As of next year, Ukraine will lift a moratorium on the sale of agricultural land, a move seen as an important step in opening up the country to potential foreign buyers. But legislation that would establish a truly modern land market is still lacking.

The parliament in Kyiv recently refused to prolong a moratorium which has prohibited land sales since 1992.

On 16 August, a parliamentary hearing took place on a new 'law on land', with the participation of scientists, civil society and foreign donors.

According to observers, Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovich and his team are seriously intending to open up the land market within the next year or so.

The move could herald new opportunities for foreign investors. Ukraine has 42 million hectares of farmland and dwarfs the EU's largest agricultural nation, France, and its 29 million hectares.

It could also help Europe's drive to lower food prices, as Ukraine harbours huge potential to increase farm yields by adapting to modern agricultural techniques. Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov admitted that the productivity of Ukrainian agriculture is three to five times lower than in most EU countries.

However, experts warn that the move may backfire politically and may pose significant challenges, as there is no official cadastre or legal base for the sale of agricultural land.

German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich hit back forcefully against a draft plan to give the European Commission more say on when member states can reintroduce border controls in the passport-free Schengen travel area.

Under the draft EU legislation obtained by AFP, a country in the passport-free zone would be able to resume border patrols without asking for permission, but only for five days.

Beyond that, the country would have to ask the European Commission in Brussels for permission.

But Friedrich slammed the proposals, saying: "Security questions are a core competence of member states and we will not accept a transfer of this task to others or an undermining of this competence."

"We will not allow Brussels to dictate when we introduce controls. We control the borders if the security situation requires," Friedrich told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Copyright protection for performers and producers to go up from 50 to 70 years.

The European Union has adopted new rules to extend copyright protection for music performers and producers.

In a move praised by the recording industry, the new directive will offer protection for 70 years, rather than 50 years as is the case at present.

A majority of member states agreed that the current timescale left many performers with several years without income at the end of their lives.

European criticism of the trial over Ukraine's former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko is groundless, incumbent Prime Minister Mykola Azarov told Le Figaro.

Tymoshenko, 50, was arrested on August 5 on charges of signing "unfair" gas supply deals with Russia and faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. She could be imprisoned for 10 years if found guilty of forcing Ukraine's state gas firm Naftogaz to sign an unfavorable deal with Russia while she was serving as prime minister. Tymoshenko has repeatedly denied all the charges against her, saying they are politically motivated.

Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski - who holds the rotating EU presidency - told Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych that plans to finalize a free-trade deal this year between Ukraine and the EU could be derailed by Tymoshenko's legal travails.

"The Ukrainian authorities need to find a solution that removes any doubts that this trial is an act of political revenge against the opposition," Komorowski said.

When Robert Bourgi was presented with the Legion of Honour - France's highest civilian decoration - in September 2007, President Nicolas Sarkozy said he was grateful for the opportunity to reward one of France's most loyal servants. However, less flattering words have been used to describe the man who has since admitted to handing former president Jacques Chirac millions in cash from African presidents. In an August 2009 profile in the daily Le Monde, unnamed diplomats accused Bourgi of willingly sowing conflict between French and African leaders only to later come to the rescue and reconcile the two sides.

Chirac and his former prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, who was also named in the payoff affair, have denied wrongdoing and said they would sue Bourgi for defamation. But before the startling allegations of illegal cash donations, Bourgi was already a controversial figure in France's shady parallel diplomacy in Africa. His close relationships with the Bongo presidential dynasty in Gabon, as well as with ousted Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo, have made him an all-too-easy target for French journalists.

Every time you buy a Billy bookcase at one IKEA's Danish warehouses, DKK 10 ends up in a secret fund in Liechtenstein which is personally controlled by the furniture company's wealthy Swedish founder Ingvar Kamprad. And the money is in all probably not taxed.

Internal IKEA accounts that Politiken has obtained show how the company's Danish subsidiary has channelled vast sums to Liechtenstein through a system of shell companies in the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Overall more than DKK 750 million has been sent from the Danish storehouses to the tiny principality. Last year alone, the figure was DKK 86 million.

In all, Danish state coffers have probably been cheated out of DKK 187.5 million.

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"Germany is already well advanced in the installation of an integrated HVDC network that will allow clusters of offshore wind farms to be developed," said Macknocker. "It is likely that this groundwork will allow Germany to surpass the UK as the world leader in installed offshore wind capacity sometime between 2015 and 2020."

Apart from Germany and the UK, the remaining 11% of the offshore cable market, which is dominated by market leader ABB, is taken up by Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Three French banks lose more than 10% of their market value, facing an erosion of their equity base; investors are concerned about the effects of an increasingly probable Greek default, and lack of G7 policy action; French stock market is now down to the depth of the 2009 recession; US money market funds have cut their holdings of CDs issued by French banks by 40%

Germany's economics minister says Greece will default, triggering Angela Merkel's scorn; Alexander Hagelüken says official talk of a Greek default was irresponsible; the Greek government adopted a partial payment freeze, that excludes salaries and pensions; the ECB bought €14bn in bonds last week, bringing the total programme to €143bn; Francois Baroin cautiously endorses eurobonds; only four EU countries will have deficits of below 3% in 2012; IMF releases second tranche of the loan to Portugal; Wolfgang Proissl calls on the Bundesbank to give up its dissident role; eurozone finance ministers will finalise the EFSF guidelines at the informal meeting this week; Germany borrows at rates close to zero, while Spain is fretting about another high-interest rate bond auction; Giulio Tremonti, meanwhile, is holding talks with Chinese officials about strategic investments to stabilise the country's position in the eurozone.

The leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party has demanded that Israel apologize for its part in the capture of the PKK's imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1999 after a report that Israel was planning to use the PKK against Turkey, the Turkish newspaper Today's Zaman reported on Monday.

The Maastricht Treaty established a monetary union, but the political union that is an indispensable precondition for the common currency's success remained a mere promise. The euro, and the countries that adopted it, are now paying the price. The eurozone now rests on the shaky basis of a confederation of states that are committed both to a monetary union and to retaining their fiscal sovereignty. At a time of crisis, that cannot work.

...

Throughout history, confederations have never really worked, because the question of sovereignty (and thus of power and legitimacy) remains unresolved. The United States is a case in point. After winning independence, the American colonies united loosely under the Articles of Confederation. But that arrangement failed financially and economically, and the US soon moved towards a full federation.

...

Financial-market pressure has now reached France, and poses a danger that is far from over. If France is brought to its knees and Germany doesn't stand by its partner unwaveringly and with everything that it has to offer, the European catastrophe will be complete. And that could happen sooner rather than later: France cannot and will not give up on the Mediterranean region, so the exit fantasies entertained by rich northern Europeans (Germans, above all) endanger the Franco-German pillar of European peace.

In Deutschland und anderen wohlhabenderen Euro-Staaten herrscht jedoch das blanke Misstrauen. Wenn China europäische Anleihen kaufe, sinnierte jüngst EU-Kommissar Günther Oettinger, sei das keine karitative Tat: "China übernimmt die EU, und wir Europäer verkaufen unsere Seele."

One of Europe's largest banks, Société Générale, is reportedly planning to take legal action against the Mail on Sunday for defamation after it claimed the bank was in a "perilous" state and on the "brink of disaster".

The Mail on Sunday sent shares in the French bank plummeting more than 20% after the story was published on 7 August. The newspaper quickly retracted the article and published an apology on its website accepting that the claim "was not true".

According to an internal memo seen by Reuters, Société Générale is now planning to sue the Mail on Sunday publisher, Associated Newspapers, for undisclosed damages over what it called "unfounded rumours"

Societe Generale SA, BNP Paribas SA and Credit Agricole SA (ACA) are being quoted higher rates than their competitors in the commercial paper market as the crisis in the euro zone spreads beyond Greece, Portugal and Italy.

Investors charged the French companies an average 6.7 basis points more to borrow three-month commercial paper on Sept. 8 than the rate the lenders said they could pay in the London interbank offered rate market, according to two buyers who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. As recently as July, the banks received CP rates that were lower than Libor.

Premiums on short-term loans are rising as odds of a default by Greece grows, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel preparing plans to aid her nation's financial companies. BNP, Societe Generale and Credit Agricole, France's largest banks by market value, may have their credit ratings cut by Moody's Investors Service as soon as this week because of their Greek holdings, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

(Reuters) - Britain's shake-up of its banks to protect taxpayers buries once and for all its "light touch" reputation and takes the sector back to a simpler, 1940s style of high street lending.

Pushing well beyond new international regulations, the Independent Commission on Banking's (ICB) final report, broadly endorsed by government, will force big and costly organisational surgery on Britain's main banks.

"Our recommendations are very much with the grain of what is happening internationally but in important respects we are going further on capital requirements, getting more detailed on loss-absorbing debt," ICB Chairman John Vickers told reporters.

Only Switzerland is planning similarly high capital ratios for its banks but Britain is going a step further with deeper reform after spending about a trillion pounds shoring up the sector.

Eurozone government bond buying by the European Central Bank accelerated last week ahead of the surprise resignation of Jürgen Stark, its executive board member who had opposed the programme.

Some €14bn of bonds had been acquired by mid-week, the ECB announced on Monday - up from €13.3bn in the previous seven days.

The pick-up highlighted the scale of the challenge facing the ECB as it tries to calm investor fears about the eurozone debt crisis, which last month forced it to start buying Italian and Spanish government debt.

Since the programme was launched in May 2010, the ECB has acquired €143bn in government bonds - almost half of which has been bought in the past five weeks.

Iran held on Monday the official opening ceremony of its first nuclear power plant completed after long delay with Russia's assistance.

Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko and head of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom) Sergei Kiriyenko attended the ceremony.

"This demonstrates that Russia has met all its obligations [under the construction contract] despite the adverse political situation [surrounding the project]," Kiriyenko said.

The first unit at Bushehr has capacity to generate 1,000 megawatts. It was connected to the grid last week.

KABUL, Sept. 12 (Xinhua) -- NATO is committed to train and equip the Afghan army after the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) end their combat operation by the end of 2014, a NATO general said here on Monday.

"The NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan (NTM-A) was only started in the late 2009 and as a consequence with mission going on to 2014, we are not even half way through on mandate on our task, and with the announcement of NATO of course we'll stay here past 2014," Major General Michael Day, Deputy Commander of NTM-A told a joint press conference with the spokesman of ISAF Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson.

He said that NTM-A aims to bring the strength of Afghan National Army (ANA) from 171,600 at present to 195,000 by the end of 2014.

The Helsinki Court of Appeal on Monday began hearing the testimony in a genocide trial in the African country of Rwanda. Over the next five weeks, the court will hear from 39 Rwandan witnesses in the case.

Last year, a Finnish court sentenced Francois Bazaramba, a Rwandan national resident in Finland , to life imprisonment for his involvement in genocide against the Tutsi minority in his home country in 1994. He has appealed the conviction.

For the next five weeks, the Helsinki Court of Appeal will be in session in the conference facilities of a hotel in the Rwandan capital Kigali. Bazaramba is following the proceedings along with his defense lawyer from the prison where he is being held in Vantaa. The two have declined to travel to Rwanda due to personal safety concerns.

A South African court has found Julius Malema, the fireband leader of the youth brigade of the country's ruling African National Congress (ANC), guilty of hate speech.

The court on Monday ordered the youth leader to pay costs for singing an apartheid-era song that advocated the killing of white farmers.

"I find the words uttered by Malema constitute hate speech" Judge Collin Lamont said.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep. 12, 2011 (IPS) - A former U.N. secretary-general was once quoted as having described non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as the world's "third superpower".

But come September, the thousands of NGOs armed with U.N. credentials will be barred from the United Nations, specifically when world leaders arrive to address the General Assembly sessions.

The annual ritual where civil society is treated as political and social outcasts has always triggered strong protests. The United Nations justifies the restriction primarily for "security reasons".

The 10-day ban on NGOs will begin Sep. 20, the day before U.S. President Barack Obama's address to the General Assembly, which will be followed by speeches from more than 100 world leaders.

This year, however, the ban has generated more protests because most NGOs have been shut out of three key "high-level meetings" scheduled for next week - on desertification and poverty eradication; on racism and xenophobia; and on the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases - plus a nuclear security summit.

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) -- Guatemala's leading presidential candidates are headed for a November runoff after a retired general who had a commanding lead in the polls failed to win 50 percent of the vote. With 95 percent of the polling stations reporting Monday, preliminary results showed Otto Perez Molina of the Patriot Party with 36 percent support, followed by businessman Manuel Baldizon with 24 percent and Eduardo Suger with 16 percent. "We are going to double our efforts, now that we are in the second round," Perez said after learning he would be in the runoff.

MercoPress: Chile's Sunday September 11 demonstrations to recall the military coup of 1973 turned violent and left one adolescent with a gun wound, power cuts, dozens of arrests and 350 "outbreaks of violence" in the capital Santiago according to the Carabineros (militarized police) report. Deputy Interior Secretary Rodrigo Ubilla said that during Saturday night and the following Sunday night a total 280 people were arrested, of which 182 in Santiago's metropolitan region and 98 in the rest of the country. Forty members of the police forces also were reported to have suffered injuries during the incidents.

NISGUA blog: Association for Justice and Reconciliation - AJR; Center for Human Rights Legal Action - CALDH; Guatemala, September 6 2011: Today Guatemalan society is witness to an historic event. For the first time in our country, the Attorney General presented an accusation for the crime of genocide against a retired army general. This step towards justice is of utmost importance for thousands of survivors of genocide in Guatemala.  The accusation against General Héctor Mario López Fuentes is a follow up to the indictment presented by the presiding Judge of the First Sentencing Court for High Risk Crimes, who in June ordered these proceedings.

Turkey has developed a new identification system for its U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets, which will now allow them to fire at Israeli targets, the Iranian state-run news agency Press TV quoted a Turkish newspaper as reporting on Tuesday.

According to the report, the new technology will allow Turkey to identify its enemies itself, as opposed to the old U.S. system which automatically identified all Israeli targets as a "friend," preventing Turkish fighter jets from firing at them, even if Turkish pilots were ordered to do so.

An international team of scientists, led by Dr Stephen Barker of Cardiff University, has produced a prediction of what climate records from Greenland might look like over the last 800,000 years.

Drill cores taken from Greenland's vast ice sheets provided the first clue that Earth's climate is capable of very rapid transitions and have led to vigorous scientific investigation into the possible causes of abrupt climate change.

Such evidence comes from the accumulation of layers of ancient snow, which compact to form the ice-sheets we see today. Each layer of ice can reveal past temperatures and even evidence for the timing and magnitude of distant storms or volcanic eruptions. By drilling cores in the ice scientists have reconstructed an incredible record of past climates. Until now such temperature records from Greenland have covered only the last 100,000 years or so.

The team's reconstruction is based on the much longer ice core temperature record retrieved from Antarctica and uses a mathematical formulation to extend the Greenland record beyond its current limit.

(...) The research published in the journal Science demonstrates that abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth's climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.

Preliminary research on Fusarium, a group of fungi that includes devastating pathogens of plants and animals, shows how these microbes travel through the air. Researchers now believe that with improvements on this preliminary research, there will be a better understanding about crop security, disease spread, and climate change.

Engineers and biologists are steering their efforts towards a new aerobiological modeling technique, one they think may assist farmers in the future by providing an early warning system for high-risk plant pathogens. It will also provide the basis for more effective management strategies to address the spread of infectious diseases affecting plants, domestic animals, and humans.

Using initial studies on the efficient movement and subsequent atmospheric dispersal of these microbes, Shane Ross, an assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics, and David Schmale III, associate professor of plant pathology, physiology and weed science, both at Virginia Tech, have received close to half a million dollars from the National Science Foundation to use autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to collect new samples of Fusarium in the lower atmosphere.

They believe their work, combining the study of biology with engineering dynamics, will allow the prediction of atmospheric transport barriers that might govern the motion of Fusariumbetween habitats.

What's good for job growth, good for the environment, and good for public health? No, it's not a trick question, but it is a reassessment of what passes for conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C., these days. The answer is the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other enormously popular environmental regulations enacted in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s with strong bipartisan support.

Let's start with the conventional wisdom. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) recently called for the repeal of 10 "job-destroying" regulations, calling them "costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business people who want to create jobs." On the list are regulations that limit air pollution, maintain the ozone layer, curtail greenhouse-gas emissions, and prevent contaminants from entering ground water. (Also on the chopping block: labor standards and health protections.) The rationale behind the proposed repeal of these important environmental regulations is somewhat baffling, but here's an example to try to sort it out.

The Environmental Protection Agency's new regulation of space-heating boilers would, according to Cantor, impose "billions of dollars in capital and compliance costs." The question is, where do those billions of dollars go? If we are to believe the majority leader, this money is flushed down the proverbial toilet. Its only impacts are to raise the costs of goods and services, and to put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk (presumably, employers -- cash-strapped after flushing all that money -- would have to fire workers to make ends meet). Environmental regulation, we are told, is nothing but a burden both to business and labor.

The French nuclear safety agency says an explosion occurred at a nuclear processing plant in the suburb of Nimes in southern France on Monday.

The blast took place at a furnace in the nuclear waste processing center in Marcoule.

One person reportedly died and 4 others were injured.

Officials at the facility say there has been no radioactive leaks, and that there is no reactor at the site.

Scores of people have died after a petrol pipeline explosion and fire in Kenya's capital, Nairobi.

The blast took place in the city's Lunga Lunga industrial area, and police and troops cordoned off the area as firefighters battled fierce flames in the surrounding shanty town.

A Red Cross official, Pamela Indiaka, said at least 75 bodies had been recovered. Some reports put the toll at more than 100 dead.

More than 110 people were injured.

The pipeline runs through the densely populated Sinai slum area between Nairobi's city centre and the airport.

Reports suggest the blast may have been sparked by a cigarette butt being thrown into an open sewer that was filling with fuel.

Camberwell magistrates court on Wednesday had 60 riot-related cases to get through but only room in the cells for 30 defendants. Since most of those charged had been refused bail and were coming from prisons around the country, this caused court staff huge logistical problems. Some prisoners were transferred to the cells beneath the courtrooms, the rest had to wait in vans parked outside.

A month after the riots, two courts were dedicated to hearing riot cases all day, and by 9.30am the hall outside the courts was crowded with family members and solicitors waiting for the hearings to begin. All seats in the corridor were taken and visitors were queuing outside the courts.

Transport tycoon Sir Brian Souter has accused Google of stopping links to his website appearing when people search for it.

On 13 August the site "mysteriously disappeared" from results returned for a search on "Brian Souter".

Sir Brian has vowed to launch a campaign to end what he dubbed "search engine censorship".

Google declined to comment on the case but said site rankings were calculated from many different measures.

"It's not Google's place to decide which sites we can see and those we can't," said Sir Brian in a statement.

Mr Osborne admitted he met Miss Rowe, a dominatrix, shortly after leaving university through William Sinclair, Mr Osborne's friend by whom she fell pregnant.

When the story broke in 2005, Mr Osborne said: "Twelve years ago a friend of mine went out with a woman called Natalie and they had a child together. I met them together occasionally in the autumn of 1993, and it soon became clear that my friend had started to use drugs."

Miss Rowe claims she threw parties attended by Mr Osborne and several of his friends from the aristocratic Bullingdon Club.

Led by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (South Africa), over 80 scientists from numerous institutes in Germany, the U.S., UK, Australia, Germany South Africa and Switzerland worked on the project. The work on the brain includes a scientist from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble (France), where the X-ray micro-tomography scan was performed.

The exceptionally well-preserved cranium of MH 1 (Australopithecus sediba) was scanned at the ESRF at a resolution (3-D pixel size) of around 45 microns, just below the size of a human hair. Thanks to this high resolution, incredible details of the anatomy of sediba's endocast could be revealed.

According to Prof. Lee Berger from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (South Africa) who found the fossil in 2009, "the many very advanced features found in the brain and body make it possibly the best candidate ancestor for our genus, the genus Homo, more so than previous discoveries such as Homo habilis."

Humans have a very large brain relative to their body size, about four times that of chimpanzees. Evolution from the brain of our shared ancestor with chimpanzees has seen this radical size increase. However, the reconstructed endocast (volume of the cranium) of MH1 is surprisingly small, with a volume of 420 cm3, on average only about 40 cm3 larger than chimpanzees.

The study of this brain shows a surprising mix of characteristics. Its overall shape resembles humans more than chimpanzees and, given its small volume, this result is consistent with a model of gradual neural (brain) reorganisation in the front part of the brain.

Many of China's churches are overflowing, as the number of Christians in the country multiplies. In the past, repression drove people to convert - is the cause now rampant capitalism?

It is impossible to say how many Christians there are in China today, but no-one denies the numbers are exploding.

The government says 25 million, 18 million Protestants and six million Catholics. Independent estimates all agree this is a vast underestimate. A conservative figure is 60 million. There are already more Chinese at church on a Sunday than in the whole of Europe.

The new converts can be found from peasants in the remote rural villages to the sophisticated young middle class in the booming cities.

A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ludwig, then 65, a retired corrections officer from Bridgeton, N.J., felt his life draining away and thought he had nothing to lose.

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells -- a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors -- and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig's veins.

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.

An angry elk turned the tables on a hunter in northern Sweden at the weekend, kicking the man down to the ground and prompting a fatal round of man-versus-beast combat.

"Suddenly the elk stopped and looked right at me. Then it came after me," hunter Per Henrik Berggren, 31, told The Local.

Berggren was part of a 15-strong hunting team that had taken to the forests near Skellefteå in northern Sweden on Saturday in search of the so-called king of the forest.

Shortly after the group started the day's hunt, word came over the group's radio from Berggren's hunting companion Niklas Forsell, 22, that an injured elk calf was in the area.

"Niklas called out that there was an injured calf heading toward me," said Berggren.