Belgium has sworn in a new government, ending a record-breaking 541 days of political deadlock.

New Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was sworn in by King Albert II at the royal palace along with his 12 cabinet ministers and six secretaries of state.

Mr Di Rupo, a French-speaking Socialist, took the oath of office in French, Dutch and German - reflecting language sensitivities in the country.

The Europe crisis is thought to have spurred politicians to find a solution.

France and Germany have reaffirmed their commitment to reform the eurozone, after ratings agency Standard and Poor's put most of the zone on "credit watch" over debt crisis fears.

The two countries said proposals for a treaty change agreed on Monday would reinforce governance of the eurozone.

They said their priority was to press ahead with the proposals.

S&P's move means six countries with top AAA ratings would have a 50% chance of seeing their ratings downgraded.

The Government faced calls today  from both Tory and Labour MPs to reform Britain's secretive lobbying system in the wake of revelations in The Independent.

This morning we published details of how Bell Pottinger boasted about its access to the heart of Government to journalists posing as potential clients.

The revelations have increased pressure for the Government to introduce a statutory register of lobbyists.

Conservative backbencher Jesse Norman said that the latest disclosures reaffirmed his view that lobbying was a "canker on the body politic".

David Cameron warned tonight that he will block plans for a new EU Treaty unless European leaders agree to a list of British demands.

The Prime Minister insisted that if eurozone countries want to use the "institutions of Europe" to rescue the single currency, they will have to back a number of "British safeguards" in return.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel renewed calls for reform of the treaty after emergency talks in Paris yesterday.

The aim would be to allow far tougher rules and sanctions governing the eurozone in future to reassure markets about the euro's long-term stability.

So here is the euro plan. It's EFSF RIP.... Instead it's over to fast tracked ESM, European STability Mechanism in mid 2012...

2. Presuming Treaty changes get passed through by March 2012. Then the ESM will be allowed to act as a bank...

3. And if Treaty passed, the ECB will consider the fiscal compact met, and be willing to effectively leverage the ESM. Hey presto. Bazooka.

4. Problems: Ireland referendum, and I suppose Denmark. Brussels invoking various protocols and articles to get round need for referenda

5. The ESM vote in the Bundestag is going to be a helluva ride. That will be off the fence time for Germany. Could topple government.

Yes, as @MattTempest reminded me it's protocol 12 that Brussels is looking at. And, I'm told article 126 and article 136 of the Treaty

Demonstrators trying to hold a second day of protests against vote fraud in Russia's parliamentary elections have clashed with police in Moscow.

Hundreds of officers blocked off Triumphal Square, then began chasing about 100 demonstrators, seizing some and throwing them into police vehicles.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party saw a significant drop in support in Sunday's election but it will still have a majority in parliament. Opponents say even that watered-down victory was due to massive vote fraud.

Britain faces years of public disorder fuelled by the economic crisis, with police battling to keep control of the streets, a former Scotland Yard chief has warned.

Lord Stevens made his warning at the launch of an independent commission into the future of policing, which has been set up by Labour as it tries to outflank the government on law and order.

Labour says the Tory-led government rebuffed its calls for a royal commission into policing, so it effectively set up its own.

Stevens, the last commissioner of the Metropolitan police to complete his term in office, warned the government not to be "insulting" or "arrogant" in dismissing the work of the panel of academics and former police chiefs that he will chair.

The European commission could be empowered to impose austerity measures on eurozone countries that are being bailed out, usurping the functions of government in countries such as Greece, Ireland, or Portugal.

Bailed-out countries could also be stripped of their voting rights in the European Union, under radical proposals that have been circulating at the highest level in Brussels before this week's crucial EU summit on the sovereign debt crisis.

A confidential paper for EU leaders by the EU council president, Herman Van Rompuy, who will chair the summit on Thursday and Friday, said eurobonds or the pooling of eurozone debt would be a powerful tool in resolving the crisis, despite fierce German resistance to the idea.

It called for "more intrusive control of national budgetary policies by the EU" and laid out various options for enforcing fiscal discipline supra-nationally.

The Government's promise to reverse the erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion has been "unfulfilled, if not abandoned altogether", experts say.

Despite the Government's initial commitments, in reality their changes "have resulted in the police having greater, often summary and arbitrary powers over the individual and less accountability for their actions", the criminal justice experts warned.

And bringing in directly elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs) to replace police authorities from next year could lead to a "passing of the buck" between the commissioners and chief constables when concerns arise, they added.

Writing in Criminal Justice Matters, guest editors professors Lee Bridges and Ed Cape said: "It's as if the Government's commitment to 'fundamental human freedoms' is one that implies its own freedom from due process and the rule of law."

Eurozone officials are currently discussing plans to double the firepower of the rescue umbrella by allowing the EFSF and ESM to run concurrently; Herman van Rompuy wants to restrain the treaty amendments to a simple change in the Protocol 12 on excessive deficits; he hopes that this would allow a fast-track procedure that would not require a convention or national ratification processes; but the strategy raises complex legal issues, and it seems that only a small subset of Angela Merkel's and Nicolas Sarkozy's proposal can be squeezed into such a procedure; Britain asks for an end to QMV on financial services as a quid-pro-quo for its acceptance of a treaty change, but the German government may not accept this deal; S&P has now threatened to downgrade the EFSF, after attaching a negative outlook to the six AAA-rated eurozone members, as well as the rest of the eurozone; Norbert Gaillard believes that the S&P downgrade threat will ultimately make Germany more co-operative; Fabrizio Saccomani hints at ECB action to counter the liquidity crisis;he also says that credit conditions in Italy might deteriorate, but this would stop short of a credit crunch; the Greek parliament approves the 2012 budget; Francois Fillon rules out yet another austerity plan;FT Deutschland says that Jens Weidmann is going to play a critical role in the next few days in shaping the ECB's response to the crisis; the SPD party congress settles for a moderate set of policies, but raises doubts about Peer Steinbrück's chances to become Merkel's challenger; Bild provides a comprehensive list of anti-German outbursts in the European media; Martin Wolf, meanwhile, says a fiscal package cannot solve a current account crisis.

NEW YORK - Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc on Tuesday won court approval for its reorganization plan, allowing it to end the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and a major trigger of the 2008 global financial crisis.

The approval was granted by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge James Peck at a hearing in Manhattan. Lehman expects to begin payouts of an estimated $65 billion to creditors early next year.

Once the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, Lehman is now a shell of its former self, having sold or closed many of its operations. Peck said Lehman may now proceed with its plan to wind down its remaining operations.

It's the time of year when children begin to hope for a flurry of snowflakes to add a festive backdrop to the Christmas build-up - and judging by this morning's grim news from retailers, they'll be pleased that temperatures have started to plummet too. But Steve Nickell, of the Office for Budget Responsibility, has suggested someone else who should be praying for a White Christmas: George Osborne.

Appearing before MPs on the Treasury select committee, Nickell pointed out that heavy snowfall at the end of the year - following last year's pattern - could mean a sharp downturn in GDP, followed by an automatic bounce-back as activity returns to normal in the new year.

The OBR, which announced its forecasts alongside the chancellor's autumn statement last week, is now predicting that growth will be broadly flat between now and next autumn. But with the eurozone crisis hammering confidence, negative growth (as economists oxymoronically call it) looks increasingly likely for October to December.

Ireland faces more heavy cuts in public spending next year, with welfare and health departments taking the brunt of the pain under the country's latest austerity budget outlined on Monday.

The public expenditure and reform minister, Brendan Howlin, said spending would be cut by 2.7%, amounting to €1.4bn (£1.2bn) of reductions, in the first part of a budget which will continue with announcements on tax increases from the finance minister Michael Noonan on Tuesday.

The austerity measures come days before the critical EU summit on Friday which could force Ireland back to the ballot box in the new year. If a new treaty emerges from the meeting of EU leaders, the Fine Gael-Labour government would be obliged to hold a referendum under the Irish constitution. Given the unpopularity of the coalition's cost-cutting programme, there is no guarantee Ireland would endorse the treaty and a rejection could plunge the entire EU into further political and economic chaos.

Via Mark Thoma, David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between Keynes and Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Warsh says, nothing like this happened. Hayek essentially made a fool of himself early in the Great Depression, and his ideas vanished from the professional discussion.

So why is his name invoked so much now? Because The Road to Serfdom struck a political chord with the American right, which adopted Hayek as a sort of mascot -- and retroactively inflated his role as an economic thinker. Warsh is even crueler about this than I would have been; he compares Hayek (or rather the "Hayek" invented by his admirers) to Rosie Ruiz, who claimed to have won the marathon, but actually took the subway to the finish line.

one validates Migs:

The Schachtian approach reversed an even older tradition in central banking, according to which the central bank is the banker to the Government. The oldest central banks, those of England and Sweden were explicitly set up in order to manage the debts of their Governments. Nevertheless, the high German inflation during the early 1990s (in the wake of German unification) aroused sensibilities around the issue of inflation. The faulty institutional set-up was then validated by the extended period of falling and then low inflation since mid-1990s. Central bankers were not modest in claiming this as their achievement.
 The inadequate institutional arrangements are now fairly obvious and widely noted. The Eurozone has a central bank, without a Government, Governments without central banks, and banks without an effective lender of last of resort. With a regime of low inflation, now turning into deflation, the system has no mechanism for eliminating excessive debt in the economy.
The deficiencies of the Maastricht arrangements in the present situation are most apparent in the requirement to maintain the present debt to GDP ceiling. Virtually all the countries in the Eurozone are now (October 2011) in breach of that ceiling, including Germany, which has a government debt to GDP ratio of between 82 and 88 per cent. Thus all Governments are obliged to run fiscal surpluses until their debt to GDP ratios are reduced below the ceiling. The fiscal surpluses will of course cause reductions in GDP, unless off-set by trade surpluses or private sector investment. But those trade surpluses and private sector investment would have to exceed the fiscal surpluses for GDP to even begin to rise. Meanwhile actual private sector investment is falling and exacerbating the deflation in the Euro-zone. This illustrates the inappropriateness of the ceiling on government debt: attempts to realise that ceiling can only move the economies in the Euro-zone away from the ceiling, because GDP would start to fall well before governments would be allowed (under present rules) to cease deflating their economies.

The second paper is just as good.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

It's here

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant. From "The Maid's Tragedy" by Beaumont & Fletcher

At least 55 people have been killed in a suicide bombing at a crowded Kabul shrine on the most important day in the Shia calendar, raising fears that radical insurgent groups are attempting to unleash a sectarian war in Afghanistan.

Around 150 people were wounded when the bomb exploded amid a throng of worshippers, including women and children, who were hemmed in on a street between the Abul Fazl shrine and the Kabul river. A second bomb, which killed four people in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, also targeted pilgrims heading to a commemoration of the holy festival of Ashura.

Kuwait's ruler has dissolved parliament and set the Gulf nation toward elections, citing "deteriorating conditions" amid an increasingly bitter political showdown over alleged high-level corruption.

The decision by the emir, Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah, came on Tuesday, less than a week after he named a new prime minister and parliamentary sessions were put on hold.

Elections must be held within 60 days, which could complicate plans by the US defence department to station thousands more of its soldiers in Kuwait as part of troop shifts around the region, following the US withdrawal from Iraq at the end of the month.

Kuwait's tensions have roots going back years before the Arab Spring protests, but opposition factions could be further emboldened by the current push for reforms around the region.

Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo - The winner of last week's presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is due to be named on Tuesday, stirring fears of new unrest in the conflict-prone country.

The latest result projections, announced early on Tuesday by the country's electoral commission, gave Joseph Kabila, the incumbent president, 46.4 per cent with votes from just over two-thirds of polling centres counted. His main rival, Etienne Tshisekedi, has 36.2 per cent.

Nearly 80 people have been killed in the central Syrian city of Homs following a series of kidnappings that began on Sunday, activists have said.

Activists and residents of several neighbourhoods said Sunni residents had been kidnapped by "shabiha," armed, mostly Alawite gangs that support the government.

An Alawite human rights activists, however, told Al Jazeera's Rula Amin that there were killings and kidnappings on both sides of the divide, with people too afraid to leave their homes.

US officials have acknowledged that the military lost control of one of its stealth drones while it was flying a mission over western Afghanistan.

Iran's official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday that Iran's armed forces had shot down the RQ-170, known as the Sentinel, and are now in possession of it.

US officials rejected that claim, saying there were no indications the plane was shot down. In either case, officials said this would be the first Sentinel lost by the US.

The officials said they are concerned that Iranian authorities may now have an opportunity to acquire information about the classified surveillance drone programme.

"I think we're always concerned when there's an aircraft, whether it's manned or unmanned, that we lose, particularly in a place where we're not able to get to it,'' Navy Captain John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters on Monday.

SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled Kashmir, Dec. 6 (Xinhua) -- India and Pakistan armies exchanged fire on Line-of-Control (LoC), a de facto border dividing Kashmir into Indian and Pakistani controlled parts, Monday night, officials said Tuesday.

The ceasefire violation took place along the LoC in frontier Poonch district, around 255 km northwest of Jammu city, the winter capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, at 21:45 p.m. local time.

Indian army spokesman said the ceasefire violation took place after Pakistani troopers resorted to unprovoked firing on Indian posts.

"Pakistani troops from a forward post fired several rockets and small arms on our posts in Poonch sector," the spokesman said.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has strong lead in the early-voting states of Iowa and South Carolina, new polls showed Tuesday.

Thirty-three percent of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers supported the former House Speaker as the party's nominee, well ahead of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and congressman Ron Paul, who were tied at 18 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Texas Governor Rick Perry ranked fourth with 11 percent of the votes, while congresswoman Michele Bachmann got 8 percent, former Senator Rick Santorum gained 7 percent and former U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman received 2 percent.

DUBAI, Dec. 6 (Xinhua) -- Amr Moussa, a front-runner for Egypt' s presidency, said Tuesday that no one shall fear the results of the first round of the parliamentary elections in Egypt where Islamist forces won around 60 percent of the votes.

"You cannot ask for democracy and afterwards criticize the result of democratically held elections," said Moussa, a former Mubarak-era foreign minister and secretary-general of the Arab League, at the ongoing 10th Summit of the Arab Thought Foundation in Dubai.

Egyptians voted for the first time after the revolution in February, with around two thirds of the eligible voters going to the ballot boxes. The first round of the parliamentary elections, which are held in steps until March 2012, revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and the ultra-conservative Salafist's Nour Party may wield a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Israel Defense Forces spokesman said on Tuesday that three soldier had been arrested Monday on suspicion of involvement in the recent `price tag' attacks in the West Bank, with two other soldiers arrested as well.

The suspect is a known West Bank activist, who was also recently investigated for forging an official document, in an unrelated case. He is linked to sabotaging IDF vehicles in the West Bank base of the Benyamin brigade, where he served up until two months prior to a price tag attack of the facility.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz ordered reporters to refrain from publishing remarks made concerning female soldiers during a visit to an army drill in Israel's North on Tuesday.

The comments were made during a Golani Brigade drill, when, seemingly unaware that there were cameras in the vicinity, the two top officials - together with the commander of the Golani Brigade - joked about the issue of women serving in the army.

Top Three in a Gallup poll conducted Dec 1-5:

Gingrich:  37% (22)
Romney: 22% (21)
Undecided: 16%

The rest of the Clown Parade are below double digits.  Of interest is the polling for Perry (7%) and Bachmann (6%) which, when they dwindle to nothing and/or pull-out could pop Gingrich's numbers to as high as 50%.

Huntsman is still nowhere, running 1% support.

At the moment, Gingrich is in the driver's seat with Romney tagging behind.  With 28 days until the Iowa caucuses Mittens had best start rising in the polls to have a hope of winning this thing.


She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

See it here.

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant. From "The Maid's Tragedy" by Beaumont & Fletcher

Occupy Wall Street has some conservatives running scared, leaving a window of opportunity to change the dialogue on what freedom really means. Last week, Republican strategist and wordsmith Frank Luntz shared his concerns about the Occupy movement with a group of Republican governors in Florida. "I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death... They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism." Chris Moody wrote a must-read article on the matter, including the ten dos and don'ts that Luntz suggested to his audience.

As Seth Ackerman pointed out, there's an entire industry around Democrats and liberals trying to get an edge on Luntz with even more carefully polled wordplay. However, by talking directly about the power of the 1 percent over our lives, the broken political process, burdensome debts, and a collapsed labor market, the Occupy movement has gotten Luntz's attention in a few short months. As Ackerman puts it:

For twenty or thirty years, Democratic politicians... have been paying what must amount to billions of dollars by now to consultants, pollsters, and think tank gurus to tell them how to talk to the public about inequality in some way that might spark sustained public engagement... Then the Occupy movement comes along and after two and a half months shifts the national consciousness so palpably that Republican governors are scrambling to ask their Rasputins how capitalism can be defended to their constituents back in Peoria.

Luntz suggests 10 sets of words, phrases, and concepts to abandon and has some easily defended ones to use instead. "Jobs" and "entrepreneur" are out. "Careers" and "job creators" are in. Many people across the spectrum are noticing that Luntz is suggesting a retreat from the word "capitalism," but few reference where he wants to retreat to:

1. Don't say `capitalism.'

"I'm trying to get that word removed and we're replacing it with either `economic freedom' or `free market,'" Luntz said. "The public...still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we're seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we've got a problem."

Luntz suggests retreating to "economic freedom" as an easily defensible phrase conservatives can use to describe the economic status quo. This is astute, as there's been a long, 30-year conservative project to locate freedom in the laissez-faire marketplace.

More than three decades after the bricks-and-mortar U.S. Embassy in Tehran was shuttered and diplomatic relations with Iran were severed following the Islamic revolution and hostage crisis, the Obama administration has opened a virtual embassy for Iran to encourage dialogue with the Iranian people.

The Web-based "embassy" went online Tuesday with versions in English and Farsi explaining why the administration has chosen a virtual diplomatic mission to further expand its effort to reach out to Iranians even as President Obama's attempts to engage the government in Tehran over its nuclear program have yet to succeed.

Proposed legislation to restrict foreign governments' donations to nongovernmental organizations is unconstitutional, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein warned this week, and if it passes the Knesset, he will not be prepared to defend it in the High Court of Justice.

"The attorney general's policy is to refrain as much as possible from declaring laws unconstitutional, out of respect for the legislative work of the cabinet and Knesset," Weinstein wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this weekend explaining his unusual decision. "But in light of the blatancy of the case before us, deviating from this policy is justified. What this means is that if these bills become law, I won't be able to defend them against the petitions that will be submitted to the High Court. That is what I intend to tell the Knesset, and afterward the Supreme Court."

India last night rejected a European roadmap to a new single, legally-binding agreement to revive the stuttering UN climate talks.

Using robust diplomatic language, environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan challenged rich countries to ratify a second commitment period of the Kyoto protocol (KP), and pay what they had promised to developing countries before trying to negotiate a new deal.

The comments came ahead of a meeting between Europe, the Basic countries - India, China, Brazil and South Africa - and the US to try to win support for the EU's proposal to try to negotiate a new legally binding treaty by 2015 that would take effect in 2020.

China has been ambiguous on whether it will support the EU, while Brazil said it was still in discussions. South Africa's president referred to the roadmap in his speech but did not commit to it.

BP has accused Halliburton of intentionally destroying evidence to conceal the results of tests that showed that sub-standard cement work by the US company led to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last year.

In documents filed at a New Orleans federal court on Tuesday, BP asked a federal judge to sanction Halliburton Energy Services Inc, the oilfield services company's main business unit.

BP said Halliburton would not provide computer modelling evidence that their cement work on the Gulf of Mexico oil well that blew out last year was inadequate, and said the evidence on cement slurry testing went "inexplicably missing". 

"Halliburton's refusal has been unwavering, despite repeated BP discovery requests and a specific order from this court," the company said in court documents.

I don't want to end up quoting the entire article -and I am unable to pass a qualified judgment on the technology, but there are plenty of references in the article.
Is anyone familiar with it?

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi

The family of murdered private investigator Daniel Morgan say Home Secretary Theresa May has offered an investigation into police failings.

However, the family said after meeting Mrs May that they are disappointed because they want a judicial inquiry.

Mr Morgan, 37, originally from Monmouthshire, was found with an axe in his head in a south London pub car park in 1987 but nobody has been convicted.

Four men were charged in 2008, but the case collapsed in March this year.

France's parliament is to debate abolishing prostitution through a crackdown which would criminalise payment for sex.

The National Assembly will vote on a symbolic resolution drafted by a cross-party commission which, if successful, will be followed by a bill in January.

The resolution urges abolition at a time when "prostitution seems to be becoming routine in Europe".

Some campaigners reject the bill, advocating prostitutes' rights instead.

It ain't easy being green, but according to Fox Business, Kermit the Frog and his Muppet friends are reds.

Last week, on the network's "Follow the Money" program, host Eric Bolling went McCarthy on the new, Disney-released film, "The Muppets," insisting that its storyline featuring an evil oil baron made it the latest example of Hollywood's so-called liberal agenda.

Bolling, who took issue with the baron's name, Tex Richman, was joined by Dan Gainor of the conservative Media Research Center, who was uninhibited with his criticism.

"It's amazing how far the left will go just to manipulate your kids, to convince them, give the anti-corporate message," he said.

(Reuters) - A woman in the border city of Laredo, Texas who was angry because she had been denied food stamps killed herself and shot and critically wounded her two children late on Monday, authorities said on Tuesday.

The 38-year-old woman entered the Texas Health and Human Services Commission office in downtown Laredo on Monday afternoon and demanded to speak to a supervisor, said investigator Joe Baeza of the Laredo Police Department.

The woman, whom he declined to identify, pulled out a handgun and started walking through the office, threatening several employees, he said

Thousands of Occupy protesters across the US will occupy foreclosed homes today, in what organisers are describing as a "new frontier" for the movement.

In New York, Occupy Wall Street has teamed up with local activist groups to secretly occupy an empty home, and plan to hand the property over to a homeless family. Similar action is scheduled in more than 20 other cities.

Over the last month many occupations have been evicted from their encampments, as cities cracked down on demonstrations that had lasted for several weeks.

It's the ultimate belt-tightening handbook: No Meat? Push an aubergine through the grinder instead. Chew your food long enough for your stomach to feel full. And don't forget to sweep crumbs off your table and into a jar.

These are some of the tips Greeks used to survive the second world war occupation that have been collected in Starvation Recipes - a cookbook that has become a surprise hit as millions of Greeks struggle to make ends meet in a new era of hardship brought on by economic crisis.

In the grim years of the occupation, starving Athenians invented ways to stay alive, helped by daily advice columns in the capital's newspapers known as "survival guides."

Online rumours are drugs that damage users and harm society, the Chinese state media have claimed, as officials step up attempts to rein in the country's hugely popular microblogs.

One commentary, published by the official Xinhua news agency, warns that while heroin and cocaine damage health, internet rumours are worse because they "poison the social environment and affect social order".

Another, on People's Daily Online, is titled: "Internet rumours are drugs: please resist and stay away from them." It calls for zero tolerance, suggests they "damage people and society" as narcotics do, and accuses rumour-mongers of having ulterior motives and "kidnapping public opinion".

The intensification of attacks on "rumours" emerged as officials said they had detained several people for spreading rumours online and amid increasing controls on microblogs, which have been urging users to register their real names and deleting accounts deemed to have crossed the line.

Invasive U.S. surveillance programs, either illegal like the NSA's wiretapping of AT&T phone lines or legal as authorized by the PATRIOT Act, are causing foreign companies to think twice about putting their data in U.S. cloud systems.

I think these are legitimate concerns. I don't trust the U.S. government, law or no law, not to spy on my data if it thought it was a good idea. The more interesting question is: which government should I trust instead?

The European Commission is investigating whether e-book publishers owned by Lagardere , Pearson Plc, News Corp and two other firms fixed prices with Apple Inc, blocking rivals and hurting consumers.

The decision by the European Commission to open an investigation on Tuesday followed raids on the companies in March this year.

US regulators are also looking into pricing deals imposed under an agency model in which publishers set the retail price. Antitrust rules forbid price-fixing agreements designed to shut out competitors or that could result in consumers paying more.

South Central Priorities Committee's MOBBB group, which covers PCTs in Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire, Berkshire East, Berkshire West and Buckinghamshire, is advising GPs to apply the limit to prescriptions for sildenafil (Viagra), varednafil and tadalifil.

Prescribing of medication for erectile dysfunction on the NHS is already subject to severe restrictions, with availability limited to patients with specific conditions including diabetes, multiple sclerosis and prostate cancer. PCTs insisted the new policy was `a recommendation to GPs', but LMC leaders raised concerns it was being presented to GPs as `edicts'.

Sócrates - Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira - who has died after suffering an intestinal infection aged 57, was one of the most unlikely of Brazil's resplendent footballers. Bearded and seemingly indestructible, he stood 6ft 3in tall, once admitting: "I am an anti-athlete. I cannot deny myself certain lapses from the strict regime of a sportsman. You have to take me as I am."

He was, in fact, a formidable attacking midfielder, prominent in two World Cups in the 1980s, initially a centre forward but, for most of his international career, a dominating figure in every sense, in central midfield. He smoked incessantly, rather like Gérson, a previous general of the Brazilian midfield, he drank large quantities of beer, and if, eventually, such indulgences may have caught up with him, they never seem to have impinged on his extensive football career.

The first child of a self-educated father, who named three of his sons after Greek philosophers, Sócrates was born in Belém, the city on the banks of the Amazon estuary and capital of the north Brazilian state of Pará. But it was in Ribeirão Preto, 290km (180 miles) north-west of São Paulo, that Sócrates played with the Botafogo club (1974-78). The greater part of his career (1978-84) was spent with the Corinthians club of São Paulo.