People clad in yellow t-shirts joined hands across highways and towns on Wednesday in the northeastern region of Spain. Many independence supporters were draped in blue, red and yellow separatist flags.

The demonstration was held on Catalonia's public holiday in an effort to stir up support for independence.

Organizers say around 1 million people turned out, while the Catalan government said it would publish official attendance figures later.

Tough economic times

"Today is a historic day," said Carme Forcadell, president of the Catalan National Assembly - the group that organized the event. "The Catalan people have reaffirmed their determination to be a free state."

Witness statements from fans who saw the Hillsborough disaster unfold may have been altered by officers from West Midlands police, according to investigators carrying out the biggest police corruption inquiry ever mounted in England and Wales.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission said its inquiry into the aftermath of the stadium tragedy, which killed 96 Liverpool fans, has also uncovered new evidence, with the discovery of 90 pocket books written by South Yorkshire officers on duty at the time and never before located.

More than 100 investigators and staff are involved in the IPCC inquiry into the alleged black propaganda campaign mounted by South Yorkshire police following the disaster in April 1989. A separate criminal investigation into all agencies involved, led by former Durham chief constable Jon Stoddart, is being run alongside the police watchdog's work.

Speaking on the first anniversary of the highly critical Hillsborough panel report - which led to the setting-up of the dual criminal investigations - Deborah Glass, deputy chair of the IPCC, revealed that the watchdog had uncovered 74 more police statements that appeared to have been altered. The panel reported last year that 164 police statements had been amended; of those, 116 were either removed or changed to alter negative comments about the police operation at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich (pictured fourth from left) welcomed 107 Syrians, half of them children, on the tarmac of Hanover's airport on Wednesday. Germany's 16 regional states agreed last March to host 5,000 civil-war refugees for two years.

Those arriving will spend two weeks at a pair of reception hostels in northern Germany before being allocated to the regional states. The most populous, North Rhine-Westphalia, is to accept 1,060, and the smallest, Bremen, some 50.

Around 300 have already made it to Germany by their own means. The quota of 5,000 granted entry visas were picked from among Syrians registered months ago with UN and charitable agencies in Lebanon.

A court in Germany has ruled that a Muslim schoolgirl should take part in mixed-sex swimming lessons.

Her parents had insisted that the girl, 13, not take part in swimming lessons at her school in Frankfurt.

Some Muslim parents say that such lessons run contrary to Islamic principles of modesty.

However, the judge in the case said the girl could wear an all-over swimming garment sometimes dubbed a "burkini" in order to accommodate her beliefs.

Some Muslim girls already wear the garment to take part in lessons.

However, others reject that solution, saying that the garment is clumsy but also that it is unacceptable for Muslim girls to be in close proximity to boys clad only in swimming trunks, the BBC's Stephen Evans reports from Berlin.

A record number of people work in estate agents offices and the sector is growing so fast that it amounted to the fastest growing part of the national workforce in the three months ending in June, according to official figures published on Wednesday.

The Office for National Statistics said that 562,000 people are employed in real estate in the UK, the largest number since records began in 1978, with 77,000 joining the industry over the last year - data that added to fears that the country is heading for a house price bubble.

"We're no longer a nation of shopkeepers - we're becoming a nation of estate agents," said Danny Gabay, director of economics consultancy Fathom. "I would certainly agree that the economy has turned a corner; my concern is about how sustainable this recovery will be, given that it is based on using government subsidies to encourage already over-extended households to take on even more debt to finance their consumption."

Concerns about the state of the housing market were also voiced by the business secretary, Vince Cable, who called for an urgent rethink of George Osborne's flagship Help to Buy scheme, which aims to provide government guarantees for low-deposit mortgages from next January.

Ministers will on Thursday give the go-ahead for a stock market flotation of Royal Mail, triggering a privatisation that even Margaret Thatcher thought a step too far.

The government will announce its intention to sell a majority of the world's oldest postal service in the most ambitious privatisation since John Major sold off the railways in the 1990s.

Vince Cable, business secretary, briefed the cabinet on the plans on Tuesday. It means the coalition is within sight of a goal that has eluded governments over 20 years.

Lady Thatcher balked at selling Royal Mail. Subsequent efforts by Lords Heseltine and Mandelson, Conservative and Labour industry secretaries, to sell all or part of the company failed because of MPs' opposition.

An EU plan to introduce a tax on financial transaction next year had to be ruled out, a spokesperson for EU tax commissioner Algirdas Semeta told the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung on Wednesday.

The tax was no longer on the agenda of an EU Finance Ministers meeting later this year, aimed at outlining the program for Lithuania's EU presidency lasting until the end of 2013, the unnamed spokesperson was quoted as saying.

Furthermore, reaching agreement next year on the tax could be achieved only with a major political effort, the spokesperson reportedly said.

Spearheaded by France and Germany, a group of 11 EU member states are seeking to go ahead with a tax on all financial transactions next year, under efforts to make financial institutions repay part of the losses from the financial crisis they caused.

Shadow financial institutions have taken advantage of the wave of new regulation to steal the lion's share of the derivatives business from the major banks in a blow to those institutions' profitability, according to traders.

Bankers fear the trend, underpinned by tougher capital rules for the banks, can only increase as regulations come into force encouraging bilateral over-the-counter deals on to exchanges, where pricing is more transparent. The obligatory clearing of trades, theoretically in place since the end of last year, will further erode margins.

"There's been a substantial increase in the number of small banks and hedge funds operating in this space," said one investment bank boss. "That has helped to narrow spreads, which is good news for clients but less good for [profits]."

Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Vodafone Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Vittorio Colao talks about the company's exit from the U.S. wireless market and its overall business outlook. Verizon Communications Inc. agreed to buy Vodafone's 45 percent stake in their U.S. mobile venture for $130 billion. Colao spoke with Bloomberg Television's Manus Cranny in London yesterday. (Source: Bloomberg)

The U.K. mobile-phone company needs to collect 75 percent of Kabel Deutschland shares by midnight tonight in Germany for the transaction to go through. The offer will lapse if Vodafone, which held or had the backing of owners of about 20 percent of shares by yesterday, doesn't reach that threshold.

Increasing Vodafone's risk of failure is Elliott Management Corp., the company run by billionaire Paul Singer that has recently become Kabel Deutschland's biggest shareholder. The hedge fund may be betting it can squeeze more than the 87-euro-per-share offer price out of Vodafone, a person familiar with the takeover offer said, asking not to be named discussing private deliberations.

Elliott -- which said this week its stake in Kabel Deutschland has reached 10.9 percent -- wants to take advantage of a German law that often requires a buyer that gets at least 75 percent of the target's shares to offer more money to hold-outs after securing a so-called domination and profit-transfer agreement, the person said.

Traditional office and industrial jobs are becoming less common. Structural changes in the labour market are forcing people who would previously have taken jobs with reasonable salaries to compete with young people for low-paid work.

The Finnish labour market is creating more high income jobs, but that is at the expense of the middle income bracket. Office and industrial jobs--such as travel agents, secretaries, mechanics and fitters--are less available than before, as many routine tasks have been replaced by technology.

Previous years of comments pointing out the stupidity of EU Neo-Liberal economic policy deemed included.


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

WASHINGTON -- America exhaled Wednesday, relieved that the United States has avoided military involvement in Syria at least temporarily.

The relief - the opposite of the rally-round-the-flag emotion common to such moments - suggested that the country is entering a new post-Cold War, post-9/11 era, reluctant if not openly hostile to armed intervention in faraway lands.

Even while he asked Congress to delay a vote on airstrikes, President Barack Obama tried this week to argue that it's crucial, that allowing Syria to go unpunished for the alleged use of chemical weapons would invite aggression, hurt allies such as Israel and Turkey, and embolden rogue nations such as Iran. Yet he did little to reverse the trend against intervention, offering no new argument for it and balancing his call for strikes with expressions of his own reluctance.

"Several people wrote to me, `We should not be the world's policeman.' I agree," he said in an address to the nation Tuesday night that likely did little to win support for possible airstrike

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process "minimization", but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.

A car bomb has exploded near a Shia place of worship in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, killing at least 33 people and wounding up to 55 others.

Wednesday's apparent sectarian attack took place in Baghdad's northwestern Kasra district.

Worshippers were leaving the mosque after evening prayers when the car bomb exploded, and as onlookers rushed to help the wounded, a suicide bomber blew himself up in their midst, Reuters news agency said.

Policemen reportedly saw a second man fumbling to detonate an explosive belt and managed to stop him, but an angry mob overcame them and stabbed him to death.

It was not immediately clear who carried out the attack, but al-Qaeda-linked Sunni Muslim groups have been regaining momentum and striking on a near daily basis this year.

Thousands of teachers are back on the streets of Mexico City a day after the president signed a controversial education reform bill into law.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto signed the final part the education reform bill into law on Tuesday, in a move that infuriated teaching unions who have fought the bill from the outset.

The reform, finalised on Tuesday, introduces mandatory teacher evaluations for the first time, which unions considers a violation of workers' rights.

"In the application of the education law there won't be a step back, rather we will make sure we move forward faster," Pena Nieto said as he signed the law.

Al Jazeera's Adam Raney, reporting from Mexico City on Wednesday, said the teachers were trying to build momentum for their cause.

The chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, said a formal complaint would be lodged with the French embassy in Tokyo, adding that the cartoon hurt the victims of the triple disaster that struck Japan's north-east coast on 11 March 2011.

"It is inappropriate and gives the wrong impression about the issue of contaminated water at Fukushima Daiichi," Suga said. "It is extremely regrettable."

But the fun part is the following excerpt from this article:

It was her military aide, Gen. Yisrael Lior, passing on a message from Mossad chief Zvi Zamir who had just met in London with his most valued source. War, said Lior. This day, before dark.

(Reuters) - The food the world wastes accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than any country except for China and the United States, the United Nations said in a report on Wednesday.

Every year about a third of all food for human consumption, around 1.3 billion tons, is wasted, along with all the energy, water and chemicals needed to produce it and dispose of it.

Almost 30 percent of the world's farmland, and a volume of water equivalent to the annual discharge of the River Volga, are in effect being used in vain.

In its report entitled "The Food Wastage Footprint", the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that the carbon footprint of wasted food was equivalent to 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.

If it were a country, it would be the world's third biggest emitter after China and the United States, suggesting that more efficient food use could contribute substantially to global efforts to cut greenhouse gases to limit global warming.

After I posted news that Greenland soared to its hottest temperature on record this summer, it came to light that the toasty reading was under review by the Danish Meteorological Society (which maintains Greenland's records) and might be rescinded.

Today, John Cappelen, senior climatologist at the Danish Meteorological Society, emailed me to let me know the record high of 25.9 C (78.6 F) set on July 30 at Maniitsoq stands.

"I have now accepted the record at Maniitsoq based on further analysis," Cappelen said.

At issue was whether the temperature measurement, taken at an airport location, was legitimate. Artificial heat sources at airports can sometimes corrupt temperature readings.

Sep. 10, 2013 -- Evidence of diverse life forms dating back nearly a hundred thousand years has been found in subglacial lake sediments by a group of British scientists.

The possibility that extreme life forms might exist in the cold and dark lakes hidden kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice sheet has fascinated scientists for decades.

However, direct sampling of these lakes in the interior of Antarctica continues to present major technological challenges. Recognising this, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and the Universities of Northumbria and Edinburgh have been searching around the retreating margins of the ice sheet for subglacial lakes that are becoming exposed for the first time since they were buried more than 100,000 years ago.

This is because parts of the ice sheet are melting and retreating at unprecedented rates as the temperature rises at the poles.

The group targeted Lake Hodgson on the Antarctic Peninsula which was covered by more than 400 m of ice at the end of the last Ice Age, but is now considered to be an emerging subglacial lake, with a thin covering of just 3-4 metres of ice.

The European Commission is proposing to scrap mobile phone roaming charges across Europe as part of a raft of measures to reform the telecoms market.

The Commission described the reforms as "the most ambitious plan in 26 years of telecoms market reform".

It said the measures will reduce consumer charges and simplify red tape for mobile companies.

The proposals must be approved by the 28 EU members and European lawmakers before they can be put into effect.

Analysts say Europe is falling behind in broadband infrastructure, while telecoms companies struggle with declining revenues.

Sep. 11, 2013 -- An HIV/AIDS vaccine candidate developed by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University appears to have the ability to completely clear an AIDS-causing virus from the body. The promising vaccine candidate is being developed at OHSU's Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute. It is being tested through the use of a non-human primate form of HIV, called simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, which causes AIDS in monkeys. Following further development, it is hoped an HIV-form of the vaccine candidate can soon be tested in humans.

These research results were published online today by the journal Nature. The results will also appear in a future print version of the publication.

"To date, HIV infection has only been cured in a very small number of highly-publicized but unusual clinical cases in which HIV-infected individuals were treated with anti-viral medicines very early after the onset of infection or received a stem cell transplant to combat cancer," said Louis Picker, M.D., associate director of the OHSU Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute. "This latest research suggests that certain immune responses elicited by a new vaccine may also have the ability to completely remove HIV from the body."

Sep. 9, 2013 -- NASA's black-hole-hunter spacecraft, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has "bagged" its first 10 supermassive black holes. The mission, which has a mast the length of a school bus, is the first telescope capable of focusing the highest-energy X-ray light into detailed pictures.

The new black-hole finds are the first of hundreds expected from the mission over the next two years. These gargantuan structures -- black holes surrounded by thick disks of gas -- lie at the hearts of distant galaxies between 0.3 and 11.4 billion light-years from Earth.

"We found the black holes serendipitously," explained David Alexander, a NuSTAR team member based in the Department of Physics at Durham University in England and lead author of a new study appearing Aug. 20 in The Astrophysical Journal. "We were looking at known targets and spotted the black holes in the background of the images."

Additional serendipitous finds such as these are expected for the mission. Along with the mission's more targeted surveys of selected patches of sky, the NuSTAR team plans to comb through hundreds of images taken by the telescope with the goal of finding black holes caught in the background.

The Wall Street mantra "greed is good" could soon be adopted by cosmologists to explain the origins of dark energy, the mysterious entity that is speeding up the expansion of the Universe.

At a cosmology meeting last week in Cambridge, UK, attendants debated a controversial class of theories in which gravity is carried by a hypothetical `graviton' particle that has a small, but still non-vanishing, mass. Such a particle would tend to gobble up vast amounts of energy from the fabric of space, enabling the Universe to expand at an accelerated, although not destructive, pace.

Since astronomers discovered in the late 1990s that the Universe's expansion is accelerating, researchers have struggled to explain not only the nature of the hypothetical entity -- dubbed dark energy -- that's causing the acceleration but also why the acceleration is so weak.

Politicians ask their supporters for a lot, from monetary donations to holding campaign signs near busy intersections - often in frigid weather. Such big asks would seem to call for strong, cogent pitches. After all, who'd volunteer for a candidate who couldn't even explain her positions on the issues? As it turns out, lots of us. In fact, recent research suggests that in some cases, providing weak arguments in favor of a candidate or cause leads supporters to engage in greater advocacy than providing strong ones.

In an experiment conducted in the months prior to the 2012 United States presidential election, several Stanford University researchers - Omair Akhtar, David Paunesku, and Zakary Tormala - asked one hundred and sixty five members of a national online sample to report their feelings about President Barack Obama's bid for reelection. Based on their responses, respondents were categorized into pro- and anti-Obama voters.

A new excavation in the Xirokambi area of Aghios Vassilios west of Sparta, in the Peloponnese, Greece, has revealed a richness of Mycenean artefacts in the area, including the remains of a palace, Linear B tablets, fragments of wall paintings, and several bronze swords.
The excavation, led by emeritus ephor of antiquities Adamantia Vassilogrambrou, was presented publicly at the biennial Shanghai Archaeology Forum at the end of August as one of 11 sites showcased from different parts of the world.

The Aghios Vassilios excavation began in 2010, after Linear B tablets were found in the area in 2008, pointing to the existence of a powerful central authority and distribution system. The deciphered texts were devoted to perfume and cloth production, the trade of which was controlled by a palace administration in the Mycenean era.

Evidence of a central palace administration was confirmed also by the architecture, which is dated to the 14th century BC, while contact with Crete was confirmed by the finding of a double axe, a feature of the island's palace culture.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman