STRASBOURG - In an era when effective global cooperation seems to be in short supply, the failure to approve a major international treaty would hardly seem to be cause for celebration. But the European Parliament's rejection of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a milestone for European democracy. Rarely has a debate on an international treaty been so intense and engaged so many people across Europe and beyond.

ACTA, negotiated by a group of industrialized countries to fight counterfeiting and enforce intellectual-property rights, provoked widespread criticism from civil-society organizations for the lack of transparency in the process used to formulate it. In the European Parliament, we tried to redress these shortcomings. Over the last four months, we held countless meetings, hearings, workshops, and online conversations with civil-society representatives and all of the concerned parties, to make sure that all opinions were properly heard.

The massive mobilization on this issue culminated in a petition addressed to the European Parliament signed by more than 2.8 million citizens. Their engagement shows that a truly European public opinion, transcending national borders, is alive and well. I personally have learned a lot from this thorough, open-minded, and respectful debate - and took part in it both online and off.

A majority of Romanian MPs voted on Friday evening in favor of the impeachment of President Traian Basescu, at the end of a blitz series of procedures which the opponents of the governing alliance, many independent observers and EU voices described as breaching the rule of law and questioning the independence of Romanian justice and balance of power. Basescu now has to face a referendum in which - according to rules newly voted by the Parliament - a majority of active voters decides his dismissal of President.

• UPDATE A referendum where Romanian voters will be asked if they agree with the dismissal of President Traian Basescu will be organized on July 29, according to a proposed bill on the organization of the referendum, announced in the Parliament today.

The European Parliament has moved a step closer towards establishing a single, liberalised European rail network after a round of voting on the proposed competition rules.

The new rules aim to boost the supply of international freight and passenger services and to improve their quality, clarify competition rules for rail transport firms and rail infrastructure managers while establishing independent regulators to oversee the network.

The EU has also proposed price incentives to modernise trains and expand the network and encourage the development of quieter and safer trains, said the Parliament statement accompanying the proposed revisions to the single European railway directive.

"It took us two years of difficult negotiations ... to guarantee better competition and lay solid foundations for infrastructure funding," Debora Serracchiani (Socialists and Democrats group, Italy), an MEP in charge of compiling the report, said in a statement after voting took place in Strasbourg on 3 July.

"I consider that the unbundling of rail operators and undertakings is necessary, but we reached a good compromise on the monitoring of financial flows," she said.

Flash floods caused by torrential rain have swept the southern Russian Krasnodar region, killing more than 100 people, officials say.

The floods, the worst there in living memory struck at night, reportedly without warning.

Emergency teams have been sent from Moscow by plane and helicopter. TV pictures showed people scrambling onto their rooftops to escape.

At least 92 people died around the worst-hit town of Krymsk.

Crude oil shipments from the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk have suspended.

Russian TV showed thousands of houses in the region nearly completely submerged.

Ed Miliband follows the blair path of announcing policy in tabloids ideologically opposed to him, as if this will somehow win their favour. I hope the image thing works, that too is a link right back to the Mail, who may not like it.

Tomorrow, he will swap rhetoric for strategy by demanding that the high street banks sell off 1,000 local branches and that the big five banks become seven. He wants to force them to help small businesses and to stop bamboozling the public with jargon and dangerous products. `Banking used to be a term of endearment. John Major was a banker. It wasn't an insult, it was a compliment,' he says.

His speech will set out his plan for putting the banks in order. He is furious at their arrogance and extravagance: `Look at Bob Diamond, a  22 million quid pay-off, £120 million over the last few years. You think "Agh!". That is totally out of whack.'

And he is hoping to capture the public anger in the same way he  did when he was the first political leader publicly to call Rupert Murdoch's corrupt News Of The World to account.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/07/article-0-13F818A0000005DC-264_634x334.jpg

keep to the Fen Causeway

Latvia's policymakers in the main are neither saints nor sadists.  Indeed, some genuinely care about the country's future. Their Prime Minister leading the austerity charge is by all accounts a paragon of integrity.  Unfortunately, he has come under the policy counsel of Anders Aslund, now seeking to salvage his place in history given he was one of the chief proponents of the failed shock therapy in 1990's Russia.

Too many in Latvia, however, take a view of the poor and of the country's speculators that would comfortably fit in the pages of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  This is especially true of Central Bank, which has dominated economic policy since Latvia's independence in 1991. For Latvia's elite, the internal devaluation and austerity program have become something of a vanity project.  Coming of age during the 1980s when the USSR was crumbling and the US neoliberal model ascendant, they fully internalized market fundamentalism as a rigid dogma to advance liberation from the Soviet occupation.  The chief criterion for its selection seems to be it was the model that looked most different from Soviet policy. To see their austerity model heralded by the IMF and ECB today is seen as vindication of their worldview, and repudiation of the putdowns heaped on them by chauvinistic occupiers in the past.

Elites aside, many emigrated.  After these protests subsided, Latvians resigned themselves to the situation and left. Demographers estimate that 200,000 have departed the past decade - roughly 10 per cent of the population - at an accelerating rate that reflects the austerity being inflicted. Latvian demographers estimate that at least 200,000 have left Latvia the past decade, Moreover, birth rates declined from already low numbers.  If a similar percent left the US, some 30 million would exit.  Where would they go? Mexico?  Surely, this model cannot be reproduced in any sizeable country.

Reuters quotes an unnamed official as saying that there was a misconception about the notion of equity injections: states remain the ultimate guarantors; if this is correct, the European Council would have misrepresented one of its main conclusions two weeks ago; on Friday, Spanish yields rose above 7%, with spreads now at over 5.6%; the euro was under $1.23 this morning; Monti is asking for a faster implementation of EU bailout funds; German president criticizes Merkel for not explaining the stakes and consequences of the euro rescue; Schäuble and Moscovici will split the eurogroup chairmanship, Der Spiegel reports; Italian recession is deepening, as Italian cut home living and clothes expenditures; Monti attacks Confidustria for driving up the spreads; Troika says Greece its off course on 210 targets, and withholds cash until September; Greece may run out of money during the summer; Portugal's constitutional court rules some austerity measures to be unconstitutional; ECB is preparing counter-proposal to Commission plan on bank supervision; Asmussen says EU bank supervisor in place in 2013; Coeure says no more ECB bond purchases; Merkel ally Von der Leyen calls Eurobonds ,,an option"; Mark Schieritz applauds the "wise men's" special report; Wolfgang Munchau, meanwhile, says that there will be no crisis resolution.

China is using its foreign reserves to further its geopolitical strategy, not to buttress the international system that has enabled its boom.

(...) For example, although China has done little to bolster the Greek government's balance-sheet, its active approach to the crisis has been conspicuous. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited Greece in October 2010 and agreed to strengthen co-operation between China and Greece during a meeting with then-prime minister George Papandreou - timely support that the weakened Greek government was delighted to receive.

But the form of Chinese support for Greece will likely benefit China far more than Greece in the long term. Indeed, in an editorial published on 15 June, China Daily described Greece as a "gateway" for China into Europe. Already, the China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) has obtained a 35-year lease to operate the second pier at the port of Piraeus, one of the busiest in the world, for €3.5bn, and has purchased a truck-loading facility and packaging centre in the Piraeus suburbs. The company has also expressed its intention to acquire 23% of Piraeus Port Authority, and is seeking to lease or acquire ports on the island of Crete.

China must "unswervingly" continue its property controls and prevent prices from rebounding, Premier Wen Jiabao said yesterday, after the central bank cut interest rates and triggered a surge in property stocks.

Local governments that introduced or covered up a loosening of curbs on residential real-estate must be stopped, Wen said during a visit to Changzhou city in eastern Jiangsu province, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Restricting speculative demand and investment in property must be made a long-term policy, he said.

Wen's comments underscore the government's determination to maintain restrictions on housing purchases even as it cuts interest rates and boosts infrastructure spending to reverse a slowdown in the world's second-biggest economy.

U.K. government bonds rose, snapping a four-week decline, as the Bank of England voted to expand its asset-purchase program by 50 billion pounds ($77.6 billion) to help contain borrowing costs.

Ten-year yields dropped to the lowest in a month as signs the European debt crisis is worsening boosted demand for the relative safety of U.K. securities. Ten-year gilts outperformed 30-year debt as the central bank left its purchase categories unchanged from its previous round of buying. The pound climbed to the strongest since 2008 against the euro after the European Central Bank refrained from committing to help bring down bond yields in Spain and Italy.

When a bank makes a loan, does it create money "from thin air"? Are banks merely intermediaries, where "if people are borrowing, other people must be lending"? I consider these sorts of questions less and less helpful. Let's just understand what a bank loan is, in terms of real resources and risk.

...

... in fact, the seller would not accept my debt in exchange for the goods and services she supplies. If I wrote her a promise to perform for her some service of equal value in the future (which might include surrendering crisp dollar bills), she would not accept that promise as a means of payment. I circumvent her fear by writing to the bank precisely the promise that the vendor would not accept and having the bank "wrap" my promise beneath its own. The bank's job is not to "lend" anything in any meaningful sense. The bank is just a bunch of assholes with spreadsheets, it has nothing real that anyone wants to borrow. The bank's role is to transform questionable promises into sound promises. It is a kind of adapter of promises, or alternatively, a guarantor.

...

but one thing should be absolutely clear. Under existing institutions, there is little coincidence in the roles of creditor from a real resource perspective and creditor from a risk perspective. Our banks are machines that permit vendors to surrender real resources in exchange for promises the risks of which they do not bear. The risks associated with those promises do not go away. They may be mitigated to some degree by diversification and pooling. They might be modest, in the counterfactual that banks were devoted to careful credit analysis. But these risks must be borne by someone. The function and (I would argue) purpose of a banking system is to sever the socially useful practice of production-and-exchange-for-promises from the individually costly requirement of assuming the risk that promises will be broken, in order to encourage the former. The essence of modern banking is a redistribution of costs and risks away from people who disproportionately surrender real resources in exchange for promises. Under the most positive spin, modern banking systems engineer an opaque subsidy to those who produce and surrender more real resources than they acquire and consume by externalizing and ultimately socializing the costs and risks of holding questionable claims.

...

Banks are not financial intermediaries in any simple sense of the word. When they "make a loan", they serve as guarantors, not creditors. The borrower does not meaningfully become a debtor until the loan is spent. Only then do creditors emerge, but the role of creditor is bifurcated. The people to whom resources are owed are not the same as the people bearing the risk of nonperformance. The question of who actually bears the risk of nonperformance has grown difficult to answer, and concomitantly, incentives among bank decisionmakers for caution in creating that risk have weakened, especially relative to the benefits of cutting themselves in on some share of borrowers' protected expenditures. This bifurcation of the role of creditor also explains why creditors as a political class are relatively indifferent to the upside of a good economy but extremely intolerant of inflation. A good economy means better higher values and better performance on outstanding loans, but creditors who are owed resources but are absolved from risk do not care about the performance of the loans that have become their assets. Those fluctuations, like fluctuations of the stock market, are somebody else's problem or somebody else's gain. Protected claimants, people who are owed money by banks or the state (which is itself a bank), can only lose via inflation. They understandably work within the political system to oppose inflation, which would force them to bear some of the cost of the bad loans whose misexpenditures were, in aggregate, the source of much of their wealth.

Tripoli, Libya - Polls have closed in Libya's capital, where voting in the country's first free national elections in more than four decades took place amid violence by federalist protesters who disrupted the vote in several districts.

Voting ended officially at 8pm (1800:GMT), but delays in starting has caused polling to continue in some other areas of the country.

While polling stations are closed in Tripoli, they are to remain open for at an additional hour in Benghazi.

In Ajdabiya and other places further from the capital, where voting did not start until the afternoon, voting will go on as late as 7am on Sunday. Voting in Brega has still not yet started.

Acts of sabotage, mostly in the east of the country, prevented 101 polling stations from opening on Saturday, the electoral commission said, although 94 per cent of stations managed to open.

A US federal judge has ordered Iran to pay more than $813m in damages and interest to the families of 241 US soldiers killed in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Judge Royce Lambeth wrote in a ruling this week that Tehran had to be "punished to the fullest extent legally possible"  for the bombing in Beirut on October 23, 1983, the deadliest ever against US soldiers.

"After this opinion, this court will have issued over $8.8bn in judgments against Iran as a result of the 1983 Beirut bombing," Lamberth wrote in the ruling, a copy of which was seen on Friday by the AFP news agency.

"Iran is racking up quite a bill from its sponsorship of terrorism," the Washington judge added, noting that "a number of other Beirut bombing cases remain pending, and their completion will surely increase this amount."

At least 241 American soldiers, including 220 Marines, were killed in the Lebanese capital Beirut when a truck packed with explosives rammed through barricades and detonated in front of the US barracks near the international airport.

The same day, in a co-ordinated attack, 58 French paratroopers were killed by a truck bomb at the French barracks in Beirut.

Afghanistan will become a major non-NATO ally for the US, Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, has said during a visit to Kabul.

The designation, which provides a long-term framework for security and defence co-operation, would give the war-torn country special privileges as the US prepares to pull its troops out in 2014, Clinton said on Saturday.

"We see this as a powerful symbol of our commitment to Afghanistan's future," Clinton said at a press conference after talks with President Hamid Karzai.

"This is the kind of relationship that we think will be especially beneficial as we do the transition."

The new status, which comes into effect immediately, makes it easier for a country to purchase and finance its acquisition of US defence equipment, along with other benefits.

(Reuters) - Syria's conflict spilled further into Lebanon on Saturday when mortar fire from President Bashar al-Assad's forces hit villages in the north, killing five people after rebels crossed the border to seek refuge, residents said.

Rebels fighting to unseat Assad have used north Lebanon as a base and his forces have at times bombed villages and even pursued insurgents over the border, threatening to stoke tension in Lebanon, whose sectarian rifts mirror those in Syria.

Residents of Lebanon's Wadi Khaled region said several mortar bombs hit farm buildings five to 20 km (3 to 12 miles) from the border at around 2 a.m. At midday villagers reported more explosions and said they heard gunfire close to the border.

In the village of al-Mahatta, a house was destroyed, killing a 16-year-old girl and wounding a two-year old and a four-year old, family members told Reuters. A 25-year-old woman and a man were killed in nearby villages, residents said.

At least 21 people have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan's North Waziristan days after the South Asian country agreed to reopen the NATO supply routes into Afghanistan.

According to official sources, six missiles were fired from a US drone at a compound in Gharlamay village of Datta Khel town near the border with neighbouring Afghanistan.

Security officials identified the dead as "militants".

It was the first drone attack since Islamabad reached a deal with Washington to reopen land routes into Afghanistan after the US apologised for the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers in an air strike in November last year.

The initial strike on a house killed nine. Then three others were killed in a second attack when they drove to the site to recover dead bodies. And a third drone killed another three five minutes later, a senior security official in Peshawar told the AFP news agency.

A similar attack in the region on Sunday killed six.

Akbar Ahmed, former Pakistan ambassador to the UK, said: "It can't go against the will of the people and Pakistan is quite unanimous in rejecting the drone strikes on its territory."

Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh took the stage in North Korea during a concert for new leader Kim Jong-un in an unusual performance featuring Disney characters.

Performers dressed as some of America's best-known cartoon characters pranced as footage from Snow White, Dumbo, Beauty and the Beast and other popular Disney films played on a huge backdrop, according to still photos shown on state TV on Saturday.

The inclusion of characters popular in the west - particularly from the US, North Korea's wartime enemy - is a notable change in direction for performance arts in Pyongyang.

In his combative preface to the report, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a medical doctor and professor emeritus at Tokyo University, said the crisis was the result of "a multitude of errors and willful negligence", by the government, safety officials and the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco].

But behind the safety missteps and lack of readiness for a tsunami in a region known for powerful earthquakes, are cultural traits that ensured the disaster was "made in Japan", Kurokawa said.

"Its fundamental causes," he wrote, "are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to 'sticking with the programme'; our groupism; and our insularity.

"What must be admitted - very painfully - is that this was a disaster 'Made in Japan'.

"Had other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident, the result may well have been the same."

None of the agencies involved emerged with any credit. "The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and Tepco, and the lack of governance by said parties," said the report, compiled by the Fukushima nuclear accident independent investigation commission.

"They effectively betrayed the nation's right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly 'man-made'."

As we continue to retire aging dirty coal plant after aging dirty coal plant nationwide (we just hit 112 coal plants secured to retire), we are also pushing hard to replace them with clean energy, and as little natural gas as possible. That's why we were excited this week to see two very large clean energy announcements from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

First, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the completion of the final environmental impact statement for a massive Wyoming wind farm. The Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project would be comprised of up to 1,000 wind turbines across private and federal land in southeastern Wyoming, and generate up to 2,500 megawatts of clean energy.

This is a great move for a state where coal mining is devastating a beautiful and critical area -- the Powder River Basin. More wind power in Wyoming could mean less coal mining and fewer coal trains and coal plants in the West.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson wrote a great column connecting the recent heat waves to climate change. As one of the very few mainstream journalists willing to do so, he deserves kudos, or props, or big-ups, or whatever kids are calling them these days.

However, much like the rest of the tiny handful of journalists making the connection, he felt the need to include this disclaimer:

This is the point in the column where I'm obliged to insert the disclaimer that no one event -- no heat wave, no hurricane, no outbreak of tornadoes or freakish storms -- can be definitively blamed on climate change. Any one data point can be an anomaly; any cluster of data points can be mere noise.

This kind of thing drives my friend Brad Johnson crazy. In an email, he says it's "just false, and not useful."

This gives me an excuse to make a point about media coverage of this stuff. In a nutshell, I agree with Brad that it's not useful -- not useful for climate advocacy purposes, but also not useful as journalism -- but disagree that it's false.

As I see it, Robinson's disclaimer is true. No one event can be "definitively blamed on climate change." The problem is, all kinds of baggage is being smuggled in with the word "definitively."

The great summertime snack, the strawberry is packed with flavor and all natural sugars. It is your healthy alternative to junk food and sweets. The one-of-a-kind fruit, with its seeds on the outside, is loved by the masses and it grows well throughout Europe, eastern North America, and elsewhere around the world. The USA alone produces over 1.25 million tons of it per year. Besides their fantastic taste, a new study has found that strawberries have other beneficial health effects. Researchers from the University of Warwick Medical School found that strawberries are extremely effective at preventing the development of heart disease and diabetes.

The research was led by Professor Paul Thornally, whose team discovered that extracts from strawberries positively activate a protein in our bodies called Nrf2. This protein has shown to increase antioxidant and other protective activities. It also decreases blood lipids and cholesterol, two factors that can lead to cardiovascular disorders.

(Reuters) - Just yards from where Lech Walesa made his first moves to bring down communism in eastern Europe, Danish businessman Thomas Gaardbo is taking advantage of the skilled workforce from the era to rescue one of Poland's most cherished historical sites.

When the European Union banned state help for the Gdansk shipyard in 2008, forcing it into bankruptcy for a third time, it seemed that all was lost for the enterprise which gave birth to the Solidarity movement in the 1970s.

But Gaardbo has found that the 6.5 hectare hall that once churned out ocean liners is perfect for building the giant steel towers needed for the windfarms driving Europe's shift towards cleaner renewable energy.

Ant-like welders climb along the inside of the towers, which are up to 120 meters tall and 7.5 meters in diameter and carry sails that weigh as much as a Boeing 757.

A major cost in their manufacture is their problematic transport, and the decision by Gaardbo's company GSG Towers to invest 250 million zlotys ($73.48 million)in production in Gdansk was largely based on the advantage of being able to load the tubes directly onto ships in the old free city's harbor on the Baltic.

(Reuters) - The Pentagon is pushing ahead with a $420 million effort to build refineries to make competitively priced biofuels, despite anger in Congress over the price the Navy paid for alternative fuel to test a carrier strike group this month.

The government plans provide $210 million in matching funds to help firms build three refineries, each able to produce at least 10 million gallons of biofuel a year for military jets or ships, according to documents released this week. The Navy would supply $170 million and the Energy Department $40 million.

The military's spending on alternative fuels has drawn criticism from Republican lawmakers, with Senator Jim Inhofe charging that President Barack Obama's priorities are "completely skewed" and Representative Mike Conaway accusing Navy Secretary Ray Mabus of "squandering precious dollars."

But Mabus warns that U.S. dependence on foreign oil is a strategic vulnerability that can only be addressed by reducing the military's reliance on petroleum as the sole source of fuel to power its jets, ships and tanks.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 7 2012 (IPS) - Far from the plush surroundings which hosted Rio+20, the most ambitious global conference on the environment of the past two decades, events in a fishing village in the state of Rio de Janeiro show the cost of fighting environmental crime can be as high as life itself.

The people living in a coastal village on Mauá beach on Guanabara Bay, in the municipality of Magé, 84 km north of Rio, had no time to digest the results of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in this city Jun. 20-22.

On Friday Jun. 22, the same day heads of states signed the conference's final document - which was criticised for its lack of commitment on crucial issues like the protection of the ocean - two fishermen and environmental activists, Almir Nogueira and Jõao Luiz Telles, went missing from their homes.

Nogueira's body was discovered two days later, tied to his boat which was sunk in the waters off a local beach. Telles was found dead on Jun. 25, washed up onshore in a nearby municipality. He was tied hand and foot in foetal position.

Firefighters in Chernobyl have one of the least enviable jobs in the world. They spend all day up rusty Soviet watchtowers, which sway in the wind like tin-box metronomes, and act as conductors to the huge lightning storms which swing across the land most afternoons in summer, often sparking fires.

When they spot a wildfire, the firefighters triangulate its location by radio. Teams jump aboard big, red, Soviet fire trucks, and lumber along cracked, overgrown roads to the source of the blaze.

Their equipment is very basic. They believe they know when they are fighting a radioactive fire - they experience a tingling, metallic sensation in their skin - but they do not fully understand the serious dangers of being exposed to superheated radioactive particles.

 

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Squid-like cuttlefish are known for their amazing camouflage abilities, thanks to specialized skin cells that allow them to change color in the blink of an eye. Now research finds that these clever mollusks use their color-changing abilities in creative ways: by pretending to be the other gender.

Well, half-pretending, that is.  

When a male cuttlefish is wooing a lady, he often "cheats" by painting typical female patterns on one side of his body, while the other side ? the one facing the female ?  shows off typical male patterns. This gender-bending disguise fools rival males into thinking they're seeing just a couple of ladies hanging out. That means more of an opportunity for the cheater cuttlefish to mate.

The earth is shaken daily by strong earthquakes recorded by a number of seismic stations worldwide. Tectonic tremor, however, is a new type of seismic signal that seismologist started studying only within the last few years. Tremor is less hazardous than earthquakes and occurs at greater depth. The link between tremor and earthquakes may provide clues about the more destructive earthquakes that occur at shallower depths.

Geophysicists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) collected seismic data of tectonic tremor in California. These data are now being evaluated in order to better understand this new seismic phenomenon.

About a decade ago, researchers discovered a previously unknown seismic signal, now referred to as tectonic tremor. Contrary to earthquakes, tectonic tremor causes relatively weak ground shaking. While tremor may last longer than earthquakes, it does not cause any direct danger.

"Both earthquakes and tremor have the same cause. They result from the relative movement on fault surfaces, a result of the motion of the tectonic plates," explains seismologist Dr. Rebecca Harrington, who heads a research group at KIT.

International football transfer numbers and player buying fees have fallen sharply worldwide in the past six months, says governing body Fifa.

Completed player deals fell by 9% in the first six months of 2012, but their total financial value plunged by more than a third, falling by 34%.

Total income from 4,973 transfers around the globe was $576m (£371m).

The drop may be due to continued global economic problems and the forthcoming Uefa financial fair play rules.

The data was revealed by Fifa's Transfer Matching System (TMS) organisation, which uses modern electronic technology with the aim of making international football transfers more transparent and legally compliant.

(Reuters) - A man Afghan officials say is a member of the Taliban shot dead a woman accused of adultery in front of a crowd near Kabul, a video obtained by Reuters showed, a sign that the austere Islamist group dictates law even near the Afghan capital.

In the three-minute video, a turban-clad man approaches a woman kneeling in the dirt and shoots her five times at close range with an automatic rifle, to cheers of jubilation from the 150 or so men watching in a village in Parwan province.

Dozens of activists have deposited a huge wind turbine blade in the Tate Modern in protest at BP's sponsorship of the gallery.

Members of the Liberate Tate pressure group carried sections of the 16.5-metre blade across the Thames's Millennium bridge on Saturday morning before assembling it in the gallery's Turbine Hall.

The one and a half tonne blade, taken from a decommissioned wind turbine in Wales, was presented to Tate staff along with an official request for it to be made part of the gallery's permanent collection.

Liberate Tate spokeswoman Sharon Palmer said that "in a time of climate crisis" visitors to the gallery "should not be made to feel that they're legitimising" oil firms such as BP.

This is a tentative weekend Salon, up on Saturday night (Europe), next Salon Monday night. (Another way of doing it would be the Friday night Salon for Sat-Sun, with a new one up on Sunday night for Monday). Contributions are, as always, of course, welcome, as are your reactions.