BRUSSELS - France risks "international ridicule" if it delivers a warship to Russia despite the Malaysian Airlines disaster, but its intentions remain unchanged in the immediate aftermath.

The ship, a "Mistral" assault vessel which forms part of a €1.2 billion contract, is to be sent to Russia in October, with the French navy currently training Russian sailors how to use it at the port of St. Nazaire in Normandy.

The US and some EU states had already criticised the deal before the air crash because of the Ukraine crisis. But others, such as Germany, had defended France's decision to go ahead.

The new debate comes amid allegations that pro-Russia rebels in Ukraine shot down the Malaysian airliner by mistake using a Russian-supplied "Buk" missile.

The US has not mentioned the Mistral since the disaster on Thursday. But German chancellor Angela Merkel hinted at a change of heart on Friday.

Pro-Palestinian protesters in France have clashed with police at a rally against Israel's action in Gaza.

Thousands took part in the protest in Paris, despite it being banned. Some threw stones and bottles at riot police, who responded with tear gas.

The ban was imposed after protesters attempted to storm two synagogues at a similar protest last week.

A militiaman with the nickname "Grumpy" - he was squat and barrel-chested with poor teeth and carried a machine gun - harangued me when I asked if the rebels would now stop fighting.

"You are only here because foreigners are dead," he said.

And the old story was repeated, the same story I have heard on numerous roadblocks.

The Western media were all capitalists doing the bidding of their American and EU masters.

When the OSCE turned up in a convoy led by police cars with flashing blue light "Grumpy" came into his own.

Now he was a man of power. He halted the OSCE and told them they would have to go forward on foot. A standoff followed.

The OSCE monitors went into a huddle. Yes, they would go forward on foot.

Ten minutes later "Grumpy" presented another problem.

The local experts - emergency service workers and local police - were working at the place where most of the wreckage had landed. It would not be possible to go on.

Again the OSCE huddled and the negotiations went back and forth.

And after another five minutes they were allowed to proceed once more.

(Reuters) - A week on from its World Cup soccer victory, Germany may return to center stage, though this time not with fan celebrations but concerns over the health of Europe's economic motor.

Investors saw dark clouds building on Friday after a Malaysian airlines jet was shot down at the Ukraine-Russia border and Israel launched a ground offensive in Gaza. That depressed shares and other risk assets, but the events are yet to disturb economic forecasts.

"We've seen a delayed impact of China and the Ukraine crisis," said ING economist Carsten Brzeski. "This is an explosive cocktail, but right now with limited impact on growth. The Ukraine/Russia issue was already there."

In a week relatively light on U.S. indicators, economists are looking for further signs that Europe's recovery and even German growth may be stalling, putting more pressure on the European Central Bank to act.

Across the Channel, minutes from the Bank of England may be the last to show unanimous backing for a stable bank rate of 0.5 percent. The case for tightening may then be reinforced by second quarter GDP estimates likely to show solid growth.

For Germany, the views of purchasing managers (PMIs) on Thursday and of company chiefs surveyed for Friday's influential Ifo report should show whether a slowdown of Europe's largest economy detected in the second quarter has spread to the third.

At least 60 people have been killed in Gaza's Shujayea district in the heaviest barrage of tank shells since Israel launched its ground offensive.

The reports of the Palestinian deaths came as a two-hour humanitarian ceasefire broke down less than an hour after it was announced on Sunday.

Thousands of people fled the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip as heavy bombardment by the Israeli army continued overnight, with the Palestinian death toll over the last 13 days reaching 410.

The eastern neighbourhoods of Shujayea, al-Shaaf and al-Tuffa were the worst hit. Bodies littered the streets. 

In the early afternoon, Israel agreed to observe a two-hour humanitarian ceasefire in Shujayea to allow the evacuation of wounded, but it was broken less than an hour after it was announced.

The battle for control of Libya's main international airport has resumed, reports say, as a truce agreed between rival militias two days ago broke down.

"The airport was attacked this morning with mortar rounds, rockets and tank fire," Jilani al-Dahesh, an airport security official, told AFP on Sunday. "It was the most intense bombardment so far."

(Reuters) - South Sudanese rebels and government soldiers clashed in the northern town of Nasir on Sunday, adding to fears that a shaky ceasefire agreement signed in May could totally collapse.

Rebel spokesman Lul Ruai Koang said troops loyal to Riek Machar, South Sudan's former vice president, launched an assault on the government-held town and "at dawn liberated Nasir".

South Sudan army spokesman Philip Aguer confirmed there was fighting but said the rebels were not in full control of Nasir, a small town 30 km from the Ethiopian border in the oil-rich Upper Nile State.

"The rebels have been shelling Nasir since last night and this morning at 6am they launched a ground attack," Aguer told Reuters. "There is still fighting in Nasir but the rebels don't control Nasir."

A 25-year-long study published in GEOLOGY provides the first quantitative measurement of in situ calcium-magnesium silicate mineral dissolution by ants, termites, tree roots, and bare ground. This study reveals that ants are one of the most powerful biological agents of mineral decay yet observed.

It may be that an understanding of the geobiology of ant-mineral interactions might offer a line of research on how to "geoengineer" accelerated CO2 consumption by Ca-Mg silicates.

Researcher Ronald Dorn of Arizona State University writes that over geological timescales, the dissolution of calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) bearing silicates has led to the graduate drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) through the accumulation of limestone and dolomite.

Many contemporary efforts to sequester CO2 involve burial, with some negative environmental consequences.

Ah, summer--the season when trillions of corn and soybean plants tower horizon-to-horizon in the Midwest. All told, US farmers planted more than 170 million acres in these two crops this year--a combined landmass roughly equal in size to the state of Texas. That's great news for the companies that turn corn and soy into livestock feed, sweeteners, and food additives; but not so great for honeybees, wild pollinating insects like bumblebees, and birds.

That's because these crops--along with other major ones like alfalfa and sunflower--are widely treated with pesticides called neonicotinoids. Made  by European chemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, these chemicals generate a staggering $2.6 billion in annual revenue worldwide--and have come under heavy suspicion as a trigger of colony collapse disorder and other, less visible, ecological calamities.

Last year, the European Union imposed a two-year ban on the chemicals, pending more study of their effects on pollinators. The US Environmental Protection Agency--which originally approved the products through a highly dubious process I laid out here--has stood by these ubiquitous pesticides.

Meanwhile, damning research piles up.

New University of Alaska Fairbanks research indicates that arctic thermokarst lakes stabilize climate change by storing more greenhouse gases than they emit into the atmosphere.

Countering a widely-held view that thawing permafrost accelerates atmospheric warming, a study published this week in the scientific journal Nature suggests arctic thermokarst lakes are 'net climate coolers' when observed over longer, millennial, time scales.

"Until now, we've only thought of thermokarst lakes as positive contributors to climate warming," says lead researcher Katey Walter Anthony, associate research professor at the UAF Institute of Northern Engineering. "It is true that they do warm climate by strong methane emissions when they first form, but on a longer-term scale, they switch to become climate coolers because they ultimately soak up more carbon from the atmosphere than they ever release."

Germany is the world's most energy efficient nation with strong codes on buildings while China is quickly stepping up its own efforts, an environmental group said Thursday.

The study of 16 major economies by the Washington-based American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy ranked Mexico last and voiced concern about the pace of efforts by the United States and Australia.

The council gave Germany the top score as it credited Europe's largest economy for its mandatory codes on residential and commercial buildings as it works to meet a goal of reducing energy consumption by 20 percent by 2020 from 2008 levels.

Arundhati Roy, the Booker prize winning author, has accused Mahatma Gandhi of discrimination and called for institutions bearing his name to be renamed.

Speaking at Kerala University in the southern Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram, Roy, 52, described the generally accepted image of Gandhi as a lie.

"It is time to unveil a few truths about a person whose doctrine of nonviolence was based on the acceptance of a most brutal social hierarchy ever known, the caste system ... Do we really need to name our universities after him?" Roy said.

The caste system is thousands of years old but still defines the status of hundreds of millions of people in India. So-called untouchables, or Dalits, continue to suffer discrimination.

A Florida jury has awarded the widow of a chain-smoker who died of lung cancer punitive damages of more than $23bn in her case against the RJ Reynolds Tobacco, the nation's second-largest cigarette maker.

The judgment, returned on Friday night in a Pensacola court, was the largest in Florida history in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by an individual, according to the woman's legal team.

Cynthia Robinson, of Pensacola, sued the cigarette maker, whose brands include Camel, in 2008 over the death of her husband, Michael Johnson.

Johnson smoked up to 60 cigarettes a day for more 20 years and died of lung cancer in 1996 aged 36.

"He couldn't quit. He was smoking the day he died," lawyer Chris Chestnut told the Reuters news agency on Saturday.

After four weeks of hearings and 15 hours of jury deliberations, the jury said that the tobacco company was negligent in informing Robinson's husband that smoking causes lung cancer and that nicotine is highly addictive.

Reuters) - U.S. companies, consumer advocates and citizens submitted more than 1 million comments to the Federal Communications Commission, drawing contentious divisions on the issue of net neutrality as the first deadline to comment approached Friday.

The FCC will continue collecting comments, made in response to these first submissions, until Sept. 10 as it weighs how best to regulate the way Internet service providers (ISPs) manage web traffic crossing their networks. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed new rules in April after a federal court struck down the FCC's previous version of such rules in January.

The FCC's draft rules propose banning ISPs from blocking users' access to websites or applications but allowing some "commercially reasonable" deals between content providers and ISPs to prioritize delivery of some web traffic.

Though Wheeler has insisted the FCC would carefully guard against abuse of the rules to hurt competition or consumers, the proposal drew ire from public interest groups and large web companies that say it would result in faster download speeds for some content at the expense of other content, which would inevitably be relegated to "slow lanes."