Europe and America are trying to obtain an agreement between Bosnian leaders on the reform of the constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, the Croatian daily Novi List reports that the EU appears to be unable to exert much pressure in the negotiations, which may prove crucial to the future of the country.

Should the summit at NATO's Butmir military base [see box below] be interpreted as yet further proof that America, intends to follow its unblocking of stalled negotiations on Croatian accession to the EU, with a renewed drive to stabilize the region and accelerate the development of closer links between NATO and the EU? Croatia is making strides in its bid to join the EU, and Serbia could soon follow in its footsteps. Sadly, the same is not true for Bosnia-Herzegovina, which simply appears to have wasted the last 14 years. In 1995, the Dayton Agreement brought an end to the war, but since then little has been done to prepare Bosnia-Herzegovina for peace. Washington has no doubt understood that the negotiations that are now underway probably represent the sole remaining opportunity to prevent the disintegration of the country.

The United States and the European Union want to present a united front, and to this end, Washington abandoned its plan to appoint Clifford Bond, the former American ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina, to the post of special envoy for the application of constitutional change -- which Bosnia needs to implement if it is to present a credible application for membership of the EU -- because Brussels opposed his nomination. But the difference in approach is not easy to hide. The head of the Swedish diplomatic service, Carl Bildt, who was the first High Representative of the international community in Bosnia, from 1995 to 1997, takes the view that the Office of the High Representative (OHR) is now obsolete, while the Americans believe that politicians in the country are still unable to work together without the supervision of a foreign governor.

Britain is facing the real risk today of a bombing campaign that targets random civilians for death - but it is being virtually ignored. When its supporters step closer every day to mass murder, nobody notices. When its perpetrators are caught, there is (at best) a little flick of information in News in Brief, before everyone goes back to talking about the Strictly Come Dancing race row. This silence suggests something dark about us - and requires us to change our behaviour, fast.

The campaign I am talking about is not being planned by jihadis or fringe Irish nationalists but by white "neo-Nazis" who want to murder Asians, black people, Jews and gays in the bizarre belief it will trigger a "race war".

They have struck before. Exactly a decade ago, a 22-year-old member of the British National Party called David Copeland planted bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane (where I live), and a gay pub in Old Compton Street. He managed to lodge a nail deep in a baby's skull, and to murder a pregnant woman, her gay best friend, and his partner. He bragged: "My aim was political. It was to cause a racial war in this country. There'd be a backlash from the ethnic minorities, then all the white people would go out and vote BNP."

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is expected to announce the deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan in an address to parliamentarians Wednesday.

Reuters - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will make a statement on Afghanistan on Wednesday amid expectations he will announce a modest increase in British troop levels.
 
Worsening violence in the U.S.-led eight-year war with the Taliban has triggered calls for a change of strategy, including the possibility of NATO forces sending more troops to try to stabilise larger areas of Afghanistan.

The internet connection for the whole of Sweden went down for almost an hour when routine maintenance broke every single .se address.

At 9:45pm local time on Monday 12 October, every Swedish website went down, and no emails to or from Swedish domains could be received. Around 900,000 domains were affected.

The problem was caused by an "incorrectly configured script" in an update of the .se domain, according to Pingdom, a Swedish web monitoring company.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The Polish head of the EU parliament on Wednesday (14 October) underlined some basic facts about Joseph Stalin at an event held in the context of mounting historical revisionism in Russia.

A Stalin-Hitler pact of 23 August 1939, called "Molotov-Ribbentrop" after the officials who signed it, carved up ownership of Poland, Finland, Romania and the Baltic states, saw millions deported and led to the deaths of 760,000 Poles, "many of them children," he said.

"We can never forget those victims for they are a reminder of where we come from, and show us how much we have achieved."

The parliament president portrayed the EU as a guarantee that great powers will no longer make deals over the heads of smaller countries, including on energy security.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The head of an association representing the families of young street protesters shot during the Romanian Revolution of 1989 has been on hunger strike for over two months over the refusal of authorities to heed a European Court for Human Rights demand that he be granted access to secret files about the events.

Twenty years after the 1989 events, there still is no justice for the shot protesters

After 72 days on strike, Teodor Maries scored a small victory on Tuesday (13 October), when the Romanian public attorney started to hand over to him all the non-secret files of the violent events surrounding the fall of the Communist regime.

Back in December 1989, more than 1,200 people were killed and over 5,000 were injured and illegally arrested in Bucharest and other Romanian cities. The culprits have still not been put behind bars.

Mr Maries on Tuesday said he would not stop his protest until the secret services de-classify all the remaining files and give him copies, which he intends to make public.

The EU's economy commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, is keeping up pressure on Latvia to fulfil budget deficit cuts agreed under the terms of a €7.5 billion international loan led by the EU and the International Monetary Fund.

"This will be extremely important to increase confidence in the markets vis-a-vis the Latvian economy," he told a news conference in Riga on Tuesday (13 October) following discussions with parliamentary leaders.

Commissioner Almunia insists the deficit cuts are the best way to get Latvia's economy back on track

"Honestly, I don't see an alternative," he added.

Ongoing squabbling between members of the government's five-party coalition recently caused it to row back from the 500 million lat (€711m) deficit cut agreed for this year.

October 19th officially marks the beginning of Ukraine's presidential race.

Former Prime Minister and leader of the Party of Regions Viktor Yanukovych, is one candidate.

In 2004 Yanukovych was declared winner in a highly-charged presidential election.

But following allegations of electoral fraud and peaceful protesting, dubbed the "Orange Revolution," the opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko took power.

With three months until the election Yanukovych spoke to euronews about his election campaign and political program.

In a progress report on would-be EU members, the European Commission told Turkey it needed to make more progress on political and civil rights reforms.  

The European Commission's annual progress report, released on Wednesday, called on countries seeking membership to the European Union to work on eliminating corruption, improving their judicial systems and improving their human rights situations.

Most of the countries, including Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosova, were making uneven progress and would not be able to accede to the EU for many years.

Pressure is piling up on embattled French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose 23-year-old undergraduate son looks set to head-up the main business district in Paris. Worryingly, not only have there been howls of disapproval at home, but the international community is now joining in as well.

The imminent appointment of the French president's son to a top post at the country's biggest business district is doing damage to France's international image, according to domestic and international commentators.   Jean Sarkozy - a 23-year-old undergraduate who is married to a wealthy heiress - is tipped to become chairman of the EPAD agency overseeing development in the Paris business area La Defense.   Since the story broke on Thursday, French media have increasingly been questioning his meteoric rise in French politics, with many suggesting is inevitably down to his father's status as the country's head of state - blatant nepotism in other words.   The international media immediately picked up on the story.

In a bid to satisfy all of the contenders for a place in the future European Commission, President Barroso plans to create four new portfolios. But, as at least one commentator in the European press has humorously remarked, perhaps the real value of a commission post should be determined by counting the number of gifts received by the previous commissioner.

José Manuel Barroso is faced with an onerous task. He has to present a brand new commission at the start of 2010, but, as Handelsblatt reports, in view of the doubts about the final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, he has no definite information on the identity of candidates for commission portfolios or on the scale of the future executive. Worse still, he will have to find work for everyone, that is to say, for 27 commissioners if the Treaty comes into force. "There simply is not enough work in Brussels to keep 27 commissioners busy," remarks the German business daily. This problem is not a new one: to wit the appointment "of Romania's Leonard Orban to the post of Commissioner for Multilingualism, which is something of a running joke in Brussels."

In response to this predicament, Handelsblatt explains that Barroso has decided to redesign the commission and to create "new portfolios, which better reflect the future challenges" faced by Europe. Having already announced a Commissioner for Climate Action to supervise the reduction of CO2 in Europe, and a Commissioner for Fundamental Rights with a mission to safeguard democratic values. He is also planning to appoint a Commissioner for Innovation with a brief to promote the commercial exploitation of the results of European research, and a Commissioner for Financial Services. Four portfolios, which as the daily remarks, "have not sparked any controversy."

Berlin - Czech President Vaclav Klaus has raised his additional demands regarding the Lisbon treaty very late, Ulrich Wilhelm, spokesman for the German government, told journalists today, commenting on Klaus's reluctance to sign the Lisbon treaty due to which the Czech Republic is the last EU member not to have ratified it.

Klaus, whose signature under the Lisbon treaty is the last missing, said on Friday he demands an opt-out for Czechs from the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, incorporated in the Lisbon treaty. His step has surprised both Czech and European politicians.

Klaus said he fears that the charter might enable German deportees to claim their former property on Czech soil, confiscated from them after World War Two on the basis of the Benes decrees.

sueddeutsche.de: Warum nennen Sie die Linke PDL?

Schäfer-Gümbel: PDL steht für "Partei Die Linke". Ich weigere mich, eine Partei links zu nennen, die vor allem populistisch ist. Der Name ist ein Etikettenschwindel. Links ist ein Markenzeichen der Aufklärung und die Partei der Aufklärung sind wir, wir sind die linke Volkspartei.

Any reference to Berlusconi is a complete coincidence, of course....

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A new report by the European Commission on the sustainability of public finances concludes that the health of member state coffers varies considerably across the bloc.

Britain, Spain, Greece, Ireland and Latvia all fell into the high-risk category as soaring public debt may constrict their ability to meet future obligations such as pension payments.

The recession has put a large hole in government finances

Published on Wednesday (14 October), the Commission's communication and accompanying "Sustainability Report 2009" takes into account the impact of the crisis, and is a follow-on from a similar report in 2006.

"The long-term sustainability of public finances is a concern for all EU countries, although to a considerably varying degree across member states," said the EU executive in a statement.

Aides to the US treasury secretary who each earned large pay packets working for some of the country's largest investment companies have been advising the administration on its regulatory policy, despite never having faced senate confirmation.

None of the aides to Timothy Geithner have faced the public scrutiny given to senate-confirmed appointees, despite earning massive sums from Wall Street firms, nor are they required to testify in US congress to defend or explain the treasury's actions.

Geithner's "kitchen cabinet", which wields considerable influence behind the scenes at the treasury department, helped oversee the nation's $700bn banking rescue, as well as helping to draw up executive pay rules and revamp financial regulations.

According to financial disclosure forms obtained by the Bloomberg news agency, advisers including Lee Sachs from Mariner Investment Group, and Gene Sperling, from Goldman Sachs, earned hundreds of thousands of dollars last year.

The credit crunch is getting worse on Main Street, despite a Wall Street bailout now in the trillions of dollars. The Federal Reserve's charts show that "base money" is rapidly expanding--meaning coins, paper money, and commercial banks' reserves with the central bank. But the money isn't getting where it needs to go to stimulate economic growth: into the bank accounts of American businesses and consumers.  The Fed has been pumping out money to the banks, and their reserves have been growing at unprecedented rates, but the money supply in the real economy has been declining.

According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing last month in the UK Telegraph, U.S. bank credit and M3 (the broadest measure of the money supply) contracted over the summer at rates comparable to the onset of the Great Depression. In the summer quarter, U.S. bank loans fell at an annual pace of almost 14 percent. "There has been nothing like this in the USA since the 1930s," said Professor Tim Congdon of International Monetary Research. "The rapid destruction of money balances is madness."

Chartered banks are allowed to create credit on their books equal to many times their deposit base, but lately they haven't been doing it. In more normal times, one dollar in base money has been fanned by the banks into $8.50 in loans. Today, one dollar in base money produces only one dollar in loans. Although the Fed has been frantically pushing cash into the banks, it can't make them lend to consumers.

Calvin Trillin's Theory

According to Calvin Trillin (or, more accurately, the probably-at-least-semi-fictional interlocutor he meets at a bar in Midtown), the financial crisis was caused by smart people going to work on Wall Street. In the old days, the story goes, it was the lower third of the class that went to Wall Street, and "by the standards that came later, they weren't really greedy. They just wanted a nice house in Greenwich and maybe a sailboat. A lot of them were from families that had always been on Wall Street, so they were accustomed to nice houses in Greenwich. They didn't feel the need to leverage the entire business so they could make the sort of money that easily supports the second oceangoing yacht."

Then, however, as college debts and Wall Street pay grew in tandem, the smart kids started going to Wall Street to make the money, leading to derivatives and securitization, until finally: "When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn't even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn't have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was."

It's a cute story. But there may be an element of truth to it. In their well-known paper, "Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry: 1909-2006," Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef measured the relative wage and relative educational levels of workers in the financial sector over the last century. The picture looks like this:

.....

I read somewhere that of the CEOs of the largest banks, only Vikram Pandit at Citi was a true "quant," and he only came in when Citi bought his hedge fund in 2007, after the bulk of the damage was done. (I'm not endorsing Pandit's job as CEO, only saying that the mess was there before he arrived.) So there probably was this situation where the executive ranks were filled with old-style relationship-builders and dealmakers, and the increasingly quantitative traders were doing things they didn't understand. A similar story has been told about Salomon under John Gutfreund in the 1980s (and LTCM under John Meriweather in the 1990s).

Technology firms also face a similar problem. In technology, as in most businesses, the way to make it to the top is through sales, so you end up with a situation where the CEO is a sales guy who has no understanding of technology and, for example, thinks that you can cut the development time of a project in half by adding twice as many people. I have seen this have catastrophic results. Even when you don't have the generational issue that Trillin talks about, the problem is that the sociology of corporations leads to a certain kind of CEO, and as corporations become increasingly dependent on complex technology or complex business processes (for example, the kind of data-driven marketing that consumer packaged companies do), you end up with CEOs who don't understand the key aspects of the companies they are managing. And the underlying problem is that, for all the blather that CEOs and boards spit out about succession planning and the importance of people, the fact remains that the market for CEOs is deeply flawed, as shown for example by Rakesh Khurana.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

This is starting to get interesting, although it is far from conclusive.

Massachusetts Land Court judge Keith Long reaffirmed a 2009 ruling (Ibanez) that invalidated foreclosures on two properties because the lenders did not hold clear title to them at the time of the foreclosure sale. Now this decision is still subject to appeal, and Richard Vetstein of the Massachusetts Law Blog (hat tip reader Barbara W) thinks the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court might hear the case directly, given the potential significance of the ruling.

I am still gobsmacked that this issue is even in dispute. Who has ownership is the foundation of commercial law, and it permeates our life in ways most people do not recognize. The reason you get a receipt at the grocery store is that it is evidence that the title of the goods transferred from the store to you. The idea that banks were too lazy to do a decent job of keeping on top of title instruments, when that was the SOLE basis for their ownership interest in the collateral underlying their loans, is equally stunning. I have seen all sorts of deals in other areas founder (water rights is a biggie) because investors were unable to "perfect" certain rights they sought. This is a well established area of law, but the banks couldn't be bothered to spend the money and time to do things correctly. And now they think they can go to banks and assert, "Yeah, we really do own this stuff" and get away with it it is brazen. If you lost a $1000 bill or a bearer bond, no one would take "yeah I really do own this stuff" claims seriously either.

From Ralph Vetstein:

   When mortgages are packaged to Wall Street investors, the ownership of a mortgage loan may be divided and freely transferred numerous times on the lenders' books. But the documentation (i.e., the assignments) actually on file at the Registry of Deeds often lags far behind....

    Despite the lender's attempt to convince him otherwise, Judge Long came out (again) in favor of consumers:

       The issues in this case are not merely problems with paperwork or a matter of dotting i's and crossing t's. Instead, they lie at the heart of the protections given to homeowners and borrowers by the Massachusetts legislature. To accept the plaintiffs' arguments is to allow them to take someone's home without any demonstrable right to do so, based upon the assumption that they ultimately will be able to show that they have that right and the further assumption that potential bidders will be undeterred by the lack of a demonstrable legal foundation for the sale and will nonetheless bid full value in the expectation that that foundation will ultimately be produced, even if it takes a year or more. The law recognizes the troubling nature of these assumptions, the harm caused if those assumptions prove erroneous, and commands otherwise.

    Judge Long also had some choice words for lenders:

       [T]he problem the [lenders] face (the present title defect) is entirely of their own making as a result of their failure to comply with the statute and the directives in their own securitization documents... What the plaintiffs truly seek is a change in the foreclosure sale statute (G.L. c. 244, § 14), which can only come from the legislature.

With everyone cheering the US economy finally completing its first lost decade, and likely the first of many, it is worthwhile to compare the top ten Dow Jones stocks by market cap today and ten years ago. What is notable is the rotation out of pharma companies, with both Merck and Pfizer dropping out of the ranking, and their replacement with taxpayer capital proxies, in the face of JP Morgan (#4) and Bank of America (#9). As both of these companies have achieved phenomenal profitability (and a resulting stock price appreciation) almost exclusively courtesy of the inverted yield curve and numerous other boons from the Fed, their market cap contribution should be carefully considered for whether it is sustainable or is one-time item (assuming the QE 1.0-xxxx.0 liquidity pump ever runs out). Also notable is CNBC parent GE's fall from grace, and its over $200 billion loss in market capitalization.

Lastly, over half a trillion in market cap (21%) has been lost by the top 10 companies, even with the Dow at the same level.

Under siege and grappling with joblessness, factional violence and the aftermath of war, Gazans are turning to pills as they seek to escape reality. Donald Macintyre speaks to a mental health group struggling to help addicts

Abu Ahmed lived through last winter's Gaza war in a daze. Though the district where he lives was invaded by Israeli ground forces and came under heavy fire, including the use of white phosphorus shells, he felt little fear. For by then, the 45-year-old unemployed father of 10 was popping tablets of the painkiller Tramadol to feed an ever more dangerous habit."Of course you care about the children but [with the drugs] you forget about yourself," he explains. "You feel less frightened."

Manufacturers warn the maximum daily dose of the synthetic opioid should be no more 300mg per day; Abu Ahmed was taking as much as 800mg - in the grip of an addiction which has rapidly spread throughout Gaza over the last two years. As the population struggles to cope with Israel closing their home to the outside world, the sometimes violent power struggles between Fatah and Hamas, and then the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, the Tramadol pills - smuggled in through tunnels from Egypt - have provided a welcome escape from reality.

Mental health professionals say there has been a rise in the drug's usage in Gaza since the war. The Hamas authorities have tried to crack down on it, but the drug's severe withdrawal symptoms means it is a seriously hard habit to break. Hasan Shaban Zeyada, a senior psychologist at the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) is convinced that many of the psychological problems underlying the addiction are "the consequence of living in this situation: the siege, internal division and the war".

Israel is violating international law by detaining hundreds of Palestinians, some of them for years without charge or trial, two leading human rights groups in the country have said.   

B'Tsalem and HaMoked released a report on Wednesday, saying that 335 Palestinians are being illegally detained by the Israeli military.

"Israel holds hundreds of Palestinians in prolonged detention based on undisclosed suspicions, without informing them what these suspicions are, without giving them an opportunity to defend themselves, and without notifying them when they will be released," the report said.

The prisoners are being held in legal limbo under a practice known in Israel as "administrative detention", which authorises the army to order the arrest and detention of Palestinians without allowing them access to the legal rights they could expect under civilian law.

Puerto Rico is getting ready for the national strike on Thursday, October 15. Since governor Luis Fortuño layed-off about 17,000 government employees the first week of October, there has been tremendous mobilization from different sectors of the civil society: workers and members of trade unions, women, environmentalists, students, and professors, among others. There have been multiple demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to protest the economic policies that the government has assured are necessary due to the financial crisis. In total this year, the recently elected government has laid off around 25,000 public employees.

In the last months hostility has grown between the government and different civil society groups: eviction orders in socially and economically disadvantaged communities, police brutality, and the dismantlement of community initiatives such as the Fideicomiso del Caño Martín Peña. There have also been a string of comments from government officials considered offensive and insensitive, such as the now sadly famous "such is life", and more recently, when the Governor's designated Chief off Staff Marcos Rodríguez Ema compared demonstrators to terrorists.

The island is literally going to be shut down (we may not even have electricity or water for spells, so I may not be "around" here).

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

A skunk in Oklahoma who got his head stuck in a jar of peanut butter was rescued with the help of a passer-by and a man known as the "skunk whisperer."

Teresa Vick was delivering newspapers when she noticed the disorientated creature with the jar stuck on its head outside a Community Centre in Bixby, Oklahoma.

Ms Vick enlisted the help of Ned "The Skunk Whisperer" Bruha, who used chloroform to sedate the animal before easing the jar off its head, and the grateful skunk even refrained from spraying him as it ran away unharmed.

Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator and founder of the original Axis of Evil, worked as a British agent for MI5 at the start of his career, it has emerged.

Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini, who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany, got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.

Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, worked to ensure that Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the First World War by publishing propaganda in his paper, the Guardian reports. He was also willing to send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan.

* Countries with restrictive laws most affected

* Global report shows overall fall in terminations

About 70,000 women die every year and many more suffer harm as a result of unsafe abortions in countries with restrictive laws on ending a pregnancy, according to a report.

The total number of abortions across the globe has fallen, the influential Guttmacher Institute says, but that drop relates only to legal abortions and is mostly the result of changes in eastern Europe.

There were 41.6m terminations worldwide in 2003, compared with 45.5m in 1995. But in 2003, says the report, 19.7m of these were unsafe, clandestine abortions. The numbers of those have hardly changed from 1995, when there were 19.9m.

Bluntness and bitterness have long been elements of integration debates in Germany. But emotion often obscures an important question: Why do many ethnic groups integrate well into German society while others do not?

It took a while, but by last Thursday the controversy had finally reached a cafe on Hobrechtstrasse in Berlin's Neukölln neighborhood, a place frequented by fans of the Turkish football club FC Phönix 56 Ayyildiz. A group of men with little else to do -- because they are either retired or unemployed -- usually meets there in the afternoon. The men sit in the sparsely furnished room under a ceiling fan, drinking tea from elegantly curved glasses and discussing politics over the electronic blubber of video games coming from the back room.

Servet Kulaksiz starts the conversation on Thursday. A 50-year-old early retiree, he taps his finger against a photo of Thilo Sarrazin on the cover of the Turkish daily newspaper Sabah and launches into a tirade. "The man is right. Many foreigners don't even want to become integrated here. They collect their unemployment payments, but aside from that, they do nothing."

Brides in white wedding gowns and Japanese kimonos joined bridegrooms in black suits and red ties today for one of the biggest mass weddings in a decade -- a spectacle officials that said involved some 40,000 people around the world from São Paulo and New York to Seoul.

It was the largest "blessing ceremony" by the Unification Church since 1999, and may well be the last on such a grand scale officiated by the 89-year-old Korean religious leader the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the controversial founder of the church, whose followers are known as Moonies.

Nearly a half-century after arranging the marriages of 24 couples in his first mass wedding, the Mr Moon today blessed more than 10,000 couples who had gathered at the Sun Moon University, the school that he founded in Asan, south of Seoul.

About half were marrying for the first time, some in marriages arranged by Mr Moon himself; while the rest were renewing their wedding vows. Officials said that the Rev Moon also blessed 10,000 couples from Sweden to Brazil taking part in simultaneous ceremonies around the world.

India has rejected a demand by the Albanian government for the return of the remains of Nobel laureate Mother Teresa, buried in the city of Calcutta.

"Mother Teresa was an Indian citizen and she is resting in her own country, her own land," Foreign Ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash said.

A spokeswoman for the nun's Missionaries of Charity described the Albanian request as "absurd".

Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian, was born in Skopje, now part of Macedonia.

Roman Polanski is putting the finishing touches to his forthcoming film from his prison cell in Switzerland, his friend and colleague Robert Harris said yesterday at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Harris, who wrote the screenplay for the film, said that the director is making decisions about The Ghost so that it will be ready for its scheduled premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Polanski, who is fighting extradition to America where he is wanted for raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977, recently gave instructions about the film score to Alexandre Desplat, the composer best known for writing music for The Queen and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

The director, 76, was arrested in Zurich on September 26 after 31 years on the run from the American authorities. He admitted having sex with Samantha Gailey, a model he hired for a photoshoot, but jumped bail in February 1978 when he discovered that he would face a lengthy prison sentence despite negotiating a plea bargain. Harris, who was in Cheltenham to publicise his book Lustrum, said that The Ghost would be completed in accordance with Polanski's wishes. The director had finished editing the film, which stars Pierce Brosnan as a British prime minister accused of war crimes, on the day of his arrest.

Vladimir Putin has defied his famously macho image by suggesting that Russia and its military allies set up a rival version of the Eurovision song contest.

In comments as odd as they were unexpected, the Russian prime minister spoke out in favour of a new international modern song competition that he said should be called "Intervision".

Speaking in Beijing, Mr Putin suggested the new song contest should be set up in the incongruous framework of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a six-nation defence bloc that is more accustomed to conducting joint military exercises than giving each others' crooners nul points.