PRAVDA French unions are striking nationwide as lawmakers begin debating President Nicolas Sarkozy’s bill to raise the retirement age. Transport workers began walking off the job last night, and many schools, post offices and government offices will be closed today. Demonstrations are planned in 137 cities, BusinessWeek reports. According to The Press Association, president Nicolas Sarkozy’s plans to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, with walkouts causing headaches for travellers and commuters. READ MORE

TELEGRAPH UK China and Russia agreed to expand co-operation over nuclear power, specifically on uranium exploration and safer power plants – but also on floating nuclear reactors. "It’s a case of Homer Simpson meets the Titanic," says Ben Ayliffe, a senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace. "The idea is just mind-boggling." Russia has been planning floating reactors for quite some time, but reached a recent milestone when the hull of the Akademik Lomonosov was launched into the Baltic Sea. The reactor is not complete, but the barge that will house the plant was launched on June 30 at the Baltyskiy shipyard in St Petersburg – and China has been watching developments very closely indeed. READ MORE

TECH CRUNCH During their event today in San Francisco, Apple announced iTunes 10, the latest version of their music software. But they also introduced a big new feature in the app — Ping: a social network for music.

It’s like “Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes,” Jobs says. “But it’s not Facebook, it’s not Twitter,” Jobs is quick to note — “it’s a social network all about music.” And guess what? It has 160 million users in 23 countries built in right away (Apple will presumably be opening it up to other iTunes users later). And it’s available on your iPhone and iPod touch — right in the iTunes Stor READ MORE

TIME Nagina drew her modest light-green cotton dupatta, the scarf that Pakistani women drape over their arms, head and chest, up over her face as she cautiously peered out from a muddy white tent to watch her youngest child, a barefoot, trouserless four-year-old boy in a navy blue shirt streaked with mud. The timid Pathan woman has four other children, three older girls and a boy, but her daughters are not with her in this overcrowded cluster of tents known as the Khandar relief camp in Nowshera, a flood-devastated northwestern district some 90 miles west of the capital Islamabad in the insurgency-plagued, religiously conservative Khyber Pakhtunkwa province. "We are trying to keep the girls away," Nagina says, "because parda is impossible now." READ MORE

The New York Times How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

They have called their project Diaspora* and intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. READ MORE

The Daily Yomiuri