BRUSSELS - The European Central Bank (ECB) on Thursday (2 August) said it "may" intervene on the markets to buy bonds to help Spain and Italy lower their borrowing costs, but only if governments first sign reform pledges with the eurozone's bailout fund - a German demand.

"The ECB may undertake outright open market operations of a size adequate to reach its objective," ECB chief Mario Draghi said in a press conference in Frankfurt after a meeting of the bank's governing council, formed of central bankers from all 17 eurozone countries.

He said the board had discussed at length how countries' borrowing costs have hiked in recent weeks, in what he called a "severe malfunctioning" of bond markets.

A government making a raft of public spending cuts might not be expected to win many friends. But critics of Mariano Rajoy's rightwing Partido Popular (PP) claim that a series of departures from Spain's leading state broadcasting organisations are a sign that it will not tolerate any criticism.

A number of journalists who have presumed to question the administration's austerity policy have been purged from the national RTVE radio and TV channel. And this weekend the most high-profile exit in recent months - that of Ana Pastor, the presenter of Los Desayunos de TVE, a popular breakfast news magazine programme - was announced.

Spanish politicians tend to get an easy ride from the press and rarely face a grilling. Pastor, however, has a reputation for calling the people she interviews to account and asking difficult questions. "They're getting rid of me for acting as a journalist," Pastor declared, adding that it was a political decision.

On Saturday the channel said Pastor was leaving after refusing the offer of a job as a presenter of a night-time programme. For her part, Pastor said: "I thought they were going to offer me something [else] but there was nothing of substance. The head of news said we should both think about my future but it was all vague. He said let's see what happens between now and January. They didn't want to say I was sacked, but I was, and I'm not one to hang around earning public money and doing nothing."

In my last blog I tried to draw your attention to the parallels between the current eurozone crisis and the EMS turmoils in 1992/93. Since the similarities become more apparent with every new day, I post the timeline of the EMS crisis once again:

There is a lot of handwringing in Germany about guaranteeing an ever increasing amount of decomposing Eurozone debt. Chancellor Angela Merkel tries to downplay it, but she can't stifle the noisy grumbling from economists, bloggers, politicians, and even journalists.

But no one has yet explained to the French people what they're getting into. President François Hollande hasn't held a press conference on the huge tab. Bank of France Governor Christian Noyer hasn't sounded any alarm bells about the suffocating debt and guarantees the French people are taking on through these bailouts. The government is too busy plowing through its honeymoon, raising taxes, and stepping on PSA Peugeot Citroën that wants to shut some plants to survive in face of double-digit sales declines.

The ESM, ingeniously, has language stipulating that bailed-out countries can't stop contributing. Hence Schäuble's refusal to let Cyprus off the hook on the EFSF. No more precedents! And that's the irony. Germany and France can't bail out 66% of the six debt-sinner countries, including Spain and Italy--they're way too large. So language was inserted in the ESM that would force bailed-out countries to remain on the hook. For instance, if the ESM gave Italy €1 trillion--assume that it could do that, and that it would be enough--Italy would have to guarantee and perhaps pay 17.86% of that and Spain 11.87%. But they're broke. They wouldn't be able to pay, and their guarantees would be worthless. It's a black hole.

Instead, Germany and France will end up with 66%, and in a worst-case scenario will have to eat it. People of both countries should be told! They should be reminded that these numbers get worse as more bailout candidates make the list. But that's just theoretical. In reality, those funds can't bail out Italy; its debt is too large. If Italy goes, so does the Eurozone--or the ECB will be tasked with printing whatever it takes (PWIT).

"The euro is irreversible," said ECB President Mario Draghi as a whiff of panic was sweeping over the Eurozone, while Greece reached the end of the line. Read.... Smashing The Can Instead Of Kicking It Down The Road.

Depression in the Eurozone's Periphery: the cases of Greece, Spain etc.

In the case of the Eurozone's depressed economies, there is another sad wrinkle to the picture above: unable to devalue their currencies, and bereft of a lender of last resort, countries like Greece and Spain are caught in an impossible death trap. With an ECB that ensures that no banks ever die, however sick they might get, a zombified, undead, network of disparate banking systems goes on `living' without however having the capacity to perform its normal banking duties. Forced periodically to re-capitalise these zombie banks (since the ECB only offers them liquidity), the Eurozone's stressed sovereigns find themselves tied to a sinking megalith. The more they try to resuscitate the banks, in order to give businesses a lifeline, the more they sink into insolvency; a fact that the money markets know (thus desisting from lending to these banks) and the local depositors fear (thus sending their money abroad). Thus, gradually, the circuits of credit die with the banks playing the sole role of funneling whatever capital is left in these god forsaken countries to the surplus countries. In a never ending circle of doom and destruction, the fact that the surplus countries are now experiencing unprecedentedly low interest rates (courtesy of the capital flight from the hapless deficit nations) reduces the incentives of the surplus countries' politicians to act in order to help the depressed nations exit their death trap.

In this state of being, talking in conventional terms of aggregate demand is something between a tautology and a... luxury. Aggregate demand is the sum of G+I+(X-M), where G=government expenditure, I=investment, and X-M is net exports. For countries like Greece and Spain, troika conditionalities squeeze G into the ground and the collapse of the circuits of credit ensure that I is negative. The only tiny fillip comes from X-M, as imports (M) fall precipitously and firms that still produce something turn abroad for customers (thus pushing X up, as much as conditions abroad permit). In short, aggregate demand is on the floor in our countries, and digging a hole toward... China - as the troika is implementing its remit and the banks sink deeper into zombie-hood.

In short, Kantoos' point that Greece, Spain et al are facing a dearth of aggregate demand is undoubtedly, almost tautologically, true. It is like saying that a terminal cancer patient is experiencing a mountain of pain. True but not particularly helpful, from an analytical point of view. The question is: What will it take to restore aggregate demand without rebuilding the bubbles that burst asunder, thus creating the problem in the first place.

The terms of the Brussels bailout of Spain's banks are expected to mean that those banks needing a hand-out impose losses of about 30 percent on bondholders. Normally this would mean financial institutions. In Spain, it now also means savers.

Estimates suggest that ordinary savers have been sold bonds and preference shares - which guarantee priority on dividends but have no voting rights - in Spanish banks worth 30 billion euros when they thought they were putting money into straightforward accounts.

...

A simple cash deposit would earn about 2.5 percent interest, but that shot up to 3.75 percent or more if some of the money was put into the complex packages. Savers were told these could be sold within a few days or weeks if they needed the cash.

Business Insider: For The European Crisis To End, This Is What Now Needs To Happen

Last week, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi laid out the framework for the next developments he wants to see in Europe.

Considering how important the ECB has been in slowing the crisis, it is likely that the ECB will get what most of what it wants.

...

7. The ECB will announce plans to target sovereign yields.

When it feels that EU leaders have made sufficient progress in economic reforms, the ECB is likely to announce plans to restrict the spread between borrowing costs for peripheral Europe (i.e. Italy and Spain) and core Europe (Germany, France, etc.). This would go a long way towards tying these regions together economically.

Außenminister Guido Westerwelle hat eindringlich zur Mäßigung in der Euro-Diskussion aufgerufen. "Der Ton der Debatte ist sehr gefährlich", sagte der Außenminister - und warnte damit CSU-Politiker, die sich zuletzt äußerst aggressiv zur Krise in Griechenland geäußert hatten.

Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle made a strong called for moderation in the euro debate. "The tone of the debate is very dangerous," said the foreign minister - and thus warned CSU politicians who had recently expressed themselves extremely aggressively on the crisis in Greece.

Liao Ping says it's like winning the lottery when he convinces a worker to accept a job offer for Luyang Shoes Co. at his roadside stand in China's southern Guangdong province. "Sometimes I get two in a day, most times the result is zero."

The region that drove China's rise after market barriers started coming down in 1978 is among the nation's slowest- growing as faltering demand cuts exports and workers exit for the central and western areas powering the nation's expansion.

Deserted factories and worker dormitories litter the Guangdong manufacturing hub of Dongguan, where walls are plastered with recruitment posters. The province is set for the weakest full-year expansion since 1989 as toy, shoe and textile industries move inland or abroad and a transformation to higher- value production and services remains unfinished.

With the euro-zone and Britain clearly back in deep recession and the U.S. apparently on the brink, the central bankers all decided to do nothing, at least for the moment. They all restated their unbreakable resolution to do "whatever it takes" - to prevent a breakup of the euro, in the case of the ECB, or, for the Fed and the BoE, to achieve the more limited goal of economic recovery. But what exactly is there left for the central bankers to do?

They have essentially two options. They could do even more of what the Fed and the BoE have been doing since late 2008 - creating new money and spending it on government bonds, in the policy known as "Quantitative Easing." Or they could admit the policies of the past three years were not working, at least not well enough. And try something different.

There is, admittedly, a third option - to do nothing, on the grounds that public bodies should stop interfering with the private economy and instead leave financial markets to restore economic prosperity and full employment of their own accord. This third idea is based on the economic theory that if governments and central bankers leave well enough alone, "efficient" and "rational" financial markets will keep a capitalist economy growing and automatically return it to a prosperous equilibrium after occasional hiccups. This theory, though still taught in graduate schools and embedded in economic models, is implausible, to put it mildly, especially after the experience of the past decade. In any case, experience shows that the option of government doing nothing in deep economic slumps simply doesn't exist in modern democracies.

Returning, therefore, to the two realistic alternatives, central bankers and financiers are overwhelmingly in favor of the first: keep trying the policy that has failed.

Zambian miners have killed a Chinese manager by pushing a mine trolley at him during a riot at a coal mine in the south of the country.

A second Chinese was injured, as were several Zambians, during the riot on Saturday.

The workers were on strike at the mine in protest against delays in implementing a new minimum wage.

They were angry their wages were lower than a new minimum of $220 (£140) a month paid to shop workers.

Zambia's minister of labour has gone to the Chinese-owned Collum coal mine in Sinazongwe, 325km (200 miles) south of the capital, Lusaka.

(Reuters) - Knight Capital Group Inc looks set to enter into a $400 million (256.1 million pounds) financing deal with a group of investors, allowing the trading firm to open its doors Monday after a crippling $440 million loss, although it will come at a steep cost to shareholders, sources familiar with the situation said.

Such a deal would help Knight continue to operate and avoid further disruption and uncertainty for its brokerage clients, which include firms such as TD Ameritrade, Vanguard and Fidelity Investments.

An announcement on the deal is expected by early Monday, one source said.

Knight's shareholders have had to pay a steep price to keep the firm afloat following 45 minutes of software-induced mayhem last Wednesday that led to the loss and a massive decline in customer confidence. Shares worth $10.33 last Tuesday night may now be worth just $1.50, an 85 percent drop.

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Aug 5 2012 (IPS) - "It will collapse, and the collapse will be harder when it happens later," says Tareq Sadeq, Palestinian economist and professor at Birzeit University, about the financial bubble building up in the Palestinian Authority government.

"It will mean that people will lose their homes. They will lose their cars. They will lose their land sometimes because of the collapse of the bubble. This will affect the whole economy and will also reflect on the Palestinian Authority. So this may be a collapse of the PA itself," Sadeq tells IPS.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has announced it is facing a funding crisis; it is now relying on donor aid to cover a budget deficit of 1.1 billion dollars and cash shortfall of 500 million dollars.

"The Palestinian economy has become more and more dependent on wages, on salaries, for the whole economy, not just for the public sector; around 70 percent of all employees are wage employees. As a result, there is no production in the Palestinian economy. People consume and consume and consume and there is nothing to produce," Sadeq says.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) turned down an appeal from the Israeli government in early July for a 1 billion dollar loan to fund the PA. The West Bank economy is almost entirely upheld by international aid; in 2011, donors promised the PA 1 billion dollars in support, of which 800 million dollars was transferred.

A brigade of the Syrian rebel army has posted an online video claiming that the 48 Iranians it kidnapped were members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, and has warned Tehran of further abductions over its support for the Syrian government.

Forty-eight Iranian pilgrims were kidnapped from a bus in the Syrian capital on Saturday, the Iranian embassy consular chief in Damascus, told Iran's state television.

"Armed terrorist groups kidnapped 48 Iranian pilgrims on their way to the airport," Majid Kamjou told the IRIB network, which gave the report on its website.

In the video released on Sunday, fighters of the al-Baraa Brigade of the Free Syrian Army said that they had "captured 48 of the shabiha [militiamen] of Iran who were on a reconnaissance mission in Damascus".

"During the investigation, we found that some of them were officers in the Revolutionary Guards," said a man dressed in an FSA officer's uniform, showing documents taken from one of the men, who appeared in the background.

At least 19 people have been killed in southeastern Turkey after a battle between soldiers and members of a Kurdish separatist group, the local provincial governor has said.

Six soldiers, two government-paid village guards and 11 Kurdish rebels were killed in the fighting near the village of Gecimili in Hakkari province, Governor Orhan Alimoglu said on Sunday.

The incident occurred near the Iraqi border early on Sunday, he said, adding that 15 soldiers had also been wounded.

Local media reported that the rebels fired on the army outpost in Hakkari with rocket launchers just after midnight.

At least 20 people are feared injured in a shooting at a Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee in the US state of Wisconsin, according to local media reports.

Stephanie Uljanec, Oak Creek police department dispatcher, confirmed the shooting took place on Sunday morning at the gurudwara, but said she did not know how many people were shot or if there were any fatalities.

A witness who sent a text message to a local reporter of the Journal Sentinel said two alleged shooters were possibly still inside the temple, holding children as hostages.

There are also reports that the head priest was locked inside a restroom with a cellphone and said there are as many as 30 victims in temple.

Among those who were shot was the president of the temple, the Journal Sentinel reported.

Human-driven climate change is to blame for a series of increasingly hot summers and the situation is already worse than was expected just two decades ago, a top NASA scientist said on Saturday.

James Hansen, who directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in the Washington Post that even his "grim" predictions of a warming future, delivered before the US Senate in 1988, were too weak.

"I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic," Hansen wrote.

"My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather."

Hansen and his colleagues have published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences an analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, revealing a "stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers," he wrote.

India's economic growth could slip to near six percent this year with the country facing the spectre of its third drought in a decade, a top government policymaker says.

In the last few months, the outlook for once-booming India has worsened with high inflation, steep interest rates, a ballooning deficit, nosediving business confidence, a falling currency and now growing worry of drought.

"If we factor in that agriculture which will not be strong ... (growth) will be closer to six percent" for the fiscal year to March 2013, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia told reporters in New Delhi.

His forecast, delivered Friday, is down from the 6.5 percent expansion India notched up last year, and far below the close to 10 percent expansion seen during a good part of the past decade.

It comes comes as private economists also pare their growth estimates for Asia's third-largest economy, citing concern about "deficient" monsoon rains that sweep India from June to September.

Earth's oceans, forests and other ecosystems continue to soak up about half the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by human activities, even as those emissions have increased, according to a study by University of Colorado and NOAA scientists to be published August 2 in the journal Nature.

The scientists analyzed 50 years of global carbon dioxide (CO2) measurements and found that the processes by which the planet's oceans and ecosystems absorb the greenhouse gas are not yet at capacity.

"Globally, these carbon dioxide 'sinks' have roughly kept pace with emissions from human activities, continuing to draw about half of the emitted CO2 back out of the atmosphere.

Our planet's changing climate is devastating communities in Africa through droughts, floods and myriad other disasters. Using detailed regional climate models and geographic information systems, researchers with the Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program developed an online mapping tool that analyzes how climate and other forces interact to threaten the security of African communities.

The program was piloted by the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at The University of Texas at Austin in 2009 after receiving a $7.6 million five-year grant from the Minerva Initiative with the Department of Defense, according to Francis J. Gavin, professor of international affairs and director of the Strauss Center.

"The first goal was to look at whether we could more effectively identify what were the causes and locations of vulnerability in Africa, not just climate, but other kinds of vulnerability," Gavin said.

CCAPS comprises nine research teams focusing on various aspects of climate change, their relationship to different types of conflict, the government structures that exist to mitigate them, and the effectiveness of international aid in intervening.

Drummondville couple fights to keep vegetable garden - Montreal - CBC News

New bylaw will ban front lawn vegetable gardens

A couple is fighting to keep a vegetable garden they grow on their property in Drummondville, 100 kilometres northeast of Montreal.

This spring, Michel Beauchamp and his wife, Josée Landry, planted an elaborate vegetable garden on the front lawn of their Richelieu Street home.

They used to have flowers growing, but Beauchamp has high blood pressure and wanted to eat healthier. So they planted cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchinis, beets, onions, and brussels sprouts, among other vegetables.

Message to Olympians: be careful what you wish for. Going for gold can trigger a bad case of the blues -- or worse.

Research shows intensive exercise is as addictive as heroin, putting retiring Olympians at risk of depression. A third of elite athletes have an unhealthy preoccupation with training, scientists in Melbourne found in a study published in March. And the biological mechanisms of this so-called exercise dependence tend to mimic those involved in drug addiction, researchers at Tufts University in Boston said. Anxiety and depression may ensue when exercise stops, according to the Tufts study.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that sheds light on why athletes may be more prone to substance abuse, eating disorders and suicide than the general population, and why they might require help adjusting after years spent engaged in relentless sports training.

Dr Dowling added: "If a mitochondrial mutation occurs that harms fathers, but has no effect on mothers, this mutation will slip through the gaze of natural selection, unnoticed.

"Over thousands of generations, many such mutations have accumulated that harm only males, while leaving females unscathed."

Tom Kirkwood, professor of ageing at Newcastle University said the paper was "intriguing".

He said: "It may be it does tell us something rather important about mitochondria and the difference between male and female fruit flies.

"And we know that mitochondria are important for ageing in a number of species.

"But I certainly don't think this is a discovery that explains why women live five-to-six years longer than men.

African elephants are known to be great communicators that converse with extremely low-pitched vocalizations, known as infrasounds, over a distance of miles. These infrasounds occupy a very low frequency range-fewer than 20 Hertz, or cycles, per second-that is generally below the threshold of human hearing.

Now, a new study shows that elephants rely on the same mechanism that produces speech in humans (and the vocalizations of many other mammals) to hit those extremely low notes.

Christian Herbst from the University of Vienna, along with colleagues from Germany, Austria and the United States, used the larynx of a recently deceased elephant to recreate some elephant infrasounds in a laboratory.

(Reuters) - NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity landed safely late on Sunday after hurtling through the pink Martian skies at the start of a two-year quest for signs the Red Planet once hosted key ingredients for life.

Mission controllers burst into applause and cheered in relief as they received signals confirming that the rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone at the bottom of a vast, ancient crater.

The robotic lab sailed through space for more than eight months, covering 352 million miles (566 million km), before piercing Mars' atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour -- 17 times the speed of sound -- before starting its descent.

And yet for all his apparent friendliness, Johnson is rarely a friend. In fact, although many might describe themselves as a pal, they are usually mistaken. As a critic once observed, as with Lord Palmerston, Johnson "does not have friends, merely interests". Indeed, when questioned, these self-professed "friends" often admit that they have seen the mayor socially perhaps only a couple of times in the past few years. Those who are no longer "useful" have not seen him at all.

Most admit they have rarely if ever conducted a lengthy conversation with Johnson; he is not one to share a pint at the pub or a club with a mate, for instance, and also only likes to run alone. One former female aide recalls how she dreaded car journeys with him as conversation would either be painfully stilted or simply non-existent.

Yannick Noah, a former French tennis player, is the most popular celebrity in France according to a poll. It is the eighth consecutive year Noah, who is now a singer, has topped the chart of the fifty most popular French personalities.

The Franco-Cameroonian singer shot to fame in 1983 when he won the French Open, Roland Garros, becoming the first Frenchmen to do so in 37 years. Since retiring from professional tennis in the late 1990s Noah has become a popular singer in France.

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere