Greece's new coalition government has proposed an extension to the deadline for it to reduce its budget deficit by at least two years, to 2016.

In a policy document, the government said its aim was for the fiscal target envisaged by the bailout deal to be met without further cuts to salaries and pensions.

The sources of Europe's German problem - or Germany's European problem - lie elsewhere and are more fundamental. Firstly, the current crisis has hit Germany hard. Not in economic terms, but in political and moral ones. Far from heralding the onset of a "German Europe", it actually means its end. The common currency system was based on the German model, with the European Central Bank as a copy of the Bundesbank.

The crash of this "Maastricht Europe" effectively undermines two assumptions crucial for Germany policy - that German solutions are best for Europe and that the German economic model thrives in symbiosis with European integration.

Before the crisis began, both made good sense. Germany supported ever closer integration, serving as the driving engine behind the formation of the common market and the single currency - and all that served Europe. But it was also a prerequisite of Germany's postwar prosperity, which was based on rebuilding the country's international reputation and developing an export-oriented economy. In the last couple of decades Germany got used to thinking that what was good for Germany was also good for Europe. Today this symbiosis is over.

Veni vidi vici. Having arrived in office after long and frustrating stints on the opposition benches, the three government leaders in Budapest, Bucharest and Kiev [respectively Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister Victor Ponta and President Viktor Yanukovych] are remarkable not only for the fact that they share a common firstname, but also because their behaviour is governed by identical reflexes. All three appear intent on holding on to the reins of power for some time to come. And all three have launched vengeful purges.

The trial of Anders Behring Breivik has ended in Norway with a walkout by families of victims in protest at his attempts to justify the massacre.

As he took the stand to explain why he had killed 77 people last July, some 30 people filed out of the courtroom.

Saying he had acted to stop a Muslim invasion, he asked to be considered sane and to be acquitted.

Judges will deliver their verdict on 24 August. The prosecution is asking for Breivik to be deemed insane.

A European Parliament Committee rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) yesterday (21 June) despite pro-business lobbying by Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, who insisted that Parliament should not decide before the European Court of Justice gives its opinion. A final vote in the full Parliament is expected on 4 July.

The International Trade Committee voted 19-12 to reject ACTA, making it the fourth Parliamentary panel in less than a month to do so.

The vote took place following a strongly worded speech by De Gucht made in Parliament the previous day, in which he said that he expected the court to find that ACTA conforms to EU treaties. If the court does rule in favour of the treaty, the commissioner said he would make a second request for consent to the European Parliament.

(Reuters) - "State capitalism is not our goal," Vladimir Putin said in his first big speech on the economy since his return to the Kremlin, managing to leave investors at Russia's premier business forum little wiser as to how serious he is about selling state assets.

Privatisation has come to the fore as Russia's most divisive policy issue since Putin, elected in March to a third term as president after four years as prime minister, named a new government last month.

Although dire markets preclude major deals that would reduce the state's 50 percent share in Russia's $1.8 trillion economy at the moment, the privatisation debate has caused a power realignment that could have far-reaching consequences.

The kicker to Putin's state capitalism quote was that private-sector monopolies should not replace state ones - a dig at the rushed sell-offs of the 1990s that handed the Soviet Union's industrial legacy to a new breed of industrial oligarch.

(Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet French President Francois Hollande late on Wednesday ahead of a key European summit, a spokesman for the German government told Reuters on Saturday.

"The purpose of the meeting is to prepare for the European Council on Thursday and Friday," the spokesman said.

Hollande wants next week's European summit to agree on more than just a growth package before he is ready to ratify the bloc's fiscal pact, a French diplomatic source said on Friday.

Hollande, who won backing from the leaders of Germany, Italy and Spain in Rome on Friday for his growth proposals, also wants an EU-wide agreement on progress towards banking sector integration and other financial stability measures, the source said.

(Reuters) - Former newspaper executive Rebekah Brooks, the woman at the heart of a scandal shaking Rupert Murdoch's media empire and the government, appeared in court on Friday at the opening of her prosecution on charges of hiding evidence from police.

Brooks, who is close to Murdoch and was friends with successive British prime ministers, resigned as chief executive of Murdoch's British newspaper group in July 2011 over revelations of phone-hacking by reporters at one of her papers.

The publication of affectionate text messages she used to exchange with Prime Minister David Cameron has caused the government deep embarrassment.

Brooks and five others, including her well-connected husband Charlie and her former personal assistant, were charged in May with perverting the course of justice. They are accused of conspiring to hide boxes of documents and computers from police.

(Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said it will transfer its Yaris compact car production f or North America to France from Japan in May next year, marking the first time the company will export cars from Europe to that market.

Analysts said the move, announced by Toyota late on Friday, is aimed at keeping a strong yen and soaring energy costs from affecting its earnings. Other Japanese automakers have also shifted some export production out of Japan.

(Reuters) - U.S. group Hewlett Packard (HPQ.N), the world's largest personal computer maker, may cut as many as 1,000 jobs in Germany as part of planned European-wide redundancies, WirtschaftsWoche reported, citing an unnamed staff representative.

HP is planning to cut about 8,000 positions in Europe by the end of 2014, the German magazine said, citing unnamed officials close to the company.

A storm has blown up in the U.K. after it was revealed that well-known comedian Jimmy Carr was taking advantage of an off-shore scheme to avoid tax.

The scheme is perfectly legal. What seemed to bother people in equal measure was how little of his very large income was going to the national treasury and his hypocrisy-one of his comedy routines was scathing about how big banks avoided paying tax.

The criticism opened up a rich seam of irony, not least when Prime Minister David Cameron argued such schemes were immoral. Mr. Cameron's own family benefited from various trusts and tax-minimization structures that are popular with the U.K.'s wealthy, including many of his political colleagues.

But this isn't just a British story. Extraordinary degrees of legal tax avoidance among the rich are near universal in developed economies, although it's particularly heavily emphasized in the U.S. and the U.K. And it exists primarily because of the vast complexity of tax laws.

Well, many years passed since then and, at long last, I understood [how the Great Depression happened]. Watching our government in Greece since the debt crisis erupted, observing Europe's leadership dither and adopt one calamitous policy after the other, I finally got it. It is, come to think of it, not dissimilar to what happened in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Inside the Pentagon, smart generals understood perfectly well that America's war in Vietnam could not be won. That sending more troops to fight in the jungles, unleashing more napalm bombs over Vietnamese towns, cranking up the war effort in general, was pointless. We know full well, courtesy of Daniel Ellsberg's heroic efforts, that they knew individually, and in small groups, the error of their ways. And yet they found it impossible to coordinate with one another, to synthesise their views, so as to agree to a change of course. A change that would have saved thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives, not to mention a huge amount of money. Something similar is happening in Athens, in Rome, in Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris today. It is not that the members of our elites cannot see that Europe is like a train that is derailing in slow motion, with Greece being the first carriage to leave the tracks, Ireland and Portugal following, leading to the derailment of the larger carriages that follow: Spain, Italy, France and, finally, Germany itself. No, I believe that, in the eye of their mind, they can see it, at least as well as American generals could envision the final scenes in Saigon - with the helicopters airlifting the last Americans from the rooftop of the US Embassy. But, just like the American generals, they are finding it impossible to coordinate their viewpoints into a sensible policy response. None of them dare speak when they enter the conference rooms in which the important decisions are reached, lest they are accused of going `soft' or of having `lost it'. So, they stay silent while Europe is burning, hoping against hope that the fire will put itself out, while knowing, in their heart of hearts, that it will do no such thing.

While they are dithering, fiddling as Athens, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, Dublin are burning, our societies are descending into a mire in which hope vanishes, prospects are annihilated, life is cheapened, and where the only winners are the misanthropes, the `haters', the seekers of scapegoats in the form of the `alien', the Jew, the `different', the `other'. As the lights are literally going out in my country, with families `choosing' to have their electricity supply discontinued in order to put food on the dinner table, thugs `patrol' the streets in search of the `enemy'. Nazi ideology is getting another chance, like hunger and dispossession, to infect, once again, our social fabric. And as our institutions, our trades unions, our cultural norms and organisations are turning into empty shells, little, if anything, stands in the way of the bigots, the racists, the exploiters of generalized pain and helplessness. Alas, the serpent's egg is hatching again in Europe, and for the same reasons it did back then.

...

Come to think of it: Behind every toxic CDO, behind all lethal financial engineering, there lurked some pristine model of one of us. Behind every economic policy that was responsible for ponzi (that is `pretend') growth prior to the Crash of 2008, one can find some celebrated, some well respected economist who provided the `ideological' cover for that policy to be adopted. Behind every austerity measure today, that suffocates our societies, again there stands an academic colleague of ours, whose models and theories provide the powers that be with the audacity to inflict such policies onto our peoples. In short, you and I are guilty for what our fellow Greeks and Italians are suffering. Even if we did not believe in these particular economic models, we did not do enough to alert the world to their toxicity. We are, indeed, guilty.

Taking stock of what I'm learned this week, I'll just link (not for the first time) to this article by Dirk Bezemer: Why some economists could see the crisis coming (FT.com, 7 September 2009)

Central to the contrarians' thinking is an accounting of financial flows (of credit, interest, profit and wages) and stocks (debt and wealth) in the economy, as well as a sharp distinction between the real economy and the financial sector (including property). In these "flow-of-funds" models, liquidity generated in the financial sector flows to companies, households and the government as they borrow. This may facilitate fixed-capital investment, production and consumption, but also asset-price inflation and debt growth. Liquidity returns to the financial sector as investment or in debt service and fees.

It follows that there is a trade-off in the use of credit, so that financial investment may crowd out the financing of production. A second key insight is that, since the economy's assets and liabilities must balance, growing financial asset markets find their counterpart in a growing debt burden. They also swell payment flows of debt service and financial fees. Flow-of-funds models quantify the sustainability of the debt burden and the financial sector's drain on the real economy. This allows their users to foresee when finance's relation to the real economy turns from supportive to extractive, and when a breaking point will be reached.

Such calculations are conspicuous by their absence in official forecasters' models in the US, the UK and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In line with mainstream economic theory, balance sheet variables are assumed to adapt automatically to changes in the real economy, and can thus be safely omitted. This practice ignores the fact that in most advanced economies, financial sector turnover is many times larger than total gross domestic product; or that growth in the US and UK has been finance-driven since the turn of the millennium.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/06/24/eurozone-germany-schaeuble-idINL5E8HO0ST20120624

"The ball is now in Greece's court," said Schaeuble. "It's in their hands to win back the confidence of the people of Europe. They're only going to accomplish that with concrete actions and deeds."

Turkey's President, Abdullah Gul, has said the Turkish fighter jet shot down by Syria's air defence forces on Friday may have violated Syrian airspace.

Mr Gul said it was routine for warplanes flying at high speed to cross borders for short distances.

Syria has said it engaged the aircraft in its airspace "according to the laws that govern such situations", and that it crashed into the Mediterranean Sea.

The Turkish and Syrian navies are searching for the two crew members.

Relations between Nato-member Turkey and Syria, once close allies, have deteriorated sharply since the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011. More than 30,000 Syrian refugees have fled the violence across the border into Turkey.

Egypt's election commission has said the results of the presidential runoff will be revealed on Sunday, as thousands of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood continue to protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

They are demonstrating against what they say is a power grab by the military and an attempt to limit presidential power.

The election commission overseeing the divisive contest between Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood candidate, and Ahmed Shafik, a former prime minister, said it would announce the official winner on Sunday.

"Farouk Sultan, the head of the presidential election commission, will announce the results of the presidential election run-off on Sunday at 3pm (13:00 GMT)," Hatem Bagato, the commission's secretary-general, said in a statement on Saturday.

Both Morsi and Shafik have claimed victory in the election for a successor to Hosni Mubarak, escalating tensions between the rival camps that have deepened after the electoral commission delayed announcing the official outcome.

Aid workers say western Ivory Coast has seen a serious increase in unrest and instability, as the country's president blames a series of cross-border raids on Liberia-based fighters who are loyal to former leader Laurent Gbagbo.  

Gbagbo's refusal to step down after losing the 2010 presidential election unleased a four-month civil war, in which around 3,000 people were killed.

And that unrest appears to be lingering. Just this month, an ambush in the region killed 22 people, including seven UN peacekeepers.

The violence has forced 13,000 people to flee their homes, according to UN estimates.

(video report)

איש אינו יודע מה פני המציאות ואיש אינו יודע מה יהיו התוצאות של פעולה או אי-פעולה. אבל במצבים של אי ודאות העיקרון המנחה צריך להיות העיקרון שאותו הגדיר אבי תורת המשחקים - ג'ון פון נוימן. המתמטיקאי היהודי, שהיה ממובילי פרויקט מנהטן, טען כי במצבים קריטיים שבהם אינך יודע מה תהיה התוצאה, עליך לא לנסות להשיג את הרווח המקסימלי אלא לוודא שבמקרה של כישלון, המחיר שאותו תשלם יהיה מזערי.

No one knows what the reality and nobody knows what the consequences of action or non-action. But in situations of uncertainty, the guiding principle should be the principle which he described as father of game theory - John von Neumann. Jewish mathematician, who was leader [Hebrew has"among the leaders"] of the Manhattan Project, said that in critical situations where you do not know what the outcome, you should not try to get the maximum profit but to ensure that in case of failure, the price that you pay will be minimal.

You might be able to find the article in English, but I'm beginning to give up on the English site because of the paywall. The Hebrew site seems to be free. Maybe they realize that Israelis will see a paywall as a challenge to be got around rather than an incentive to pay. Or maybe the market is simply too small in comparison.

Thousands of American school pupils are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real - in an attempt by religious teachers to disprove Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Pupils attending privately-run Christian schools in the southern state of Louisiana will learn from textbooks next year, which claim Scotland's most famous mythological beast is a living creature.

SPECIAL REPORT / Rattled in Europe by the REACH regulation and carbon dioxide emission curbs, international chemical companies are at the Rio Earth Summit determined to push for a global approach to environmental policy - but with a light regulatory touch.

Speaking ahead of the Rio summit, international chemical firms were keen to convey the message that environmental standards are better if they are implemented globally.

"I think globalisation of standards and definitions, common definitions are good," said Frank Sherman, president of AkzoNobel's North America branch.

The reasoning is simple and well-known. Rather than complying with a myriad of environmental laws in different countries, companies prefer dealing with a single set of globally harmonised rules.

"One thing that industry goes crazy about is having multiple directions, multiple rules, multiple definitions. And so we need some consistency," Sherman told reporters in a telephone briefing organised by the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA).

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 23 2012 (IPS) - Agroforestry is gaining ground as a tool for climate change adaptation and mitigation in Central America, a region where global warming could generate losses equivalent to 19 percent of gross domestic product.

"Agroforestry is our only alternative to mitigate and adapt to climate change," Alberto Chinchilla, executive director of the Central American Coordinating Association of Indigenous and Peasant Community Agroforestry (ACICAFOC) told Tierramérica.

A side event of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), held Jun. 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro, addressed this "climate-smart" agriculture approach that could help reduce the vulnerability of the Central American region.

The meeting was attended by government ministers, scientists, technicians and farmers.

An agroforestry system combines trees with agricultural production and livestock grazing. Its practice, enhanced by scientific research, can contribute to the development of environmentally friendly methods and technologies, said Chinchilla.

There is no longer any question of preventing climate change. Some 98 percent of working climate scientists agree that the atmosphere is already warming in response to human greenhouse-gas emissions, and the most recent research suggests that we are on a path toward what were once considered "worst case" scenarios.

That chipper sentiment marks the beginning of my new piece for Popular Science. It's an introduction/scene-setter for their recent issue, which has a package of pieces focused on climate adaptation in shelter, food, water, and more. Go read the whole thing!

There won't be much new material in it for my 12 loyal readers, especially those who have read my "brutal logic" posts or watched my TEDx talk. It's all that ol' doom-and-gloom, again.

If there's any shift in emphasis, it's just that avoiding serious disruptions is no longer really an option, even if we go gangbusters on mitigation. Adjusting to severe weather, rising sea levels, desertification, and diminished agricultural output is something we will do, period. John Holdren's oft-quoted line is worth quoting yet again:

We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We're going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.

A new study with NASA participation has sharply reduced previous estimates of how much carbon was emitted into Earth's atmosphere from tropical deforestation in the early 2000s. Research scientist Sassan Saatchi of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., participated in the study, published June 21 in the journal Science.

The team, led by researchers from Winrock International, an environmental nonprofit organization in Little Rock, Ark., also included scientists from Applied GeoSolutions, Durham, N.H.; and the University of Maryland, College Park. They combined satellite data on gross forest loss and forest carbon stocks to track emissions from deforestation in the world's tropical forests.

The resulting gross emissions estimate of 0.81 billion metric tons of carbon emitted per year is approximately one third of previously published estimates, and represents just 10 percent of the total global human-produced carbon emissions over the time period analyzed (2000 to 2005).

Don't let the hobbling, wobbling, and blubber fool you into thinking elephant seals are merely sluggish sun bathers. In fact, scientists are benefiting from these seals' surprisingly lengthy migrations to determine critical information about Antarctic melting and future sea level rise. A team of scientists have drilled holes through an Antarctic ice shelf, the Fimbul Ice Shelf, to gather the first direct measurements regarding melting of the shelf's underside.

A group of elephant seals, outfitted with sensors that measure salinity, temperature, and depth sensors added fundamental information to the scientists' data set, which led the researchers to conclude that parts of eastern Antarctica are melting at significantly lower rates than current models predict.

"It has been unclear, until now, how much warm deep water rises below the Fimbul Ice shelf, and previous ocean models, focusing on the circulation below the Fimbul Ice Shelf, have predicted temperatures and melt rates that are too high, suggesting a significant mass loss in this region that is actually not taking place as fast as previously thought," said lead author of the study and PhD student at the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI), Tore Hattermann.

Drought is claiming a heavy toll on Argentina's corn and soy crops, creating new problems for the economy amid an increasingly fraught confrontation between farmer groups and the government.

Drought isn't a new threat to Argentine agriculture and has affected crops with varying severity over the past three years but officials said this year's yields could be the worst in 15 years.

Dry, hot weather conditions are blamed on La Nina, the weather phenomenon that is the opposite of El Nino.

BERKELEY, California, Jun 22 2012 (IPS) - The city of Berkeley, California has long been regarded as a leader in the movements for peace, free speech and civil liberties. But this very city is now poised to follow the lead of hundreds of others around the United States where local police deploy armoured vehicles to fight crime and terrorism.

The University of California, Berkeley police department is using grant funds from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a Lenco Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck, better known as BearCat. The university will share the BearCat with police from Berkeley and the neighbouring city of Albany, where it will house the vehicle.

Some of the world's most powerful women, including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, have lamented the omission of women's reproductive rights in the Rio+20 summit's final statement.

Reproductive rights include a woman's right to decide the number, timing and spacing of children, the right to voluntarily marry and establish a family, as well as the right to the highest attainable standard of health.

The issue was a major bone of contention at the three-day UN summit on sustainable development, which was closing Friday with 191 UN members set to adopt a weak compromise statement on a roadmap to a green economy.

A reference to reproductive rights was included in the original summit draft, but it was dropped in the final version approved by negotiators Tuesday.

ScienceDaily (June 22, 2012) -- After 10 years of archaeological investigations, researchers have concluded that Stonehenge was built as a monument to unify the peoples of Britain, after a long period of conflict and regional difference between eastern and western Britain.

Its stones are thought to have symbolized the ancestors of different groups of earliest farming communities in Britain, with some stones coming from southern England and others from west Wales.

The teams, from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Southampton, Bournemouth and University College London, all working on the Stonehenge Riverside Project (SRP), explored not just Stonehenge and its landscape but also the wider social and economic context of the monument's main stages of construction around 3,000 BC and 2,500 BC.

"When Stonehenge was built," said Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, "there was a growing island-wide culture -- the same styles of houses, pottery and other material forms were used from Orkney to the south coast. This was very different to the regionalism of previous centuries. Stonehenge itself was a massive undertaking, requiring the labour of thousands to move stones from as far away as west Wales, shaping them and erecting them. Just the work itself, requiring everyone literally to pull together, would have been an act of unification."

Science, technology, math and engineering fields suffer from a troubling gender gap, many experts argue. The European Commission (EC), for example, reports that fewer than 32% of Europe's career researchers are women. But the EC is taking a lot of flak for its latest attempt to close that gap, a campaign launched on Thursday called "Science: It's a Girl Thing." While the campaign Web site is fairly innocuous, an associated 53-second trailer is drawing some angry criticism.

The video opens with three female models strutting into the frame in high heels and short skirts. A male scientist watching them from behind his microscope doesn't seem to mind that none of them are wearing safe lab attire--he just pops his glasses on for a better look. The rest of the video is a mish-mash of heels, nail polish, lipstick, and sexily smoldering Erlenmeyer flasks, arbitrarily punctuated by girly giggles.

The video is so chock-full of clichés that viewers might be forgiven for thinking it a parody. It certainly bears more than a few similarities to this Saturday Night Live sketch. But alas, according to a tweet from Michael Jennings, the EC's spokesperson for research, innovation and science, it's very real: "Commission doesn't really do irony."

Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts [1]. For a sovereign's debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.

This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.

Although dancing mania was something confined to its period, some have identified modern-day activities that display some of its characteristics. Bartholomew believes that raving, an activity which became popular in the latter half of the 20th century, features characteristics of dancing mania. For example, raves may involve activities that onlookers consider odd (such as partying all night), the use of drugs to bring on hallucinations, and participants who are part of a subculture.

Other studies have shown that researchers without direct experience in altered states of consciousness should refrain from opinion, judgement and explanation, lest they be seen to be complete idiots.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin