Two Danish brothers of Somali origin have been arrested in Denmark on suspicion of plotting a terror attack, police said.

The country's intelligence police issued a statement on Tuesday saying that the arrests had foiled "a concrete act of terror".

The two brothers, aged 18 and 23, whose names were not given, were arrested on Monday; one at his home in the city of Aarhus and the other as he arrived by plane at Copenhagen airport, the statement said

An earthquake killed at least 15 people in northern Italy damaging buildings and spreading panic among thousands of residents still living in tents after a tremor in the same region destroyed their homes just over a week ago.

Officials said several people were trapped under the rubble of houses and warehouses in the Emilia-Romagna region, where several building sites and workshops had just reopened after the previous quake on May 20.

Civil protection officials said 15 people were confirmed dead after Tuesday's quake. Seven people were killed in the May 20 quake that, like Tuesday's, had its epicentre not far from the city of Modena.

Italian television showed buildings shaking and collapsing, ambulances racing across towns and rescue workers battling to remove rubble.

Al Jazeera's Sabina Castelfranco reported from Cavezzo that the centre of the town had been evacuated and cordoned off.

François
Hollande, the man who wooed the French with the promise to be a "normal" president, has decided to break rules and conventions in the name of normality.

In a break from his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, who never travelled by rail while in office, Mr Hollande has announced that he will make official journeys within France, and to European summits in Brussels, by train. He has also decided, for time being at least, to continue living in his flat in a run-of-the-mill Parisian apartment block near the Eiffel Tower.

But in attempting to keep his campaign promise to be "normal" president who remains in touch with the people, the new President is flouting conventions and advice from security chiefs - and even a 60 year old law.

Professional football in Italy should be suspended for up to three years after a match-fixing row, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti has suggested.

He said that the scandal had caused "profound sadness" across the country.

Mr Monti was speaking a day after a number of people - including Lazio's captain Stefano Mauri - were arrested.

Police are searching more than 30 homes, including those of players, trainers and administrators of clubs in Serie A, Serie B and lower divisions.

AFP: French president does not rule out armed intervention in Syria

From the end of this week, Britain's minister for wildlife is sending men to destroy the nests of wild buzzards by blasting them with shotguns. Believe it or not, from Friday, a project will begin to destroy buzzard nests in the interest of protecting pheasant shooting estates, which has been personally sanctioned by Richard Benyon, pictured, the minister responsible for wildlife protection at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

When news of this emerged last week, it sparked outrage from conservationists even exceeding that which greeted the last Defra proposal to do down the environment - the plan to sell off the nation's forests announced in January 2011. That lasted all of three weeks, until David Cameron, still then claiming to run the Greenest Government Ever, ordered it to be withdrawn when the ridicule and the uproar got too much.

The buzzard revelation did not make similarly derisive headlines last week because political news, when it broke on Wednesday, was dominated by remarkable revelations from the Leveson Inquiry. But the buzzard backlash is not going away and now looks set to cause the Government some serious grief. The proposal to shotgun-blast the nests of wild birds of prey, fully protected under wildlife laws, is contained in a Defra research contract drawn up to investigate techniques to reduce the alleged predation by buzzards of pheasant poults.

Twelve people committed suicide on French railways between Saturday and Monday, causing lengthy delays for travellers and concern for railway authorities who say there is almost nothing they can do to prevent people from taking their own lives by jumping in front of trains.

Coupled with a technical problem late on Sunday, some 30,000 passengers were reportedly affected. The 12 people killed took their lives in separate incidents across the country between late Friday and early Monday. Information released by the police detailed a miserable chain of events.

One of the victims was a 34-year-old man who leapt to his death with his 19-month-old baby, who also died. The police said that the man was suffering "a relationship breakdown" and had written to his parents to explain his actions. In a separate case, the victim lay across the tracks of an oncoming train from Lille.

France's state railway, SNCF, described the weekend as a "dark period". "We've never seen so many suicides in such a short period of time," SNCF spokesperson Michel Pronost told French radio Europe 1 on Monday morning.

A Spanish plan to recapitalise Bankia, the troubled lender, by indirectly tapping the European Central Bank for cash, was bluntly rejected as unacceptable by the ECB, European officials said.

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Madrid had floated the unorthodox idea over the weekend of recapitalising Bankia by injecting €19bn of sovereign bonds into its parent company, which could then be swapped for cash at the ECB's three-month refinancing window, avoiding the need to raise the money on bond markets.
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The ECB told Madrid that a proper capital injection was needed for Bankia and its plans were in danger of breaching an EU ban on "monetary financing," or central bank funding of governments, according to two European officials.

Overdraft facilities or any other type of credit facility with the European Central Bank or with the central banks of the Member States (hereinafter referred to as `national central banks') in favour of Union institutions, bodies, offices or agencies, central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of Member States shall be prohibited, as shall the purchase directly from them by the European Central Bank or national central banks of debt instruments.

Paragraph 1 shall not apply to publicly owned credit institutions which, in the context of the supply of reserves by central banks, shall be given the same treatment by national central banks and the European Central Bank as private credit institutions.

Spain's central bank governor Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez resigns in protest at the Spanish government's handling of the Bankia scandal; resigns only a month ahead of the expiry of his official term; resignation follows decision by the Spanish government to block his testimonial in parliament on the banking crisis; another trick that backfired yesterday was the attempt to use the ECB to refinance Bankia; government had earlier proposed to issue bonds to recapitalise Bankia for exchange in 3-month ECB finance operations; ECB rejected this bid on the grounds that this would constitute debt monetisation; German editorialists express outraged at the Spanish government's tricks, and argue that even higher interest rates are now to be expected; the European Commission is preparing to give Spain another year to cut the deficit, but with strict conditions attached; among those is an increase in the pension age, more labour reforms, and broadening in the VAT base;Jean-Marc Ayrault says France may miss the 3% deficit target for 2013; says growth was now the priority; also expressed diplomatic caution about Wolfgang Schäuble's bid to lead the eurogroup on the grounds that the eurozone must send an anti-austerity signal; polls show that the French left is headed for a narrow victory in the upcoming parliamentary elections; German inflation drops below 2%; the National Bank of Greece warns that Grexit would led to a catastrophic collapse of Greek output and employment; another poll has New Democracy in the lead;an analysis of the Greek election results shows that Syriza has its biggest support among young people and in the large metropolitan areas; Philip Lane says a No vote in tomorrow's referendum would put the country in economic peril; Martin Wolf, meanwhile, argues that the key to the eurozone's survival lies in Berlin.

Prime Minister David Cameron's former director of communications Andy Coulson has been detained by police investigating allegations of perjury.

Mr Coulson, 44, was detained at his home in the Dulwich area of London at 06:30 by seven officers from Strathclyde Police.

He is being held on suspicion of committing perjury at the trial of former MSP Tommy Sheridan in 2010.

Mr Coulson is being taken to Glasgow, where he will be questioned.

India's top vehicle maker Tata Motors reported Tuesday a doubling in quarterly profit from a year ago, led by strong demand for British brands Jaguar and Land Rover which offset weak domestic sales.

Tata Motors, part of the tea-to-steel Tata group conglomerate, said net profit for the three months to March was 62.34 billion rupees ($1.13 billion), up from 26.38 billion rupees in the same period the previous year.

Revenues soared 44.3 percent to 509 billion rupees, the firm said in a statement.

Facebook shares have dipped below $29 for the first time since their flotation to a new low.

The shares were launched at $38 less than two weeks ago during its high-profile flotation, which valued the firm at $104bn (£66bn).

Since then, Facebook's shares have lost almost a quarter of their value.

Russia's biggest social network, VKontakte, has now postponed its stock market launch, fearing a repeat of Facebook's problems.

US consumer confidence has fallen to an eight-month low in May as fears about the global economy and a falling domestic stock market hit sentiment.

The Consumer Confidence Index, published by the Conference Board, fell to 64.9, down from 68.7 in April.

That was the index's biggest fall since October 2011, but above the all-time low of 25.3 reached in February 2009.

May's confidence figure was weaker than expected, with economists predicting a figure of about 70.

Greggs, the UK's largest bakery chain, enjoyed a 6% share price boost on Tuesday after the government revised its "pasty tax" proposal.

The government had intended to levy 20% VAT on hot, freshly-baked takeaway foods to the consternation of bakers and food outlets across the UK.

Greggs, known for its pasties and sausage-rolls, had warned that the tax rise would "materially affect" its sales and profits.

It had lobbied against the move.

The roles of central banks in the advanced economies have expanded and multiplied since the beginning of the crisis. The conventional monetary policy roles - setting interest rates in the pursuit of macroeconomic stability and acting as lender of last resort and market maker of last resort to provide funding liquidity and market liquidity to illiquid but insolvent counterparties - have both been transformed. With official policy rates near or at the effective lower bound, the size of the central bank's balance sheet and the composition of its assets and liabilities have become the new, 'poor man's', monetary policy instruments. The LLR and MMLR roles have expanded to include solvency support for SIFIs and, in the euro area, the provision of liquidity support and solvency support for sovereigns also. Concentrating too many financial stability responsibilities, including macro-prudential and micro-prudential regulation, in the central bank risks undermining the independence of the central bank where it is likely to be useful -- the conventional monetary policy roles. The non-inflationary loss-absorption capacity (NILAC) of the leading central banks is vast. For the ECB/Eurosystem we estimate it at no less than EUR3.2 trillion, for the Fed at over $7 trillion. This is tax payers' money that is not under the effective control of the fiscal authorities. The central banks have used their balance sheets and their NILACs to engage in quasi-fiscal actions that have been essential to prevent even greater financial turmoil and possible disaster, but that also have important distributional impacts between sectors, financial institutions, individuals and nations. The ECB was forced into this illegitimate role by the fiscal vacuum at the heart of the euro area; the Fed by the fiscal paralysis of the US Federal government institutions.

Major Western powers say they are expelling senior Syrian diplomats following the killing of 108 people in the Houla region of Syria on Friday.

The United States, France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Switzerland all took action.

Most of the victims in Houla were summarily executed, the UN says.

UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan said, after talks with President Bashar al-Assad, Syria was at a "tipping point".

Mr Annan said he had asked Mr Assad to take "bold steps" to see that his peace plan was implemented.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition figure, has left the country for the first time in 24 years on a visit to Thailand.

Her trip on Tuesday is seen as a newfound display of confidence in the liberalisation taking shape in her country after five decades of military rule.

Suu Kyi, who spent 15 years in detention under Myanmar's military dictatorship, is due to give a speech at this week's World Economic Forum on East Asia in Bangkok.

Al Jazeera's Wayne Hay, reporting from Bangkok, said Suu Kyi's 5-day schedule will be packed.

Unidentified assailants have set fire to the headquarters of Egypt's runoff presidential candidate Ahmad Shafiq and thousands of protesters have returned to Cairo's Tahrir Square to rally against alleged injustice in the election process.

An annex in Shafiq's headquarters in Cairo went up in flames late on Monday, hours after election officials announced that the former prime minister, a symbol of Hosni Mubarak's rule, would square off against Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi.

There were no immediate reports of injuries and firefighters said the blaze was quickly put under control. Police arrested eight people in connection with the attack.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Tuesday in a meeting with German President Joachim Gauck that despite Turkey's vicious tongue-lashing against Israel over the past few years, Jerusalem has been behaving with "maximum restraint toward the Turkish provocations."

Lieberman added that despite Israel's restraint, it will not allow its officers and soldiers to be terrorized, for they acted completely justifiably and in accordance with international law, as was also determined by the UN's international investigatory committee into the Gaza flotilla.

"We hope that the European nations will not cooperate with the Turkish provocation of baseless indictments against the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff and other senior officers," Lieberman told Gauck, who is visiting Jerusalem. "We hope the European nations will put Turkey back in its place and prevent wild behavior by the NATO member that has gone off course and is behaving contradictorily to all acceptable international laws."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's sword-polishing hasn't frightened the Iranians, according to recent reports about last week's nuclear talks in Baghdad. Foot-dragging by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei opposite the six world powers has been accompanied by an attempt to strengthen the Iranian foothold in Lebanon.

The Iranians' senior partner there, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, is threatening to heat up Israel's northern border. The victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in the first round of Egyptian elections and the leading presidential candidates' declared intentions to review the peace agreement with Israel does not bode well for the south of the country, either.

And if the new round of talks between Fatah and Hamas results in the formation of a national unity government over the West Bank and Gaza, and the determination of dates for an election any time soon, all the while negotiations for a final settlement with Israel recede into the distance, then the first two intifadas will look like a light summer rain in contrast to the hurricane that will take place in our neighborhood.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has launched one of the most extraordinary tirades in the history of online diplomacy, using its Twitter feed to lambast the US Ambassador to the country as "unprofessional" in a barrage of furious tweets.

"The Foreign Ministry is utterly shocked at US Ambassador Michael McFaul's remarks," ran the first tweet, referring to a speech given by Mr McFaul to a group of students this week. The speech was mainly aimed at touting the results of Barack Obama's "reset" policy with Russia, but the ministry took offence at suggestions that Russia had bribed Kyrgyzstan to close a US airbase in the country.

"This is not the first time that Mr McFaul's statements and actions have been a cause for concern," fumed the Foreign Ministry. "Ambassadors' job, as we understand it, is to improve bilateral ties, not to spread blatant falsehoods through the mediasphere."

The number of children from Africa being adopted by foreign nationals from other continents has risen dramatically, a report has said.

In the past eight years, international adoptions increased by almost 400%, the African Child Policy Forum has found.

"Africa is becoming the new frontier for inter-country adoption," the Addis Ababa-based group said.

But many African countries do not have adequate safeguards in place to protect the children being adopted, it warns.

Pakistan on Tuesday successfully testfired a short range nuclear capable missile, the military said.

The indigenously developed Short Range Surface to Surface Multi Tube Missile Hatf IX (NASR), with a range of 60 km, can carry nuclear warheads of appropriate yield, with high accuracy, and possesses shoot and scoot attributes, an army statement said.

This quick response system addresses the need to deter evolving threats, specially at shorter ranges, it said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and the U.S. President Barack Obama will hold a "full-scale" meeting on the sidelines of the upcoming Group of 20 (G20) summit, a Russian official said on Tuesday.

The two countries have agreed that Putin and Obama will make several agreements at the meeting and a presidential joint declaration on deeper bilateral ties, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov told reporters during a news briefing.

The G20 summit is scheduled for June in Los Cabos, Mexico

On June 7th the Centre for Alternative Technology publishes what Transition movement founder Rob Hopkins has described as a `manifesto' for a revolution in home and community energy. The Home Energy Handbook will increase community participation in energy projects, deepen social resilience and help to re-direct the profits of energy production back to the households and communities that generate, save and use it.

The illicit and highly-lucrative trade in shellfish is putting the health of many thousands of people at risk with tonnes of potentially contaminated seafood feared to be entering the food chain.

Health officials and food watchdogs are concerned that a boom in the illegal harvesting of cockles, clams and oysters for sale to restaurants and wholesalers threatens outbreaks of serious food poisoning.

The thriving seafood rustling industry, which sees unlicensed gangs of pickers target beaches and mudflats across the country to steal molluscs worth thousands of pounds at a time, has prompted a crackdown by the authorities. But with some pickers operating in organised gangs, fisheries protection bodies say they lack the resources to effectively tackle the problem.

Fire hydrant abuse in parts of Belfast has resulted in disrupted water supplies in hundreds of homes and businesses, NI Water has said.

Fifty hydrants have been vandalised with an estimated three-quarters of a million litres being wasted daily.

NI Water said staff had been working around the clock to close vandalised hydrants.

However, the company said its efforts were hindered in many cases when its staff were threatened and abused.

A team of Canadian scientists have discovered that thioridazine, a drug used to treat psychotic disorder, could successfully kill cancer stem cells in humans without the toxic side-effects on normal cells.

The research, published Thursday in the science journal CELL, may pave the way for the development of anticancer drugs for treatment of various cancers.

Conventional cancer treatments, like chemotherapy, work in a way that is toxic to cells, which may also lead to side-effects such as hair loss, nausea and anemia, according to the researchers from McMaster University.

Bluefin tuna contaminated with radiation believed to be from Fukushima Daiichi turned up off the coast of California just five months after the Japanese nuclear plant suffered meltdown last March, US scientists said.

Tiny amounts of caesium-137 and caesium-134 were detected in 15 bluefin caught near San Diego in August last year, according to a study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

The levels were 10 times higher than those found in tuna in the same area in previous years, but still well below those that the Japanese and US governments consider a risk to health. Japan recently introduced a new safety limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram in food.

A "golden age of gas" spurred by a tripling of shale gas from fracking and other sources of unconventional gas by 2035 will stop renewable energy in its tracks if governments don't take action, the International Energy Agency has warned.

Gas is now relatively abundant in some regions, thanks to the massive expansion of hydraulic fracturing - fracking - for shale gas, and in some areas the price of the fuel has fallen. The result is a threat to renewable energy, which is by comparison more expensive, in part because the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are still not taken into account in the price of energy.

Fatih Birol, chief economist for the IEA, said the threat to renewables was plain: "Renewable energy may be the victim of cheap gas prices if governments do not stick to their renewable support schemes."

The case for more regulation of the press needs to be very strong "before we further curtail liberty", Michael Gove has told the Leveson Inquiry.

The education secretary said he was "concerned about any prior restraint and on their [journalists'] exercising of freedom of speech."

He said existing laws should be used to judge individuals and institutions.

Lord Justice Leveson said he did "not need to be told about the importance of free speech".

Vice Prime Minister and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon hinted on Monday at possible Israeli involvement in the Flame bug, which was revealed to have targeted computers in Iran and the West Bank on Monday.

"Anyone who sees the Iranian threat as a significant threat - it's reasonable [to assume] that he will take various steps, including these, to harm it," Ya'alon said Tuesday morning in an interview with Army Radio.

"Israel was blessed as being a country rich with high-tech, these tools that we take pride in open up all kinds of opportunities for us," he added.

A minor planet that was discovered by Chinese scientists, has been named after a well-known late Chinese scientist and educator Yan Jici, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced Monday.

The minor planet, known as No. 10611 internationally, was discovered by the Beijing Schmidt CCD Asteroid Program under the National Astronomical Observatories with the CAS in 1997, and was bestowed the name in memory of Yan, said the CAS.

The value proposition of self-employment is so compelling that it's precisely what drove the corporates-gone-creatives entrepreneurs behind the aforementioned companies to empower others to strike out on their own, while providing a business structure, resources, and guidance through the platforms that are otherwise unavailable to the self-employed trying to do it solo.

But of course, as in every economy, the growth and survival of micro-entrepreneurship will be determined by the market. Do customers have a palate for the smaller, more custom, and unique experiences that these platforms offer? So far, the verdict is a strong yes.

Still golden, after all these years, San Francisco's most celebrated landmark turned 75 at the weekend with a display of pomp, pageantry, and fireworks so extravagant that they could be seen from space.

Hundreds of thousands of revellers crammed the city's waterfront on Sunday night to pay homage to the Golden Gate Bridge, which opened to the public on 27 May, 1937, and remains one of the best-known man-made structures in the world.

Built as America was emerging from the Great Depression, it was the largest suspension bridge ever completed, spanning 1.7 miles across the strait that connects San Francisco Bay with the Pacific Ocean, and costing more than a billion dollars in today's money.

Ferret Fred has a meal with deputy city mayor on family, youth, sports and Euro 2012 issues Alexander Popov (L) and director of the city zoo Alexei Grigoryev during a news conference in Kharkiv May 28, 2012. The ferret, brought to the fan zone on the day of matches in Kharkiv, will be predicting the results during the Euro 2012 soccer tournament, according to local media.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has lost his Supreme Court fight against extradition to Sweden to face accusations of sex offences.

The judgement was reached by a majority of five to two, the court's president, Lord Phillips, told the hearing.

Mr Assange's legal team was given 14 days to consider the ruling before a final decision is made, leaving the possibility the case could be reheard.