In a July 22nd speech marking the one month anniversary of the parliamentary coup that overthrow left-leaning Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, the former leader denounced that a motivating interest among the coup-plotters was a sought-after deal between Paraguay and the Montreal-based mining company, Rio Tinto Alcan.

"Those who pushed for the coup are those who want to solidify the negotiations with the multinational Rio Tinto Alcan, betraying the energetic sovereignty and interests of our country," Lugo told supporters.

Such an accusation represents the widespread discontent among Paraguayan people toward current negotiations between Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) and the government of Federico Franco, Lugo's right wing replacement.

It also points toward the Franco administration's larger strategy to open up Paraguay to multinational corporate exploitation, from Rio Tinto Alcan to Monsanto.

22 July is a date which haunts Norway; a date it would like to forget, but never will - the date of the twin attacks carried out by Anders Behring Breivik.

As the country braces itself for the first anniversary of the attacks, thoughts are once again turning to the horror he visited on the small population.

The car-bomb in Oslo designed to kill the leadership of the country, and the shootings on the island of Utoeya designed to destroy the next generation of Labour party politicians, left 77 people dead, the majority of them teenagers.

It was one of the worst acts of terrorism the world has witnessed in recent decades.

Sandy Weill, who created the era of megabanks when he led Citigroup in the 1990s, has called for America's biggest banks to be broken up.

The call from the 79 year-old will cause a stir on Wall Street and in the City of London because Mr Weill engineered the 1998 deal that made Citigroup the world's largest bank. Hailed at the time, the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group required the US government to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, a law dating back to the Great Depression that prevented banks from both taking deposits from customers and gambling on the markets.

"What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking," Mr Weill said in a television interview on Wednesday. "Have banks do something that's not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that's not going to be too big too fail."

Mr Weill's intervention comes as the debate in the US over how to regulate the country's largest banks has been reignited by JP Morgan Chase's almost $6bn (£4.9bn) trading loss on complex derivative trades. JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, who was Mr Weill's chief lieutenant at Citi until the two fell out, has insisted that combining retail and investment banking is beneficial to consumers and businesses.

"I'm suggesting that they [the banks] be broken up so that the taxpayer will never be at risk, the depositors won't be at risk, the leverage of the banks will be something reasonsable," said Mr Weill, whose fortune was estimated at $1.3bn before Citigroup shares crashed in 2008. The bank eventually turned to the US taxpayer for a $45bn bail-out later that year.

Rather than split up the largest banks, the Dodd-Frank Act - America's signature piece of financial reform since the crisis - limited their activities and gave regulators more power. Critics of the reform say it has not removed the risk that taxpayers will ultimately have to bail-out the banks again should they get in trouble.

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The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad - a sum larger than the entire American economy.

James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group - sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.

Comedian Jimmy Carr became the public face of tax-dodging in the UK earlier this year when it emerged that he had made use of a Cayman Islands-based trust to slash his income tax bill.

But the kind of scheme Carr took part in is the tip of the iceberg, according to Henry's report, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited. Despite the professed determination of the G20 group of leading economies to tackle tax secrecy, investors in scores of countries - including the US and the UK - are still able to hide some or all of their assets from the taxman.

"This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and - most importantly - to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of 'source' countries," Henry says.

As she presided over the regular luncheon meetings of the Monterey Bay Colony of Mayflower Descendants, Mary Jane Crawford Holmes represented a lineage stretching proudly back to the original Pilgrims.

She never could have imagined that her family's landing on Plymouth Rock would extend almost four centuries later to a grandson accused of mass murder at a Batman movie.

That sort of violence couldn't be more foreign to the genteel gatherings in the Beach House at the Monterey Peninsula Country Cub on idyllic Pebble Beach in California. And Holmes was not just a member of the chapter. She was the governor. Her duties included conducting an annual reading of the Mayflower Compact, marking the day in 1620 that the Pilgrims pledged "to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."

President Putin was last night warned that he is taking a "big gamble" with the lives of 20,000 Russians in Syria.

In the bloodiest week since troubles began last year, Russian sources confirmed that despite deploying an assault ship and more than 250 marines near the port of Tartus, Moscow would not pick up its citizens trapped in the fighting.

"Russia is taking a big gamble, and the stakes are high," warned Dr Jonathan Eyal, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute.

"Moscow has contingency plans, and it has also raised the possibility of Russian military intervention to rescue its citizens, but from my conversations with senior Russian figures, there is no plan to implement it.

Across the country and even in Canada, cities' thinking about front lawns is more than a little bit antiquated. It comes down to this simple formulation: Grass good! Vegetables bad. We've heard one too many stories in which people decide to use their yards to grow some fresh vegetables, only to have city officials come down hard on them, forcing them to tear out their food or bulldozing the gardens themselves. If building a few bike lanes counts as a war on cars, this is definitely a war on gardens.

The latest skirmish took place in Drummondville, Quebec, where Josée Landry and Michel Beauchamp built what supporters describe as "a gorgeous and meticulously-maintained edible landscape full of healthy fruits and vegetables." (You can judge for yourself: It's the garden in the picture above.) Under the town's new code, a garden like that would be illegal. It covers too much of the yard. Under the new rules, only 30 percent of a yard's area can go towards growing vegetables, and the town's given the couple only two weeks to pull out their carefully planted veggies.

Many Americans hurl themselves with fundamentally false, deeply disturbed enthusiasm into public demonstrations of grief over the needless deaths of some human beings -- those human beings they see as being much like themselves, when the deaths happen in what could be their own neighborhood. As for all the murders committed by their government with a systematic dedication as insane as that of any serial killer: silence.

Ghana's President John Atta Mills has died unexpectedly, a presidential statement said, and an aide said his death occurred on Tuesday after he took ill on Monday night.

The death of the president of the world's No. 2 cocoa grower comes months before Mills was due to stand for re-election at the helm of the West African country that posted double-digit growth in 2011 and has been praised for its strong democracy in a turbulent region.

"It is with a heavy heart...that we announce the sudden and untimely death of the president of the Republic of Ghana," a statement sent to Reuters by the president's office said.

Three National Security Agency whistle blowers told Viewpoint host Eliot Spitzer on Monday that the agency was gathering information on every person in the United States.

The FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008 gave the NSA broad powers to monitor international phone calls and emails, and granted legal immunity to telecommunication companies that had participated in the Bush administration's wiretapping program prior to 2008. But former senior official Thomas Drake, former senior analyst Kirk Wiebe, and former technical director William Binney said the NSA was not only monitoring international communications - the agency had been spying on "the entire country."