MPs are to question expenses officials in private, following an explosive public evidence session last week.

A second committee hearing had been due to be held in public, but a "round-table discussion" will now take place behind closed doors instead.

Some MPs are upset that the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) will cost £6.5m this year, up from £2m for its predecessor.

But Ipsa claims the annual bill will fall after an its start-up period ends.

Council job adverts should be published online to save money, increase transparency and help reduce pointless posts, says Eric Pickles, the local government secretary.

In a speech this afternoon, Pickles will explain the commercial logic behind the strategy, one that could well lead to a further decrease in ad revenue for national, regional and local newspapers.

Pickles will point out in his speech to the Local Government Association conference in Bournemouth that it can cost £5,000 to £10,000 to place an advert in some national newspapers.

Though he will say that his plan will not end advertising in the media, it is bound - over time, if not sooner - to depress newspaper revenues.

Clashes between Kurdish separatist fighters and Turkish soldiers in the country's southeast have left at least 13 people dead, local security officials said.

Violence erupted overnight as fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fired at a military post in Hakkari province, near the Iraqi border.

Three soldiers and 10 fighters were killed in the battle that followed, while another three soldiers were wounded.

Turkish military helicopters have flown in to search for the remaining fighters, security sources said.

The government announces a judge-led inquiry into allegations British security services were complicit in torture, but the release of new torture guidelines is not terribly revealing without the old ones, writes Home Affairs Correspondent Simon Israel.

The prime minister said he hoped the independent inquiry, led by former appeal court judge Sir Peter Gibson, would start by the end of the year and report within a year. 

David Cameron told the Commons that the reputation of our security services is being over-shadowed by allegations about the treatement of detainees overseas.

As Northumbria Police continues to hunt for alleged gunman Raoul Thomas Moat in Rothbury, Channel 4 News looks at the possible lines of inquiry the Independent Police Complaints Commission may investigate to establish if there are any police failings.

Liberal Democrats running local councils across England have warned that the spending cuts agreed by their party in government may be impossible to deliver and put crucial public services at risk.

British forces are to be pulled out of the Sangin district of Afghanistan, the scene of heavy UK casualties since the deployment of soldiers to Helmand province in 2006.

The government will announce tomorrow that British troops are to be replaced by US soldiers as part of a reconfiguration of coalition forces in the area.

Out of the 311 British service personnel to have died in Afghanistan, more than 100 were killed in Sangin.

Political sources said the news would be presented as part of a reorganisation of coalition forces in Helmand. Britain will concentrate on the centre of the province, leaving the north and south to the US.

Spain wants to double its subsidies for domestic coal-fired power; and it's having a bit of trouble doing so, thanks to European Union competition rules.

That's right, Spain -- the country that is the world's biggest per-capita producer of wind energy, home to the world's biggest wind power operator, not to mention being a rather significant player in the world solar market, too. From the FT:

The Spanish plan centres on giving preferential access to the wholesale electricity market for power plants that run on domestic coal, and was announced by the government in February, after months of behind-the-scenes tussling with Brussels.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has dismissed claims that his presidential campaign received 150,000 euros (£124,000) in illegal party financing.

He was responding to allegations reportedly made by a former accountant of L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

The accountant, who prosecutors have questioned, told the website Mediapart the cash had been channelled through Eric Woerth, now budget minister.

Mr Woerth, under growing pressure over the case, has also rejected the claims.

A Swedish feminist party has publicly burned 100,000 Swedish kronor ($13,000; £8,500) in a protest against unequal pay.

The Feminist Initiative party said the money represented the sum Sweden's women miss out on every minute in comparison to men.

The party hopes to win its first seat in parliament in elections on 19 September.

The notes, thrown on to a barbecue, had been donated by an advertising agency.

Passengers travelling by sea are expected to win new compensation rights if their journey is delayed or cancelled.

Currently, ferry passengers generally have the right to a refund or a space on a later sailing if their journey is disrupted.

Airline customers get more protection, such as compensation if a flight from a European airport is affected.

Similar EU rules for sea passengers are likely to come into force in two years.

The German government is to raise charges for state healthcare, bringing in an extra 6bn euros (£5bn; $7.6bn).

The total contributions levied on workers' gross pay will rise from 14.9% to 15.5%, with the burden split equally between employers and employees.

Annual spending will also be cut by 3.5bn euros, as Berlin seeks to close an 11bn-euro gap in the health budget.

The measures are part of an 80bn-euro austerity programme agreed in June by Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition.

Civil service unions are threatening strike action after the government announced a "non-negotiable" new redundancy deal that will reduce pay-outs for compulsory redundancies from a maximum of more than six years to just one year.

A new bill will cap compensation payments for compulsory redundancies at 12 months' salary and voluntary redundancies at 15 months and will also amend a 1972 law which dictated that changes in conditions could only be implemented with union approval in order to force it through.

More precisely : he, among others, resigned (abdicated?) his seat in the House of Lords, at the expiration of a deadline for all UK members of Parliament to renounce "non-dom" tax status.

It was a pretty weird situation, having non-resident members of the legislature.

(30 June 2010)

A Green Paper, due to be published on 7 July, will start a public consultation on pension reform across Europe that will last until mid-November. The Commission will then follow up with a policy paper setting out its ideas more clearly.

But the Green Paper already reveals a lot about EU plans to achieve "adequate and sustainable" pensions in the long run.

"A key to supporting adequacy and sustainability is ensuring that the time spent in retirement does not continue to increase compared to time spent working," reads a draft of the Green Paper, to be finalised in coming days.

1. a consultation period is open
   
2. Euractiv hints that the consultation or at least the paper may be leading and not totally open to questioning the pre-determined policy
   
3. the emphasis is on delaying or reducing pension benefits, not on raising taxes

A quick note on David Brooks's column today. I have no idea what he's talking about when he says,

The Demand Siders don't have a good explanation for the past two years

Funny, I thought we had a perfectly good explanation: severe downturn in demand from the financial crisis, and a stimulus which we warned from the beginning wasn't nearly big enough. And as I've been trying to point out, events have strongly confirmed a demand-side view of the world.

Scott Adams warned of this trend in "Dilbert & the Way of the Weasel." Forget competition. No, capitalism breeds monopolies, it's a "financial system designed to transfer money from lesser weasels to greater weasels. Someday, if everything goes according to plan, one supreme weasel will have all the money and everyone else will be his or her domestic servant."

....

...99% of America's wealth remains concentrated in Wall Street's "Conspiracy of Weasels." They know only one thing, blindly "follow the money. If you took the same amount of money" traded daily on the NYSE, "sealed it in drums and dropped it in the ocean, 4 billion weasels would drown just trying to be near it."

When Obama signs the so-called reform bill, blow a goodbye kiss to our last great hope for true reform: Obama failed. True reform will never happen. Wall Street gains more power fighting every new reform bill, making massive investments in lobbyists. Witness their rapid return to power since near-bankruptcy in 2008.

No, the Weasel Conspiracy members didn't drown, they rule America. They killed democracy, destroyed capitalism and are consolidating vast new wealth and power in the hands of this conspiracy of Wall Street, Corporate CEOs, the Forbes 400 and Washington's pay-to-play power-players. Result: Less than one million co-conspirators control a nation of 310 million citizens.

Here are 12 more warnings exposing the Weasel Conspiracy's phony financial reforms:

Municipal Government To Spend 500 Million To Create 150 Jobs

Reykjavík's municipal government recommends spending 500 million on city development projects in addition to the 150 million that has already been approved for this year, according Eyjan.is.

The coalition government claims this new budget will strengthen the city`s economy. Mayor Jón Gnarr was scheduled to present the proposal at the city council meetings over the weekend but the meeting was postponed to today. Some of the development projects that will be undertaken include bicycle and walking paths, playgrounds, maintenance for city-owned elementary schools and kindergartens. These projects are supposed to create 150 jobs by the end of the year.

Source: The Reykjavik Grapevine

Or not

When the U.S., and then the world's money economy started to crumble, the first thing capitalist economists could think of to do was to monkey with the paper. That's all they knew how to do. It was unthinkable that the tertiary virtual economy, that great backroom fraud of debt manipulation and fiat money, might have finally reached the limits of the material earth to support. That the money economy's gaming of workers and Mother Nature might itself might be the problem never occurred to the world's economic movers and shakers. It still hasn't. (Except for Chavez, Morales, Castro and Lula). Jobs disappeared, homes went to foreclosure, and personal debt was at staggering all time highs. America's working folks were taking it square in the face. Not that economists or financial kingpins cared much one way or the other. In the capitalist financial world, everything is an opportunity. Cancer? Build cancer hospital chains. Pollution? Sell pollution credits. The country gone bankrupt?

"Nothing to do," cried the mad hatters of finance, "but print more money, and give gobs of cash to the banks! Yes, yes, yes! Borrow astronomical amounts of the stuff and bribe every fat cat financial corporation up and down The Street!" All of which came down to creating more debt for the common people to work off. They seem willing enough to do it too -- if only they had jobs.

Along with the EU, Japan and the rest of the industrial world, the US continues to flood the market with cheap credit. That would be hunky dory, if was actually wealth for anybody but a banker. The real problems are debt and fraud, and tripling the debt in order to cover up the fraud. And pretending there no natural costs of our actions, that we do not have to rob the natural world to crank up the money world through debt.

An Israeli soldier who fought in the country's war on Gaza last year is to be prosecuted for the manslaughter of two Palestinian women, the military has said.

The move, which is the first prosecution of an Israeli soldier over the deaths of civilians during the 22-day war, was one of several disciplinary steps announced by the army following an internal investigation.

"The military advocate general has decided to indict a number of officers and soldiers for their conduct during the operation," an army statement said on Tuesday.

They include a disciplinary hearing for a battalion commander with the rank of lieutenant colonel who allegedly allowed troops to use a Palestinian as a human shield, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Last March General David Petraeus, then head of Central Command, sought to undercut his own testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that was critical of Israel by intriguing with a rightwing writer to put out a different story, in emails obtained by Mondoweiss.

The emails show Petraeus encouraging Max Boot of Commentary to write a story-- and offering the neoconservative writer choice details about his views on the Holocaust:

Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?!  And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome...

Petraeus passed the emails along himself through carelessness last March. He pasted a Boot column from Commentary's blog into in an "FYI" email he sent to an activist who is highly critical of the U.S.'s special relationship with Israel. Some of the general's emails to Boot were attached to the bottom of the story. The activist, James Morris, shared the emails with me.

Hundreds of pro-government protesters have tried to enter the UN offices in the Sri Lankan capital during a demonstration against an inquiry into alleged rights abuses during the war against Tamil rebels. 

Wimal Weerawansa, Sri Lanka's housing minister, led the demonstration in Colombo on Tuesday, which saw the protesters try to breach security walls before staging a sit-in outside the compound.

"We warn the UN to withdraw the [investigating] panel if they want to get the employees out," Weerawansa said, addressing the crowd.

"Our armed forces have beaten terrorism in an exemplary manner. The panel is intended at taking our soldiers and political leaders before international courts. We will not let that happen."

The 19-year-old South African was sidelined for 11 months after undergoing gender tests following her 800-meter victory at the world championships last August.

The International Association of Athletics Federations said Tuesday it accepts the conclusion of a panel of medical experts that she can compete with "immediate effect."

The statement adds that medical details of her case remain confidential and the IAAF will have no further comment on the matter.

In Malaysia, political cartoons criticizing the government are labeled as a threat to national security. Last week, the Government of Malaysia banned three of my political cartoon books and magazines under the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984 (PPPA).

On June 24, Home Ministry secretary-general Mahmood Adam said that "all three publications have been banned for their contents that can influence the people to revolt against the leaders and government policies." He added that the contents are not suitable and detrimental to public order.

Last year, officials from the Home Ministry also raided my office in Kuala Lumpur and siezed my other magazine, Gedung Kartun (Cartoon Store) under the same act.

Four journalists have filed complaints with Ontario's police watchdog, alleging physical assaults and threats of sexual violence by police during the Toronto G20 summit, their lawyer says.

Amy Miller, Daniel McIsaac, Jesse Rosenfeld and Lisa Walter each filed complaints about their arrests with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director on Tuesday, their lawyer Julian Falconer of Falconer Charney LLP said in a release.

According to Rosenfeld's complaint, the Toronto-based freelance journalist for the Guardian was covering a group of demonstrators in front of the Novotel hotel in downtown Toronto on Saturday evening when he said he was attacked by police.

Barack Obama will meet the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu for the fifth time today at the start of a US visit aimed at improving strained relations between Israel and the US.

Netanyahu is expected to get a better reception than he did in March, when Obama kept him at arm's length and refused even a photo of their meeting.

Today's meeting was due to be held a month ago, but was postponed after Israeli troops killed nine Turkish activists in a raid on a Gaza aid flotilla.

A US army intelligence analyst was today charged with leaking a highly classified video of American forces killing unarmed civilians in Baghdad and secret diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

Private Bradley Manning, who had a top-secret security clearance, has been held in military custody in Kuwait since his arrest in Iraq in May over the video, which caused great embarrassment to the US military establishment. It showed an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency. The air crew is heard falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead. WikiLeaks gave the video the title Collateral Murder.

In a funeral free of the usual pageantry and party politics of the nation he long sought to unite, Lebanon laid its Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah to rest today in the mosque where his sermons of resistance and religion inspired millions of Muslims worldwide.

Delegations from across the Middle East, from the Shia holy cities of Qom in Iran and Najaf in Iraq, to Sunni Islam's Azhar mosque in Cairo, travelled to Beirut's southern suburbs to pay their respects to a religious authority instrumental in the establishment of Hezbollah and the growth of Shia political power.

Security was tight for tens of thousands of mourners following Fadlallah's coffin. Banks and public offices closed as Lebanon observed an official day of mourning. The ayatollah's family received condolence from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an overnight visit kept secret for fear of assassination by the Israelis.

Like a scene from a Western movie, the two top lawmen here are settling their scores in public.

In May, a Nye County sheriff's deputy arrested the district attorney. The sheriff, Tony De Meo, alleges that the D.A., Robert Beckett, was misusing public funds.

According to Mr. De Meo, public money had gone to supporting the local cheerleading squad, led by the D.A.'s wife, and to make a family friend's car payments. No charges have been filed, in part because Mr. Beckett, the D.A., refuses to charge himself.

[...]

The special prosecutor filed felony charges against the sheriff's deputy, David Boruchowitz, who had arrested the D.A.

Mr. Boruchowitz was also the sheriff's informal press liaison. And after he was summoned to lock himself in the corrugated metal county jail, he sent out a press release with his own mug shot announcing he had been arrested. A judge later rejected the charges, contending Mr. Beckett didn't have the power to appoint a special prosecutor. So Mr. Beckett refiled the charges himself.

In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day.

The disparity between what BP promised in its March 24 filing with federal regulators and the amount of oil recovered since the April 20 explosion underscores what some officials and environmental groups call a misleading numbers game that has led to widespread confusion about the extent of the spill and the progress of the recovery.

July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Kenya, whose economy is the biggest in East Africa, has the potential to produce 300 megawatts of electricity from agricultural residues such as bagasse from the sugar industry, Assistant Energy Minister Mohamed Mahamud said.

The country, which gets 1 percent of its energy requirements from renewable sources, produces 38 megawatts from bagasse, the fiber that remains once juice is extracted from sugar cane, Mahamud told a Brazilian business and government delegation, led by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in Nairobi, the capital.

"It is our desire to learn from the Brazilians best practices on bio-fuels in addition to other forms of renewable energy," he said.

As an ever increasing number of people around the world become connected by mobile communications networks, the challenges to providing electricity to these expanding networks are becoming greater as well. In particular, developing countries are seeing unprecedented growth in wireless subscribers, however many of the base stations in these areas are in remote locales that have limited or no access to grid power.

Renewable energy from solar panels and small wind turbines offers a viable alternative to diesel generators in these remote off-grid sites, and a new report from Pike Research forecasts that renewable energy will power 4.5% of the world's mobile base stations by 2014, up from just 0.11% in 2010. ­In developing countries, the percentage will be even higher - the cleantech market intelligence firm forecasts that 8% of base stations in those regions will utilize renewable power by 2014.

July 6 (Bloomberg) -- China, the world's biggest polluter, needs to pick up the pace of increasing the nation's capacity to produce power from renewable energy sources for 2020 targets to be met, a government official said.

The country must increase the pace of capacity expansion by 50 percent, Li Zuojun, vice director of resources and environment at the State Council's development research center, said at a conference in Shanghai today.

China aims to boost the share of non-fossil fuels in its primary energy consumption to 15 percent by 2020 to rely less on more polluting sources such as coal. The 2020 renewable energy capacity targets include an installed capacity of 100 gigawatts of windpower and 20 gigawatts of solar units, Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, said in May.

The Gulf oil disaster has created some impetus in Congress to reduce the lavish subsidies granted to oil companies to incentivize and spur domestic production. Multiple bills are under consideration that would rescind billions of dollars in tax breaks and other handouts to Big Oil. But the industry's lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, isn't about to let these giveaways go without a fight.

API launched television ads in ten states this week to attack what they classify as "new taxes on the oil and natural gas industry." Actually making oil companies pay their fair share like other industries, API claims, would have a "devastating effect on our jobs, economic recovery and our energy security."

Washington - -- While the BP oil spill has been labeled the worst environmental catastrophe in recent U.S. history, a biofuel is contributing to a Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" the size of New Jersey that scientists say could be every bit as harmful to the gulf.

Each year, nitrogen used to fertilize corn, about a third of which is made into ethanol, leaches from Midwest croplands into the Mississippi River and out into the gulf, where the fertilizer feeds giant algae blooms. As the algae dies, it settles to the ocean floor and decays, consuming oxygen and suffocating marine life.

The chess game of climate politics -- or, more specifically, of putting a binding limit on climate-changing pollution from dirty fuels -- is at a moment of great uncertainty. President Obama continues to push for putting a price on carbon, and Senate action may come in July or August. But there's every chance that a US climate law (which would trigger Canadian action and advance Northwest sustainability more than any other single thing) will prove a bridge too far in 2010.

So it's a good time to think through contingencies, to identify paths on which the movement for a fair and effective climate/clean-energy policy can still travel forward, even if the Senate fails to act this year. In the end, the shortest path may cross the thicket of Senate rules reform. Perhaps surprisingly, that passage may depend on the persuasiveness of the junior senator from New Mexico -- and how much help he gets from Northwest Senators.

A motor rally due to attract thousands of spectators to south Wales has been postponed due to a tree disease.

The route of the Swansea Bay Rally runs through forests near Resolven and Rhondda that have been hit by the Phytophthora ramorum infection.

Also known as as "sudden oak death" it kills many of the trees it infects and can be spread by tree needles and soil clinging to people or vehicles.

Meanwhile, a £600k support package has been announced to fight the disease.

The rally was due to start and finish outside Swansea Museum on 17 July.

Andrew M. sent us a link to an interesting post by Lewis Denby at Beef Jack about the video game APB. The game lets you customize the characters in a variety of ways, including height and weight. Denby noticed something interesting about the customization, however. Here's a male figure with the weight at the maximum level:

Complex interactions between Saturn and its satellites have led scientists using NASA's Cassini spacecraft to a comprehensive model that could explain how oxygen may end up on the surface of Saturn's icy moon Titan. The presence of these oxygen atoms could potentially provide the basis for pre-biological chemistry.

Why have American women become so active in the right wing Tea Party movement? Could it be that they are drawn to the new conservative Christian feminism publicized by Sarah Palin? Without its grassroots female supporters, the Tea Party would have far less appeal to voters who are frightened by economic insecurity, threats to moral purity and the gradual disappearance of a national white Christian culture.

Most Americans are not quite sure what to make of the sprawling right-wing Tea Party, which gradually emerged in 2009 and became a household name after it held nationwide Tea Party rallies on April 15th 2010, to protest paying taxes. Throwing tea overboard, as you may remember, is an important symbolic image of the colonial anger at Britain's policy of "taxation without representation."

When the anger of a prominent young thinktanker causes one of the world's largest web-hosting companies to shut down a site that monitors lobbying and transparency, it is time to start asking questions about online free speech and censorship.

Last week, as Hugh Muir reported in the Guardian diary, the website SpinProfiles was taken down by the domain name registrar, 1 & 1 Internet, following a complaint from Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son of journalist Christopher.

SpinProfiles, run by sister organisation Spinwatch, aims to stitch together publicly available information to provide a detailed picture of who's who in the shadowy world of lobbying. It features close to ten thousand profiles of think tanks, lobbying organisations and those associated with them.

The Sunday Express, the paper that specialises in publishing stories that stretch the truth to breaking point, came up with another page one winner at the weekend, QUEEN NEEDS LOTTO CASH.

The article claimed that the Queen and the country were so strapped for cash that she would "have to rely on lottery handouts to fund her Diamond Jubilee celebrations."

I searched in vain for a justification for the claim. Indeed, on following the turn to page 3, the headline was altogether less certain: "Will lottery pay for Queen's Jubilee?" Answer, of course: no.

There was a quote from a spokesman for the Big Lottery Fund who pointed out that it had played "an active part" in the Golden Jubilee in 2002 - when there was no suggestion of the monarch's (alleged) poverty - and who said the fund would hope "to help communities across the UK to participate in Diamond Jubilee celebrations".

The Economist is in hot water over the cover of their June 19th issue, reports the New York Times. The cover, which features a despondent-looking President Obama standing alone on a beach, was meant to communicate the politically difficult times the President faces in light of the BP oil spill near the Gulf coast. However, the New York Times report shows that the original picture featured two other people standing next to the President that The Economist edited out for dramatic effect. The first figure, that of coast guard admiral Thad Allen, was removed by the cop of the photo, claims the Economist. The other figure, local parish president Charlotte Randolph, was removed "not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers."
Photo-editing has been a point of controversy for quite some time, with some arguing that it is a form of deliberate reader deception. Notably, in July 2008 Agence France-Presse retracted a digitally altered image of Iranian missiles. Also, last year, the New York Times removed a slide show from its web site after discovering that one of the photos was digitally edited.

Hannah Allam is having a baby shower. Her son, Bilal, is due in four months. And unlike most baby showers, the guests at this one are more accustomed to donning helmets and flak jackets than writing out advice for the new mother on small blue cards.

That's because Allam's shower is being held in Baghdad, where she is a veteran reporter for McClatchy Newspapers.

Allam isn't the first foreign correspondent this year to be pregnant in Iraq. Deborah Haynes from The Times of London paved the way, giving birth to a boy. Nada Bakri from the The New York Times was in her eighth month of pregnancy when she left to give birth a few months ago, also to a boy.

In a room festooned with blue bunting, Allam reflects on covering a war while pregnant.

Intense competition for graduate jobs means that more than three quarters of employers require at least a 2:1 degree grade, a survey suggests.

The Association of Graduate Recruiters says there are more graduates chasing fewer jobs - with vacancies down by 7%.

Applications have soared, with an average of 69 people chasing each graduate job.

In response, 78% of employers are now filtering out applicants who have not achieved a 2:1 degree.

A canister recovered from the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid and return to Earth, contains dust particles, say Japanese scientists.

Japan's space agency (Jaxa) began to open the Hayabusa craft's sample container on 24 June.

It has now revealed images of tiny dust particles inside the container.

Whether the particles are from the near-Earth asteroid, Itokawa, or from Earth is still unknown.

Jaxa released two photographs of the inside of the Hayabusa sample container.

A planned presentation about ATM security at the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam last week was cancelled following legal pressure from vendors.

Italian ethical hacker Raoul Chiesa intended to explain how vulnerabilities and security shortcomings that that cyber criminals were using to break into ATMs as part of his Underground Economy presentation at Hack in the Box. However, this talk was cancelled at the last minute in favour of a presentation on Side Channel Analysis on Embedded Systems by Job de Haas, Softpedia reports.

Oddly Chiesa had made the cancelled presentation at other security conferences without incident. The slides were even available online. The talk focused on security flaws that have been well understood among banking security experts, if not among the general public, for years. ENISA report, ATM Crime: Overview of the European situation and golden rules on how to avoid it, and published in September 2009, draws heavily from Chiesa's research.

When, asks Blair Supporter, did The Journey become A Journey? Before and after:

Authorities in Ecuador say they have captured the first true submarine designed and built to smuggle drugs. "Semi-submersible" vessels have long been built for the narcotics trade, but it appears that the drug runners have now upped their game to make vessels able to travel completely underwater.

"It is the first fully functional, completely submersible submarine for transoceanic voyages that we have ever found," Jay Bergman, Andean regional director for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told AP.

According to reports the sub captured at the weekend measured 33m long, would have carried a crew of five or six, and was equipped with twin screw diesel-electric propulsion, a periscope and "air conditioning". It could have carried up to 10 tonnes of cargo, according to an initial DEA assessment.

It looked like a Test match that would attract only cursory interest in a calendar so bogged down with international fixtures.

But now Sri Lanka's match against India in Galle starting on 18 July will be a very special one, bringing to an end the phenomenal Test career of one of the finest bowlers the game has seen.

Should Muttiah Muralitharan take eight wickets in the match - and for a player with his record it is by no means a distant prospect - he will end with an extraordinary haul of 800 wickets.

With the volume of Test cricket set to drop in the coming years, it is almost unthinkable that anyone will get close to that mark ever again.