Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the United States and Russia share "no trust" in relations but suggested the two countries can begin to heal ties and reach an agreement over a missile defense system.

Speaking Saturday, Nov. 15, after the gathering of 20 world economic powers in Washington to address the financial crisis, Medvedev said there is "no trust in Russian-US relations -- the trust we need" to tackle international challenges and strengthen ties.

 

However, he also signaled a readiness to enter into talks with the US over its plan to build a missile shield in eastern Europe.

 

"We will not do anything until America does the first step," Medvedev said. "I think we have a chance to solve the problem through either agreeing on a global (anti-missile) system or to find a solution on the existing programs which would suit the Russian Federation."

On the 70th anniversary of anti-Jewish decrees in Italy, an Italian Auschwitz survivor has said the Roma population faces discrimination similar to Jews in Nazi Germany.

"History is repeating itself" in Italy, Piero Terracina said Friday, Nov. 14, at a conference marking the 70th anniversary of the notorious racial laws targeting Jews, which were approved by the Italian cabinet on Nov. 15, 1938.

"Everything started with the census of the Jews and the terrible consequences to which this led us," said Terracina, reported AFP news agency.

The 80-year-old Holocaust survivor was freed from the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945, shortly before the end of World War II.

The discriminatory decrees introduced in both Nazi Germany and Italy under then leader Benito Mussolini included the prohibition of mixed marriages between Jews and so-called "Aryans" and economic restrictions on Jews, among other measures.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and his Hungarian counterpart Ferenc Gyurcsany failed to thaw icy relations between their countries in a meeting called to stem nationalist tensions.

While the leaders on Saturday, Nov. 15, called for cooperation after their meeting in the border town of Komarno, they mostly engaged in a stinging exchange that did more to highlight their disagreements than signal a quick way out of the crisis.

"The biggest problem is the export of fascism and extremism from Hungarian territory to Slovakia," Fico said at a press conference televised on the TA3 news channel.

He urged his counterpart to crack down on Hungary's neo-Nazis, who have contributed to escalating tensions in recent weeks.

"It is unacceptable for us ... that 28 people dressed in Hungarian fascist uniforms cross the border and march through a Slovak town," Fico said referring to a recent incident.

An "Anyone But Ségolène" movement gathered steam at France's Socialist party congress yesterday as rivals strove to prevent Ségolène Royal, the party's former presidential candidate, from taking control.

Royal, 55, who lost to Nicolas Sarkozy in last year's election, is standing for the post of party secretary-general, which is being vacated after 11 years by François Hollande, her former lover.

Yet even Hollande, who has four children with Royal, has sided with one of her rivals in the increasingly acrimonious leadership contest.

The debates are taking place this weekend in Reims, the Champagne capital, but there is nothing to celebrate. The socialists have been so busy arguing among themselves that they have lost all credibility against Sarkozy. He has added insult to injury by appointing some of their most charismatic figures to cabinet posts.

Political parties have been vying to offer the biggest tax cuts as the credit crunch tightens its grip on Britain. In their view, low taxes are now the best way to get the economy going and to help out families.

Cutting or keeping taxes low has always proved popular with the electorate: in 1992 the Conservatives' election campaign slogan 'Labour's tax bombshell' made the most of the then shadow Chancellor John Smith's intention to increase the higher rate of tax from 40 to 50 per cent. Labour lost.

But is this the best way to proceed in the long term, and would UK taxpayers get better value for money if they paid more, rather than less?

One way to examine the issue is to compare state help provided by the British government to one which traditionally charges much higher taxes: Sweden. Swedes support the second-highest tax burden in the world - after Denmark's - with an average of 48.2 per cent of GDP going to taxes. Yet Sweden, along with equally high-taxing Denmark and Norway, tops almost every international barometer of successful societies.

Swedes' personal income tax can be as little as 29 per cent of their pay, but most people (anyone earning over £32,000) will pay between 49 and 60 per cent through a combination of local government and state income tax.

Three Kremlin-friendly opposition parties, which failed to win seats in the Russian parliament in 2007 elections, have formed a new liberal party called Just Cause. They have have their eye on the next poll in 2011.

At the party's inaugural congress on Sunday, Nov. 16, the initiators said the move had been discussed with the Kremlin, according to Moscow radio broadcaster Echo Moskvy.

The party had been formed with the help of the Kremlin, but not by the Russian government, said Leonid Gosman, deputy chairman of the Union of Just Forces (SPS).

The SPS and its two allies, the Democratic Party and the Citizens' Force, disbanded to to form the new union.

BERLIN: The Green party, one of Germany's main political parties, has elected the son of Turkish immigrants to its top political post, the first time any party here has chosen a leader with an immigrant background.

The election Saturday of Cem Ozdemir, 42, born in southern Germany of parents who had come from Turkey to work as "Gastarbeiter," or guest workers, during the 1960s, marks a major turning point not only for the opposition Greens, but also for the country as a whole.

Even though more than 2.6 million Turks live in Germany, accounting for 3 percent of the population, few have managed to make it to the higher ranks of the professions, including politics and the civil service.

But with a conservative party that had chosen Angela Merkel to run as chancellor in 2005 - a successful gambit - and now an ethnic Turk at the helm of an influential party, it appears that German society is slowly breaking with the past, when women were inconspicuous in public and immigrants' voices were seldom heard.

Ozdemir, a social scientist who studied at the Lutheran College for Social Sciences in Reutlingen in the state of Baden-Württemberg, was elected as a Greens legislator to the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, in 1994, the first time anyone with a Turkish background had won such a mandate. He moved to the European Parliament in 2004 after he was forced to give up his parliamentary seat for using his publicly paid airline miles for private use.

Congratulations to Cem Oezdemir who has been elected co-chairman of the German Green Party. It's the party's top political post. His victory makes him the highest-ranking German politician of Turkish descent. Turkish immigrants and their descendants number more than 2.5 million and make up 3% of Germany's total population.

I woke up Sunday morning in my hotel in Istanbul to find this article on the front page of the Turkish Daily News, the most popular English language daily here.

The article explains how Oezdemir employed many of President-elect Obama's campaign tactics.

Following massive protests at the blocking of the wikipedia.de web site, the German MP Lutz Heilmann announced on Sunday he was withdrawing his injunction against Wikipedia. But the legal dispute isn't all over yet.

Heilmann took out a temporary restraining order against the Wikimedia Germany association on the grounds that an article about him contained false accusations. Now that the "false and vilifying content", constituting "an invasion of his personal privacy", has largely been removed from the relevant article, he says, he has told Wikimedia e.V. he will be taking no further legal steps and that links to Wikipedia content via de.wikipedia.org can be reestablished. He had found the legal route problematic, he explained, because the structure of Wikipedia meant that other users were being affected, and that had not been his intention. He would however be taking further action against certain individuals.

After the blocking of wikipedia.de, Wikipedia authors made some revisions to the article about Heilmann. They came to the conclusion that many sections objected to by Heilmann, a qualified lawyer, including speculation about his involvement in an online sex mail-order firm, and about internal party disputes about him, actually did not belong in the article. Heilmann did not protest against mention of his having worked for the former East German Ministry for State Security.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) _ Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is planning to hold his own summit to counter a meeting of the so-called Group of 20 industrialized and developing countries this weekend in Washington.

Chavez says he'll invite the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas trade bloc, known as ALBA, and members of the Petrocaribe oil initiative to discuss the world financial crisis.

The two groups include more than 18 Caribbean and Latin American nations.

At an emergency summit in Washington, leaders from the world's 20 top economies have agreed on an action plan to better regulate global financial markets and halt a global economic slide.

The measures agreed to at the meeting include a call for beefing up regulation of the world's financial system, bolstering government spending to spur economic growth and reforming international financial institutions.

 

"We are determined to enhance our cooperation and work together to restore global growth and achieve needed reforms in the world's financial systems," said the Group of 20 (G20) leaders, which included the world's advanced economies as well as the leading emerging economies. The G20 represents 85 percent of the global economy.

 

The group committed to using "fiscal measures to stimulate domestic demand to rapid effect," while delegating regulation to "national regulators" instead of organizing a coordinated stimulus package.

World leaders pledged yesterday to cut taxes and boost government spending to drag their economies out of recession, and to begin work on a new system for regulating the battered global financial system.

The heads of 20 countries, meeting in Washington, endorsed a series of broad goals to fend off future economic calamities and to revive economic growth. They are expected to reconvene in London in April, with the incoming US President, Barack Obama, to decide on longer-term measures. "We must lay the foundation for reform to help ensure that a global crisis, such as this one, does not happen again," the leaders said in a joint communiqué issued after the conclusion of the G20's emergency two-day economic summit.

Gordon Brown called the deal a "road map" to pull the world out of the credit crisis and predicted that participating countries will, in the coming weeks, unveil packages of tax cuts or spending programmes designed to stimulate their economies. If all 20 governments, accounting for 90 per cent of the world's GDP, acted in concert, he said, the effect on the world economy would be magnified. Among other things, leaders agreed to reform international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to help developing countries weather the economic storm. And they promised to restart a round of international trade talks moribund since July.

WASHINGTON: Facing the gravest economic crisis in decades, the leaders of 20 countries agreed Saturday to work together to revive their economies, but they put off thornier decisions about how to overhaul financial regulations until next year, providing a serious early challenge for the Obama administration.

Though the countries' stimulus packages were cast as ambitious steps, they mainly reflected measures that the countries were already undertaking to respond to the crisis. What remains to be seen is whether, working with a new White House, the leaders will cast aside their political and economic differences to embrace more radical changes, including far-reaching but fiercely debated proposals to overhaul regulation.

The group planned its next meeting for April 30, 101 days after President-elect Barack Obama is sworn into office.

Obama, who sent emissaries but did not attend at the meeting, will find common ground with the leaders in his support of a further stimulus program in the United States -- something President George W. Bush opposes. The group called for more fiscal measures to cushion the blow of a downturn that is hitting rich and poor countries.

Gordon Brown claimed that world leaders have agreed a "route map to global economic recovery" at the conclusion of the G20 summit in Washington yesterday.

The leaders of the world's 20 leading economies promised to instruct their ministers to seek a new Doha trade deal by the end of the year and to co-ordinate interest rate and tax cuts to soften the severity of the global recession.

They also agreed new international regulations of banks to be finalised at a second summit, possibly in the UK, in March next year.

European leaders said the emergency finance summit in Washington was a success, even though the resulting action plan was less drastic than some of their original suggestions.

The measures agreed to at the meeting include a call for beefing up regulation of the world's financial system, bolstering government spending to spur economic growth and reforming international financial institutions.

 

"We are determined to enhance our cooperation and work together to restore global growth and achieve needed reforms in the world's financial systems," said the Group of 20 (G20) leaders, which included the world's advanced economies as well as the leading emerging economies. The G20 represents 85 percent of the global economy.

The Croatian government has banned Christmas and New Year parties in the public sector because of the global financial crisis.

State-run firms and organisations have also been told that they won't be allowed to dip into their funds to buy Christmas presents.

The ban follows a proposal to freeze public-sector salaries next year.

Prime Minister Ivo Sanader said there was no need for panic, but the country had to be serious.

... and this Christmas

"For that goal we forbid buying of Christmas and New Year's gifts as well as organising of Christmas and New Year's receptions," said Mr Sanader.

"I believe that with the proposed measures ... we can avoid a deeper crisis within the next year," he added.

WASHINGTON: Leaders of the Group of 20 nations headed back to their home countries Sunday to continue work on reviving their economies, leaving no clear direction for the thornier questions of overhauling financial regulation that President-elect Barack Obama of the United States will have to address.

While the group put on a strong united front during its summit meeting here Saturday in the face of a global crisis, members delayed any top-level decisions, including far-reaching but hotly debated proposals on overhauling financial regulation, until the 101st day of the incoming Obama administration.

The group planned its next meeting for April 30, months after Obama was scheduled to be sworn into office.

The measures announced by the G-20 on Saturday, though cast as ambitious reforms, mainly reflected steps that the countries were already undertaking to grapple with the crisis. What remains to be seen is whether, working with Obama's new White House, the G-20 leaders will be able to put aside their political and economic differences to embrace more radical changes.

The following is a reformatted version of the full text of the statement released today by the leaders of the Group of 20 developed and emerging-market nations after meeting in Washington: ...

Commitment to an Open Global Economy

12. We recognize that these reforms will only be successful if grounded in a commitment to free market principles, including the rule of law, respect for private property, open trade and investment, competitive markets, and efficient, effectively regulated financial systems. These principles are essential to economic growth and prosperity and have lifted millions out of poverty, and have significantly raised the global standard of living. Recognizing the necessity to improve financial sector regulation, we must avoid over-regulation that would hamper economic growth and exacerbate the contraction of capital flows, including to developing countries.  ...

14. We are mindful of the impact of the current crisis on developing countries, particularly the most vulnerable. We reaffirm the importance of the Millennium Development Goals*, the development assistance commitments we have made, and urge both developed and emerging economies to undertake commitments consistent with their capacities and roles in the global economy. In this regard, we reaffirm the development principles agreed at the 2002 United Nations Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, which emphasized country ownership and mobilizing all sources of financing for development.

15. We remain committed to addressing other critical challenges such as energy security and climate change, food security, the rule of law, and the fight against terrorism, poverty and disease. ...

FRB, CFTC, SEC consolidate global CDS settlement | Bloomberg | 14 Nov 2008

CME Group, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. of Atlanta, NYSE Euronext and Eurex have each submitted proposals to run a clearinghouse, a central body that would back trades in the unregulated market. Authorities are now conducting "detailed" on-site reviews of risk management functions, the regulators said in a joint statement with the U.S. Treasury today. ...

Chicago-based CME, Intercontinental Exchange and NYSE Euronext are vying for control of a global market that could generate as much as $400 million in revenue a year, Keefe Bruyette & Woods analyst Niamh Alexander estimates. "Bringing transparency to this market is vitally important,'' SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said in a statement today. "The virtually unregulated over-the-counter market in credit-default swaps has played a significant role in the credit crisis."  ...

CME is regulated by the CFTC. Intercontinental Exchange has set up its clearing plan as a special purpose banking entity within the state of New York that would be regulated by the Fed. Intercontinental agreed last month to buy Chicago-based Clearing Corp., which is owned by nine major banks. Eurex is part owned by Deutsche Boerse AG.

The agreement between the Fed, the CFTC and the SEC, while not altering their oversight mandates, seeks to ensure consistent rules for clearinghouses that fall under the domain of one or the other. It also would give the SEC better access to market data to police market fraud and manipulation.

Menu for the Dinner in Honor of the Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy | White House | 14 Nov 2008

Fruitwood-smoked Quail with Quince Gastrique
Quinoa Risotto

Landmark Chardonnay "Damaris Reserve" 2006

Thyme-roasted Rack of Lamb
Tomato, Fennel and Eggplant Fondue
Chanterelle Jus

Shafer Cabernet "Hillside Select" 2003

Lolla Rosa, Red Oak and Endive
Cider Vinaigrette
Baked Vermont Brie with Walnut Crostini

Pear Torte
Huckleberry Sauce

Chandon Étoile Rosé

FT.com / Companies / Aerospace & Defence - European companies launch supply chain rescues

Some of Europe's largest companies are taking extraordinary measures to help out suppliers stricken by the credit crisis by offering cash to prop them up.

Groups from Daimler in cars, EADS in aerospace to Safran in defence are worried that their own financial health could be affected by a collapse of a supplier and are considering using their own liquidity to support smaller companies.

Paul Lester, chief executive of UK defence company VT Group, said he had told his top 100 suppliers that they should come to him for financial help. "If you get into financial difficulties don't delay, but come and talk to us. You are probably better talking to us than banks because banks aren't really doing their jobs right now and we can help," he said.

Daimler and BMW, the world's two largest luxury carmakers, have both hinted they could buy suppliers if they get into difficulties. Dieter Zetsche, Daimler's chief executive, said he was already helping some suppliers with cash and added "300,000 jobs were at risk in the industry" if banks continued to tighten credit.

The supply chain for many large manufacturers is coming under increasing stress as their small and mid-sized suppliers see credit becoming more expensive or even withdrawn. Several small suppliers have gone bankrupt in recent weeks, including one to VT Group and several in the retail sector.

... The North Dakota farmer, Bob Sinner, says he is suddenly getting more business than ever from overseas. But just as he was gearing up to sell more wheat and soybeans abroad, he discovered he couldn't find enough shipping containers -- the big, colorful steel boxes seen on ships and trains.

The mystery of those missing containers reveals the interdependence of producers, consumers and economies around the world. <...>

Americans aren't buying as much, which means they aren't importing as much. This is how Hagovsky [a woman who just bought a new house but refuses to buy stuff to furnish it, because she is worried about her economic situation] -- and probably most of us -- are linked to Sinner. We usually buy rugs, couches, teddy bears and shoes, and all those goods ride over from Asia or Europe in containers. And that's how Sinner gets his containers: They have to come from overseas so that he can fill them up with soybeans and wheat and then send them back.

So Akemi in Japan might want to buy Sinner's cheap soy products. But if Hagovsky doesn't take out that credit card and furnish her house, Sinner can't get his stuff to Japan or anywhere else.

"Well, we're all consumers, we all have our personal lives that we have to take care of," Sinner says. "I don't fault those consumers for those decisions -- that's just a function of our economy."

Leonard Doyle reports on the way that America's president-elect is set to follow Abraham Lincoln's example and recruit even his most bitter opponent

When Abraham Lincoln appointed his secretary of state, he picked his greatest opponent in the battle for the presidency, who just happened to be an able and popular senator from New York. Just like president-elect Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, in fact.

Mr Obama's greatest rival within his own Democratic Party for the White House travelled secretly to Chicago last week, and was all but offered a top job in his administration. She was first spied at the airport. Later, after Mr Obama's cavalcade left his anonymous steel and glass headquarters, a second convoy of Secret Service 4x4s was seen departing. As a former First Lady, Mrs Clinton never has to drive herself, but it was a giveaway for reporters camped outside the building.

The Obama camp, which almost never leaks, has made it clear that Mrs Clinton is in the running for the foreign policy slot or for some other top position in the next administration. Bringing her on board would be as clear an indication as any that Mr Obama intends to build an administration of political superstars for the challenges of the post-Bush era. One of Mr Obama's aides yesterday described him as "self-confident enough to want to send a message to the world about America and all that it can be - and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state would do that".

Hundreds of thousands of once prosperous Pakistani villagers are stranded in freezing tented refugee camps after being compelled to leave home by their own forces in a ferocious battle against the Taliban along the Afghan border.

Yesterday 300,000 Pakistani men, women and children, many of them driven from farms in the Bajaur region, were sheltering in eight makeshift camps on the outskirts of their nearest city, Peshawar.

In one of the camps, Sheikh Yassin, home to 13,000 newly displaced Pakistanis, five children died of hypothermia on one night last week. They had been weakened by diarrhoea rife among children in the camp, which has no sanitation.

Aid officials had hoped to transfer some refugees to Jalozai, an area near Peshawar that was once an Afghan refugee camp, but on Friday they had to abandon their plans because of security concerns.

KABUL, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Sunday he would guarantee security for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar if he ever wanted to negotiate and said Western allies should remove him or leave if they disagreed with that.

With the Taliban insurgency spreading seven years after the hardline Islamists were forced from power, the possibility of talks with more moderate Taliban leaders is increasingly being considered, both in Afghanistan and among its allies.

The Afghan government says it is willing to talk to anyone who recognises the constitution.

A tentative first step towards talks was taken in September when a group of pro-government Afghan officials and former Taliban officials met in Saudi Arabia for discussions on how to end the conflict.

But the Taliban have rejected any suggestion of talks as long as foreign troops remain. Karzai, who visited the United States and Britain last week, said that Taliban condition was unacceptable.

However, Karzai said he would guarantee the safety of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar if he ever wanted to talk peace.

BAGHDAD -- Iraq's cabinet on Sunday overwhelmingly approved a proposed security agreement that calls for a full withdrawal of American forces from the country by the end of 2011. The cabinet's decision brings a final date for the departure of American troops a significant step closer after more than five and a half years of war.

The proposed pact must still be approved by Iraq's Parliament, in a vote scheduled to take place in a week. But leaders of some of the largest parliamentary blocs expressed confidence that with the backing of most Shiites and Kurds they had enough support to ensure its approval.

Twenty-seven of the 28 cabinet ministers who were present at the two-and-a-half-hour session voted in favor of the pact. Nine ministers were absent. The nearly unanimous vote was a victory for the dominant Shiite party and its Kurdish partners. Widespread Sunni opposition could doom the proposed pact even if it has the votes to pass, as it would call into question whether there was a true national consensus, which Shiite leaders consider essential.

The proposed agreement, which took nearly a year to negotiate with the United States, not only sets a date for American troop withdrawal, but puts new restrictions on American combat operations in Iraq starting Jan. 1 and requires an American military pullback from urban areas by June 30. Those hard dates reflect a significant concession by the departing Bush administration, which had been publicly averse to timetables.

Iraq also obtained a significant degree of jurisdiction in some cases over serious crimes committed by Americans who are off duty and not on bases.

Almost 20 percent of all the energy produced in the world is used to power lights. Energy-saving bulbs could help -- though so far the ones on the market aren't quite up to par.

The potential is enormous. If all the traditional light bulbs in the world were replaced with energy-saving ones, lighting energy use could be cut by 40 percent. By 2030, 16 billion tons of CO2 would have been prevented from escaping into the atmosphere. That's according to a new study released by the renowned Worldwatch Institute.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Traditional bulbs only turn five percent of the electricity they use into light

The use of energy saving bulbs is on the rise worldwide. Since the beginning of the century, use has tripled to over four billion, and some countries are calling for more. Australia has even gone so far as to say that after October 2009 the sale of traditional light bulbs will be outlawed.

Manufacturers say energy-saving bulbs have an efficiency factor of 25 percent -- five times that of a traditional light bulb. Energy saving bulbs also last longer, and experts predict that those who use them save up to 100 euros ($125) per lamp over a 10-year period.

RAUMA, Finland: The café where Paivi Alanko-Rehelma serves coffee and smoked fish stands almost in the shadow of a sprawling building site on the island of Olkiluoto where Finland is erecting a nuclear power plant, the third on the island and the fifth in Finland in the past 30 years.

Like many of her neighbors who have grown accustomed to nuclear energy, Alanko-Rehelma makes no objections to the new reactor. "It's now safe, it saves nature, it's cheaper," she said.

No one is certain when the plant, which has been plagued by construction delays, will be finished. But whenever it does begin operating, the reactor will be a new cog in the works of Finland's national energy policy, which seeks to diversify the country's sources of energy and reduce its historical reliance on Russia for cheap electricity.

The plant is also part of a global trend, as the prospects of nuclear power rise amid concerns about the warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions to generate electricity.

The Finns are going first-class, building what is called a European Pressurized Reactor, the latest model, which is billed as the safest and most powerful nuclear reactor ever designed. It is the product of a consortium of French and German engineering companies.

In the face of climate change, food experts call for more home-grown fruit and less grain for cattle

It is an image worthy of a Keats poem or a Constable landscape: great orchards bursting with fruit, fields crammed with ripening vegetables and hillsides covered with sheep and cattle.

But this is no dream of long-gone rural glories. It is a vision of the kind of countryside that Britain may need if it is to survive the impact of climate change and higher oil prices, according to leading agricultural experts.

They have warned that only a total revolution in the nation's food industry can save Britain from serious shortages of staples as world oil production peaks, the climate continues to heat up, the population grows and our dietary needs continue to evolve.

In turn that means a complete shake-up in the way we farm the countryside. At present Britain imports more than 90 per cent of the fruit it consumes.

[Jason] Eskenazi found few restrictions in those early days. He traveled thousands of miles, through seven time zones and entered factories and prisons in Siberia. Though he didn't speak Russian initially, he quickly learned the words for, "Where is the wedding?" or "Where is the funeral?" so he could enter into ritual and community life.

In one photo, a milkmaid with mud-stained shoes in Kazakhstan looks out dreamily as she milks a cow. The next photo features a young woman of similar features and age, but well dressed and dancing with a young man at a waltz competition. It's almost as if the first picture is dreaming the second.

At another point in the book, a woman jumps up in a park. She almost seems in flight, like the dreams of space flight that many people associate with the Soviet Union. But the next picture is totally ironic: A woman is dusting off a stuffed dog in a museum. It is, in fact, one of the dogs that went into space.

A shift to the left by the French president is worrying supporters, who pin the blame on his wife

Bewildered supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right French president, are wondering what to do. Should they blame the global financial crisis or the influence of Carla Bruni, his glamorous wife, for what sounds like a lurch to the political left?

Rarely does a day pass without "Sarko" displaying signs of an ideological rethink. He has attacked "fat cats" and the "dictatorship of the market". He declared that "laissez-faire capitalism is over" and has called for a cap on executive pay and an end to "golden parachutes".

The transformation is striking given that Sarkozy, famed for his "zero tolerance" policing as interior minister, was once derided on the left as a dangerous right-winger.

These days he is caricatured on one internet website as a French Che Guevara. Martin Schulz, German leader of the socialists in the European parliament, congratulated him (mockingly) for "speaking like a real European socialist".

Andrew Lloyd Webber has won backing from an unlikely source in his attempt to turn around the UK's fortunes in the Eurovision song contest.

On a fact-finding mission to eastern Europe, the region which has dominated the contest in recent years, the composer met Vladimir Putin - and the Russian Prime Minister promised to pick up the phone to vote for the UK entry in next year's contest.

Lord Lloyd Webber said: "At least we have got one vote, from Mr Putin."

Despite his power at the Kremlin, Putin's vote will be counted just like that of any other Russian television viewer.

In recent years Eurovision has been dogged by accusations of "bloc-voting", which this year led presenter Terry Wogan to threaten walking out on the competition he first hosted 35 years ago.

This year's winning Russian entry, Believe by Dima Bilan, received the maximum 12 points from former Soviet states Armenia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine. The country's success means that next year's contest will be staged in Moscow. The UK entry, Andy Abraham's song Even If, only received votes from Ireland and San Marino, placing him joint last with Poland and Germany.

For non-French readers, Noir Désir is a well-known rock band in France, with strong lefty political views, often expressed int their songs (including the last one we hear over the wee-end) - but their lead singer, Bertand Cantat, has only recently coming out of jail for killing his girlfriend, actress Marie Trintignant, in a fight (which happened in Lithuania) a couple of years ago.

My wife is outraged that this guy would find it normal to come back on stage, and to pontificate about the current crisis in a new song, rather than making himself forgotten after beating up his wife.

what do you think?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes