(Reuters) - The European Central Bank is thinking the unthinkable to save the euro, including resuming its controversial bond-buying program and possibly even pursuing quantitative easing - in effect printing money.

Bold action is probably at least five weeks away, insiders say, though some more clues may come when the ECB reveals its latest interest rate decision on Thursday.

Shortages of refined sugar that have forced the European Commission to temporarily ease its sugar regime are giving industry groups new ammunition in their fight against efforts to extend the EU's production quota.

The beverage, confection and starch industries have called on the EU to stick to its 2015 commitment to end quotas on sugar beet production. The quota system, dating to 1968, provides farmers a guaranteed minimum price aimed at ensuring stable supplies.

But with no shortage of demand for sweets, soft drinks and automotive biofuels, the sugar sector's competitors and buyers alike are asking why the commodity should continue to get special treatment. Since early 2011, the Commission has had to authorise extra sales of sugar to address domestic shortages.

"We would certainly question why sugar is the only EU agriculture raw material out there which is still benefiting from a quota system now that dairy is also going," said Jamie Fortescue, managing director of a group representing Europe's starch industry, the Association des Amidonniers et Féculiers (AAF).

Romanian President Traian Basescu survived a referendum on his impeachment on Sunday after the voter turnout fell short of the required level and derailed an effort by his opponents to oust him from office.

Socialist Prime Minister Victor Ponta's efforts to unseat the conservative Basescu have brought criticism from the European Union, which accused him of undermining the rule of law and intimidating judges.

The row over Basescu has delayed policymaking, sent the leu currency plunging to record lows, and pushed up borrowing costs. It also raised concern about the future of Romania's €5 billion ($6.2 billion) International Monetary Fund-led aid deal.

The election bureau said the voter turnout was 46%, below the 50% threshold Ponta's leftist Social Liberal Union (USL) needed to make the referendum valid.

Exit polls showed more than 80% of those who went to the ballot box had voted to remove the president.

"The flame of democracy has remained alight. Romanians have rejected the coup d'etat," Basescu said.

The EU ombudsman has launched an investigation into an alleged conflict of interest by European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi due to his membership in a club of top bankers, the Group of Thirty (G30).

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The ECB also confirmed it received a request from the ombudsman and will respond in due time, while rejecting the claim that membership in the G30 is against the bank's ethics code.

The complaint was filed last month by Corporate Europe Observatory, a Brussels-based transparency group, which criticised Draghi's membership in a bank lobby group whose declared statement is to influence the debate on regulation of the financial sector.

An Iranian court has sentenced four people to death for a billion-dollar bank fraud that tainted the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, state media has reported.

Iranians, hit by sanctions and soaring inflation, were shocked by the scale of the $2.6bn bank loan embezzlement that was exposed last year and by allegations it was carried out by people close to the political elite or with their assent.

Of the thirty-nine people tried for the fraud, the biggest in the country's history, four were sentenced to hang, the IRNA state news agency reported on Monday.

"According to the sentence that was issued, four of the defendants in this case were sentenced to death," prosecutor general Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei told IRNA.

Two people were sentenced to life and others received jail sentences of up to 25 years, Mohseni-Ejei said. In addition to jail time, some were sentenced to flogging, ordered to pay fines and banned from government jobs.

IRS data suggests that, globally, U.S. nonfinancial companies hold at least three times more cash and other liquid assets than the Federal Reserve reports, idle money that could be creating jobs, funding dividends or even paying a stiff federal penalty tax for hoarding corporate cash.

The Fed's latest Flow of Funds report showed that U.S. nonfinancial companies held $1.7 trillion in liquid assets at the end of March. But newly released IRS figures show that in 2009 these companies held $4.8 trillion in liquid assets, which equals $5.1 trillion in today's dollars, triple the Fed figure.

Why the huge gap?

The Fed gets its data from the IRS, but only measures the flow of funds in the domestic economy. The IRS reports the worldwide holdings of U.S. companies, which I think is the more revealing measure.

From the companies' point of view, it makes perfect sense these days to hoard cash.

(Reuters) - Several banks under investigation for suspected rigging of euro interest rates are cooperating with EU antitrust regulators in the hope of lower fines, two people familiar with the matter said on Monday, a move which puts the lenders at a higher risk of lawsuits.

The decision by the banks to disclose more about their knowledge of possible manipulation of the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (Euribor) is effectively an admission of wrongdoing and illustrates growing nervousness that they face a heavy penalty.

The European Commission is investigating possible manipulation of Euribor, the benchmark used when pricing bank lending in euros.

The EU watchdog has not disclosed the names of the banks being investigated, which could face fines of up to 10 percent of their global revenues if found to have breached EU antitrust rules.

(Reuters) - Revelations of lax anti-money laundering controls at HSBC are "shameful and embarrassing" for Europe's biggest bank, its boss said on Monday, and it may have to pay out well over $2 billion (1 billion pounds) for the scandal and in compensation for UK mis-selling.

HSBC set aside $700 million to cover fines and other costs after a U.S. Senate report criticised it this month for letting clients shift funds from dangerous and secretive countries, notably Mexico.

Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver told reporters the ultimate cost could be "significantly higher".

"What happened in Mexico and the U.S. is shameful, it's embarrassing, it's very painful for all of us in the firm," he said on a conference call. "We need to execute on the compliance changes and then prove ourselves worthy and rebuild this over a number of years. There are no quick and easy fixes."

(Reuters) - Major banks face growing pressure to extract more money from, or even sever ties with, unprofitable hedge fund clients as they cut costs in the face of tough trading conditions and try to refocus on the biggest managers.

Industry insiders say prime brokers - which provide services such as stock lending and financing for hedge funds - are sifting through their client lists, in some cases demanding higher fees on trading or a greater share of a fund's business, and sometimes telling funds to look elsewhere.

The moves come as banks, faced with a tough economic environment, higher regulatory costs and looming Basel III capital standards that are set to reduce returns on equity, look to cut costs across the board and focus on more profitable activities.

Syrian forces and rebels have clashed violently in and around Aleppo as the battle for control of the northern city raged into a third day, with both sides claiming advances.

The Syrian army claimed on Monday to have overrun part of the city's rebel-held Salaheddin district, but the claim was denied by a Free Syrian Army commander.

"The Syrian army took control of part of Salaheddin district and continues its offensive," a security source in Damascus said.

Colonel Abdel Jabbar al-Oqaidi, head of the FSA military council of Aleppo, the country's most populous city and commercial capital, insisted government troops had "not progressed one metre".

"We launched a new assault from Salaheddin during the night, and we destroyed four tanks," the rebel commander said by phone.

Paraguay's suspension from Mercosur has angered farmer groups who want an amicable diplomatic resolution of the standoff between the new government in Asuncion and regional powers withholding its recognition.

The Mercosur Federation of Rural Associations, known as Farm, warned the discord over Paraguay's exclusion from the trade bloc and almost simultaneous confirmation of Venezuela's membership in the group posed a threat to Mercosur.

Paraguay was suspended from Mercosur after the country's Senate voted to impeach Fernando Logo and remove him from the presidency June 22. Lugo was succeeded by Vice President Federico Franco but Mercosur denounced the move as a coup.

Paraguay's suspension removed the main obstacle to Venezuela's confirmation as a full member. But the manner in which the events took place has upset critics who say due constitutional processes were ignored.

A power cut has halted hundreds of trains, forcing hospitals and airports to use back-up generators and leaving 370 million people without electricity in northern India.

It hit a swathe of the country on Monday morning  at  2100 GMT affecting people in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan states.

The blackout, one of the worst to hit India in a decade, highlighted the nation's inability to feed a growing hunger for energy as it strives to become a regional economic power.

The country's northern grid crashed because it could no longer keep up with the huge demand for power in the hot summer, officials in the state of Uttar Pradesh said.

Sushil Kumar Shinde, India's power minister, said later on Monday that 60 per cent of the supply had been restored and the rest would be reinstated soon.

The grid was drawing power from neighboring grids as well as getting hydroelectric power from the mountain kingdom of Bhutan.

(Reuters) - The U.S. shale oil revolution can't be stopped, but it could be delayed by a potential shortfall of 10-ton valves and giant pipeline pumps essential for rebalancing markets upended by the surge in production.

Amid an unanticipated boom in inland oil output that turned the domestic market upside down last year, firms from Enterprise Products Partners to Shell Pipeline and Plains All American have launched a $20 billion bonanza to build, expand or reverse two dozen pipelines in the past year.

But as they help effectively to switch the flow of oil from the north to southern refineries and relieve the glut of cut-price, landlocked crude, concerns are growing that the firms that make key pipeline components may be straining to keep pace.

"The supply chain hasn't quite caught up," said Terry McGill, president of Enbridge Energy Co Inc, the U.S. division of Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge Inc, which has some $4 billion worth of U.S. projects on the books.

A survey conducted by Michigan State University reveals strong public support for government programs to assist farmers to adapt to climate change.

According to NASA research, global temperatures have been rising for decades, and it's affecting all aspects of agriculture. Regardless of what those surveyed believe causes climate change, more than 65 percent of them support government assistance for farmers, said Scott Loveridge, MSU professor of agricultural, food and resource economics.

Last week, the University of Texas provost announced he would reexamine a report by a UT professor that said fracking was safe for groundwater after the revelation that the professor pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Texas natural gas developer. It's the latest fusillade in the ongoing battle over the basic facts of fracking in America.

Texans aren't the only ones having their fracking conversations shaped by industry-funded research. Ohioans got their first taste last week of the latest public-relations campaign by the energy policy wing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It's called "Shale Works for US," and it aims to spend millions on advertising and public events to sell Ohioans on the idea that fracking is a surefire way to yank the state out of recession.

The campaign is loaded with rosy employment statistics, which trace to an April report authored by professors at three major Ohio universities and funded by, you guessed it, the natural gas industry. The report paints a bright future for fracking in Ohio as a job creator.

In his column of July 2nd George Monbiot recanted peak oil, claiming "the facts have changed, now we must change too". Much of the article was spent regurgitating a recent report by Leonardo Maugeri, a former executive with the Italian oil company Eni, which Monbiot breathlessly reported "provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun".

Plenty of ink has already been spilled by oil depletion experts exposing some of the wildly optimistic assumptions contained in Maugeri's report. More damning is that the work is shot through with crass mistakes that render its forecast worthless.

Göttingen University Hospital has suspended two senior doctors who were accused of falsifying medical records to push certain - possibly paying - patients further up donor organ waiting lists.

The Göttingen public prosecutor said on Friday it planned to investigate 23 possible cases of negligent manslaughter, where people may have died as a result of being pushed down the organ waiting list.

And it now seems information that goings-on at the hospital's transplantation unit were not as they should be had surfaced as far back as 1995. Doctors then expressed doubts about the large number of transplantation operations carried out there, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on Monday.

It would seem that for many years, around half of all organ recipients were Italian - as was the suspected doctor. Nearly all of these patients were being treated at the Bologna University Hospital - where the doctor in question did his training.

An unmarried couple in Northern Mali, were stoned to death on Sunday. It is the first reported sharia killing since Islamists have occupied the area following a power struggle with Tuareg rebels.
 

Having just returned to Mali after receiving medical treatment in France for the past two months, interim Mali President Dioncounda Traore is faced with making an immediate decision on how best to deal with the Islamist occupation of the North. This latest execution has put more pressure on the interim government to find a solution as soon as possible.

On Sunday, the al-Qaeda linked Islamists in the North dragged a rural couple to the centre of Aguelhok for a public stoning. "I was there. The Islamists took the unmarried couple to the centre of the Aguelhok. The couple was placed in two holes and the Islamists stoned them to death" a local government official told news agency AFP.A second official confirmed that the couple had two children, the youngest being six months old.

   Hey everyone, we're going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still, we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do. We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots. That's correct. Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn't reply. Do we know who the bots belong too? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes. But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable.

Larry probably would have been too tough to eat, although MacKenzie released him out of respect rather than gustatory choice. "This lobster has seen World War I, World War II, seen the landing on the moon and the Red Sox win the World Series. He's made it this far in life," he said, according to ABC News. "He deserves to live." We'd be willing to bet the cost of Larry's freedom that he did not have access to a TV in 1969, but whatever, the point is that nobody wants to eat an old lobster, because it's depressing and tastes bad.

The great French director and writer, Chris Marker, died in Paris on Sunday at the age of 91. He is often credited as the godfather of the essay film, a blend of documentary and personal reflection. Many well-known directors such as, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Michael Moore have based their work on Marker's innovation.

His creative use of sound, images and text in his often poetic and philosophical documentaries were his signature skills in this new documentary genre. "A quiet personality, immense talent" was how the president of the Cannes film festival, Gilles Jacob desribed Marker. He added in his tweet that Marker had this "curious nature", and was a "tireless director".

Marker got his first break during the 1952 Helsinki Olympics when he filmed the his first film "Olympia 1952" on a tight budget

He is best known for his documentary "Cuba Si!" (1961), and for his fictional short film "La Jetée" (1962). Much of his work dealt with the theme of memory, in particular how a person reconstructs a personal memory or a certain time in history.