"Perhaps never in the history of our countries have the United States and France been that close on the big dossiers and on the big topics," Mr Sarkozy said at a joint press conference after the meeting.

But when it comes to Turkey's EU membership bid, Washington and Paris remained poles apart. While Mr Obama believes Ankara should join the EU, Mr Sarkozy remains firmly against the idea.

"I've said publicly that I think Turkish membership of the EU would be important," Mr Obama said.

"What the US wants to do is just to encourage talks and discussions where Turkey can feel confident that it has a friendship with France, with the United States, with all of Europe and to the extent that it defines itself that it has an opportunity to be a part of that," he added.

For his part, Mr Sarkozy said he agreed on the general principle of having strong and friendly relations with Turkey, as well as of having the country as "a bridge between East and West." But he reiterated his opposition to letting Ankara enter the EU as a full member.

Victims of mass atrocities from around the globe have turned to Spain's National Court of Justice throughout the past decade. But Madrid is likely to limit a generous law which allows its judges to investigate alleged human rights abuses in other countries.

Spain is one of a few countries that embraces the principle of universal jurisdiction. Since 1985, Spanish criminal law has allowed the National Court, or Audiencia Nacional, to reach beyond national borders in cases of serious human rights abuses, even if there are no Spanish victims.

Spanish judges have used the doctrine in recent years to try to seek prosecution in atrocities cases from Tibet to Rwanda. Judge Balthasar Garzon rose to fame when he ordered the arrest of Chile's former despot Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998. From that moment, serious human rights abusers were aware that they could no longer rely on global impunity.

The National Court now has 13 cases open involving genocide or crimes against humanity involving eight countries, including China, Israel and the US.

When Glenys Kinnock quit her job as an MEP, it looked as though her days on a public-funded salary were over.

Yet a surprise call from Number 10 has seen the wife of the former Labour Party leader make the seamless transition from a £63,291-a-year euro MP to the £83,275-a-year Europe Minister in Gordon Brown's troubled government.

The appointment, coupled with the fact that she will be joining her husband Neil (Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty), in the House of Lords marks an astonishing political - and financial - coup for the former primary school teacher from south Wales.

Silvio Berlusconi's attack on Rupert Murdoch group comes as state broadcaster RAI threatens to pull channels from Sky Italia

Silvio Berlusconi's account of why he thinks Rupert Murdoch's media outlets are out to get him came as a surprise to observers of the broadcasting scene in Italy. The VAT row he mentioned was resolved at the end of last year, to the detriment of Murdoch's Sky Italia.

The Australian-born media magnate now has another bone to pick with Berlusconi. But Italy's prime minister has good reason for not citing it.

Critics argue that the two media tycoons' latest dispute offers the most blatant example yet of something Berlusconi has always vigorously denied - that, when he is in power, Italy's public broadcaster RAI acts in his personal interests, providing him a virtual monopoly of what voters see on their screens.

RAI and Berlusconi's Mediaset together operate six of the country's seven terrestrial TV channels. The only serious competition facing this "duopolio", as Italians call it, is Sky Italia, which has carved out an 11% share of the overall Italian TV market.

However, it was the fracas involving the Queen's invitation - or the lack of it - that really stirred things up. As it happens, nobody in Paris reacted at first to the accusation of a snub to Buckingham Palace. The French, who were originally planning to have Sarkozy attend a specific French-American ceremony, acceded to Downing Street's request that Gordon Brown tag along. But it was only when Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, insisted that Mr Obama wanted the Queen to attend, and was "working with those involved to see if we can make that happen", that the whole affaire took off.

The French opposition, which is expected to trail behind Sarkozy's UMP party in the Euro-elections tomorrow, realised that while French law forbids political campaigning from midnight onwards on the Saturday before a Sunday poll, Sarkozy would be on every television screen before the vote, saying worthy, statesmanlike things. They grabbed the Obama-validated royal story and ran with it. Sarkozy was pelted with insults by every opposition candidate in the country, who flew - with no sense of irony - to the defence of Britain, usually painted as the fly in the Euro-ointment. Sarkozy's behaviour towards Her Majesty was that of a cad, a buffoon, a jerk, a pathetic human being with no manners - a bad European, and a worse Frenchman.

Then, into this heated atmosphere, came the translation of Obama's speech in Cairo. Fabricated outrage was instantly replaced by very real indignation, in a country where the neutrality of the public space is sacrosanct. Obama's pointed words defending the hijab aroused the ire of feminists, teachers' unions, and even moderate Muslim groups, who have come to a civilised arrangement with the headscarf law, which bans the conspicuous display of religious symbols in schools. Equally vocal were France's political parties - not least the president's own.

For the first time, newspaper websites were full of anti-Obama comments - a decided first in France. However much he looked forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with the US president, Sarko may rue the day he dreamt up this D-Day photo-op.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Greek cotton farmers prospered with large European Union subsidies, but that aid fell away as the bloc switched its help to African growers.

As European elections begin, the farmers, in common with many other Greeks, are losing their enthusiasm for the EU and are increasingly sceptical about its policies.

Yannis Vagkos is a worried man.

For five generations, his family has been growing cotton on the plains outside the southern Greek town of Livadia.

Now, as a new crop is coming up, he wonders whether he can carry on much longer.

"We used to call cotton white gold," he says, "but comparing cotton farming now with the way it was in the 1990s is like comparing day and night." 

He says the prices he can get for his cotton are barely one-sixth of what they were in the early 1990s, while the cost of inputs such as fertiliser and diesel has risen dramatically.

Do Mr. Brown and his party really deserve blame for the crisis here? Yes and no.

Mr. Brown bought fully into the dogma that the market knows best, that less regulation is more. In 2005 he called for "trust in the responsible company, the engaged employee and the educated consumer" and insisted that regulation should have "not just a light touch but a limited touch." It might as well have been Alan Greenspan speaking.

There's no question that this zeal for deregulation set Britain up for a fall. Consider the counterexample of Canada -- a mostly English-speaking country, every bit as much in the American cultural orbit as Britain, but one where Reagan/Thatcher-type financial deregulation never took hold. Sure enough, Canadian banks have been a pillar of stability in the crisis.

But here's the thing. While Mr. Brown and his party may deserve to be punished, their political opponents don't deserve to be rewarded.

After all, would a Conservative government have been any less in the thrall of free-market fundamentalism, any more willing to rein in runaway finance, over the past decade? Of course not.

Italian GDP during the first quarter was 5.9% lower than in the same quarter of the previous year. This fall - almost 10% when measured at a seasonally-adjusted annualised rate (the normal US practice) - was one of the worst of the major European countries, excepting only Germany and Sweden. It would be wrong to lay much of the blame for this on the current government - the international environment has been the main culprit, and the inheritance of the past - including the inheritance of past Berlusconi governments - leaves no Italian government with much room for manoeuvre. But a crisis of this kind would normally call forth some coherent response - some plan of action - from a government. This seems to be lacking in Italy, essentially because macro-economic problems do not give rise to photo-opportunities. If there is an earthquake, you can get a photo-opportunity with an arm around a grieving widow. If there is a refuse crisis, you can pose with a spade and a refuse bin. But the narcissistic world of the Silvio Berlusconi reality show - look at me, I'm governing! - does not know how to respond to economic crisis. Apart from optimistically announcing that the crisis is over, there has been little reaction from Mr Berlusconi. Unfortunately, many of world's most pressing problems - climate change, for example - give equally little scope for photo-opportunities, and are therefore equally neglected.

 

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~