Five years of Slovakian membership in the EU have brought a lot of changes to Slovak people's lives. Two main issues include converting the Slovak crown to the Euro and joining the Schengen area. Despite the generally positive pro-European atmosphere on the political sceneand the common understanding of the Slovakian external policy toward the EU, the tense mood among the parties and the polls inside the national parliament "risk the reputation of Slovakia," Prime Minister Robert Fico told New Europe in an interview with Vladimira Briestenska.

How would you evaluate the first five years as part of the European Union. Can we call it a beneficial period for Slovakia?

Without any doubts. These five years have been not only a beneficial but also a successful period for Slovakia. You know, one thing is to get the membership in the EU and mainly if it is so important for the politics that they are willing to accept also the non-favourable conditions. And this has happened to Slovakia in few cases as well. But it is something absolutely different to reach success afterwards and to gain the possible maximum from the membership, as it requires hard work, which I can say my government has done and therefore we can see the results

With its controversial six-month EU presidency coming to an end, the Czech Republic's eurosceptic President Vaclav Klaus made sure Saturday that the incoming Swedes knew what to expect from the Lisbon Treaty debate. 

Klaus said that the European Union was "squaring the circle" with guarantees granted to Ireland before its vote on the treaty.

"I find this amusing and above all undignified," Klaus, whose country holds the EU presidency until the end of this month, told Saturday's edition of the Pravo daily. "We all know that it's impossible to square the circle, but it is exactly what these countries have tried to do. To say that the concessions don't change anything about the Lisbon Treaty is silly," he added.

"Although it is written in the treaty that not all countries ... will have their own commissioner, now suddenly it is promised that they will," Klaus said. "Every normal human being, a first grade pupil, would know that it is a change and that somebody is promising it. So it is a change," he said.

The Czech president's comments were likely to open a debate on whether the treaty's ratification process should be renewed just over a week before Sweden takes the reigns.

Since the disbanding of the November 17th terrorist group, Greek police have breathed easier. Formed during the 1967-1974 dictatorship in Greece, it was one of the last militant organisations still active in Europe, responsible for a series of attacks against Western diplomats and domestic politicians. The authorities finally broke it up in 2002, following a botched bombing attack on a ferry company.

Although spinoff groups continued to operate, with one firing a rocket-propelled grenade at the US Embassy two years ago, revolutionary violence appeared to have run out of steam. Greece, it seemed, was ready to turn the page.

That changed, though, on December 6th, 2008. The police shooting of an Athens teenager not only unleashed weeks of rioting and destruction, but appears to have revived a seemingly moribund tradition -- namely, urban guerrillas armed with manifestos and bombs.

Several such organisations have emerged in the months since 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos died during an altercation between youth gangs and police.

More than 2,000 Roma (Gypsies) who fled Kosovo during the conflict in the 1990s still live in Konik refugee camp near Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro.

The sprawling slum of tents and shacks is built near the largest rubbish dump in Montenegro.

The mayor of Podgorica recently said the refugees should go back to where they came from.

Save the Children is working to integrate the Roma, but few stay long in the local school.

As the UN marks World Refugee Day, Save the Children's Phoebe Greenwood meets two men who describe appalling living conditions at the largest refugee camp in the Balkans.

Reporting from Brussels -- Like many spy tales in fiction and reality, "Background to Danger" begins in a train station...

Fast-forward six decades into a transformed landscape. Europe has erased internal borders. Instead of fighting Nazis or communists, spy agencies use satellites and wiretaps to track Islamic terrorists who conspire on the Internet.

But one thing has not changed much. Trains, stations and the gritty neighborhoods that surround them are often the backdrop to danger.

Rail passengers were slaughtered in terrorist bombings in Paris in 1995 and Madrid nine years later. On a foggy Tuscan morning in 2003, a police ID check in a second-class compartment set off a point-blank shootout with a Red Brigades militant, the author of a manifesto proclaiming a leftist-Islamic militant alliance. Her companion and a police officer died.

And it was aboard a train to Paris that a Moroccan Belgian informant decided on a risky gambit after departing the Gare du Midi station here in the Belgian capital: Fearing betrayal by a handler, he surrendered to police and announced that he was a spy. After his French and Belgian spymasters reconciled with him, they sent him on an undercover mission to Al Qaeda's Afghan camps, according to his book, "Inside the Jihad," written under the alias Omar Nasiri.

Spies, terrorists, smugglers and other stealthy types use trains in Western Europe because they are fast, cheap and efficient. Unlike airports, rail travel also offers anonymity: Authorities don't routinely check papers, search luggage or use metal detectors.

Message to Americans: be grateful you don't have "fast, cheap and efficient" passenger trains like Western Europeans have... because of trains and the "gritty neighborhoods that surround" train stations — Europe is Doomed™.

The UK's Conservative MEPs have formed a new "anti-federalist" European Parliament bloc.

The new European Conservatives and Reformists Group includes 55 MEPs from across eight member states.

The EU's leaders agreed today on reforms to financial supervision, following a deal between the UK, France and Germany on two of the main elements.

The reforms will include granting new powers to EU committees tasked with overseeing the health of individual financial institutions and the creation of a European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) responsible for identifying threats to the EU economy as a whole. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said the agreement was "a new constitution for the financial market system".

The reforms are based on proposals drawn up by a high-level group led by Jacques de Larosière, a former director of the International Monetary Fund, to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis. The European Commission, which convened the de Larosière group, developed the plans further in proposals presented to member states last month.

VANCOUVER, Jun 15 (IPS) - Sitting in the restaurant of Vancouver's posh Fairmount Waterfront Hotel, the former chief economist for one of Canada's largest banks doesn't seem like the typical apocalyptic peak oil theorist.

But in his new book, "Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller", Jeff Rubin argues that globalisation, fuelled by cheap oil, is finished. In the book, Rubin contends the current global recession is a result of expensive oil, rather than subprime mortgages in the U.S.

Frequently ranked as Canada's top economist, Rubin predicts that one barrel of oil will cost 225 dollars by 2012. Other analysts consider that number outlandish; the conservative National Post newspaper, where he was frequently quoted as an economic expert before leaving his job at CIBC World Markets, accuses him of "anti-materialism" and "Big oil paranoia."

But in 2000, Rubin correctly predicted that oil would top 50 dollars per barrel by 2005. And, in 2005 he got it right again, forecasting prices would top 100 dollars per barrel in 2007.

Rubin sat down with IPS at his hotel after giving a lunch address to the Vancouver Board of Trade.

IPS: If Iraq's security situation improves, and its cheap oil comes back online for export, could that stop your prediction of 225 dollars per barrel by 2012?

Jeff Rubin: Not even close. Nor would it stop the prediction that exports from OPEC (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), instead of growing, are likely to fall by about one to one and a half million barrels per day over the next four or five years.

It's not just about depletion [of OPEC oil fields], though depletion is playing a key role. It is also about the explosive growth of oil consumption in OPEC countries themselves.

After two smugglers were stopped last week with what at first appeared to be $134bn in US state bonds, the tension and paranoia surrounding the fate of the dollar hit a new high.

How on earth did these two men, who at first refused to identify themselves, come to be there, trying to ride the train into Switzerland carrying bonds worth more than the gross domestic product of Singapore? If the bonds were genuine, the pair would have been America's fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the UK and just behind Russia.

No sooner had the story leaked out from the Italian lakes region last week than it sparked a panoply of conspiracy tales. But one resounded more than any other: that the men were agents of the Japanese finance ministry, in the country for the G8 meeting, making a surreptitious journey into Switzerland to sell off one small chunk of the massive mountain of US bonds stacked up in the Japanese Treasury vaults.

In the event, late last week American officials confirmed that the notes were forgeries. The men, it appeared, were nothing more than ambitious scamsters. But many remain unconvinced.

Goldman to make record bonus payout
Surviving banks accused of undermining stability

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Staff in London were briefed last week on the banking and securities company's prospects and told they could look forward to bumper bonuses if, as predicted, it completed its most profitable year ever. Figures next month detailing the firm's second-quarter earnings are expected to show a further jump in profits. Warren Buffett, who bought $5bn of the company's shares in January, has already made a $1bn gain on his investment.

Bailout Costs vs Big Historical Events

It is exceedingly difficult to convey exactly how much we are spending on all these bailouts. Whenever I start talking trillions (versus mere billions), I get puzzled looks from people. Humans have a hard time conceptualizing any number that large.  I wanted a graphic way to clearly show how astonishingly ginormous the amounts involved were.

So I once again went to Jess Bachman at Wallstats. I gave him my list of expenditures (inflation adjusted of course!) and he went to work. This early Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or  otherwise committed.

It is nothing short of astonishing.

It includes the total outlay for all the bailouts to date. In just about one short year (March 2008 -  March 2009), the bailouts managed to spend far in excess of nearly every major one time expenditure of the USA, including WW1&2 (omitted from graphic), the moon shot, the New Deal, total NASA budgets (omitted from graphic), Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars -- COMBINED.

206 years versus 12 months. Total cost: ~$15 trillion and counting . . .

As the race to list the first credit contracts on the world's financial exchanges intensifies, regulators are under increasing pressure to impose tighter constraints on the market. While one of the main challenges for the exchanges and their partners will be defining the specifications of the contracts, a bigger concern is the risk that investors will be taking. The much publicized corporate failures of the past few years have only added to the general awareness of the risks involved in credit derivatives, many of which are still only partially understood by all but a handful of major players.
.....

Unfortunately, many trades are cross-border, and a number of national regulators are concerned that the ISDA rules are inadequate. They are looking into creating their own rules, triggering concern among the major banks that these groups will lag behind the market, resulting in rules that are out of date before they are even implemented.

Credit derivatives have only recently attracted the attention of national regulatory bodies. This is mostly because the market was traditionally the almost exclusive realm of the major investment banks, and the number of credits was small. In 2004, however, it is expected that insurance companies will be the single largest participant in the market, with hedge funds also playing a major role. The past two years has also seen an increase in uptake among retail investors.

This expansion of the investor pool and the rapid growth in the number and variety of credits has led to concern that the new holders of such instruments may not have a clear understanding of the risks they are taking.

Abstract:

This article is an updated version of an article that was published in Seeking Alpha. I have updated  and clarified certain definitions. The relevance of that article in todays' Market justify this updated publication.

The commodities we are concerned with here are those with potentially very low storage costs. Minerals, when kept in the ground, have a storage cost next to zero.

I observed a strong link between the evolution of the market price of minerals and the shape of the yield curve.

The slope of the yield curve indicates the fair valuation or not of the price of short-term assets compared to long-term assets.

I am going to show that the shape of the yield curve is a first order parameter of the evolution of the price of minerals.

When the yield curve is inverted, because of profit maximization, Miners & Drillers prefer hoarding a higher proportion of their minerals in the ground (their preferred short-term assets) rather than extracting them and investing the proceeds in long-term instruments. Hence, the marginal cost of extraction of minerals becomes irrelevant to their market price as miners stop maximizing their output under the constraint: Market Price - Their Marginal Cost of Extraction.

Prevailing Theory:

According to the prevailing theory the Market price of a mineral is its marginal cost of extraction: the cost of extraction of the most expensive unit that find its way on the Market.

Reminder: the Marginal Cost of Extraction does not include fixed cost (i.e. exploration cost, cost of an offshore platform, etc...).

If that was true then the marginal cost of extraction would have risen has much as $140!

In order to account for that unexpected behaviour people have invoked the concept of peak oil or the possibility that minerals would behave like stocks and would discount some future value, without even trying to find out what those future value were.

Need for a Global Parameter:

The price of minerals has grown unabated since the yield curve started being inverted with acceleration when the Federal Reserve started increasing short-term rates from 1%. At that time, long term interest rates were so low that the yield curve became inverted when the short term rates reached 2.5% All of the minerals have grown together, which cannot be explained by the growth of the marginal price of extraction alone; no price increases have caused the price of any mineral to stop its growth as a result of an increased investment in exploration.

Fascinating stuff from one Shalom Hamou, not just here but other stuff on his site Yield Curve which gets down to the relationship between yields from (fictitious) financial assets and the yield of "real" productive (but for non-renewables, essentially finite) assets over time.

Should be of particular interest to Jerome professionally, I would think, and to Migeru intellectually! A couple of Diaries there, methinks.

Modern conservatives engage in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.Galbraith

As authorities fulminated against protesters backing defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi, moderate former president Mohammad Khatami signaled increased opposition among pro-reform clerics to Iran's conservative leadership.

"Preventing people from expressing their demands through civil ways will have dangerous consequences," Khatami, a Mousavi ally, said in a statement, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.

His comment, implying criticism of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has backed a ban on protests and defended the outcome of the election, found an echo with Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the most senior dissident cleric.

"Resisting people's demand is religiously prohibited," said Montazeri, an architect of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution who fell out with the present leadership and has been under house arrest for some years.

In a statement on his website, Montazeri called for three days of national mourning for those killed.

ZAGREB, June 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Hu Jintao's just concluded three-nation tour is "very successful" in enhancing friendship, boosting cooperation and promoting common development with relevant countries, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said Saturday.

    During the tour from June 14 to June 20, President Hu attended the ninth annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the first BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and paid state visits to Russia, Slovakia and Croatia.

    Hu's tour took place amid the complicated and changing international situation, while the global financial crisis continues to spread, regional security faces new challenges, and various countries share stronger will to deepen cooperation and promote development, Yang said.

    The tour was a significant diplomatic move taken by China to develop relations with neighboring countries, major developing countries as well as Central and Eastern European countries, said Yang.

RAMALLAH, Jun 20 (IPS) - Forty international aid agencies and NGOs have released a joint statement condemning Israel's blockade of Gaza, to mark the second anniversary of the coastal territory being hermetically sealed off from the outside world.

"We, United Nations and non-governmental humanitarian organisations, express deepening concern over Israel's continued blockade of the Gaza Strip which has now been in force for two years.

"These indiscriminate sanctions are affecting the entire 1.5 million population of Gaza, and ordinary women, children and the elderly are the first victims," read the statement, to mark the anniversary Wednesday.

Simultaneously, an increasingly concerned U.S. administration is pressuring Israel to change its Gaza policy and alleviate unnecessary suffering. Three weeks ago U.S. officials sent a diplomatic letter to Israeli government officials expressing alarm at the deteriorating humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Diplomatic sources in Jerusalem say the note was delivered following agreement between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, and senior administration officials.

The officials argue that Israel's collective punishment of Gaza's mostly civilian population is counterproductive.

The U.S. has also rejected Israel's argument that the opening of Gaza's borders is linked to the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Palestinian guerrillas three years ago.

Indonesia's devastating 'mud volcano' could keep spewing for the next 30 years, filling the equivalent of 50 Olympic-size swimming pools every day, a top Australian expert warned on Thursday.

Curtin University of Technology's doctor Mark Tingay, who has just returned from the disaster site in East Java, said about 100,000 people remained under threat from subsidence three years after the volcano first erupted.

"In effect, the whole region around the vent hole is sinking by about two to five centimetres each day due to the rising mud level, causing more damage to suburban villages and triggering frequent bursts of flammable gas around homes," he said, according to a Geological Society of Australia statement.

Tingay added that damage caused by the mud, which has been devouring land and homes in Sidoarjo district since May 2, 2006, was estimated at about 4.9 billion dollars.

The volcano has buried 12 villages, killed 13 people, displaced more than 42,000 residents and wiped out 800 hectares (1,977 acres) of densely populated farming and industrial land.

...Australian oil and gas giant Santos, which was drilling in the area when the volcano erupted, by September had declared previsions of just 88.5 million dollars to cover the clean-up cost.

In December, Santos exited the project and said it would pay an Indonesian firm 22.5 million US dollars "to support long-term mud management efforts" at the site.

Montreal, Canada (SPX) Jun 11, 2009
Antibiotics, antimicrobials and antifungals are seeping into the waterways of North America, Europe and East Asia, according to an investigation published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP). Authored by Universite de Montreal and Environment Canada researchers, the review found that consumption of anti-infectives for human and agriculture use contributes to their release into the environment and even into drinking water.

"Anti-infectives are constantly discharged, at trace levels, in natural waters near urban centres and agricultural areas," says senior author Sebastien Sauve, a Universite de Montreal professor of environmental analytical chemistry. "Their potential contribution to the spread of anti-infective resistance in bacteria and other effects on aquatic biota is a cause for concern."

The research team compiled published data for three classes of antibiotics (macrolides, quinolones and sulfonamides) and the compound trimethoprim present in the urban wastewaters of East Asia, Europe and North America. The scientists found higher concentrations of these pharmaceuticals in raw wastewater compared to treated wastewater.

"Rivers, creeks, lakes, estuaries, basins, sea waters and wells have been reported to be contaminated by several of these compounds," says Dr. Sauve, adding that a previous review by the scientific team also demonstrated that pharmaceuticals could promote microbial resistance when released in the environment.

CAPE TOWN, Jun 20 (IPS) - The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) claims that its "stress breeding", high-yield seed program and its emphasis on grassroots farmer input will boost agricultural production among poor, small scale farmers. But NGOs and environmentalists say AGRA's Programme for Africa's Seed System (PASS) is essentially a top-down, corporate driven approach that further threatens food security on the continent.

Like its predecessor, AGRA's `new' Green Revolution views food shortages as a crisis of demand-and-supply and has initiated what Joe de Vries, director of PASS, describes as a "farmer participatory" program that aims to develop strains of crops specifically suited to African conditions.

"It is our belief that Africa's farmers need to move beyond subsistence farming and that by doing so they will benefit, and so will African consumers through greater abundance of food in local markets," says de Vries.

For many NGOs working with subsistence farmers, AGRA's model has more to do with increasing Africa's production of commercial crops for export and opening up markets for agribusiness than it does with contributing to food security.

"The need to increase yield is a neat argument that is easily swallowed by governments and citizens.It does not necessarily lead to ending hunger, especially when that yield is headed for a global market and remains inaccessible to the majority", says Haidee Swanby, researcher at the African Centre for Biosafety (ACB).

One of the main criticisms levelled at AGRA is that it has not taken cognizance of the 2008 report by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) which suggested that food sovereignty is inextricably tied to traditional and ecological agricultural models.

KAMPALA, Jun 20 (IPS) - Widespread gender-based violence against women and children in the conflict zones of the Great Lakes region has received some attention in recent years; less well-known is the extent of sexual violence against men.

A new documentary film shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Uganda and elsewhere in the region shows the extent of sexual violence against men.

"You are worth nothing. You are like women," says one of the male rape survivors in the film, recounting what government soldiers told him. "They would ask you to bend and remove your trousers and different soldiers would penetrate you through the anus."

"They put their penis wherever they could see an opening: in the ears, mouth, and the anus. By the time they were done I had sperm all over my body," another survivor of sexual abuse recounts.

Women and men alike are raped in conflict situations in order to dominate them physically and psychologically. Male survivors are humiliated in terms of socially-accepted sexual and gender roles.

Tony Blair urged Gordon Brown to hold the independent inquiry into the Iraq war in secret because he feared that he would be subjected to a "show trial" if it were opened to the public, the Observer can reveal.

The revelation that the former prime minister - who led Britain to war in March 2003 - had intervened will fuel the anger of MPs, peers, military leaders and former civil servants, who were appalled by Brown's decision last week to order the investigation to be conducted behind closed doors.

Blair, who resisted pressure for a full public inquiry while he was prime minister, appears to have taken a deliberate decision not to express his view in person to Brown because he feared it might leak out.

The United Nations Secretary General has urged governments around the world to work towards eradicating polio.

Ban Ki-moon made his comments to delegates at the Rotary International Annual Convention at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham.

The organisation has raised £151m($250m) since launching a campaign in 1985 to eliminate the disease.

He said polio is now only endemic in four countries, falling from 125 when the campaign began.

Two female protesters who challenged police officers for not displaying their badge numbers were bundled to the ground, arrested and held in prison for four days, according to an official complaint lodged today.

The incident was caught on camera, and footage shows officers standing on the women's feet and applying pressure to their necks immediately after the women attempted to photograph a fellow officer who had refused to give his badge number.

Ground has been broken on the construction site of Spaceport America, the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport.

Those behind the project say that it will help provide a new chapter in space exploration.

When finished in 18 months' time, the facility will house Virgin Galactic's space tourism business and other firms working in the commercial space arena.

It will cost the New Mexico government almost $200m (£121m).

He has built an unlikely political career on the bold premise that opponents of tax-cutting Republicanism are a bunch of limp-wristed "girlie men" and Arnold Schwarzenegger is nothing if not consistent in his line of attack.

The Governor of California has written yet another chapter in his colourful personal history by sending his leading Democratic rival a metal sculpture of a pair of bull's testicles.

Sources close to both men told the Los Angeles Times that the gift was a response to a similar gag by Mr Steinberg, who recently sent a package of mushrooms to the Governor's office, after Mr Schwarzenegger had branded Democratic proposals to raise taxes "hallucinatory".

Yet the gift was not received well. Mr Steinberg returned the sculpture to its sender with a stern note about the need to protect society's most vulnerable from cuts in services.

Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, has rejected calls to resign amid accusations that he misled parliament over his friendship with a car dealer, in what has become the biggest political crisis of his 19-month premiership.

The allegations centre around claims that the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, misled parliament when they denied that a Queensland car dealer, John Grant, received special attention over his application for a government loan to cope with the global credit crunch.