A special constable who gave a drunken off-duty soldier a "good beating" while arresting him has been jailed for three years.

Peter Lightfoot 40, was convicted by a jury at Manchester's Minshull Street Crown Court of charges of assaulting former Lance Corporal Mark Aspinall, then deliberately lying in court in a bid to cover up what he had done.

Sentencing him, judge Jeffrey Lewis told him: "It is always an unpleasant and unwelcome duty to have to pass sentence on a police officer, and this case is no exception."

Sweden's chief prosecutor said this morning she was reopening a preliminary investigation into a rape claim against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the latest twist to a case in which prosecutors of different ranks have overruled each other.

The Australian has denied the allegations and suggested they are part of a smear campaign by opponents of WikiLeaks, which has angered Washington by publishing thousands of leaked documents about US military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

William Hague's special adviser has resigned over "untrue and malicious" allegations made against him, the Foreign Secretary has said.

Mr Hague said suggestions Christopher Myers' appointment was due to an improper relationship between them were "utterly false".

In a statement, he also denied his marriage to wife Ffion was in trouble.

He revealed they have suffered multiple miscarriages and are still grieving the loss of a pregnancy this summer.

A mysterious accident in which one of Russia's most powerful spies was found dead on a Turkish beach has provoked speculation that the deputy head of the country's foreign military intelligence service had been murdered.

The badly decomposed body of Yuri Ivanov washed up last month on the shore of the Mediterranean, and was discovered by Turkish villagers in the province of Hatay, Turkish newspapers reported today. Reports suggest that he was quietly buried in Moscow over the weekend.

Ivanov was the second in command at Russia's foreign military intelligence unit, the GRU. The general had last been deployed to review military installations in Syria, amid Kremlin attempts to reassert its influence in the Middle East, reports suggested.

Two Yemenis arrested in Amsterdam on suspicion of planning a terror attack have been released, prosecutors in the Netherlands have said.

An investigation failed to find any evidence against the two men, the Dutch national prosecutor's office said.

They were arrested on Monday upon arriving at Amsterdam airport on a flight from the US after a request from US authorities.

US officials later said they did not believe they were planning an attack.

The German railway, Deutsche Bahn, says it will test a high-speed train in the Channel Tunnel between France and Britain sometime around 19 October.

Currently, only Eurostar is allowed to operate trains on the route and the move could widen rail competition.

Eurostar is owned by railways in the UK, France and Belgium, which are responsible for running the service in their own territory.

The German railway has asked repeatedly for access to the tunnel.

A profitable route for its high-speed ICE trains could be between the financial centres of London and Frankfurt.

The body of MI6 codebreaker Gareth Williams was found padlocked into a sports bag, police reveal, as the inquest is delayed amid questions over the cause of his death - which Channel 4 News understands was a "neat job" - code for a professional killing.

The attorney general's office is examining files relating to the death of David Kelly, a move which could herald a full inquest into the weapons inspector's death.

Officials acting on behalf of Dominic Grieve, the government's senior law officer, had requested the Ministry of Justice to supply reports of Kelly's post mortem examination, and now have them.

The move came after a group of prominent legal and medical experts called for a full inquest into the 2003 death of the scientist. A spokeswoman for the attorney general said the files had arrived in the office this week after being requested "quite a while ago".

Many European companies that publicly embrace workers' rights under global labor standards nevertheless undermine workers' rights in their US operations, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued today.

The 128-page report, "A Strange Case: Violations of Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States by European Multinational Corporations," details ways in which some European multinational firms have carried out aggressive campaigns to keep workers in the United States from organizing and bargaining, violating international standards and, often, US labor laws.
...
Among the violations documented in the report are practices of forcing workers into "captive audience" meetings to hear anti-union harangues while prohibiting pro-union voices, threatening dire consequences if workers form unions, threatening to permanently replace workers who exercise the right to strike, spying on employee organizers, and even firing workers who support organizing efforts at companies.

KABUL - Hundreds of nervous account holders waited for hours Wednesday to withdraw their money from Kabul Bank, even as officials sought to assure them that the country's largest private bank was not in danger of collapsing.

Governor Abdul Qadir Fitrat declared that Afghanistan's Central Bank would insure all of Kabul Bank's assets against creditors, and cautioned depositors to refrain from closing their accounts after media reports that the Central Bank had ordered the top two Kabul Bank officials to resign and hand over $160 million in Dubai villas purchased by its chairman for well-connected insiders.

Only -ish: Hatzius, who heads the excellent Goldman Sachs econ group, is a very calm, measured guy. But like me, he finds the Fed's complacency about disinflation and deflation baffling (no link):

The most surprising aspect of the August 10 FOMC minutes was the highlighted part of the following sentence (near the start of the discussion of the committee's policy action): "While no member saw an appreciable risk of deflation, some judged that the risk of further near-term disinflation had increased somewhat."

...

We are surprised by this statement, for several reasons.

First, it seems to be at odds with the recent economic data.

...

Second, the confidence that deflation will be avoided is at odds with the recent moves in some measures of inflation expectations. Survey expectations have not changed much, but the decline in forward measures of breakeven inflation is noticeable.

LONDON (Reuters) - Gold and silver hit multi-month highs in Europe on Wednesday, with gold breaking above $1,250 an ounce for the first time since late June, as investors bought the metals amid concerns over the pace of U.S. economic growth.

Spot gold hit a high of $1,251.45 an ounce and was at $1,250.55 an ounce at 0920 GMT, against $1,248.99 late in New York on Tuesday. Silver hit its highest since May 17 at $19.53 an ounce and was later at $19.42 an ounce against $19.34.

Deutsche Bank analyst Daniel Brebner said concerns over economic activity in the United States were leading to "a growing acceptance that if conditions remain poor or deteriorate further, the Fed will move to support growth."

In this data brief, we use a unique synthesis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data to track private industry employment and wages from December 2007 (the start of the recession) through July 2010 (the most recent month of data available). We find that:

The former Lehman Brothers chief executive Dick Fuld is on the hotseat today for a quizzing over the bank's spectacular 2008 collapse at a hearing of America's bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in Washington.

New orders booked by British manufacturers slowed sharply last month, pushing industrial activity to a nine-month low.

The Markit/Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply monthly manufacturing index dropped to 54.3 in August from a downwardly revised 56.9 in July. This was the lowest level since last November, although it remained above the 50-mark which separates growth from contraction.

A sub-index measuring new orders plunged to 52, the lowest since June 2009, from 58.5 in July. It was the biggest one-month fall in more than six years.

European companies look set for a victory in their efforts to persuade regulators not to force them to use clearing houses for over-the-counter derivatives trades after the European Commission proposed that they be given exemptions from sweeping regulation to clamp down on such markets.

The move, contained in a draft regulation, comes after months of lobbying by large industrial companies like Siemens, Eon, Lufthansa and Rolls-Royce. They argued that forcing them to process their OTC derivatives trades through clearing houses would cause a huge drain on cash, possibly hurting European economic growth prospects.

Brussels is two weeks away from finalising its version of regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act agreed by the US Congress in June that clamp down on the OTC derivatives markets, parts of which were blamed for exacerbating the 2008 financial crisis.

They would force more OTC derivatives to be traded on exchanges and electronic trading platforms, and push them through clearing houses to safeguard the financial system against the fallout from a catastrophic default, such as the failure of Lehman Brothers.

Global meat prices have hit a 20-year high as robust demand from emerging countries has coincided with a drop in production by exporters such as the US and Australia, fuelling concerns about rising food inflation.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's index of meat prices rose in August to its highest level since 1990, up 16 per cent over the past year, after lamb prices hit a 37-year high, beef prices climbed to a two-year high and the cost of pork and poultry prices rose.

"There has been sustained demand from Asia and from the Middle East for both beef and lamb," said Pedro Arias, a livestock economist at the FAO in Rome, echoing a widely held view in the industry. "But the traders have not been able to satisfy that demand because herds have been curtailed."

The sharp price rises have attracted speculative money to what is otherwise a niche market in Chicago. The number of outstanding contracts at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for live cattle and lean hogs futures and options - both benchmark derivatives - has jumped by nearly a third since the start of the year.

MAPUTO (Reuters) - Police opened fire on demonstrators protesting against rising prices in Mozambique's capital on Wednesday, killing two children and at least four other people, police and hospital sources said.

Police shot live ammunition after running out of rubber bullets, police officials said. They also fired tear gas as protesters blocked roads and burned tyres across the city.

The government said it had the situation under control.

BAGHDAD -- The United States changed commanders in Iraq Wednesday, beginning the final phase of American military involvement in the country despite political uncertainty and persistent violence.

The transfer of authority came a day after President Barack Obama announced the shift from combat operations to preparing Iraqi forces to assume responsibility for their own security. Obama made clear in Tuesday's speech that this was no victory celebration.

A six-month stalemate over forming a new Iraqi government has raised concerns about the country's stability and questions over whether the leadership can cope with a diminished but still dangerous insurgency.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's largest labour confederation on Wednesday suspended a one-day sympathy strike that could have shut mines to give about 1.3 million striking state workers more time to consider a new wage offer.

The decision removes some of the pressure on President Jacob Zuma's ruling African National Congress to quickly reach a deal or risk a massive labour action that could have dealt a blow to Africa's largest economy.

Palestinian security forces have swept through the West Bank, arresting more than 150 Hamas members, after the group's military wing claimed responsibility for killing four Israeli settlers, according to senior Palestinian security officials.

The crackdown on Wednesday comes on the eve of peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians in Washington, and appears to be an attempt by the government of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to send a message that his organisation is serious about the talks.

"Dozens of Hamas members have been arrested, mainly in [the] Hebron area and across the West Bank," the Palestinian security source said. "We are investigating if they have any links to the shooting attack. There will be more arrests."

During the seemingly never-ending conservative freak-out over the proposed Park51 community center, right-wing media have dismissed the idea that the right's extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric has fueled "Islamophobia" throughout the country. As we've documented extensively, based on numerous hateful protests and vandalisms of mosques around the country, this is clearly not the case. Unfortunately, we can add another piece of evidence to the growing trend.

San Diego radio station KFMB, which features a lineup of conservative talk programming, is currently hosting the following poll on their homepage:

I've spent most of the day trying to reduce a fallen 30 foot tree to manageable slabs of wood and my hands are swollen and bleeding.  Also, we still have no electricity.  And I'm at the office about to give my first 3 hour night class of the semester.

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

More than 10,000 trucks mainly carrying coal are stuck in a 120 km (75 mile) traffic jam in the northeastern Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, in the latest dramatic snarl-up on the country's roads.

[...]

Just over a week ago the authorities finally cleared a previous 100-km jam that had lasted nine days.

Amazingly, that's just what Utah is now proposing, after its  Republican governor intervened to prevent the state legislature from  passing its own version of an Arizona crackdown law.  Momentum behind a  copycat law in Utah was slowed after a federal district court judge  ruled that the heart of Arizona's law, SB 1070, was likely  "pre-empted" by federal law, and issued a temporary injunction  blocking SB 1070's full implementation.

But rather than dropping the matter, the state's governor decided to  convene a roundtable of key stakeholders to come up with a better  approach.  Out of these discussions came the proposal for a state  guest worker program that would effectively bypass, or at least run  parallel to, current federal visa policy.

The basic idea is that Mexican and Utah state officials would sit down  to discuss their respective labor situations, and out of these  discussions a system for regulating the importation of Mexicans into  Utah would be established and administered more or less jointly by the  two sides.

ROACH DRY LAKE, Nev. -- Not a light bulb's worth of solar electricity has been produced on the millions of acres of public desert set aside for it. Not one project to build glimmering solar farms has even broken ground.

Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, vast tracts still sit idle.

An Associated Press examination of U.S. Bureau of Land Management records and interviews with agency officials shows that the BLM operated a first-come, first-served leasing system that quickly overwhelmed its small staff and enabled companies, regardless of solar industry experience, to squat on land without any real plans to develop it.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 1, 2010) -- Researchers describe how to carry out the first experimental test of string theory in a paper published September 2 in Physical Review Letters.

An ancient reef found in the Pacific may provide clues to what will happen to coral when sea temperatures rise.

A team of researchers from Australia and New Zealand have discovered a huge 9,000-year-old reef surprisingly far south.

Lord Howe Island is 600km east of the Australian mainland and has a small modern coral reef - the furthest south in the world.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) says that world food prices have risen to their highest level in two years.

It says the increase is due partly to a drought in Russia and to government export restrictions which have brought about a surge in the price of wheat.

The Rome-based agency says that its food price index shot up 5% between July and August.

A new labelling deal with Australia may make Europe's winemakers feel more than a little light-headed as imitations will no longer be sold with names like champagne and sherry.

Australian producers will not be able to use 11 prestigious European drink labels.

Australia also gets protection for 112 of its "geographical indicators" (GIs), including Barossa and Coonawarra.

Australia exported wine worth 643m euros (£530m) to the EU last year.

Europe is the biggest market for Australian wine exporters.

LAHORE, 1 September 2010 (IRIN) - For hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis forced by the floods to abandon their homes, food is a primary concern: some families have gone days without a meal.

Frances Kennedy, a World Food Programme (WFP) spokesperson, told IRIN: "We are very concerned about the nutritional situation. About 2.8 million people have been reached, but there are others in need. Camps are crowded and people are sleeping on sides of the roads."

WFP has been supplying "dry rations" (family rations for a month), made up of wheat flour fortified with vitamins and minerals, cooking oil and high-energy biscuits.

A lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic conceals Charles Darwin's best-kept secret.

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical "cloud forest".

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.

DALLAS - Gay couples legally married in other states cannot get a divorce in Texas, where same-sex marriage is banned, a state appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The 5th Texas Court of Appeals ruled that a Dallas district court judge didn't have the authority to hear a divorce case involving two Dallas men who married in Massachusetts in 2006. Republican state Attorney General Greg Abbott's office had appealed after Judge Tena Callahan, a Democrat, said she did have jurisdiction and dismissed the state's attempt to intervene.

"Today's court of appeals decision overruled the district court's improper ruling, confirmed the constitutionality of Texas' traditional definition of marriage and correctly found that Texas courts lack the legal authority to grant divorces to same-sex couples," said Abbott spokesman Jerry Strickland.

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster has distanced himself from an aide who said gay rights and the commercialisation of sex had turned Britain into a "selfish, hedonistic wasteland" and "the geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death".

The comments from Edmund Adamus, director of pastoral affairs at the diocese of Westminster and an adviser to the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, have angered gay rights and secularists groups and provoked embarrassment among the Catholic hierarchy weeks before the pope visits Britain.

If being homeless had an upside, you might suppose that at least it's free. Except it's not -- not if you want to stay at most Central Florida shelters.

For years, the region's shelters have charged small fees to those who spend the night -- in part to offset their own costs, in part to encourage people to get a job and move on. But in the worst economy in decades, even the homeless are getting poorer, with many struggling to come up with as little as $2 to $10 a night.

HONOLULU (AP) â€" The head of the Hawaii Republican Party is calling GOP Lt. Gov. James "Duke" Aiona the only "righteous" gubernatorial candidate while urging pastors to bar Democrat Mufi Hannemann from campaigning in their churches.

In an undated e-mail that came to light Sunday in three Hawaii political blogs, Jonah Kaauwai also wrote that a vote for Hannemann or Democrat Neil Abercrombie is "succumbing to fear and advancing unrighteousness."

The e-mail frequently cites Bible verses and uses other religious language to allege that Hannemann deceptively wants to visit church services to boost his support in the Sept. 18 Democratic primary.

The firm concluded there were approximately 90,000 people at the rally and right-wing bloggers howled in protest. Of course, they didn't take issue with the science of the estimate. They just didn't like the results and so they whined. A lot.

In response to those complaints, Professor Stephen Doig of Arizona State University, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and crowd estimate expert who worked on the CBS crowd estimate, noted the irony in conservatives attacking his work today. The irony was that back in Jan., 2009, when Doig came up with a crowd estimate for Obama's inauguration, and the estimate (800,000) was much smaller than most other crowd estimates, conservatives loved Doig's work.

He writes:

I am amused to see that those who embraced my Obama inauguration estimate as soberly realistic are now attacking the Beck rally estimate, produced using exactly the same methods, as deliberately biased.

In our new issue Sam Geall, deputy editor of the website China Dialogue, introduces the Chinese science cops - the debunkers who are bravely tackling the prevalence of quackery and shoddy (often fraudulent) science that so often prevails in the People's Republic. The bad science ranges from nutritionists offering mung beans as a cure-all solution for dietary issues, through the discredited and harmful "science" of earthquake prediction, to the troubling fact that, according to a Chinese government study, over a third of 6,000 Chinese scientists surveyed have practised "plagiarism, falsification or fabrication".

In the piece, Geall points to the work of two particular debunkers, Fang Zhouzi (pictured) and Fang Xuanchang, who have both played prominent roles in taking on the peddlers of pseudoscience; Zhouzi through running the influential watchdog site New Threads and Xuanchang in his role as science and technology editor at Caijing magazine.

Montgomery County police have confirmed the Discovery Communications headquarters on Georgia Avenue in downtown Silver Spring has been evacuated after the report of a man possibly with explosives inside the building.

A man entered the lobby and may have fired a weapon and declared, "Nobody is going anywhere," Montgomery County police said.

In a phone interview on ABC 7 News and TBD TV, Discovery Communication employee Lisa Lucas said the building is in lockdown, with an unknown number of employees sheltering in offices. Police have established a cordon around the building.

She said that about 1:20 p.m., "we heard, Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop."

Police have not confirmed that multiple shots were fired.

IN NOVEMBER 2005, three senior aides to Britain's royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country's biggest tabloids, News of the World.

One of the odors emanating from Washington, D.C., these days is from journalists marking their territory.

Whatever awkwardness previously existed as journalists desiring a federal shield law wooed the legislators they're supposed to be watching, it's now worse. In recent weeks, the two groups have publicly joined forces to exclude WikiLeaks from possible protection under the bill. In doing so, journalists have managed both to look territorial and to endanger the independence they're striving to create.

On Aug. 4, Sen. Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat and Senate sponsor of the Free Flow of Information Act, announced that he intended to include in the proposed law new language specifying that WikiLeaks and organizations like it would not be able to use the act to protect the identities of confidential sources.

God did not create the universe, the man who is arguably Britain's most famous living scientist says in a forthcoming book.

In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking had seemed to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. But in the new text, co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, he said new theories showed a creator is "not necessary".

An interesting essay that offers more background to a discussion here at ET, a few days ago, concerning gender in language.

The long article ends with this:

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a "prison house" that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

Call it a crash course. A group of undergrads at the University of Colorado at Boulder got to participate in an unusual and awesome classroom activity on Monday, the culmination of a weeks-long process to decommission a NASA science satellite: they crashed a satellite into the atmosphere, sending it to a fiery death.

The shadows of Saturn's rings cast onto the planet appear as a thin band at the equator in this image taken as the planet approached its August 2009 equinox.

Ferrari has decided to recall all of the 458 Italia cars it made this year, following reports of a number of the luxury cars catching fire.

Ferrari said its engineers had flown around the world to investigate five reports of "thermal incidents".

As a result, it will be asking the owners of more than 1,200 of the supercars to bring them in for modification work.