STOCKHOLM: The Icelandic central bank struck a deal with the central banks of Sweden, Norway and Denmark on Friday that allows it to buy euros with Icelandic kronur, giving strong support to the island's beleaguered currency.

Each swap arrangement is for as much as €500 million, or $774 million, but analysts said it was not the amount that mattered but the deal itself, which underlined how the Icelandic central bank, the Sedlabanki, was actively working on ways to support the currency.

The Sedlabanki termed the move a "precautionary measure" while the head of the Swedish Riksbank said central banks had a responsibility to cooperate in times of uncertainty.

"This of course is bound to be positive news," said Jon Bentsson, economist at Glitnir in Reykjavik.

Police in France, Germany and the Netherlands detained 10 people on suspicion of having financial ties to an Uzbek group linked to al Qaeda.

Eight of the suspects were arrested in the eastern French city of Mulhouse and in the central Rhone region on Friday, May 16, according to a source close to the French investigation.

 

All of the suspects arrested in France were of Turkish origin, the unnamed source told AFP news agency.

 

The arrests in France were coordinated with police in Germany and the Netherlands. Two other suspects were arrested during those raids and police were reportedly searching the suspects' homes Friday.

 

All those arrested were suspected of supporting a funding network that helped finance the group in Uzbekistan, an unnamed French source told Reuters news agency.

 

Global search engine colossus Google has been warned by the EU data protection chief that the "Street View" feature on its Google Maps service could run up against European privacy laws if it launches in EU countries.

Street View allows users of Google's online map service to have a full-colour, 360-degree look around city streets. Users can digitally walk up and down the virtual street, which is built from composites of photographs taken by roaming Google cars with roof-mounted cameras.

Peter Hustinx, the EU data protection supervisor, told reporters while presenting his annual data protection report on Thursday (15 May) that if Google launched such a feature in Europe, the company would first have to comply with European privacy legislation, which in many member states is stricter than in the United States.

"I would encourage Google to think about how to do this," Mr Hustinx said, AP reports. "Making pictures on the street is in many cases not a problem, but making pictures everywhere is certainly going to create some problems. I'm quite sure they are aware of this."

The European Union is preparing to introduce tough new rules on car advertising, forcing manufacturers to include conspicuous and easily understood information about petrol consumption and emissions.

The new line follows the EU's decision to exert ever-greater control on the way that tobacco, alcohol and food products can be advertised, counterbalancing the claims and sales lines of advertisers with warnings about the health implications of their products.

Details of the proposal to compel car manufacturers to own up to the carbon footprint of their vehicles will be unveiled by the end of the month, after which the politicians and car industry representatives will discuss them for the first time. As well as spelling out the environmental implications of the cars, the draft regulations are said by Der Spiegel magazine to require manufacturers to put a brake on the prose and the images used to imprint the desirability of their latest models. Any reference to sportiness will apparently be frowned on.

The target of the new rules is obviously the gas-guzzler, and as the country that produces the great majority of Europe's luxury cars - including those driven by the chauffeurs of most European Commissioners - the German industry is already up in arms about the restrictions.

BERLIN: Wrapping up a five-day visit to Russia, the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told President Dmitri Medvedev on Friday that German industry was prepared to help modernize the Russian economy and reduce its dependence on energy and commodities as the main engines for the country's recent growth.

But there was a noticeable absence in Steinmeier's packed itinerary, which started in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg on Monday night and ended Friday in St. Petersburg, home of Vladimir Putin, the former president who was sworn in as prime minister last week. At the last moment, Putin canceled his meeting with Steinmeier, citing protocol reasons and the need to focus on domestic issues, according to German officials who were quick to play down the significance of the schedule change.

Analysts, however, suggested that Putin wanted to give at least some of the limelight to Medvedev. His role as a president capable of setting policy independent of Putin's influence has been constantly questioned since he was promoted by Putin for the presidency and therefore owes his position to his patron.

Steinmeier's talks with Medvedev in Moscow were the first with a foreign diplomat that the Russian president has conducted at home since taking office.

The fact that Steinmeier was the first in the Kremlin to meet Medvedev - and is not even a government leader - confirms the importance Russia places on its relationship with Germany, particularly with the Social Democrats, Steinmeier's party.

Portugal's parliament has voted to introduce contentious changes to the Portuguese language in order to spell hundreds of words the Brazilian way.

The agreement standardises numerous spellings and adds three letters - k, w and y - to the alphabet.

A large majority of lawmakers backed government proposals to phase in the changes during the next six years.

But a petition against the move was signed by 33,000 people who argue it is a capitulation to Brazilian influence.

Proponents counter the move will make the language more uniform globally, making such things as internet searches and legal documents easier to understand.

Once they governed an empire, their crusaders and missionaries spreading the faith to newly discovered corners of the world. Today the Catholics of Spain are an angry and fearful group, convinced that the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero wants to oust them from public life.

The Socialists are "engaged in a brutal assault on the Catholic Church on many fronts", says Elena Fernández-Trapiella, a Madrid-based public relations executive with three sons in primary school. "They are attacking the very Christian foundations of Spain."

Like many Catholic parents she is particularly concerned about the Government's new citizenship classes, introduced this academic year amid great controversy. "I am worried because of my children," she says. "They are trying to demolish fundamental pillars of our society that I grew up with, believe in and feel comfortable with. They are leaving us in a moral void."

Britain's £800m international project to help the poorest countries in the world adapt to climate change was under fire last night after it emerged that almost all the money offered by Gordon Brown will have to be repaid with interest.

The UK environmental transformation fund was announced by the prime minister to international acclaim in November 2007, and was widely expected to be made in direct grants to countries experiencing extreme droughts, storms and sea level rise associated with climate change.

But the Guardian has learned that the money is not additional British aid and will be administered by the World Bank mainly in the form of concessionary loans which poor countries will have to pay back to Britain with interest.

A letter signed by two government ministers and seen by the Guardian shows that Britain has been pressing other G8 countries to also give money to the new fund, which will be launched in July in Japan at the G8's annual meeting.

Sixty-eight per cent of Italians, fuelled by often inflammatory attacks by the new rightwing government, want to see all of the country's 150,000 Gypsies, many of them Italian citizens, expelled, according to an opinion poll.

The survey, published as mobs in Naples burned down Gypsy camps this week, revealed that the majority also wanted all Gypsy camps in Italy to be demolished .

About 70,000 Gypsies in Italy hold Italian passports, including about 30,000 descended from 15th-century Gypsy settlers in the country. The remainder have arrived since, many fleeing the Balkans during the 1990s.

Another 10,000 Gypsies came from Romania after it joined the European Union in January 2007, according to an Italian human rights organisation, EveryOne, part of the approximately half million Romanians believed to be in Italy.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: The Dutch government, famous for liberalism on issues of personal morality, announced plans Friday to criminalize the visiting of prostitutes who are not officially licensed.

The Justice Ministry said the move is necessary to force better compliance with the country's legalized prostitution policy.

At the same time, authorities will compel prostitutes to be registered in a national database "before they may offer sexual services."

"There are still too many problems in the prostitution sector, including human trafficking," the Justice Ministry said in a statement.

Prostitution has been legal in the Netherlands since 2000, when a long-standing tolerance policy was formalized.

Chatting to union leaders after the Yvette Cooper meeting, they were both angry and perplexed. Unions cannot understand why the Treasury clings to the belief that public sector pay rises fuel inflation. There is no evidence to support such a link and very few reputable economists would argue for it. With pay deals in the private sector currently running at 4% or more, it makes no sense to claim that a rise in public sector pay would fuel inflation.

This is yet another collision of the "reform" propaganda with reality.

Leaders of the EU, Caribbean and Latin America meet for two days in Lima, Peru, for talks on topics such as trade and climate change. Meanwhile personal, political and ideological splits are on the unofficial agenda.

It may well be that no big decisions will be made at the summit. However, the idea of a gathering under the slogan "addressing our peoples' priorities together" is to press forward on issues of common interest, like battles against poverty and climate change.

And with 60 world leaders -- nearly one-third of the number of countries in the UN -- gathered at one place, EU officials have high hopes for at least one issue: climate change.

The European commissioners for trade and external relations, Peter Mandelson and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, say they are set to present a plan in the Peruvian capital for the fight against global warming in Latin America which they hope will get the enthusiastic support of countries like Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.

RIYADH: With the price of oil hitting record highs, President George W. Bush used a private visit to King Abdullah's ranch here Friday to make a second attempt to persuade the Saudi government to increase oil production. And while Saudis initially appeared to rebuff the request, the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, announced later that the kingdom had increased output by 300,000 barrels a day, starting May 10.

The Saudis have previously rejected American requests to increase production, and Naimi insisted that the increase was in response to demands from some 50 "customers" worldwide. He did not give further details. "Our response is positive," he said at a news conference. "If you want more oil you need to buy it."

The increase means that Saudi Arabia aims to produce 9.5 million barrels a day.

Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, said at the briefing, "The president showed great concern for the impact on the American economy," adding, "We of course sympathize with that."

DAGAARI, Somalia: The global food crisis has arrived at Safia Ali's hut.

She can't afford rice or wheat or powdered milk anymore.

At the same time, a drought has decimated her family's herd of goats, turning their sole livelihood into a pile of bleached bones and papery skin.

The result is Safia, a 25-year-old mother of five, has not eaten in a week. Her one-year-old son is starving too, an adorable, listless boy who doesn't even respond to a pinch.

Somalia -- and much of the volatile Horn of Africa, for that matter -- was about the last place on earth that needed a food crisis. Even before commodity prices started shooting up around the globe, civil war, displacement and imperiled aid operations had pushed many people here to the brink of famine.

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was "a totally Virginia girl," as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington's home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit -- meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon -- eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

Mr. Salerno's case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States -- problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors.

While Israelis celebrate the 60th anniversary of their state's founding, Palestinians around the world are mourning the "Nakba" -- or "catastrophe" -- that drove so many into exile. Scholar Lila Abu-Lughod has taken a close look at the way Palestinians see the past and present.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: This week Palestinians all over the world mark the sixtieth anniversary of what they have come to call the "Nakba," or catastrophe -- the expulsion from their homes in 1948 in the wake of the founding of the State of Israel. You have studied the phenomenon as an anthropologist, but you yourself are the daughter of a Palestinian. What does this day mean to you?

Lila Abu-Lughod: Only my father was Palestinian, but for both my parents the political injustice of the situation was clear. Every child of a Palestinian refugee feels the burden of the events of 1948, not just through what a parent or grandparent might tell her or through sensing their hollow feeling of exile, but because the results are with us today in the continuing violence. Those who live in the US are faced daily with a kind of symbolic violence -- misconceptions and untruths conveyed by the media about Israel. I don't see the anniversary as a time of mourning but as an occasion for trying to get the world to listen to what really happened and to think about how this should shape our vision of a solution.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Nakba is a national trauma for the Palestinians, hundreds of thousands had to leave their homes and villages behind. But of course the number of those who actually lived through it decreases every year. Has this changed the meaning of commemorating the Nakba?

Abu-Lughod: This is a wonderful question. Dr. Rosemary Sayigh, who has been interviewing Palestinians about their experiences for decades, describes her work as a race against time. But Diana Allan, an anthropologist from Harvard who has been videotaping old men and women in the refugee camps all over Lebanon to create a Nakba Archive, would be the first to insist that though it is important to get these stories, it should not distract us from the contemporary problems Palestinians face, in Lebanon and elsewhere. I have been following with interest, though, the way this particular Nakba commemoration has galvanized people and spurred storytelling: a good example is the series of "untold stories" on the Web site of the Institute for Middle East Understanding.

GENEVA: Believe the advocates of a treaty banning cluster munitions and the international community is about to take a decisive step toward curbing the use of a weapon that inflicts terrible suffering, particularly on civilians. Believe the U.S. government, and the measure they propose threatens to undermine the NATO alliance that has underpinned Western security since World War II.

Delegates from more than a hundred countries will open a conference in Dublin on Monday that will try to hammer out a treaty banning the production, use, stockpiling or transfer of cluster munitions - bombs or artillery shells packed with up to several hundred bomblets or submunitions that are sprayed over wide areas of territory.

Major producers and stockpilers of cluster munitions, the United States, Russia and China, will be absent and are opposed to a treaty, but disarmament experts liken the cluster treaty to the Ottawa Treaty of 1997 banning land mines, which was shunned by the major powers but has proved influential in shaping the policies of countries outside the convention.

Myanmar state television said the official death count from the May 3 cyclone was 77,738, with 55,917 others missing. <...>

"More than two weeks after the event, we are at a critical point," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "Unless more aid gets into the country -- quickly -- we face the risk of an outbreak of infectious diseases that could dramatically worsen today's crisis."

Jean-Maurice Ripert, France's ambassador to the U.N., criticized the junta for refusing to allow a French navy ship to deliver 1,500 tons of food, drugs and medication to the Irrawaddy delta using small boats.

He said refusing to allow aid to be delivered to those in need "could lead to a true crime against humanity if we go on like that."

Many survivors were found on Saturday, five days after the disaster, including a German tourist who was pulled from rubble in Wenchuan after being buried for 114 hours, Xinhua news agency said. <...>

In earthquakes elsewhere in the world, survivors have been found a week or more after the disaster. In Baguio in the Philippines in 1990, a cook was found alive after two weeks in the rubble of a shattered hotel. <...>

Zhang Xue's parents and aunt have been looking for the 15-year-old girl ever since the quake brought down the Ju Yuan High School in Dujiangyan.

In a hospital, distraught, they looked at the body of a girl, lowered their eyes and shook their heads.

"The girl has the same name and age, but she's not our child," her mother said. <...>

Offers of help have flooded in and foreign rescue teams from Japan, Russia, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore have arrived.

Juneau, the capital of Alaska and a popular cruise-ship stop, has had little to celebrate since an avalanche wiped out the lines supplying it with hydroelectricity. But four weeks later it has become a model for energy conservation, with its citizens doing everything from unplugging tumble-driers to regulating airport runway lights.

It is a crisis no American metropolis would wish for itself. On 16 April, a roaring snow-slide in the Coastal Range made matchsticks of pylons linking the city to the hydroelectric dam about 40 miles to the south that supplied 80 per cent of its power.

The good news was that the local provider had back-up diesel generators waiting to be cranked up in just such a situation. Less good is the expense. Residents, who already have to contend with a cost of living higher than almost anywhere in the US because of Juneau's remoteness, were told to expect their power bills to quintuple during the three or four months that it would take to repair the lines.

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) -- Governments have changed. War erupted and ended. Neighbors had children, and then grandchildren. But Hedviga Golik never left her tiny apartment in Croatia's capital -- until her mummified body was carried out this week, 35 years after she died.

Police said Friday that no one ever reported Golik missing and no one has come to claim her body.

Residents of her loft building in downtown Zagreb had broken into Golik's flat after deciding that the apartment should belong to them, and not to her. Startled by the remains in bed, they called police.

Forensics experts said Golik likely died in 1973, about the time a neighbor last saw her. Expert Davor Strinovic said she seemed to have died of natural causes, but "it's almost impossible to say for certain" after so much time.

Some of Golik's neighbors claimed she had talked about going abroad.

The Wall Street Journal:
Cash before chemo: Hospitals get tough

By BARBARA MARTINEZ, The Wall Street Journal

LAKE JACKSON, Texas -- When Lisa Kelly learned she had leukemia in late 2006, her doctor advised her to seek urgent care at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. But the nonprofit hospital refused to accept Mrs. Kelly's limited insurance. It asked for $105,000 in cash before it would admit her.

Sitting in the hospital's business office, Mrs. Kelly says she told M.D. Anderson's representatives that she had some money to pay for treatment, but couldn't get all the cash they asked for that day. "Are they going to send me home?" she recalls thinking. "Am I going to die?"

Hospitals are adopting a policy to improve their finances: making medical care contingent on upfront payments. Typically, hospitals have billed people after they receive care. But now, pointing to their burgeoning bad-debt and charity-care costs, hospitals are asking patients for money before they get treated.

..................................................................

M.D. Anderson says it provides assistance or free care to poor patients who can't afford treatment. It says it acted appropriately in Mrs. Kelly's case because she wasn't indigent, but underinsured. The hospital says it wouldn't accept her insurance because the payout, a maximum of $37,000 a year, would be less than 30 percent of the estimated costs of her care.

...................................................................

M.D. Anderson, which is part of the University of Texas, is a nonprofit institution exempt from taxes. (Please see article below.) In 2007, it recorded net income of $310 million, bringing its cash, investments and endowment to nearly $1.9 billion

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt will be welcoming their twins into the world on August 19 this year, and the couple is considering having their babies in France, the native place of the actress' late mother.

The news about when Angelina would be giving birth was revealed by actor Dustin Hoffman, reports The Sun . However, it was Angelina herself who revealed that she was 'certainly thinking' about giving birth in France. Speaking at a news conference in Cannes, she revealed that the couple's kids were already learning to speak French.

The starting line-up for this year's Eurovision Song Contest in Belgrade is the biggest on record, with 43 competing countries.

The event, now in its 53rd year, regularly throws up some surprises, a little controversy - and plenty of colour.

A puppet with an axe to grind, a song in a made-up language and a former winner bidding to make Eurovision history are among 2008's notable offerings.