Authorities have started removing about 250 Roma families from an informal city outside the Serbian capital. Rights groups have called the evictions human rights violations.

The city of Belgrade started removing nearly 1,000 Roma from a settlement of tin and wood huts outside the capital, drawing sharp criticism from Amnesty International and other rights groups.

The city planned to move the Roma families to four settlements of metal container homes outside Belgrade. Amnesty said the decision to move the settlement's inhabitants from an area where it wants to build a street represented an eviction and a "blatant" violation of human rights.

The EU's top 10 delegations in terms of staff numbers are: Ankara (137), Beijing/Hong Kong (116), Moscow (102), Belgrade (100), Tel Aviv/Ramallah (97), Kiev (93), Sarajevo (92), New Delhi (87), Washington (86) and Nairobi (85). The EU also has 187 people posted to various branches of the UN, the WTO, the African Union, the OECD economic club and democracy watchdogs the OSCE and the Council of Europe.

THE HAGUE - Human trafficking is booming in Europe, the Hague-based Eurojust, the EU's crime fighting unit, said on Thursday (26 April). But the number of cases brought against traffickers is grossly disproportionate to the number of reported victims.

BRUSSELS - Sixty nine MPs from across Europe have called for an international enquiry into the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.

The deputies - who hail mostly from EU countries, but also Croatia, Iceland, Norway, Serbia and Switzerland - signed the motion at the human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe (CoE), in Strasbourg on Wednesday (25 April).

If the council's steering group at its meeting on Friday gives the green light, the motion will trigger an in-depth investigation on the model of previous enquiries into CIA renditions, organ smuggling in Kosovo and death squads in Belarus.

BRUSSELS - All EU ambassadors are returning to Minsk in a bid to improve deteriorating relations with Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko, in power for the past 18 years.

"All EU ambassadors are returning to Minsk, including our own ambassador," a spokesman for Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office told Reuters on Wednesday (25 April).

EU ambassadors left Belarus in March in a display of solidarity when Lukashenko kicked out Polish envoy and the EU envoy in February for helping draw up new sanctions against the regime.

Centrist leader François Bayrou has promised to weigh in on the second round of France's presidential vote before Election Day. But while he hopes to hold sway on the May 6 contest pitting incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy against Socialist challenger François Hollande, the moderate politician seems to be losing control of his own Democratic Movement (MoDem) party.

Bayrou's 9.1% support placed him fifth in the first round of the election, behind far-right leader Marine Le Pen (19.7%) and extreme-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon (11.1%). On Wednesday, he sent a letter to Sarkozy and Hollande, asking the two men to reply to his concerns in view of a potential second-round endorsement.

REUTERS - Rupert Murdoch blamed News of the World journalists for conspiring to cover up a culture of phone-hacking at the tabloid, saying they hid their activities from his son James and protegee Rebekah Brooks and that he personally was not paying attention.

In a second day of testimony in Britain's High Court on Thursday, Murdoch painted a picture of a rogue culture at the best-selling Sunday tabloid, in an echo of his company's now abandoned defence that a single "rogue reporter" was to blame.

"I think in newspapers, the reporters do act very much on their own, they do protect their sources, they don't disclose to their colleagues what they are doing," Murdoch told a judicial inquiry into press ethics.

Up to 40,000 Norwegians have staged an emotionally charged singalong in Oslo near the court building where Anders Behring Breivik is on trial for the murder of 77 people in a protest organisers said showed he had not broken their tolerant society.

"It's we who win," said guitar-strumming folk singer Lillebjørn Nilsen as he led the mass singalong and watched the crowd sway gently in the rain. Many held roses above their heads, and some wept.

The protest followed several days of defiant testimony from Breivik, who has admitted killing his victims but denied criminal guilt.

The crowd chose to sing Children of the Rainbow, a song that extols the type of multicultural society Breivik has said he despises and one he dismissed during the trial as Marxist propaganda.

The rightwing coalition in Prague is to face a vote of confidence in parliament on Friday in the latest survival test facing governments across Europe as they struggle to stay in office in the age of austerity.

The three-party government of the prime minister, Petr Necas, is hanging on by the most slender of margins, battered by large street protests over spending cuts, tax increases, job losses and corruption, and the splintering of his smallest coalition partner, after less than two years in power.

Spain's sovereign rating has been cut to BBB+ with a negative outlook; S&P is concerned about the possibility of a deeper than expected recession, and its impact on the deficit and debt; S&P also warns that Spain may have to provide more fiscal support to the banking system; S&P says eurozone efforts to solve the crisis continue to lack effectiveness; under an adverse scenario, Spain's GDP could drop by 4% this year, which would then lead to further downgrades; the Spanish government said S&P had failed to take into account the economic reforms; El Pais reports that the Spanish government released a misleading translation of an IMF report on Spanish banks that downplayed the effects; the original report said Spanish banks would mask risks through refinancing non-performing loans;El Pais article noted that the Bank of Spain discouraged such practises, but investors were concerned because of a lack of data;the Dutch government agree a deal with small, centrist opposition parties on a series of budget cuts and tax increase to meet the 2013 deficit target of 3%; deal includes cuts to healthcare and education, and increase in VAT, and reductions in tax relief; Angela Merkel rejects the call by Francois Hollande to renegotiate the fiscal pact, saying it has been agreed by 25 governments; Wolfgang Schäuble says growth is already a component of the pact; Mario Draghi has become the latest eurozone official to endorse the idea of a eurozone-wide bank resolution authority; French unemployment registered its nine consecutive monthly increase; Robin Wells, meanwhile, argues that the eurozone's mishandling of the crisis could play into the hands of President Obama in his election campaign.

Chancellor Merkel had said the Fiscal Union Accord signed by 25 EU countries out of 27 "is not negotiable".

...

  "The growth challenge has long been the second column of our political policy together with the solidity of public finances," Merkel added. ...

Something must be wrong in the EU when a pro-Europe, pro-austerity conservative government is ignored by Berlin or, worse, humiliated by France. Something must be wrong too when the International Monetary Fund endorses your programme of reforms and asks whether you really need such tough fiscal consolidation at a time of recession - yet nobody in Brussels, Berlin or Frankfurt cares to listen. Equally worrying is that the European Commission happily endorses Spain's severe cuts in education and research spending, deliberately ignoring the fact that these are incompatible with both the sustainable growth model it has been advocating for a decade and Spain's urgent need to move away from an economic model based on real estate.

...

Who governs? In the EU as we teach it to our students, the commission speaks for the general interest and has the right of initiative, while member states and citizens have their say through the European Council and parliament. But in today's Europe, EU institutions have been hollowed out as real power flows back and forth from Berlin to the corridors of the ECB, where the real battles about the crisis are fought in opacity.

The fiscal compact, the most unbalanced and asymmetric treaty member states have ever signed, is the best illustration of the new Europe: while austerity is strictly enforced, growth is barely promised. In the good old EU, member states were equal and treaties represented a compromise between competing visions of Europe. Now, Europe is about asymmetries in power and fear for the future. Europe now resembles Thomas Hobbes' description of man's life in its natural state: "poor, nasty, brutish and short." Two years on, not a single growth measure has been adopted. Time to say: basta!

The collapse of the Dutch government, the prospect of Socialist François Hollande as next French president and the surging popularity of far-right parties shows that budget discipline is out of fashion in Europe. Chancellor Angela Merkel is looking increasingly lonely in her fight to save the euro through painful austerity measures, write German commentators.

...

Business daily Handelsblatt, which runs the front-page headline "Is Europe Failing?", writes: "One can conduct great election campaigns by whipping up sentiment against Europe and Germany these days. The advocates of strict austerity in Berlin fear that they may run out of allies given the strengthening of euro opponents."

In a separate commentary, the newspaper writes: "The strengthening of the far right shows that in many countries, governments haven't found answers to simple questions. The language of the EU and of national governments isn't being understood by many citizens who are grateful for the simple slogans of the populists. People who don't understand Europe's austerity policy can't be persuaded by citing clauses of the Maastricht treaty or the fear of 'markets' that will punish their country. That just makes people more rebellious."

Oh, and we do "understand" Europe's austerity. We understand it all too well. That's never been the problem.

guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper

Romanian opposition bolstered by deserters from the ruling coalition and national minority MPs managed to pass a motion of censure with 235 votes ( 231 needed ).
Romanian president Traian Basescu will consult with the political parties starting from 14.00 UTC  .

The US has ruled out an immediate end to sanctions on Myanmar despite recent reforms, which it branded as "reversible." The new democratic policies prompted the EU and Canada to suspend most sanctions earlier this week.

The United States refused to follow in the footsteps of Canada and the EU on Wednesday by ruling out an immediate end to its main sanctions on Myanmar.

Both the EU and Canada suspended most sanctions on the regime earlier this week, while Japan waived $3.7 billion (2.8 billion euros) of the country's debt in response to a series of democratic changes introduced by President Thein Sein.

China has announced a special line of credit worth $10 billion to fund infrastructure, technology and environmental projects in central and eastern Europe, one its fastest-growing trade partners.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao on Thursday said his government plans to set up a $10 billion (7.6 billion euro) special line of credit for central and eastern European countries as his trip to Europe comes to an end.

Speaking to thousands of delegates at the China-Central Europe economic forum in Warsaw, Wen said the credit line was "to boost practical cooperation with central and east European countries."

BRUSSELS - EU leaders may meet for a special summit dedicated to growth before a regular meeting at the end of June, Council chief Herman Van Rompuy said on Thursday (26 April), as several Prime Ministers stressed the need to shift the focus away from austerity.

Picking up on the calls made by mostly by centre-left EU politicians, Van Rompuy told an audience at a business conference in Brussels that this was "the highest priority for European leaders."

BRUSSELS - French Socialist candidate Francois Hollande has reaffirmed his intention to re-open the treaty on fiscal discipline to include a "growth pact" and said his stance is gaining support.

The frontrunner in the French presidential elections said in a press conference on Wednesday (25 April) that if elected, he would send a letter to other EU leaders proposing a "growth pact" to be added to the existing treaty on tight budget rules.

BRUSSELS - MEPs have backed changes to working conditions for EU officials designed to save over €1 billion a year and to improve ethical standards.

The legal affairs committee in Brussels on Tuesday (25 April) voted through the new staff regulation by 19 against three with two abstentions. The Green group was the main malcontent, after its amendment on a higher tax for salaries of top officials failed to make the final cut.

It is not original to remark that there is a modern-day scramble for Africa taking place. Economic growth averaging around 5% on the continent for the past decade is certainly good news compared with two decades of increasing poverty. But on the other side of the coin are the reasons for that growth: the large-scale export of commodities with no clear industrial or institutional benefits. "Jobless growth", the source of the uprisings in north Africa, is the norm in Africa, and although manufacturing exports quadrupled to over $100bn in the last decade, manufacturing is actually declining as a proportion of GDP from a fairly stable 17% between 1965 and 1990 to 13% today.

Clearly African countries need to think hard about their development strategies and how best to take advantage of the changing global context. Is the ever-growing interest in Africa's land and resources its route out of poverty, or are we seeing dependency theory in action, with resources being extracted with little resembling sustainable development left behind? A recent article on the impact of oil wealth in Chad bears out this complex picture.

h/t The Stormy Present

Our mainstream colleagues keep banging their heads against the wall. "Why, oh why wouldn't Chairman Bernanke do more to rescue the economy?" Today Paul Krugman took on this question again, arguing that Chairman Bernanke should listen to Professor Bernanke who had far more sensible ideas about rescuing an economy from a deflationary environment, as seen in his research on Japan during the 90s.

....

In 2010, I wrote a paper Bernanke's Paradox (JPKE version, April 2011) which examines his monetary policy prescriptions for Japan in detail. I have been asking myself the same question: why isn't Bernanke following his own advice? But the answer I give is that it's because he cannot, literally. Whatever policy options he believes to be genuinely effective actually depend on Congress and not on him.

The difference is that, unlike Paul Krugman, I actually read Bernanke's paper from start to finish. See, what Krugman is missing is that Bernanke did not prescribe two policy options to deal with deflations (1. stick to an inflation target and 2. engage in alternative OMOs), but four.

I have discussed these in the paper above and in shorter blogs.... Here are the four options Bernanke recommends:

    1. Commit to an inflation target and a long-term low interest rate environment;

    2. Depreciate the currency through open market purchases of foreign currency;

    3. Engage in non-traditional OMOs - including purchases of long term government securities and other private sector liabilities such as non-performing loans, commercial paper, corporate bonds, asset-backed securities and other;

    4. Last but not least, finance various fiscal transfers (e.g., tax cuts) to boost consumption demand;

....

Fiscal components of monetary policy, of course are a euphemism for fiscal policy proper. The reason why Bernanke calls them "components" of monetary policy and why the mainstream refuses to acknowledge them is because they are still blindly wedded to the idea that monetary policy is omnipotent in rescuing the economy from recessions. Well, it's time to give up this old notion. How many years of low interest rates, aggressive QE1, QE2, Operations Twists, swaps, and $trillions and $trillions of lending do we need to recognize that these policy actions do not provide proper channels for dealing with the unemployment problem?

How long before we try what has been shown to work in the 30s and 40s - direct federal spending?

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Two bombs have exploded at newspaper offices in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, and the northern city of Kaduna in attacks bearing resemblance to others claimed by a radical Islamist group.

Twin bombings hit the offices of the Nigerian daily newspaper This Day in two cities on Thursday, killing at least sixpeople, witnesses and officials said.

A suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at This Day's offices in the capital, Abuja, while a man threw an explosive device at an office in the northern city of Kaduna that houses This Day, The Moment and The Daily Sun newspapers.

An international tribunal in The Hague has found former Liberian President Charles Taylor criminally responsible for crimes against humanity committed during Sierra Leone's civil war.

A United Nations-backed court in The Hague has unanimously found Charles Taylor guilty of aiding and abetting atrocities in connection with Sierra Leone's civil war.

"The trial chamber finds you guilty of aiding and abetting of all these crimes," presiding judge Richard Lussick told the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague following a preamble of well over two hours.

France's foreign minister has threatened harsher measures against Syria if the regime continues to defy a UN-brokered peace deal. Alain Juppe raised the prospect of military intervention to enforce broader UN sanctions.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe raised the prospect of military intervention in Syria on Wednesday in a sign of growing international frustration at the regime's defiance of a peace deal brokered by UN-Arab League envoy, Kofi Annan.

With the death toll in Syria rising daily, Juppe revealed that France had discussed invoking Chapter Seven of the United Nations charter with other world partners. He also demanded that a 300-strong UN observer team be deployed to Syria within two weeks, rather than the three months agreed by the UN deal. There are currently just 15 observers in the country.

Pakistan's Supreme Court has convicted the prime minister of contempt. It sentenced Yousuf Raza Gilani to a symbolic sentence which only lasted a few minutes.

Pakistan's top court has convicted Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani of contempt of court.

The country's Supreme Court found Prime Minister Gilani guilty of ignoring court orders to write to Swiss authorities to ask them to re-open corruption cases against the president, Asif Ali Zardari.

"For reasons to be recorded later, the prime minister is found guilty of contempt for willfully flouting the direction of the Supreme Court," Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk said.

The recently revealed friendship between Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu has caused a stir in the US election campaign. But it won't have a big impact, even if Romney wins the White House.

The close personal relationship between presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicted in detail by The New York Times recently wasn't entirely unknown. But it was the first time it had really been brought to international attention.

AFP - The wife of detained Bahraini activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who is on a hunger strike, said Thursday she is being denied the right to call or visit the prominent Shiite dissident.

"They say he is in good health, but if that's true, then why won't they let me speak to him, why won't they let me see him?" asked Khadija Khawaja.

On the anniversary of the world's worst nuclear disaster, Ukraine began work on a containment unit for the damaged Chernobyl reactor. The shelter will allow experts to clean up radioactive material in the reactor.

Warning nations to take extreme care with nuclear energy, Ukraine's president thanked international contributors for their donations to create a new, safer cover for the Chernobyl reactor, which exploded 26 years ago.

"The Chernobyl disaster underscored that mankind must be extra careful in using nuclear technologies," President Viktor Yanukovych said. "Nuclear accidents lead to global consequences. They are not a problem of just one country; they affect the life of entire regions."

The Arctic and its vast energy reserves were a key focus of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's recent trip to Europe, fueling concerns about Beijing's preparations for an ice-free Arctic Ocean.

It may seem surprising that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, leader of the world's most populous nation, should begin his Europe tour with a stop in Iceland, a remote island with a population of just 320,000. But the move is in line with a wider Chinese strategy to gain a strategic foothold in the Arctic. Global climate change is opening up the once inaccessible region for shipping and industrial development.

A 2011 report by the Arctic Monitoring Assessment Program (AMAP) says that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Estimates suggest the polar ice cap might disappear completely during the summer season as soon as 2040, perhaps much earlier.

The Nabucco pipeline was intendend to make Europe less dependent on Russian gas. But with one of the backers jumping ship, the entire project is now in danger.

It must have been a meeting in good spirits, back in 2002, rounded off by a visit to the famous Vienna opera. That evening's performance? Verdi's Nabucco - and the officials from energy companies from Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria seemed to have enjoyed the show.

But a great performance was probably not the only reason for naming their planned pipeline Nabucco. Like Verdi's protagonist, who attempts to free his people from bondage, the deal was nothing less than an ambitious plan to win independence from government-controlled Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom and to build a separate pipeline from Austria to Azerbaijan, allowing Central Asian gas to bypass Russian territory.

The government has achieved its aim of being the "greenest ever", David Cameron said on Thursday, in his first significant remarks on the environment since reaching office.

"When I became prime minister I said I would aim to have the greenest government ever and this is exactly what we have," he told energy ministers from the world's leading nations at a summit in London.

Cameron said he "passionately believed" the growth of renewable energy was vital to the UK's future. "I believe renewable energy can be among our cheapest energy sources within years not decades," he said. But he warned: "We need to make it financially sustainable."

As the Royal Society report and others have made quite clear today, it is impossible to isolate consumption and population and view them as separate issues. They are tightly interwoven and near-impossible to prise apart. But that shouldn't frighten us off from discussing them in detail and I welcome today's report and believe it to be an important, heavy-weight contribution to this vexed, highly emotional debate about sustainable "boundaries", which many seem still too keen to dismiss or deny.

Britain's biggest clothing retailer is launching a campaign to stop one in four items of clothing bought in the UK ending up in the bin.

Marks & Spencer wants customers to hand over an old or unwanted garment whenever they buy a new one, to encourage a phenomenon it has dubbed "shwopping".

It wants to kick-start a "buy one, give one" culture which could allow unwanted items to be resold, reused or recycled by its charity partner Oxfam. According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, UK consumers throw away 2m tonnes of clothing a year, with half going straight to landfill.

I started filming my daughter Lotte as a newborn in 1999, every week, usually on a Saturday morning. After 12 years of filming her, and nine years of doing the same with her brother Vince, I turned the footage into the two films you see today. While I always had the feeling that this project was special and that it deserved a wider audience, I never dreamed that it would get this kind of exposure.

A 2002 documentary called "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," about the Funk Brothers, the studio musicians who provided the backing for Motown Records' biggest hits between 1959 and 1972, won several film awards and a Grammy and showed that there is an audience for films like Mr. Tedesco's; it made over $2.3 million at the global box office, has done well as a DVD and was accompanied by an uptick in sales of CDs by Motown artists. But that film was easier to make because, as Mr. Blaine noted, the Funk Brothers worked exclusively for Motown, but the Wrecking Crew played for dozens of labels large and small. Mr. Hartman, whose book is also called "The Wrecking Crew," said he was puzzled by what he sees as the shortsightedness of the four conglomerates that now control the music business.

"The Wrecking Crew made these songs hits and made the record companies a ton of money," he said. "It's to their advantage to let this thing come out. Here's this beautifully crafted marketing vehicle that could sell so many more copies of these great songs. It's free money for the labels, with no cost for them. But here comes Denny to reinvigorate their catalog, and he has to pay to do it."

Thousands remember Levon Helm.

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant. From "The Maid's Tragedy" by Beaumont & Fletcher

funky dat!

The power of knowledge is in mortal combat with the knowledge of power. It really is that simple... That's the Edenic apple we are all munching on.