Robert Marquand | Paris | July 1

CSM - On Monday, the French legislature passed a radical new law making it illegal to be part of a "gang" – if it's one that has been or may be violent.

The move is part of a recent law-and-order initiative by President Nicolas Sarkozy that the French palace is tying to new forms of youth crime at a time of economic crisis. Earlier this month, France banned the wearing of masks during public protests.

The new antigang law says that anyone identified with a group, formal or informal, known by police to have committed criminal acts, or is intending to, may be subject to a three-year sentence or a 45,000 euro (US$63,000) fine.

Christian Estrosi, of Mr. Sarkozy's ruling center-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, spearheaded the new antigang law that passed late Monday night.

CSM - Facing a reported $1.2 billion budget deficit, accusations of corruption, and a parliamentary commission investigation, Leonid Chernovetsky, mayor of Kyiv (Kiev), knew he needed to give the performance of his life.

He didn’t disappoint. After jogging and doing 15 chin-ups, he stripped down to a Speedo and swam 15 meters. “I want to demonstrate to the whole world that I am absolutely fit physically and mentally,” he announced.

A millionaire businessman and evangelical Christian, Mr. Chernovetsky has gained a reputation for wacky ideas. With Kyiv facing an economic crisis, Chernovetsky proposed charging fees to enter cemeteries, selling his kisses in a raffle, and selling burial plots for frogs.

Infighting among opposition members has prevented them from mounting a consolidated challenge. After the parliamentary commission ordered him to have a mental-health check, Chernovetsky took a few weeks off on sick leave.

June 30

The Independent - At least 14 people were killed and 50 injured overnight in Italy when a freight train hauling liquefied petroleum gas derailed and exploded as it passed their homes, officials said today.

About 1,000 people were evacuated following the blast just before midnight on Monday in the Tuscan seaside town of Viareggio, about 350 km (220 miles) north of Rome.

Thirty-seven people were serious injured, with 16 of them in critical condition, including a two-year-old who was badly burned and was being transferred to a hospital in Florence, rescue workers said.

"The emergency and danger are not over. The area has been sealed off and search and rescue operations are ongoing," said Guido Bertolaso, head of Italy's civil protection agency.

"We have a convoy with four train wagons that are still carrying liquefied petroleum and are off the tracks, on their sides .... so the area is still at a really high risk level because the fire is still smouldering."

Jerusalem | June 30

Reuters - French President Nicolas Sarkozy has urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "to get rid of" Israel's ultranationalist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli media reports said on Tuesday.

Sarkozy's office had no immediate comment on the remarks Israeli newspapers and Channel 2 television attributed to him from his talks last Wednesday in Paris with Netanyahu. "You must get rid of this person," the Haaretz newspaper and Ynet website quoted Sarkozy as telling Netanyahu.

Netanyahu's office issued a statement saying "in light of the latest media reports", the prime minister voiced his "full confidence" in Lieberman during a meeting with ambassadors from European Union countries.

The reports said Sarkozy compared Lieberman, accused of racism by Israeli Arab lawmakers, with French far-rightist Jean Marie Le Pen, but retracted the remark after Netanyahu countered that the foreign minister left a different impression in private conversations.

A spokesman for Lieberman, leader of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, said that if Sarkozy made the comments, they would amount to "intolerable" meddling in Israeli affairs.

June 28

BBC - Russia and Nato have agreed to resume co-operation on security issues, after nearly a year of difficult relations. The deal came at a meeting in Greece of foreign ministers from the two sides.

Ties deteriorated sharply in 2008 after Russia's brief conflict with Georgia. Nato chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said differences over the issue remained.But he said Nato and Russia would nonetheless resume co-operation on issues such as Afghanistan, drug trafficking and piracy.

"We have restarted our relations at a political level, we also agreed to restart the military-to-military contacts which had been frozen since last August," the Nato secretary-general told a news conference in Corfu.

Ludwig Burger, Hendrik Sackmann and Arno Schuetze | FRANKFURT | June 27

Reuters - Porsche fumes at VW, Lower Saxony "extortion"
Sat Jun 27, 2009 12:35pm EDT

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Porsche accused Volkswagen and its key shareholder Lower Saxony of extortion following a magazine report that VW and the regional state had demanded Porsche accept a tie-up of the two carmakers with VW in charge.

Der Spiegel magazine reported in its online edition on Saturday, that Porsche Chief Executive Wendelin Wiedeking and Chairman Wolfgang Porsche had been pressed to agree by the end of June that VW take a 49 percent stake in Porsche's sports car business for 3-4 billion euros ($4.2-$5.6 billion).

John Lichfield | Paris | June 26

The Independent - Families of 11 engineers murdered in Karachi in 2002 point finger of blame at French government

A political scandal is gathering pace over claims that 11 French submarine engineers were murdered in a bomb attack in Karachi seven years ago to punish France for the non-payment of arms contract "commissions" to senior Pakistani officials.

Lawyers for the French victims' families believe the attack, allegedly carried out by Islamist terrorists, was in fact part of a web of financial chicanery and political manoeuvring which may yet severely embarrass senior figures, including the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari.

Cahal Milmo | June 26

The Independent - Sewing machine needle tipped with anthrax was developed for war effort

Tipped with a sewing machine needle and finished with a tail made from a drinking straw, they looked more like a schoolboy's toy than a terrifying weapon. For Britain's wartime scientists, however, these tiny projectiles were the sharp end of a chilling project to secure victory over the Nazis by bombarding German troops with poisoned darts.

A secret file that details British research to develop the lethal anti-personnel darts, carrying a toxin likely to have been anthrax or ricin, casts rare light on the work that was carried out by the Allies during the Second World War into chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed against Hitler's forces.

The document, released at the National Archives in Kew, London, reveals how scientists at Porton Down in Wiltshire, the site of Britain's top secret weapons laboratory, worked between 1941 and 1944 to perfect the projectiles to ensure the maximum number of casualties and the quickest death for enemy soldiers.

Entitled Research Into Use of Anthrax and Other Poisons for Biological Warfare, the report said the idea of using darts dated back to the First World War but the novelty of adding a poison, either coated on to a grooved point or injected through a hollow needle, meant that a viable weapon to cause "death or disablement" had been created.

June 24

BBC -

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has denied allegations he paid prostitutes who attended parties at his official residencies.

In an interview with Italian gossip magazine Chi, the 72-year-old leader insisted he had never paid for sex.

He alleged a prostitute at the centre of the scandal had been paid to make false accusations against him.

This is the first time Mr Berlusconi has spoken at length about some of the most serious accusations involving his private life.

An Italian model, Patrizia D'Addario, said last week she had been paid more than $1,000 (£609, 720 euros) to attend a party in his residence in Rome, in the company of other women.

He added: "I never understood where the satisfaction is when you're missing the pleasure of conquest."

June 24

The Independent -

A group of pensioners has been accused of kidnapping and torturing a financial adviser who lost over €2m of their savings.

The pensioners, nicknamed the "Geritol Gang" by police after an arthritis drug, face up to 15 years in jail if found guilty of subjecting German-American James Amburn to the alleged four-day ordeal.

Two of them are said to have hit him with a Zimmer frame(pic) outside his home in Speyer, western Germany, before he was driven 300 miles to a home on the shores of a lake in Bavaria.

Mr Amburn (56) says he was burned with cigarettes, beaten, had ribs broken, was hit with a chair leg and chained up "like an animal".

The incident began on Tuesday last week after Mr Amburn, the head of an investment firm called Digitalglobalnet, was allegedly attacked by two men aged 74 and 60.

Another couple, retired doctors aged 63 and 66, later arrived to join in the alleged torture.

Two thumbs up for Sarkozy:

“The issue of the burqa is not a religious issue. It is a question of freedom and of women’s dignity,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “The burqa is not a religious sign. It is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission, of women.”

Having seen the devastating treatment of women across large swathes of the world this last year, it's obvious to say that my views on hejab have changed markedly. I first saw it as a matter of personal choice, but the more I examined the issue the more the evidence was overwhelming that it is as Sarkozy describes, a manner of enslavement.

The way the sexes mingle and socialize and interact together in the West is something we often take for granted. But we shouldn't. Women have worked very hard to get where they are (and many men have helped as well) but there is still work to be done.

I applaud the French president for taking a stand that won't be easy.

Angelique Chrisafis | Paris | June 22

The Guardian -

Nicolas Sarkozy today took a hard line in France's latest row over Islamic dress, saying full veils and face coverings were a sign of women's debasement and "not welcome" on French soil.

More than 50 MPs, mostly from the president's centre-right UMP party, last week backed calls for a parliamentary inquiry to debate whether Muslim women who wear full-body religious veils with only their eyes visible posed a threat to the republic's secular values and gender equality. A government spokesman had suggested that a law could eventually be proposed to ban full coverings from being worn in public in France.

Sarkozy today used his first state of the nation speech to defend the French republican principle of secularism and attack full Islamic veils.

BBC: Types of veils

Clifford J Levy | Kiev | June 22

NYT - Ukraine, which has suffered a roundhouse blow from the economic crisis, has had no finance minister since February. It also has no foreign minister or defense minister. The transportation minister just stepped down. The interior minister has offered to resign as well, after being accused of drunken behavior.

The president and the prime minister are no longer speaking, though they were once allies and heroes of the Orange Revolution, which brought a pro-Western government to power in 2005. The spirit of that uprising has apparently been squandered in a country that seems permanently gripped by political paralysis.

The public appears so frustrated that the leader of the opposition, who has close ties to the Kremlin and is often portrayed as the villain of the Orange Revolution, is the early favorite to win the presidential election next January.

Policing of protest in the UK is again under scrutiny after the Guardian obtained police surveillance footage showing the violent arrest of two women after they tried to photograph officers policing a climate protest. The women were part of an organization called FITwatch who monitor the activities of police Forward Intelligence Teams, surveillance units who's job is to collect photographic evidence during public order policing. The women tried to photograph officers in order to submit a complaint against them for covering their identifying badges and refusing to provide their numbers when asked despite regulations which require them to do so. The women were held for 4 days without bail, several of them in prison, before being released without charge.

The right to protest peacefully without the fear of police violence or arbitrary arrest is a crucial component of democracy. Cameras and mobile phones are probably the most powerful tools members of the public have for ensuring that the police behave appropriately at protests and that when abuses do occur they are reported. , Unfortunately in contemporary Britain protest policing requires public scrutiny as evidenced by the police violence at the G20 protests, and the failure of the press to cover it until forced to do so by footage taken by members of the public in which officers appear to assault the uninvolved bystander Ian Tomlinson shortly before he died of internal bleeding.

Jamie Doward, Gaby Hinsliff and Mark Townsend | June 21

The Observer - A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

Steven Morris | UK | June 19

The Guardian -

A big police operation involving an unmanned drone, horses and drugs sniffer dogs will be launched at Stonehenge tomorrow as huge crowds descend on the ancient site for the summer solstice.

Because the celebrations fall over the weekend and fine weather is predicted, bigger crowds than usual are expected and Wiltshire police have said they will clamp down heavily on antisocial behaviour.

Restrictions are being placed on the amount of alcohol revellers can bring in and police have said they will not tolerate illegal drug taking or unlawful raves.

The force's no-nonsense approach, after a more relaxed feel in recent years, has raised fears that there could be clashes.

Some peace-loving druids have told the Guardian that they will be staying away because they fear the combination of large crowds - possibly more than 30,000 ‑ and the police's stance could lead to trouble.

Police have played down the idea that the event is the first big test of how police control large crowds since the violent G20 protests. They have denied that the presence of the drone and police horses shows they are taking a "zero-tolerance" approach to the event and say such measures are simply to make sure everyone is safe.

What will the drone be armed with? ;)

Ian Traynor | Brussels | June 19

The Guardian - European leaders tonight sought to revive the ill-fated Lisbon Treaty reforming the way the EU is run by delivering pledges shoring up Irish independence in the hope of securing a Yes vote in an Irish referendum in October.

But Brian Cowen, the Irish prime minister, told a summit of 27 government chiefs in Brussels that he would not win the referendum, expected on 2 October, unless the "guarantees" were legally enshrined in a new protocol that could cause problems for Gordon Brown and other European leaders by reigniting old feuds over the treaty.

In June last year, the Irish derailed the Lisbon project by rejecting the treaty in a referendum. The rest of the EU has agreed to assure Ireland that the new regime will not affect Irish military neutrality, ­abortion laws, taxation policy and the Irish are also guaranteed a seat in the European Commission.

UK

BBC - Nearly half of teachers questioned for a survey believe the health and safety culture in schools is damaging children's learning.

When questioned by Teachers TV, teachers complained about a five-page briefing on using glue sticks and being told to wear goggles to put up posters.

Others said pupils were not allowed to enjoy the sun or snow without taking health and safety precautions.

Teachers TV surveyed 585 subscribers to the channel by questionnaire.

Around 45% of those who took part thought health and safety precautions had a negative effect on teachers, as well as on students' personal development and learning.

Example health and safety rules
Wearing goggles to put up posters
Five-page briefing on the dangers of glue sticks
Ban on running in the playground
Wet grass stopping PE lessons
Ban on playing with conkers
One person at a time in staff kitchen
Ban on sweets because of choking risk
Buoyancy aids for capable year 11 swimmers on a school trip to France

Kate Connolly | Berlin | June 17

The Guardian - Twenty blue chip German companies are pooling their resources with the aim of harnessing solar power in the deserts of north Africa and transporting the clean electricity to Europe.

The businesses, which include some of the biggest names in European energy, finance and manufacturing, will form a consortium next month. If successful, the highly ambitious plan could see Europe fuelled by solar energy within a decade.

The consortium behind what would be the biggest ever solar energy initiative will first raise awareness and interest among other investors for the project, known as Desertec, which is estimated to cost around €400bn (£338bn).

Henry McDonald | June 17

The Guardian - More than 100 Romanians fleeing racist attacks in Belfast have been moved to a council-run leisure centre after taking refuge overnight in a church.

The 115 Romanians were transferred to the O-Zone complex this morning.

The sports centre in the city's Ormeau Park has become a temporary home for the Romanians, many of whom have said they want to leave Northern Ireland.

Belfast's lord mayor, Naomi Long, said the repeated attacks on the Roma families close to the university district had brought shame on the city.

Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor | June 17

The Guardian - The foreign secretary, David Miliband, told MPs today that he will not allow the public to see the secret interrogation policy that is at the heart of allegations that MI5 has been colluding in the torture of British citizens.

Gordon Brown has ordered that the policy be rewritten after a series of people complained that they had been questioned by British intelligence officers after being asked the same questions under torture by Pakistani and Bangladeshi intelligence officers. Brown has also pledged that the policy would be made public.

However, Miliband told MPs on the Commons foreign affairs select committee today that he has no intention of making public the policy as it currently stands, because of the risk of prejudicing a number of on-going court cases. Pressed further, he said that the currently policy would not be published even once those court cases have concluded, as to do so would "lend succour to our enemies".

** David Miliband has again stonewalled allegations that Britain was complicit in Binyam Mohamed's torture. What is he hiding?

June 17

BBC - Adults should be banned from smoking in cars when children are passengers, the new head of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has said.

In a BBC News website Scrubbing Up column, Professor Terence Stephenson, said children deserved protection.

"You can't inflict this on your colleagues any more. Why should we treat our children's health as a lower priority?" he said.

A Department of Health spokesman said it would review smoking laws next year.

Michael Day | Milan | June 16

The Independent - Global warming is already causing flooding in the north and water shortages in south, report says

The dramatic effect of climate change on the Alps comes into focus as never before this week with the publication of a major report which reveals that the mountain range is rapidly dividing into two contrasting climatic zones, each posing new problems.

The Convention on the Protection of the Alps is a statutory EU body set up in 1991 and its magisterial second report, published tomorrow, which has been seen by The Independent, reveals that the northern ranges of the Alps are suffering ever more serious flooding while the parched southern mountains see less and less snow.

According to the report, precipitation in the south-east of the region has fallen nearly 10 per cent in the past 100 years while rain and snowfall in the north-west ranges has increased by the same amount over this time.

* Michael McCarthy: Don't be fooled by this winter's powder. The Alpine snow line is already in retreat

As I was walking home from the Christening Party this afternoon I saw a wonderful field of flowers. I was reminded of my good friend Jeff with whom I traveled in Malaysia and his habit of stopping to smell the flowers. It is a good habit to pick up. Really, how often do we all just stop to enjoy the little things in life, those things that are totally and completely free and untainted by all the associations that Madison Avenue and 'normal' life throw at us? So, that is just what I did, smelled the flowers and took this shot.

Today Sienna Anemone Noble was christened and I am her Godfather. It's pretty cool. If you are so inclined there is a massive photo dump of the full day, here. I haven't been around much, lately. But I will be heading off to Finland in a day or so and the journey will continue.