An Italian judge sent shockwaves through the scientific world on Monday when he sentenced seven of the country's leading experts on natural disasters to six years each for giving false assurances before the earthquake that hit the city of L'Aquila in 2009.

More than 300 people died after a 6.3-magnitude tremor hit the central Abruzzo region. The earthquake wrecked L'Aquila's historic centre, injured more than 1,000 people and left tens of thousands homeless.

The seven defendants, who belonged to the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, were accused of offering an unjustifiably optimistic assessment to the local population a week before the disaster. By then, the area had been hit by some 400 tremors over a period of four months and a local researcher had warned of the risk of a major earthquake, largely on the basis of abnormal radon emissions.

But after an extraordinary meeting of the commission in L'Aquila, one of the experts told a press conference that the situation was "normal" and even "favourable" because potentially destructive energy was being released through the tremors. The prosecution, which brought charges of multiple manslaughter, maintained that lives could have been saved had people not been persuaded by the assurances to remain in the area.

The sentences handed out by judge Marco Billi were higher than those demanded by the prosecution, which had asked for the accused to be given four years each. The judge also imposed lifetime bans from holding public office and ordered the defendants to pay compensation of €7.8m (£6.4m).

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy secured backing for his austerity drive in a vote in his home region of Galicia on Sunday, but a clear win for nationalist parties in the Basque Country could soon prove a headache for the central government.

According to exit polls, Spain's ruling centre-right People's Party was set to retain its absolute majority and government in Galicia with 39 to 42 seats in the regional parliament compared with 18 to 20 seats for the Socialist Party and 15 to 18 seats for two nationalist parties. Opinion polls before the vote had indicated the PP would win 39 or fewer seats.

In the Basque Country, the Basque nationalist PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco) was set to win with 24 to 27 seats, compared with 23 to 26 seats for Bildu, a pro-independence party, 13 to 15 seats for the Socialist Party and 9 to 11 seats for the PP.

The vote in Galicia, where austerity steps were taken by the People's Party even before Rajoy took national office one year ago, had been seen as a referendum on the Spanish government's handling of the euro zone crisis. The PP has ruled in the region for 24 of the past 31 years.

European officials and analysts said Rajoy wanted to wait until after the election before requesting more European aid because he feared conditions, such as a reform of the pension system, could anger voters.

Also see Migeru's results diary.

EU interior ministers are set to discuss strengthening the visa regulations they loosened a few years ago. But following an influx of asylum seekers, many fear those entering the EU might have come to stay long-term.

It is the sheer numbers that are worrying German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich. In the whole of 2011, some 7,000 people from Serbia and Macedonia requested asylum in Germany, while there were 2,500 such requests this September alone. Serbians and Macedonians are free to travel to Germany without a visa, where they can then apply for asylum. These applicants may reside in Germany while authorities consider the request.

All EU members except for Great Britain, Ireland, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria belong to the Schengen area, while non-EU members like Iceland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Norway have acceded to it. In all the Schengen countries, citizens may travel freely without visas, and without having their passports checked at the border.

Friedrich believes the fact that many non-EU citizens may enter the EU without a visa is allowing the asylum system to be abused. In theory, citizens from all countries not part of the Schengen area need visas to enter a Schengen country. But in practice, the EU has loosened visa requirements for many non-EU citizens over the last couple of years. Serbians and Macedonians, for instance, have not needed a visa since 2009.

Iceland residents voted overwhelmingly in favour of a new Constitution written by a Constitutional Council of 25 citizens who gathered feedback through social media. 

The ballot, which is non-binding, included six questions written by the Constitutional Council, to which voters could either respond `yes' or `no'. The vote was held on Saturday (19 October).

The process to draft a new constitution began after the country's 2008 financial meltdown prompted calls for reforms (see background).

A new basic law is due to replace the existing Constitution from 1944, which is largely inspired by the Danish constitution of the time and is seen as anachronism. Iceland used to be a colony of Denmark.

In July 2011, the Constitutional Council presented its draft to Parliament. The text, consisting of 114 articles, has been put together with feedback gathered via social networking websites Facebook and Twitter. News media have dubbed the new Icelandic basic law as the world's first "crowdsourced constitution".

Backers of change hope that politicians will not ignore the referendum, even though parliament is responsible for adopting a new constitution and the main opposition party has said it opposes proposed changes.

Initial results showed that 66% of participants voted in favour of a Constitution drafted by the Council. Nearly half of the island's 235,000 eligible voters participated. More than 80% voted to declare all non-privately owned natural resources as "national property". Fishing accounts for about 7% of the economy and critics say that fishing rights have benefited a select few. Backers of the system say it has led to sound management of fish stocks.

Residents also voted to allow the Evangelical Lutheran Church to retain its role as state church (see the vote result to all six questions).

The first EU country to get a bailout and to implement harsh austerity measures, Latvia is now the bloc's fastest-growing economy and is poised to join the eurozone in 2014 - proof that spending cuts work, its Prime Minister, Valdis Dombrovskis, told this website.

"We still plan to join the eurozone on 1 January 2014. According to the Bank of Latvia already since September we meet almost all criteria," Dombrovskis said in an interview last Thursday (19 October) during the European People's Party congress in Bucharest.

Despite popular opposition to the move, Latvia is obliged to join the euro when it meets all criteria, as are all EU countries except Britain and Denmark.

Its deficit and debt levels are in line with EU demands, with only inflation above the threshold, at 2.9 percent.

Dombrovskis believes adopting the euro will help the country attract foreign investors, ease transaction taxes on businesses and create price transparency, as in neighbouring Estonia, which joined the common currency in 2011.

Until recently, German officials tended to down play divisions with Britain when pressed about its semi-detached stance on Europe. Not any more. Now they tend to make their irritation plain.

"If someone wants to leave, you can't stop them," said one senior German official, summing up a view in Berlin that the door is open if Britain really wants to quit the European Union.

While Angela Merkel has largely overcome Eurosceptic qualms on the fringes of her centre-right coalition, Britain's David Cameron -- never a committed European in Berlin's view -- appears to be bowing to the isolationist instincts of the bulk of his Conservative lawmakers.

"There's certainly a growing feeling among European partners and also in Berlin that Britain is less interested in any new form of cooperation," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "That's a pity, because it is an important partner and we need more integration in the EU."

The latest cause of tension is Cameron's refusal to envisage any increase beyond the rate of inflation in the EU's seven-year budget -- a package worth around 1 trillion euros ($1.2 trillion) -- at a special budget summit due in late November.

In 2011, this double Polish u-turn enabled the new Polish-German tandem to be an innovative and leading combination when it came to unlocking hitherto deadlocked EU-Russia relations. In November 2011, Radek Sikorski and Guido Westerwelle suggested closer cooperation with Russia in a common letter to the EU chief of foreign affairs and asked her to focus on modernizing Russia's economy and keeping oil and gas flowing as a top priority. The letter brushed aside concerns on the prospect of Vladimir Putin's non-democratic return to office in 2012 and urged Ashton to help make him a "reliable partner" on international security and energy issues.  "We must stay the course to intensify ties with Russia and overcome political and economic lethargy," the Westerwelle-Sikorski letter said.

...

After having played a decisive role in re-calibrating the geo-strategic orientation of Europe towards Russia, the new tandem is now seeking to tackle Europe from the inside with the same energy, and hopefully better results. The latest example is the joint letter of Guido Westerwelle and Radek Sikorski in the New York Times in September 2012, in which they ask for, and sketch out, a new vision of Europe. This is the continuation of a new - and perhaps game-changing - trend in Poland's attitude towards Germany in the European context and this trend has its own history.

...

Germany meanwhile needs a strong partner in Europe. France is, for many in Germany these days, falling behind. It is not doing enough on the dossier of structural reforms in the economy and adapting to global markets; whereas Poland still has substantial growth and ideologically also buys more into the `liberal' German economic philosophy. Further, and in strong contrast to Poland, currently France has not opted into the market of ideas for a more political Europe and how the new European democracy could be organized. Germany, however, has had the painful experience of isolation when it recently tried to dominate Europe institutionally and to impose its own policy preferences on the eurozone, at least economically. It cannot shape these ideas alone. German institutional ideas for a `more' and a better Europe were always generally well accepted when they came accompanied and thereby, sublimated; usually by France. But they cannot arrive alone and Poland today has already largely replaced France as a German tandem partner, when it comes to institutional ideas for Europe.

Paranoia hit a new extreme in the form of an official report urging the German central bank to have formal audits of its foreign-held gold reserves; report was triggered by MPs acting on rumours that the German gold stock has disappeared, or replace by certificates of unknown gold quality (Greek bonds for example); no, it is not April 1; acting on the criticism, the Bundesbank already audited domestically held reserves; it yesterday released court of auditor report with blacked-out details; Bundesbank says it has no doubt about the integrity of its gold holdings in the US, the UK and France, but seeks to repatriate samples of its gold holding to check for quality; the troika and the Greek government edged further towards an agreement, with some differences remaining over labour market reforms; the two sides have also negotiated a new lower target for privatisation revenues; the troika has relaxed its position on the immediate sacking of Greek civil servants; state-owned Irish Life sold its stake in Nama, which will insure that Nama can remain an off-balance sheet vehicle; Cyprus invites international lenders for a round of talks on an aid package; the European Commission says Portugal needs a plan B if deficit targets are not met next year; the latest data show that the Spanish mortgage market continues in a free fall; Eurostat revises Spain's 2010 and 2011 budget deficit upwards; after the rejection of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee, Yves Mersch is now facing the vote of the full assembly of the European Parliament; CLO have made a remarkable come-back this year; Italy has the third highest number of NEETs in the EU  - not in employment, education and training; Massimo Giannini notes that Italian like Mario Monti, but not his policies; an ECB working paper finds that credit rating agencies give better ratings to their clients; Christopher T. Mahoney wonders when southern Europeans will start to revolt; Paul de Grauwe, meanwhile, says the Bundesbank undermines the ECB in order to bring about a German departure from the eurozone.

The convoluted theory is that this is Pakistani military getting revenge for the cancelling of kickbacks they had been getting from the sale of French submarines to Pakistan. Slowly, since then, it had emerged that Edouard Balladur, previously Prime Minister, had used this contract to fund his unsuccessful Presidential bid.

The judicial net is closing on Balladur. Sarkozy has a guest-star role.

Affaire de Karachi : les juges établissent le rôle central d'Edouard Balladur

Les juges Renaud Van Ruymbeke et Roger Le Loire, chargés du volet financier de l'affaire de Karachi, en ont acquis la certitude : l'ancien premier ministre Edouard Balladur et l'ex-directeur de son cabinet Nicolas Bazire auraient été les architectes d'un vaste réseau de financement politique occulte, à travers des contrats d'armement. Nicolas Bazire, déjà poursuivi pour "complicité d'abus de biens sociaux", risque une nouvelle mise en examen, pour "recel" de ce même délit.

Celui qui fut aussi directeur de la campagne présidentielle de M. Balladur en 1995 est convoqué à cette fin, lundi 29 octobre, par les deux juges. Il n'est plus seulement soupçonné d'avoir supervisé la signature de contrats d'armement douteux, mais aussi d'avoir détenu des fonds illicites issus desdits contrats. Fonds qu'il aurait eu pour mission de remettre à M. Balladur...

DEVANT QUELS JUGES ?

Ce nouvel épisode d'une enquête portant sur les dessous de ventes d'armes négociées par le gouvernement dirigé, entre 1993 et 1995, par M. Balladur, confirme l'implication de ce dernier et pourrait bientôt le contraindre à répondre judiciairement de ses actes. Mais devant quels juges ? Ceux de la Cour de justice de la République (CJR), seuls compétents pour enquêter sur des faits commis par des ministres pendant l'exercice de leurs fonctions ? Ou ceux du droit commun, en l'occurrence les juges d'instruction qui enquêtent sur l'affaire ? L'ex-premier ministre pourrait en fait devoir répondre devant les deux juridictions.

En effet, si les actes relatifs aux ventes d'armes conclues par son gouvernement relèvent à l'évidence de la CJR - s'agissant d'Edouard Balladur à Matignon et de son ministre de la défense, François Léotard -, les faits d'enrichissement personnel éventuels, postérieurs à 1995, peuvent continuer à être instruits par les deux juges du pôle financier. Ces derniers enquêtent notamment sur l'acquisition, en 1996, d'une propriété en Normandie par le couple Balladur.

Judges Renaud Van Ruymbeke and Roger Le Loire, in charge of the financial aspect of the case of Karachi, became convinced: former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and the former chief of staff Nicolas Bazire were the architects a vast network of secret political financing, through defense contracts. Nicolas Bazire, already charged with "complicity in abuse of corporate assets", now risks indictment for "concealing" the same offense.

Bazire, who was also director of  Balladur's presidential campaign in 1995  was summoned for this purpose, Monday, Oct. 29, by two judges. He is no longer believed to have merely overseen the signing of contracts dubious weapons, but also to have held illicit funds from such contracts. Funds that would have been passed on to Mr. Balladur ...

WHAT JUDGES?

This new episode of a survey on the underbelly of arms sales negotiated by the government led between 1993 and 1995 by Mr Balladur, confirms the involvement of the latter and could soon force him to answer for his acts judicially . But to what judges? Those of the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), only competent to investigate offenses committed by ministers for the exercise of their functions? Or those of the common law, in this case the judges investigating the case? The former prime minister might actually have to answer before the two courts.

Indeed, if the acts relating to arms sales concluded by the government are obvious from the CJR - in the case of Edouard Balladur at Matignon and his defense minister, François Leotard - the possible cases of personal enrichment, after 1995, may continue to be investigated by two judges of the financial center. These include investigating the acquisition in 1996 of a property in Normandy by the Balladur couple.

The eurozone appeared last night to be in a stronger position to survive the debt crisis after EU figures revealed member governments cut their annual budget deficits last year.

The EU statistics office, Eurostat, said the aggregate budget deficit in the 17 countries using the currency fell to 4.1% of GDP in 2011 from 6.2% in 2010 - the first year of the sovereign debt crisis.

Ireland cut its annual deficit from 31% of GDP to 13.4%, while Germany brought the deficit on its annual budget down to 0.8%, Eurostat said.

The figures were published before a flurry of meetings that culminated in the taoiseach, Enda Kenny, gaining a commitment from François Hollande of France and Angela Merkel of Germany that cheaper funds would be made available to prevent Dublin's bank rescue from bankrupting the country.

Hollande said after talks with Kenny that he supported calls to treat the Irish banking sector as "a special case" after the Dublin government was almost brought to its knees by the crippling cost of bailing out the Irish Republic's main banks.

Merkel previously blocked direct recapitalisation of banks with eurozone rescue funds until a banking supervisor is fully operational late next year but issued a joint statement with Kenny on Sunday affirming that Ireland's bank rescue was a "special case".

"I said Ireland was a special case and should be treated as such," Hollande told reporters after his meeting with Kenny. Asked if recapitalisation could be backdated, he said: "Yes, recapitalisation already took place through their own funds so the Eurogroup will take that into account."

One of the age-old exercises in European politics is to transform even the most wonderful news into messages of discord. What is new is that the governments in Paris and Berlin are proving to be especially adept at this strange discipline.

It was last Thursday evening in the somber government building in Brussels. The leaders of the 27 European Union countries had just convened for a crisis summit when German Chancellor Angela Merkel surprised them with a novel proposal. What if everyone at the summit would fly to Oslo together in December to jointly accept the Nobel Peace Prize, as a sign of European unity?

The other European leaders' reactions were reserved. Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti said that it ought to be sufficient for the heads of the European Commission, European Council and European Parliament to make the trip. British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed sending a child from every member state to Oslo. Finally, though, the issue was decided when French President François Hollande rejected the idea of a joint trip altogether, when he said caustically: "I'm not an extra."

Europe's most powerful political team is unable to find a common denominator, from the question of who should be picking up prizes or, more tellingly, to the much broader issue of rescuing the euro. At the Brussels summit last week, Merkel and Hollande, after arguing for hours, agreed on a slim formulaic compromise on the banking union, while all other contentious issues remained unresolved.

Since the days of former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and former French President Charles de Gaulle, Germany and France have generally been run by politicians who placed more value on unity than their differences. The axis between former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former French President Valéry d'Estaing axis proved to be just as resilient as the partnership between their successors, Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterand.

Prior to the 2009 elections the European Central Bank (ECB) did not take the European Parliament very seriously. In its defence, it did not need to.

The bank's function was just to control price stability through interest rates and - with the first decade of its existence coinciding with a period of prolonged and consistent economic growth - there were relatively few challenges to its work.

Scrutiny of the ECB was also fairly tame. Compared to the powers that the US Congress has over the Federal Reserve or the UK House of Commons over the Bank of England, scrutiny at European level was palpably weak.

The accountability of the bank to the parliament consisted of one non-binding report per year responding to the ECB's own annual report, with MEPs giving their verdict on the bank's performance and making a handful of modest demands.

Meanwhile, the President of the ECB would appear before the economic committee every three months for a "monetary dialogue" which consisted of a presentation followed by questions from MEPs.

What's the point of short-term cash bonuses? John Kay, when he pondered this question in his review into the causes of short-termism in the City, concluded a ban was in order. Judges and surgeons, he noted, would be offended by the notion they would do their job better if large sums of extra cash were on offer every year. Why should directors of large public companies expect different treatment?

So well done Lloyds Banking Group for at least entertaining the notion that annual boardroom bonuses should be ditched. This is just one proposal being examined by the bank - but it sounds like one that ought to be adopted.

Within the portfolio of directors' rewards, annual bonuses have grown like weeds in the past couple of decades - it is now common to find levels set at 100% of salary for chief executives, an obvious incitement to short-term decision-making.

In the world of retail banking, such structures make no sense. The heart of the business involves 25-year mortgages, multi-year personal loans and long-term savings. By definition, incentives should be set to encourage risk to be viewed and measured over similar periods. Lloyds' proposals, in their most radical version, would extend the time frame for the payout of incentives to 10 years. That sounds more like it.

When Wilco Drijver bought an apartment in Amsterdam's gentrifying De Pijp neighborhood in 2008, the bank gave him a no-money-down loan of 209,000 euros  ($274,000). That was 24,000 euros more than the sales price. Drijver used the extra cash to renovate the place, figuring it was a good investment.

He figured wrong. When he put the apartment up for sale five months ago, real estate agents said it would fetch only about 189,000 euros. Even at that price, he hasn't had a nibble. And because his mortgage is interest-only, he still owes the entire 209,000-euro principal to the bank. Had he known what would happen, the 32-year-old self-employed consultant says now, "I wouldn't have bought the house."

Homeowners like Drijver are part of a worrisome stain on an economy usually seen as one of Europe's strongest. While lecturing their southern neighbors about frugality, the Dutch have run up the highest rate of mortgage debt in Europe. Their borrowing, fueled by generous tax breaks and subprime-style lending practices, now totals 107 percent of the country's gross domestic product, more than twice the European average of 50 percent. "It's one of the big scandals of Dutch policy," says Rick van der Ploeg, an Oxford university economist and former Dutch cabinet minister. "The government has encouraged reckless financial speculation."

No one worried much about the situation so long as housing prices kept rising--as they did for more than two decades, until 2008. Since then, though, they've slid 16 percent, pushing almost one-fourth of mortgages under water. Royal BAM, the country's biggest homebuilder, expects the decline to continue for another 2 or 3 years, for a total drop of up to 30 percent. Such a scenario would rival Spain's real estate collapse.

The debt load is already putting strains on the economy. Highly leveraged households have trimmed their consumer spending, helping to push the country into recession. Dutch GDP is forecast to contract 0.5 percent this year, the worst performance of any northern European country. "The high stock of mortgage debt is among today's biggest vulnerabilities of the Dutch economy," Klaas Knot, the country's central bank chief, said in an Oct. 15 speech.

Greece is spiraling into the kind of decline the U.S. and Germany endured during the Great Depression, showing the scale of the challenge involved in attempting to regain competitiveness through austerity.

The economy shrank 18.4 percent in the past four years and the International Monetary Fund forecasts it will contract another 4 percent in 2013 as Greece struggles to reduce debt in exchange for its $300 billion rescue programs. That's the biggest cumulative loss of output of a developed-country economy in at least three decades, coming within spitting distance of the 27 percent drop in the U.S. economy between 1929 and 1933, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington.

"Austerity has been destroying tax revenue and therefore thwarting the intended effect," said Charles Dumas, chairman of Lombard Street Research, a London-based consulting firm. "There's no avoiding austerity, though, because these people have no borrowing power. The deficits are there."

€153,013,053,902. That is the cost to the European Union of the 13,941,264 young people who are not in education, employment or training. The official acronym is NEETs and the number of this 'lost generation' is growing to record levels.

The amount is worth 1.21% of the EU's GDP, up from 0.96% when the recession hit in 2008. In the UK, this cost €18.4bn (£15bn) in 2011, and includes 1,872,403 15 to 29 year-olds. The number of people is second only to Italy, with 2,157,052 people costing €32.6bn.

The data is from Eurofound, which is the EU research agency specialising in living and working conditions. Shiv Malik writes today that:

Europeans aged 15 to 29 who are not in employment, education or training have reached record levels and are costing the EU €3bn a week in state welfare and lost production. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said Europe was "failing in its social contract" with the young and rising political disenchantment could reach levels similar to those that sparked North African uprisings during the Arab spring

Of those out of education, training and employment, 73% of 15- to 19-year-olds had no experience of work at all, dropping to 43% for those aged 20 to 24 and 28% for 25- to 29-year-olds. In southern European countries such as Italy, Bulgaria and Greece, the figure for Neets aged 25 to 29 with no experience of work rose to over 40%.

Recommended reading.

At least seven people were killed and dozens wounded in gunbattles in the Lebanese capital Beirut and coastal Tripoli on Monday in further unrest linked to the conflict in neighboring Syria, security and hospital sources said.

The clashes have heightened fears that Syria's civil war with its sectarian dimensions is now spreading into Lebanon, pitting local allies and opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against each other.

The Lebanese army promised decisive action to quell the violence, which was touched off by the assassination of a senior intelligence officer last week.

That killing has plunged Lebanon into a political crisis and the army command urged party leaders to be cautious in their public statements so as not to inflame passions further.

It issued the warning after troops and gunmen exchanged fire in Beirut's southern suburbs overnight and on Monday morning while protesters blocked roads with burning tires.

Fierce fighting continues to rage in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and in Aleppo, the country's commercial hub which has been battered by warfare between troops and rebels for the past three months.

Clashes erupted on Monday morning when troops tried to storm the rebel-controlled Damascus suburb of Harasta, activists said.

In Aleppo, violence reportedly flared in the southwest rebel district of Salaheddin, Izaa in the north and the central Old City.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that on Sunday alone, 173 people were killed nationwide.

Ceasefire call

Joint UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has been visiting Syria in a bid to establish a ceasefire during this week's four-day Eid al-Adha holiday, which begins on Friday.

Brahimi said he had contacted political opposition leaders inside and outside Syria and armed groups in the country. "We found them to be very favourable" to the idea of a truce, he said after meeting al-Assad on Sunday.

"We will return to Syria after Eid and if calm really takes hold during the feast, we will continue to work," he added.

France is planning to send drones into Mali as part of an international intervention to free the west African country from al-Qaida-backed insurgents who control large swaths of its territory, according to reports.

A French defence official said the country was moving surveillance drones to the region as part of secretive plans with the US, amid increasing fears that, if left unchecked, the crisis could serve as a launchpad for terrorist attacks on its own soil.

Speaking to the Associated Press, the official said on Monday that France was discussing plans with the US for drones, intelligence-gathering and security in Africa's Sahel region. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said that Germany would be prepared to train Malian security forces and would consider providing "material and logistical support".

"Free democratic states cannot accept international terrorism gaining a safe refuge in the north of the country," Merkel said at a German military conference near Berlin. A diplomatic source told the Guardian that the international consensus on the need for a concerted action in Mali was unprecedented.

"I've never seen anything like this level of international co-operation : the United States, the EU - both collectively and its individual states - the UN security council, all are in 100% agreement about what we should do here," said the source, speaking in Mali's capital, Bamako, on condition of anonymity.

"It is no secret that there is military planning going on. The EU is conducting a scoping mission and looking to send a training team to help train the Malian army. But the French are the nation with the most experience working here, and they see the terrorism threat more acutely than others."

Fourteen of the 34 Lonmin platinum miners killed by the police in August were shot in the back, a judicial inquiry into the Marikana shooting heard on Monday.

"All fatal projectile wounds were sustained from the back," advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza told the Farlam commission at the Rustenburg Civic Centre, North West.

"Those who were killed were unlawfully killed by SAPS [the SA Police Service]," he said in his opening remarks.

On August 16 the police opened fire while trying to disperse a group of striking mineworkers encamped on a hill in Nkaneng, killing 34 and wounding 78.

The workers had been carrying knobkerries, pangas, sticks, and iron rods.

The miners went on strike on August 10, demanding a monthly salary of R12,500. Within four days, 10 people had been killed, two of them policemen and two of them security guards.

Ntsebeza represents the Eastern Cape families of 20 of the men who died.

The family members, many of the women wearing black and blue mourning clothes, sat in the first two front rows of the auditorium at the hearing.

Ntsebeza said the police had claimed the mineworkers charged at officers because they had taken muti (traditional medicine) which made them feel invincible. This was the police's justification for killing them.

"For us, the subtext of this justification... is that the miners, according to them [police], acted like possessed men, that they had to be destroyed like vermin and that they were destroyed like vermin," he said.

"Whatever the truth of that tragic day, it cannot be that the SAPS could not have acted differently. [They] could and should have brought the gathering to an end peacefully and without loss of life," Ntsebeza said.

Republican Mitt Romney has closed the gap with President Barack Obama and the two candidates are now tied in the November 6 presidential race, according to a Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll released on Monday.

The online survey of likely voters found Obama and Romney were each supported by 46 percent of the electorate as they prepare for their final televised debate on Monday night.

Romney trailed by 1 percentage point when the poll was last published on Saturday. The two candidates have remained within three percentage points of each other since shortly after their first debate on October 3.

"Today's number emphasizes the fact that the race is very close. We enter the final debate with the candidates literally neck and neck," Ipsos pollster Julia Clark said.

However, Obama still holds a substantial advantage in the battleground states that will determine the outcome of the election. Ipsos projects Obama will carry hotly contested states such as Florida, Ohio and Virginia, for a relatively comfortable electoral college victory.

As euphoric rock music played, dozens of men in suits swarmed the aisles with hand-held credit card machines to take donations from the faithful.

The pastor smiled at the crowd in the downtown headquarters of the mega-church and, as cameras rolled, belted out: "We all voted already, right? Who voted today?"

In the spotlight, he made no mention of whom he hoped his flock had cast ballots for. But for most in the crowd, and those watching the election for the mayor of Latin America's largest city, it was clear which candidate Brazil's increasingly influential evangelical churches were throwing their weight behind.

Television personality Celso Russomanno took Brazil's political establishment by surprise when he shot to the top of the polls in the run-up to the election. Although he is Roman Catholic, his relatively new Brazilian Republican Party is backed by the powerful Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, or Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

In the world's largest Catholic country, a group of well-organized evangelical churches is rewriting the rules of politics here. In the process, the evangelicals have dismayed Brazilians uneasy with such blatant mixing of religion and politics.

Amid a surge in Latin America in recent years, more than 20% of Brazilians are now evangelical Christian. Followers make up one of the largest voting blocs in Congress, and use their money, influence and media power to press a small set of socially conservative issues, as well as to maintain favorable conditions for their often very profitable enterprises.

"They don't yet have quite as unified an agenda as the evangelical movement in the U.S.," said David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Brasilia. "But they are growing, and are far more effective than the Catholic Church at convincing people to vote one way or another."

There was an interesting part in the survey about the use of the term apartheid. While some people who responded didn't know it so well, only 31 percent objected to Israel being called an apartheid state (58 supported the use of the term), and 50 percent said apartheid is practiced in a few or in many fields. If the use of the term apartheid is anti-Semitic, as some of Israel's PR agencies claim - then most Israelis are guilty of anti-Semitism.

The growing popularity of early voting raises the question of what happens when someone who casts an absentee ballot dies before Election Day.

Does the vote still count?

The answer, it seems, is yes, though Ohio election law does not specifically address the question and the Ohio Secretary of State's office issued a ruling only after receiving inquiries last week from The Plain Dealer. A survey by the newspaper found differing opinions among elections officials in some Northeast Ohio counties. The elections director in Medina County believed the ballot should be invalidated, while the Lorain elections chief said the vote should count.

Cuyahoga County Elections Director Jane Platten sought advice from the Ohio Secretary of State's office, and said she received conflicting opinions. At first, an attorney for the state office advised her that a ballot must not be counted if cast by someone who is not a qualified voter on Election Day.

But later another state election official overruled that and told her the ballot counts.

Pesticides used in farming are also killing worker bumblebees and damaging their ability to gather food, meaning colonies that are vital for plant pollination are more likely to fail when they are used, a study showed on Sunday.

The United Nations has estimated that one-third of all plant-based foods eaten by people depend on bee pollination and scientists have been baffled by plummeting numbers of bees, mainly in North America and Europe, in recent years.

British scientists said they exposed colonies of 40 bumblebees, which are bigger than the more common honeybee, to the pesticides neonicotinoid and pyrethroid over four weeks at levels similar to those in fields.

Neonicotinoids are nicotine-like chemicals used to protect various crops from locusts, aphids and other pests.

"Chronic exposure ... impairs natural foraging behaviour and increases worker mortality, leading to significant reductions in brood development and colony success," the scientists wrote in the report in the journal Nature on Sunday.

Exposure to a combination of the two pesticides "increases the propensity of colonies to fail", according to the researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London.

A 2011 UN report estimated that bees and other pollinators such as butterflies, beetles or birds do work worth €153bn ($200bn) a year to the human economy and are in decline in many nations.

The findings underscored the importance of wider testing of pesticides to ensure they do not also target bees, it said.

Scientists estimate that the Earth is losing species at 100 to 1,000 times the historical average. The international community addressed this largely man-made disaster at the 11th biodiversity summit in Hyderabad.

At times, the United Nations conference on the protection of endangered species looked a little like a tug-of-war. In the end, representatives of the developed nations pledged to double their support for developing countries to better protect biodiversity - agreeing to pay a total of almost eight billion euros ($10.5 million) per year until 2015. Representatives of 190 states took part in the conference.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh summed up the spirit of the discussions. "Particularly over the past couple of years it has become increasingly difficult to define common environmental protection goals. And that's despite us knowing a lot more about this global threat now than we did in the past."

The 11th "Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity" was a forum for around 14,000 international delegates to exchange their knowledge and opinions. During the discussions it quickly emerged that the protection of species is facing sharp competition from other interests. Emerging economies want economic growth, akin to the development of western industrialized nations - including sacrificing natural resources on the way.

Farmers drilling ever deeper wells over decades to water their crops likely contributed to a deadly earthquake in southern Spain last year, a new study suggests. The findings may add to concerns about the effects of new energy extraction and waste disposal technologies.

Nine people died and nearly 300 were injured when an unusually shallow magnitude-5.1 quake hit the town of Lorca on May 11, 2011. It was the country's worst quake in more than 50 years, causing millions of euros in damage to a region with an already fragile economy.

Using satellite images, scientists from Canada, Italy and Spain found the quake ruptured a fault running near a basin that had been weakened by 50 years of groundwater extraction in the area.

During this period, the water table dropped by 250 meters (274 yards) as farmers bored ever deeper wells to help produce the fruit, vegetables and meat that are exported from Lorca to the rest of Europe. In other words, the industry that propped up the local economy in southern Spain may have undermined the very ground on which Lorca is built.

The researchers noted that even without the strain caused by water extraction, a quake would likely have occurred at some point.

In February, a team of Russian scientists made headlines when they reached the surface of a lake buried two miles beneath the Antarctic Ice sheet. 

The icy body of water, which had not been exposed to air for some 20 million years, is called Lake Vostok. 

There were nearly a dozen theories about what Lake Vostok may hold. But mainly, researchers were excited about finding new lifeforms. The microbes found in Lake Vostok could provide clues about life on Jupiter's moon Europa since scientists believe the two entities have similar environments.

So far, no dice. 

An analysis of some water that froze in a drill bit back in February reveals no signs of life -- at least not yet. This conclusion is based on "very preliminary results" announced at the 12th European Workshop on Astrobiology, reports Brian Owens of Nature News Blog. 

German industrial group Siemens is pulling out of its loss-making solar power business, in the latest sign of difficulties in the renewable energy market.

The company said on Monday it would concentrate its renewable energy business on wind and hydroelectric power in a bid to increase productivity. It hopes to sell the unit and is in talks with possible buyers.

Siemens said the solar business had not been as profitable as hoped. "Due to the changed framework conditions, lower growth and strong price pressure in the solar markets, the company's expectations for its solar energy activities have not been met." It said the solar and hydro division generated sales "in the low triple-digit millions" in the year to September and has "roughly 800 employees".

Growing competition from manufacturers in Asia has caused the cost of solar panels to plummet. The industry has also been hit by weaker sales and falling government subsidies. Bruce Jenkyn-Jones, managing director at Impax, an environmental investor with £1.8bn of assets under management, said: "The cost has come down dramatically. There has been an influx of capital. It's very, very competitive; it's only going to be the lowest-cost producers that survive in the middle of this downturn." Various German solar manufacturers have filed for bankruptcy in the past 12 months, including QE Cells and Solar Millennium.

The news comes shortly after General Electric said a poor performance at its wind unit contributed to disappointing third-quarter results. Wind-turbine orders at the industrial conglomerate plunged because a key US subsidy for wind power is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. The chief executive, Jeff Immelt, said GE is assuming "no market" in the US for wind turbines next year without the subsidy. He expects wind revenue to drop 40% next year.

Arizona lawmakers want to take back the Grand Canyon and use one of the seven natural wonders of the world to generate more revenue for the state.

A referendum placed on the Nov. 6 ballot by the Legislature would amend the Arizona Constitution to declare sovereign control over air, water, minerals, wildlife and public land including national parks -- a move to sidestep federal environmental laws and open up 25 million acres of public space to more livestock grazing, logging and mining.

Supporters say the proposition -- which follows a Utah law signed in March by Governor Gary Herbert demanding some U.S. land be handed over by 2014 -- sends an important message in a battle against an overreaching federal government, which controls more than half of the land in the West. Opponents say the plan is unenforceable, unconstitutional, environmentally irresponsible and typical of a state known for high-profile confrontations with national authorities on illegal immigration.

It amounts to a "partial secession," said Paul Bender, a constitutional law professor at Arizona State University.

"If you want to start a war, this is the way," Bender, dean emeritus of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, said by telephone. "When the state passes its own immigration law, people say, `Well, that is crazy Arizona.' But if people go to the Grand Canyon and find a uranium mine there, they are going to be very upset."

Researchers in the US have been shocked to discover a beluga whale whose vocalisations were remarkably close to human speech.

While dolphins have been taught to mimic the pattern and durations of sounds in human speech, no animal has spontaneously tried such mimicry.

But researchers heard a nine-year-old whale named NOC make sounds octaves below normal, in clipped bursts.

The researchers outline in Current Biology just how NOC did it.

But the first mystery was figuring out where the sound was coming from. The whales are known as "canaries of the sea" for their high-pitched chirps, and while a number of anecdotal reports of whales making human-like speech, none had ever been recorded.

When a diver at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in California surfaced saying, "Who told me to get out?" the researchers there knew they had another example on their hands.

Once they identified NOC as the culprit, they made the first-ever recordings of the behaviour.

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Russia's self-proclaimed morality police have discovered a new danger to the people's health and values, and it is to be found in the country's supermarkets -- in the form of dairy products from the American company PepsiCo. Activists from the Orthodox group called the People's Council have even gotten Russia prosecutors involved.

"The packaging of these dairy products with the label 'Vesyoly Molochnik' have long been a thorn in my side," says Anatoly Artyuch, of the People's Council. The brand means "happy milkman" in English.

Pepsi uses the brand to sell all manner of dairy products, including milk, yoghurt and kefir. Packages portray a smiling, slightly rotund milkman wearing a chef's hat. Behind him is a green meadow with a rainbow stretching across the sky. Artyuch believes that the rainbow isn't quite as innocent as it might seem. He thinks it is "the global symbol of the sodomite movement." Russia's judiciary is currently looking into the claims.

The grotesque offensive against the dairy brand is part of a conservative campaign in Russia aimed at gays and lesbians in the country. In their view, homosexuality isn't merely a sin, but also a symbol of damaging "Westernization."

The happy milkman isn't the only target. A court in the metropolis of St. Petersburg, once called the "window to the West" by Czar Peter the Great, has subpoenaed US pop icon Madonna for allegedly disseminating "homosexual propaganda" during her concert in the city at the beginning of August.

If human beings had not invented cooking as a way of increasing the number of calories they consumed, they could only have supported the 86bn neurons in their big brains by spending an impossible nine hours or more each day eating raw food, according to a scientific paper published on Monday.

The research, the authors suggest, explains why great apes such as gorillas, which can have bodies three times the size of humans, have considerably smaller brains. Though gorillas typically spend up to eight hours feeding, their diet influenced an evolutionary tradeoff between body and brain size; supporting both big bodies and big brains would be impossible on a raw food diet.

The brain is so energy-hungry that in humans it represents 20% of the resting metabolic rate, even though it only represents 2% of body mass, suggest Professor Suzana Herculano-Houzel and Karina Fonseca-Azevedo of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

"Why are the largest primates not those endowed with the largest brains as well? Rather than evidence that humans are an exception among primates, we consider this disparity to be a clue that, in primate evolution, developing a very large body and a very large brain have been mutually excluding strategies, probably because of metabolic reasons."

Gorillas, they suggest, already live on the limit of viability, foraging and eating for 8.8 hours a day, and in extreme conditions increasing this to as much as 10 hours a day.

Despite the global wave of urbanization, some cities are shrinking.

Among nearly 600 major cities listed in a UN report, 28 cities are on track to shrink between 1990 and 2025.

Russia dominates the list, along with many cities in former Soviet states. There are some surprises on there too, like Rome, Milan, and Turin in Italy.

We also published a list of the fastest-growing cities, which was dominated by China.

The oldest known survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp has died aged 108 in Debno, north-west Poland, officials say.

A teacher, Antoni Dobrowolski was imprisoned for giving secret lessons during Germany's occupation of Poland.

Mr Dobrowolski was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Polish concentration camp in 1942.

He was later transferred to the Gross Rosen and Sachsenhausen camps in Germany, before being freed in 1945.

"Auschwitz was worse than Dante's hell," he said in a video made when he was 103.

Education for Poles was restricted to just four years during the Nazi occupation, in an effort to suppress Polish culture.

Mr Dobrowolski was part of an underground effort to continue education for children.

An Amazon Kindle user has had her account wiped and all her paid-for books deleted by Amazon without warning or explanation.

The Norwegian woman, identified only as Linn on media commentator Martin Bekkelund's blog, approached Amazon when she realised her Kindle had been wiped.

She was informed by a customer relations executive that her account had been closed, all open orders had been cancelled and all her content had been removed, but has been unable to find out why.

The move, which will shock ebook fans, highlights the power digital rights management (DRM) offers blue-chip companies. DRM is used by hardware manufacturers and publishers to limit the use of digital content once it has been purchased by consumers; in Amazon's case, it means the company can prevent you from reading content you have bought at the Kindle store on a rival device.

Linn was told by Amazon: "We have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. As such, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed and any open orders have been cancelled. Please understand that the closure of an account is a permanent action. Any subsequent accounts that are opened will be closed as well. Thank you for your understanding with our decision."

When Linn queried to which "directly related" account Amazon was referring, what had happened, and whether there was anything she could do to get her access reinstated, the online giant replied by saying it was "unable to provide detailed information" and reiterated her account would not be reopened.

The British Broadcasting Corp. faced a ballooning crisis Monday as a scandal over late BBC host Jimmy Savile's alleged pedophilia pivoted to focus on why the BBC's flagship "Newsnight" program scrapped an explosive report on the topic last year.

The BBC announced Monday that "Newsnight" Editor Peter Rippon would "step aside" while an independent investigation examines why "Newsnight" scrapped the report.

The British broadcaster also assailed Mr. Rippon's explanation of what happened as "inaccurate or incomplete in some respects," issuing three corrections to an Oct. 2 blog post that Mr. Rippon, 47 years old, wrote to explain his reasons for killing the report.

The moves came hours before another BBC program, "Panorama," was scheduled to broadcast a show accusing Mr. Rippon and others at the BBC of misleading the public about the scrapped "Newsnight" segment.

"The developments today are concerning because the BBC has effectively changed its story about why it dropped the 'Newsnight' program about Jimmy Savile," U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday. Mr. Cameron described the allegations against Mr. Savile as "appalling" and called on the BBC to answer "serious questions" about its behavior.

Trees lay on a spectacle in Britain and around the northern hemisphere, with leaves turning vivid shades of copper, yellow and red

A robin shelters in an Acer japonicum tree, which is turning red and dropping its autumn leaves in Belstone, Dartmoor

A woman walks under trees in a park in Moscow, Russia

Autumn leaves in the trees in Vondelpark as commuters ride their bicycles to work in Amsterdam, the Netherlands