Opposition coalition Georgian Dream has claimed victory in parliamentary elections, and President Mikheil Saakashvili conceded, saying his United National Movement (UNM) party would go into opposition.

According to preliminary results by the Central Election Commission, opposition coalition Georgian Dream received 53 percent of the vote, which puts them ahead of UNM's 41 percent. Georgia's electoral system allocates 77 of the 150 parliamentary seats by party lists; the remaining seats are obtained in individual constituencies. Voter turnout was 61 percent.

Outgoing President Saakashvili announced his party's defeat

Billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili - who said he was confident to become prime minister - founded the six-party opposition movement at the beginning of this year. As soon as initial results indicated that Georgian Dream was on top, supporters celebrated on the streets in Tbilisi. Thousands gathered at the capital's central Freedom Square, overjoyed that Georgia's opposition had won an election - and not started another revolution. No clashes took place between supporters of Ivanishvili and those of Saakashvili, who had gathered at the party's headquarters in the city center.

Contracts for almost 400 NHS services, worth a quarter of billion pounds, were signed this week resulting in the "biggest act of privatisation ever seen in the NHS", Labour's health spokesman Andy Burnham has said.

In a briefing before his speech to the Labour party conference, Burnham said he had "evidence of accelerating privatisation" - citing a rash of examples across England which he said showed the government was committed to a "market in healthcare".

Burnham pointed out that non-emergency ambulance services in the north-west would soon be run by the bus group Arriva and that Lancashire county council had awarded the contract to run patient advocacy groups to a private firm, Parkwood Healthcare.

However the "biggest privatisation" so far was in community services - those areas of healthcare offered outside of hospitals. Labour used freedom of information requests to survey England's NHS primary care trusts on the range and value of community services being offered to the private and voluntary sector under the government's "any qualified provider" policy.

Three government officials at the heart of the abandoned west coast mainline franchise competition have been suspended after the transport secretary launched an urgent review into how the award of Britain's most lucrative rail service ended in fiasco.

Patrick McLoughlin said he was angry and that the fault lay "only and squarely within the Department for Transport". The shock move looks set to revive the apparently doomed Virgin Trains after the government admitted to "significant flaws" in the franchise process that was won by FirstGroup.

Taxpayers now face paying compensation of £40m to the original bidders - something the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, called a disgrace.

Virgin and McLoughlin will be holding talks to discuss options later on Wednesday, with the tender process likely to be rerun. Until Tuesday the transport secretary had, like his predecessor Justine Greening, defended the "robust" process, and he was set to invite the state-owned Directly Operated Railways (DOR) to run the service when the current franchise expires on 9 December had Virgin's legal proceedings delayed the new contract with FirstGroup.

While the topic of war reparations is a closed matter to Germans, many Greeks hope to be repaid for damages caused during the Nazi era. The Greek Finance Ministry has established an expert group to look into the issue.

Greece is evaluating asking Germany for reparations for the destruction of Greek villages and towns as well as for Nazi crimes during World War II and for the repayment of a loan worth billions of dollars the Bank of Greece was forced to make to Germany in 1942 and which has not been repaid.

A working group has been set up and the government has been going through the state archives for relevant documents, according to Deputy Finance Minister Christos Staikouras. Initial results should be available by the end of the year. Many observers, including those in Greece, have wondered if potential demands for reparations, almost 70 years after the war, are still justified.

Stelios Perakis a professor of international law at Panteion University in Athens, has called for reparations to be paid as soon as possible. These claims have not been made due to the international treaty situation after the war, but this, he said, in no way means Greece has forfeited its rights.

The former East German states have been subsidized to the tune of billions of euros - not always successfully. Struggling regions in the west now want a share of the financial support.

Twenty-two years after German unification, the gap between east and west is widening once again. The gross domestic product in the eastern states has shrunk by 2 percent, and now stands at just 71 percent of per-capita GDP in the West. Prospects are not good. Many of the young generation are moving away; not enough trainees are coming onto the eastern German job market. Wages and salaries there are about a quarter less than what they are in the western states.

But in western Germany, too, there are entire regions struggling with the consequences of structural change. The industrial Ruhr valley is just one example. For a long time now many people have been calling for an overhaul of the system, and for subsidies to be allocated differently. Two decades after the euphoria of unification, the everyday reality is hitting home.

Valérie Trierweiler, the partner of the French president, François Hollande, has issued her first public apology for the controversial tweet that caused a scandal in June, just as a poll showed the majority of French people have a negative view of her.

After three and a half months of no interviews and few public comments, Trierweiler appeared to be back on a media offensive to correct her poor image, with a carefully worded interview with the biggest-selling regional paper, Ouest France. She gave her first public mea culpa for the tweet that laid bare her animosity to Ségolène Royal, Hollande's ex-partner and the mother of his four children, and which forced the president's complex love life on to the front pages.

In the tweet, which shocked the political class and embarrassed Hollande shortly after his election, she had expressed support for a dissident Socialist running for election against Royal.

"It was a mistake, and I regret it," she told Ouest France. "I was clumsy because it was badly interpreted. I hadn't yet realised that I was no longer a simple citizen. It won't happen again." She added that she thought the media treatment of the tweet had been "disproportionate".

The remains of Turkey's former President Turgut Ozal have been exhumed from an Istanbul grave in a bid to determine whether the former leader was poisoned.

Amid heavy security mechanical diggers dug up his grave from within a grand mausoleum in an Istanbul cemetery on Tuesday, on the orders of prosecutors investigating suspicions of foul play in his death 19 years ago.

"The corpse was in its place, everything went as planned, no problem arose" - Turan Colakkadi, Istanbul's chief prosecutor

Ozal, who led Turkey out of military rule in the 1980s and drove far-reaching economic reform, died of heart failure in April 1993 at an Ankara hospital at the age of 65, and while in office.

Relatives and associates voiced suspicions he had been poisoned.

A Muslim cleric was present at the exhumation, which lasted seven hours. Ozal's remains were placed in a zinc-coated coffin which was wrapped in the Turkish flag and carried by police officers in formal uniforms to a municipal hearse.

Germany's opposition party, the Social Democrats (SPD), has closed the gap on Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats following the selection of her former finance minister to lead their general election campaign next year.

Polls show that the choice of Peer Steinbrück as the SPD challenger last week has given the party a significant boost in its attempt to oust Merkel. The SPD is now enjoying its highest level of support in a year.

A Forsa survey shows that the SPD has gained three points from a week earlier to 29% after the selection of the feisty, plain-speaking 65-year-old. Merkel's party dropped three points to 35%.

The combined support for the SPD and the party's preferred partner, the Greens, is now 41%, marginally ahead of the 39% support for the ruling centre-right coalition.

I am Beppe Scienza, I lecture at the Turin University's Mathematics Department and the topic I want to address today is that of usury.
In terms of Art 644 of the criminal code, usury is classified as a crime, remember? But exactly at what point does money lending become usury? At one point the law was rather vague, but back in 1996 the law was amended and the act of usury was determined on the basis of certain rules and certain interest rate tables published by Banca d'Italia (the Italian Central Bank). Now, however, when you pick up these tables you can immediately see that something doesn't quite add up any more because we see that in order to be classified as usury, the interest rate must be above 18% per annum in the case of overdraft facilities, above 19.4% per annum in the case of personal loans, above 19.5% per annum in the case of loans not exceeding one fifth of salary, and so on..... to the extent that, by law, in order to be classified as usury, the interest rate on fixed rate mortgage bonds must exceed 10.8%. At which point you say to yourself: "Hang on, there's something here that's not quite right". In recent times interest rates have been particularly low, interest rates on the BOTs (Government Bonds) are sitting at 1.5 %, the banks borrow money from the European Central Bank at 1% interest, the Euribor Rate is currently at 0.3 or 0.4% and yet, according to the law, the interest rates of 25% per annum currently being charged on credit cards and deposits are not classified as usury.
At this point I will have to provide some figures, not simply because I'm a mathematician but because when discussing the issue of usury and interest rates, unfortunately one simply has to mention some figures. The current issue is as follows: many Italian savers have received notifications from certain banks. Almost all the banks have sent out letters, particularly Intesa San Paolo. This is the bank that set up Mr. Passera and Ms. Fornero as pawns in the Monti Government. Now, Intesa San Paolo has sent out a letter to its millions and millions of customers, but why you ask? Well, because the Monti Government had tried to slip in a major mistake that was bigger than all the rest, but what was this mistake? The mistake was that not only was the saver having to pay interest whenever his/her current account went into the red, but in addition to these high interest rates, he/she would also be stuck with a whole series of costs, a whole range of costs with strange names, so that the bank could profit shamelessly from proportionately unjustified amounts. Here are two examples, one of which happened to me and the other to an acquaintance: I had gone just slightly into the red on my account for just one day and the Banca del Piemonte charged me 14 cents interest of interest. This may not be much, I agree, but then, in addition to this overdraft interest, they proceeded to charge me an additional €42.30 for settlement of the overdraft.
Another example: a case of being overdrawn by €800 for one month, Banco Desio charged a total of 8 Euro in interest, that's 12% per annum or 1% per month, however, they then added on another €13.50 per day of being overdrawn, supposedly for overdraft administration fees. This amounted to 405 Euro so, 8 Euro of interest plus 405 Euro of overdraft administration fees.
These are costs that are totally unjustifiable in financial terms, but there is a programme that does the calculation and they allow you to go into overdraft just so that they can take money from you.

Troika representatives want Greece to frontload more than €1bn in 2013;  recession is expected to be worse in 2013, 5% instead of 3.8%;  tight timetable  might call for an extraordinary summit in November to approve the €31bn aid instalment for Greece; Portugal announced new taxes including an extraordinary 4% income tax raising €2bn in additional income;  Portugal's trade union announced general strike for November;  Herman van Rompuy's draft on economic union will be prepared for the October European Council, followed by a final proposal in December; Financing of the common budget most likely to come from national contributions, or a share of eurozone tax receipts; Germany is likely to react positively to van Rompuy's draft, as does the European Commission;  Holger Stelzner is predictably negative,  especially if the common budget were to be funded by a solidarity tax; Luke Baker says van Rompuy's draft is more of a wish-list prone to be hijacked by other more pressing topics;  71 banks have increased their capital base by €200bn since the end of 2011 to prepare themselves against further financial turbulence; Poland's finance minister said Poland would join the eurozone provided it can be stabilised and reformed; the Italian government is mulling to sell its participations in energy companies ENI and ENEL; France plans to dampen capital gains tax increase of the 2013 budget;  Le Monde also reports that the French government prepares a significant reduction of  labour costs of some €40bn over five years; The Finnish government is divided of whether or not to support an EU financial transaction tax; Marco Onado argues that the Liikanen' report is the first step for a new Eurozone; Mark Mazower in the FT argues that democracy is at stake in Southern Europe; Wolfgang Munchau argues that Peer Steinbruck is the least useful candidate imaginable;  Paolo Menasse in his blog on inefficiencies in the Italian tax systems; Paul Krugman lays out the economic consequences of Rajoy; Reuters reports that Spain's revenue from corporate tax has dropped by 2/3 since the start of the crisis; Growth-promoting EU programmes running out of cash; Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, meanwhile, said the Spanish government's reforms should be better explained to the public in other European countries.

Other economic policy areas need to make substantial contributions to ensure a further stabilisation of financial markets and an improvement in the outlook for growth. As regards fiscal policies, euro area countries are progressing with consolidation. It is crucial that efforts are maintained to restore sound fiscal positions, in line with the commitments under the Stability and Growth Pact and the 2012 European Semester recommendations. A rapid implementation of the fiscal compact will also play a major role in strengthening confidence in the soundness of public finances. At the same time, structural reforms are as essential as fiscal consolidation efforts and measures to improve the functioning of the financial sector. In the countries most strongly affected by the crisis, noticeable progress is being made in the correction of unit labour cost and current account developments. Decisive product and labour market reforms will further improve the competitiveness of these countries and their capacity to adjust.

Finally, it is essential to push ahead with European institution-building. The ECB welcomes the Commission proposal of 12 September 2012 for a single supervisory mechanism (SSM) involving the ECB, to be established through a Council regulation on the basis of Article 127(6) of the Treaty. The Governing Council considers an SSM to be one of the fundamental pillars of a financial union and one of the main building blocks towards a genuine Economic and Monetary Union. We will formally issue a legal opinion in which we will, in particular, take into account the following principles: a clear and robust separation between supervisory decision-making and monetary policy; appropriate accountability channels; a decentralisation of tasks within the Eurosystem; an effective supervisory framework ensuring coherent oversight of the euro area banking system; and full compatibility with the Single Market framework, including the role and prerogatives of the European Banking Authority. As the Commission proposal sets out an ambitious transition schedule towards the SSM, the ECB has started preparatory work so as to be able to implement the provisions of the Council regulation as soon as it enters into force.

Eurozone countries would have to sign binding contracts with Brussels, committing them to detailed fiscal reform, according to a draft EU agenda that would increase the bloc's control over national economic policies.

The provision, included in a report distributed to EU countries before this month's summit, would require all 17 eurozone members to sign on to the kinds of Brussels-approved policy programmes and timelines now negotiated only with bailout countries.

If adopted, the plan could help to meet demands in Germany for tighter control over the economies of highly indebted countries such as Italy and France that have a mixed record on economic reform.

The proposals, seen by the Financial Times, reflect how far some EU leaders believe they need to overhaul the eurozone with more centralised decision-making. It is a shift that many policy makers conclude will require a wholesale change in EU treaties.

Advisers to the European Commission have issued their recommendations for a structural reform of the continent's banking system. They're in favor of separating retail and investment operations to reduce future risks.

A group of advisers, led by Finnish Central Bank Governor Erkki Liikanen (left in the picture), on Tuesday recommended splitting big European banks' retail business from their investment operations, to protect savers and governments from the sort of risk-taking that triggered the ongoing debt crisis.

The proposal is the central pillar of reforms the group of financial experts and academics deem is needed to overhaul the banking sector, particularly in the embattled 17-member eurozone.

"The analysis conducted revealed excessive risk-taking and excessive reliance on short-term funding in the run-up to the financial crisis," the group said in a statement. Hence the experts "deem it necessary to call for legal separation of certain particularly risky financial activities from deposit-taking operations within a given

Four years ago today, President George W. Bush signed into law the biggest corporate rescue in American history. Even as U.S. unemployment has remained above 8 percent for 43 months, the country's biggest banks are making almost as much as they ever have.

The combined $63 billion in profit reported by the six largest U.S. lenders over the four quarters through June is more than they earned in any calendar year since the peak in 2006.

Bank of America Corp. made more in the 12-month period than Walt Disney Co. and McDonald's Corp. combined. Citigroup Inc. (C), which like Bank of America took $45 billion in taxpayer funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, earned more than Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) and Boeing Co. JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the largest U.S. bank by assets, had profits of more than $17 billion even after reporting a $5.8 billion trading loss.

Still, Wall Street isn't enjoying its good fortune.

Those billions of dollars in profits aren't enough, according to interviews with more than a dozen bank executives and analysts. The lowest leverage in a decade, return on equity at a third of 2006 levels, higher capital requirements, shares trading below book value, declining bonuses, job cuts, the European sovereign-debt crisis and a backlash against bankers have damped the joys of profit, they said.

Mortgage refinancing applications have soared as Americans rush to take advantage of record low rates triggered by the Federal Reserve's programme of quantitative easing.

The Mortgage Bankers Association's latest weekly survey showed applications jumped 20 per cent over the previous seven days to the highest level since April 2009. It will be many weeks before it becomes clear if the applications turn into actual refinancing deals, but the data suggests that so-called "QE3" could soon have a significant impact on household finances.

The Fed promised in September to buy $40bn of mortgage-backed securities a month for as long as it took to bring down US unemployment, and its intervention in the market has already pushed wholesale mortgage rates to below 2 per cent.

"In case Japan becomes insolvent, what will happen to government bonds?"

Tweeted 1,645 times, liked on Facebook 3,733 times!

The MoF website isn't some blog to be ignored (at your own risk) but the official voice of the most important ministry of the most indebted country in the world, whose debt will reach 240% of GDP by the end of this fiscal year. The country borrows over 50% of every yen it spends, and it spends more every year. With no solution in sight. Other than more borrowing. Certainly not cutting the budget, which would be too painful. It wouldn't be enough anyway. Even cutting the budget in half would leave a deficit. And the recently passed consumption tax increase? It will raise the tax from its current 5% to 8% in 2014 and to 10% in 2015, way too little to deal with the gigantic problem, and years too late. Yet it won't kick in unless GDP grows at least 2% per year--which has practically no chance of happening.

No, there is no longer a good solution. And everyone knows it.

In Europe, monetary intervention has greater potential to help - but with a similar risk of making matters worse. To allay anxiety about government profligacy, the ECB built conditionality into its bond-purchase program. But if the conditions operate like austerity measures - imposed without significant accompanying growth measures - they will be more akin to bloodletting: the patient must risk death before receiving genuine medicine. Fear of losing economic sovereignty will make governments reluctant to ask for ECB help, and only if they ask will there be any real effect.

CommentsThere is a further risk for Europe: If the ECB focuses too much on inflation, while the Fed tries to stimulate the US economy, interest-rate differentials will lead to a stronger euro (at least relative to what it otherwise would be), undermining Europe's competitiveness and growth prospects.

CommentsFor both Europe and America, the danger now is that politicians and markets believe that monetary policy can revive the economy. Unfortunately, its main impact at this point is to distract attention from measures that would truly stimulate growth, including an expansionary fiscal policy and financial-sector reforms that boost lending.

Four blasts have struck a government-controlled district close to a military officers' club in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, killing at least 40 people and wounding more than 100, opposition activists say.

Later on Wednesday, a Syrian mortar bomb killed five Turkish nationals when it landed in southeastern Turkey. The deaths in the border town of Akcakale mark the first time Turks have died from mortar bombs landing on their side of the border.

In Aleppo, "a medical source said that at least 40 people were killed and 90 injured," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. "Most of them were regime troops."

Meanwhile, official television channel Al-Ikhbariya said 31 people were killed and dozens wounded.

The attacks within minutes of each other struck the main Saadallah al-Jabiri Square near a military officers' club and a hotel.

Syrian state television reported of "terrorist explosions" in the city.

Iranian riot police have clashed with protesters in the capital Tehran over the collapse of the rial, the country's currency, which has lost a third of its value against the dollar in a week.

Police on Wednesday reportedly fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators, including currency exchange dealers.

It was the first sign of public unrest over the plunging currency.

The fall of the rial, which has now lost more than 80 per cent of its value compared with a year ago, with 17 per cent of its value shed on Monday alone, has been largely blamed on Western sanctions imposed over the country's nuclear programme.

The rial slipped another four per cent on Tuesday to close at 36,100 to the dollar, according to exchange tracking websites.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil -- The sun had just begun to rise here one morning in September as André Peres de Carvalho, an officer in a special-operations police squad, prepared to leave his home. Two masked gunmen lurking outside the door did their work quickly, killing him before disappearing by motorcycle into the crazy quilt of São Paulo's sprawl.

He was one of more than 70 police officers killed this year in São Paulo, Brazil's largest and most powerful state. The sharp increase in murders of police officers, up almost 40 percent since last year, has raised fears of a resurgence of the First Capital Command, a criminal organization that carried out a harrowing four-day uprising here in 2006 during which almost 200 people were killed.

São Paulo officials have tried to play down the suspected role of the criminal group in this year's police killings, calling it a violent reaction by a variety of criminals to tougher policing strategies. But security analysts and some members of São Paulo's own state police force have characterized the killings as deliberate reprisals by the gang, commonly referred to as the P.C.C., or Primeiro Comando da Capital in Portuguese.

A poll of three swing states released today shows Republican challenger Mitt Romney pulling closer to President Barack Obama in Florida and Virginia while continuing to trail in Ohio.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist College survey of likely voters taken Sept. 30-Oct. 1 put Obama ahead in Florida, 47 percent to 46 percent, and in Virginia, 48 percent to 46 percent. Obama led by five points in both states in the Sept. 9-11 NBC/Journal/Marist poll.

In Ohio, without which a Republican candidate has never won the White House, Obama led, 51 percent to 43 percent. He was ahead, 50 percent to 43 percent, in last month's poll.

The results in Florida and Virginia show Romney closing the gap in two states crucial to his White House hopes as the two presidential candidates prepare for their first of three debates tonight. The debate, to be held at the University of Denver in Colorado, starts at 9 p.m. Washington time.

A Chinese-owned company has filed a lawsuit against US President Barack Obama for blocking its purchase of wind farms near a US military base on national security grounds, court documents showed.

Obama signed the decree on Friday banning the sale of four wind farms in Oregon to the Ralls Corp and its Chinese affiliate, Sany Group.

In the decree, Obama said companies linked to Chinese nationals "might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States".

In a complaint filed on Monday in a US federal court, Ralls Corp argued that Obama had "exceeded his limited authority to "suspend or prohibit a "covered transaction" by dictating the terms of the sales, allowing the government to inspect all aspects of its operations and not treating the company equally as required under the law. 

It asked the court to declare the executive order "arbitrary and capricious" in contending that the transaction posed national security risks to the United States.

Almost all of Europe's nuclear reactors are in need of an urgent overhaul that could cost as much as $32bn, according to a leaked draft-report by the European Commission.

The Commission is expected on Thursday to finalise its stress test report, which was designed to ensure that a disaster similar to the one at Japan's Fukushima could not happen again.

The report will be debated by EU ministers later this month..

After that, the Commission intends in 2013 to propose new laws, including on insurance and liability to "improve the situation of potential victims in the event of a nuclear accident", the draft obtained by Reuters news agency said.

Of the 134 EU nuclear reactors grouped across 68 sites, 111 have more than 100,000 inhabitants living within 30 km.

Safety regimes vary greatly and the amount that needs to be spent to improve them is estimated at $13-32bn across all the reactors, the draft says. 

Environmental, humanitarian and economic challenges do not exist in isolation, but that is how the world most often deals with them. To take just one example: one of the key challenges facing cities around the globe in the 21st century is flooding. Flooding is determined by environmental factors, from climate change to overcrowding of floodplains with habitation. Flooding is also often a humanitarian disaster when it strikes and can be an aftereffect of big development projects, like hydroelectric dams.

Or take the metals in a cell phone. As Judith Rodin, president of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, noted at her organization's event about "resilient livelihoods" on September 25, tungsten is the "metal that puts the buzz in your cell phone." Mining that tungsten is an economic development opportunity but also too often creates a humanitarian crisis when such economically valuable minerals become a source of conflict--as has been the case in the eastern Congo. At the same time, the mining practices used to extract such metals can be more or less bad for the environment and human health.

The U.N. buzz phrase of the last decade--"sustainable development"--is slowly morphing into a new sustainable buzzword for the development and humanitarian communities: resilience. Resilience means, at its core, an ability to bounce back from stress in a healthy way, Rodin said. But, as development expert Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina rightly notes, resilience of what, to what? Enabling the poor to be resilient in the face of challenges like climate change may require a fundamental rethinking of the methods used to address both poverty and global warming.

International illegal logging activity is worth an estimated $30 billion to $100 billion annually, at least double the value estimated just months ago, the U.N. Environment Programme and the international police organization Interpol have found.

The report's estimates are a significant update from a World Bank report released in May, which placed the value of illegal logging at $15 billion to $20 billion. The report used data from an older World Bank report from 2006.

"Since that time, however, the size of the timber industry has grown significantly, both in quantity and in value," said Davyth Stewart, team leader for Interpol's Law Enforcement Assistance for Forests (LEAF) project. "The growth in the amount of legal logging has also been matched by a growth in illegal logging."

Despite the global economic downturn, demand for both legal and illegal wood has continued to grow.

The drought that has kept much of the nation in its grip this summer brings a host of additional downstream worries for growers already struggling with reduced yields.

Cattle are being poisoned by cyanide-laced weeds in Arkansas. Across the Midwest water-soluble fertilizers are concentrating in soils and plants, making them harmful rather than productive. And in Missouri, samples suggest that more than half the corn crop isn't fit for human consumption, thanks to unusually high levels of a carcinogenic toxin.

For farmers coping with the worst drought to hit the United States in decades, it's another chapter in an unfolding disaster that shows no sign of abating. And with climate projections showing more frequent summer droughts in heavy farming areas, these elevated drought-related poisons add to the challenges growers face in a changing climate.

Three unusual earthquakes that shook a suburb west of Dallas over the weekend appear to be connected to the past disposal of wastewater from local hydraulic fracturing operations, a geophysicist who has studied earthquakes in the region says.

Preliminary data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) show the first quake, a magnitude 3.4, hit at 11:05 p.m. CDT on Saturday a few miles southeast of the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport. It was followed 4 minutes later by a 3.1-magnitude aftershock that originated nearby.

A third, magnitude-2.1 quake trailed Saturday's rumbles by just under 24 hours, touching off at 10:41 p.m. CDT on Sunday from an epicenter a couple miles east of the first, according to the USGS. The tremors set off a volley of 911 calls, according to Reuters, but no injuries have been reported.

Not a coincidence

Before a series of small quakes on Halloween 2008, the Dallas area had never recorded a magnitude-3 earthquake, said Cliff Frohlich, associate director and senior research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics. USGS data show that, since then, it has felt at least one quake at or above a magnitude 3 every year except 2010.

hareholders have stepped up their campaign to remove Rupert Murdoch as chairman of News Corporation ahead of the media company's annual meeting this month.

Hermes, a British fund manager that controls £24.8bn assets, joined an action on Wednesday launched by dissident shareholders seeking to oust News Corp's chairman in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

Glass Lewis, one of the largest shareholder advisory groups, has also recommended its clients vote for the appointment of an independent chair. This is the second year that major shareholders have rounded on Murdoch and his board.

Hans Hirt, global head of corporate engagement at Hermes, said: "While we acknowledge the recent board changes made by the company, News Corp has still not sufficiently addressed the significant shareholder concerns about its board structure and corporate culture highlighted at last year's annual meeting. The time is right for the company to appoint an independent chair in order to rebuild trust, and ensure that the interests of all investors are more properly represented."

Reports are filtering in that the new iPhone 5 has a camera problem. When pointed near a bright light, a characteristic magenta hue smears across the screen. This "Hendrix Effect" is not apparent in earlier versions of the iPhone.

According to Gizmodo, Apple is responding to complaints by informing customers that the purple is normal:

Our engineering team just gave me this information and we recommend that you angle the camera away from the bright light source when taking pictures. The purple flare in the image provided is considered normal behavior for iPhone 5′s camera.

This is the wrong reaction.

Former Nepalese Maoist insurgency leader Prachanda has launched a new tourist trail and guide book, giving walkers the chance to see routes and hideouts used by the guerrillas.

The trek - which lasts up to four weeks - stretches across several districts of central and western Nepal.

The aim is to attract more tourists to the impoverished Himalayan nation.

About 16,000 people died in the 10-year war, before a 2006 peace deal and elections won by the Maoists in 2008.

The civil war culminated in the king relinquishing his absolute powers and being forced to give up his throne in June of that year.

Prachanda derived his inspiration from Peru's Shining Path rebels and dreamt of setting up a communist republic to address the plight of the rural poor and bring an end to Nepal's ceaseless political bickering.

Hiding in a clump of stars 10,000 light-years away are two small black holes, slowly sipping their stellar prey.

But the black holes shouldn't be there -- at least, not both of them. The snacking pair disobeys prevailing theories that predict the survival of only one black hole in M22, a globular cluster of stars. And, like cockroaches and rats, observing two means the cluster could contain many, many more small black holes -- perhaps as many as 100, a team of astronomers reports in the Oct. 4 Nature.

"If there really are tons of black holes in there, then my old theory is completely toast," says astrophysicist Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University. "This is a really nice piece of work."

The two black holes are located roughly one light-year from the core of M22, an ancient ball of stars that orbits the Milky Way's center. The black holes are between 10 and 20 times as massive as the sun, placing them in the stellar-mass, or featherweight, class.  Many stellar-mass black holes are known to exist, but this pair is the first observed in a Milky Way globular cluster. "M22 is not the first cluster where I would have predicted we'd find a black hole," says Greg Sivakoff, an observational astrophysicist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "This is the first convincing evidence," he says, noting the slim chance that the black holes are actually located behind the cluster instead of inside it. "But there's still room for some healthy skepticism."

Children live on in their mothers' brains for decades, and not just as memories. Scientists have found pockets of male DNA, presumably from boy fetuses, in the brain tissue of women who died in their 70s.

Not only is male DNA present in women's brains, it's common, researchers report online September 26 in PLOS ONE. J. Lee Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and her colleagues found snippets of a male-only gene in the brains of 18 of 26 women who died without neurological disease. The male DNA was spread throughout their brains.

The technique used in the study couldn't distinguish if the DNA was from intact, functional brain cells, though in a separate test of brain tissue from a different woman, Nelson and colleagues did spot nuclei from male cells in the brain. Earlier studies in mice hinted that these foreign cells can integrate themselves into the brain and start functioning as nerve cells.

So far, cells from fetuses have turned up in women's blood, livers, lungs, heart and other organs, so finding male DNA in the brain isn't a complete shock, says geneticist Kirby Johnson of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., who wasn't involved in the study. "From everything we knew, it's not really that surprising."What's interesting is how the DNA could have gotten there. Male cells from a fetus could have broken through the blood-brain barrier -- a wall that protects the fragile brain from pathogens in the blood. But that shouldn't be possible, Johnson says.

"There is no alternative", said Franco Frattini, European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security, in the European Parliament four years ago. "Criminals have superior technology to ours." And he therefore announced the launch of two plans. The first involved the permanent surveillance of all exterior borders, complete with drones for the detection of migrants at sea. The second was a proposal for "smart borders", or rather biometric recognition of everyone entering and leaving Europe.

The former plan, Eurosur - which stands for European Border Surveillance System - is to commence on 1 October 2013, and is therefore currently being discussed in the European Parliament. "Each member state is to set up its own centre to coordinate all border security operations, by the police, customs and navy," explained Erik Berglund, Director of Capacity Building at Frontex, the European border security service based in Warsaw. "So far, the dissemination of information has taken place solely on a voluntary basis." Eurosur has three main objectives, as Mr Berglund explains: "Detecting illegal migrants, combating international crime and rescuing boat people."

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So much money has already been spent on Eurosur, that it has become something of a runaway train, Mr Vermeulen thinks. That is not yet the case with the smart borders proposal, currently being considered by the Commission. While its spokesperson was unwilling to discuss the matter, it is clear that it is to comprise both an Entry/Exit System and a Frequent Travellers Programme. Data on all non-European travellers, including the date and place of entry and the addresses of any contacts within the EU, as well as their biometric data, such as fingerprints and a digital photo. The person is then scanned once more on departure, enabling the system to detect anyone staying behind illegally.

MONTREAL -- If you like your maple syrup hot, there's tons of it out there.

Literally.

The purloined product even traversed a provincial border after sticky-fingered thieves made off with the amber gold over the summer months.

Contents of 16,000 45-gallon barrels, siphoned off and reported stolen from a central distribution centre in August, have been found.

The Sûreté du Québec and the RCMP obtained search warrants last week and raided a facility in New Brunswick.

While Sergeant Daniel Thibodeau of the SQ could do no more than confirm that a search warrant "had been executed," sources told The Gazette that an "important" amount of product was found in a maple syrup processing and exporting facility in Kedgwick, NB.