ANTIQUES SHOPS

The clashes occurred after protesters, led by opposition members of parliament defending the role of Ukrainian as the only state language, massed in front of a building where President Viktor Yanukovich was due to hold a press briefing.

The chamber rushed the language bill through on Tuesday, minutes after a surprise proposal by a pro-Yanukovich deputy, giving opponents little time to cast their vote and prompting scuffles both in parliament and on the streets.

Though the bill needs Yanukovich's signature and that of parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn - who has offered to quit - to become law, protesters took to the streets and stayed there overnight to bring pressure to bear on the president.

The row has galvanised Ukrainian opposition, weakened by the jailing of its leader, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, for seven years last October on abuse-of-office charges.

Tymoshenko faces separate tax evasion charges in a trial set to resume next Tuesday and will seek to have her initial conviction overturned in separate appeal hearings on July 12.

Ukraine kept her case largely out of sight when it co-hosted the Euro 2012 soccer tournament for three weeks in June, but Yanukovich has now returned to handling fractious relations with the West and domestic political divisions.

"MILLIONS OF US"

"There are millions of us and they cannot pretend that nothing has happened," said Vitali Klitschko, the world heavyweight boxing champion who has founded his own opposition party - Udar (Blow), and took part in Wednesday's protest.

The two-metre (6ft 7 inches) Klitschko himself had to have his eyes washed out after being sprayed with teargas. His left arm was bandaged because of a cut sustained in the commotion.

Protesters urged Yanukovich, who had planned a celebratory statement on a trouble-free Euro 2012, to veto the bill, which was pushed through by his own majority Party of Regions.

Opposition parties and millions who speak Ukrainian as their first language see the bill as a threat to sovereignty, keeping Ukraine in Russia's sphere of influence after 20 years of independence following the break-up of the Soviet Union.

As black-helmeted riot police moved to push the crowds back, Lytvyn himself tendered his resignation, apparently siding with the opposition which complained of procedural irregularities.

Yanukovich cancelled his briefing and called an urgent meeting with faction leaders and Lytvyn, although the latter chose not to attend.

Yanukovich said Ukraine may have to hold an early parliamentary election if the crisis persisted. [ID:nL6E8I442P]. But since an election is already set for October 28, this seemed more of a rhetorical flourish aimed at preventing the situation from undermining his own prestige.

ELECTION PLOY?

People in large swathes of Ukraine speak Russian as their mother tongue and the bill would recognise it as a regional language in predominantly Russian-speaking areas in the heavily industrialised east and southern regions such as Crimea.

The bill will be welcomed particularly in neighbouring Russia whose leaders have pressed Yanukovich to deliver on an election pledge in 2009 to upgrade the status of Russian.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to visit Ukraine on July 12 for a meeting with Yanukovich in Yalta on gas supplies when the language law seems certain to crop up in conversation.

But given the level of protest, it is by no means certain that Yanukovich will sign the bill into law even though it will be popular in his power base in the east of the country.

Opponents of the bill say it was pushed through by Yanukovich's party in order to win back disenchanted voters in Russian-speaking regions ahead of the October poll.

"This bill would push the Ukrainian language out of use," said one of the protesters, 40-year-old entrepreneur Yuri Chernyak. "It might be too late but we must do something and not stay indifferent."

More protests were planned across the country, opposition party Batkivshchyna said. A court in Kiev on Wednesday pre-emptively barred protests in certain downtown locations, including the area around the president's office and parliament.

Another opposition leader present at the scene of the Kiev protests, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, said: "There are all signs of a real political crisis in Ukraine and it will develop further."

A protest also took place in the western city of Lviv where opposition activists blocked the entrance into the regional government building, Batkivshchyna said.

(Writing by Richard Balmforth; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Bob Diamond, 60, quit this week after Barclays agreed to pay nearly half a billion dollars in fines for conspiring with other banks to fix the interest rates at the heart of the global financial system.

MPs have rounded on the case as a symbol of a culture of greed that has poisoned the entire financial industry. Newspapers have seized on e-mails disclosed in the case which show traders congratulating each other for fiddling figures with promises of champagne.

Appearing thoughtful and humble before a parliamentary committee, the man who until Tuesday was one of the world's highest paid and most powerful financial executives acknowledged "reprehensible behaviour" among his group's traders.

The wrongdoing was "not representative of the firm that I love so much", the American banker said. But he also insisted that Barclays was being made a scapegoat because it had cooperated with the authorities to help unearth the misdeeds.

"This week the focus has been on Barclays because they were the first," Diamond said, describing years of cooperation with regulatory agencies to uncover the practice.

"I think it's a sign of the culture of Barclays that we were willing to be first, we were willing to be fast and we were willing to come out with this."

Of his own decision to step down, a day after saying he wouldn't, he said he had realised that he had become a lightning rod for criticism. "The focus of intensity was my leadership. It was better for me to step down."

Barclays has acknowledged that its traders colluded with others to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, the rate that big banks say they borrow from each other which underpins trillions of dollars in global contracts.

MANIPULATION

In addition to the manipulation by traders, which took place from 2005-2009, Barclays has also admitted it deliberately understated its submissions of Libor rates at the height of the 2008 economic crisis to make its balance sheet look stronger.

That has led to wider questions about the behaviour of other banks - and British government and banking regulators.

Politicians questioned Diamond over a 2008 memo, in which he appeared to suggest that the Bank of England or the government might be giving the firm the nod to report that it was able to borrow money at lower rates to make it look better.

At the time, Barclays was reporting Libor funding costs that were among the highest of the large banks, even though others were in much worse shape.

Diamond wrote in the memo that the Deputy Governor of the Bank, Paul Tucker, told him "it did not always need to be the case that we appeared as high as we have recently".

Diamond said he feared at the time that if the British government believed its rates were higher than those of other banks, it might have nationalised the bank as it did with several competitors.

"They might say to themselves, 'My goodness, they can't fund. We need to nationalise them.'"

The Bank said Tucker intended to present his own explanation of the phone call to politicians at a later hearing.

Shareholders, meanwhile, just want answers.

"What was the nature of the manipulation? Who was involved, how long were they involved for? Was it escalated? If it was escalated, who was it escalated to?" asked Dominic Rossi at Fidelity Worldwide Investment, a top 10 Barclays investor.

"What did the people who it was escalated to actually do? Who did they inform? Did they inform the regulator? Did they inform the Bank ? If they did, who within the Bank ? Who within the FSA (regulator)? These are all the questions that we need to establish."

The bank said in documents released ahead of Diamond's appearance that it was "ironic" that there had been such an intense focus on it alone, as it had been lauded by regulators for its "exceptional level of cooperation" over the Libor probe.

But some investors accuse the bank of missing the "big picture".

"The board should now proactively break the bank up into its constituent parts after putting in place a coherent bonus and remuneration clawback of all misdemeanours of the last decade, from Libor to mis-selling of mortgage protection and interest rates swaps," said Neil Dwane, CIO Europe, Allianz Global Investors, which owns 13.4 million Barclays shares via its RCM unit.

"Break it up because it trades at half book value."

Libor is compiled by Thomson Reuters on behalf of the British Bankers' Association from estimates supplied by the world's biggest banks of the amount they believe other banks will charge them for loans.

(Additional reporting by Steve Slater, Sinead Cruise, Raji Menon, Kirstin Ridley, Chris Vellacott and Tim Castle; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Will Waterman and Giles Elgood)