(Reuters) - Olympic organisers scrambled on Sunday to quell a backlash over depressing TV images of half-empty stands at the London Olympics as a government minister said an urgent inquiry had been launched to identify just who had failed to show up and why.

Sports fans from all over Britain who had been charmed by the Olympic publicity offensive but let down by a complex ballot system for the 8.8 million tickets, have been outraged by footage of empty seats at key venues including Wimbledon, one of the hottest tickets in world tennis.

Chairman Sebastian Coe, who threatened to name and shame sponsors that did not fill their seats, said missing spectators were mostly officials from international sports federations, other Olympic officials, their families and friends.

Romanians have gone to the polls to decide whether to impeach their president, Traian Basescu, bringing to a head weeks of political warring that has mired the young democracy.

Polling stations opened at 04:00 GMT on Sunday. Around 18.3 million people are eligible to vote, including large diasporas in Spain and Italy.

The opening hours have been extended and a number of additional polling stations have been set up along the Black Sea coast to facilitate voting for holidaymakers and rural populations in a country where voter fatigue is high.

Opinion polls show two-thirds of Romanians are expected to vote in favour of impeaching Basescu, once one of the country's most popular politicians whose ratings plummeted amid austerity cuts in 2010.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti have said they will do "everything possible to protect the eurozone".

The comments came in a joint statement following a telephone conversation on Sunday.

They echo remarks from French President Francois Hollande and European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi.

It has increased speculation that the ECB could resume its programme of buying up Spanish bonds.

The remarks came the day before a visit from US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

On Monday, he will be meeting German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble before flying to Frankfurt to meet Mario Draghi.

Markets rallied on Thursday following Mr Draghi's supportive comments.

The BBC's Stephen Evans in Berlin said that Mr Geithner's whirlwind visit combined with the remarks from eurozone leaders had raised speculation still further that a quiet change of policy was underway.

Germany's interior minister is sacking the entire leadership of the federal police force, it emerged this weekend. Not only the head of the force will go next week, but also his two top deputies.

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is set to replace the entire leadership of the federal police force in one fell swoop, Focus magazine reported on Saturday.

The reshuffle, confirmed by government sources, will see the forced resignations of not only police president Matthias Seeger but also his two deputies Wolfgang Lohmann and Michael Frehse.

While Friedrich's motives for the dramatic reshuffle remain unclear, the removal of Seeger was said to be connected to his contacts to authorities in Belarus, as well as internal conflicts in the police force, which the top cop appeared unable to take in hand.

Other reports point to a lack of trust between the interior minister and the police leadership, after sensitive internal matters were repeatedly leaked to the public, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Sunday.

(Reuters) - When Peregrine Financial collapsed earlier this month, a nagging question resurfaced. As in the implosion of Lehman Brothers, the fall of Bernard Madoff and other cases in recent years, many asked: Where were the accountants?

That this question still arises could be seen as an indictment of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law, enacted 10 years ago on Monday. The law was a response to accountants' failures to sound the alarm about financial misconduct at Enron Corp, WorldCom and a host of other companies.

But, lawyers and analysts say that for the most part Sarbanes-Oxley is working. It has strengthened auditing, made the accounting industry a better steward of financial standards, and fended off Enron-sized book-cooking disasters.

Yes, it has fallen short in important ways, but these failures are on a more subtle level, the experts say.

Matt Yglesias tries to referee a dispute between partisans of Tim Geithner, who say that bank bailouts were a critical part of getting the economy running again, and partisans of Neil Barofsky, who say the Obama administration should have spent more time bailing out underwater homeowners who were crushed by the housing bust:

So who's right? I think this is actually a much more difficult question than partisans on either side are willing to acknowledge. Team Tim has bolstered their argument with the overblown notion that homeowner bailouts "launched the Tea Party" via Rick Santelli and are therefore politically impossible and thus one doesn't even really need to address the merits of the case. On the other hand, Team Neil has never really presented a coherent alternative course of action that takes real account of the consequences of imposing very large losses on the banks.

I say: why choose? Like it or not, Team Tim is right: the banks had to be bailed out, the same way you'd bail out electrical utilities rather than let everyone go without electricity. They're just too important to the rest of the economy. Perhaps the bank bailouts should have been more punitive (that's my view), but frankly, this is nibbling around the edges. Punitive or not, we needed to spend a boatload of money to rescue the banks.

PARIS, Jul 27 2012 (IPS) - For several decades, microcredit presented itself as a magical and benign financial tool for the poorest people in the world, who were otherwise completely excluded from conventional commercial banking services, to secure easy access to loans in order to set up their own businesses and live a dignified life.

Such was the hype surrounding the concept of microfinance that in 2006 its leading practitioners, the Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen bank, received the Nobel Peace prize for, as the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm put it, "their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below."

Such prestige quickly lured activists, investors, and tycoons like Bill Gates, George Soros, Bono, William and Hillary Clinton and even the Queen of Spain, to fund and endorse microfinance projects around the world.

Now, new evidence suggests that even microcredit was not protected from the greed that characterises modern international finance.

Two recent studies show that microfinance was simply another profit making scheme for global private finance corporations, such as the Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, and Standard Chartered, who started pouring money into microcredit initiatives.

In his book, `Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic', released Jul. 9, former investment banker Hugh Sinclair claims that such banks and funds use microcredit, through local operators, to charge usurious interest rates - of up to 200 percent - on even the smallest loans.

ROME, Jul 24 2012 (IPS) - Six months have passed since the beginning of the United Nations International Year of the Cooperatives (IYC). There can be no doubt it has fallen far short of its goal of calling the world's attention to this formidable instrument of social production.

While there has been a rise in the dissemination of information related to cooperatives, it is minuscule in comparison to the vast importance and potential of the cooperative movement worldwide.

Cooperativism emerged in the early 19th century in England where it was promoted by unions opposed to the capitalist expansion driven by the Industrial Revolution. It assumed the function of improving the buying power of salary workers through consumer cooperatives.

Since then the system of cooperative property has spread throughout the world, in industry, the primary sector, trade and other branches of the service sector.

Cooperatives also have a significant presence in the media, with hundreds of outlets dedicated to spreading information about the world of cooperatives. Moreover there are thousands of media cooperatives, including the Associated Press in the U.S., Le Monde, the French newspaper, and the IPS news agency, which, since 1964, has covered the subject of cooperatives as a part of its editorial focus on development and civil society, particularly in countries of the South.

The scenario is this:

1. British government introduces austerity policies which deliberately create unemployment. Jobs vanish because aggregate demand contracts. People stop spending and firms stop investing because the fear of unemployment rises.

2. The same government then claims the solution to the rising unemployment is a Community Action Programme (CAP) - which advertises itself as providing "support" for the "Very Long-Term Unemployed".

3. The CAP's client base rises dramatically as a result of the austerity program which created the unemployment problem in the first place. The austerity program ensures that many of those that enter short-term unemployment transit as time elapses into long-term and then very long-term unemployment, thus, keeping a regular clientele for its CAP.

4. Faced with an explosion of people to be managed the British government then decides that those receiving jobseeker's allowance (JSA) - the only thing between starvation and penury - are clearly unmotivated and need to work. Just the terminology is the same - the unemployed became jobseeekers!

5. Solution - force anyone on JSA for more than three years to work for no pay for 6 months. Refusal to work for the benefit which is well below the minimum wage then leads to cancellation of the said benefit.

CESI estimated that the British Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) - which oversees the scheme has dramatically under-estimated the number of unemployed who are being referred to its Work Program - by a factor of 19 per cent.

This is the program that the Government claims will find work for the long-term unemployed.

It all reads like deja vu to me. The conservative Australian government adopted the same strategy when it was elected in 1996. Its privatised public employment service - the so-called Job Network - was a refinement of the trend towards mean-spirited government that led to the abandonment of a commitment to full employment and the retrenchment of a comprehensive welfare state.

Fierce fighting has erupted in rebel-held districts of Aleppo, a day after opposition forces repulsed an offensive by government troops in Syria's second-largest city, a human rights group said.

"Intense clashes took place in the districts of Bab al-Hadid, Zahraa, Arkub and Al-Hindrat Camp as explosions were heard and aircraft were sighted overhead," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.

Helicopter gunships flew over the Saif al-Dawla district as well as Salaheddin, where rebels held off an offensive by ground troops backed by tanks and helicopters on Saturday, the Britain-based rights group said.

In the central city of Homs, a battle broke out near the police headquarters between troops and rebel fighters, of whom at least one was killed.

Near the capital, sniper fire killed a civilian in the town of Irbin, the Observatory said. Two more were killed in shelling in Idlib province in the northwest.

On Saturday, violence killed 168 people, 94 civilians, 33 rebels and 41 soldiers, the Observatory said.

(Reuters) - U.S. Republican candidate Mitt Romney, presenting himself as Israel's best friend in the November 6 presidential election, said on Sunday that "any and all measures" must be used to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

A top aide said Romney would support an Israeli military strike if all options had been exhausted, but the candidate himself balked at repeating that position.

In a foreign policy speech in Jerusalem, Romney voiced strong support for the alliance between the United States and Israel and seemed to suggest that President Barack Obama had let the relationship flounder.

"We cannot stand silent as those who seek to undermine Israel voice their criticisms. And we certainly should not join in that criticism. Diplomatic distance in public between our nations emboldens Israel's adversaries," said Romney, the walls of the Old City lining the hilltop behind him.

West African countries have given an unenthusiastic response to Laurent Fabius's calls to take part in a military intervention in Mali during the French foreign affairs minister's 48-hour tour of four French-speaking countries that ended in Chad on Sunday.

Only Niger, which feels it is most under threat from Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (Aqim), is keen to see a speedy intervention by the proposed west African force in north Mali, RFI's French service reports.

"Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the G.D.P. in Israel? Eight percent," he said. "You spend eight percent of G.D.P. on health care. You're a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our G.D.P. on health care, 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, compare that with the size of our military -- our military which is 4 percent, 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of G.D.P. We have to find ways -- not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to fund and manage our health care costs."

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth's land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.

h/t ceebs

Using a newly developed analytical technique, a team led by scientists at USC was the first to identify long-hypothesized vitamin B deficient zones in the ocean. "This is another twist to what limits life in the ocean," said Sergio Sanudo-Wilhelmy, professor of biological and earth sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and lead author on a paper about the vitamin-depleted zones that will appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

B vitamins are organic compounds dissolved in the ocean and are important for living cells to function. Zones poor in B vitamins may inhibit the growth and proliferation of phytoplankton, which are tiny microorganisms at the base of the food chain in the ocean.

"An important result of our study is that the concentrations of the five major B vitamins vary independently and appear to have different sources and sink," said co-author David Karl, professor of oceanography and director of the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) at the University of Hawaii. "This could lead to complex interactions among populations of microbes, from symbiosis to intense competition."

NEELUM VALLEY, Jammu and Kashmir, July 27, 2012 (ENS) - A journalist has been arrested by police and is being detained after the publication of photos he took of historic trees chopped down by government officials.

Elderly eyewitnesses say the trees that were cut down were 54 years old. They were planted by the hands of prominent personalities of national fame, including the first Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Abdul Hamid Khan.

 The photos show trees that were felled before the July 18 visit of Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf to Athmuqam in the Neelum Valley of Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Khawaja Fiaz Hussain, a correspondent for a leading Urdu daily newspaper and a freelance photojournalist, released a collection of images of the felled trees, both pines and other species.

The images were widely carried by local newspapers and aroused public anger over the logging by the government workers, whom local people describe as being primarily responsible for the protection of forests and environment.

STRAUBING, Germany, July 26, 2012 (ENS) - Swiss chemicals company Clariant has opened Germany's largest pilot plant for making climate-friendly cellulose ethanol from agricultural waste.

This biofuel of the future cuts emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by 95 percent without competing with food production. Located in Straubing, Bavaria, the 28 million euro pilot project will produce up to 1,000 tonnes of cellulosic ethanol for automotive fuel from around 4,500 tonnes of wheat straw.

Oxford University students will no longer have to wear gender-specific academic clothing after concerns it was unfair to the transgender community.

It will mean men can attend formal occasions in skirts and stockings and women in suits and bow ties.

The new rules come after a motion by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer society (LGBTQ Soc) was passed by the students' union earlier this year.

The changes, to start from 4 August, have now been agreed by the university.

Jess Pumphrey, LGBTQ officer, said the change would make a number of students' exam experience significantly less stressful.

Under the old laws on academic clothing - known as subfusc - male students were required to wear a dark suit and socks, black shoes, a white bow tie and a plain white shirt and collar under their black gowns.

Female students had to wear a dark skirt or trousers, a white blouse, black stockings and shoes and a black ribbon tied in a bow at the neck.

Jul 28 2012 (IPS) - Far from fears that female education is on the decline after the Taliban campaign against girls' schools, female students outclassed their male counterparts in the secondary school examination for 2012.

And participation itself was a success. In all 265,000 students sat the examinations, including 115,343 girls. The results were declared over a ten-day period earlier this month.

The results have come as a boost to authorities in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and nearby Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) regions of north Pakistan. "It's great given the Taliban's attitude towards female education," KP Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain told IPS.

"About 700 schools were damaged by miscreants in the last five years in KP and FATA. Despite that girls have got top positions in the secondary school certificate (SSC) examination." The top 15 positions went to girls. This meant an outright rejection of Taliban calls against women education, Hussain said.

In militancy-riddled Malakand division in KP, girls grabbed 10 of the 20 top positions. Malakand saw destruction of 181 schools from 2007 to 2009, among them 118 were girls' schools.

WASHINGTON, Jul 24 2012 (IPS) - Two months after a free-trade agreement between the United States and Colombia went into effect, workers and activists are warning that U.S.-stipulated labour reforms have not been fully implemented and have yet to result in promised improvements in the lives of workers.

"We ask President (Barack) Obama to push for more guarantees for Colombian workers," Miguel Conde, with Sintrainagro, a union representing workers on palm-oil plantations, said here on Tuesday. "In Colombia, it is easier to form an armed group than a trade union ... because we still have no guarantees from the government."

Colombia today is the most dangerous place in the world to be a member of a trade union.

Further, those gathered Tuesday at the Washington headquarters of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of trade unions in the United States, warned that much of a year-old labour agreement, meant to pave the way for the free-trade agreement (FTA), was in certain respects making things even more difficult for labour organisers in Colombia.

Two suspects have confessed to killing two French soldiers during an operation against illegal gold-prospecting in French Guiana last month, Brazilian police said Saturday. The two were arrested Friday in northern Brazil after fleeing across 200 kilometres of tropical forest.

The two, who are Brazilian nationals, have been identified as 25-year-old Manoel Ferreira Moura, nicknamed "Manoelzinho", and Ronaldo Silva Lima, known as "O Brabo" (The Angry Man).

Moura led a violent gang of illegal gold prospectors in French Guiana's remote Dorlin region.

After a tip-off that they were staying in a hotel in Macapa, northern Brazil, police caught them in a taxi along with a woman, Marilene Santos Fonseca, who had accompanied them on their flight across 200 kilometres of jungle in stolen canoes and quadbikes.

The said social services quickly went to offer support to the family after the suicide.

(La Vanguardia)

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa