A proposal to reinstate the use of the ballot box to decide on naturalisation applications has been rejected by voters.

Results show that the plan, by the rightwing Swiss People's Party, has not mustered the necessary majority of the cantons.

Two other issues - the latest reform of health system and plans to limit the information policy of the federal authorities - are also heading for rejection in Sunday's vote, according to the gfs.berne polling and research institute.

Five years ago the Federal Court outlawed the ballot box as a way of dealing with citizenship requests. It followed a series of allegedly discriminatory decisions, particularly against people of Balkan origin.

The court argued rejected candidates must have the right of appeal.

One person died and several were injured in separate shooting incidents that forced election officials to halt voting in at least 17 polling stations during Macedonia's snap parliamentary elections on Sunday.

Polling stations in the village of Aracinovo near Skopje were closed after a gunman killed one person there in an attack on a Macedonian security patrol.

 

"One person has been killed and a few others have been wounded" a police officer told AFP news agency.

 

The area around the village was known as a stronghold of Albanian rebels who fought government forces in Macedonia's 2001.

 

In a separate incident, the headquarters of the county's main ethnic Albanian party were shot at in the capital city of Skopje, leaving at least three people injured.

Tension is once again rising between Georgia and the breakaway region of Abkhazia, which is supported by Russia but not internationally recognized. Abkhazia's Prime Minister Alexander Ankvab talks to SPIEGEL ONLINE about why his people don't want war.

Abkhazian Prime Minister Alexander Ankvab: "We don't want a war." Among the various hotspots just beyond Europe's borders, of particular concern to European observers is the breakway province of Abkhazia, located on the Black Sea within Georgia's internationally recognized borders. The territory, which borders Russia, has been a de facto independent state since a bloody armed conflict with Georgia in 1992-1993 in which hundreds of thousands of ethnic Georgians were expelled from Abkhazia.

In recent months, Abkhazia has once again been a source of tension between Georgia and Russia. Georgia has offered Abkhazia autonomy but refuses to recognize it as an independent state. Tbilisi retains control of the strategic Kodori Gorge within Abkhazia, having deployed forces there in 2006 to disarm a local rebel group.

Russia, on the other hand, has given essential support to Abkhazia, which otherwise has few links to the outside world. Russian peacekeepers are stationed there, the Russian ruble is the official currency and most Abkhazians have been issued Russian passports.

FRANKFURT: The president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, still marvels at the feat.

Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome and Berlin - each, at some point, the political and economic capital of an empire, containing the power of New York and Washington combined - each surrendered a piece of sovereignty to a common currency, a foreign coin of the realm.

"When you have to cope with the history enshrined in those capitals," Trichet said in an interview in the Eurotower, the European Central Bank's headquarters, in Frankfurt, "you are necessarily working on an original."

That original, the euro, is the currency of 15 countries and 320 million people today. Trichet and top European leaders, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, will gather Monday in Frankfurt's elegant Old Opera to celebrate the accomplishment.

The euro is as gilt-edged an investment as can be found in the current tumultuous global economy. And it is, in the view of Trichet and many others, its stability that is the ECB's greatest single accomplishment.

After years of being accused of riding the Brussels gravy train, members of the European parliament are about to step aboard a real one.

A Eurocrats-only express service will be launched next month to ferry MEPs and officials in luxury at 186mph between one European parliament in Brussels and the other in Strasbourg. The buffet car will, of course, be fully stocked.

The Strasbourg Express will leave Brussels for the first time at 9.57am on Monday, July 7. Each return journey will cost the taxpayer about £158,000, but the fare-paying public will be banned. MEPs will pay £170 for a return ticket, but will then be reimbursed.

"The public will not be able to buy tickets or use this train," said Thalys, the high-speed train operator that will run the service.

Replacing Gordon Brown as Labour leader without a general election would be "unconstitutional", Justice Secretary Jack Straw has admitted.

In a clear message to restless Labour backbenchers, Mr Straw also said that Mr Brown was "the best leader we could possibly have" in the current economic circumstances.

And he dismissed speculation that the Prime Minister might be replaced as "nonsense".

Mr Straw, who is also Lord Chancellor, was asked on BBC One's Andrew Marr show whether it would be unconstitutional to replace Mr Brown without going to the polls. He replied: "Technically it would be unconstitutional, but it's not going to happen".

The news that ousting the Prime Minister would mean a general election is likely to ward off Labour backbenchers, given the party's terrible poll ratings. One poll on Friday put Labour at its lowest level since polling began in 1943 with just 23% - 24 points behind the Conservatives.

Since Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's recent return to power and Jose¤ Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's re-election as Spanish premier, rivalry between the Mediterranean neighbours has been growing.

After decades of being looked down on as siesta-loving poor relations by their Italian cousins, the progressive Spanish now seem to have the upper hand.

Controversial issues such as gay rights and immigration have prompted a series of bitter spats between Berlusconi's new conservative government and Zapatero's latest liberal administration.

The political leaders of the two Latin countries could not be more different.

"Smoke screen"

Since then government shutters have closed and doubts about the official version of events have grown.

Andreas Zumach, a strategy expert from Geneva, said the government's citing of the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was an "absolute smoke screen".

Zumach doesn't believe the IAEA gave any orders to destroy the documents. Instead he thinks there was pressure from the United States.

There has been widespread media speculation that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which allegedly employed the Tinners, had requested the shredding of the documents.

A Swiss radio report, quoting "well-informed sources", said the shredding took place under the supervision of a US official

• Czech Republic: some people advertising an Islamophobic website glued placards all around Prague, but focusing on the quarter where many Muslims live, with Mohamed cartoons...

• Hungary 1.: three Gypsies submitted membership applications for the Hungarian Guard. The Guard (which used to march against "Gypsy Crime") says they aren't racist, Gypsies are of course welcome; but they will study the applications and conduct long interviews with the applicants. (They didn't see that as necessary with some other members, including a formerly sentenced serial robber and a couple of formerly sentenced violent thugs.)

• Hungary 2.: a far-right teacher was fired from a Catholic private school last year after photos of him donning an SS uniform surfaced (and even that was a bit late: he already voiced rather racist views in LTEs). Now the councillors of a village, ignoring protests by locals (including a colleague of mine), voted to make him director of the local school...

Italy was wrestling yesterday with the problem of what to do about a one-man diplomatic nightmare known as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who is making his first trip to western Europe this week.

The Holocaust-denier, who has repeatedly called for Israel to be destroyed, is flying in to Rome, with 40 other heads of state, for a UN summit on the soaring cost of food. Organisers at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) insist they had no choice but to invite him with the heads of state of all the UN's other 190 members.

Israel is incensed. "To imagine on the podium of a UN organisation a leader who calls for the destruction of a member state is a disgrace for every democrat," its ambassador to Rome, Gideon Meir, told the daily La Repubblica. Mr Ahmadinejad's presence has also been fiercely criticised in the Italian media, and a coalition of secular groups under the slogan "We are hungry for freedom" will protest against his visit outside Rome's city hall today.

For the Italian government, the task of dodging the undesirable photo-op was relatively simple. The Foreign Ministry said a meeting between the Iranian leader and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would only happen if Mr Ahmadinejad was prepared to climb down on Israel and the Holocaust, or make a substantive offer on Iran's nuclear programme. None of those was forthcoming, so a polite refusal was not difficult.

"It would be like committing suicide. As soon as I step out of the Green Zone I would be walking around Baghdad with the word 'target' across my forehead." This is the fate awaiting Zyad al-Saadon, an Iraqi who has lived in Britain for 35 years. He faces deportation under the government programme for forced removal of failed asylum-seekers and foreign convicts.

He has been offered £500 from the British embassy in Baghdad if he goes voluntarily but nothing if his removal is enforced.

"They must be bloody mad if they think after all this time in Britain, a country I consider home, I'm going to voluntarily walk out of here [Dover immigration removal centre] and on to a plane to Baghdad. I'd be dead in days."

Mr Saadon, 54, is one of dozens of Iraqis facing removal to Iraq, despite making claims to residency or asylum in the United Kingdom. The Government argues that under the strict terms of immigration law there is no "internal armed conflict" in Iraq and encourages those in detention to voluntary return to Baghdad and Basra.

A German intelligence agent has been brokering a prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hezbollah on behalf of the United Nations. Now an official proposal is on the table, and Jerusalem is due to decide shortly whether to accept it.

 Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, pictured here on placards at a rally in Beirut last weak, could gain gain from a prisoner exchange. Secret diplomacy in the Middle East is always a sensitive issue. Successive German foreign ministers have realized that, and so has German negotiator Gerhard C., who has been mediating between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah for almost two years. For most of that time, the agent of Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), had little to show for his troubles apart a fractured hand sustained in a fall during a secret visit to Israel.

But since last week the German agent, who has been shuttling back and forth between the two sides on behalf of the United Nations, has been able to report signs of progress to his masters in Berlin and New York, and his news gives rise to hope for an easing of tensions in this troubled region. The deal the agent is currently arranging could enter the history books as a masterly diplomatic coup, if it works. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been informed, as has Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who travels to Jerusalem this week.

Last week the head of the CIA claimed it was winning the battle. Nonsense, argues Robert Fisk. The extremists in the Middle East are growing stronger
So al-Qa'ida is "almost defeated", is it? Major gains against al-Qa'ida. Essentially defeated. "On balance, we are doing pretty well," the CIA's boss, Michael Hayden, tells The Washington Post. "Near strategic defeat of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qa'ida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qa'ida globally - and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' - as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam." Well, you could have fooled me.
Six thousand dead in Afghanistan, tens of thousands dead in Iraq, a suicide bombing a day in Mesopotamia, the highest level of suicides ever in the US military - the Arab press wisely ran this story head to head with Hayden's boasts - and permanent US bases in Iraq after 31 December. And we've won?
Less than two years ago, we had an equally insane assessment of the war when General Peter Pace, the weird (and now mercifully retired) chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning but we are not losing". At which point, George Bush's Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, said he agreed with Pace that "we are not winning but we are not losing".

A full-fledged cottage industry is already focused on those who eagerly await the end of the George W Bush administration, offering calendars, magnets and t-shirts for sale as well as counters and graphics to download onto blogs and websites. But when the countdown ends and Bush vacates the Oval Office, he will leave a legacy to contend with. Certainly, he wills to his successor a world marred by war and battered by deprivation, but perhaps his most enduring legacy is now deeply embedded in Washington-area politics - a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition.

The Pentagon's massive bulk-up these past seven years will not be easily unbuilt, no matter who dons the presidential mantle on January 19, 2009. "The Pentagon" is now so much more than a five-sided building across the Potomac from Washington or even the seat of the Department of Defense. In many ways, it defies description or labeling.

Who, today, even remembers the debate at the end of the Cold War about what role US military power should play in a "unipolar" world? Was US supremacy so well established, pundits were then asking, that Washington could rely on softer economic and cultural power, with military power no more than a backup (and a domestic "peace dividend" thrown into the bargain)? Or was the US to strap on the six-guns of a global sheriff and police the world as the fountainhead of "humanitarian interventions"? Or was it the moment to boldly declare ourselves the world's sole superpower and wield a high-tech military comparable to none, actively discouraging any other power or power bloc from even considering future rivalry?

Population, pollution, and climate put the squeeze on potable supplies - and private companies smell a profit. Others ask: Should water be a human right?
Public fountains are dry in Barcelona, Spain, a city so parched there's a €9,000 ($13,000) fine if you're caught watering your flowers. A tanker ship docked there this month carrying 5 million gallons of precious fresh water - and officials are scrambling to line up more such shipments to slake public thirst.
Barcelona is not alone. Cyprus will ferry water from Greece this summer. Australian cities are buying water from that nation's farmers and building desalination plants. Thirsty China plans to divert Himalayan water. And 18 million southern Californians are bracing for their first water-rationing in years.
Water, Dow Chemical Chairman Andrew Liveris told the World Economic Forum in February, "is the oil of this century." Developed nations have taken cheap, abundant fresh water largely for granted. Now global population growth, pollution, and climate change are shaping a new view of water as "blue gold."
Water's hot-commodity status has snared the attention of big equipment suppliers like General Electric as well as big private water companies that buy or manage municipal supplies - notably France-based Suez and Aqua America, the largest US-based private water company.
Global water markets, including drinking water distribution, management, waste treatment, and agriculture are a nearly $500 billion market and growing fast, says a 2007 global investment report.

JOHN HOWARD recalls it as the hardest decision he made as prime minister. The dispatch of Australian troops to the looming Iraq conflict was very much a "personal decision", influenced by his presence in Washington on September 11, 2001, and his deep commitment to the US alliance.

A lot has changed since then. Iraq has extracted a heavy toll - in lives lost and in the billions of dollars spent on the war and rebuilding the shattered nation. There has been a high political price. Yet the former prime minister is adamant he made the right choice. Speaking in detail on Iraq for the first time since he lost office, Mr Howard told the Herald he had no regrets about Australia's involvement in the invasion and said that, despite President George Bush's problems, it was too soon to say what impact the warhad had on America's international standing.

Describing Kevin Rudd's decision to withdraw Australia's combat troops as "baffling", Mr Howard said the deployment had "further deepened" the alliance with the US.

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

German Foreign Minister Steinmeier said Sunday after meeting newly elected President Michel Suleiman that he saw "signs of hope" in Lebanon after an Arab League-brokered deal ended Beirut's prolonged political crisis.

Speaking to reporters in Beirut on Sunday, June 1 after holding talks with Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged feuding factions to avoid using arms to settle political differences.

 

"We consider the Doha agreement as a first step but a very important step to settle conflicts among the various factions in Lebanon," Steinmeier said.

British householders can produce their own energy, but official policy has led to Britain lagging behind the rest of Europe.
Ministers could avoid building nuclear reactors by encouraging families to fit solar panels and other renewable energy equipment to their homes, a startling official report concludes.
The government-backed report, to be published tomorrow, says that, with changed policies, the number of British homes producing their own clean energy could multiply to one million - about one in every three - within 12 years.
These would produce enough power to replace five large nuclear power stations, tellingly at about the same time as the first of the much-touted new generation of reactors is likely to come on stream.
And, it adds, by 2030, such "microgeneration" would save the same amount of emissions of carbon dioxide - the main cause of global warming - as taking all Britain's lorries and buses off the road.

House sales have plunged, automobiles have tanked, and credit is throttled, but Spain is experiencing an unprecedented boom in books. Once the nation that read fewer books than any other in Europe, Spaniards have become voracious readers, devouring more books than ever before.

Spain's book trade has not only escaped the downturn afflicting the rest of the economy, but is spectacularly bucking the trend. Publishing houses say business last year broke all records, and they predict even better results for 2008. The sector was said to be euphoric ahead of Madrid's annual book fair which opened yesterday. Open-air book fairs have become media spectacles, but also massively popular events where fans queue to meet their favourite author, and clasp books as a comfort in uncertain times.

Book reading was a minority pursuit for a long time in a country where education was confined to a tiny elite. Print runs were minuscule, bookshops the fusty haunts of the well-to-do, and literary reviews were back-scratching operations among chums.