Norway is commemorating one year since 77 people were killed and 242 hurt in gun and bomb attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utoeya.

PM Jens Stoltenberg laid a wreath in Oslo before travelling to Utoeya, where he was joined by hundreds of people, including relatives of the dead.

Anders Behring Breivik, who has admitted carrying out the two attacks, remains on trial.

"The killer failed; the people have won," Mr Stoltenberg said.

(Reuters) - News Corp's Rupert Murdoch has stepped down from a string of boards overseeing the Sun, Times and Sunday Times newspapers in Britain, the company said in an internal memo on Saturday.

The company described the news as a "corporate housecleaning exercise" linked to the announcement in June that News Corp would split into two separate companies: a smaller publishing division and a much larger entertainment and TV group.

But the news is also likely to reignite speculation that News Corp could be preparing to sell the titles, following a phone hacking scandal at the now defunct mass-circulation News of the World that has damaged Murdoch's reputation in Britain.

The revelations of sustained criminality prompted an influential parliamentary committee in May to describe Murdoch as unfit to run a major company.

The European commission has asked member states to "give the green light" for the opening of negotiations on a free trade deal with Japan, EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht has announced.

Member states were urged to allow trade negotiations to progress with Tokyo, as Japan is "a major political and economic partner", said De Gucht, who added that the deal would strengthen ties with Europe's "second biggest trading partner in Asia".

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, the Belgian official suggested that, over the next 20 years, global economic growth would be primarily driven by economies in Asia, and warned that it would be "a serious mistake" to overlook Japan in the EU's trading strategy.

At a summit in June, EU leaders agreed that trade was pivotal in ensuring growth and the emergence of EU economies from the sovereign debt crisis.

The EU considers the signing of trade accords with the 80 countries where negotiations have already begun to be of high importance, which could in turn lead to the creation of over two million jobs and contribute nearly €275m to Europe's ailing economy.

Former state premier of Baden-Württemberg Stefan Mappus, who stands accused of breach of trust over a multi-billion-euro buy-back of energy company shares, has come under fire from his own conservative party.

Mappus, who was absent at the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Baden-Württemberg regional party conference on Saturday, has been accused of spending nearly a billion euros too much of taxpayer's money.

Mappus bypassed parliament to close a €4.7 billion deal to buy 45 percent of the regional utilities group EnBW in December 2010 - three months before he lost his post in the state election.

Now his party colleagues have attempted to distance themselves from the deal - which caused a national scandal earlier this month after prosecutors began criminal investigations against Mappus and his old friend Dirk Notheis, the head of investment bank Morgan Stanley's German operations.

Daily Mail - Dominic Sambrook - Bankers drowning in money. Out of touch politicians. Unaccountable quangocrats. Not for generations have those who run Britain been so far removed from the common man

Three hundred years ago, British politics and society presented a deeply unedifying picture. In the century after 1700, millions of people lived in desperately poor conditions. Deprived of any meaningful say in their own destiny and condemned to lives of demeaning drudgery, they relieved their frustrations in spasmodic outbursts of mob violence.

At the top, a narrow, gilded elite maintained tight control over the levers of patronage. Under the oligarchic system nicknamed `Old Corruption', a handful of Whig families and their fawning hangers-on jealously hoarded jobs and influence. This was a system personified by Britain's first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole -- an immensely talented statesman, to be sure, but also one of the most corrupt politicians this country has ever produced. As a contemporary ballad remarked, the man who governed Britain from 1721 to 1742 `judged of Men's Worth by the Weight of their Fee'.

At first glance, this might seem  like ancient history, irrelevant and  obsolete in today's democratic age. I would argue not. After all, that ballad could easily apply to many of today's politicians, especially after the recent revelations about Tory donors paying for dinners with the Prime Minister. And for one acute observer of 21st- century Britain, we have come full circle

Spanish 10-year spreads are now over 6.2% as the country is slowly heading towards a full blown EFSF/ESM programme; two autonomous regions are asking for a central government bailout as their revenues have been in freefall; El Pais says others, including Catalonia, are likely to follow; Luis de Guindos is heading towards a visit to Berlin on Tuesday amid much speculation; El Pais quotes economists and commentators as saying that a full bailout for Spain is only a matter of time; Greece is far off course from bailout targets especially its €3bn privatisation target; Outgoing chief of the state's asset-sales fund says state likely to raise €300m only; Troika of creditors are visiting Greece this week;Der Spiegel reports that the IMF has given up on Greece, and is no longer prepared to pay out any further tranches; there is a seemingly insurmountable reluctance among eurozone member states to grant Greece a programme extension, given the country's abysmal implementation record; Greece will be allowed to a do T-Bill issue to bridge its August debt obligations; Germany's economics minister says he expects Greece to leave the eurozone soon; The ECB stopped accepting Greek collateral, at least until after troika review; Peer Steinbruck says he expects several countries to leave the eurozone; 10 Italian cities are at the verge of a financial crisis; Berlusconi wants to rerun next year and suggests a two currency system for Italy; Ferdinando Giugliano says Mario Monti should tell the truth to his parliament, and adopt more ambitious reforms; Monti turns to Putin for help; Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi say ESM will not be enough to fix the crisis; Tito Boeri, meanwhile, lists the requirements for a No Bailout rule to be credible: ECB supervision of all banks, a eurozone-level minimum income guarantee, a single labour market and immigration policyand a single VAT administration.

What would John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the 20th Century, have made of the current economic situation, ponders philosopher John Gray.

"I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath."

That was how John Maynard Keynes, speaking in 1938 in a talk later published as his brilliant memoir My Early Beliefs, recalled his younger self and his friends in the Bloomsbury Group as they had been in the years before World War I.

The influential Cambridge economist has figured prominently in the anxious debates that have gone on since the crash of 2007-2008. For most of those invoking his name, he was a kind of social engineer, who urged using the power of government to lift the economy out of the devastating depression of the 30s.

Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280bn in lost income tax revenues, according to research published on Sunday.

The study estimating the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts - excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses - puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion.

This amounts to roughly the US and Japanese GDP combined. Roughly 10 million people worldwide have offshore accounts, with 100,000 people owning half of those secreted assets.

The research was carried out for pressure group Tax Justice Network, which campaigns against tax havens, by James Henry, former chief economist at consultants McKinsey & Co.

John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network told Al Jazeera that he was shocked by "the sheer scale of the figures".

"What's shocking is that some of the world's biggest banks are up to their eyeballs in helping their clients evade taxes and shift their wealth offshore," said Christensen.

"We're talking about very big, well-known brands - HSBC, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Credit Suisse - some of the world's biggest banks are invovled...and they do it knowing fully well that their clients, more often than not, are evading and avoiding taxes."

(Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors and European regulators are close to arresting individual traders and charging them with colluding to manipulate global benchmark interest rates, according to people familiar with a sweeping investigation into the rate-rigging scandal.

Federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., have recently contacted lawyers representing some of the individuals under suspicion to notify them that criminal charges and arrests could be imminent, said two of those sources who asked not to be identified because the investigation is ongoing.

Defense lawyers, some of whom represent individuals under suspicion, said prosecutors have indicated they plan to begin making arrests and filing criminal charges in the next few weeks. In long-running financial investigations it is not uncommon for prosecutors to contact defense lawyers for individuals before filing charges to offer them a chance to cooperate or take a plea, these lawyer said.

The prospect of charges and arrests of individuals means that prosecutors are getting a fuller picture of how traders at major banks allegedly sought to influence the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, and other global rates that underpin hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets. The criminal charges would come alongside efforts by regulators to punish major banks with fines, and could show that the alleged activity was not rampant in the banks.

(Reuters) - "Faster, Higher, Stronger" is the motto of the Olympics opening in London on Friday. "Slower, Lower, Weaker" would be a better description of the economic performance of many of the countries competing in the games.

None of the big names will look worthy of a place on the podium if forecasts for a raft of data due this week from the euro zone, the United States and Britain prove accurate.

Even China, the long-standing growth champion, is huffing and puffing.

And for all the growth hormones injected in the form of cheap central bank money, the global economy is likely to be running on the spot for some time yet given fears that the United States could fall off a fiscal cliff, the softer trend in China and, above all, the debilitating euro zone crisis.

CAMBRIDGE - The world economy faces considerable uncertainty in the short term. Will the eurozone manage to sort out its problems and avert a breakup? Will the United States engineer a path to renewed growth? Will China find a way to reverse its economic slowdown?

The answers to these questions will determine how the global economy evolves over the next few years. But, regardless of how these immediate challenges are resolved, it is clear that the world economy is entering a difficult new longer-term phase as well - one that will be substantially less hospitable to economic growth than possibly any other period since the end of World War II.

Regardless of how they handle their current difficulties, Europe and America will emerge with high debt, low growth rates, and contentious domestic politics. Even in the best-case scenario, in which the euro remains intact, Europe will be bogged down with the demanding task of rebuilding its frayed union. And, in the US, ideological polarization between Democrats and Republicans will continue to paralyze economic policy.

Why are markets tanking now, despite Euro deal in Brussels? 1) Growing signs of IMF/ECB give-up on Samaras-led govt Greek stocks -6% (1/3)

(2/3)... In Spain, Rajoy's E65bn austerity prog looks as deliverable as the one that destroyed Greece. Mkts think E400bn needed soon...

(3/3) Spain/Italy heading for fiscal standoff between regions/cities and govts. While growth zooms downwards. And (4/3 - sorry)...

(4/3) Banking union agreed but not delivering co-ordinated action in Frankfurt/Brussels.

Madagascar's army says it is back in control of a military camp close to the airport in the capital Antananarivo after several soldiers earlier staged a mutiny.

The military said on Sunday that the group of mutinous soldiers who stormed the camp were eventually driven out in an assault by government forces. The leader of the rebellion was killed, the army said.

"The situation is under control. Corporal Koto Mainty, alias Black, has been killed," General Raphael Ramasy, chief of staff of the defence minister, told the public television station TVM.

Mainty was the bodyguard of former defence minister Noel Rakotonandrasana. Rakotonandrasana was arrested after taking part in another mutiny back in 2010.

"The other mutineers gave themselves up or were arrested," Ramasy said. "Four other civilians were arrested ... Two mutineers and two other elements of the security forces are wounded."

An officer sent in to begin negotiations with the soldiers was shot and later died of his wounds, the army said. Two fighters of each side also suffered injuries, according to the defence ministry.

Bomb attacks in several Iraqi towns have left at least 17 people dead and dozens more injured, in one of the most violent days in the past two weeks.

Two parked car bombs exploded near an entrance of a public market in Mahmodiya, a town 30km south of Baghdad, and another exploded close to the town's police station resulting in the killing of five people and wounding 28 others, an interior ministry source told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

In Madaeen, a town 30km southeast of the Iraqi capital, three IEDs exploded inside a crowded al-Tameem market just before iftar, killing six people and wounding 13 others, sources said.

And car bombs planted near a public restraunt in Najaf, 160km south of Baghdad, killed five people and wounded 14, while a policeman was killed and 16 others were injured when a car bomb exploded in Mosul district.

Although violence in Iraq has eased since a peak in 2006-2007, deadly attacks are still carried out, especially around the capital.

US President Barack Obama is heading for Colorado to honour victims of Friday's gun attack at a Batman film screening that left 12 people dead.

The White House said Mr Obama would meet survivors and families of victims, as well as local officials in Aurora.

In his weekly radio address, he called for prayer and reflection on the gun rampage in the Denver suburb.

Pope Benedict has voiced "deep shock" over the attack which left another 58 people injured, some critically.

James Holmes, 24, currently being held in solitary confinement for his own safety, is alleged to have opened fire during a packed midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises.

Three foreign contractors have been killed when an Afghan dressed in police uniform opened fire at a police training camp in the western province of Herat, the International Security Assitance Force (ISAF) press desk has said.

"An individual wearing an Afghan National Army uniform turned his weapon against International Security Assistance Force contracted civilian employees in western Afghanistan today, killing three," the ISAF said in a statement on Saturday.

The individual who fired on the contracted civilian employees was killed following the engagement, ISAF said.

Al Jazeera's Bernard Smith, reporting from Kabul, said a police source had revealed that fighting had broken out on the 
outskirts of Herat city, near the airport and not far from the Italian base." 

"We understand that there have been NATO casualties - three foreign casualties - foreigners training police seconded by their respective countries.

Syrian state news agency SANA said on Sunday that unspecified Western intelligence agencies plan to hijack local satellite television channels to broadcast misinformation.

False reports are to include news of defections, rebels capturing cities across the country and even coups d'état, SANA said, citing a source at the Syrian Information Ministry.

The news are supposed to be broadcasted by Syrian journalists working outside the country who will be pressured into delivering false reports, the agency said.

"Arab parties" are expected be aiding Western spies in their information attacks, the agency added, without elaborating.

India's former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee came out victorious in the country's presidential election on Sunday after scooping up more than half of the votes from both national and state lawmakers. By News Wires (text)  

AFP - Former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee was elected Indian president on Sunday after votes from national and state lawmakers were counted in the race for the mainly ceremonial post.

Some analysts believe Mukherjee, a veteran from the ruling Congress party, may take a more active approach to the job than his predecessors as India struggles with a parliamentary deadlock and slowing economic growth.

The PTI news agency announced Mukherjee, 76, as the winner after he collected more than half of the electoral college votes during counting on Sunday.

(Reuters) - The Chinese capital's heaviest rainstorm in six decades killed at least 37 people, flooded streets and stranded 80,000 people at the main airport, state media and the government said on Sunday.

The storm, which started on Saturday afternoon and continued late into the night, flooded major roads and sent torrents of water tumbling down steps into underpasses.

The Beijing city government said on its official microblog at least 37 people had died, including 25 drowned, six crushed in collapsing homes, five electrocuted and one struck by lightning.

WIND

• In 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published its World Energy Outlook, predicting that non-hydro renewable energy would comprise 3 percent of global energy by 2020. That benchmark was reached in 2008.
• In 2000, IEA projected that there would be 30 gigawatts of wind power worldwide by 2010, but the estimate was off by a factor of 7. Wind power produced 200 gigawatts in 2010, an investment of approximately $400 billion.
• In 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated that total U.S. wind power capacity could reach 10 gigawatts by 2010. The country reached that amount in 2006 and quadrupled between 2006 and 2010.
• In 2000, the European Wind Energy Association predicted Europe would have 50 gigawatts of wind by 2010 and boosted that estimate to 75 two years later. Actually, 84 gigawatts of wind power were feeding into the European electric grid by 2012.
• In 2000, IEA estimated that China would have 2 gigawatts of wind power installed by 2010. China reached 45 gigawatts by the end of 2010. The IEA projected that China wind power in 2020 would be 3.7 gigawatts, but most projections now exceed 150 gigawatts, or 40 times more.

SOLAR

Scientists searching for clues to understand how superweeds obtain resistance to the popular herbicide glyphosate may have been missing a critical piece of information, a Purdue University study shows. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed killer sold under the name RoundUp, is the most widely used herbicide in the United States, but some plants have grown resistant to it.

This has caused farmers to turn to additional herbicides. While the mechanisms that have led to resistance are not fully known, Bill Johnson, a professor of weed science; Steve Hallett, an associate professor of weed science; and Jessica Schafer, a graduate student in botany and plant pathology, believe that soil microbes may play a role.

Most laboratory tests done to understand glyphosate resistance are done in sterile soil, void of those microbes. Schafer said Purdue's findings, published online early in the journal Weed Science, show that those microbes may play a significant role in how glyphosate affects plants.

"The soil you're growing the plants in is important to the results," Schafer said. "If we're growing in a sterile media, we could get some false positive results because the plants are more tolerant to glyphosate in those conditions."

Who Could Have Predicted?

The rapid spread of solar power across China, India, Africa and Latin America is being driven not by subsidy but by the market.

(...)

So this is the question: does the world need nuclear power for us to solve the climate crisis, as Monbiot claims? To borrow a second thought, this time from Margaret Thatcher, must we accept that there is no alternative?

Let's look at the figures. In 2010 the world demand for primary energy was equivalent to 12,000 million tonnes of oil (Mtoe), 87% of which was provided by oil, gas and coal. Nuclear power contributed a gross 626 Mtoe, about 5% of the total, while renewables accounted for 935 Mtoe, almost 8%.

To solve the climate problem, the world must not only reverse the trend of increasing carbon emissions over the next few decades, but bring them down to less than they are now. So can nuclear power do it? Assume a 2% growth in primary energy demand per year over the next 35 years, and that demand will double to some 24,000 Mtoe. Rely on nuclear power to accommodate all the growth, and knock out 4,000 Mtoe-worth of coal, and it will have to produce 16,000 Mtoe of energy per year - a 25-fold increase on its current level.

Today the world has 440 operational nuclear reactors, so 25 times more means 11,000 reactors. To have these in 35 years means building, on average, about one a day. Or in an exponential growth scenario, the world would need to sustain an annual increase of 8% per year in the number of operational nuclear reactors for 35 years.

Russian customs officials have stopped the smuggling of nearly 300 radioactively contaminated cars at the Japanese border as part of an ongoing operation monitoring imports following the disaster at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant last year.

"We have inspected 150,000 vehicles as part of this monitoring mission. Three hundred units that have been seized indicated a level of radioactivity," said Gennady Onishchenko, the head of Russia's consumer rights watchdog.

Farms have sprouted in cities across the country over the past several years as activists and idealists pour their sweat into gritty soil. Now Paul Lightfoot wants to take urban agriculture beyond the dirt-under-your-nails labor of love. He wants to take it corporate.

In June, Lightfoot's company, BrightFarms, announced a deal with The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., or A&P, to provide New York City-grown vegetables to the local chain's supermarkets year-round. The goods will grow in what the company says will be the country's largest rooftop greenhouse farm, a high-tech hydroponic operation that will boost yields, allowing the company to face-off with organic vegetables trucked from California, cutting thousands of miles from the supply chain while aiming to provide a fresher product at a competitive price.

With similar deals announced for St. Paul, Minn. and Oklahoma, BrightFarms is looking to tap into the local-food zeitgeist nationwide and create a more efficient produce mass-market. With some notable exceptions, urban farms have largely been non-profit, community-based endeavors, aiming to provide healthier food as a public good. The few for-profit operations have been mostly small and local. Lightfoot has grander ambitions.

"We're not trying to change the fringes of the supply chain," he said. "We want to change the supply chain itself."

The cold water may have been the final straw for animals already prone to premature birth for other reasons and probably stressed both by the 2010 oil spill and the unusually cold winters that bracketed it, said Ruth H. Carmichael, senior marine scientist at Alabama's Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

...

The one common thread so far has been brucellosis, found in 12 of 51 animals tested so far for Brucella bacteria, she said. At least three of the dolphins which tested positive for the bacteria were adults or subadults, but most were infected while still in the womb.

...

Exposure to oil and other organic pollutants has been linked to perinatal and infant mortality in some marine mammals but has not been reported among dolphins, the study said. Other scientists have found that plankton quickly gobbled up nontoxic carbon from the spilled oil, bringing it into the Gulf of Mexico's food web.

(Reuters) - An international health panel has recommended for the first time that all HIV patients be treated with antiretroviral drugs, even when the virus's impact on their immune system is shown to be small.

The nonprofit International Antiviral Society-USA cited new evidence that untreated infection with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS can also lead to a range of other conditions, including cardiovascular disease and kidney disease. In addition, data have shown that suppressing HIV reduces the risk of an infected person passing the virus to another person.

"We are no longer only focused on traditional AIDS-defining infections. We know that HIV is doing damage to the body all the time when it is not controlled," said Dr. Melanie Thompson, principal investigator of the AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta and a member of the Antiviral Society panel.

A new study of Oregon's Paisley Caves confirms that humans used the site as early as 12,450 radiocarbon years ago, and the projectile points they left behind were of the "Western Stemmed" tradition and not Clovis - which suggests parallel technological development of early inhabitants to the Americas. The study, published this week in the journal Science, could have a major impact on theories of how the Western Hemisphere was populated.

The research was funded by multiple organizations, including the National Science Foundation.

Lead author Dennis Jenkins, from the University of Oregon, and second author Loren Davis, from Oregon State University, were part of a large multidisciplinary team that spent much of the past two years combing through deposits and collecting more than 100 high-precision radiocarbon dates from Paisley Caves, located in south-central Oregon's Summer Lake basin.

Chia-Nan Chen and colleagues explain that royal jelly is a thick liquid made up of proteins, sugars and fats that is secreted by glands in the throats and jaws of worker bees and fed to larvae.

Workers feed all bee larvae RJ for the first three days of their lives, but only the queen gets it throughout life, growing larger and living up to 15 times longer than other bees. The scientists treated worker bees with drugs called histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACis) to see whether they could enhance the larvae's growth.

They found that worker bees given HDACis produced a fortified royal jelly that made the queen bee larvae grow to be 2-3 times larger than larvae fed standard royal jelly. A couple HDACis have already been approved for treating certain forms of cancer.

People get ready, there's a climate change induced disaster a comin'.

The worst drought in a generation is hitting farmers across America's corn belt far harder than government projections and forcing them to a heart-breaking decision: harvest what's left of their shrivelled acres or abandon their entire crop.

For Mike Buis, pictured, who farms in west-central Indiana, the most he could hope for, his best-case scenario, was saving one-third of his crop.......

That, in time, will mean higher prices for milk, poultry and meat for American consumers, and misery - possibly chaos and unrest - in African and Latin American countries, which depend on imported grains, food security experts say.....

Is it evidence of climate change? "I'd have to ask Al Gore," Rhea joked.

But the question is growing impossible to ignore, even in strongly Republican parts of rural Indiana. Another year or two like this one and farmers are going to have to change their practices, Buis said.

(Reuters) - Bradley Wiggins was greeted by thousands of Union Jack-waving fans on the Champs Elysees when he claimed the 99th edition of the Tour de France to become the first British winner of the famous race on Sunday.

Wiggins finished safe in the bunch on the 20th and last stage, a 120-km ride from Rambouillet, as he helped his Sky team mate and fellow Briton Mark Cavendish to victory.

"What a finish, that was something, Mark won the stage after we led him out in the finale. Wonderful, wonderful," Wiggins told reporters.

There is nothing inevitable about the way things have turned out in Afghanistan. Afghans do not appreciate foreign troops on their soil more than any other people, but in 2001, after two decades of war and five years of brutal Taliban misrule, they were open to whatever the Americans and their British allies had to offer. We had to work hard to make them hate us.

The disasters of the Bush era are all too well known. After invading Afghanistan in pursuit of al-Qaida, US forces were ordered into Iraq, leaving Afghanistan to languish and fester. It was the greatest strategic folly in modern times.

Barack Obama's Afghan war was meant to be different.....

I read his previous book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, about the Iraq War, a funny yet terrifying book with a sense of outraged horror. This review suggests this will be much the same.

Interestingly, the Guardian had an interview with Emma sky, who was a senior civilian adviser in Iraq who said many interesting things about the fubar that was Iraq and confirmed many things which chandrasekaran said in his first book. Worth reading if you have half an hour

Guardian - Inside Iraq: the British peacenik who became key to the US military

Guardian - Inside Iraq: 'We had to deal with people who had blood on their hands'

keep to the Fen Causeway