Aid organization Borderline Europe has been honored with the 2012 Aachen Peace Prize for its criticism of what it calls the EU's harsh border control policies that leave the union with blood on its hands.

Refugees coming to Europe seem to top the headlines only when major tragedies strike - but the drama persists even when the coverage doesn't. For many years, people from Africa have made dangerous trips in inadequate vessels in an effort to seek refuge on European shores. And for many years, European authorities have tried to stop them. Aid organization Borderline Europe has been trying to give refugees a voice since 2007.

Coast guards in Italy, Greece, Spain and France are supported logistically and with personnel by the EU border protection agency Frontex. Their mission verges on the absurd. On the one hand, boats with refugees are to be turned around - using force if necessary - but, on the other hand, no person's life is to be endangered in the process. In fact, the border guards must offer help when migrants face visible dangers, whether caused by sickness or water or fuel shortages on board - or simply when a boat is so full that it could sink.

The German government on Monday reaffirmed its commitment to Israel after media reports said relations between the two countries had been damaged by an unconfirmed deal to supply Egypt with two German-made submarines.

OAS_RICH('Middle2'); A German government spokesman declined to comment on an article which appeared in the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram last Friday and cited the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian navy, Osama al-Gindi, as saying: "We have agreed to a deal with Germany to procure two submarines of the latest 209 Class."

On Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said only: "There has been no change in the German government's position towards Israel, in the commitment the German government feels towards Israel's security."

But he declined to comment on the supposed deal, saying the government maintained secrecy concerning matters dealt with by the Federal Security Council, a government committee that decides on sensitive weapons export deals.

Israeli newspaper Jediot Achronot reported on Sunday that ties between Israel and Germany had dramatically deteriorated because of the deal. The Israeli government declined to comment on Monday.

Class 209 submarines are built by the companies HDW and Nordseewerke. Germany has sold some 60 of those vessels to 12 nations.

Fears about Egypt Grow in Israel

Israel's relations with Egypt have deteriorated since Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February 2011. The Egyptian revolution has stirred fears in Israel that Egypt may undermine the peace treaty the two nations signed in 1979. According to Jediot Achronot newspaper, Israel is worried that its navy may fall behind if Egypt gets modern German submarines.

In the past few weeks, the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has fired the chief of his air force and border guard patrol; has shut down the Swedish Embassy in the country and kicked out the ambassador; and just last week fired his long-serving foreign minister. The reason? Teddy bears.

In early July, Tomas Mazetti, a marketing executive with the Swedish firm Studio Total, took off in a single- engine propeller plane from an airfield in Lithuania, donned a furry bear mask, and headed for Belarus. When his plane was inside the country, known as the last dictatorship in Europe, he released his cargo: several hundred teddy bears carrying slogans calling for democracy and increased freedom of expression. After nearly 90 minutes inside Belarusian airspace, he turned and headed back towards Lithuania, unmolested by the country's air defences.

Initially, the Belarus authorities denied it had ever happened, but when photographs started appearing on the internet, all hell broke loose. "Was this the stupidity of specific actors or systemic mistakes in the defence of the airspace?" Mr Lukashenko raged at a meeting of his security chiefs, demanding to know why the plane had not been shot down.

Perhaps the most disturbing victims of the teddy bear raid, however, are not the Swedish diplomats or Belarusian officials, but two locals who on the surface appear to have had very little to do with the Swedish stunt. Anton Suryapin, an ambitious 20-year-old photographer who had started his own news agency, was sent photographs of the teddy bears landing near a Belarusian village. He published the photos on his website, realising it was a journalistic coup.

There was lots of discussion online about the pictures, but nothing more happened for more than a week. Then on 13 July, the police and KGB, as the security services are still known in the country, arrived at his apartment.

A founder of the Pirate Bay filesharing website has been arrested in Cambodia at the request of Swedish police.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, 27, was detained in Phnom Penh by officers executing an international warrant issued against him in April after he did not turn up to serve a one-year jail sentence for copyright violations.

In Sweden, Warg's former defence lawyer Ola Salomonsson confirmed the arrest, according to the Aftonbladet website.

Warg and the site's co-founders - Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, and financier Carl Lundstroem - were convicted of encouraging copyright violations in 2009.

Neij, Sunde and Lundstroem all had their one-year jail terms reduced to between four and 10 months on appeal in 2010. They were also ordered to pay nearly $7m (£4.4m) in damages for copyright infringement to music and movie companies.

Warg did not appear at the appeal hearing, with his lawyer claiming he was too ill. The court upheld his sentence in his absence.

European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso has said EU institutions need more power over member states to fight the crisis.

Speaking on Saturday (1 September) in The Hague at a meeting of constitutional court judges organised by Yale University, he called for a "European renewal" and for a further "leap" of integration.

"We are experiencing a situation in which we need greater unity and coherence between our policies, as well as greater legislative harmonisation ... We need greater institutional integration. We need to consolidate a transnational order that through shared sovereignty guarantees the protection of our citizens," he said.

"The present crisis has shown the limits of individual action by nation states. Europe and the principles of the Treaty need to be renewed."

Barroso noted that deeper political union must come with "appropriate mechanisms of accountability" for Brussels.

But he blamed the EU's financial mess on profligacy by individual countries.

"If the member states do not in practice abide by the fundamental principles they have all agreed, then we are faced with a crisis of credibility," he said.

"While the immediate causes of the crisis currently affecting the European Union are indeed financial and economic, they are also, on a more fundamental level, the product of a crisis of values and of the non-respect of the norms," he added.

His remarks come at the start of the new political season after the summer break in Europe.

Despite pledges from governments across Eastern Europe and Central Asia to fight HIV/AIDS - one of the eight Millennium Development Goals - the region has the world's fastest-growing HIV epidemic.

Punitive drug policies, discrimination and problems with access to medicines and important therapy are all driving an epidemic which is unlikely to be contained, world experts say, until governments in countries with the worst problems change key policies and approaches to the disease.

Daniel Wolfe, director of the International Harm Reduction Development Programme at the Open Society Foundations, told IPS: "In most post-Soviet countries, where HIV remains concentrated among injecting drug users, harsh policies and discrimination in healthcare settings continue to cripple the AIDS response."

Figures showing the extent of the region's problems with the disease make grim reading. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), while HIV infection rates are actually falling globally, Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) is seeing the reverse.

The WHO says that there were 170,000 new HIV infections in the region in 2011. New infections have risen 22 percent in the EECA since 2005, and there is no sign of a slowdown.

Injection drug use has been identified as fuelling the epidemic - accounting for up to 70 percent of new infections, according to the WHO.

Activists say the key to tackling the epidemic lies first and foremost in combating the injecting drug use problem, but that official and unofficial stances towards drugs and their users are stopping the problem being effectively tackled, or are even making it worse.

Dasha Ocheret of the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, told IPS: "Punitive drug policies have to be stopped. People are afraid to get treatment for fear of criminal prosecution or problems with the police in other forms and there are situations where people would rather risk getting HIV than go somewhere like a needle exchange centre."

Russia and the Ukraine are widely seen as facing the greatest problems, with official policies in the former being blamed for hindering the fight against HIV/AIDS in other countries in the region too.

Opiate-substitution therapy (OST), a treatment for drug users in which methadone or buprenorphine are provided to heroin users, which is standard practice in much of the rest of the world, is banned by law in Russia. Public promotion of its use is punishable by jail.

Critics of methadone treatment in Russia argue that it keeps patients in addiction, while others claim western countries want the treatment offered in Russia for commercial gain. They also warn that methadone would probably end up being sold on the black market, sparking another drug problem.

But with Russia emerging in recent years as a major donor in the EECA region, it is also exporting its policies, including on OST, along with its money, and there are fears this could lead to OST programmes being shelved or restricted in other states.

"Russia is a serious regional player and its policy on drugs, like its policies on other drugs, influence policies in other countries in the region," said Ocheret.

According to a report in the Expressen newspaper, which obtained previously classified documents from the US military's Central Command, a Swedish intelligence agency helped US war planners determine which targets to hit in a bombing raid to be carried out in March 2003.

Specifically, the US military was interested in learning more about Swedish-built bunkers in the Iraqi capital as the Pentagon suspected that one bunker, which was officially a safe room for civilians, may have also been used by the Iraqi military or the country's leaders.

The document explains that the US military obtained data about the bunkers through "intelligence exchanged with Sweden and the U.S.".

Last autumn, Expressen reported that high-ranking US military experts made a secret visit to Sweden in January/February 2003 to meet with officials from Swedish military intelligence agency MUST, reportedly to discuss the bunkers.

The revelations prompted a Swedish prosecutor to launch a preliminary investigation into whether a single employee with MUST gave secret information to the Americans.

However, the probe was shuttered after the prosecutor concluded that no espionage had taken place.

At the time of the Swedish-US intelligence cooperation detailed in the document, Sweden's Social Democrat-led government had pronounced its opposition to any invasion that wasn't sanctioned by the United Nations.

Following the March 20, 2003 bombing raid which marked the start of the Iraq War, then Swedish prime minister criticized the US-led invasion as "unfortunate".

"For starters, they acted without the support of the international community," he said the day after the attack, according to Expressen.

ECB president says in a closed door session of the European Parliament that the ECB considers purchases of bonds with a maturity of up to 3 years as legal under its mandate; Draghi also laid out a plan to divide the job of bank regulation, not based on size but on functional grounds; Spain's deputy PM Soraya Saenz de Santamaria says it was now up to the ECB to save the euro; Draghi also strengthen the monetary transmissions argument, pointing out that the ECB cannot fulfil its price stability goals; the latest ECB data show that Spanish and Italian companies are paying much higher interest rates than German counterparts; Ewald Nowotny says this is not the time to worry about inflation: he is worried about a Japanese-style scenario instead; Markit has revised downwards the data for the eurozone's PMI for August; Frankfurter Allgemeine reports that Michel Barnier plans a separate proposals for a central bank recapitalisation and deposit insurance funds; the two may be merged; Wolfgang Schauble signalled readiness to compromise on bank regulation, but insisted that the ECB cannot supervise 6000 banks; Andalusia says it will apply for aid under Spain's rescue fund; the Valencian government has almost doubled its deficit forecast; Luis de Guindos says Spain would consider a rescue if the conditions are right; Italian car sales fall to lowest levels since 1964; the proportion of foreign holders of Italian bonds has dropped to 30%; In the Netherlands, Labour closes gap to anti-bailout Socialist party after television debates; Mark Rutte's party now leading in the polls; Troika officials are expected to reject planned cuts in defence and public administration in Greece; likely to ask for more pension cuts and lower minimum wages; two thirds of Austrians are against further bailouts according to a poll; an Austrian billionaire gets into politics with his call for abandoning the euro; Paul de Backer, meanwhile, reminds the Germans that they still owe Greece reparation payments; Paolo Manasse says it takes international coordination to solve the eurozone crisis; Claus Hulverscheidt, meanwhile, says the German government acts with duplicity by publicly endorsing the Bundesbank and privately endorsing Draghi.

Speaking in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Monday (3 September) in Sofia, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and Finance Minister Simeon Djankov said the decision was the result of the debt crisis and the double dip recession facing the eurozone, along with rising public opposition to joining the single currency.

...

Bulgaria already fulfills the economic criteria to join the euro, having reduced its budget deficit to 2.1 percent in 2011, comfortably below the 3 percent limit laid out in the Stability and Growth Pact.

The country, whose 17.5 percent debt burden is also one of the lowest in the EU, has pegged its Lev currency to a currency basket including the euro but is not in ERM II, a formal EU mechanism for limiting currency fluctuation. Countries must spend at least two years in ERM II before joining the euro.

Und dann appellierte er an die traditionell tief sitzende Angst seiner Landsleute vor Fremdbestimmung, was einem nationalen Trauma gleichkäme: "Und glauben Sie mir, jede slowenische Regierung wird immer noch viel sozialer sein als das mildeste Diktat der Troika." Schon vor Wochen hatte Janša den Druck auf die Opposition erhöht, indem er eine Vertrauensabstimmung im Parlament ankündigte. Da aber selbst in Janšas Fünf-Parteien-Koalition Streit herrscht, hat er seine Drohung zunächst nicht wahr gemacht und auf diesen Herbst verschoben.

And then [Slovenian PN Janez Jansa] eppealed to his compatrits' traditionally deep-seated fear foreign rule, which is a national trauma: "and believe me, any Slovenian government will be much more social than the mildest diktak from the Troika." Already weeks ago Janša had increased pressure on the opposition, by threatening a confidence motion in Parliament. But stife reigns also in Janša's onw five-party coalitionm and so he hasn't made good on his threat and postponed it to the Autumn.

The number of French unemployed has broken through the 3-million barrier for the first time since 1999, the country's leaders say.

The latest total adds pressure on President Francois Hollande, whose administration is under attack for doing not doing enough to fix the economy. France's unemployment rate is currently 10 percent.

Breaking the 3 million mark carries more symbolic importance than economic but it was covered extensively in the French media over the weekend. The Ministry of Employment says the 3-million threshold was crossed in 1996 and again in 1999.

Employment Minister Michel Sapin confirmed the total on French radio on Sunday and warned that the numbers would likely get worse. Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called the numbers "very violent". The government announced last week that it had counted more than 2.9 million unemployed people in July, so the threshold was expected to be passed in August.

Pressure is mounting on the European Central Bank (ECB) ahead of a key meeting on Thursday (6 September), when it is expected to shed more light on a controversial bond-buying plan aimed at helping Spain and Italy.

"The ECB is the bazooka, the firepower, the muscle, the one that has the capacity to impress upon the markets," said Angel Gurria, a Mexican economist chairing the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development - a club of the world's most developed economies.

Asked by newswires whether the ECB should buy Italian and Spanish bonds in order to lower their borrowing costs, he said: "Yes, they should. If you ask when, the answer is the sooner the better."

Burria spoke on the sidelines of a conference in Slovenia's lakeside resort of Bled on Sunday.

"We have passed the question of moral hazard, these are performing countries [in terms of reforms], now it is the system that is at stake," he added.

Despite support from several leading economists, the bond-buying move still lacks backing from the ECB's most influential member - the German Bundesbank.

Spain's Andalusia has become the latest region to request a financial lifeline from the central government.

The region had asked for 1bn euros (£791m) worth of aid to be granted immediately, said Susana Diaz, a senior politician from the region.

She said that Andalusia was following in the footsteps of other regions and made the request for an advance "because we need liquidity".

Valencia, Murcia and Catalonia have requested bailouts in recent weeks.

Last week, Valencia said it would ask for 4.5bn euros in bailout money, more than had been suggested when it first made the plea earlier this summer. Debt-ridden Catalonia has asked for a bailout of 5bn euros, while Murcia has said it will need 300m euros.

A 18bn-euro public fund was set up by Madrid to aid its 17 autonomous regions, which are in deep debt.

The conditions which the Spanish government will impose on loans from the fund have not yet been announced.

But Mario Jimenez, the spokesman for the Socialist Party (PSOE) in Andalusia's left-leaning coalition government, warned against trying to impose a "corralito", which refers to capital controls and harks back to Argentina a decade ago, when its government froze bank accounts in order to prevent bank runs.

"What shouldn't happen is to run the financing of the autonomous communities like a corralito," he said.

Bulgaria, the European Union's poorest member state and a rare fiscal bright spot for the bloc, has indefinitely frozen long-held plans to adopt the single currency, marking the latest fiscally prudent country to cool its enthusiasm for the embattled currency.

Speaking in interviews in Sofia, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and Finance Minister Simeon Djankov said that the decision to shelve plans to join the currency area, a longtime strategic aim of successive governments in the former communist state, came in response to deteriorating economic conditions and rising uncertainty over the prospects of the bloc, alongside a decisive shift of public opinion in Bulgaria, which is entering its third year of an austerity program.

"The momentum has shifted in our thinking and among the public...Right now, I don't see any benefits of entering the euro zone, only costs," Mr. Djankov said. "The public rightly wants to know who would we have to bailout when we join? It's too risky for us and it's also not certain what the rules are and what are they likely to be in one year or two," Mr. Djankov said.

Bulgaria's move to freeze accession plans comes as Europe's debt crisis has caused other fiscally prudent European nations to back away from adopting the currency. Lithuania's Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius last week said that his country would only join the common currency when "Europe was ready," signaling that his government had tempered its previous enthusiasm. That followed a statement from Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis that his government would decide on a euro-adoption timetable in the spring of 2013, contrasting with a previous pledge to join in 2014.

Bulgaria has won plaudits for successfully reducing its budget deficit to 2.1% of gross domestic product in 2011 by slashing wages and pensions. The economy is stabilized by a currency board that pegs the currency, the lev, to the euro and forces the government to hew to tight policy.

Activity in euro-zone factories fell further in August as new orders dwindled, suggesting the outlook for the 17-nation economy remains poor, a survey of purchasing executives showed Monday.

The decrease in manufacturing activity was less steep in August than in July, but still marks a 13th month of contraction that will drag on the economy overall in the third quarter.

Data company Markit said the manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index for the 17 nations that use the euro rose to 45.1 in August from 44 in July. The latest reading remains below the 50 break-even level, indicating a drop in activity compared with July.

While the pace of decline slowed in Europe's largest economy, Germany, as well as in France, new orders for German exports suffered their steepest retreat in over three years, underscoring the vulnerability of its economy to global stagnation.

Interest rates paid by companies in the eurozone's weaker economies have surged, highlighting the bloc's fragmentation as the European Central Bank loses control of borrowing costs.

ECB data on Monday showed Spanish small businesses face the highest bank borrowing costs in almost four years - while interest rates paid by German rivals are at record lows.

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The sharply diverging interest rates have put southern European companies increasingly at a competitive disadvantage to their northern European rivals.

They provide a gloomy backdrop to this week's ECB governing council meeting, which will discuss plans for intervening in eurozone government debt markets, as investors price in the chance of a break-up of the 14-year old monetary union.

David Riley, head of sovereign ratings at Fitch Ratings, said: "The fragmentation is getting worse. If this trend gains even greater momentum we'll face a fundamental reordering of the eurozone. It undercuts the whole rationale of the euro, and could eventually make it easier for it to break up."

In a lot of ways George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) is Britain's answer to Paul Ryan. True, he's a toned-down version -- no Ayn Rand, please, we're British -- but other aspects of package are there in full force: he's articulate, has a vision that's completely at odds with everything we actually know about macroeconomics, and he was for a while the darling not just of the right but of self-proclaimed centrists on both sides of the Atlantic.

Osborne's big idea was that Britain should turn to fiscal austerity now now now, even though the economy remained deeply depressed; it would all work out, he insisted, because the confidence fairy would come to the rescue. Never mind those whining Keynesians who said that premature austerity would send Britain into a double-dip recession.

Strange to say, Britain's recovery stalled soon after Cameron/Osborne began their new policies, and the country is now in a double-dip recession.

So is Cameron rethinking his faith in Osborne? According to the FT, no:

But Mr Osborne continues to enjoy David Cameron's backing and will stay as chancellor when the prime minister this week conducts his reshuffle, expected to take place on Tuesday.

Instead of a real policy rethink, what Cameron and Osborne apparently have in mind is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic a set of basically minor twiddles involving credit and planning authorizations, which seem highly unlikely to make any significant difference.

Still, there is criticism from within the Tory party -- except what the dissidents want is not a return to conventional macro, but "right-wing shock therapy".

Let's replace our fixation on growth with a steady-state economy focusing on lower consumption, leisure and ecological health

... our present money system can only function in a growing economy. Money is created as interest-bearing debt: it only comes into being when someone promises to pay back even more of it. Therefore, there is always more debt than there is money. In a growth economy that is not a problem, because new money (and new debt) is constantly lent into existence so that existing debt can be repaid. But when growth slows, good lending opportunities become scarce. Indebtedness rises faster than income, debt service becomes more difficult, bankruptcies and layoffs rise.

Central banks used to have a solution for that. ...

<...>

... what if quantitative easing were combined with debt forgiveness? The banks get bailout after bailout - what about the rest of us? The Fed could purchase student loans, mortgages or consumer debt and, by fiat, reduce interest rates on those loans to zero, or even reduce principal. That would liberate millions from the debt chase, while freeing up purchasing power for those who are truly underconsuming.

More radically, central banks should be allowed to breach the "zero lower bound" that has rendered monetary policy impotent today. If investors are unwilling to lend even when risk-free return on investment is 0%, why not reduce that to -2%, even -5%? Implemented as a liquidity tax on bank reserves, it would allow credit to circulate in the absence of economic growth, forming the monetary foundation of a steady-state economy where leisure and ecological health grow instead of consumption.

One thing is clear: we are at the end of an era. No one seriously believes that we will grow ourselves out of debt again. There is an alternative. It is time to begin the transition to a steady-state economy.

Arab Gulf monarchies lambasted Syria's regime for deploying heavy weapons against its civilians, as more than 100 people were killed in raids, bombings and air strikes, according to a watchdog toll count.

As the violence raged, new international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said change in Syria was "unavoidable", although he carefully refrained from calling for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, as his predecessor Kofi Annan had.

Speaking to the BBC, the former Algerian foreign minister admitted that his new mission was "nearly impossible".

He said he was "scared of the weight of responsibility. People are already saying people are dying and what are you doing?"

Jihad Makdissi, a spokesman for Assad's embattled government, announced Brahimi would "soon" travel to Damascus, expressing confidence that "he will listen to us".

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said more than 20 people were killed in an army offensive on Al-Fan village in Hama province, one of the main arenas of conflict in the more than 17-month uprising.

The Britain-based watchdog had no details on whether those killed were civilians or rebel fighters, "but all 21 of the dead were men", said its director Rami Abdel Rahman.

Horrific images shot and posted on YouTube by activists in Al-Fan showed a long row of bodies shrouded in white cloths, laid out on the ground surrounded by scores of weeping men, women and children.

State news agency SANA said all of those killed during the Al-Fan clashes were from "an armed terrorist group that was attacking citizens and security forces".

In the aftermath of Libya's revolution, Libyan fighters and weapons are flooding areas of conflict in neighbouring countries, according to local fighters and officials in several countries.

Libya's still heavily armed militias continue to sell their weapons on the black market directly to foreign militias from war-ridden countries, or to arms-dealers from third countries who then sell them on to warring factions, they say.

"All of the militias are involved in selling weapons. There is no law in Libya, still no functioning government, and the country's security forces are too weak to control the situation, so selling weapons is regarded as legal by many of the rebels," said Ridwan, a former rebel who fought with Tripoli's Suq Al Jumma Katiba (brigades).

"Many of the fighters got greedy following the war and believe they are entitled to compensation for the sacrifices they made for their country as they believe the government has abandoned them," Ridwan, who did not give his last name, told IPS.

"The guys sell an AK-47 on the black market for 1,000 Libyan dinars (800 dollars). An anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back of a pickup truck goes for between 8000-10,000 LD. Most of the weapons are smuggled to the borders, especially Turkey."

Libyan Islamist fighters are also reported to have swollen the ranks of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in their fight against Syrian President Bashar Al Assad's security forces.

The presence of Islamic extremists in North Africa's greater Sahel region, bordered by Algeria, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Niger, has contributed to destabilising the area.

Tuareg rebels have declared their own state, Azawad, in the northern part of Mali, which has also been invaded by Ansar Dine, an Islamist group that works closely with an organisation known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The Tuareg are an indegenous people in the Saharan region.

As fighting rages on in Mali, reportedly supplemented by Libyan weapons, a number of foreigners have been kidnapped.

By mining natural resources from the occupied Palestinian territories for its own economic purposes, Israel is committing the war crime of pillage in the Dead Sea area, according to a report released Monday by Palestinian human rights group Al Haq.

"Israel is openly in violation of its obligations as an Occupying Power in the (occupied Palestinian territories), because it is encouraging and facilitating the exploitation of Palestinian natural resources and actively assisting their pillaging by private actors," said the Al Haq report, titled `Pillage of the Dead Sea: Israel's Unlawful Exploitation of Natural Resources in the Occupied Palestinian Territory'.

Criminal responsibility for the crime of pillage does not only extend to the state of Israel, but can also be applied to individuals, namely Israeli settlers who benefit from the extraction of resources from the Dead Sea, Al Haq said.

"Although settlers and companies involved in the exploitation of the natural resources of the Dead Sea are mainly encouraged to do so by the State of Israel, they cannot ignore that such resources are considered Palestinian under international law. This should be sufficient to substantiate the `mental element' of the crime of pillage, thus allowing for some Israeli settlers to be considered as the direct perpetrators of that crime," the report stated.

Israel has maintained that numerous covenants of international humanitarian law do not apply to the occupied Palestinian territories since these areas are not under Israel's jurisdiction. Recently, an Israeli government-appointed committee, known as the Levy Committee, also ruled that Israel is not an occupying power and that therefore, Israeli settlements in the West Bank are legal.

Nonetheless, many international jurists have maintained that Israel is violating basic principles of international law in its occupation of the Palestinian territories and exploitation of the area's resources. Article 47 of the Hague Convention (1907), which outlines war crimes under international humanitarian law, states that "pillage is formally forbidden."

South Africa has released the first of 270 miners detained more than two weeks ago after police shot dead 34 of their colleagues in a bid to break up a wildcat strike at Lonmin's Marikana platinum mine.

"The murder charges against the accused are at this point of time withdrawn," Magistrate Esau Bodigelo said on Monday as he released dozens of miners in the court in Ga-Rankuwa near Pretoria.

"You may stand down," he added as applause broke out in the courtroom.

The men were charged last week under an obscure apartheid-era security law with murdering their fellow miners, despite video of the incident clearly showing it was police who fired on the strikers.

State prosecutors provisionally withdrew the murder charges at the weekend following a public outcry.

The releases are being processed in batches with no bail required but the group will return to court on February 12 next year on charges of public violence and for holding an illegal gathering.

"They [the freed miners] were really joyous when they left the court, a sense of triumph even if it is a very small triumph," Al Jazeera's Tania Page reported from Ga-Rankuwa on Monday.

"It vindicates them that they were allowed free after there was such an outcry against that murder charge laid against them by the National Prosecuting Authority."

Although the murder and attempted murder charges were dropped for all 270 arrested miners, not all of them were released on Monday. Police said addresses had to be verified as a condition for their release.

"We were expecting 140 men to walk free from this court on Monday, we didn't see that," our correspondent said. "We think it was about 50 or 60, but we understand that on Thursday the remainder of that 270 will walk free from this court as well."

Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half- starved, holds in his gnarled hands the reason for his hunger: a tattered card entitling him to subsidized rations that now serves as a symbol of India's biggest food heist.

Kishen has had nothing from the village shop for 15 months. Yet 20 minutes' drive from Satnapur, past bone-dry fields and tiny hamlets where children with distended bellies play, a government storage facility five football fields long bulges with wheat and rice. By law, those 57,000 tons of food are meant for Kishen and the 105 other households in Satnapur with ration books. They're meant for some of the 350 million families living below India's poverty line of 50 cents a day.

Instead, as much as $14.5 billion in food was looted by corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates over the past decade in Kishen's home state of Uttar Pradesh alone, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The theft blunted the country's only weapon against widespread starvation -- a five-decade-old public distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India's hungriest.

"This is the most mean-spirited, ruthlessly executed corruption because it hits the poorest and most vulnerable in society," said Naresh Saxena, who, as a commissioner to the nation's Supreme Court, monitors hunger-based programs across the country. "What I find even more shocking is the lack of willingness in trying to stop it."

Before Mitt Romney retired from Bain Capital, the enormously profitable investment firm he founded, he made sure to lock in his gains, both realized and expected, for years to come.

He did so, in part, the way millions of other Americans do -- with the tax benefits of an individual retirement account. But he was able to turbocharge the impact of those advantages and other tax breaks in his severance package from Bain in a way that few but the country's super-rich can ever hope to do.

As a result, his IRA could be worth as much as $87 million, according to his estimates, and he can continue to earn tax-advantaged income from Bain more than a decade after he formally left the firm.

The Republican presidential nominee has been "scrupulous" about observing the tax code, said Romney campaign spokeswoman Michele Davis. "His income is reported and taxed in full compliance with U.S. law, and he has paid 100 percent of what he has owed." She added that the financial holdings of Romney and his wife, Ann, are managed by a blind trust the Romneys do not control.

... a tongue-in-cheek critique of Americans has gone viral on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter, with over 42,000 retweets and 5,400 comments.

I've already been in the U.S. for a long time. I regret that choice. We've been [fooled] by Western media the whole time, making us think that the U.S. is a modernized country. Harboring hopes of studying American modern science in order to serve my motherland, I moved heaven and earth in order to make it over to this "superpower." But the result has been very disappointing!

(1) The U.S. is actually a giant, undeveloped farming village. ...

(2) Americans don't understand economics. ...

(3) American construction is too primitive. ...

(4) Americans' thinking is naive and backwards. ...

(5) Americans don't understand [how to eat] game. ...

(6) Americans don't understand self respect. ...

(7) American elementary school students don't have lofty ideals. ...

(8) Americans cause a big ruckus every time they see a little illness. ...

(9) American public opinion is nuts. ...

(10) Americans are spiritually empty. ...

(11) Americans do not have a concept of time. ...

(12) American stores make no sense: You can return something weeks after buying it without even giving a reason. ...

(13) The U.S. isn't safe. ...

(14) Americans are wimps. ...

(15) Americans lack emotion. ...

(16) Americans aren't sensible. ...

(17) Looking at the above photo, it's enough reason for us to look down on the Americans! ...

Anyone who wants to see what irreversibility looks like should head to Jerusalem. The Arab residents of East Jerusalem have long continued to see themselves as part of the Palestinian community of the West Bank, even though they are officially Israeli residents and are entitled to vote in municipal (but not national ) elections. But that appears to be starting to change.

Take the East Jerusalem Palestinians who aspire to an "Israeli" education. They no longer wish to make do with Palestinian matriculation certificates that keep them out of Israeli jobs, and they don't want to wait in line at a roadblock to attend Palestinian institutes of higher learning. They would prefer to earn an Israeli matriculation certificate and attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

[...]

If the theory of Israelization is correct, the next step for Arabs living in East Jerusalem should be immersion in local politics. So far, they have largely refused to vote in Israeli municipal elections, as a way of making a statement about their distinct identity. Their lack of governmental representation has made it easier for the city, and the country as a whole, to discriminate against them when it comes to apportioning slices of the budget.

[...]

A united Palestinian ticket (if there were to be one ) could, based on population data, win between 10 and 13 of the 31 seats on the city council. There are even some pundits who think it is possible, even if unlikely, that as long as the Jewish vote continues to be split along religious lines and the city's Arabs succeed in remaining united enough to field only one ticket, the next mayor of the Israeli capital could be a Palestinian from East Jerusalem.

At the time of writing these lines, the sun continues to shine and even though the Muslim Brotherhood is in power in Egypt, the country has not been cloaked in darkness. It was not out of excessive love of secularism that Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi declared in Tehran that Egypt is a modern, constitutional democracy. Egypt has not adapted itself to the Brotherhood, it is the Brotherhood that has adapted itself to Egypt, which is known as "Umm al-Dunya," the mother of the world.

And at a time when the emissary of the prime minister of the only democracy in the Middle East - National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror - was busy requesting the blessing of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef to bomb the Iranian nuclear project, Cairo was filled with demonstrators demanding that the Brotherhood movement be dispersed. Democracy works in strange ways.

Two of the world's last uncontacted tribes are under threat from oil exploration deep into the heart of the Amazon forest in Ecuador, according to conservationists, who say this may indirectly add to the pressure on wildlife.

The Tagaeri and the Taromenane - who have fought off illegal loggers and Catholic missionaries with spears and blowpipes to maintain their isolated, nomadic existence - are now at risk from the construction of roads and drilling wells as petroleum firms carve up the Yasuni national park.

Scientists believe Yasuni is the most biodiverse place on Earth and large swaths of the park remain in pristine condition thanks partly to the ferocity of the indigenous people's resistance to intruders.

That is changing. Although the rights of these tribes are recognised by the country's constitution, their existence has been largely ignored by government authorities responsible for drawing up the boundaries for development, say researchers who have studied their interaction with often-violent and lawless frontiers of globalisation.

The Taromenane - known locally as the "red feet" - are thought to be offshoots of the Huaorani, who speak the same language but have suffered a very different fate. The Huaorani - which means "human being" - also used to be almost entirely carnivorous nomads and fearsome defenders of their rainforest home. They resisted contact until 1958, but now most are settled, often around oil well communities with whom they have a parasitic relationship.

BASF, the German chemical giant, has distanced itself from the rest of the industry by saying Europe's REACH chemical safety law was worth the investment in the end. A review of the legislation is expected this month.

From the moment it was tabled until its eventual adoption in 2006, the REACH regulation gave rise to one of the most epic lobbying battles in the EU's history.

The bitter campaign saw chemical companies warn they could be forced to close factories and leave Europe because of the extra costs generated by the EU law, which sought to protect consumer health and the environment.

These included widely publicised industry studies which claimed that REACH would cost billions of euros to implement, causing millions of job losses in Germany.

"BASF was possibly the single most important player in influencing politicians and in leading the industry lobby against the environmental and health objectives of REACH," said Jorgo Riss, from the Greenpeace European Unit in a paper recalling the REACH lobbying saga.

BASF U-turn on REACH

Six years on, the European Commission is preparing to launch a review of the controversial legislation.

But BASF has now radically changed its communications strategy.

Grape growers are lining up support from EU national governments and the European Parliament to protect limits on vine planting that are due to expire by 2016, a liberalisation move they claim will destroy one of Europe's premier industries.

The planting debate is gaining momentum as a high-level group organised by Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Cioloş searches for a compromise and lawmakers weigh amendments to the EU's common market organisation, or CMO, that for years has allowed government intervention to support and stabilise grape growing.

Backed by national governments in major wine producing countries, vintners are pressuring Parliament and national leaders to reverse a four-year-old decision to lift restrictions which, unlike production quotas, limit how many vines can be planted. Though the planting rules  are due to expire in 2016, national governments can maintain restrictions for two additional years.

Stéphane Le Foll, France's agriculture minister, said last week he had lined up the support of the German, Italian and Spanish governments to defend planting rights, EurActiv France reported.

Agricultural organisations say ending planting restrictions could further weaken a sector that is already battling cheap imports, overproduction and declining demand for a glass of wine. Land under cultivation in the EU fell 12% from 2001 to 2011, International Organisation of Vine and Wine figures show.

`Rural exodus'

They also say those bucolic landscapes covered in vineyards have add-on effects - tourism and rural preservation - that Europe can ill afford to lose. The debate is also full of emotion - the regional wine growers association, AREV, adopted a resolution in May defending planting rights, calling vine cultivation one of the "

Tigers aren't known for being accommodating, but a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the carnivores in Nepal are taking the night shift to better coexist with humans.

The revelation that tigers and people are sharing exactly the same space -- the same roads and trails -- of Chitwan National Park flies in the face of long-held convictions in conservation circles. It also underscores how successful conservation efforts need sciences that takes into account both nature and humans.

"As our planet becomes more crowded, we need to find creative solutions that consider both human and natural systems," said Jianguo "Jack" Liu, the director of the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University. "Sustainability can be achieved if we have a good understanding of the complicated connections between both worlds. We've found something very interesting is happening in Nepal that holds promise for both humans and nature to thrive."

Conventional conservation wisdom is that tigers need plenty of people-free space, which often leads to people being relocated or their access to resources compromised to make way for tigers.

Neil Carter, MSU doctoral student and one of the paper's co-authors, spent two seasons setting motion-detecting camera traps. His analysis of the images shows that people and tigers are walking the same paths, albeit at different times.

in the just-released Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, witnessed by Stephen Hawking, a prominent group of scientists has declared that humans are not unique in ways that matter. Says the panel, "Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these [same] neurological substrates [as human beings]." Yes, they stand on their toes or tentacles, snatch their offspring from their arms or their arboreal nests, and they feel the same way about it as would you or I. The question is, how is this knowledge to inform our behavior? After all, shouldn't it?

Of course, hundreds of studies have already demonstrated animals' logical, mathematical, linguistic, and emotional intelligence. For example, for years we blithely believed that humans were the only species to use tools, until researchers documented that wasps were using pebbles as hammers, octopuses were carrying coconut shells as portable hiding places, crows were using sticks to dig in the ground for grubs and many other examples. The mathematical abilities of fish have proved to be on a par with those of monkeys, dolphins and bright young human children.

We know that elephants flirt with each other and gather to grieve over the loss of a loved one, that cows shed tears, and that monkeys have refused to pull a chain to access their only source of food if doing so caused another monkey, even a stranger, to experience a painful electric shock. In that famous study, one monkey starved and went without water for nearly two weeks to avoid hurting his fellow. When the experiment was repeated, other monkeys also chose to starve rather than giving shocks to another monkey. A similar study done with human subjects showed that 65 percent of people continued to give other people increasingly strong electric shocks if an experimenter simply told them to do so. It's not the monkeys who need their heads examined!

Patient after patient asked: Is eating organic food, which costs more, really better for me?

Unsure, Stanford University doctors dug through reams of research to find out -- and concluded there's little evidence that going organic is much healthier, citing only a few differences involving pesticides and antibiotics.

Eating organic fruits and vegetables can lower exposure to pesticides, including for children -- but the amount measured from conventionally grown produce was within safety limits, the researchers reported Monday.

Nor did the organic foods prove more nutritious.

"I was absolutely surprised," said Dr. Dena Bravata, a senior research affiliate at Stanford and long-time internist who began the analysis because so many of her patients asked if they should switch.

"There are many reasons why someone might choose organic foods over conventional foods," from environmental concerns to taste preferences, Bravata stressed. But when it comes to individual health, "there isn't much difference."

Gene therapy has been used to give mice born without a sense of smell the ability to sniff their surroundings, an international team of researchers say.

The mice had a genetic disease which affected microscopic hairs in their body - called cilia - which can detect chemicals in the air.

Researchers hope their findings will lead to treatments for diseased cilia, which can cause blindness, deafness and kidney disease in people.

The study is in Nature Medicine.

Microscopic cilia stick out from many cells in the body. A range of genetic disorders called ciliopathies result in damaged cilia which can be fatal or severely debilitating. One symptom can be a lifetime without a sense of smell, called congenital anosmia.

A 15-year-old Dutch boy has been sentenced to a year in juvenile detention after he confessed to killing a schoolgirl over a row that appears to have begun on Facebook.

Jinhua K was 14 when he fatally stabbed Joyce "Winsie" Hau at her home.

A teenage couple will appear in court next month charged with ordering the killing.

Jinhua was also convicted by the court in the eastern city of Arnhem of attempting to kill his victim's father.

As well as a year in youth detention, he faces up to three years' detention in a psychiatric institution.

The court heard that the row started when school friends Polly W and Joyce "Winsie" Hau fell out over comments Joyce had posted on Polly's Facebook wall.

According to reports in Dutch media, Polly W and her boyfriend gave Jinhua a note with the victim's address and let him know when she would be home.

Jinhua, whose surname is not given under Dutch law, apologised to the court for his actions. He had argued that he had been put under pressure by the girl and was unable to disobey her.

Germany's top-selling women's magazine is considering abandoning its use of amateur models barely two years after deciding to banish professional ones.

The fortnightly Brigitte hit the headlines in 2009 when it said it would feature only "real women" in its pages, part of a backlash against the use of ultra-thin professional models in fashion.

However, the magazine is reported to have found working with amateur models a challenge and the move has done nothing to increase sales.

Now, with Stephan Schäfer taking over at the helm as co-editor-in-chief alongside Brigitte Huber, the magazine is reconsidering the policy.

Schäfer has been brought in to give Brigitte, which has been providing German women with a mix of fashion, recipes and lifestyle tips since 1954, a facelift.

"Naturally there is now a new direction at the magazine, which means everything is under review and that includes the no-models policy," confirmed Sabine Grüngreiff, spokeswoman for the magazine's publisher, Gruner + Jahr.

Back in 2009, the former editor-in-chief Andreas Lebert had claimed he was fed up having to retouch photographs of ultra-thin models.

"For years we've had to use Photoshop to fatten the girls up," he said. "Especially their thighs and décolletage."

He said Brigitte's readers had complained that they couldn't identify with the women featured in the magazine. That prompted the magazine to make use of ordinary women, with the first model-free issue appearing in January 2010.

China's sexual revolution is underway, but it's a complicated, and sometimes contradictory affair. A new book by American journalist Richard Burger -- of the popular Peking Duck blog -- seeks to address those changes by studying China's sexual history over the past 5,000 years.

Behind the Red Door: Sex in China will be released tomorrow, and the introduction is certainly an eye opener:

Every year, thousands of Chinese women pay for an operation to restore their hymens shortly before their wedding so that husbands can see blood on the sheets on their honeymoon night. Brides-to-be who cannot afford the 4,400 yuan operation (about $700) can walk into one of China's 200,000 sex shops or go online to buy a cheap artificial hymen that seeps artificial blood when punctured. Although the percentage of Chinese women who engage in premarital sex has skyrocketed in urban areas from 15 percent in 1990 to more than 50 percent in 2010, conservative attitudes toward sex, even in big cities like Shanghai, remain largely intact. To most Chinese people, virginity matters, and husbands look forward to their wedding night when they can deflower their young virgin brides. For some husbands, the absence of blood on the sheets can be grounds for divorce.

Burger, a former writer for both the Baltimore Sun and the Global Times was one of the first people to start blogging about China in 2002. He told us he was approached by Earnshaw Books to write a book about the changing face of sex in China.

While the book was based on exhaustive research -- Burger says he personally went through thousands of articles and dissertations -- it's not just a piece of academia. The point of the book is to bring China's sexual revolution to a mainstream audience. We've read an advanced proof of the book and have to say its a great read. Burger was kind enough to give us a short interview about the book.

A new book by Lance Armstrong's former cycling teammate Tyler Hamilton has made its way into the hands of the press.

The book is called THE SECRET RACE: Inside The Hidden World Of The Tour De France. Doping, Cover-Ups, And Winning At All Costs.

David Walsh, a journalist at London's Sunday Times who wrote an early article about Armstrong's suspected doping, described the book this weekend.

Hamilton's book describes in vivid detail the sophisticated system that Hamilton says that Armstrong's U.S. Postal team used to stay ahead of the anti-doping authorities, a challenge that Hamilton says was easy, at least in the early years.

Hamilton's book says that Lance Armstrong not only took part in this cheating system, he ran the system.

In the 1998 Tour de France, for example, Hamilton says, the top riders on the team were supplied with blood-doping drug EPO throughout the race by a motorcycle courier who delivered it to the riders in white lunch bags. The courier also worked as a gardener for Armstrong at his house in Nice. Hamilton wasn't considered good enough to get hand-delivered EPO that year, but he wanted it.

Israeli actress Orly Weinerman reportedly has urged Tony Blair to help save the life of her "discreet" lover, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi.

The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, quoted Weinerman, 41, as saying that Blair - former British prime minister and now envoy of the Middle East Quartet diplomatic grouping - was an "old friend" of Saif al-Islam, the son of the late ruler of Libya, Muammar Gadhafi.

Saif al-Islam Gadhafi is facing the death penalty in Libya, where he is on trial for his role in the killing of protesters during last year's uprising against his father.

Weinerman "dated" Saif al-Islam for six year, after meeting him in London in 2005, the tabloid reported.

The paper quotes her as saying that "Saif worked closely with Mr. Blair before he was captured. The two are old friends."