One of the members of Pussy Riot jailed in Russia has been set free after an appeal. Her two band mates lost the appeal and must serve the remaining two years of their sentence for inciting religious hatred.

Yekaterina Samutsevich, pictured center above, was given a suspended sentence instead of jail time, but her band mates - Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina - had their sentences upheld.

The appeals court in Moscow heard the appeal of the three women on Wednesday.

In February, the three women performed a song critical of Vladimir Putin - who would win Russia's presidential election a month later - inside a Russian Orthodox cathedral. They were convicted for inciting religious hatred.

Samutsevich had her sentence suspended because she didn't actually take part in the performance of the song inside the cathedral. Before the band started singing, she had already been ushered out of the cathedral by security guards.

Despite an agreement reached between doctors and health insurance companies about an increase in fees, many doctors' offices across Germany plan to close as part of nationwide strikes.

As many as 80,000 doctors are expected to take part in Wednesday's strikes. For Germans hoping to see a doctor, the strikes could mean closed clinics or waiting times that are longer than usual.

On Tuesday evening, progress seemed to be made in negotiations that have gone on for weeks between Germany's public health insurance companies and the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (Kassenärtzliche Bundesvereinigung, KBV). The deal reached saw the fees received by Germany's 150,000 private practice doctors from the insurance companies for patient services increase by 1.15 - 1.27 billion euros ($1.48-$1.63 billion). The exact amount is subject to further negotiation and will differ regionally.

However, doctors' unions that were not part of the negotiations believe this does not address the central problem facing Germany's private practice doctors and have therefore called for Wednesday's strikes to continue as planned.

Amid mass unemployment and insecurity over the euro, a parallel economy is evolving in Spain. It's based on time banks, where services are exchanged in a barter-style system. DW met with some of the people using them.

Lola Sanchez lives in the Spanish capital Madrid with her teenage son, Jose Antonio, who has cerebral palsy. He can't walk or talk, and tasks as simple as getting into a car are essentially impossible without assistance.

After saving money for years, Sanchez was finally able to buy a car refitted with a mechanical ramp and space for a wheelchair in the back. A nurse used to come each day to help operate the ramp, but that was before the government's austerity program took effect. The family does, however, still get a small check every month.

"But what we really need is physical help - much more so than financial assistance. Because I can't physically lift my son on my own anymore."

Two people have been arrested at Heathrow airport on suspicion of terrorism offences related to Syria.

A man and a woman were held at 8.30pm on Tuesday after arriving on a flight into the airport from Egypt, the Metropolitan police said.

The pair, both aged 26, were arrested by officers from the counter-terrorism command on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

They were taken to a central London police station where they were being held in custody.

Scotland Yard said in a statement released early Wednesday that the pair had flown into the airport from Egypt.

Religious circumcision has taken another step back towards legality in Germany, months after a Cologne court ruled that it caused grievous, irreparable bodily harm and should only be conducted on older children.

The German government approved a new bill on Wednesday that would make the religious circumcision of young boys legal, after a May court ruling in Cologne threw the practice's legality into question.

Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said the proposed law was "an important signal to dispose of the uncertainty that has arisen."

The new law would make the practice legal on religious grounds, but only under certain conditions. Either a qualified doctor or religious figures without medical training but "specially trained for the task" would have to carry out the operation, and only with parental consent. The draft still has to clear parliament and ultimately be signed into law by President Joachim Gauck.

Technically speaking, it seems as though the new provision will not make circumcision "legal", merely not subject to punishment if performed by a suitably trained operator.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

The messages are as curt as telegrams: "Pregnant woman comes to Athens for a Caesarean section. The doctor requests 500 euro [US$640] to perform the operation. The husband has only 300 [$390]. The doctor re-joins with threats."

In this case, the Greek doctor relented and performed the discounted C-section.

The entry is from Greece's first website dedicated to sharing stories of corruption in the public sector. The response has been impressive - after just two weeks online, the site has logged 40,000 visitors and highlighted more than $85,000 in bribes requested and paid.

"What we've noticed is how incredible the bribes can be," says Panos Louridas, one of several volunteers who built the website. "The funniest thing I saw was a hospital patient who had bribed staff to allow his wife to sleep in an empty second bed in his room. It was reported by a patient in an adjacent room."

Anyone can make an anonymous entry on teleiakaipavla.gr, loosely translatable as "Stop it. Period". Names and dates are not mentioned, but institutions are - the top eight by number of entries are hospitals. 

In Turkey, compulsory military service applies to all male citizens from the age of 20 and thousands have been sent to the southeast of the country to confront and quell the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which demands autonomy.

But military service comes at a price - and very often young men give more than their loyalties - they give a piece of their humanity in the process.

Studies show that some 2.5 million young men in Turkey who completed tours of duty in the southeast of the country may be afflicted by "Southeastern Anatolia Syndrome", a localised name for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) characterised by psychological symptoms that emerge following a distressing event outside the range of normal human experience.

Europe Selling off Britain: Lost in translation?

OK, here's a question for you. Imagine you're on holiday in a country whose language you don't speak.

You're walking through a market and someone commits a crime - steals a handbag, say - near where you are standing.

The police turn up and arrest you by mistake. Then they take you to the police station, and talk loudly at you in their language which you don't understand. And then they lock you up.

Sound a bit Kafka? A bit post-Soviet? Well, it's exactly what interpreters and legal campaigners say has been happening throughout this year in Britain.

Why? Because at the end of last year the government here decided to privatise - outsource - the courts' interpretation service.

French police found bomb-making materials during an investigation into radical Islamist suspects arrested at the weekend, a prosecutor says.

Police discovered chemicals and guns at a garage in the Paris suburb of Torcy, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said.

He said the detention of 12 suspects would be extended by 24 hours.

On Saturday, police carried out raids in several cities and shot dead a man said to be linked to a grenade attack against a Jewish shop last month.

The materials found in Torcy overnight included potassium nitrate, sulphur, headlight bulbs, and pressure cookers, Mr Molins told journalists on Wednesday.

Because of suspicion in abuse of power and money laundering, the Slovenian police on Wednesday launched a large investigation of former Nova Kreditna Banka Maribor (NKBM) executives and the investigation is under way in Croatia as well.

...

The Croatian Police Directorate told the media their Slovenian colleagues had requested assistance.
According to Slovenian media, investigators are looking into the bank's operations through the fictitious companies it set up in Croatia which, between 2006 and 2009, bought for the NKMB real estate at too high prices, defrauding Slovenia's second largest state-owned bank of about EUR 60 million.

According to the media, the corruption also allegedly enabled a company to try to buy the Slovenian newspaper Vecer, probably to siphon money out of it too.

Standard & Poor's cuts Spanish sovereign rating by two notches to BBB-, citing weakening Spanish economy, rising social tensions, and the dispute between the central and the regional governments  as the main reason; also says that reluctance to apply for a bailout compounds is a factor; Bild reports that the Bundesbank is looking at the legality of the OMT; Ewald Nowotny says the ECB acted fully in line with its mandate;  the Bild article said that lawyers were also checking the precise extent to which the programme can go; Bild said the issue might be brought to the ECJ; Christine Lagarde says it would be better to give Greece two more years than to frontload the programme;  German economic institutes see no solution to the eurozone crisis; they also express criticism of the OMT, saying it will not solve the problem, which is a lack of political will; a member of the Lombardy regional government was arrested for paying the Mafia to deliver votes for him; latest corruption scandal is playing into the hands of Beppe Grillo, leader of separatist, anti-euro, 5-Star Movement; there is more anecdotal evidence that Italy's recession is beginning to hit the rich; the eurozone; the funding situation for eurozone banks has normalised; a Bundestag delegation is visiting Catalonia on a fact-finding mission; Spain's general prosecutor says he won't bring criminal charges against banks for selling their own preference shares to their clients; economists Tito Boeri and Agar Brugiavini applaud the proposed Italian pension and urge the government not to give in to their critics; Le Monde says Europe is facing a straight choice between integration and disintegration; Lee C. Buchheit  and G. Mitu Gulati, meanwhile, list five policy options that are now left as a result an incompetent crisis management, with a debt re-profiling most likely of all.

British fishermen have been attacked by French boats in the Channel, raising fears of battles among rival boats over resources as quota limits bite and declining stocks make fishing ever more difficult.

The British fishermen were dredging for scallops in an area west of Le Havre, a lucrative fishing ground, when they were attacked with rocks thrown by nearby French boats, which attempted to block their path.

They called for help from the UK coastguard and Royal Navy, but were told that a French naval vessel would be sent. When it arrived, according to the men, the French authorities refused to intervene, angering the British fishermen and raising fears that a similar confrontation could happen again.

Saint Jacques, priez pour nous!

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

When Facebook Inc. (FB) filed its proposal Feb. 1 to go public, it touted the effectiveness of ads linked to customers' friends, citing research from Nielsen, the audience-counting company.

Barbara Jacobs, an assistant director for corporation finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, was skeptical, as she and her staff vetted the filing to ensure Facebook had disclosed all material information to investors. The claim appeared to be drawn from marketing materials, not a Nielsen study, she wrote to Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, 42.

She gave him an ultimatum: Produce the study and provide Nielsen's consent for use of the data -- or don't use it, she wrote to Ebersman on Feb. 28. Facebook dropped the reference after initial resistance.

The incident was part of a two-and-a-half-month volley of messages among SEC officials, Ebersman and Facebook's law firm Fenwick & West LLP. A dozen letters, published a month after the May 17 IPO on the SEC's website, depict a management team hesitant to disclose information and still guessing at even rudimentary aspects of its business just weeks before the company held the largest-ever technology initial public offering. Many of the issues raised by the SEC and now unnerving investors were foreshadowed in the then-private correspondence between the SEC and Facebook.

European Airbus owner EADS and British aircraft manufacturer BAE Systems have called off a planned merger that would have led to the formation of the world's biggest defense and aerospace group.

Talks on the proposed $45-billion (35-billion-euro) deal collapsed on Wednesday after the governments of Britain, France and Germany were unable to agree terms.

BAE said in a statement that it had not been possible to reach an accord on several issues, including the proportion of shares that the French and German firm should own and where the new organization's headquarters should be based. 

"BAE Systems and EADS have therefore decided it is in the best interests of their companies and shareholders to terminate the discussions and to continue to focus on delivering their respective strategies," it said.

12:53PM EST October 10. 2012 - Just when Toyota appeared back on track with hefty sales and a reputation on the mend, up crops its largest recall worldwide ever.

The recall covers more than 7.4 million vehicles, including 2.5 million in the U.S., and requires the automaker to add the right kind of grease to the master switch mechanisms of side power windows, so they won't potentially lead to fires.

LIST:What models are recalled

The problem is less complicated than the dozen or so recalls that Toyota faced in the U.S. a couple years ago when it was under intense scrutiny for accelerators that could potentially jam or stick, causing runaway cars. But it comes at a delicate time for Toyota.

Haven't read the whole thing, just going to cherry pick from the executive summary

So far, policymakers' record in meeting structural challenges has been mixed [...]

Some countries, notably the economies of the euro area periphery, have introduced reforms to make labor markets more flexible.

However, many economies need to take stronger action to help the long-term unemployed, including through improvements to job-search support and training.

Within the euro area, current account imbalances--the large surpluses in Germany and the Netherlands and the deficits in most periphery economies--need to adjust further.

[...] the current account positions of many Asian economies are undesirably strong and their exchange rates undesirably weak. In part, this reflects distortions that hold back consumption. But it also reflects the effect of large-scale official accumulation of foreign exchange.

Germany China, would you please behave yourself? You're embarrassing the invisible hand.


-----
sapere aude

Syria has rejected a call by the UN chief for it to declare a unilateral ceasefire, insisting that rebels fighting the government must stop the violence first.

Jihad Makdissi, Syrian foreign ministry spokesperson, said on Wednesday that twice during the abortive UN military observer mission deployed to Syria between April and the end of August, the Syrian government had implemented a ceasefire.

But he said the rebels "used the opportunity to expand their armed deployment and increase casualties due to terrorist activities".

Battle for strategic town

Makdissi's comments came as the government was sending tanks from Mastumah, south of Idlib city, to Maarat al-Numan, a rebel source told an AFP news agency reporter in the nearby town of Sarmin.

Pakistan's supreme court has ordered authorities to investigate the alleged barter of 13 children - all girls - to settle a blood feud in a remote area of the southwestern Balochistan province.

Iftikhar Muhammed Chaudhry, the country's chief justice, began proceedings on Tuesday, probing the alleged trade in the Dera Bugti district.

IN VIDEO

Human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir discusses women's rights in Pakistan

Saeed Faisal, the deputy commissioner for the district, told the court that a tribal council had ordered the barter in early September.

Faisal said that he did not know the girls' ages, but local media reported that they were aged between four and 13.

Faisal said during Wednesday's proceedings that two helicopters had been sent to get the girls from Dera Bugti to Quetta to take part in the court's proceedings.

One of Tunisia's best-known children's magazines is to be prosecuted for printing an article about how to make petrol bombs, officials say.

The material was published in Qaws Quzah - Arabic for Rainbow - which is aimed at children between five and 15.

The Ministry for Women and Family Affairs said the article "encouraged violent and terrorist thoughts".

The publication carried a picture of a burning glass bottle to illustrate the history and uses of petrol bombs.

The piece appeared in the magazine's so-called Knowledge Corner.

(Reuters) - A new South Carolina law that generally requires voters to show photo identification does not discriminate against racial minorities but cannot go into effect until the start of next year, a federal court ruled on Wednesday.

The U.S. District Court three-judge panel said too little time remains before the November 6 general election for state officials to implement the law this year. The decision was unanimous.

Republican governors and state lawmakers across the country have renewed the push for photo-identification requirements in the past two years.

The requirements are necessary to deter fraud, they say, although examples of in-person voter impersonation are rare. Democrats argue the laws are intended to depress turnout among groups that support them.

Drought damage to corn and soybean fields in the U.S., the world's top grower and exporter, is eroding supplies of the nation's two largest crops to below year-earlier consumption levels for the first time since 1974.

The government probably will say tomorrow that the U.S. corn harvest and inventories on Sept. 1 will be a combined 11.604 billion bushels, less than the 12.33 billion consumed and exported last year, according to a Bloomberg survey of 31 analysts. Soybean supplies will be 2.932 billion bushels, below the 3.157 billion used in 2011. Supplies failed to top usage from the previous year only twice since 1960 for corn and five times for soybeans, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show.

Record heat in June and July sparked the worst drought since 1956, sending corn and soybeans prices to record highs. Morgan Stanley predicted corn may rally 35 percent in a year, while Barclays Plc sees soybeans gaining 16 percent. Higher costs for dairies, grain processors and livestock producers helped send global food prices in September to the highest since March, United Nations data show.

"Supplies of both corn and soybeans will be tight, and we expect prices to rebound after the report," said Bill Tierney, the chief economist for Chicago-based AgResource Co. and a former USDA grain analyst. "There is no evidence that current prices are rationing soybean supplies, and there will be less supply relief for corn" from South American harvests that start in February, he said.

At about 11am local time near the Western Australian town of Geraldton this morning, Australia's first-utility scale solar farm was officially switched on.

It was a suitably sunny day (blighted by three million flies) and although just 10MW in size, and built courtesy of funding from the local government, a state-owned utility and by one of the wealthiest companies on the planet, it may presage a dramatic change in the way this country produces energy.

For the last 100 years or so, Australian power companies have produced energy by burning something - mostly coal, sometimes gas, and occasionally sugar cane and other agricultural or forestry waste - to create steam and drive a turbine. Even with the advent of wind energy, this is the first large-scale energy plant that does not involve a rotating machine. It does not need water either, and it makes no emissions.

The US supreme court has denied a bid by Chevron to block an $18.2bn (£11.4bn) judgment against the company in a pollution case in Ecuador.

A lower court threw out an injunction blocking enforcement of the judgment. Chevron appealed to the supreme court, which rejected the appeal without explanation. On 26 January, the 2nd US circuit court of appeals in New York said Chevron had been premature to challenge the judgment, which residents of Ecuador's Lago Agrio region won in February 2011 over pollution of the Amazon jungle and resulting damage to their health. In July, damages in the case were increased to $19bn.

Chevron claimed that the judgment was fraudulent and unenforceable under New York law.

But the 2nd Circuit said the oil company, based in San Ramon, California, could challenge it "only defensively, in response to attempted enforcement," which the Lago Agrio residents had not attempted and might never attempt.

http://www.greatamericanbeerfestival.com/about/photos/

Michele Simon
Appetite For Profit, September 12 2012 
http://www.appetiteforprofit.com/2012/09/12/meet-the-scientific-experts-claiming-gmo-foods-are-safe/

Last month, I wrote about how the food industry has hired powerful consultants with ties to Big Tobacco to oppose California's Proposition 37, which would require labeling of all genetically engineered foods. 
http://www.appetiteforprofit.com/2012/08/13/big-tobacco-shills-trying-to-stop-gmo-labeling-in-califo rnia/

Now, the No on 37 campaign (ironically named the "Stop the Deceptive Labeling Scheme") is putting up alleged scientific experts to do its bidding, once again taking a page from the tobacco industry playbook.

Third-party experts, aka corporate shills

When corporations such as Philip Morris or Monsanto don't have actual facts on their side, they have to resort to "third-party experts" to speak on their behalf. While the name implies no obvious ties to either side, it doesn't take much digging to uncover the bias of the scientific experts for No on 37.

Enter Henry Miller, a physician and molecular biologist who recently penned an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle claiming (among other misleading statements) that, "Americans have consumed more than 3 trillion servings of food with genetically engineered ingredients - with not a single documented ill effect."

Two American doctors whose work over four decades has revealed how the body responds to the smells, sights, flavours and threats of the outside world have won this year's Nobel prize in chemistry.

Robert Lefkowitz at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Brian Kobilka at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, share science's most prestigious award - and 8m Swedish kronor (£744,000) - for their discovery of molecular sensors called G-protein-coupled receptors or GPCRs.

The sensors take the form of proteins that act as gatekeepers between cells and the environment they live in. When a substance latches on to the outer part of a sensor protein, it causes it to change shape, triggering a response inside the cell.

Scientists now know of a whole family of GPCRs that detect hundreds of different substances in and around the body. Work on the receptors has underpinned decades of progress in medicine, with half of all pharmaceuticals acting on the proteins.

Few researchers have given credence to claims that samples of dinosaur DNA have survived to the present day, but no one knew just how long it would take for genetic material to fall apart. Now, a study of fossils found in New Zealand is laying the matter to rest -- and putting paid to hopes of cloning a Tyrannosaurus rex.

After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate.

Determining that rate has been difficult because it is rare to find large sets of DNA-containing fossils with which to make meaningful comparisons. To make matters worse, variable environmental conditions such as temperature, degree of microbial attack and oxygenation alter the speed of the decay process.

But palaeogeneticists led by Morten Allentoft at the University of Copenhagen and Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, examined 158 DNA-containing leg bones belonging to three species of extinct giant birds called moa. The bones, which were between 600 and 8,000 years old, had been recovered from three sites within 5 kilometres of each other, with nearly identical preservation conditions including a temperature of 13.1 ºC. The findings are published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

First impressions are powerful and are formed in all sorts of social settings, from job interviews and first dates to court rooms and classrooms.  We regularly make snap judgments about others, deciding whether people are trustworthy, confident, extraverted, likable, and more. Although we have all heard the old adage, "don't judge a book by its cover," we do just that. And at the same time that we are judging others, we in turn communicate a great deal of information about ourselves - often unwittingly - that others use to size us up.

It is no surprise that complete strangers engage in a process of mutual evaluation, or that people form impressions quite quickly, and in many cases, quite accurately. One of the first studies to demonstrate this fact was conducted in 1966 by Warren Norman and Lou Goldberg, who had college students rate their classmates' personalities on the very first day of class, before they had a chance to interact. Students were also asked to rate their own personalities. Two surprising findings emerged from that study: First, classmates tended to agree in their assessments of others; if one classmate rated a peer as dependable or extraverted, it was likely that other classmates rated that individual as dependable or extraverted too.

The second and more noteworthy finding was that students' first impressions of their classmates tended to align with their classmates' own self-assessments. Thus, if a person was rated as sociable by his classmates, it was quite likely that he had independently rated himself as sociable as well. These data, and those from similar studies, suggest that we are adept in rapidly and accurately evaluating some personality traits, or at the very least that we are quick to discern the way others see themselves.

Causing a fire, not deploying or partial deployment are not how you would like to have your airbag described, but those are the words U.S. Department of Transportation administrators used today when explaining the dangers behind a stream of counterfeit airbags.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and ICE officials today warned consumers about counterfeit airbags made at overseas manufacturers and installed in cars throughout the U.S. The counterfeits have been found in more than 75 different makes and models, both domestic and internationally made cars, and could affect thousands of individuals.

Investigators cautioned that even though this affects less than 0.1 percent of vehicles, the danger to those vehicles is extreme including airbags not deploying, partially deploying or catching fire So far they are unaware of any death or injury from the counterfeit airbags.

Edward S. Curtis' masterpiece, the North American Indian, is widely considered the most lavish and elegantly produced series of photography books ever made and recently, it became one of the highest selling works to ever make it to auction.

The Swann Auction Galleries in New York sold the 40 volume series for a whopping $1,440,000, the most expensive item ever sold at the 70-year-old house.

Banking magnate J. P. Morgan funded the expedition that sought to chronicle the customs, manners, rituals, songs, languages, and ceremonies of more than 80 Native American tribes.

Apparently ...

... Mo Yan is a pen name. The author's real name is Guan Moye; "Mo Yan" means "don't speak" in Chinese.

THEN, just short of finally living your childhood dream, you are told, either straight out or implicitly, by some coaches, mentors, even the boss, that you aren't going to make it, unless you cheat. Unless you choose to dope. Doping can be that last 2 percent. It would keep your dream alive, at least in the eyes of those who couldn't see your heart. However, you'd have to lie. Lie to your mother, your friends, your fans. Lie to the world. This has been the harsh reality laid out before many of the most talented, hardest working and biggest dreaming athletes.

How much does that last 2 percent really matter? In elite athletics, 2 percent of time or power or strength is an eternity. It is the difference in time between running 100 meters in 9.8 seconds and 10 seconds. In swimming it's between first and ninth place in the 100-meter breaststroke. And in the Tour de France, 2 percent is the difference between first and 100th place in overall time.

To be clear, running a 9.8 (or faster), winning the 100-meter breaststroke or winning the Tour de France are all very possible and have been done without doping. But it is also clear that winning isn't possible if antidoping regulations aren't enforced. If you just said no when the antidoping regulations weren't enforced, then you were deciding to end your dream, because you could not be competitive. It's the hard fact of doping. The answer is not to teach young athletes that giving up lifelong dreams is better than giving in to cheating. The answer is to never give them the option. The only way to eliminate this choice is to put our greatest efforts into antidoping enforcement. The choice to kiss your childhood dream goodbye or live with a dishonest heart is horrid and tearing. I've been there, and I know. I chose to lie over killing my dream. I chose to dope. I am sorry for that decision, and I deeply regret it. The guilt I felt led me to retire from racing and start a professional cycling team where that choice was taken out of the equation through rigorous testing and a cultural shift that emphasized racing clean above winning. The choice for my athletes was eliminated.

The United States Anti-Doping Agency said Wednesday that Lance Armstrong was at the center of the most sophisticated and professional doping program in recent sports history and that it would soon release details of its findings.

The agency said its dossier on Armstrong, the seven-time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor who denies ever doping, will include sworn testimony from 26 people, including nearly a dozen former teammates on the United States Postal Service team. Those Postal Service teammates have admitted their own doping and say that Armstrong doped, encouraged doping and administered doping products on the team, the agency said on Wednesday.

The file, as described by the agency, would be the most extensive, groundbreaking layout of Armstrong's alleged doping, bolstered by unprecedented interviews, financial statements and laboratory results.

"The U.S.P.S. Team doping conspiracy was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices," the agency said. "A program organized by individuals who thought they were above the rules and who still play a major and active role in sport today."

La Frondeuse (The Troublemaker), claims that Miss Trierweiler, 47, had an affair with Patrick Devedjian, 68, a former economic recovery minister, in the early 2000s, but that the Socialist Mr Hollande, 58, muscled in when the Right-winger failed to commit himself further to the relationship.

There followed a period "a bit like Jules et Jim," said the co-author Christophe Jakubyszyn, a close friend of the first lady, referring to the 1962 François Truffaut film in which Jeanne Moreau is in a love triangle with two men and all three live in the same house.

Savile's headstone was removed from a cemetery in Scarborough and taken away out of "respect to public opinion". The £4,000 granite memorial was smashed up to be used as landfill at the request of Savile's family.

The grave, in which Savile was buried at an angle so he could "see" Scarborough castle and the sea, will remain unmarked for the foreseeable future.

I think he should be dug up, impaled on a stake, and paraded through the streets.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}