Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party has handed out free food to hundreds of struggling people in central Athens - but only to Greek nationals.

The ultra-nationalists won 18 parliamentary seats in Greece's June election, with a campaign openly hostile to illegal immigrants.

People lining up for food had to show identity papers to get the free packages from party volunteers.

Greece's debt crisis has pushed the unemployment rate up to nearly 23%.

The president of Belarus has sacked his air force and border security chiefs because a Swedish light plane managed to drop teddy bears into the country with labels calling for freedom.

President Alexander Lukashenko expressed fury over the incident, which happened on 4 July.

Only last week did the official media admit that it had actually happened.

Mr Lukashenko has cracked down hard on political opponents. His re-election in 2010 was marred by reports of abuses.

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson was left dangling on a zip wire for several minutes when it stopped working at an Olympic live screen event.

He was trying out a 45m (150 ft) high zip wire at Victoria Park, where the Games are being shown on big screens.

The wire then lost momentum, leaving him suspended "like an odd Christmas decoration" above a crowd of people.

As onlookers snapped photos, he joked: "This is great fun but it needs to go faster."

BRUSSELS - US presidential candidate Mitt Romney has described Poland as an economic model for Europe in the financial crisis.

Speaking at the Warsaw University Library in the Polish capital on Tuesday (31 July) he said: "Today, as some wonder about the way forward out of economic recession and fiscal crisis, the answer ... is 'Look to Poland'."

He noted that the Polish economy "last year outperformed all other nations in Europe."

He attributed Polish growth to its embrace of free market capitalism and budgetary discipine.

"Yesterday, one of your leaders shared with me an economic truth that has been lost in much of the world: 'It is simple. You don't borrow what you cannot pay back'," he said.

A leading MEP strongly reacted after the US Senate transport committee cleared a key vote on a measure that would ban American airlines from paying for their carbon emissions and participating in the EU's controversial cap-and-trade scheme.

"The United States spurn international efforts to mitigate climate change," said German Socialist democratic MEP, Jo LEINEN, slamming a US bill under which American airlines would not pay into the EU Emission Trading Scheme (ETS).

Leinen called the upcoming decision by the U.S. Congress `arrogant' and `ignorant'.

"It would be absolutely arrogant to prohibit American companies to comply with EU legislation. This would be an unprecedented step to thwart the legal standards in Europe. The decision would be ignorant as well because it neglects the increase in greenhouse gas emission caused by aviation. There shall be no special treatment for American Airlines," said Leinen.

The MEP argued that it would be surprising for the US to accept air passenger duties and taxes in Europe, but not the costs from the ETS.

France's data-protection authority said Tuesday it wants Google to hand over data secretly collected from Internet users by its Street View mapping cars which it failed to delete as promised.

The request came just days after a similar demand by Britain's privacy watchdog after the US tech giant admitted it had not deleted some of the data, including passwords and emails, it sucked up from private wireless hotspots.

France's CNIL authority said on its website that it had asked Google to "place at its disposal the relevant data and to conserve the data for as long as it takes to carry out the necessary investigations".

13.43 Justifying action, Mr Draghi said bond market risk premiums pricing in a eurozone break up were "unacceptable". There was a "severe malfunctioning" in markets. "Modalities" for the ECB's action would be worked out in coming weeks.

13.42 Action by the EFSF/ESM would be a "necessary condition" for addressing dysfunctional bond markets, but it would not be sufficient, Mr Draghi said. Hence he foresaw an ECB role as well - of course while sticking within its "price stability" role, of course.

13.40 Mr Draghi also said governments "must stand ready" to activate the European Financial Stability Facility and European Stability Mechanism - the bail-out funds, which have bond buying powers. Those bodies would imposed "strict and efficient" conditionality on governments, he said.

Also...
Live blog: Draghi presser | Money Supply

13.47 "The ECB cannot replace governments," Mr Draghi warns.

Well, no. But it can have them replaced.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Hopes that the UK could emerge from recession this year were dealt a major blow by data showing that the manufacturing sector shrank at its fastest rate in more than three years in July.

The data could push the Bank of England to extend its quantitative easing programme when it runs out in November and could even prompt another rate cut from the monetary policy committee meeting on Thursday.

The UK slumped into a double-dip recession at the start of the year, and the economy shrank by another 0.7% in the second quarter, driven by government cuts, turmoil in the eurozone, perpetual rain and an extra bank holiday over the Jubilee weekend. Economists have been forecasting that the UK will pull itself out of recession in the third quarter, but Wednesday's manufacturing PMI for July of 45.4 - well below analysts' expectations of 48.6 - points to another contraction.

In 1991, I began trading for Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, in London. I was trading bonds, derivatives and related securities. One of those securities was based on the three-month Libor rate: the interest rate at which banks can borrow money for three months from each other. Morgan Stanley does not trade on the interbank market so I could not directly borrow or loan money at Libor rates. What I could do, however, was trade a futures contract on the three-month Libor rate.

This was the pattern of the long-term unemployed in the Great Depression. It was also the pattern of the long-term unemployed in Western Europe at the end of the 1980s. And, in a year or two, it will be the pattern again for the long-term unemployed in the North Atlantic region.

I have been arguing for four years that our business-cycle problems call for more aggressively expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, and that our biggest problems would quickly melt away were such policies to be adopted. That is still true. But, over the next two years, barring a sudden and unexpected interruption of current trends, it will become less true.

The current balance of probabilities is that two years from now, the North Atlantic's principal labor-market failures will not be demand-side market failures that could be easily remedied by more aggressive policies to boost economic activity and employment. Rather, they will be structural market failures of participation that are not amenable to any straightforward and easily implemented cure.

One of Somalia's most popular comedians, known for his parodies of Islamist militants, has been shot dead in the capital, Mogadishu.

Abdi Jeylani Marshale was reportedly killed shortly after leaving a local radio station where he worked as a drama producer and performer.

It is not known who carried out the murder but last year Marshale was threatened by the extremist group al-Shabaab, prompting him to go into hiding in neighbouring Somaliland for several days.

Syrian combat aircraft and artillery pounded Aleppo late into the night as the army battled for control of the key city, where rebel fighters said troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad had been forced to retreat.

During the day on Tuesday large clouds of black smoke rose into the sky after attack helicopters turned their machine guns on eastern districts for the first time in the latest fighting and a MiG warplane later strafed the same area.

After nightfall, Reuters journalists in Aleppo heard loud explosions somewhere near the city. At least 10 volleys of shells lit up the night sky and drowned out the sound of the Islamic call to prayer. Carloads of rebel fighters shouting "God is great" sped off towards the fighting.

More than half members of the new Egyptian cabinet, including head of the foreign ministry, have been confirmed, state TV reported Wednesday.

According to a line-up broadcast on Nile TV, 21 members of the cabinet have been confirmed.

Members of the former cabinet including Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr, Finance Minister Momtaz el-Saeid, State Minister for Scientific Research Nadia Zakhari, Insurance and Social Affairs Minister Nagwa Khalil, State Minister for Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim Ali will keep their post in the new cabinet.

The International Criminal Police Organization, or Interpol, has rejected Pakistan's request to issue a red warrant against former president and army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf in the assassination case of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, local media reported on Wednesday.

The Interpol headquarters rejected the request on the grounds that Pakistani authorities and the Federal Investigation Agency ( FIA) had sent insufficient documentation for the purpose of issuing a red warrant.

According to an Interpol statement, it could not issue red warrant based on the evidences and documentation presented for the arrest of the former president.

India's power supply was restored to its full capacity Wednesday, after two days of blackout which affected more than half of the country's 1.2 billion population in some 20 of the country's 29 states, including the national capital.

A senior official of the Power Grid Corporation of India, the state-run company which operates all five of the regional grids or supply networks, said that 98 percent of the supply has been restored in eastern India and northern India, while 100 percent of the supply has been restored in northeastern India.

The northern, eastern and northeastern grids had collapsed Tuesday -- the northern grid for the second day in a row -- affecting nearly 600 million people across more than half of the country. The outages caused chaos on roads and brought rail services to a grinding halt.

The chronic drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004 left dying forests and depleted river basins in its wake and was the strongest in 800 years, scientists have concluded, but they say those conditions will become the "new normal" for most of the coming century. Such climatic extremes have increased as a result of global warming, a group of 10 researchers reported in Nature Geoscience. And as bad as conditions were during the 2000-04 drought, they may eventually be seen as the good old days.

Climate models and precipitation projections indicate this period will actually be closer to the "wet end" of a drier hydroclimate during the last half of the 21st century, scientists said.

Aside from its impact on forests, crops, rivers and water tables, the drought also cut carbon sequestration by an average of 51 percent in a massive region of the western United States, Canada and Mexico, although some areas were hit much harder than others. As vegetation withered, this released more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with the effect of amplifying global warming.

A modest ski area in the French Alps is ready to unbolt its chairlifts and rope off slopes as the local mayor concludes that climate change means the trails ahead will be rocky.

Henri-Victor Tournier, the mayor of Biot, wants to clear cable towers from the 1,230-metre-high (4,000-foot) resort of Drouzin-le-Mont before the next elections in 2014 and convert the area to low-impact alpine activities.

"There are lots of things to do in the mountains without having cables hanging over our heads. People will come, I have no fear of that," he says.

Though Tournier foresees maintaining two draglifts "so youngsters can have fun," he wants to focus on cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, mountain biking and hiking to keep families coming into town.

In case you had any doubt that California's Prop 37 - which would require labeling of food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) -- poses a significant threat to the food industry, a top food lobby has now made it perfectly clear that it does.

In a recent speech to the American Soybean Association (most soy grown in the U.S. is GMO), Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), said that defeating the initiative "is the single highest priority for GMA this year."

You may not know the GMA, but its members represent the nation's largest food producers -- those with the most at stake in the battle over GMO labeling. Soft drink and snack giant PepsiCo, cereal makers Kellogg and General Mills, and of course, biotech behemoth Monsanto all belong to the GMA.

According to state filing reports, GMA has already spent $375,000 on its efforts to oppose the labeling measure, with its members adding additional out-of-state lobbying power in the tens of thousands of dollars.

What caused the vast power grid failure that roiled India this week? Precise causes remain unknown, but one emerging explanation points a finger at the nation's severe drought. Here's the New York Times:

Part of the reason may be that low rainfall totals have restricted the amount of power delivered by hydroelectric dams, which India relies on for much of its power needs. Another cause may be that drought-stricken farmers are using more power than expected to run water pumps to irrigate their crops.

That's a drought-related double whammy: Low rainfall crimps energy supply because of its effect on hydropower, and jacks up demand by forcing farmers to irrigate more.

One glance at the numbers, and it's easy to see why pundits are already calling 2012 "the Twitter election." More Tweets are sent every two days today than had ever been sent prior to Election Day 2008 -- and Election Day 2008's Tweet volume represents only about six minutes of Tweets today.

All this explosive growth in conversation has fueled Twitter as a platform for civic debate and created a massive data set for analysis -- data our Government & Politics team has used to study the State of the Union, a FOX News debate, Super Tuesday, gay marriage and other election-year topics. For the first time, it's possible to measure conversations that just an election cycle ago were limited to coffee shops, dinner tables and water coolers.

Four pairs of women's doubles badminton players, including the Chinese top seeds, have been ejected from the Olympic tournament for trying to throw matches in an effort to secure a more favourable quarter-final draw.

The Badminton World Federation, the sport's governing body, read a brief statement to a packed throng of media at the Wembley Arena venue for the sport, saying the players had been disqualified for breaching two parts of the players' code: "Not using one's best efforts to win a match and conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport."

After four months of increasingly astronomical sales, EL James's Fifty Shades trilogy has today officially outsold JK Rowling's seven-book Harry Potter series on Amazon's UK site.

James has sold more than four million copies of her books in print and on Kindle since they went on sale in March, making her the bestselling author of all time at Amazon.co.uk.

JK Rowling's final book in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is being outsold by the first book in the James trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey, by more than two to one on the website.

The first Gold medal for Team GB at the London 2012 Olympic Games has been won by Helen Glover and Heather Stanning in the Women's Pair, with Glover becoming the first ever `Sporting Giant' to win at the Olympics.

Her stunning success at Eton Dorney today with Heather Stanning caps a remarkable journey for the 26 year old from Penzance.

Prior to 2008 she had no rowing experience - and in just five years, she has progressed from a rowing novice to Olympic Champion.

Helen's involvement with rowing came about as a result of the UK Talent team's `Sporting Giants' national talent identification programme. The first of its kind, Sporting Giants was launched by Sir Steve Redgrave in February 2007, aiming to unearth tall, powerful, talented contenders who could be fast-tracked into sports, particularly rowing, handball and volleyball.

The Internet is slowly becoming a less anonymous place. YouTube has a new policy encouraging commenters to use their real names, and many news sites have switched to a login system run by Facebook.

News sites that still allow anonymous comments are finding there are legal risks. The Spokesman-Review newspaper in Spokane, Wash., has spent the last few months trying to protect the identity of a reader who saw a photo of a Republican Party official in Idaho named Tina Jacobson, and then posted a disparaging comment.

The paper's city editor, Addy Hatch, practically has the comment memorized, given the amount of trouble it's caused.

A team of researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the National Research Council of Argentina recently fitted a South American sea bird called an imperial cormorant with a small camera, then watched stunned as it became "superbird" - diving 150 feet underwater in 40 seconds, feeding on the ocean floor for 80 seconds where it eventually caught a snakelike fish, before returning to the surface 40 seconds later.

This is the first time researchers have been able to watch first-hand the amazing feeding techniques of these fascinating birds, which occur off the coast of Argentina.

The footage shows the cormorant briefly on the surface before diving for the bottom. The camera is attached to the bird's back, so the view is of its head as it pumps its feet to swim deeper.

When it finally reaches the ocean floor, it explores a vast area searching for food. It eventually finds an elongated fish, which it brings to the surface to eat.

The world's chickens descend from Southeast Asian common ancestors that Australian researchers say were the "great, great grandmothers of the chicken world."

Scientists from the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, found the ancient DNA preserved in 48 archaeological chicken bones matches the DNA signature present in bones from Europe, Thailand, the Pacific, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Spanish colonial sites in Florida.

It has been a challenge to determine the ancient origin and dispersal of chickens, domesticated at least 5,400 years ago, as almost all civilizations were involved in carrying them around the globe, researchers said.

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo has usurped Orson Welles's Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time in a poll by the BFI's Sight and Sound magazine.

The magazine polls its experts once a decade - and Citizen Kane has been their top pick for the last 50 years.

This time, 846 distributors, critics, academics and writers chose Hitchcock's 1958 suspense thriller, about a retired police officer with a fear of heights.

Starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, Vertigo beat Citizen Kane by 34 votes.

Multi-millionaire Hans Kristian Rausing has been sentenced after admitting preventing the lawful and decent burial of his wife.

The body of Eva Rausing, 48, was discovered at the couple's house in Belgravia on 9 July.

Rausing, 49, was sentenced to 10 months in custody, suspended for two years, at Isleworth Crown Court.

Judge Richard McGregor-Johnson said the case illustrated the "utterly destructive effects of drug misuse".

Los Angeles Times Jay L. Clendenin spent four weeks leading up to the Olympics traveling around Souther California, making portraits of athletes on the US Olympic Team. While he certainly wasn't the only one shooting the athletes, Clendenin chose an interesting way of capturing them: in addition to using Canon 5D Mark IIs for digital photos, he also used a 4×5-inch field camera and a 100+-year-old Petzval lens. When displayed side-by-side, the photos show an interesting contrast between "old" and "new".