The coalition has dropped plans for a crucial vote on its plans to reform the House of Lords after it faced likely defeat over the issue.

Up to 100 Conservatives were expected to defy the government and oppose the plan to limit the time available for debating plans for a mainly elected second chamber of Parliament.

Ministers said they were still "committed" to the plans.

But one senior Conservative MP said the plans had "lost moral authority".

Germany's Constitutional Court is hearing objections to the new EU permanent rescue fund, with petitioners hoping to block its introduction.

German lawmakers backed the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) in June, but President Joachim Gauck wants a court ruling before he will sign it into law.

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned the judges that delaying a ruling would carry economic risks.

Various groups want the court to block the ESM and the EU's fiscal treaty.

The European Court of Human Rights has told Spain to release an Eta militant jailed in 1989 for terrorism offences, ruling that her rights were violated.

Spain was also ordered to pay the prisoner, Ines del Rio Prada, damages of 30,000 euros (£24,000; $37,000).

Del Rio was jailed for 30 years but was due for release in July 2008, having been granted remission.

However, the remission rules were changed in 2006 and Spain decided to postpone her release until 2017.

François Hollande was in Downing Street for a big hugs summit with our prime minister. The idea was to forget old slights, bond together, and get onto affable Frank 'n Dave terms.

It must have been puzzling for the French president. Questions at the press conference were about House of Lords reform. If Dave had been in Paris, and the hacks wanted to ask about the fate of various ducs, marquises and viscomtes, he would imagine the French revolution had never taken place.

What he didn't know, and what we didn't know, but what Dave presumably did know, was that the government was about to withdraw the "timetable motion", without which the reform bill may never get through.

After weeks of violent protest at cuts to Spanish mining subsidies, workers are on the march to Madrid.

* Read some of their stories

The death toll from recent rains and floods in southern Russia's Krasnodar territory has climbed to 172, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday.

"According to the Interior Ministry's crisis center, the disaster has killed 172 people, including 159 in Krymsk, 11 in Gelendzhik, and two in Novorossiisk," the ministry said.

It would have been easy yesterday for Angela Merkel and François Hollande to have felt like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, as they met in Reims to mark the 50th anniversary of the summit between Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle that set the final seal on France and Germany's reconciliation after almost a century of conflict. Yet the challenges that both leaders face are, if anything, the equal of those that confronted their celebrated predecessors. The construction of the European Economic Community, in which both Adenauer and de Gaulle played such a role, was meant to end Europe's divisions forever. Now, the single currency to which the European project gave birth threatens to divide the Continent once more. That is why Mrs Merkel and Mr Hollande are pushing Europe towards becoming even more integrated, in order (they hope) to secure its economic salvation.

For British observers, yesterday's summit was a bittersweet affair. It was the alliance between de Gaulle and Adenauer that doomed our initial attempt to join the European Economic Community. Even though we did later sign up, the snub set the pattern of decades: France and Germany charting the course of European integration, with the UK either trying to hold them back or running to catch up.

Atos IT workers are threatening to strike over pay in industrial action that could hit the London Olympics.

The Public and Commercial Services union said it was balloting members on strike action this week after they voted not to accept "below-inflation pay offers".

Over 1,500 members across Atos Healthcare and Atos IT Services will get to vote for or against going on strike, which they could decide to do during the Olympic Games.

"In sponsoring the Olympics, Atos would like the world to associate it with a spirit of effort and success, but the reality is that it makes its millions on the backs of its low-paid staff," PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said in a canned statement.

At yesterday's hearing, the president of Germany's constitutional court hinted that he may not run this case under the emergency procedure - and this implies that Germany won't be able to ratify the ESM for some time yet; Andreas Voßkuhle says court may need to undertake an in-depth analysis; Wolfgang Schauble warns that a negative rule would have considerable implications for the financial markets; plaintiffs argue that the ESM and the fiscal pact deprive the Bundestag of its effective budgetary control; Jens Weidmann used the opportunity to criticise the ESM in front of the constitutional court; he said the ESM challenges the autonomy of central banks; also said it was not clear whether the costs may not have to rise again; he said court would have to weigh the risks of a negative short-term market reaction against the long-term negative consequences of transfers; Bild applauds the court's decision to delay, but remains concerned about the dominance of southern Europeans; we have the full list of the ESM programme agreed by Spain: a highly invasive action plan to reform the Spanish financial sector; it includes provisions for the bail-in of shareholders, preferred shareholders and subordinated bondholders, i.e. including a lot of small savers; also includes provision for a strengthening of the role of the Bank of Spain, and for a bad bank; El Pais says that EU has taken Spain under guardianship; Vitor Constancio says the ECB will not help fund bank restructuring funds and deposit insurance schemes because this was against the spirit of the treaty; the Bundestag interrupts its summer break to decide on the Spanish rescue; Joaquín Almunia estimates the costs of the bank rescues at 4-5%; Greece must find €2.6bn to plug budget gap until August 20; IMF forecasts higher deficit and debt levels for Italy, and warns that structural reforms won't have any short-term impact; the Bank of Italy approves the business plan of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena; Mario Monti, meanwhile, says he will quit in 2013, and Silvio Berlusconi says he may run again.

It's no fun being Prime Minister of a debtor nation without its own currency. Unlike the US or the UK, Spain has no easy options.

That said, the new austerity measures just announced make no sense at all.

According to news reports, Rajoy has announced 65 billion euros of tax increases and spending cuts; this will clearly deepen Spain's depression. So what purpose will this serve?

...

So, Rajoy is imposing harsh further austerity that will raise unemployment while making no significant dent in either the fiscal problem or the competitiveness problem. And this makes sense why?

Eurozone finance ministers have agreed to lend Spain 30bn euros (£24bn; $37bn) this month to help its troubled banks.

It will be the first instalment of a bailout of up to 100bn euros, which was agreed in June.

The ministers will need to get approval from their own parliaments and hope to make the payment by the end of July.

The eurozone finance ministers also agreed to extend the 2013 deadline for Spain to cut its budget deficit to the EU limit of 3% by one year.

Bob Diamond, the former chief executive of Barclays, has given up bonuses worth up to 20m pounds ($30m) following his resignation over an interest rate-rigging scandal, the bank's chairman told a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday.

Marcus Agius, the man at the top of Barclays when its traders manipulated a global benchmark interest rate, appeared before a hostile panel of lawmakers as part of its investigation into a row that has caused widespread public anger and which threatens to draw in a dozen more global banks.

Agius was the first Barclays executive to quit when the scandal erupted last week but that was not enough to protect Diamond, who was forced out a day later. Agius has had to stay on to find a successor to Diamond.

"Bob Diamond has voluntarily decided to forgo any deferred consideration and deferred bonuses to which he otherwise would have been entitled to," Agius, 65, told the panel.

The financially illiterate arts graduates MPs who tried to question Bob Diamond last week never stood a chance of getting down to how it was possible in the first place to screw with the single most important set of numbers in finance. So if you know an MP or someone at the Financial Services Authority, pass this on to them.

The Financial Services Authority is meant to be the City's watchdog but `devastating' internal documents reveal it has secretly co-ordinated high-level lobbying strategies with the industry it is supposed to police.

The documents come from previously restricted minutes of meetings between the FSA and 13 powerful financial industry trade bodies, including the British Bankers Association (BBA) and the Association of Financial Markets in Europe.

The redacted details of 16 meetings - under the trade associations consultative committee (TACC) - between 2006 and 2011, reveal several strategies;-

My bold

keep to the Fen Causeway

Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga has been sentenced to 14 years in jail for recruiting and using child soldiers in his rebel army in 2002 and 2003.

Taking into account time in custody, he will now serve a further eight years.

In March, he became the first person to be convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) since it was set up 10 years ago.

The conflict between ethnic groups in Ituri, north-eastern DR Congo, is estimated to have killed 60,000 people.

Lubanga led the Union of Congolese Patriots, an ethnic Hema militia which was active in the war that started in the Ituri region and its main town of Bunia in 1999.

Israeli President in unusual remark during memorial service for the visionary of the Jewish state, Theodore Herzl.

Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court has frozen the decree issued by President Mohamed Morsi reinstating the Islamist-led parliament.

"The court ruled to halt the president's decision to recall the parliament," Judge Maher el-Beheiry said in court on Tuesday.

Morsi, a former member of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, ordered on Sunday for the lower house to reconvene, just eight days after taking office.

Fighters from the al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar Dine, controlling northern Mali, have destroyed two tombs at the ancient Djingareyber mud mosque in Timbuktu, an endangered World Heritage site, witnesses say.

About a dozen men arrived in an armoured four-wheel drive truck, armed with pickaxes and hoes. They fired in the air
to intimidate people and started smashing the tombs, according to Ibrahim Cisse, who witnessed the incident.

"They blocked the two main roads leading to the mausoleums. When they saw people gathering for a ceremony nearby, they began firing shots in the air," another resident, Mahamad ould Ibrahim, said.

UN and Democratic Republic of Congo troops are reinforcing a key city in the east of the country to guard against attack by rebels who have seized ground in recent days.

DR Congo authorities and the United Nations fear that the M23 movement, which took one town on the Uganda border last week and forced 600 government troops to flee, may target the provincial capital of Goma, UN officials said.

"It would be disastrous if Goma was taken," said a UN official who gave details of the reinforcements on Tuesday.

The UN Security Council is to discuss the new strife on Tuesday while international leaders will use an African Union summit in Addis Ababa this week to try to defuse tensions between DR Congo and Rwanda over the fighting.

UN and Arab League peace envoy Kofi Annan has said that top-level talks with the Syrian leadership have failed and that a new approach, focusing on pockets of violence and building "from the ground up rather than the other way around", is needed to stop the fighting.

"We've tried it at the national level on the 12th of April and it didn't hold," Annan told journalists in Baghdad in a short briefing in the heavily fortified Green Zone after meeting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Tuesday.

Annan said he would brief the UN Security Council on Wednesday on the Syria crisis, pointing out that the primary aim should be containing the violence in order to enable talks to begin between the conflicting sides.

An Israeli court has acquitted former prime minister Ehud Olmert on two key corruption charges while finding him guilty on a lesser charge, in a verdict he hailed as just.

The Jerusalem District Court on Tuesday cleared Olmert on charges of receiving cash-stuffed envelopes and falsely billing trips abroad multiple times, but convicted him on the charge of granting favours to a former colleague during his time as a minister.

Olmert still faces a second trial over allegations he accepted bribes during his time as Jerusalem mayor to smooth the way for the construction of the massive Holyland residential complex in the city.

Wartime rebel prime minister Mahmoud Jibril took an early lead in Libya's national assembly election, according to partial tallies released on Monday that pointed to a weaker than expected showing for Islamist parties.

If confirmed that trend would set Libya apart from other Arab Spring countries such as Egypt and Tunisia where groups with overtly religious agendas have done well - although Jibril insists his multi-party alliance is neither secular nor liberal and includes sharia Islamic law among its core values.

President Barack Obama called on Monday for a one-year extension of Bush-era tax cuts for families earning less than $250,000 a year, seeking to put Republicans on the defensive and reinforce his campaign mantra of being a middle-class champion.

Obama's proposal is unlikely to sway his opponents in Congress, who have argued consistently that the Bush tax cuts should be extended for everyone, including higher earners.

"Let's not hold the vast majority of Americans and our entire economy hostage while we debate the merits of another tax cut for the wealthy," Obama said at the White House, standing in front of a riser filled with people who he said would be hurt if their tax cuts were not extended.

In the course of the most recent session, Netanyahu directed representatives of the national information directorate, which operates under the aegis of the Prime Minister's Office, to present him by the next session with a proposal for a media campaign in those African states from which the unlawful migrants are arriving, in order to deter them from crossing the border into Israel.

[...]

Similarly, there is concern that any such negative campaign could have a boomerang effect - instead of reducing the motivation of labor migrants to go to Israel, it could harm Israel's image in the public opinion in Africa and the West.

New York property magnate Donald Trump opened his controversial new golf course north of Aberdeen, Scotland, on Monday. Environmentalists have opposed the development, built across a stretch of stunning land overlooking the North Sea near Balmedie in Aberdeeenshire, because of its proximity to protected sand dunes.

But Trump dismissed the concerns when he teed off with a rather unimpressive shot.

The opening came three years later than planned, delayed by a public inquiry and official wrangling. Plans for a clubhouse, hotel and villas are on hold. Trump says they rest on whether the Scottish government approves an offshore windfarm (which he opposes) and - more plausibly - change in the economic climate.

The city authorities of San Francisco have banned departmental purchases of Apple hardware after Cupertino dropped out of the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) green-standards scheme.

"We are disappointed that Apple chose to withdraw from EPEAT," Melanie Nutter, director of San Francisco's Department of Environment, told The Wall Street Journal, "and we hope that the city saying it will not buy Apple products will make Apple reconsider its participation."

There is no money for infrastructure projects. Right?

Two months after Vladimir Putin once again assumed the post of Russian president, the long-feared crackdown on his critics appears to have begun. The internet bill due to be considered by parliament on Wednesday is, say activists, the latest sign of growing repression of civil freedom in Russia.

The bill calls for the creation of a federal website "nolist". Internet providers and site owners would be forced to shut down any websites on this list. According to Wikipedia authors on Tuesday, the bill will "lead to the creation of a Russian analogue to China's great firewall".

The bill's backers in Putin's United Russia party argue that the amendments to the country's information legislation are aimed at child pornography and sites that promote drug use and teen suicide.

The revelation of the software failure comes just days after the head of Germany's internal security service stepped down after his agency admitted shredding files on a high-profile right-wing terrorism case.

In the latest incident a technical problem prompted computers at the federal police headquarters (BKA) to erase evidence such as bugged telephone conversations, text messages, emails and faxes over two months covering the end of 2011 and the beginning of this year.

Instead of transferring the files to an online storage depository the software glitch meat that the files were deleted.

Cranks who claimed that the aurora borealis makes a noise when it lights up the Northern sky have been proven right by science.

Boffins from Aalto University in Finland recorded the 'clapping' sounds of the Northern Lights back in 2004, but only discovered the noises when they switched the recording from DV tapes to disc.

Just to check they were right, the researchers then put three microphones in three different locations during the phenomenon to record the auroral sounds again.

In other words, that Twigg will come up with this rubbish should be nothing surprising to people not members of the party. We have yet to see serious changes within labour that illustrate it has learned anything about policy making. And this isn't anything about ideology either, it applies to the Blairites, Brownites, and the Fabians as well - there is nothing intrinsically about Blairism that should lead to this rubbish.

It's about the way Labour selects and promotes (or doesn't promote) talent within the party, and how it rewards tribalism and careerism over ability. There are talented people in the Labour party currently running organisations and being successful in their careers who are trying to become MPs, MSPs, MEPs and AMs who are overlooked in selection processes where safe seats are either given to long standing members who are simply regarded as backbench fodder, or to party hacks with no outside experience being rushed into senior levels.

One of the UK's richest women has been found dead in west London, Scotland Yard has confirmed.

The body of US national Eva Rausing, 48, a member of the family behind the Tetra-Pak cartons empire, was found at Cadogan Place, Belgravia.

The death is being treated as unexplained.

A 49-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the woman's death and on suspicion of possession of drugs, the Metropolitan Police said.

China will send 396 athletes in 23 sports to the upcoming London Olympic Games, it was announced on Tuesday.

The team, consisting of 171 men and 225 women athletes, will also be accompanied by 225 officials for the Games which start on July 27.

According to the Chinese Olympic Committee (COC), China will be represented in 23 of 26 sports at the Summer Games after it has failed to qualify for soccer, equestrian and handball.

A total of 29 Beijing Olympic titlists, including badminton star Lin Dan, swimming ace Liu Zige and sharpshooter Du Li, will lead the team at the quadrennial games.

- Tour de France team Cofidis have suspended Frenchman Remy Di Gregorio over doping allegations, the team announced on the race's first rest day Tuesday.

Di Gregorio was arrested following a police raid at his team's hotel in Bourg-en-Bresse, several miles outside Macon in eastern France where the race will resume on the 10th stage Wednesday.

A team statement said: "We have just learned that one of our riders, competing at the Tour de France, has attempted to resort to doping substances to improve his performance.