The employment minister Chris Grayling has been accused of trying to censor a Ministry of Justice courts service information video that helps people appealing against decisions to remove their disability and sickness benefit.

Emails and letters between Grayling and MoJ civil servants, seen by the Guardian, appear to show Grayling wanted to remove parts of the educational video, produced by Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service, giving advice on how to be more successful in the appeals process. Emails from the minister's account complain about the video's "tone" and "negative comments" towards the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) even though the sections in dispute were agreed to be factually true.

The censorship allegations come after Channel 4's Dispatches programme on Monday alleged that Atos, the firm involved in medically assessing sickness and disability claims, had developed a target culture to ensure enough people were being taken off benefits. The BBC's Panorama, also aired on Monday, further questioned Atos's assessment procedures and found one case in which a man died of his serious heart condition five weeks after Atos found him fit to work for the second time. Hundreds of thousands of people have appealed against benefit decisions in the past few years and, according to the latest figures, about 30% are successful.

Falkirk MP Eric Joyce has been fined £600 for removing an electronic tag, in breach of a community order imposed after a bar brawl at Westminster.

Joyce, 51, appeared at Stirling Sheriff Court after he cut off the tag to take part in a parliamentary boat race.

The MP left the Labour Party after he was given a 12-month community order following the brawl.

Joyce claimed he was granted permission by officials supervising his community order to temporarily remove the tag.

Best-selling Irish author Maeve Binchy has died aged 72 after a short illness.

Binchy, born in Dalkey, Co Dublin, has sold more than 40 million books. Her works were often set in Ireland and have been translated into 37 languages.

They include The Lilac Bus as well as Tara Road and Circle of Friends, which were both adapted for screen.

Binchy trained as a teacher before moving into journalism and writing, publishing her first novel - Light a Penny Candle - in 1982.

The Catalan government on Tuesday said it is unable to pay this month's bills for privately managed hospitals, old people's homes and disabled centres, blaming Spain's central government for its financial problems.

"Liquidity for these payments depends on them," said Francesc Homs, spokesman for the Barcelona-based government. "They should meet their obligations, and they are not doing so."

Regional governments provide health, education and social services and jointly account for almost 40% of Spain's public spending. Catalonia, one of Spain's wealthier regions, has outsourced management of almost half of its hospital services and much of its care for the disabled and elderly. Several old people's homes were reported to have lodged a court writ demanding immediate payment.

A Russian blogger known for his virulent criticism of President Vladimir Putin has been charged with theft, and could be handed a 10-year prison sentence as the government continues its crackdown on dissent.

Alexei Navalny was charged on Tuesday in Moscow, dismissing the allegations as "weird" and baseless.
 
The State Investigative Committee said it suspects Navalny of organising a scheme to steal assets from a state timber company. The assets are estimated to be worth about $500,000.

As the committee pursues an investigation against him, Navalny has been ordered not to leave Moscow.

French parliamentarians are due to vote on a new sexual harassment bill, in the wake of complaints within the body itself of discriminatory conduct.

The bill, to be voted on by legislators on Tuesday, was drafted after Cecile Duflot, the country's housing minister, faced hooting and catcalls in the national assembly when she stood up to deliver a speech on July 17, ostensibly because she was wearing a blue-and-white flowered dress.
 
The heckling came from male legislators, who later said that they were merely showing their appreciation for her attire and that their conduct had not been equivalent to harassment

Today was the day that several of us ventured into County Hall today to view the accounts. It was never going to be straightforward and it certainly wasn't. I had forwarded, in advance, a list of specific areas we wished to view only to be told on Friday that it would not be possible to supply the requested details.

On arrival a friendly officer had clearly drawn the short straw and was tasked with guiding us through the mire. It soon became clear that to see the details we had initially requested was going to be a problem with the information provided. It seemed that anything connected with individual projects, particularly controversial ones, didn't appear to exist on the accounts, well not in any identifiable form, in fact nothing much was in identifiable form at all. Could we have the purchase ledgers, or a simple tot up of total spends on selected areas, one of our number asked? The helpful officer went off to ask his boss, no we couldn't, and we couldn't have it 'electronically' either "....we don't know where it might end up". Not for the first time he whispered that very few people inspect the accounts these days, everyone uses Freedom of Information. I am not surprised.

Search warrants issued to the Serious Fraud Office as part of its investigations of property tycoons the Tchenguiz brothers were unlawful and obtained by "misrepresentation", the High Court has ruled.

The warrants were issued as part of the SFO's inquiry into their role in the collapse of Icelandic bank Kaupthing.

Robert Tchenguiz said the SFO's conduct had been "outrageous and unlawful".

But the SFO pledged to continue investigating the case "with vigour".

France and Italy are trying to bounce a reluctant Germany into swift action to prop up the euro as the deepening crisis sent unemployment to its highest level since the creation of the 17-nation single currency zone, in 1999.

Mario Monti, the Italian prime minister and François Hollande, the French president, made it clear after talks in Rome that they wanted measures that would help euro members struggling with high borrowing costs.

The joint statement on Tuesday evening followed a day in which news of lengthening dole queues and a standoff between the Greek government and the troika group responsible for setting the countries' bailout conditions rattled financial markets.

Another thing you often here is that the reason the Fed engages in actions like QE (which has mostly taken the form of buying government Treasuries) is to reduce public sector debt burdens.

The arguing goes: With governments issuing record levels of debt, they've now turned to their central banks for their funding and to reduce interest rates. The Fed happily complies and engages in 'financial oppression', lowering the rates on government debt to below where the market would otherwise set them.

This is a VERY mainstream idea.

...

And in his latest US Macro Dashboard note, Morgan Stanley's Vincent Reinhart discussed this idea as part of a broader point about why large public sector debts are associated with lower economic growth (a thesis that his economist wife Carmen Reinhart has become quite famous for).

Reinhart writes:

High levels of public debt relative to the scale of an economy are costly.  That is a message from work done recently with my wife Carmen and Ken Rogoff, both of Harvard University.1 One reason we think so is that governments resort to forms of financial repression to lower their borrowing costs.  Limiting investor choice, forcing financial intermediaries to hold more government debt, and keeping policy interest rates low makes the fiscal burden of the debt more sustainable.  But there is a cost, as this crowds out private borrowers and slows economic growth.

The problem is: This really doesn't make much sense.

In fact, if the Fed were primarily concerned with government borrowing costs, it's obvious that the easiest course of action would be to do nothing, let everything collapse into deflation, and watch the world pile into US Treasuries, sending yields even lower than where they are now.

They haven't done this. The Fed is trying to inflate the economy and that means higher rates. The myth that the Fed is motivated by public sector debts is nonsense.

We've all heard ECB's president Mario Draghi's pledge to do "whatever it takes to preserve the euro."  Risk assets have rallied dramatically on this announcement. Spanish 10-year bonds moved up over 7% in price for example.

Everyone of course assumes that the ECB has put together some type of plan to change its policy course. But did this statement come from the ECB (similar to the announcements of the FOMC) or is Draghi trying to do this on his own? Did the Governing Council of the ECB actually agree on this policy move of incremental asset purchases?

Apparently this announcement came as a total surprise to some at the ECB.

DER SPIEGEL: - ... experts at the central banks of the euro zone's 17 member states had no idea what to do with the news. Draghi's remark was not the result of any resolutions, and even members of the ECB Governing Council admitted that they had heard nothing of such plans until then.

This is a bizarre action by a head of a central bank - a statement that is interpreted as a policy shift that apparently has not been vetted by the governing body. It seems that Draghi, possibly without consulting his colleagues, has succumbed to political pressures.

   DER SPIEGEL: - Now Draghi is apparently prepared to lend a hand to the hapless politicians. Under his plan, which essentially creates a new form of cooperation between governments and monetary watchdogs, both of Europe's bailout funds -- the temporary European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the permanent European Stability Mechanism (ESM) -- and the ECB will intervene jointly in the bond markets in the future to bring yields down. (op.cit.)

Now the ECB has been painted into a corner. They can either follow Draghi's lead without fully agreeing with him or they pause to deliberate on this matter and disappoint the markets. Both outcomes seem rather unsettling.

Hundreds of millions of people have been left without electricity in northern and eastern India after a massive power breakdown.

More than half the country was hit by the power cuts after three grids collapsed - one for a second day.

Hundreds of trains have come to a standstill and hospitals are running on backup generators.

The country's power minister has blamed the crisis on states drawing too much power from the national grid.

US presidential candidate Mitt Romney wrapped up his overseas tour in Poland, as frustrations between his campaign and journalists boiled over.

In a foreign policy speech in Warsaw, the former Massachusetts governor praised Poland's economy as a model of small government and free enterprise.

But it was a Romney spokesman who captured headlines by lashing out at US reporters asking questions.

The Republican is set to challenge President Obama in November's polls.

Government forces withdrew from the town of al-Bab, according to rebel forces, who claim it was the army's last urban base in the region outside of Aleppo city.

The people of al-Bab took a captured government tank on a victory lap around the town after the army fled and its prized military assets were left behind.

Yasser Arafat's widow has asked a French court to launch a murder investigation into the death of the Palestinian leader, after an Al Jazeera investigation suggested he was poisoned by a radioactive element.

After a sudden collapse in his health, Arafat was flown to France in October 2004 from his battered headquarters, where he had been effectively confined by Israel for more than two and a half years.

He died a month later. Arafat aides at the time quoted doctors as saying he had suffered a brain haemorrhage and lost the use of his vital organs one by on

The Ugandan president has called on people to limit physical contact with each other, after a victim of a deadly outbreak of the Ebola virus was reported in Kampala, the country's capital, for the first time.

"The Ministry of Health are tracing all the people who have had contact with the victims," Yoweri Museveni said in a state broadcast on Monday, adding that 14 people had died in total since Ebola broke out in western Uganda three weeks ago.

Two cases have been reported in the capital since the outbreak began, he said, and one victim is reported to have died in Kampala's Mulago Hospital.

BP has set aside a further $847m (£540m) to pay for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, raising the potential cost to $38bn, but the oil major's embattled boss stood by claims that the group has "turned the corner" after the world's worst offshore spill.

Atoning for the blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico has been an expensive and ongoing process for BP, with disappointing second quarter figures showing a 35% fall in underlying profits to $3.7bn. Despite chief executive Bob Dudley's assertion that one of Britain's biggest corporate names has moved on from the hammering its reputation and finances have taken, one analyst warned that BP was "testing the faith" of investors.

The Obama administration was urged on Monday to stop diverting grain to gas amid warnings of an "imminent food crisis" caused by America's drought.

US government forecasts of a 4% rise in food prices for US consumers because of the drought have sharpened criticism of supports for producing fuel from corn-based ethanol.

Meanwhile, research published last week by the New England Complex Systems Institute warned of an "imminent food crisis" because of the diversion of corn stocks to ethanol.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that the West has used oil as an instrument to put pressure on the Islamic republic.

The economy of the Islamic republic should give up its dependance on oil exports, Ahmadinejad said addressing a ceremony to mark the launch of Shaid Tondgouyan oil refinery's optimization units in Tehran.

The country's crude oil exports should be stopped since the issue of oil has been presently manipulated by big powers as a means to put pressure on its producers, Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has invited Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi Deng as his personal guests to watch Rebecca Adlington defend her 800 metre swimming gold at the 2012 Olympics on Friday.

The tycoon and his wife will sit poolside with the Conservative politician and other business leaders at the high-profile event, for what Johnson describes as his "schmoozathon".

The Guardian understands the invitation was due not just to Murdoch's business role but his investment in British sport through his News Corporation companies, in particular BSkyB, over the years.

Work is to begin in December on a two and a half-year, €25m (£19.5m) restoration of the Roman Colosseum, Italian officials said on Tuesday.

The mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, said work would start in December and be completed by the middle of 2015.

Mariarosaria Barbera, the government official in charge of Rome's archaeological monuments said a contract for the first stage of the restoration had already been awarded to a company that had offered to carry out the work for 26% less than the working estimate.

Scaffolding will obscure parts of Italy's most visited monument for a planned 915 days. But, said Barbera, once the work was completed, underground sections of the Colosseum would be open to the public for the first time resulting in "an increase of 25% in the area that can be visited".

Fears that pirated editions of JK Rowling's upcoming novel The Casual Vacancy could leak out mean that some foreign publishers will not receive a copy of the manuscript until it is published in English, forcing them to rush their translations or miss out on sales.

Rowling's literary agency, the Blair Partnership, is withholding advance copies of the novel from its publishers in territories including Italy, Finland and Slovenia, because the territories are viewed as high risk for piracy and it wants to "minimise the risk of the manuscript being leaked".

The Casual Vacancy will be published on 27 September in the UK and the US. Publishers in France and Germany are receiving early copies to enable them to release their translations, Une place à prendre and Ein plötzlicher Todesfall, simultaneously. "We have agreed to let publishers in some countries publish simultaneously with the English-language release, as some publishers are better able to handle the security demands of a simultaneous release," literary agent Zoe King told Publishers Weekly.

Twitter Inc. reinstated the account of Guy Adams, a journalist for the Independent newspaper, after he had been kicked off for what Twitter said a violation of its privacy guidelines for publishing the email address of an executive from NBCUniversal.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has defended China's teenage swim sensation Ye Shiwen, saying she passed a drug test after her world record win in the 400 medley.

Mark Adams, an IOC spokesman, urged people on Tuesday to "get real" and said it is "very sad" if great performances cannot be applauded.

"These are world class athletes competing at the very highest level with records being broken all over the place," Adams said.

His films resembled literary essays or epistles more than traditional documentaries, finding room for quirky personal observations, wit and seeming irrelevances. One of his earliest films, Letter from Siberia (1958), began exactly like a travel writer's letter home: "I am writing to you from a far country..."

Though of broadly Marxist, humanist persuasion, he was his own man and refused to toe the party line. He regarded Soviet propaganda as fair game for ridicule just as much as Western consumerism. One sequence from Letter from Siberia presented the same procession of shots three times, each with a different commentary -- one eulogising the USSR, one vilifying it and one "telling it like it is".

He went to the Antarctic for 18 months in 1948, when the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey posted him as base leader and glaciologist on King George Island in the South Shetlands. Four years later he joined the Canadian Defence Board, which gave him the opportunity to indulge his love of the frozen wilderness in the north of the dominion, climbing and driving husky teams, employing the racquets serve he had learned at Winchester College to crack the whip over the dogs' heads.

Over more than 20 years Hattersley-Smith conducted an oceanographic survey of the Beaufort Sea with the English millionaire Tom Manning (who shot a polar bear and added an unappetising bear soup to their diet). He produced a geological map of Banks Island; made astronomical fixes for five survey stations on the mainland; dug a deep pit to measure snow and ice accumulation in the upper Seward glacier; and placed a nuclear detector on Cornwallis Island.

Ledley did not invent CT technology, nor did he produce the first CT scanner. The British scientist Sir Godfrey Hounsfield (who won a Nobel Prize for his work) is generally considered the "father of CT", having conceived the idea of projecting an X-ray beam through the human body from all directions and converting the data, by computer, into 3D images which, he argued, reduced the need for exploratory surgery.

Hounsfield's first commercial scanner, however, was capable of scanning only a patient's head. So in 1974 Ledley and his staff at Georgetown University developed the first whole-body machine - called the Automatic Computerised Transverse Axial, or ACTA, scanner .