British Police intervene with anti-capitalists before the G8 meeting in Northern Ireland; An oil spill creeps down into the Brazilian Amazon; Protests accompany Greece’s shutdown of its only public broadcaster.

Hundreds of London police officers raided a derelict building being used as a headquarters by organizers of anti-G8 protesters.  At one point one of the anti-capitalist squatters got up to the roof, and police appear to have stopped him before he jumped off. Leaders of the world's richest economies including are due to meet at a resort in Northern Ireland next Monday and Tuesday.

The audit of Venezuela’s Presidential Election is over and it confirms that Nicolas Maduro won the April poll by a margin of less than 1.5 percent.  Sore loser Enrique Capriles accused the National Electoral Commission of taking orders from the governing party.  All of Venezuela’s neighbors and trading partners have recognized the results.

Brazil is monitoring an oil spill that originated up the River Coca in Ecuador, as the black sludge moves towards the Brazilian Amazon.  Brasilia is offering help to Ecuador and Peru to try to stop the spill while it’s still upriver.

Austria has commenced the withdrawal of its 377 soldiers from the United Nations buffer zone in the Golan Heights, because the civil war on the Syrian side got to close.  The full withdrawal should take about a month.

Greece shut down the taxpayer-funded but editorially independent public broadcaster ERT.  Critics call it a haven for waste, but it leaves Greeks without non-corporate source for news.  Thousands of people held a protest against the decision outside ERT headquarters.  It is the latest move in rafts of spending cuts and tax rises aimed at leading the country out of recession.

South Korea is charging its former head of the country's spy agency for meddling in last December’s presidential elections.  Prosecutors say Won Sei-hoon ordered online postings to boost Park Geun-hye in the run up to December's vote.  Park won, becoming South Korea’s first female president.

China successfully launched its latest manned space mission, carrying two male and one female astronaut into orbit to link up with China’s orbiting space station. It is the latest step in China's plan to eventually put a permanently manned station above the Earth.

The United Nations says about twice as many ancient manuscripts were lost to desecration while rebels in Mali occupied Timbuktu until early this year.  The Islamist Tuareg rebels for some reason destroyed ancient Islamic papers, some dating back as early as 1329, which documented the spread of Islam in Western Africa.  UN officials feared about 2 thousand were destroyed.  Today, the number of irretrievable manuscripts is more than 4,200.