Every Tuesday for the whole of this year, customers will be queuing at 9 a.m. for the 200 free bottles of water and complementary bread on offer to Eroski supermarket customers in Carcaixent. They hope to help needy customers get by.

The Eroski food store is located in Carcaixent (Valencia), and starting on January 7 this year, staff began to hand out the 200 bottles of water and baguettes to customers who are having problems making ends meet in the continuing economic crisis.

While you might think it would be homeless people queuing for the offer, it is actually customers who regularly buy from the supermarket. They have to show a till receipt from a previous purchase (no matter how small) to get the special offer.

The manager of the store told El Mundo, "A queue forms before we open up the store, people want to make sure they get their basic goods."

"Others who notice the line outside the supermarket don't mind waiting in line for a while either as soon as they find out there's free bread and water," he added.

Osaka - BBC filmmaker and personal friend Martyn Stewart has been detained at Kansai Airport in Osaka on his way to document the dolphin drives that take place in Taiji, Japan. Stewart, known for his powerful filming, is being accused of eco-terrorism.

The filmmaker and producer of compelling short documentaries such as Dawn to Death, wrote several hours ago on his Facebook page:

I am locked in a cell room at Osaka airport waiting on an appeal to the high minister regarding my entry into Japan. I'm accused of being sea shepherd and an Eco terrorist, my footage is not liked in Japan apparently and have been accused of assaulting members of the public.

In 4 years of being here for the dolphins I have maintained the law and abided by their rules. My words and pictures did the rest. The government of Japan will do anything to protect the rights of the fishermen of Taiji and the barbaric treatment of the animals involved.

Please share far and wide to bring awareness to this corrupt government and those that want to continue to brutally treat these amazing animals. The condition I'm in and the treatment I have received is nothing short of criminal.

Stewart left for Japan yesterday - a trip he makes every year as part of an ongoing campaign to shed light on the annual dolphin massacre that occurs in Taiji between September and March every year.

The Sochi Olympics has attracted many protests. One, the Fair Games Project, launched an awareness campaign to support Russia's LGBT community with a high-profile ad asserting that being gay in Russia costs $3,000 in fines... Wait, really?

The Fair Games Project sent out their Public Service Announcement, titled "Russia Declares Discrimination Newest Olympic Sport," on February 6, a day ahead of the Sochi opening ceremony.

In the clip, scenes of a happy gay couple celebrating a birthday and subsequent marriage proposal are followed by the same two men violently beaten on a football pitch by players to general applause, as a crowd of viewers wave Russian flags.

The two-minute video, which also features the song "Freedom" by King Avriel, concludes with an ominous caption reading: "In Russia, the punishment for being gay is a $3,000 fine." A series of slides lists other countries such as Saudi Arabia, Uganda and Iran, where being gay is a crime. Various types of punishment, ranging from imprisonment to public stoning, are recounted.

If a recent night out at Denny's is any indication, public life may not go back to normal any time soon for one California police officer even after being acquitted of murder.

Former Fullerton, California, police officer Manuel Ramos was one of two officials accused of beating a homeless schizophrenic man named Kelly Thomas to death back in 2011. Thomas was beaten and tasered multiple times during the confrontation, which left him in a coma. He died five days later in a hospital bed.

In a controversial trial that ended in January, both the 39-year-old Ramos and former Corporal Jay Cicinelli were found not guilty.

Although Ramos has been spared jail time, the rest of his public life looks like it's going to be more complicated, at least in the short term. Ramos doesn't live in Fullerton anymore, but some time after his acquittal he found himself visiting a local Denny's restaurant in the area, and local diners were not pleased to see him there.

According to a blog post by Orange County Weekly, Ramos was confronted by customers sitting next to him to the extent that he stood up and left the restaurant. A photo was also snapped of Ramos and posted on Facebook, with the caption reading:

Angry residents in a flood-hit flat block have blasted a "total lack of support" from Christchurch council and their MP, saying they have been forced to buy their own sandbags.

Residents in Conifer Close - some of whom were evacuated on Christmas Day - say they are the "forgotten corner" of Christchurch and living in fear of further flooding.

Residents say they requested sandbags from the council but were told they would have to purchase Floodsacks at £30 for a pack of four.

Today, as the Government insisted councils shouldn't charge for sandbags and the cost would be met centrally, Christchurch council clarified their position saying they don't charge for them in an emergency and if the Environment Agency put out a red warning, they will provide them free of charge.

A spokesperson said at the moment people are concerned and are requesting them just in case, and in instance they charge £30 for a flood pack.

Residents at Conifer Close have suffered flooding issues since Christmas Day.

And yesterday, while PM David Cameron promised that "money is no object" when it comes to helping flood victims, Conifer Close residents told the Daily Echo they have had to buy their own sandbags and plastic sheeting.

They have also asked for help from their MP Chris Chope, but say he has not accepted their invitations to visit them.

Thousands of people have turned out in Romania to protest plans by a Canadian company to develop Europe's biggest gold mine. The open-cast mine would involve the use of cyanide and the razing of four mountains.

An estimated 4,000 people demonstrated in the capital Bucharest, 3,500 people took to the streets of the northwestern city of Cluj and another 600 demonstrated in Timisoara to demand the mine project in Rosia Montana be dropped. They also called for the government to resign. Protesters marched past government headquarters on Sunday shouting "Your treason is measured in gold!"

The mine is believed to contain 314 tons of gold and 1,500 tons of silver which would be extricated in a couple of decades, according to the project plans.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta had opposed the project when he was a member of the opposition but is now backing it. The bill clearing the way for the mine to be developed has yet to be approved by parliament.

In what should be filed under: ''most impressive Olympic medal news ever,'' Sochi brass have announced that all gold medals to be handed out on Feb. 15 will be embedded with shards of meteorite.

The move will mark the one-year anniversary of the Chelyabinsk meteor strike, which injured nearly 1,500 people.

"We will hand out our medals to all the athletes who will win gold on that day, because both the meteorite strike and the Olympic Games are global events," said Chelyabinsk Region Culture Minister Alexei Betekhtin.

Energy secretary to raise concerns about political consensus breaking down as other parties denounce science

Britain's climate change policy is under threat from a "diabolical cocktail" of nimbyism, denial of science and fear of Europe from politicians on the right, the energy secretary will say on Thursday.

Amid growing warnings about a potential link between global warming and extreme UK weather, Ed Davey will raise concerns that the politicial consensus about the need to tackle climate change is in danger of breaking down as some in the Conservative and Ukip parties try to discredit the science.

He will say that the actions of climate deniers are "undermining public trust in the scientific evidence for climate change" and that "we can see around us today the possible consequences of a world in which extreme weather events are much more likely".

Grey-haired and grinning, two dozen couples hold champagne flutes at a Warsaw ceremony in their honour. They survived 50 years of marriage and in Poland, that is reason enough for a presidential medal.

"To qualify, you have to put in over 18,000 solid days of work. Other medals require less, so it really is a considerable feat to have spent the last half century together," Warsaw mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz says at this month's event.

The lucky-in-loves take turns walking down the red carpet to accept their medals -- silver-plated with intertwined roses at the centre and a pink ribbon -- while family members cheer and play paparazzi at the back of the room at the so-called Wedding Palace.

The tradition is regularly played out in cities across the heavily Catholic country, with a hefty average of 65,000 medals awarded each year according to the president's office.

True, marital milestones are also recognised elsewhere. In the United States, a golden anniversary will get you a greeting from the White House, while Britain sets the bar a notch higher: couples have to make it through six decades without splitting for a message from the queen. She herself qualified seven years ago.

Yet no other country honours marathon marriages with a presidential medal, something more often associated with military feats for example.

"It's really quite unusual. I haven't found any other (medal) that's specifically for sustaining a marriage," says Megan Robertson, a 54-year-old computer programmer who runs the website "Medals of the World".

"Although, many countries have awards for raising large numbers of children -- something popular in Communist countries," adds the Briton who has herself been married for nearly 30 years.

Socialist-era Romania for example had "what they called the Order of Mother Hero, which I think she was, because you had to have 10 children to get it. That sounds pretty heroic to me."

Robertson says medals offer an indication of what a country finds important, whether it be a particular profession or trade or churning out enough children to fill factories and armies.

Rather than grovel and beg for the U.S. government to respect our privacy, these innovators have taken matters into their own hands, and their work may change the playing field completely.

People used to assume that the United States government was held in check by the constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and which demands due process in criminal investigations, but such illusions have evaporated in recent years. It turns out that the NSA considers itself above the law in every respect and feels entitled to spy on anyone anywhere in the world without warrants, and without any real oversight.

Understandably these revelations shocked the average citizen who had been conditioned to take the government's word at face value, and the backlash has been considerable. The recent "Today We Fight Back" campaign to protest the NSA's surveillance practices shows that public sentiment is in the right place. Whether these kinds of petitions and protests will have any real impact on how the U.S. government operates is questionable (to say the least), however some very smart people have decided not to wait around and find out. Instead they're focusing on making the NSA's job impossible. In the process they may fundamentally alter the way the internet operates.