Plans to reform the House of Lords are being abandoned after Conservatives "broke the coalition contract", Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has announced.

Agreement on an elected Lords could not be reached with Tory opponents, he said, and the plans would be shelved rather than face a "slow death".

As a result, he said Lib Dem MPs could not now support Conservative-driven changes to Commons boundaries in 2015.

Labour said the Lords climbdown was a "humiliation" for the coalition.

Conservative politician and novelist Louise Mensch is to stand down as an MP, the party has announced.

The MP for Corby is moving to New York with her three children to be with her husband of a year, Peter Mensch, who is manager of rock band Metallica.

Her decision to quit will trigger a by-election in the Northamptonshire constituency, a marginal seat.

Before entering politics she made her name as a best-selling chick-lit author, under her maiden name Bagshawe.

A graduate has lost her legal challenge to a government scheme which she says forces people to work without pay.

Cait Reilly, a University of Birmingham geology graduate, had argued that making her work unpaid at a Poundland store for two weeks or risk losing her benefits was a breach of human rights.

The scheme was ruled lawful by the High Court, but letters setting out possible sanctions should be clearer, it said.

The government said its letters were clear and would contest that finding

Italy needs moral support from Germany but not its cash, Prime Minister Mario Monti said in an interview published on Sunday as German conservatives renewed calls for Greece to leave the euro zone.

The Italian leader also told weekly magazine Der Spiegel that he was concerned about growing anti-euro, anti-German and anti-European Union sentiment in the parliament in Rome.

The German government has resisted calls from Italy and struggling countries to introduce common euro zone bonds or take other action to help alleviate the bloc's sovereign debt crisis, saying it would remove pressure to enact painful reforms.

On Sunday, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative alliance, Bavaria's finance minister Markus Soeder, said Greece would leave the euro zone by the end of 2012.

AFP - Romanian Interior Minister Ioan Rus resigned Monday, citing "unacceptable" pressures amid controversy over his ministry's organisation of an impeachment referendum against president Traian Basescu.

..."We have been subjected to multiple forms of pressure, discussions, and criticism, coming from Romanian political figures from Traian Basescu to Crin Antonescu," he said.

...Antonescu, who took over as interim president after Basescu was suspended last month, is a leading figure in the USL, which contested the accuracy of electoral registers after the referendum failed to meet the 50-percent turnout threshold required to oust arch-rival Basescu.

Romania's Constitutional Court last week delayed its ruling on the validity of the impeachment referendum, which has been sharply criticised by the European Union and the United States.

The court asked the government to update the lists of eligible voters, saying "contradictory data from state institutions" had forced it to delay its decision to August 31.

Athens police staged a mass sweep of undocumented migrants over the weekend, questioning some 6,000 people and pledging to deport nearly 1,600. A conservative government minister described the country's influx of foreign nationals as "an invasion".

You need a diversion. One solidifying the framing of the fascists...

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Turkey's top military council on Saturday ordered the retirement of dozens of generals and admirals who are currently being held on charges of coup plotting, the army announced on its website.

Fifty-five generals and admirals are required to retire due to a lack of vacancies in their positions, and one admiral due to an age limit as of September 1, the army said in an online statement.

Among them were 40 generals and admirals in detention in connection with several probes, including the so-called Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases into alleged plots to topple the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reported local media.

The jailed generals had been awaiting promotion after it was suspended at last year's meeting. But the military council's statement said the one-year waiting period for the generals had expired, ordering their retirement instead.

The latest announcement comes as the Supreme Military Council (YAS) began its meeting on Wednesday to discuss promotions and dismissals within the army. The decisions were made public Saturday after being approved by the president.

The surveillance and blacklisting of thousands of workers, including some suspected by construction companies of being left-wing troublemakers, should be immediately investigated by the privacy watchdog, it was urged last night.

More than 40 major firms referred to the secret database, which listed thousands of people's details, including their involvement in union activity, before hiring staff. Workers who were on the list allege they were deprived of their livelihoods as a result of their inclusion, with supporters claiming their human rights have been breached.

Liberty has written to the Information Commissioner, Sir Christopher Graham, accusing him of inaction over a privacy scandal that it compares to phone hacking. Liberty is threatening to go to court to force him to investigate the case.

In the 1860s, one of the established columnists working for the New York Tribune, a certain Karl Marx, wrote that Japan was "the only truly feudal state, with all of its irrationalities and divisions" (of power). Today the European Union is reminiscent of this Japan, with Angela Merkel in the role of shogun.

...

The Japanese elite spent a lot time at Edo (Tokyo/Brussels), spending the bulk of tax revenues on their expenses. The man in the street had absolutely no interest in the Emperor or the shogun (the leaders in Brussels). So in his column for the New York Tribune, Karl Marx expressed what was, at the time, a widespread disdain for Japan: a backward country whose political organisation was too fragmented to enable it to resolve its problems.

...

Today Europe is in the throes of a similar crisis. Southern European countries have yet to adapt their economies to  the reality of an industrialised China. Worse still, they have been caught in the trap of a currency that has enabled them to borrow cheaply, but which has also pushed up the price of the goods they produce.

...

Thereafter, Brussels will have to punish the provinces, which are still caught in the noose of the euro. Blinded by its fixation on the most recent cataclysm in living memory, that is to say on WWII, the EU sells the European project as a peace plan. However, in so doing it conveniently ignores a significant number of conflicts that began as protests against the decrees of a central power, for example the Thirty Years' War [1618-1648].

Standard Chartered bank illegally "schemed" with Iran to launder as much as $250bn (£161bn) for nearly a decade, a US regulator says.

The New York State Department of Financial Services said that the bank hid 60,000 secret transactions for "Iranian financial institutions" that were subject to US economic sanctions.

It labelled UK-based Standard Chartered a "rogue institution".

The bank has been threatened with having its US banking licence revoked.

Hopes that a City jobs bloodbath could be averted arrive today in the form of figures from the leading headhunter Astbury Marsden.

The recruiter says that 2,985 new jobs were created in the Square Mile in July, an improvement on recent months.

That's still down by 39 per cent on the same month a year ago, when there were 4,880 jobs going in the financial district. But it suggests that banks are looking to hire at least as many as they fire, a huge relief to a sector buffeted by scandal and going through a slump in business.

US attempts to clean up on tax evasion took a new twist when a Geneva banker's two teenage children were detained when they arrived on US soil, it was reported Monday.

The teenagers, due to visit their grandparents, were questioned for several hours by US officials who asked them the whereabouts of their father and whether he sometimes worked in the country, according to La Tribune de Genève newspaper.

During their six-hour interrogation the youngsters were not allowed to contact their grandparents who were waiting for them at an undisclosed airport, the report added.

where is there an democratically elected politician, or leader in any sphere with the honesty to tell the public what the financiers have done to the world by treating it as a common commodity to be profited from, instead of our only common home?

nowhere, they're off being serious.

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

First, pay. Capping bonuses, as the European Parliament is proposing, is not sensible as it merely encourages banks to boost salaries. A better idea is to require lenders to pay a big chunk of their managers' compensation in the form of the bank's own subordinated debt. If the bank then got into trouble, executives would lose a lot of money. That should concentrate their minds on better risk management.

Second, the industry is under-taxed. The best solution here is not the financial transaction or "Robin Hood" tax proposed by the European Commission. That wouldn't make the industry safer. Better options are to impose VAT on financial services and require banks to pay a levy to the extent that they finance themselves with hot money - a tax that has so far only been adopted in some countries.

Third, boards have too often failed to hold powerful executives to account. That was a big weakness at Barclays and other banks such as Britain's RBS. Both regulators and shareholders need to insist that bank boards have more clout.

I was reading several older papers from the 1990s today as part of a project I am working on where I track predictions that leading mainstream economists were making at the time about the evolution of national and global economies. It is a very interesting exercise to build the narratives that were popular at an earlier time and then consider how far the economists got things right. I have noted that there has been some debate out in blog-land about who predicted the failure of the Euro. I am less interested in documenting which person was the first or the second - there were many who saw the design flaws from the inception and could extrapolate what they would mean if a negative shock occurred. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists were among them. I am more interested in groupthink (at the paradigm level) and how the failed predictions can be used to demonstrate the inapplicability of a certain body of theory. That is, what can we learn from the failure of mainstream economists in general to see the crisis coming (and being in denial now of what the solution is). In this blog I consider a part of the thinking that explains why my profession proved to be unreliable in this regard.

This astonishing GIF comes from Nanex, and shows the amount of high-frequency trading in the stock market from January 2007 to January 2012. (Which means that the Knightmare craziness of last week is not included.)

It's certainly fair to say that if you take a long, five-year view, then you can see a clear rise in trading activity. But it's also fair to say that there's something quite literally out of control going on here. Just as the quants at Knight found themselves unable to turn off their machines for 30 long minutes last week, the HFT world in aggregate seemingly has a mind of its own when it comes to trading patterns. Or, to put it another way, if there's a pattern here, it's one incomprehensible to human minds.

...

The stock market today is a war zone, where algobots fight each other over pennies, millions of times a second. Sometimes, the casualties are merely companies like Knight, and few people have much sympathy for them. But inevitably, at some point in the future, significant losses will end up being borne by investors with no direct connection to the HFT world, which is so complex that its potential systemic repercussions are literally unknowable. The potential cost is huge; the short-term benefits are minuscule. Let's give HFT the funeral it deserves.

US authorities have said they are investigating reports that a gunman who killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin had white supremacist links.

Wade Michael Page, 40, who was gunned down by police during the attack near Milwaukee, reportedly performed in a white-power music group.

Five men and a woman died in the shooting. Three others including a policeman remain in critical condition.

The FBI is treating the attack as a possible domestic terrorism case.

China's state-run media has lambasted the United States over its intervention in the South China Sea row, highlighting the alarming escalation of a long-running dispute.

Furious commentaries ordered Washington to "shut up" and accused it of "fanning the flames and provoking division" in the region. The foreign ministry in Beijing called in a senior US diplomat at the weekend over the State Department comments.

Analysts fear the South China Sea has become a major potential flashpoint, as tensions have risen sharply between China - which claims almost all the sea - and Vietnam and the Philippines. Brunei, Taiwan and Malaysia also lay claim to parts of the sea, which contains valuable energy reserves and fisheries and sees an estimated $5 trillion of cargo - half the world's shipping tonnage - pass through its sea lanes annually.

Japan marked the 67th anniversary of the first atomic attack with a ceremony on Monday that was attended by a grandson of Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the bomb to be dropped on the city of Hiroshima.

About 50,000 people gathered in Hiroshima's peace park near the epicentre of the 1945 blast that killed as many as 140,000 people. A second atomic bombing on 9 August in Nagasaki killed tens of thousands more and prompted Japan to surrender, bringing the second world war to an end.

The ceremony, attended by representatives of about 70 countries, began with the ringing of a temple bell and a moment of silence. Flowers were placed before Hiroshima's eternal flame.

Syria's prime minister on Monday became the most high-profile political figure to quit the regime of Bashar al-Assad - a propaganda coup for the opposition as the country's crisis continued to escalate.

News of Riyad Hijab's dramatic move broke shortly after a bomb blast hit state TV in the centre of Damascus and reports from the northern city of Aleppo pointed to an imminent government offensive.

The first stronghold established by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Aleppo was also hit by government aircraft in an attack that killed nine members of a family in a nearby house and forced the rebel fighters to move to a new base in the city.

A huge ash cloud is covering the central North Island as Mt Tongariro erupts for the first time in more than a century.

Roads were closed, flights disrupted and nearby residents have been advised to stay indoors as ash and rock spews from the mountain.

The volcanic alert level for Mt Tongariro has risen from 1 to 2, while the aviation colour code has been raised to red.

The ash cloud is drifting east and has reportedly fallen as far east as Napier.

Hiding in his office near the Indian capital as workers armed with iron bars and car parts rampaged through the factory, Maruti Suzuki supervisor Raj Kumar spent two terrified hours trying to comprehend the warzone his workplace had become.

By the end of the day, one of his colleagues had been burnt to death and dozens wounded, many with broken bones, as a long-running struggle between the shop floor and management exploded at a factory racked by mistrust.

While police investigate and the carmaker counts its mounting losses, the July 18 clash has rattled corporate India and shone a light on outdated and rigid labor laws in a country where cheap labor drives manufacturing and draws foreign investment. High inflation, a shortage of skilled labor and rising aspirations have emboldened workers' demands [...]

Other foreign carmakers, such as Hyundai and Honda, have seen labor unrest at their Indian plants in recent years, and industry groups have renewed calls for the government to overhaul laws they say tie their hands.

In separate rallies on Monday, more than 7,000 people, including atomic bomb survivors and evacuees from the Fukushima area, staged anti-nuclear demonstrations, the latest in a series of protests triggered by last year's crisis.

...Usually sedate Japan has seen a string of anti-nuclear protests since Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda in June ordered the restart of two reactors.

...Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui called on the government "to establish without any delay an energy policy that guards the safety and security of the people".

But Noda, who also attended the event, only said: "We will establish an energy mix with which people can feel safe in the long- and medium-term, based on our policy that we will not rely on nuclear power."

James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and colleagues compared global temperatures between 1981 and 2010 to the cooler climes of 1950 to 1980. Extreme warming events, when temperatures were more than three standard deviations above the 1950 to 1980 average, were an order of magnitude more common. Such heatwaves covered 4 to 13 per cent of the planet between 2006 and 2011.

Hansen says this means recent extremes can be firmly blamed on climate change. In an editorial in the Washington Post, he writes: "The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills."

That's going too far, says Peter Stott of the UK Met Office in Exeter. "While we can provide evidence that the risk of heatwaves has increased, we cannot say that the chances of such heatwaves were negligible before global warming set in."

A baby boom of gray whales is apparently under way along Alaska's coast and off Southern California, marine researchers say.

Scientists tracking marine mammals in the Chukchi Sea between Alaska and Russia have recorded an unprecedented number of sightings of gray whale calves in July, the Anchorage Daily News reported Friday.

Fifty-seven cow-calf pairs were recorded between July 1 and July 26, the federal Alaska Fisheries Science Center said.

The biggest number previously counted was 18, reported in 1982 and 2011 for those years' full season, which runs from late June/early July until October.

"There's the potential that some of those are repeat sightings," said Megan Ferguson, project coordinator for the Aerial Surveys of Arctic Marine Mammals Project. "But the fact that we're seeing a five-fold increase makes me think that it is a real increase."

BRASILIA, Brazil, August 2, 2012 (ENS) - Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon is slowing down according to an analysis of satellite images released today by Brazil's National Space Research Institute, INPE.

Environment Minister Izabella Teixeria said the slowing trend in deforestation is a result of strengthened enforcement efforts and monitoring initiatives by the Brazilian government, including renewed cooperation with national intelligence agencies.

Data from INPE's Real Time Detection System show that across the country's Amazon region there was an estimated 23 percent reduction from August 2011 to July 2012.

An area of 2,049 square kilometers of forest were cleared during this period as compared with 2,679 km2 the previous year.

In the last four months, the reduction in deforestation was 50 percent, compared with the same period in 2011.

A few days ago, a team of approximately 20 Danish researchers left Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, on their way to the North Pole on board the Swedish icebreaker Oden. The goal of the expedition is to prove that the 155,000 square kilometres of seabed that lie beneath the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean - and in particular the North Pole - form part of the Greenland continental shelf, and should therefore be considered part of the Danish Realm, which includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands along with Denmark.

...

They have to gather bathymetric data on the Lomonosov Ridge and on the layers of sediment in the Amundsen Basin to the east of the North Pole. In 2014, this data will be essential if the Danish Realm is to successfully submit a claim to the UN for a substantial area of seabed, which extends to the north beyond the 200 nautical mile limit off Greenland to the North Pole.

The launch of the expedition has raised three questions: Will there be a conflict between Denmark and Russia, because Russia is also claiming certain parts of this territory? What are the motives for the Danish claim? And will Denmark preserve the North Pole if it becomes Danish?

A spectacular image of the Curiosity rover descending to the surface of Mars on its parachute has been obtained by an overflying satellite.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter played a key role in Monday's (GMT) historic landing by recording telemetry from the robot as it approached the ground.

But Nasa also tasked it with trying to get a picture of the new arrival.

The remarkable feat repeats MRO's effort in 2008 when it also managed to sight the incoming Phoenix lander.

On Sunday 4 April 1880, a young medical student called Arthur Conan Doyle was wrestling with a two-iceberg rather than a two-pipe problem: he had yet again fallen overboard from a whaler called the Hope, into the icy Arctic.

"I fell into the Arctic Ocean three times today, but luckily someone was always near to pull me out," the 20-year-old Doyle wrote.

Farming is one of the most difficult ways to earn a living. You'd think that with all the innovations mankind has developed over the centuries, we could make farmers' lives easier. But as it turns out, sometimes miracles of modern science make things tougher. Literally.

Take genetically modified organisms (GMO) for instance. For now, let's ignore the controversy over its safety, usefulness and ethical issues. The main issue for those guys actually growing and harvesting the stuff is much more practical. As it turns out, corn modified to stand tall and tough against pests is also wreaking havoc on tractor tires.

Mark Newhall of Farm Show Magazine tells American Public Media's Marketplace that after the stalks are cut during harvest, the leftover stubs are like "having a field of little spears."

So instead of tractor tires lasting the usual five to six years, they're getting chewed up after just one or two years. One tractor tire can cost thousands of dollars, and some tractors have as many as eight tires.

How does a modern farmer fight back against a genetically modified enemy intent on destroying the very thing his business rides on? The same way our military defends against its enemies: Kevlar.

But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple's and Amazon's. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information -- a partial credit card number -- that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

This isn't just my problem. Since Friday, Aug. 3, when hackers broke into my accounts, I've heard from other users who were compromised in the same way, at least one of whom was targeted by the same group.

En la zona oeste de Girona puede verse desde ayer una inédita imagen: contenedores de materia orgánica cerrados con candado para que nadie pueda revolver en ellos en busca de comida. El Ayuntamiento quiere acabar con esta práctica "ante el riesgo para la salud que puede comportar y la alarma social que provoca", y ha llegado a un acuerdo con tres cadenas de supermercados para impulsar un nuevo sistema de depósito y recogida de alimentos. Dos agentes cívicos se encargarán de derivar a las personas que ronden por los contenedores al centro de distribución de alimentos, donde se les proporcionará una cesta básica.

Los supermercados, a cambio, donarán comida que no pueden vender pero que todavía es apta para el consumo. El programa empezó ayer en fase de prueba. El Ayuntamiento ha puesto candados en cinco contenedores de los barrios de Sant Narcís y Santa Eugènia, todos cercanos a los supermercados Condis, Novavenda y Bonpreu que han firmado el convenio. El concejal de Servicios Sociales de Girona, Eduard Berloso (CiU), explicó que el objetivo es "garantizar el derecho a la alimentación" de los ciudadanos sin que estos tengan que caer en la "humillación" ni renunciar a su "dignidad". Según los datos del Ayuntamiento, hay unas 90 personas en la ciudad que frecuentan los contenedores para buscar comida en ellos.

La idea es derivar a estas personas a un centro de distribución de alimentos, una iniciativa del anterior gobierno, del PSC e ICV, para repartir cestas de comida entre las familias en riesgo de exclusión. El centro lo gestiona un consorcio en el que están presentes Cáritas y la Cruz Roja, y reparte 800 cestas de comida cada 15 días. El consorcio aumentará el número de lotes hasta 1.000 para cubrir las necesidades del nuevo programa. Los encargados de derivar a las personas que se dirijan a los contenedores hacia el centro de alimentos serán dos agentes cívicos que, equipados con vales, les informarán del nuevo procedimiento.

Since yesterday, a previously unseen scene in the west area of Girona: organic garbage bins padlocked so nobody can rummage in them looking for food. The local Council wants to end this practice "given the risk to health that this can carry and the social alarm it causes", and has reached an agreement with three supermarket chains to sponsor a new program of deposit and gathering of food. Two civic agents will be in charge of shifting people roaming around the containers to the food distribution centre, where they will be given a basic basket.

The supermarkets, in eschange, will donate food that they cannot sell but which is still fit for consumption. The programme began yesterday in a trial phase. The council has padlocked the containers in five neighbourhoods of Sant Narcís and Santa Eugènia, all near Condis, Novavenda and Bonpreu supermarkets which have signed the covenant. The Girona's Social Services Coucillor, Eduard Berloso (CiU), explained that the goal is "to guarantee the right to food" of citizens without having them fall into "humiliation" or renouncing their "dignity". According to Council data, there are some 90 people in the city who frequent the containers to look for food in them.

The idea is to shift these people to a food distribution centre, an initiative of the previous [local] government, of PSC and ICV, to distributefood baskets among families at risk of exclusion. The centre is managed by a consortium including Caritas and the Red Cross, and distributes 800 food baskets every fortnight. The consortium will increase the number of lots to 1.000 cover the needs of the new programme. Those in charge of shifting the people coming to the containers to the food centre will be two civic agents who, equipped with vouchers, will inform them about the new procedure.

Wright Brothers First Airplane

4. Wright Bros (flying machines)- After their Kitty Hawk success, The Wrights flew their machine in open fields next to a busy rail line in Dayton Ohio for almost an entire year. American authorities refused to come to the demos, and Scientific American Magazine published stories about "The Lying Brothers." Even the local Dayton newspapers never sent a reporter (but they did complain about all the letters they were receiving from local "crazies" who reported the many flights.) Finally the Wrights packed up, and moved to Europe, where they caused an over-night sensation, and sold aircraft contracts to France, Germany, Britain etc.

More than 10,000 athletes from 200 national Olympic committees around the globe have gathered in London for the 17-day 2012 Summer Olympic Games. So far, dozens of Olympic and world records have already been broken and more than 500 medals have been awarded. As we pass the Games' halfway point, here's a look back at some amazing events that have taken place in the U.K. over the past nine days. [62 photos]

A 34-year-old man has denied throwing a bottle at the start of the men's Olympic 100m final on Sunday night.

Ashley Gill-Webb, of South Milford, North Yorkshire, pleaded not guilty at Stratford Magistrates' Court to a public order offence.

After the incident a Dutch judo champion hit a man she had seen throwing a bottle on to the track.

Edith Bosch, 32, said she hit him on the back with the flat of her hand.

A petition to 'reclaim' the British crown jewels has been signed by 2500 people in the town of Angers, and the man behind it says he is ready to go to trial over the issue.

Artist Calixte de Nigremont, the man who initiated the petition, says there will be a trial to finalise which country has the rights to the jewels during the upcoming Accroche-Coeurs street festival.

Speaking exclusively to The Local, Nigremont said: "The petition is serious. It's a bit of a nod towards the British to remind them of the history and relationship between France and the United Kingdom.

"If we do eventually get back the crown jewels I plan to do with them what you do in the UK, and display them for the public to see. I like to think if it as giving something back to the French public."

The Plantagenet petition, named after the house of Kings who ruled in England until the 16^th Century, claims the crown is rightfully theirs after Henry VII Tudor decapitated the last Angevin heir to the throne, Edouard Plantagenet, in 1499.

Italy's highest court ruled that telling a man he has "no balls" as an insult is a crime punishable with a fine because it hurts male pride in a ruling on a curious row between two cousins.

The case was brought to the supreme court by a lawyer named only as Vittorio against his cousin Alberto, a justice of the peace, for the phrase uttered during a heated courtroom exchange in the southern Italian city of Potenza.

[...]

The ruling, which comes after years of legal dispute, did not specify whether any insults against women should now also be considered crimes.