John Yates and Theresa May made detailed comments on the phone-hacking affair. Nick Davies analyses them

The coroner carrying out the inquest into the death of Ian Tomlinson today sought to dispel conspiracy theories surrounding his appointment of the controversial pathologist Dr Freddy Patel, claiming his selection was "routine".

In a detailed statement, released at a pre-inquest review hearing, the City of London coroner Paul Matthews said Tomlinson's body was transferred to St Pancras mortuary the day after his death at the G20 protests.

A RUSSIAN teenager is facing castration after being severely beaten by police in the Volga river town of Kstovo.

The doctors now treating the 17-year-old, Nikitin Kaftasev, "are not sure whether they will be able to save his male organs," the Committee Against Torture said in a statement.

Nikitin Kaftasev and a friend were detained and beaten by police on a street in the town centre, before being dragged to police headquarters where beatings continued for hours, the group said, citing the teen's testimony.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of France to register their anger over the government's austerity measures.

The rallies came as a 24-hour national strike disrupted flight and rail services, and closed schools.

Officials said 1.1 million people had joined protests, but unions claimed the figure was 2.5 million.

The activists are angry at government plans to overhaul pensions and raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says he has not ruled out standing for president again at the 2012 elections.

Mr Putin said he would share power with current President Dmitry Medvedev until the election, when they would decide "what would be best for Russia".

Mr Putin has previously served two terms as president.

Speaking in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, he drew a comparison with US President Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected four times in a row.

They just can't get it right, can they? Having failed to attract enough grown-ups to the Pope's Hyde Park vigil on September 18, the bungling organisers of the papal visit are trying to drag schoolchildren there.

Expected cuts in public expenditure could be devastating for the economy, the NI first minister has warned.

Peter Robinson said given the scale of the cuts expected to be imposed by the Treasury, ministers will inevitably have to make very difficult decisions.

He said the prospect of 20-25% cuts, amounting to about £2bn, would have a "devastating impact bogging NI down in a recession for a prolonged period".

A major potential flaw in the coalition's bill to introduce fixed-term parliaments was exposed when the clerk of the Commons today warned it would open the way for repeated legal challenges if parliament passed a vote of no confidence in a government, leading to a general election.

Malcolm Jack, parliament's most senior legislative expert, said the bill could mean the courts would "be drawn into matters of acute political controversy such as whether an election should be held".

It is rare for the clerk of the house to stray into criticism of the government, and only happens if he feels legislation will undermine parliament.

In evidence to the political and constitutional reform select committee, Jack said the legal challenges could be passed to the European court of justice.

The president of the European commission delivered veiled criticism today for the first time of the French government's anti-Gypsy campaign.

In his first annual "state of the union" speech to the European parliament in Strasbourg, José Manuel Barroso urged greater protection of the rights of the EU's largest ethnic minority - the 12 million-strong Roma community - and warned European leaders to steer clear of the racism and discrimination of the past.

Barroso's speech, outlining his priorities for the year and focusing on the financial and economic crisis, was preceded by a farcical failed attempt to force MEPs to attend the Strasbourg session. Parliamentary leaders abandoned a plan to fine MEPs who did not show up after being accused of Stalinism and infantilism.

Anyway, the local paper last week must have been really short of news. They devoted half a page to a major police operation of traffic enforcement. Lots of drivers were pulled over for checks, lots of speed traps, etc. The result: Nothing. Every single driver was obeying the law.

Eventually, they did get a motorcyclist for reckless driving. Not a local, of course - he was from Torino.

European Union finance ministers have agreed to establish a new framework for financial supervision, designed to help prevent future financial crises.

The measures include a European Systemic Risk Board to oversee the health of Europe's economy.

Ministers also approved a second instalment of emergency loans to Greece worth 9bn euros ($11.4bn; £7.5bn).

They were unable, however, to agree a new Europe-wide bank levy or bank transaction tax.

HSBC may move from London if the UK government decides to break up big banks, a senior executive has said.

Stuart Gulliver, head of the Canary Wharf-based bank's investment banking division, made the warning at a banking conference.

He said he was "genuinely concerned" that the UK's banking commission would recommend splitting up banks.

"[That] has significant implications clearly for where we may choose to headquarter our institution."

"I want to be crystal clear. Our preference is to be headquartered in the UK," added Mr Gulliver.

Nearly 10,000 jobs are at risk as the property and environmental services giant Connaught faces collapse.

The company, which specialises in social housing, said it was "in the process of appointing administrators".

The appointment is expected to be completed and announced formally on Wednesday morning.

President Barack Obama is to back new company tax breaks in a bid to regain the initiative as mid-term polls loom.

He will lobby Congress - including a blocking minority of Republicans in the Senate - to let companies in the US write off investment costs until 2011.

With unemployment stuck at 10% and the economy appearing to slow sharply, the president's Democratic Party could face big losses at the November elections.

On Monday, Mr Obama also called for $50bn of new infrastructure spending.

In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. "Our people went in and couldn't believe what they found," a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he'd returned from the I.M.F.'s first Greek mission. "The way they were keeping track of their finances--they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn't even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country."

As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms--and that number doesn't take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece's rail passengers into taxicabs: it's still true. "We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension," Manos put it to me. "And yet there isn't a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay." The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland's. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses.

Wall St. at Harvard and Princeton: "A Communal Obsession"
As we continue to ask ourselves, "how could it all have happened," that is, the financial crisis that nearly plunged the world into a second Great Depression, we should not forget the nature of the salespeople who peddled the faulty investments which almost brought it on. That's conveyed to us in a startling way in Chapter One, which Ho has entitled "Biographies of Hegemony." In an interview (individual names are changed, the institutions' kept) with a "Robert Hopkins, a vice president of mergers and acquisitions at Lehman Brothers," the pitch is: "`We are talking about the smartest people in the world. We are! They are the smartest people in the world. If you (the average investor or the average corporation) don't know anything, why wouldn't you invest with the smartest people in the world? They must know what they are doing.'"(Page 40.) Now where do you find the smartest people in the world? Arguably, but conventionally, the answer would be mostly at Harvard, Princeton and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Why not MIT, and Stanford, and what's the matter with Yale? Well, maybe it isn't quite all about smartness. In fact, it's about cultural projection too: clothes, confidence, aggressiveness contained within good manners, body image...in brief, it's smartness well-packaged, because salesmanship for financial products, deals and mergers, scanning the horizon for new customers, depends on wide business networking and social interaction with corporate America, and beyond...as we will see shortly. So sorry MIT, Ho tells us ("too nerdy"), Yale ("too liberal") and Stanford ("too far" - from Wall Street, that is)...

Two things jolted me about this smartness motif and the recruiting process at Princeton and Harvard. One is the astounding numbers of undergraduates that want to ascend into this celestial orbit; at Princeton, from 37% of the class of 2001 up to 40% of the class of 2005 & 2006 "entered financial services," with similar numbers for Harvard. How could that be done? The answer is not pretty: Wall Street's presence "dominates campus life: recruiters visit the university virtually every week, even on weekends...the recruiting process saturates almost every aspect of campus life from the very first day of the academic year."(Page 45.) Ho presents us with a two page spread of "Goldman Sachs Recruitment Schedule at Harvard University, 2000-2001," and I count 30 or so events, multiples in every month from September through February. It's so Wall Street saturated at these schools that Ho says "a glance at the campus publications...demonstrates what amounts to a communal obsession..." (Page 53.)

It was in the light of Ho's illumination that I read with great interest Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust's September 6, 2009 NY Times Op-Ed, "The University's Crisis of Purpose." It's a retrospective and lamentation at the same time, in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, and what universities had become, unable to "expose the patterns of risk and denial" contained in that "bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism..." She asks if "universities (became) too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve" and, "has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?" Noting the trend, since the 1970's, for business degrees to outnumber by a 2:1 ratio the next most popular major, she reaffirms a mission for higher education to "offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present." This sounds hopeful, but the trends of 30 years of Market Utopianism, and the vast shadow cast by The Market, will not be lifted in an instant, barring a further economic catastrophe on the scale of the Great Depression.

Wow, the EU is increasingly taking steps to force foreign, meaning US and UK firms, to play by its rules or not have access to its investors. The first salvo occurred over private equity funds and hedge funds, where the EU will limit its investors to funds located in the EU, and is also limiting the ability of foreign funds to acquire firms in the EU.

The latest development is that the EU is implementing a rule called 122(a) which will have a significant impact on the private securitization market. EU investors will be penalized (via much higher capital requirements) if they invest in asset backed securities that they cannot understand. And of course, to understand them, the issuer has to make pretty complete disclosure (you can't assess in a vacuum). That disclosure in turn happens to be higher than the norm pre crisis.

....

The fact that the EU is muscling the US is a sign of both the US's weakening authority and a lack of strategic vision. As strange as it may seem now, the reason the US has had the deepest capital markets wasn't simply the size of our economy, but the perception that we had the most open and fairest regime for investors. The US markets are badly tarnished, yet the authorities continue to take their cues from the very same industry incumbents who created this mess.

The Japanese often would speak of "foreign pressure" as in using foreigners as an excuse to do things that the elite bureaucrats actually wanted to happen but found difficult politically. The worst is our top regulators still seem unable to believe that they can and must be much tougher with their charges.

And you were wondering why the SEC and certain politicians with extensive connections to the financial services lobby are starting to stir now that it is common knowledge that every single hedge fund and trading desk's woes are a function of HFT run amok (which is exaggerated BS of course, but from Wall Street's darling, HFT has now become the one thing everyone loves to hate, and blame their own underperformance on). And as we suspected, there is a far more structural issue underlying the recent faux-move to restore confidence in markets, namely imminent pain for Wall Street headcounts... and bottom lines. According to Meredith Whitney, who had been relatively quite in recent weeks, Wall Street faces the departure of about 80,000 staffers, or 10% of all, within 18 months, not to mention a major drop in Wall Street compensation. The reason is the same as the one we pointed out earlier: slowing revenue growth, primarily due to the complete collapse in trading volumes, as computers have used their binary elbows to push everyone else out of the markets, and with Wall Street's primary revenue model now being exclusively reliant on trading, this is equivalent to a partial extinction event as many trading firms will have to close. This also means that the New York City economy is facing another major solvency crisis as tax receipts are sure to plummet.

More from Bloomberg, citing Whitney:

   "The key product drivers of Wall Street's revenues and profits over the past decade have been in a structural decline over the past three years," Whitney said in the report. "2010 marks the first year in many in which Wall Street-centric firms will go through structural changes."

    Barclays Plc, Credit Suisse Group AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc may lead a slowdown in hiring in Europe as the fixed-income trading boom fizzles out, recruiters said last month. Barclays Capital's income from trading bonds and commodities fell 40 percent in the first half amid the sovereign debt crisis. Fixed-income, currencies and commodities trading was the biggest revenue contributor at investment banks from Deutsche Bank AG to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

    While regulatory reform, including higher capital requirements, will force some of these shifts, there will be a "deeper secular change" due to declining revenue in businesses such as securitization, Whitney wrote.

    Even though emerging markets will continue to expand, they won't do so fast enough to offset the declines in the U.S. and Europe, Whitney said.

Guardian - Jonathan Freedland - An economy kept afloat by mafia cash is not just the stuff of Le Carré thrillers

Leading banks around the world, desperate for cash in the financial crisis, turn to the proceeds of organised crime as "the only liquid investment capital" available, eventually absorbing the greater part of a staggering $352bn of drugs profits into the global economic system, laundering that vast sum in the process.....

I'd arrived in Athens just a few days earlier, exactly one week before the next planned riot, and a few days after German politicians suggested that the Greek government, to pay off its debts, should sell its islands and perhaps throw some ancient ruins into the bargain. Greece's new socialist prime minister, George Papandreou, had felt compelled to deny that he was actually thinking of selling any islands. Moody's, the ratings agency, had just lowered Greece's credit rating to the level that turned all Greek government bonds into junk--and so no longer eligible to be owned by many of the investors who currently owned them. The resulting dumping of Greek bonds onto the market was, in the short term, no big deal, because the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank had between them agreed to lend Greece--a nation of about 11 million people, or two million fewer than Greater Los Angeles--up to $145 billion. In the short term Greece had been removed from the free financial markets and become a ward of other states.

That was the good news. The long-term picture was far bleaker. In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. "Our people went in and couldn't believe what they found," a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he'd returned from the I.M.F.'s first Greek mission. "The way they were keeping track of their finances--they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn't even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country."

As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms--and that number doesn't take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece's rail passengers into taxicabs: it's still true.

Amnesty International has urged Kyrgyzstani authorities to ensure a fair trial for eight ethnic Uzbeks facing charges over the death of a police officer during mass violence across southern parts of the country in June.

The appeal comes after the accused, their lawyers and families were attacked by relatives and colleagues of the dead policeman at the opening of their trial in the southern town of Massi on 2 September, following repeated requests from the defence to move the trial away from the region.

The leading US and Nato commander in Afghanistan today said threats by a US church to burn copies of the Qur'an could endanger troops in Afghanistan and Americans worldwide.

General David Petraeus's warning followed a protest by hundreds of Afghans yesterday over plans by the Florida-based Dove World Outreach Centre - an evangelical Christian church espousing anti-Islamic philosophy - to burn copies of the Qur'an on church grounds to mark the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Several hundred Afghans rallied outside a Kabul mosque, burning American flags and an effigy of Dove World's pastor and chanting: "Death to America." Members of the crowd briefly pelted a passing US military convoy with stones, but were ordered to stop by protest organisers.

As if they haven't suffered enough, Cantabrians toiling to clean up after Saturday's quake now face a potential shortage of Canterbury Draught beer.

And the rest of the country also faces running out of a number of well-known brands, including Guinness, Beck's and the Macs Craft range.

Lion Nathan's Christchurch brewery - which suffered heavy damage in the 7.1 magnitude quake - is closed, and likely to stay that way until the end of the week. It is the sole producer of the four popular labels.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has found an unlikely ally to help raise cash for his impoverished regime: The Dude, the pot-smoking underachiever played by Jeff Bridges in the movie "The Big Lebowski."

Programmers from North Korea's General Federation of Science and Technology developed a 2007 mobile-phone bowling game based on the 1998 film, as well as "Men in Black: Alien Assault," according to two executives at Nosotek Joint Venture Company, which markets software from North Korea for foreign clients. Both games were published by a unit of News Corp., the New York-based media company, a spokeswoman for the unit said.

The threat posed by al-Qaida and the Taliban is exaggerated and the western-led counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan risks becoming a "long, drawn-out disaster", one of the world's leading security thinktanks warned today.

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the west's counter-insurgency strategy has "ballooned" out of proportion to the original aim of preventing al-Qaida from mounting terrorist attacks there, and must be replaced by a less ambitious but more sensible policy of "containment and deterrence".

The critique of the US- and British-backed military policy is contained in the latest strategic survey from the IISS, a respected but usually uncontroversial body. IISS officers made clear today they have departed from their normal practice because of the serious threat to the west's security interests in pursuing the current Afghan strategy.

CAIRO: Egypt's most popular opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei has called for a boycott of this November's parliamentary elections. He told a group of some 200 supporters that elections in Egypt are already decided and that patience is needed among opposition forces before change can be created.

Speaking at a Ramadan iftar meal - the meal to mark the end of the sunrise to sunset fast - ElBaradei said that a vote would go against "the national will" of transforming Egypt into a real democracy.

"If all people boycott elections totally, it will be in my view the end of the regime," he told reporters after the meal.

VIENNA - Austrian billionaire Martin Schlaff is behind the transfer of $4.5 million to the bank accounts of Gilad and Omri Sharon, an investigation conducted by Israel's national fraud squad has concluded.

The investigators are therefore recommending that Schlaff be indicted on bribery charges, and that Gilad and Omri, the sons of former prime minister Ariel Sharon, be charged with serving as conduits for a bribe.

Egyptian troops on Tuesday seized nine weapons consignments bound for the Gaza Strip that included anti-aircraft weapons, according to Israeli and Palestinian news reports.

In a series of raids across the Sinai Peninsula, which borders Hamas-controlled Gaza, troops recovered machine guns, ammunition, over 170 anti-aircraft shells, 90 artillery shells and anti-tank landmines, the reports said.

Bolivia, Sept. 7 2010, Emily Achtenberg for NACLA - Recent massive protests in Potosí, a traditional bastion of support for Bolivia's Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government, have confronted President Evo Morales with perhaps the most significant challenge of his second term in office. Unlike past regional revolts led by conservative opposition forces in Santa Cruz, Potosí represents a new type of regional economic conflict led by coalitions of popular organizations demanding to be part of Bolivia's "process of change." These protests are taking place in the context of a new federalism that is raising expectations as well as demands for political accountability. (...) While the protesters gained important government promises  in recognition of their demands, the situation is far from resolved. Next steps, for the most part, will depend on the work of multi-party commissions set up to address each issue. In addition to questions of financing and implementation, significant legal obstacles remain. The resolution of the boundary dispute, for example, will require new legislation, and the metal processing plant can't open until the government completes arbitration to oust the existing transnational owner. Since the settlement, the rhetoric and charges have continued to escalate on both sides. The government has dismissed the conflict as "fabricated," and accused protest leaders of sacrificing the population of Potosí at great economic cost to their own department ($12 million in mining royalties plus foregone tourist revenues). The MAS deputies who joined the protests have been isolated by the party leadership and branded as "traitors."

Honduras, Reporters Without Borders: There has a new surge in cases of harassment and censorship of journalists working for radio stations that have been outspoken in their criticism of the government since the June 2009 coup d'état.

Colombia Reports: Colombia's Catholic church says there are more than 3.8 million displaced people in the country. (...) Most of Colombia's internal refugees were forced from their land by violence from guerrillas or paramilitary groups. The church's charity body Pastoral Social has registered 2.8 million hectares of land that were seized from Colombians, but warned that the actual figure could be closer to 5 million.

Foreign Policy in Focus: Peruvian President Fujimori's Right-Hand Man Was a Gun Runner and Drug Dealer -- and Employed by the U.S.  A Supreme Court verdict in Peru this week once again shows how the U.S. government has engaged in unholy alliances -- often with those involved in the very drug trade it claims to be combating -- in order to further its short-term drug policy objectives and to the detriment of broader U.S. foreign policy goals.

Guatemala, Prensa Libre: The Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food (MAGA) reported yesterday Q25.7 million losses in various crops, mainly white maize, due to flooding and landslides in recent days. According to the preliminary report, from August 28 until September 5 last just five thousand 456.6 hectares were adversely affected of maize, bananas, beans, tomatoes and "pepitoria". The product most affected was corn, with four thousand 852.4 hectares ruined and Q21 million in losses.

GEORGETOWN, Guyana -- Guyana and Suriname have agreed on a new mechanism to advance co-operation and the bridging of the Corentyne River linking the two South American and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) neighbours. This was revealed at a join press conference on Monday following a meeting between Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo and his Surinamese counterpart president Desi Bouterse, who was on a one day state visit to Guyana.

Castro opened our initial meeting by telling me that he read the recent Atlantic article carefully, and that it confirmed his view that Israel and America were moving precipitously and gratuitously toward confrontation with Iran. This interpretation was not surprising, of course: Castro is the grandfather of global anti-Americanism, and he has been a severe critic of Israel. His message to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, he said, was simple: Israel will only have security if it gives up its nuclear arsenal, and the rest of the world's nuclear powers will only have security if they, too, give up their weapons. Global and simultaneous nuclear disarmament is, of course, a worthy goal, but it is not, in the short term, realistic.

Castro's message to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, was not so abstract, however. Over the course of this first, five-hour discussion, Castro repeatedly returned to his excoriation of anti-Semitism. He criticized Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and explained why the Iranian government would better serve the cause of peace by acknowledging the "unique" history of anti-Semitism and trying to understand why Israelis fear for their existence.

[...]

He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. "This went on for maybe two thousand years," he said. "I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything." The Iranian government should understand that the Jews "were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here's what happened to them: Reverse selection. What's reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation." He continued: "The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust." I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. "I am saying this so you can communicate it," he answered.

Castro went on to analyze the conflict between Israel and Iran. He said he understood Iranian fears of Israeli-American aggression and he added that, in his view, American sanctions and Israeli threats will not dissuade the Iranian leadership from pursuing nuclear weapons. "This problem is not going to get resolved, because the Iranians are not going to back down in the face of threats. That's my opinion," he said. He then noted that, unlike Cuba, Iran is a "profoundly religious country," and he said that religious leaders are less apt to compromise. He noted that even secular Cuba has resisted various American demands over the past 50 years.

Baghdad - Two United States soldiers were killed and nine injured Tuesday in a firefight in northern Iraq, the military said.

The incident took place 'inside an Iraqi Army commando compound' near Tuz, about 150 kilometres north-west of the capital Baghdad, according to a statement released by the US military in Iraq.

A single assailant was apparently behind the assault and he was shot dead.

The two soldiers are the first US deaths in Iraq since President Barack Obama declared the end of military operations on August 31.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has announced his intention to retire at the end of his term (an office he's held since 1989!) and the talk is that Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel will run to replace him.

It's good timing, because with the national election imminent, a major White House shakeup was due.

From AP:

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico -- Weeks of torrential rains have unleashed flooding in huge swaths of southern Mexico, forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes.

Tens of thousands more are sleeping on their roofs, refusing to abandon their possessions even as the rivers around them rise rapidly.

Authorities on Tuesday started releasing 2,000 cubic meters (71,000 cubic feet) of water per second from four damns in the region that have reached capacity. That caused several rivers to overflow.

The flooding has affected all four southernmost Mexican states: Tabasco, Veracruz, Chiapas and Oaxaca. People in the region are accustomed to severe flooding every year, and the government often struggles to persuade residents to leave dangerous zones.

In Tabasco, the homes of more than 124,000 people have been severely flooded. More than 187,000 hectares of crops belonging to 20,000 people have been lost.

Bailiffs and police are currently at the site of Brighton's Lewes Road community garden.

The bailiffs attempted to execute a court-order to seize the garden at about 2am today.

But protesters who have made it into a community garden are reluctant to give it up to developers Alburn Minos who hope to build seven flats and two shops, one of which is set to be leased to Tesco.

Germany's coalition government has decided to extend the life span of the country's nuclear power plants by an average of 12 years, officials say.

Under the agreement, some plants will now remain in production until the 2030s, instead of being phased out by 2021 as the previous government wanted.

There will also be new fees on utility companies to fund renewable energy.

A massive expansion is to take place at Europe's largest onshore wind farm, which is situated in East Renfrewshire.

ScottishPower Renewables is to add another 75 turbines to Whitelee wind farm on Eaglesham Moor by 2012.

This will bring the number of turbines on site to 215 - raising electricity generating capacity by two thirds.

The 140 turbines currently at the wind farm, to the south of Glasgow, can produce enough electricity to power 180,000 homes.

The expansion will see its generating capacity increase from 322MW to 539MW - enough to power about 300,000 homes.

Julia Gillard's new minority government in Australia means that the country's green party will take a pivotal position in the nation's politics for the first time.

Like the UK and Germany, a surge in popularity has given the environmental movement an unprecedented parliamentary presence in Australia this year, prompting suggestions that electorates are punishing mainstream parties for failing to act decisively on climate change.

The story is painful even to consider. This panel went up on the White House roof in 1979, with then-president Jimmy Carter (in a wide tie, and with a bushy haircut) promising that it would still be there in the year 2000, producing hot water from the sun for whoever was then president. In fact, it didn't make it through the next decade -- it came down in the Reagan years, a symbol of our decision to turn away from the idea of limits and veer sharply down the path we've trod ever since.

But not everyone went along. Frugal folks at Unity College in Maine salvaged the panels, and put them up on the cafeteria, where they continued to produce hot water for the next three decades. Meanwhile, around the world other nations took the technology and went to work. Germany and Japan took over the lead in photovoltaic panels, but solar thermal technology like this became the special province of the Chinese.

I sat not long ago with Huang Ming, China's leading solar entrepreneur, in his space-age Sun Moon Mansion in Shandong Province looking over the stats: his HiMin Solar Energy Group has put up 60 million such systems across China--he estimated that when 250 million Chinese take a shower, the hot water is coming off their roofs. In a biting symbol of that passed torch, he keeps one of the Carter panels in his private museum.

China overtook of the U.S. to lead a quarterly index of the most attractive countries for renewable energy projects for the first time, according to the the global accounting firm Ernst & Young, which compiles the list.

China, which shared the lead with the U.S. in the first quarter, moved ahead of the world's largest economy and ranked the most attractive for investment in wind and solar projects. The move followed the failure of a proposed energy bill in the U.S. to include a clean energy standard, the company said today.

A zero-carbon heating initiative in Paris plans to harness hot air generated by underground travel to warm up nearby homes

Warmth generated by sweaty passengers as they commute on the Paris Mètro may be used to heat a block of low-income flats located near the Pompidou Centre in the city centre. This could slash the building's energy bill and carbon footprint by a third, according to the property's owner.

The temperature in nearby Rambuteau Mètro station stays at a toasty 14-20C degrees all year round thanks to the heat generated by passengers, trains and other machinery. Paris Habitat-OPH, the owners of the building, plan to use the underground heat to warm up water as it courses through pipes. It will then be pumped to the surface into an underfloor heating system in the block of flats.

BP says a "sequence of failures" involving "multiple companies" led to the explosion and fire that killed 11 people and caused a massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

In a 193-page report released Wednesday and posted on its website, the company said the accident arose from "a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces."

...

The internal report was prepared by a team led by BP's head of safety and operations, Mark Bly.

I reiterate that if a set of people with equal access to the factors used in producing food and to other sorts of fuel increased in numbers to the point that food supply was insufficient for everybody and food was offered in the market, the food raiser could command the product of all the other energy produced in that society.

But such conditions rarely if ever exist. Two things make their appearance unlikely. First, population will be limited. There is a great deal of evidence that over a long period of time the culture of a given people living in a particular environment will sanction practices that produce a steady state, sometimes only at subsistence, but sometimes as I have shown, at a level far above that which is strictly a result of food shortage. Secondly, a "free market" for food rarely exists. There are claims of kinship, religion, government, and other social controls that limit the market in low-energy societies. Neither is the free market for food likely to be allowed where the transition to high-energy culture has been made. As I pointed out earlier, energy can be used not only to induce people through reward, seduction, and corruption to choose a new way of life. It can be and has often been used to coerce physically those who have only their bodies and its product with which to resist the much greater physical power of those using high-energy fuels and their converters. So those who dominate permit the market to function only within the limits they impose.

In feudal times in the West, population was limited by the fact that productivity was a function of organic converters. The worker's share was a fixed amount of goods or a fixed fraction of what was produced; it did not necessarily increase as his family increased. As a consequence, population could increase during years of plenty, but weaker individuals, children and old people were bound to die off in the years of scarcity. The feudal lord sought the maximum surplus; beyond a given point, increased numbers of laborers yielded less than the food consumed by that labor. Those landlords too "humane" to recognize this fact were frequently conquered by those who restricted the number of laborers, raised draft animals, which produced greater surplus, and used that surplus to overrun their weaker neighbors.

The feudal lord was usually the only man who controlled food in excess of his personal needs; he was in control of more political and military power than those who might otherwise have forced him to disgorge that food on their own terms. He commanded the loyalty of those whom he protected and owned the land on which their animals fed. Since with low-energy techniques the greater portion of the population must be attached to the land, he was able to subordinate other men and their values to those which he favored. The balance between population and resources was kept at a point above subsistence, and the landlord did not have to enter a free market.

In 1960, Harold Macmillan announced the abandonment of Britain's colonial aspirations with his famous "wind of change" speech. The empire had become too expensive, it was time to withdraw. This Wednesday, Vince Cable is poised to signal an equally historic retreat, this time from the empire of knowledge.

Britain has an unusually comprehensive capability across all the disciplines of scholarly research. Only the US can match our diversity of expertise. Everywhere else has concentrated on disciplines directly relevant to their commercial ecosystem. Germany is famously strong in engineering, Japan spectacularly weak in the social sciences.

Our expertise resides largely in our universities and has been irrigated for decades by increasing funding for research under both Conservative and Labour governments. The water of funding has allowed academics to spend time exploring the frontiers of knowledge, maintaining British outposts in many far-flung realms. Now the Treasury is considering cuts of 35% in research funding, turning off the tap to many fields. If that happens, expertise will rapidly wither, and our empire will fragment.

Nikolas Sarkozy has become the latest high profile victim of a Google bomb, after bloggers linked his Facebook page to the phrase "trou du cul".

Schoolboys searching for foreign insults will discover the French for 'asshole' is now synonymous with the diminutive President, according to Google at least.

US researchers have found that happiness can be yours for an income of $75k a year (or £48,814.44 as of this morning), although trousering more than that won't necessarily increase your joie de vivre.

Professor Angus Deaton, an economist at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University, and Nobel Prize winning psychologist Professor Daniel Kahneman looked at surveys of 450,000 Americans carried out in 2008 and 2009 for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which quizzed respondents on their day-to-day happiness and overall life satisfaction.

They found that people's happiness increased steadily as income rose to $75,000, but then levelled out. Their sense of success or well-being did, though, continue to rise beyond that figure.

The Commission For Rural Communities is calling for less restrictive planning laws to encourage comms networks to build out, for the sake of the rural economy.

Having spent a few years talking to rural businesses the Commission has published recommendations, entitled Action for Change, concluding that rural development is being stifled by nimbys who`d prefer pretty views to a sustainable economy.

A Japanese journalist held against his will in Afghanistan used a captor's cellphone to tweet his status and location to his followers -- right under said captor's nose.

PC World reports that Kosuke Tsuneoka had been held in captivity for five months when a low-ranking soldier showed him his new cellphone, a Nokia N70. The soldier didn't know how to use the phone or the Internet, so he asked Tsuneoka to show him.

Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre Photography - The Ruins of Detroit

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the city of Detroit
developed rapidly thanks to the automobile industry.

Until the 50's, its population rose to almost 2 million people.
Detroit was the 4th most important city in the United States.

It was the dazzling symbol of the American Dream City with
its monumental skyscrapers and fancy neighborhoods.

Increasing segregation and deindustrialization caused violent riots in 1967.
The white middle-class exodus from the city accelerated and the suburbs grew.
Firms and factories began to close or move to lower-wage states.
Slowly, but inexorably downtown high-rise buildings emptied.

Since the 50's, "Motor City" lost more than half of its population.

A major study was just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine from Harvard. In approximately 85,000 women who were followed for 26 years and 45,000 men who were followed for 20 years, researchers found that all-cause mortality rates were increased in both men and women who were eating a low-carbohydrate Atkins diet based on animal protein.

However, all-cause mortality rates as well as cardiovascular mortality rates were decreased in those eating a plant-based diet low in animal protein and low in refined carbohydrates.

Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary has turned his focus on the cockpit as part of his ongoing drive to save costs at the budget airline.

He said he intends to write to aviation authorities for permission to use only one pilot per flight because he believes co-pilots are unnecessary in modern jets, the Financial Times reported.

Mr O'Leary, who has previously considered standing tickets on flights as well as charging for the use of toilets, conceded that two pilots would be needed on long-haul flights, but said on shorter trips flight attendants could do the job.

LOS ANGELES - Police beating victim Rodney King is engaged to one of the jurors who awarded him a $3.8 million settlement, RadarOnline reported Tuesday.

King and Cynthia Kelley said they first felt a romantic spark when they met in a Newport Beach pizzeria the day after the controversial 1994 jury award.

Both were married at the time, which complicated the blossoming relationship

A man posing as a barrister fled a court in Devon when a senior judge became suspicious of him.

Judge Stephen Wildblood asked some basic legal questions which the man could not answer when he appeared before him at Plymouth Crown Court.

Judge Wildblood said he was suspicious because the man, who gave his name as David Evans, wore a barrister's wig with a solicitor's gown.

The judge said he had informed the Crown Prosecution Service.

There are about 60 barristers called David Evans operating in the UK.

The man, who gave his address as a printing house in London, was appearing at a preliminary defence hearing.

NASSAU, Bahamas (AP) -- Bahamian police said Tuesday they are trying to identify human remains found in the stomach of a tiger shark caught off the Exuma islands.

Forensic investigators were conducting DNA tests on the two legs, two arms and severed torso found inside the 12-foot (3.6-meter) shark, said Assistant Police Commissioner Glenn Miller.

He said the remains appeared to be a couple of days old, but that it was not clear whether the person was dead or alive when consumed by the shark.

The tiger shark can migrate long distances and has been known to attack people.

The Prince of Wales embarks on a tour of Britain today to promote his sustainable living initiative START.

Charles will travel by the bio-fuel powered Royal Train as he takes his message to communities from Glasgow to London.

START, launched earlier this year, encourages people to consider a more energy efficient, less wasteful way of life.

Tony Blair's autobiography has been turning up in the crime section of bookshops thanks to a Facebook and Twitter campaign.

The publication of the ex-prime minister's memoirs, A Journey, was one of the most eagerly awaited literary events of the year, but his insistence that the decision to invade Iraq was correct meant that not everyone welcomed the book. Tony Blair's book is being subversively moved (PA)

A Facebook group entitled 'Subversively move Tony Blair's memoirs to the crime section in book shops' gained more than 1,000 members inside a day.

The group's creator, Euan Booth, said the idea was non-violent direct action against a man he described as "our generation's greatest war criminal".

Blair's popularity never recovered after Iraq, and although he won the 2005 election, he did so with a narrowed majority against a disorganized opposition. His third-way flexibility had put off some people, and his messianic certainty put off others. For many Britons, that is, he combined the negative qualities that some people found in President Clinton with the negative qualities that others found in President Bush. There was a widespread perception that Blair's time in office was winding down, which aggrieved him: "I was at the height of my powers, if not my power." He had, he says, "a complete vision of where we should be in the early twenty-first century," and is emphatic about the need for public-sector reform, if somewhat short on the specifics.