it will be the first rotating presidency to play second fiddle to the new permanent EU president set up by Lisbon, Herman Van Rompuy, and to the new High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Lady Ashton.

These two will chair EU summits rather than José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister, or Miguel Angel Moratinos, the foreign minister. Nonetheless, Madrid is attempting to seize the agenda from the fledging eurocrats.

It wants to re-start the Middle East peace process with a push for a Palestinian state, and is promoting a renewed dialogue between the EU and Cuba, as well as a strengthened Mediterranean Union, the partnership that France launched during its presidency last year. There will also be a summit with Morocco.

Rumours abound this evening that another Cabinet minister is set to resign over Gordon Brown's leadership. That minister is Tessa Jowell.

But the anti-Brown plotters will be disappointed to learn that she has been on the phone tonight reassuring Downing Street that she is now staying, after all. "Tessa is in a good place with Gordon right now," a well-placed source tells me.

So now a real comedian, Alan Davies, has hit out at a part-time aspirant comedian, Boris Johnson, over the London Mayor's extraordinary transport fare hikes, first reported here a few weeks ago. The eagle-eyed Paul Waugh of the London Evening Standard has highlighted Davies's outraged online messages, in which he calls Johnson a "fraud".

Could the tide be turning against this most populist of politicians? Certainly, the Government hopes so. As I exclusively reported on NS.com last month (and you can see full details of the Tube fare increases there), Labour party strategists are determined to step up scrutiny of the Mayor and portray his actions in London as a blue-print for Tory priorities.

Minister Celso de Mello, of the Supreme Court, confirmed the decision that authorized federal courts to deliver justice to Russia which are documents and equipment of Boris Abramovich Berezovsky seized in Brazil in 2006.

A partner of Media Sports Investment (MSI) in the Sport Club Corinthians Paulista 2004 to 2007, Boris Berezovsky is accused of the crimes of money laundering and conspiracy in Brazil which is also being investigated in Russia.

Boris Berezovsky's defense attorney filed a Habeas Corpus in the Supreme Court to try to prevent the delivery of the documents and computers seized from the businessman to Russian authorities. The order to deliver the documents and equipment came from Judge Fausto de Sanctis, of the 6th Federal Vara of São Paulo, at the behest of the Prosecutor of the Russian Federation.

The laptop and documents were seized in 2005 in San Paolo by Brazilian authorities. Berezovsky was detained briefly and then released at the time. Two years later in July 2007, Berezovsky was indicted for money laundering in Brazil.

Two ex-cabinet ministers are calling for a secret ballot on Gordon Brown's leadership, the BBC understands.

Former health secretary Patricia Hewitt and former defence secretary Geoff Hoon have texted MPs urging a ballot, it is understood.

It follows rumours that critics of Mr Brown were trying to persuade ministers to resign in a bid to force him out

A government scheme that gives households in England £400 off the cost of a new boiler has been launched.

The boiler scrappage scheme was announced in the pre-Budget report last month.

According to the government it will help households cut their energy bills, reduce CO2 emissions and support thousands of jobs.

Up to 125,000 households in England could benefit from the scheme, which is costing the government £50m.

People who own their homes or landlords who rent homes are eligible, but social landlords, housing associations and boiler installers are not.

There are about 3.5 million homes in England with the least efficient types of boilers.

Cambridge University is considering issuing bonds of up to £300m for the first time in its 800-year history.

The university said funds raised would be used for building projects.

A trend for issuing bonds has already been set in the United States, where Ivy League universities use the money markets to raise cash.

A bond is a certificate of debt where issuers guarantee to pay the lender the sum back, plus interest, by a specific date in the future.

The proposal to raise money from bonds follows warnings of a tough financial climate for universities.

Workers at two Chilean mines owned by Codelco, the state-controlled copper mining giant, have gone on strike demanding higher wages and better work benefits.

The strike, which helped send copper prices to a 17-month high, is expected to be short-lived as workers are due to vote on a revised offer from the company on Tuesday and most appear to favour a deal.

"Spirits have calmed and I think that tomorrow it is very probable the offer will be approved," said Hector Milla, a union leader.

About a third of the unionised workers at the Chuquicamata and Mina Sur mines refused to turn up for work on Monday

Spain is groaning under a glut of ham after Christmas sales of one its most celebrated products plummeted with a crash in demand for traditional gift hampers.

The nation's top hams - the world-renowned jamon Iberico - were traditionally given away in corporate gift hampers to employees and favoured clients but the practice greatly diminished this season as companies struggle to survive the recession.

The industry estimate sales of the traditional cured leg of Iberian pig could be down as much as 20 per cent during the festive season, a period which usually accounts for more than 60 per cent of annual revenue for ham producers.

BARANCHINSKY, Russia -- For a few weeks this winter, this town wobbled on the edge of nonexistence.

Workers were showing up every morning at Baranchinsky's lone factory, even though many had received their tiny salaries only once in the last 16 months. But then the local utilities cut off the factory's electricity and heat over unpaid debts. Temperatures were dropping to 15 degrees below zero, and exterior pipes began to burst. A few more days and the factory would be damaged beyond repair.

The workers responded by putting on sweaters and showing up for work. Shop managers told them to go home -- there were barely any orders to fill, anyway. But many refused, said Svetlana I. Yelpanova, president of the factory's trade union.

Overall, personal bankruptcy filings hit 1.41 million last year, up 32% from 2008, according to the National Bankruptcy Research Center ...

The most remarkable statement I heard at the American Economics Association meeting over the past few days came from an astute observer - not an economist, but someone whose job involves talking daily to leading economists, politicians, and financial industry professionals.

He claims "all serious economists agree" that Too Big To Fail banks are a huge problem that must be addressed with some urgency.

He also emphasized that politicians are completely unwilling to take on this issue.  On this point, I agree - but is there really such unanimity among economists?

I ran his statement by a number of top academics over the past day and - so far - it holds up.  But this may just reflect the kinds of people I meet.

Still, it is an interesting claim that stands until refuted - send or post details of serious people (in economics or elsewhere) who currently think Too Big To Fail Is Just Fine (other than people in government or big banks, of course).

This morning at the American Economic Association (AEA) meeting in Atlanta, I was on a panel, "Global Financial Crises: Past, Present, and Future," with Allen Sinai (the organizer), Mike Intriligator, and Joe Stiglitz.

The Wall Street Journal's RealTime ran a summary of my main points: growth in 2010 may be faster or slower - depending on how lucky we get- but, either way, the most serious problem we face is that 6 banks in the U.S. are now undeniably (in their own minds) Too Big To Fail.

Reckless and mismanaged risk-taking is the sure outcome.  But don't take my word for it - read Larry Summers's 2000 Ely Lecture to the AEA.  The best line is on p.13, "[I]t is certain that a healthy financial system cannot be built on the expectation of bailouts" (American Economic Review, vol. 90, no. 2; access through your library).

A number of participants asked for a copy of my slides - please use this version (in addition there was some other material that will appear shortly in 13 Bankers, so we're not putting it on the web yet).

The US embassy in Yemen reopened today and said successful Yemeni counterterrorism operations had addressed the threat that led to the two-day closure.

It said the threat of terrorist attacks against American interests remained high and urged its citizens in Yemen to be "vigilant and take prudent security measures".

The reopening comes a day after Yemeni security forces clashed with al-Qaida fighters, killing two. Among the group was Nazeeh al-Hanaq, a senior figure on Yemen's most wanted list, who escaped.

The main suspect in the worst political massacre in the Philippines has pleaded not guilty.

Charged with 41 counts of murder over the killing of 57 people in November, including pregnant women who were relatives of a political rival and about 30 journalists, Andal Ampatuan Jr appeared in a Manila court on Tuesday and denied the charges.

Heavily-armed police escorts took Ampatuan Jr to a special court inside the Philippines' national police headquarters for the first step in judicial proceedings in a case that has put the nation's corruption-plagued political and justice systems under the microscope.

The hearing lasted just two hours and is set to resume next week, but critics fear the case could drag on for years.

China's Yellow River tributaries have been "seriously polluted" by an oil spill last week, further contaminating badly-tainted drinking water resources, state media has said.

Last week a ruptured pipe operated by China's oil giant, PetroChina, sent 150,000 litres of fuel down two major tributaries of the Yellow River, Chishui and Wei.

China National Petroleum Corporation, the parent company and the country's largest oil producer, said the leak was caused by a "third party" during construction work.

The pipeline is supposed to transport diesel from northwest China's Gansu province to central parts of the country.

The murder of an Indian student in the Australian city of Melbourne was not racially motivated, the government has said.

Nitin Garg was stabbed to death while walking to work last week.

"What we have to do is to let the investigations take their course, but certainly on the basis of what we're being told so far, by the Victorian authorities, there's no basis for a racial motivation behind this," Simon Crean, the acting foreign minister told local radio on Tuesday.

Garg, 21, was a graduate accounting student at an Australian university.

The alma mater of a Massachusetts terror plot suspect has banned students from wearing clothing that obscures the face, including face veils and burqas.

The policy at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Services was announced weeks after Muslim alumnus Tarek Mehanna -- the son of a professor -- was charged in October with plotting terror strikes. It went into effect Friday.

School spokesman Michael Ratty said the change was unrelated to Mehanna's arrest and was part of an annual review. He said officials want everyone entering the school's Boston campus to be able to be identified.

TOKYO -- For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin -- one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo's decrepit "capsule" hotels.

"It's just a place to crawl into and sleep," he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit -- one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. "You get used to it."

When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel's tiny plastic cubicles offered a night's refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.

Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510's capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.

HAVANA, Cuba (Reuters) -- Cuba denounced as "anti-terrorist paranoia" new US security measures for air travelers from the island and 13 other countries, but passengers waiting to fly from Havana said on Monday thorough checks before heading to the United States were nothing new. (...) Granma, the newspaper for the ruling Communist Party, called the measures a "desperate directive" that was "part of the (US) anti-terrorist paranoia."

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) -- Venezuela may be forced to close its aluminum, steel and bauxite operations in the south-east of the nation due to a drought and electricity shortfall, a minister was quoted as saying on Monday.

"If we have to close the basic industries in Guayana, because the Guri (reservoir) is drying up, well we have to close them," Electricity Minister Angel Rodriguez said in an interview with financial daily El Mundo.

"We have to avoid the reservoir drying up completely."

The Guri, one of the world's largest hydroelectric dams, close to the Orinoco river, supplies about two-thirds of the South American oil-producing nation's electricity, but is at dangerously low levels, officials say.

President Hugo Chavez's government has imposed electricity rationing across the nation, from Caracas shopping-malls to the state-owned heavy industries in Guayana state that consume around a quarter of the nation's power output.

    * The whole international system--as constructed following WWII--will be revolutionized. Not only will new players--Brazil, Russia, India and China-- have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.
    * The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.
    * Unprecedented economic growth, coupled with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources--particularly energy, food, and water--raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.
    * The potential for conflict will increase owing partly to political turbulence in parts of the greater Middle East.

On Wednesday, governors in California, Kentucky and New York kick off the season of addresses to state lawmakers as at least 36 states struggle to close budget shortfalls and also begin confronting the next fiscal year's woes.

For many of the states, the new year spells the end to accounting maneuvers, one-off solutions, tax increases and service cuts that were as deep as lawmakers thought they could bear. And governors confront this situation in an election year in which dozens of their jobs are in play, and as many state legislators face their own election challenges.

"A budget gap of 5 percent or 10 percent in any given year is a tough problem," said Corina Eckl, fiscal director at the National Conference of State Legislatures. "But we're talking about gaps in excess of 20 percent over multiple years. The size of these gaps is staggering." California's problems, including a projected budget deficit of $20 billion, are as outsized as the state itself.

In his state-of-the-state message here, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, will proclaim California close to incapable of paying for social services in the next fiscal year, which begins in July, unless the Obama administration greatly increases aid to the state. That will be just one of many bleak assessments -- and far-from-slam-dunk prescriptions -- that Mr. Schwarzenegger will proffer as he and nearly every other governor face another year of extraordinary fiscal distress.

THE Islamic Republic of Iran is not about to implode. Nevertheless, the misguided idea that it may do so is becoming enshrined as conventional wisdom in Washington. <...>

During the final months of the shah's rule, his opponents used mourning rituals held for demonstrators killed by security forces to catalyze further protests. But does this mean that a steady stream of mourning rituals for fallen protesters today will set off a similarly escalating spiral of protests, eventually sweeping away Iran's political order?

That is highly unlikely.

<...> there is nothing in the Islamic Republic's history to support projections that future mourning rituals for those killed in the Ashura protests will elicit similar attention. <...>

In keeping with this pattern, the seven-day mourning observances for those killed in the Ashura protests generated no significant demonstrations in Iran. Clearly, comparisons of the Ashura protests to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, projecting a cascade of monumental consequences to follow, are fanciful. The Islamic Republic will continue to be Iran's government. <...>

As a model, the president would do well to look to China. Since President Richard Nixon's opening there (which took place amid the Cultural Revolution), successive American administrations have been wise enough not to let political conflict -- whether among the ruling elite or between the state and the public, as in the Tiananmen Square protests and ethnic separatism in Xinjiang -- divert Washington from sustained, strategic engagement with Beijing. President Obama needs to begin displaying similar statesmanship in his approach to Iran.

Amnesty International has called on the Salvadoran authorities to investigate the killing of two environmental activists who opposed mining projects in the central Cabañas area, and threats against the staff of a community radio station.

Ramiro Rivera was killed on 20 December and Dora Alicia Recinos Sorto on 26 December. Both were representatives of the Cabañas Environment Committee, a grass-roots organization campaigning on local environmental issues which had spoken out against a proposed mining project in the area.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed a law Tuesday requiring that Brazil cut greenhouse gas emissions by 39 percent by 2020, meeting a commitment made at the Copenhagen climate talks.

Brazil announced at the summit a "voluntary commitment" to reduce CO2 emissions by between 36.1 and 38.9 percent in the next 10 years.

More than 12 billion years of cosmic history are shown in this unprecedented, panoramic, full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly.

This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, was made from mosaics taken in September and October 2009 with the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and in 2004 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The view covers a portion of the southern field of a large galaxy census called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), a deep-sky study by several observatories to trace the evolution of galaxies.

A senior member of the Chinese negotiating team at Copenhagen has been shifted from his post, prompting speculation that he has been punished for the debacle of the climate talks.

He Yafei, who was at the forefront of China's blocking actions on the final fraught day of the summit, has been removed as vice foreign minister, according to a short summary of government appointments by the Xinhua news agency.

The agency gave no explanation, but the Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao suggests He has been punished with a shift to a post at the United Nations for failing to smooth relations between China, the US and Europe, particularly as tempers flared in the last hours of the talks.

The UK has the equivalent of eight days worth of gas usage left in storage, the Conservative Party has claimed.

Shadow energy secretary Greg Clark called for more storage capacity and said the UK lacked "essential back-up plans".

But speaking to the BBC, National Grid said: "Be assured, the gas isn't going to run out."

Demand for gas was a third higher than normal on Monday due to the weather, prompting the Grid to issue an alert.

Scientists have revealed that there is not one but two types of killer whale living in UK waters.

Each differs in its appearance and diet, with males of one type being almost two metres longer than the other.

The killer whales could be at an early stage of becoming two separate species, the researchers say.

The international group of scientists has published its results in the journal Molecular Ecology.

"It's exciting to think about two very different types of killer whale in the waters around Britain," says Dr Andy Foote from the University of Aberdeen, UK, who undertook the study.

Plans to boost food production in Britain and reduce its impact on the environment have been unveiled.

The government's 20-year food strategy includes making land available for people to grow their own food and more healthy cooking courses.

Minister Hilary Benn said shoppers had led the push for free-range eggs and could do the same for sustainable food.

The Tories said ministers "belatedly" recognised the need for food security after a decade of declining production.

Plans to build America's first off-shore wind farm in the sea off Cape Cod are being obstructed by local American Indian tribes which say it will disrupt their ancient sun-saluting rites.

The proposed $1 billion (£620 million) wind farm off the Massachusetts coast would provide electricity to 400,000 homes and bolster President Barack Obama's strategy to expand the US renewable energy sector.

However, it has been opposed by two local tribes, descendants of the Wampanoags who greeted the Pilgrim Fathers, whose lawsuit on Monday won the backing of the National Park Service.

The crew of the New Zealand trimaran harassing Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean had to be rescued after their boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese ship, anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society says.

The confrontation is thought to have happened early today in the area of Commonwealth Bay off the Adelie Coast of Antarctica.

Photos here.

Looks like the Japanese are getting even more aggressive in their efforts to stomp on those objecting to their murder of whales.  And with this escalation, its only a matter of time before someone on one side or another is killed.

The web is awash with gossip and rumour about the imminent arrival of a Google-branded phone.

The search firm is widely expected to unveil the Nexus One phone at a press conference scheduled for 5 January at its California HQ.

It is believed Google will sell the gadget directly to customers and that it will also be available, subsidised, from mobile operators.

Google has remained tight-lipped about what will be unveiled at the event.

Dij Bentley's mother Christine, 47, died from acute myeloid leukaemia in August last year. Prior to her death, she had developed an infection and needed a blood transfusion. Friends and family members were asked to give blood to see if they were a match for her. Although Bentley did not know whether he was a match, he was prevented from donating under rules which bar men who have had with another man from giving blood.

All secondary school pupils in England should have the chance to learn a less familiar language such as Mandarin, says Children's Secretary Ed Balls.

Mandarin has become increasingly popular in schools - with one in seven now teaching the subject.

Making it more widely available is an "aspiration" rather than a pledge - and could mean schools and colleges sharing specialist language teaching staff.

Mr Balls highlighted the economic importance of learning languages.

As well as Mandarin, he pointed to the growing importance of Portuguese for trading with Brazil, Spanish in Argentina and Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia.

Police in Sweden believe they have uncovered an elaborate cross-border criminal masterplan to steal left shoes in Stockholm and match them up with right shoes pilfered from designer boutiques in Copenhagen.

For months, officers were baffled when designer shoe shops in Malmö reported that only left shoes were disappearing from their shelves. But the mystery was solved when it emerged that in neighbouring Denmark only right shoes were put on display, the Times reports.

"Apparently this is a tried and tested approach," Stig Möller, a police superintendent in Malmö, Sweden's third-largest city and scene of the initial crime, told the paper.

GESTÉ, France -- The soaring steeple, airy flying buttresses and steep slate roof of the 19th-century parish church that dominates this town in western France is -- like many other village churches in France -- scheduled for demolition, a victim of its size, its condition and, ultimately, municipal budget concerns.

Although the church, dedicated to St. Peter, is arguably the sole architectural jewel in this town of 2,400 people, the town has decided to tear it down and replace it with a new one that will be far cheaper to keep up.

Erected in stages to accommodate 900 people, the formidable stone building has stood sadly empty since 2006. Completing the picture of dereliction, it is surrounded by a wire fence to protect visitors from the very real threat of crumbling stonework.

With only 18% of the vote in the last legislative elections in September 2009, the Bulgarian socialist party (BSP) is nowadays a rather sluggish opposition. Its leaders, nostalgic former communists, are joined on the left of the political spectrum by youngsters with ideas and dreams

In 1989, central and eastern European countries each underwent revolutions: democratic, velvet, violent or otherwise... In Bulgaria, the revolution was at the Palace. Either through street protests or fierce opposition, the country lived in a lethargic state of communism, slowly disintegrating away. Fine connoisseurs of the game of politics, those in power then devised a brilliant idea: transform the communist party into a socialist party seeking democratic change by simply changing its name...

`From that moment, the socialist party, the direct heir of the old nomenklatura, became a de facto conservative party,' analyses Ivo Petkov, a Bulgarian journalist who has been committed to the left for some years now. `Since the right launched itself into reforms to transform the country, the left took the opposite path, seeking to weaken them, while protecting the privileges of old age and talking them down with half-words. This posture can be understood because the men who made up the BSP were former communists. As for their constituents, either they lost a lot with the transition, such as pensioners, or they still firmly believe in a certain form of socialism.'

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute's move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.

"The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics," said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "They were absolutely singular on this topic" -- capital punishment -- "because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States."

Does power make fertile ground for a person to develop double standards?  Do the powerful think themselves less bound by the moral strictures they would apply to everyone else? A recent parade of disgraced governors, brazenly greedy CEOs and wayward sports icons seems to say yes, and yes. A series of psychology experiments outlined in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science  says so as well. That's a publication of the newly named Assn. for Psychological Science (previously the American Psychological Society).

Psychologists at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management conducted five separate role-playing experiments in which university students -- all female -- were assigned a range of positions from flunky to fat cat. The researchers then dangled temptation in front of their subjects with little seeming risk of getting caught. And in surveys, they plumbed participants' attitudes exhaustively about the acceptability of engaging in behavior as varied as padding expense accounts, disobeying traffic laws and appropriating a found bicycle.

Throughout, participants were divided into two groups -- each containing the full spectrum of weak and powerful. One group completed surveys on the moral acceptability of others engaging in a set of questionable behaviors. The other group completed surveys on the moral acceptability of their own transgressions in the same scenarios.

Across the five experiments, the researchers reported, "we found strong evidence that the powerful are more likely to engage in moral hypocrisy than those lacking power." Compared to the weak, the powerful were both more likely to cheat furtively on a dice-rolling exercise and to declare expense-account padding, scofflaw driving and failing to turn in a found bicycle reprehensible -- when others engaged in those behaviors. When asked to rate the acceptability of such behavior on their own part, the powerful were decidedly more forgiving than were the weak.

"The powerful judged their own moral transgressions more acceptable" than those committed by others. Weaklings, by contrast, appeared to hold themselves to a higher standard of behavior than that to which they held others -- a phenomenon dubbed "hypercrisy" by the researchers.

Actor Tim Robbins, who has recently been in the news because of his split with longtime wife Susan Sarandon, is known generally as an activist for liberal causes.

So why exactly did he give $5,000 to 10 Republican Senate and House nominees in 2006, including Rep. Michele Bachmann? Let's take a look.

Ancient "Woolworths" sites follow a precise geometrical pattern, according to Matt Parker of the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London, who analyzed the locations of the 800 UK Woolworths stores and ignored the vast majority to allow the patterns to emerge. He explains that the study is based on the work of Tom Brooks (a retired marketing executive of Honiton, Devon) who found similar patterns in prehistoric monuments across the UK.

The Argentine musician Sandro, an early Latin American rocker who matured into a ballad singer, has died aged 64.

He died from complications from heart and lung transplant surgery, doctors at a hospital in the western Argentine city of Mendoza said.

The singer, whose real name was Roberto Sanchez, began his rock career in the 1960s in the style of Elvis Presley.

He later developed into a ballad singer with a distinctive style and a strong following across Latin America.

It may not be one of the great remaining mysteries, on a par with the nature of dark matter or the origins of the universe, but the question of how many women Warren Beatty, 72, has slept with certainly seems to have got New York's media-land in a froth.

Peter Biskind, Beatty's new biographer, estimates that the famously seductive star of Bonnie and Clyde and Reds has notched up 12,775 sexual conquests, including Isabelle Adjani, Diane Keaton and Madonna. If true, that is impressive. Don Giovanni could only claim a lacklustre 2,065, according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

A YouTube video of "The Most Useless Machine EVER!" is proving popular among those who'd like to have a robotic box whose only purpose is to turn itself off:

France's right-wing leader stands accused of political bodysnatching with a plan to move the author's remains to the Panthéon - burial place of the country's establishment

Albert Camus had the anguished good looks of a doomed film star, not a writer or philosopher. He died a doomed film star's death, aged 47, when his powerful car skidded on an icy road 100 miles south of Paris and struck a tree on 4 January 1960. Fifty years on, Camus - writer, resistance hero, philanderer and goalkeeper - remains one of the most popular of non-populist writers in the world, and one of the hardest to define. Leftist or libertarian? Novelist or existentialist philosopher? Courageous humanist or heartless womaniser?

Like the protagonist of one of his best-known books (L'Etranger), Albert Camus remains an outsider, and any attempt to interpret or categorise him can still cause trouble.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, an avid Camus reader since his youth, has blundered into this difficult territory. He wants to claim Albert Camus for the nation, by moving his body to the Panthéon in Paris, the last resting place of great Frenchmen (and of one great French woman). The suggestion has raised a wonderfully French intellectual storm. How dare a right-wing President try to snatch the body of a left-wing hero? (Camus, unlike his sometime friend Jean-Paul Sartre, was never truly a hero of the French left, but no matter). How dare the anti-intellectual President become an intellectual grave-digger and place the Great Outsider inside the secular temple of the Officially Great and Good?

As the one truly universal nation, the United States continually refreshes its connections with the rest of the world--through languages, family, education, business--in a way no other nation does, or will. The countries that are comparably open--Canada, Australia--aren't nearly as large; those whose economies are comparably large--Japan, unified Europe, eventually China or India--aren't nearly as open. The simplest measure of whether a culture is dominant is whether outsiders want to be part of it...

Everything we know about future industries and technologies suggests that they will offer ever-greater rewards to flexibility, openness, reinvention, "crowdsourcing," and all other manifestations of individuals and groups keenly attuned to their surroundings. Everything about American society should be hospitable toward those traits--and should foster them better and more richly than other societies can. The American advantage here is broad and atmospheric, but it also depends on two specific policies that, in my view, are the absolute pillars of American strength: continued openness to immigration, and a continued concentration of universities that people around the world want to attend.