French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday (28 July) announced his government is to order police to round up allegedly illegal migrants of Roma ethnicity for expulsion from French territory and destroy their encampments.

The announcement was the result of a cabinet meeting dedicated to the subject called after officers shot and killed a gypsy youth in the Loire Valley, provoking a riot by others of his community.

The Greek government has used an emergency order to force lorry drivers back to work after a three-day strike. The drivers, who oppose government plans to open the industry to more competition, could lose their licences or face arrest if they do not go back to work.

French financial police on Thursday questioned France's scandal-hit labour minister, Eric Woerth, as part of a continuing investigation into the financial affairs of billionaire L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

Woerth, who has been forced to quit his post as treasurer of the ruling UMP party, has been accused of accepting illegal campaign donations from France's richest woman in a widening scandal that has rocked the government of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

FRANCE 24's French Politics Editor Marc Perelman said police questioned Woerth over three separate incidents that have come to haunt the embattled minister.

In an effort to keep right-wing extremists out of early-childhood education, the state government of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania has ordered all heads of state-funded pre-schools to swear allegiance to the German constitution.

The order, which takes effect August 1, came after a scandal involving a pre-school in the tiny village of Bartow, population 550. The village needed 15,000 euros to keep the school running when Mattias Schubert, a father of seven, offered to run the school for free.

It was soon discovered that Schubert is a member of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), which the German government accuses of racism and anti-Semitism. The town council quickly rejected Schubert's offer.

Far-right nationalists in the German state of Thuringia are seeking to reach a wider audience by founding five new newspapers in the region. The worrying move by the National Democratic Party (NPD) is aimed at capturing more voters.

The publications purport to address regional issues, running headlines such as "Is Erfurt broke?", "Venturing more democracy," and "Schools are the future." But behind this veneer of seemingly harmless headlines lies the NPD's true agenda.

"The NPD's ideology is communicated above all else in these articles," said Stefan Heerdegen of the Mobile Council in Thuringia for Democracy - Against Right-wing Extremism, based in the state's capital, Erfurt.

"There is always a hostility towards democracy being piggybacked [in these stories]," said Heerdegen.

At Vienna Press Conference, Dunja Mijatovic Notes that in Most OSCE Member Countries Media Freedom under Threat

New OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic on Thursday released her first regular report to the OSCE Permanent Council, noting that in many OSCE member countries media freedom remains under threat. 

In opening remarks, Mijatovic highlighted the threats posed by criminal defamation and tight Internet control, as well as the cases of recently-murdered Greek journalist Socratis Giolias, imprisoned Azerbaijan bloggers Adnan Hajizada and Emin Milli and recently-attacked Serbian journalist Teofil Pancic. 

Mijatovic's report notes: "The freedom to express ourselves is questioned and challenged from many sides. Some of these challenges are blatant, others concealed; some of them follow traditional methods to silence free speech and critical voices, some use new technologies to suppress and restrict the free flow of information and media pluralism; and far too many result in physical  harassment and deadly violence against journalists. We regularly receive reports of threats, intimidation, administrative harassment (registration and re-registration requirements, alleged tax violations, cancelled contracts for printing or distribution of papers and the like).

The report (pdf)

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

Newsnight has seen a leaked copy of the "command paper" to be issued by Ian Duncan Smith tomorrow. Technically a consultation document, the paper "Welfare in the 21st Century" admits that:

"the overly bureaucratic benefits system can act as a barrier to work, trapping people in poverty".

The problem is the rate at which four or five separate benefits are withdrawn as people move off the dole and into work. For 130,000 people, the effect of working more than 16 hours a week is to remove 90p out of every extra pound they earn. For a staggering 1.9 million people the effect is to remove 60p.

The paper explores three solutions, but IDS' clearly preferred option is the so called Universal Credit. This will be spun as "combining elements of the present system" but even the cursory detail in the command paper makes clear this is radical reform.

Fini was also invited to step down as President of the House of Deputies. 34 deputies have left Berlusconi's party to form an autonomous group with Fini, thus reducing Berlusconi's majority to a razor-thin margin within the House.

Gianfranco Fini co-founded the PdL with the intention of creating a mass center-right party. He has stuck to this line for the past sixteen months, earning praise and respect both here and abroad. On the contrary Berlusconi's vision of the party is that it is nothing more than a political vehicle for his personal interests, a principle he has egregiously reasserted this evening.

The immediate consequences are that the final vote on the infamous law against wiretapping and press freedom has been postponed to September. The government could at this point fall on any vote of confidence.

It is likely that Berlusconi will seek to exasperate the situation to provoke general elections. He is at his best campaigning, selling used cars. However, were his government to fall, this would not necessarily lead to general elections, as a broad anti-Berlusconi coalition could conceivably be formed to continue the legislature (it would of course not be formed in those terms.)

At present his government is swamped in major scandals involving almost all of his closest collaborators. Once again, the judiciary branch and its investigators are forced to resolve a cancerous situation of generalized illegality and capillary corruption that has long since become a social and political norm. Neither the political caste nor public opinion has seen fit to remedy this gravely deteriorating situation.

There may however be limits. Watching a 74 year old lecher jerk off in public for the past 15 years may in the end test the interest of all but the very, very faithful.

The government has hit back at a legal charity's "unwarranted and baseless" suggestion that the senior judge leading the inquiry into allegations of UK involvement in torture is too close to the security services to conduct an impartial investigation.

Last week, Reprieve wrote to Sir Peter Gibson, a former appeal court judge, asking that he recuse himself from the inquiry into claims of British complicity in the abuse of detainees abroad since the 9/11 attacks.

The 11-page letter, which was copied to the prime minister, said that Sir Peter's impartiality had been "fatally compromised" because he had spent the last four years overseeing the security services in his role as intelligence services commissioner (ISC).

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein on Wednesday (28 July) agreed to donate €1.79 billion to the EU's poorer southern and eastern members in the coming five years for green projects, labour rights, research and human resources, a top-up of 22 percent compared to the previous period.

AFP - Italy's lower house of parliament Thursday approved an unpopular austerity package totalling 25 billion euros (32 billion dollars) aimed at bringing the public deficit under control and reassuring markets.
   
Sponsored by the centre-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the law passed by 321 to 270 votes, with four abstentions.
   
The law was approved by the Senate two weeks ago and was the object of a confidence vote on Wednesday.
   
The plan calls for a three-year salary freeze for public workers, a 10 percent cut in ministry budgets, less funding for local governments and more action to combat tax evasion, among other measures.
   
The plan also raises the retirement age of public and private workers by more than three years by 2050.

(Reuters) - Britain announced plans to scrap the fixed retirement age next year, saying it wanted to give people the chance to work beyond 65, but business leaders warned the move would create serious problems.

Currently, employers can force staff to retire at the age of 65 regardless of their circumstances and without having to pay any financial compensation.

Under the government's consultation proposals, the default retirement age (DRA) would begin to be phased out from April 2011 and come to an end by October next year.

Ministers said the move was designed to give people more choice as they enjoyed longer and healthier lives.

However, with Britain needing to cut public spending to address a record budget deficit, the move would see people paying tax for longer.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister, has admitted that he changed his mind about the timing of spending cuts prior to the general election, despite publicly telling the electorate weeks before the poll that early deep cuts would be "economic masochism".

In what was seen as the biggest policy reversal of the coalition negotiations, the Lib Dems abandoned their policy of maintaining the government's economic stimulus through this financial year and backed a tougher Tory plan instead.

European regulators kicked off the biggest overhaul of the region's securities regulations in years on Thursday, calling for a wide range of reforms to bolster the transparency of Europe's increasingly fragmented equities and over-the-counter derivatives.

The call, by the Committee of European Securities Regulators (Cesr), included proposals for changes to the Market in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid). Enacted in 2007, Mifid sparked competition against the region's established stock exchanges - but that has resulted in what many market participants say is a confusing picture, as markets have fragmented across multiple new venues.

Among key measures urged by Cesr is the introduction of a mandatory "consolidated tape" in Europe showing post-trade data across all equity markets and tighter rules governing "dark pool" trading venues operated by big banks.

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a fiscal state of emergency, putting pressure on lawmakers to pass a state budget that is now more than a month overdue.

California's economy, which is the eighth largest in the world, faces a budget deficit of $19bn (£12bn).

Mr Schwarzenegger said that without a budget in place the state's government would run out of cash by October.

He also ordered most state employees to take three days unpaid leave a month.

Earlier this month, the governor ordered 200,000 state workers to be paid the minimum wage because no budget had been passed.

Euro zone economic sentiment rose strongly in July, buoyed by figures from Germany that point to a recovery as the currency area overcomes the sovereign debt crisis, but the outlook remains uncertain.

The European Commission said its economic sentiment indicator for the 16-nation currency area rose to 101.3 in July, a 28-month high, from an upwardly revised 99.0 in June. Economists polled by Reuters expected the index to stay at 99.0.

Economic morale is the latest in a string of indicators that have shown the currency area continues to recover from the worst economic crisis in decades, despite turbulence on its sovereign debt market and uncertainty about the health of banks.

On Thursday, James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, warned that the Fed's current policies were putting the American economy at risk of becoming "enmeshed in a Japanese-style deflationary outcome within the next several years."

The warning by Mr. Bullard, who is a voting member of the Fed committee that determines interest rates, comes days after Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, said the central bank was prepared to do more to stimulate the economy if needed, though it had no immediate plans to do so.

A swath of Europe's leading companies on Thursday reported stronger-than-expected earnings, underlining the strength of the corporate recovery across the continent.

Heavyweight names such as Siemens, Royal Dutch Shell, Volkswagen and BASF all saw their second-quarter profits beat analysts' forecasts considerably.
...
Analysts are expecting European earnings to rise about 25-35 per cent this year before tapering off and increasing 10-15 per cent next year.

Industrial companies have led the recovery after a crushing fall in earnings last year. VW and BASF, Europe's largest carmaker and the world's biggest chemicals group, respectively, both saw their operating profits double as they benefited from strong growth in emerging markets such as China and a weaker euro.

The solid results and good news last week in the banking sector is causing investors who shunned Europe for most of the year to think again.

For the past three years in Europe, traders have watched as the share dealing landscape has changed beyond recognition.

Thanks to reforms passed by the European Commission, competitors have emerged for national exchanges, while new rivals have proliferated, creating a spaghetti junction of trading venues, spewing out market data and prices.

On Thursday, however, regulators fired their first salvo in attempting to bring more order to the markets.

The Committee of European Securities Regulators kicked off the biggest overhaul of the region's securities regulations in years, calling for a wide range of reforms to bolster transparency of Europe's increasingly fragmented equities and over-the-counter derivatives markets.

Among CESR's top recommendations was a call for the establishment of a central point where prices for shares traded across multiple venues can easily be seen - a so-called "consolidated tape".

This evening the SEC announced a massive fraud charge against Dallas-based investors The Wyly brothers....The gist of the allegations: The brothers Wyly (Samuel and Charles J.) used their various board seats and a network of offshore accounts to trade and conceal their holdings.

From the SEC press release:
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged brothers Samuel E. Wyly and Charles J. Wyly, Jr. of Dallas with violating federal securities laws governing ownership and trading of securities by corporate insiders. The Wyly brothers reaped more than $550 million in undisclosed gains while sitting on corporate boards by trading stock in those public companies through hidden entities located in foreign jurisdictions to conceal their ownership and trading of those securities.

The SEC alleges that the brothers created an elaborate sham system of trusts and subsidiary companies in the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands to sell more than $750 million worth of stock in four public companies for which they were corporate directors. They also committed an insider trading violation in one of the companies for an unlawful gain of more than $31.7 million.

Along with the Wylys, the SEC charged their attorney Michael C. French of Dallas and their stockbroker Louis J. Schaufele III of Dallas for their roles in the fraudulent scheme. French was on the board of directors at three of the companies.

"The cloak of secrecy has been lifted from the complex web of foreign structures used by the Wylys to evade the securities laws," said Lorin L. Reisner, Deputy Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement. "They used these structures to conceal hundreds of millions of dollars of gains in violation of the disclosure requirements for corporate insiders."

According to the SEC's complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the public companies the Wylys used in the scheme were Michaels Stores Inc., Sterling Software Inc., Sterling Commerce Inc., and Scottish Annuity & Life Holdings Ltd. (now known as Scottish Re Group Limited).

The SEC's complaint alleges that the Wylys and French knew or were reckless in not knowing their legal obligations as public company directors and greater-than-five-percent beneficial owners. The laws require such persons to report holdings and trading in their companies' securities on Schedule 13D and Form 4, which are filed with the SEC. The Wylys and French also knew or were reckless in not knowing that the investing public routinely uses such disclosures to gauge the sentiment of public companies' insiders and large shareholders about the financial condition and prospects of those companies, relying on those disclosures when making investment decisions.

The SEC alleges that the Wylys and French systematically and falsely created the impression that the Wylys' entire holdings and trading were limited to the fraction that they held and traded domestically. By depriving existing shareholders and potential investors of information deemed material by the federal securities laws, the Wylys were able to sell -- in large-block trades alone -- more than 14 million shares of issuer securities over a period of 13 years for undisclosed gains in excess of $550 million. The SEC further alleges that the sales generating most of these illicit gains were made pursuant to materially false or misleading SEC filings.

Ran Kivetz, a professor of marketing at Columbia Business School, has done research on consumer psychology. He says that consumers' brains lack a line that separates spending from saving. We [!] practice a certain amount of thrift so that we [!] can justify blowing a large sum frivolously, he says....

There is only so long we [!] can suppress our need to spend, Kivetz says.

"It's just been a slow walk out of the woods," he says. "And it's so complicated. The things going on in Europe are frightening. There are problems with China, with our government debt, and bank debt. At the end of the day, people are saying, `There is still risk. I gotta cut back.' But this is not a typical [!] one-year recession. Life has to have some normalcy. I have to have some luxuries."

Read more...

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has expressed "deep regret" after two men were hanged for murder in Japan on Wednesday and repeated a call for a moratorium on using the death penalty.

"I deeply regret the execution by hanging of Hidenori Ogata and Kazuo Shinozawa on 28 July 2010, and the fact that this marks the resumption of executions in Japan after one year during which none took place," Ms Ashton said in a statement on Wednesday.

AP - Afghan President Hamid Karzai pushed his international partners on Thursday to take stronger action against terrorist sanctuaries outside of Afghanistan. In a clear reference to havens in Pakistan, Karzai said: "The international community is here to fight terrorism, but there is danger elsewhere and they are not acting."

Pressure is building on Pakistan to escalate the fight against militants on its soil, especially since the release of more than 90,000 leaked U.S. military documents posted Sunday on the web by WikiLeaks. The trove of U.S. intelligence reports alleged close connections between Pakistan's intelligence agency and Taliban militants fighting Afghan and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

AP - A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona's immigration law from taking effect, delivering a last-minute victory to opponents of the crackdown.

The overall law will still take effect Thursday, but without the provisions that angered opponents - including sections that required officers to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws.

The judge also put on hold parts of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places.

The Pakistani government declared Thursday as a day of mourning for the victims of the Airblue plane crash that killed all 152 passengers on Wednesday. The Islamabad-bound Airbus A321 slammed into the mountains just 15 kilometers away from the capital's airport. The plane's wreckage is strewn across the densely forested Margalla Hills, hampering the investigation. In particular, officials say the difficult conditions on the ground have frustrated the search for the plane's "black box" flight recorder that may provide answers as to what led to the crash.

AFP - A boat capsized on a river in western Democratic Republic of Congo killing at least 140 people, the provincial governor's office said Thursday.
   
The boat overturned on the Kasai river, a tributary of the Congo river, on Wednesday.

Some TV news channels will no doubt present the current Operation Tor Shezada (Black Prince), in southern Afghanistan in the same, ludicrous fashion as they reported Operation Moshtarak earlier in the year in Helmand. Or Operation Panther's Claw before that.

The story is not about how big or long or fat or noisy the current operation is. Because the current operation is almost irrelevant in its significance.       

Operation Tor Shezada will be completely successful in "clearing" an area because obviously the Americans and British have overwhelming firepower and manpower and can clearly "clear" anything they want whenever they want, with minimal loss of life. Minimal risk, frankly.

But that has as much to do with winning the Afghan war as rearing alpacas in Chile.

Singapore's long-serving administration has won some time to ponder how it will deal with yet another self-inflicted blow to its global branding.

The reprieve came as a Singapore court today postponed a case against the British author Alan Shadrake for three weeks.

Shadrake, 75, faces contempt of court charges, after Singapore's Media Development Authority lodged a police report on 16 July against his book Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock, which criticises the application of the death penalty. Published in neighbouring Malaysia, the book has sparked a criminal defamation investigation against the author in Singapore.

The EU Commission Wednesday said six genetically modified corn varieties may now be imported into the EU. The unilateral decision was taken after member states failed to reach agreement among themselves. The approvals, valid for 10 years, cover imports for food and animal feed, not for cultivation.

Italian FM Franco Frattini told his EU counterparts Monday that the Union of the Mediterranean should discuss any plans by BP to drill off the coast of Libya, the FT reports. "All of us are paying close attention to what BP is doing after the worrying example in the Gulf of Mexico," he said.

REUTERS - The French government said state-owned electricity giant EDF and nuclear reactor maker Areva would sign a wide-ranging partnership to help the country regain its leadership in nuclear energy.   After a report on the health of France's nuclear sector was published on Tuesday, President Nicolas Sarkozy's government called for closer coordination between the companies to offset recent losses of contracts to Asian rivals.   The government will study the possibility of EDF taking a stake in Areva, according to a statement released by Sarkozy's office. The government confirmed that Areva would sell about 15 percent of itself by the end of the year, and said discussions with potential partners were underway.

A demonstration in a Moscow suburb turned violent Wednesday night as 100 people threw stones and smoke bombs at the local town hall to protest against the razing of the local forest, Moscow regional police said Thursday.

Russian television reports showed the administration building in Khimki surrounded by smoke and broken glass after a permitted rally in which hundreds of people denounced plans to put a new highway through the local forest. Police say a gang of 90 unidentified suspects met up there after the rally.

"They shouted slogans in support of the Khimki forest. Shots were fired and glass bottles were thrown," Yevgeny Gildeyev, spokesman for the Moscow police, told Echo of Moscow radio.

The snow cover on the mountainside above the settlement of Longyearbyen, around 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) from the North Pole, melts to a large extent in summer. But much of the earth below remains frozen. The permafrost is one of the main reasons why this spot, 130 meters above sea level, was chosen to house the planet's "deep freezer" for crop seeds.

 

In 2008, the bunker in the frosty interior of this Arctic mountain, christened the "Global Seed Vault, initiated by the Norwegian government and now run by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, was officially opened. Since then, more than half a million seed samples have been stored in what the organizers consider to be the "safest place in the world."

Delaware (Reuters) - The tide of lawsuits unleashed by BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico breaks into an Idaho courtroom on Thursday, just as the company's rivals are counting the cost of a ban on offshore drilling.

Attorneys hoping to lead the legal fight against BP are set to descend on Boise, Idaho, to address a special judicial panel considering how to bring order to the hundreds of civil lawsuits spawned by the spill after a rig explosion on April 20.

"There will be more lawyers in that courtroom than exist in the entire city of Boise put together," Mark Lanier, a Houston-based lawyer who plans to attend the hearing, joked this week. "It's going to be a circus."

The vaults rose up as high as the city walls, bearing reeds richly bedded in bitumen and gypsum. The layered galleries peered each beyond its neighbour to reach the sunlight, and water drawn from the river was pumped through conduits up to the highest level. The topsoil was thick enough to root even the largest trees...

These were the renowned Hanging Gardens of Babylon, as described by the Greek historians Diodorus and Callisthenes, and the earliest example of vertical farming - at least according to Dan Caiger-Smith. His company, Valcent, is taking the concept into the 21st century, recently launching the first farm of its kind at Paignton Zoo in Devon.

It's a beguilingly simple idea: make maximum use of a small amount of space by filling glass houses with plant beds stacked high one above the other.

The amount of phytoplankton - tiny marine plants - in the top layers of the oceans has declined markedly over the last century, research suggests.

Writing in the journal Nature, scientists say the decline appears to be linked to rising water temperatures.

They made their finding by looking at records of the transparency of sea water, which is affected by the plants.

The decline - about 1% per year - could be ecologically significant as plankton sit at the base of marine food chains.

...According to Scientists in 48 Countries. Earth has been growing warmer for more than fifty years.

Figure 1: Source: NOAA.

The 2009 State of the Climate report released today draws on data for 10 key climate indicators that all point to the same finding: the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to the report, which confirms that the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years.

Based on comprehensive data from multiple sources, the report defines 10 measurable planet-wide features used to gauge global temperature changes. The relative movement of each of these indicators proves consistent with a warming world. Seven indicators are rising: air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, air temperature over oceans, sea level, ocean heat, humidity and tropospheric temperature in the "active-weather" layer of the atmosphere closest to the Earth's surface. Three indicators are declining: Arctic sea ice, glaciers and spring snow cover in the Northern hemisphere.

The entire document is here.

EPA determined in December 2009 that climate change caused by emissions of greenhouse gases threatens the public's health and the environment. Since then, EPA received ten petitions challenging this determination. On July 29, 2010, EPA denied these petitions.

The petitions to reconsider EPA's "Endangerment Finding" claimed that climate science can't be trusted, and asserted a conspiracy that calls into question the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , the U.S. National Academy of Sciences , and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. After months of serious consideration of the petitions and of the state of climate change science, EPA found no evidence to support these claims.

The scientific evidence supporting EPA's finding is robust, voluminous, and compelling. Climate change is happening now, and humans are contributing to it. Multiple lines of evidence show a global warming trend over the past 100 years. Beyond this, melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, altered precipitation patterns, and shifting patterns of ecosystems and wildlife habitats all confirm that our climate is changing.

(Reuters) - Japan's Sharp Corp is investing almost 4 billion yen (29.4 million pounds) at a plant in Britain to double production of solar cell modules to meet growing demand across Europe.

Sharp Solar UK, which began making cells at the plant in Wrexham, Wales in 2004, said it was also seeing increased demand from the British market following the introduction of subsidies for renewable energy installations in April.

"This time last year 99 percent of the modules that we manufactured at Wrexham were exported to Europe and that has already dropped to 90 percent," Andrew Lee, General Manager of Sharp Solar told Reuters.

Microsoft, Google and other US firms are pushing Brussels for a single set of rules on cloud computing and data-storage services, reports the Wall Stree Journal. The EU commission to produce a preliminary text in the autumn on 31 new pieces of legislation, some of which may touch on cloud computing.

AFP - Top Spanish bullfighting entrepreneurs vowed on Thursday take Catalonia's parliament to court in a bid to reverse its decision to ban the bloodsport and stop other regions from following their lead.

"We are going to launch a huge battle" against this "outrageous" measure, promoter Luiz Alvarez, a founder of the bullfighting lobby group Mesa del Toro, told AFP.

Catalonia's regional parliament on Wednesday voted to ban bullfighting from January 1, 2012.

AFP - An Arab man jailed for 18 months for duping a Jewish woman into consensual sex by lying about his ethnicity has appealed his sentence to Israel's supreme court, media reported on Thursday.

The man's lawyer, Elkana Laist, told the Ynet news website that he had appealed because the severity of the sentence did not reflect the reality of the case.

Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to jail last week after a court found that the married Arab had had sex with the woman by posing as a Jewish bachelor interested in a long-term relationship.

AP - German state authorities on Wednesday accused the organizer of last weekend's Love Parade techno festival of major security breaches which may have led to the crush that killed 21 people and injured more than 500.

The organizer's security officials failed to properly control the entrance area where the victims were crushed, according to North Rhine-Westphalia's Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger and the state's chief police controller Dieter Wehe.

"Security did not fulfill its duty," Wehe said while presenting the key findings of a preliminary police investigation at a news conference.

Access to clean drinking water is now an official basic human right - just like the right to food and the right to live without torture and racial discrimination. The resolution was approved late yesterday by the United Nations General Assembly without opposition.

 

Although the decision does not make the right to water legally enforceable, it is symbolically important and places more political obligation on national governments. The resolution highlights how urgent the issue of water shortage is for a growing portion of the world's population.

The war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor in The Hague is expected to take a glamorous turn with British supermodel Naomi Campbell scheduled to testify next week. She's claimed that Taylor gave her a large, rough diamond at a dinner party in South Africa in 1997. That diamond is allegedly linked to the civil war in Sierra Leone. Taylor stands accused of arming rebels in return for illegally mined diamonds.

The French government on Tuesday announced the official launch of Hadopi, the government agency designed to promote creative works on the Internet and to counter online piracy. One of the law's most controversial provisions created a "three strikes" system where, in addition to possible fines and even jail time, a person caught illegally downloading copyrighted material three times would be blacklisted from receiving Internet service for up to a year.

 

The law, which has been in the works since 2008, has gone through various iterations, including surviving a Constitutional Council of France ruling. The court decision required judicial review before terminating someone's Internet connection. Deutsche Welle spoke with Joe McNamee of EDRi, a European digital rights organization based in Brussels about the Hadopi going into effect.

(Reuters) - Prosecutors in Germany have charged a suspected Nazi camp guard with helping to kill 430,000 Jews in the Holocaust and personally shooting 10 others.

State prosecutors in the western city of Dortmund said on Thursday charges had been filed against Samuel Kunz, 88, for assisting in the murder of Jews at Nazi death camp Belzec near the Polish city of Lublin between January 1942 and July 1943.

Kunz is also accused of shooting 10 Jews in two separate incidents, prosecutors' spokesman Christoph Goeke said.

Because Kunz was under 21 at the start of the period under investigation, the trial will probably be held in the youth chamber of a court in nearby Bonn, prosecutors said. No date has been set for the trial.

(Reuters Life!) - Calling people fat rather than obese would be more likely to motivate them to lose weight, according to Britain's public health minister.

Doctors and health workers are too worried about using the term "fat," Anne Milton said, but doing so could help encourage people to take personal responsibility for their lifestyles.

"If I look in the mirror and think I am obese I think I am less worried (than) if I think I am fat," Milton, a former nurse, told the BBC. "At the end of the day, you cannot do it for them. People have to have the information."

People see desirable objects as physically closer than less desirable ones, according to a study in the January issue of Psychological Science. When psychologists Emily Balcetis of New
York University and David Dunning of Cornell University asked people to estimate how far away a bottle of water was, those who were thirsty guessed it was closer than nonthirsty people did. This difference in perception showed up in a physical challenge, too. People tossing a beanbag at a $25 gift card were, on average, nine inches shy, whereas people aiming for a gift card worth nothing overshot by an inch.

In a first for modern Russia, a leading Russian theatre on Wednesday appointed a celebrated Spanish choreographer as its ballet director.

The Mikhailovsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg said Spanish dance legend Nacho Duato would lead its ballet troupe from January 2011, the first time a foreigner has been appointed to such a post since the Tsarist era.

The last foreigner to lead a Russian ballet theatre was the French choreographer Marius Petipa who was invited by the Romanov imperial family to work in Saint Petersburg in the 19th century.

Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone writer whose reporting compelled the White House to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, does not mince words when it comes to allegations that he broke pre-arranged ground rules or agreements to go off the record.

"They were lying," Hastings said, referring to the unnamed sources who leveled the accusations last month as fallout from his story mounted. "What they said to The Washington Post and, I think, to the Army Times is fiction. And they know that."

He was speaking Thursday at a small luncheon hosted by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

Not only did he adhere to the ground rules, Hastings said; he even went beyond them, running some quotes from McChrystal's staff without attribution that he had every right to attach to names. He did that not to protect the speakers, he said, but merely as "an editorial decision."

"Whatever ground rules were put down, we followed them," he said. "Whenever someone said something was off the record, I followed that. There is absolutely no gray area here. How it works is the reporter goes and hangs out with a subject and writes down what the subject says and does."

One bit of evidence that Hastings played fair: He's already been approved by the military for another assignment. "There's actually an embed that's waiting for me in Afghanistan," he said

AP - France's first lady, a former supermodel turned singer, is making her debut as an actress, filming Wednesday in the shadow of Notre Dame cathedral for Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris."

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy jotted in a notebook while seated next to actor Owen Wilson on a park bench. Allen gave instructions, while dozens of onlookers tried to get a glimpse of the action on the cordoned-off Jean XXIII Square.

The French president showed up on a nearby set Tuesday, in dark suit but no tie, to watch his spouse in her latest creative venture.

Allen, beloved by the French, recruited Bruni-Sarkozy last fall for a role in the romantic comedy which follows a family traveling in Paris for business. France's first lady reportedly plays a museum director.

(Reuters) - Robots that can chat, find misplaced glasses, draw airplanes and play with your children are attracting thousands of visitors during an expo in Tokyo as Japan adapts to changes in society.