Lawyers for the woman who accused former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault have explored a deal in which they would scuttle the criminal case in exchange for a monetary settlement in the civil lawsuit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The woman's lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, strongly denied the report, which the Journal sourced to unidentified people briefed on the matter.

The report comes ahead of Tuesday's scheduled court hearing in which Strauss-Kahn, once seen as a leading contender to be the next president of France, was due to appear before a judge for the first time since he was freed from house arrest on July 1.

The US police have arrested dozens of environmental activists who staged a sit-in in front of the White House to protest a plan to build a pipeline which is believed to cause serious environmental damages in America.

Around 2,200 people from all over the US are expected to take part in the two-week event which began on Saturday, AFP reported.

The protest is designed to pressure US President Barack Obama to deny permit for the USD 13 billion Keystone XL pipeline project, which is planned to stretch 1,700 miles from Canada to the US Gulf Coast.

Environmental experts say the project requires energy that produces a large volume of greenhouse gasses.

"President Obama can stop this climate-killing disaster with the stroke of a pen," said Bill McKibben, spokesman for Tar Sands Action, the environmental group that organized the protest.

German demonstrators have clashed with police officers and damaged public property after an all-night street festival in the city of Hamburg.

On Saturday, police had detained approximately 30 protesters who caused property damage and fought with law enforcement, AFP reported.

Police fired water cannons to subdue left-wing demonstrators who were pelting officers with stones, bottles and firecrackers, as well as setting ablaze barricades.

Rioters had also caused property damage by attacking a bank, setting fire to cars and burning garbage containers.

Patrons had attended the annual Schanzenfest street festival which attracts large crowds with its music and food stalls, and often ends in clashes between protesters and police.

About 2,500 police officials had prepared beforehand and participated in this year's melee.

Tyranny in America. Today it happened to me. Please I need your help spreading the video I took today. My name is David Stowell. For a living I provide a free junk removal service for people in the Seattle area. This is how I make my living. it is a hard and dirty job, but atleast it's a job. Today as I was taking my first load of scrap for the week in to seattle Iron and Metal to sell I was waved to pull over by Trooper Hooper with the wa state patroll. His actions of tyranny will probably put me out of business and land me in jail. Please watch and share the videos. There are 7 of them because I don't know how to turn them into one. In the video my hands were shaking because my blood sugar had dropped and because of the anxiety that I was feeling.

This is the biggest story of the late day with implications for Jamie Dimon, precious metal ETFs, and central banks worldwide. We'll start at the beginning.

Anyone holding gold miner Rusoro is panicking.

Details from Reuters

Toronto-listed Rusoro, owned by Russia's Agapov family, is the only large gold miner operating in Venezuela. It produced 100,000 ounces last year.

The gold industry will be just the latest part of the economy to be put under state control by the socialist leader, who said he would issue the necessary decree in the coming days and called on the military to help control the sector.

"I have here the laws allowing the state to exploit gold and all related activities ... we are going to nationalize the gold and we are going to convert it, among other things, into international reserves because gold continues to increase in value," Chavez said in a phone call to state television.

In a startling and strange occurrence, two American nuclear reactors triggered automatic shutdowns within twelve hours of each other.

Late Thursday night an automatic shutdown that occurred at the Sequoyah Nuclear Plant in Tennessee was supposedly caused by a coolant pump. Officials have reported that no radiation leakage occurred.

RSOE EDIS

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the unit 1 reactor at Sequoyah Nuclear Plant near Chattanooga automatically tripped.

The commission said the incident late Thursday night was traced to a coolant pump and apparently caused no leakage. It was classified non-emergency. Auxiliary feedwater automatically actuated as expected, the commission said Friday. The unit 2 reactor was not affected, the commission said.

Tense moments in Mexico as thousands of soccer fans are interrupted by gun fire outside the Corona stadium Saturday in Torreon, Mexico.

While the rioters in England this week have looted shops selling shoes, clothes, computers, and plasma televisions, they've curiously bypassed one particular piece of merchandise: books. The Economist observes that while rioters have a centuries-old history of book burning, "books are losing out to high-end jeans and Apple-made gadgets" in London, with the Waterstone's bookstore chain emerging unscathed and the WH Smith chain reporting only one incident (some stores closed as a precaution). In explaining that the store would probably stay open during the unrest, one Waterstone's employee even felt comfortable enough to issue a dare to the rioters: "If they steal some books, they might actually learn something." The exception to the rule is the gay bookstore Gay's the Word, which had its front window smashed and its shopfront splattered with eggs (notably, no goods were stolen). "Our impression is that there are certain people who have an issue with a visible gay business and are using the excuse of chaos to cause anti-gay damage," an assistant manager told PinkPaper.

Confronted with all this evidence, The Huffington Post poses a couple vexing questions: "Did the bookstores survive because the rioters respect reading--or because they simply don't care about books? Is this a positive or a negative sign for the future of the industry?" Most people seem to be embracing the theory that the rioters simply didn't want books, particularly in the digital age. "The only shop NOT looted down the road from where I live was Waterstones," British author Patrick French tweeted. "I guess the rioters have Kindles--bought or looted." Martin Fletcher touched on a similar theme at the end of a report for NBC News. "A final thought that may say a lot about our times," he concluded. "In this shopping center every store had been looted but one, the book store." The "underlying message for bookshops," The Economist adds, is "hardly front-page news: looters, like more conventional consumers, are all too happy to ignore their wares."

Radioactive substances that leaked from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant have spread over far broader areas of the sea than Japan has acknowledged, according to the State Oceanic Administration of China.

An Aug. 15 article in the electronic version of Science and Technology Daily, a Chinese newspaper, cited an ocean environment survey conducted off Fukushima Prefecture in the western Pacific Ocean as part of the Oceanic Administration's written reply to an inquiry by the newspaper.

The article said that radioactive substances were detected in a 252,000-square-kilometer area within 800 kilometers to the east of Fukushima Prefecture. It said the level of cesium-137 was up to 300 times higher than corresponding concentrations in waters near China. Strontium-90 was detected at levels up to 10 times higher than those found in Chinese waters.

Police have welcomed new laws that require people to remove face coverings or risk a fine or jail time, saying officers will no longer be hindered on the job.

Under changes to the Law Enforcement Act that have the backing of the Islamic community, police can require anyone to remove a face covering - including a helmet, burqa, niqab or mask.

In most cases, the penalty would be a $220 fine, but cases involving motorists could incur penalties of up to a year in jail and a fine of $5500.