Sweden will assume the EU's six-month rotating presidency on 1 July, amid great economic challenges and institutional uncertainty for the 27-nation bloc.

If ratification of the Lisbon Treaty is completed this year it could be the last six-month presidency.

What are Sweden's priorities as it takes over from the Czech Republic?

A senior Tory MEP has become the first to break ranks and voice "real concern" over the inclusion of "extreme Right-wingers" in the new anti-federalist group in the European Parliament.

Edward McMillan-Scott said he was unhappy with many of the candidates who would be sitting with the Conservatives in the 55-strong group.

He also said it was "humiliating" for the Tories to be "scrambling around" for new members for the group.

Russia's supreme court has annulled not guilty verdicts handed in February to all suspects in the trial in the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, according to Russian news agencies. The case will be retried.

AFP - Russia's supreme court Thursday annulled innocent verdicts handed in February to all suspects in the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and ordered a new trial.

"The supreme court has annulled the innocent verdict on the case of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. The case will be examined again with new jurors," supreme court spokesman Pavel Odintsov told AFP.

A jury in February acquitted four men, none of whom had in the first place been charged with shooting dead the reporter nor with ordering the apparent contract killing in her Moscow apartment building on October 7, 2006.

The escort girl at the centre of the scandal engulfing Silvio Berlusconi has hit back at the Italian Prime Minister's claims that she was part of an organised "mission" to discredit him.

Patrizia D'Addario, 42, claims to have spent the night with the 72-year-old billionaire at his residence in Rome the night Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

Yesterday she rejected comments by Mr Berlusconi that "someone sent her with a very precise aim", repeating her allegations that she stayed overnight at Palazzo Grazioli in exchange for help with a personal building project.

"I knew that I would be accused of the worst kind of wickedness but I cannot be attacked because I have always told the truth, and indeed Berlusconi cannot deny the circumstances that I have revealed," she told the newspaper Corriere Della Sera.

----

There were reports yesterday that Bari prosecutors were in a "race against time" as Mr Berlusconi's centre-right coalition attempted to rush through parliament a law that could ban the use of phone tapping and other recordings.

A proposal to ban phone taps in cases other than those involving crimes with minimum prison sentences of ten years was put before parliament last year.

Delegates from 75 countries pledging to destroy their stockpiles of cluster bombs are meeting in Berlin for a two-day conference to assess progress since a 2008 ban on the weapons. 

The event, which brings together 217 participants from 75 countries, is intended to share know-how on the complicated destruction of cluster munition.

Delegates are also to discuss a destruction verification process and greater transparency by signatories on how many cluster munitions they hold.

Since the Convention on Cluster Munitions was adopted in December 2008 in Oslo, 98 countries have signed the document and 11 have already ratified it.

Signatory states have eight years to destroy military stockpiles of cluster weapons, once the convention comes into effect six months after it has been ratified by thirty states.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - One week after EU leaders proposed to make Jose Manuel Barroso European Commission chief for a second time, it is no clearer whether the Portuguese politician is likely to get a majority if put to a vote mid July.

Consultations due to take place Thursday (25 July) between the incoming Swedish EU presidency and leaders of the political groups in the parliament have been postponed until 6 July in the hope to get a clearer picture of how each group stands on the matter.

MEPs will decide on 9 July whether to put the Barroso issue on vote in the July plenary session

A spokesperson for the Swedish presidency said that Stockholm had made the move to "show some flexibility."

"The ambience coming from the parliament showed that this was perhaps a good idea," he said, adding that Sweden is hoping the extra time will help opinions on the Barroso candidacy crystallise.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The Czech social democrat party is discussing the possibility of suspending president Vaclav Klaus' powers if he does not sign the EU's Lisbon treaty.

The temporary suspension would require a simple majority of 41 votes in the country's 81-seat senate and would allow caretaker prime minister Jan Fischer to sign the document instead.

President Klaus vowed earlier this week that he would be "the last" politician in Europe to sign Lisbon

Social democrat senator Alena Gajduskova is leading an "intensive debate" on the subject in her party, the secretary of the senate's constitutional commission, Jan Kysela, told EUobserver.

Ms Gajduskova's campaign is linked to president Klaus' refusal to sign off on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which was ratified by the Czech parliament in October 2008.

EU laws protects our water and air, but as the Union's environment ministers gather in Luxembourg June 25, no such legislation exists for that other element none of us can live without - the soil.

Lucie Kundra is something of a feminist rebel -- not because she wouldn't take her husband's name when they got married last year, but because she did.

She adopted his surname exactly as it was, and in doing so defied centuries of tradition and the wishes of her own mother. That's because she refused to add the customary feminine suffix "ova" at the end, as the Czech language normally dictates; she answers to Lucie Kundra, not Lucie Kundrova.

The three letters were a step too far for the 27-year-old charity worker.

"I really didn't want 'ova' because [it means] you are owned by your husband," Kundra says. "Language is a huge part of culture and socialization, and if we want to change relations between women and men and promote equal opportunities, this is something we have to deal with."

Though still a small minority, more and more young Czech women are grappling with that question as women make further inroads in Czech society and inch closer to parity with men.

Dresden was today removed from Unesco's list of World Heritage Sites because of the construction of a four-lane bridge across the river Elbe just over a mile from the city's historic centre.

The Dresden Elbe valley won heritage status in 2004 for its 12-mile stretch of landscape, which incorporates the city centre and features baroque palaces, churches, opera houses and museums.

The city has been on Unesco's "red" list for three years because of the bridge.

Conservationists say that the four-lane Waldschlösschenbrücke would be a blot on the unique Elbe valley and is sited in a particularly sensitive spot, near the old city, from where it could be seen.

Yesterday's decision came at a meeting in Seville of the World Heritage Committee. "Every time we fail to preserve a site, we share the pain of the state party," said María Jesús San Segundo, the ambassador and Spain's delegate to Unesco.

It was an agreeable way to spend a balmy evening: a summer drinks party held in the lush surroundings of London's oldest botanical garden.

Champagne glasses clinked as guests from business, politics and entertainment mingled at the elegant soirée hosted by the City public relations supremo Alan Parker at the Chelsea Physic Garden on Tuesday.

The Marks & Spencer boss Sir Stuart Rose rubbed shoulders with Stephen Fry and Jack Straw as leading bankers talked excitedly about the new buzzword in their born-again sector: BAB.

BAB stands for Bonuses are Back, and its arrival in the lexicon of the Square Mile is evidence that bankers are once again looking forward to bumper payouts, just eight months after the sector faced meltdown and governments worldwide were required to prop them up.

The European Central Bank (ECB) will pump a further €442 billion into money markets after a record auction on Wednesday (24 June), in which eurozone banks snapped up one-year loans amid expectations borrowing costs may rise in future.

The ECB move to lend billions of euros across the 16-country currency area is designed to unblock bank lending, improve private sector access to credit and revive the area's ailing economy.

The ECB's latest move is designed to unblock lending in the Eurozone

Banks provide roughly three quarters of company financing in the eurozone.

Financial markets have dubbed the move a continuation of the ecb's non-standard measures, with Wednesday's auction part of a wider ECB policy to provide unlimited liquidity to banks since the financial crisis began.

How can we explain the fact that, in the middle of a global recession, and a corresponding slump in oil demand, that the price of a barrel of the black stuff continues to climb? The answer lies near the port of Rotterdam where, out at sea, fully loaded supertankers must wait until oil barons have decided that the time is ripe for selling.

Last week when the weather was good, most of the tiny ships you could see dotting the horizon on the coast of Rotterdam were carrying enough fuel to fill five million average sized cars. Virtually all of them were supertankers loaded with two million barrels of of oil. On 19 June, there were eight supertankers outside Europe's busiest port. They could have docked in less than an hour, but their captains had received orders to drop anchor off the coast -- and with good reason. The loading docks were full, so too were the storage tanks -- and even more importantly, the price per barrel did not offer much incentive to sell.

In describing this unusual situation, financial analysts speak of a "contango," which occurs when the spot price paid on delivery is less than the price offered by futures contracts (obtained by buying a barrel today and pledging to deliver at a future date). The opposite market condition is more common, because in general markets will offer better prices to buyers who are willing to pay in advance.

Really bad news on the health care front. After making the case for a public option, and doing it very well, Obama said this:

"We have not drawn lines in the sand other than that reform has to control costs and that it has to provide relief to people who don't have health insurance or are underinsured," Mr. Obama said. "Those are the broad parameters that we've discussed."

There he goes again, gratuitously making a big gift to the other side.

My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn't understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise -- his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions -- will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return -- and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh.

And now he's done it on a key component of health care reform. What was the point of signaling, right at this crucial moment, that he's willing to give away the public plan? Let alone doing it at the very moment that he was making such a good case for it?

Almost 7,000 British Airways staff have applied for voluntary pay cuts, including 800 who said they will work unpaid for up to a month, the airline announced today.

Of the 40,000-strong workforce, 6,940 employees had volunteered for unpaid leave, part-time working or unpaid work by 24 June, which the company said will save up to £10 million.

Chief executive Willie Walsh, who has already announced that he will work unpaid for the month of July, said: "This is a fantastic first response. I want to thank everyone who has volunteered to help us pull through this difficult period.

"This response clearly shows the significant difference individuals can make."

In 1969, national governments gave the International Monetary Fund (IMF) the right to create Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), often referred to as "paper gold." Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz describes SDRs as "a kind of global money, issued by the IMF, which countries agree to accept and exchange for dollars or other hard currencies"

For several years, Stiglitz has proposed that SDRs -- or a new "global greenback" along similar lines -- be used to supplement other reserve currencies. They would be issued for investment in developing countries and for "global public goods" like environmental projects, health initiatives, and humanitarian assistance. They would simultaneously counter global deflation and help countries with trade deficits to avoid ruinous devaluations and runs on their currencies.

In today's converging economic and environmental crises, why not issue "green SDRs" to help finance the global war on global warming? Surely nothing could better qualify as a "global public good" than saving the planet from ruinous climate change. And at the same time, green SDRs could provide some of the stimulus needed to move the global economy out of its deepening stagnation. A New Trust Fund

Since many countries have reservations about the IMF, and since it's not well-suited to run environmental programs, the IMF could issue the green SDRs to a global climate protection trust fund. The appropriate overseer for such a fund might well be the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). Its authoritative scientific committee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), should certainly play a major role in setting criteria and evaluating the results.

During Alan Greenspan's tenure at the helm of the Federal Reserve, he was often accused of using monetary policy to target asset markets so as to keep the party going. In short, Alan Greenspan was seen by many, including myself, as the bubble blower-in-chief. All of this came to an end with the very hard landing we have experienced after the global housing bubble.

However, despite the economy being in tatters and debt deflation looming as a threat, many asset markets have zoomed ahead. The cause: easy money in the U.S. and elsewhere. In the U.S., we have zero percent rates with Ben Bernanke at the helm. So, naturally, you should ask yourself: Does Ben Bernanke blow bubbles too?

To get at an answer to that question, I want to highlight a recent post on MoneyWeek called "The next big investment bubble - green energy." In this article, research from James Montier of SocGen about investor attitudes in bubbles is quite enlightening.

   James Montier at Societe Generale is a specialist in 'behavioural finance'. This basically takes psychology and applies it to the field of investment and economics.

    As someone who's studied psychology in the past, I'd be the first to admit that it's a pretty 'soft' science compared to something like physics, for example. But compared to the pseudo-science that is economics, it's positively respectable.

Published in June 24th, 2009   Posted by Cassander in Debtwatch

Economic historians Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O'Rourke are using empirical data to compare this downturn to the Great Depression. I'll be referring to and adding to their comparison in the next Debtwatch (which will be published late next week, before the RBA's July meeting), but the research is so good that it deserves to be highlighted now.

Their conclusion is compelling:

To summarise: the world is currently undergoing an economic shock every bit as big as the Great Depression shock of 1929-30. Looking just at the US leads one to overlook how alarming the current situation is even in comparison with 1929-30.

Click here to see the full post;  below I simply link to some of the figures.

Thousands of American troops are being poured into southern Afghanistan to break the "stalemate" in the region, the senior British commander in the country said today.

General Jim Dutton, deputy commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, denied that the British forces based in Helmand province in the south had been fighting a "losing campaign" against the Taliban.

But he acknowledged that "neither side could progress much" with the present force levels.

"In order to break that stalemate, to increase the capacity, the decision was made to bring many more forces into the south," he said in an interview with the BBC.

His acknowledgement that US reinforcements were needed to defeat the Taliban is likely to lead to further criticism that the Government failed to commit sufficient forces to the campaign.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is to meet with Barack Obama in what will be her first trip to the US since Obama took office. Iran, climate change and the global recession are expected to be on the agenda. 

Merkel is scheduled to arrive in Washington for a two day visit which will include meetings with both US President Barack Obama and Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The agenda of the talks is expected to be dominated by the recent developments in Iran. German government sources said there was close correlation with the US position relating to Iran's post-election protests.

Both Berlin and Washington have called upon Tehran to stop using violence against protestors. The German government has demanded a recount of the votes in the disputed elections that saw hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad return to power.

Western countries have in turn been strongly criticized by Iran for meddling in internal affairs.

The inauguration of the first ever A320 to be assembled outside Europe was a big step for Chinese aviation and a milestone in a market much coveted by the West. To such an extent that in France, Germany and Britain, tempers have been frayed.

Fine weather, a packed house, and VIPs everywhere -- it was a perfect setting for the ceremony to present the first Airbus A320 assembled in the only EADS factory outside Europe. China still holds the promise of undreamed of opportunities, and Airbus has found a springboard for an aviation market that remains dynamic, in spite of the financial crisis. Nine months after its official opening, 1,000 guests gathered in a hangar at the factory in Tianjin to see its first completed plane delivered to the Sino-European leasing company, Dragon Aviation. The aircraft will shortly enter into service for Sichuan Airlines on regular flights between Chengdu, Beijing and Shanghai.

Nationalistic trumpet blowing

By all accounts, the new production facility will be good for China. "We will establish a strong future for the Chinese aviation industry with the help of the Chinese aviation market," announced Airbus CEO, Germany's Thomas Enders. Completed on tight schedule in just over a year, the assembly plant at Tianjin (which is 115 kilometres east of Beijing) was officially opened in September 2008. Built to seal a deal for a record order of 150 planes, which was signed in Beijing at the end of 2005, it will also play a key role in establishing what Enders terms "a long-term strategic position." Today, Airbus has 40% of the Boeing-dominated Chinese aviation market, which is experiencing double-digit growth -- and it has its sights set on 50%.

Why is Britain conniving at the evil work of the US's secret site in Afghanistan where rendered prisoners are routinely abused?

The BBC's revelations about prisoner abuse at the US prison at Bagram airforce base in Afghanistan are the latest in a long line of revelations about abuse at US prisons around the world.

President Obama told us that this sort of thing has stopped. Well, it hasn't.

Sadly, the Obama administration is up to the former administration's familiar tricks, attempting to block the world from the truth. In April, a federal judge in Washington DC ordered that prisoners in Bagram should be allowed counsel, and the right to be heard in court; the Obama administration refused to comply, and appealed the judgment. People being beaten up in Bagram should, apparently, grin and bear it.

The US is spending $50m on a new prison for Bagram, housing more than 1,000 people - to add to the 600 who are already there. Of these, many (including all those in the recent Washington case) were not originally captured in Afghanistan at all, but in other countries. The US then rendered them into Afghanistan.

Iran protest leader Mir Hossein Mousavi says he holds those behind alleged "rigged" elections responsible for bloodshed during recent protests.

In a defiant statement on his website, he called for future protests to be in a way which would not "create tension."

He complained of "complete" restrictions on his access to people and a crackdown on his media group.

A BBC correspondent in Tehran says the statement is a direct challenge to Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

WASHINGTON -- Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles.

The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers' copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity.

Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country.

Lyn Finelli, a flu surveillance official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, voiced the estimate at a vaccine advisory meeting Thursday in Atlanta.

The estimate is based on mathematical modeling. Nearly 28,000 U.S. cases have been reported to the CDC, accounting for roughly half the world's cases. The U.S. count includes 3,065 hospitalizations and 127 deaths.

surreal

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

At least 1 million Americans have now contracted the novel H1N1 influenza, according to mathematical models prepared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while data from the field indicates that the virus is continuing to spread even though the normal flu season is over and that an increasing proportion of victims are being hospitalized.

Meanwhile, the virus is continuing its rapid spread through the Southern Hemisphere, infecting increasing numbers of people and at least one pig.

Nearly 28,000 laboratory-confirmed U.S. cases of the virus, also known as swine flu, have been reported to the CDC, almost half of the more than 56,000 cases globally reported to the World Health Organization.

But Lyn Finelli, a flu surveillance official with CDC, told a vaccine advisory committee meeting in Atlanta today that standard models of viral spread indicate that many times that number have been infected. Although 1 million seems like a high number, between 15 million and 60 million Americans are infected by the influenza virus during a normal flu season.

At least 3,065 of those infected in this country have been hospitalized and 127 have died.

While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed - yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine.

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies - and, for today, they have won.

Here's the story of how it happened - and how we all need to pick up this fight. Earlier this year, Peru's right-wing President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 per cent of his country's swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon's trees: "There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle."

There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia's plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn't bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?

Wallabies snacking in opium poppy fields are getting "high as a kite" and hopping around creating crop circles.

Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legally-grown opium for the pharmaceutical market.

Tasmania attorney-general Lara Giddings told a budget hearing yesterday that she recently read about the wallabies in a brief on the state's large poppy industry.

She said: "We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles.

Storing CO2 underground was supposed to be a cure-all for Germany's heavily coal-reliant power supply. But many are skeptical of the technology, and this week, a law designed to regulate carbon sequestration derailed amid bickering in Berlin.

Anyone who plans to travel to the North Sea resort island of Sylt in early July can expect to get stuck in long traffic jams. Just in time for the Saturday changeover in vacation condos, environmental activists plan to block a highway that leads to the train station where vacationers' cars are loaded onto a train that travels across a causeway to Sylt. But their goal is not that of keeping vehicles off the island.

 An engineer at a CO2 sequestration test site near Berlin. Instead, the activists want to draw the public's attention to the plans of electric utility RWE, which intends to ship carbon dioxide (CO2) from a power plant near Cologne through a pipeline to the North Sea coast, where it will compress the greenhouse gas into sequestration sites hundreds of meters below the surface. The gas will be stored there for thousands of years, preventing it from escaping into the atmosphere. The way RWE sees things, the protests are counter to the lofty goals of climate protection.

Appealing to the fun side of Northwest beer enthusiasts, Full Sail Brewing is launching a bold bid to expand its successful Session brand with a dark lager.

Session already stands out on the shelf or at the pub thanks to its 11-ounce bottle that makes older folks smile with fond memories of Olympia stubbies and makes younger drinkers feel as if they're not running with the herd.

"Beer is a fun product," says Full Sail founder and CEO Irene Firmat, "and people shouldn't be put off if they aren't up to a beer with a lot of bitterness and malt."

Russia's energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria's state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture.

The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria.

Analysts say the move could further strengthen Russia's role in supplying natural gas to Europe.

Recordings from the former US President's ill-fated second term reveal his private views on everything from abortion to the Jews and beautiful women

Nixon addicts everywhere are not to be disturbed as they devour one more delicacy served up by the National Archives: 150 more hours of secretly taped conversations from the White House in early 1973 packed with fresh tidbits from the often angry synapses of the late, disgraced president's mind.

The latest instalment of Nixonalia, held back until now in part because the poor quality of the under-the-table recordings, is unlikely to change history's perception of the 37th president. Rather, it will re-enforce the national memory of a hard-boiled leader prone to blasphemy, bursts of impatience and views on modern society - notably here on abortion, Jews and women - that were, well, not quite modern.

It was a day after the Supreme Court legalised abortion in its Roe vs Wade ruling, and Mr Nixon wonders aloud about wisdom of the judgement with his senior aide Charles Colson. He worries that abortion "breaks the family" and its legalisation could encourage "permissiveness". On the other hand, he offers: "There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape."

It's standard practice for nightclubs to enforce dress codes, banning T-shirts, sneakers or hats. But in Kansas City, Mo., a new entertainment district has established some pretty strict rules that some say discriminate against young African-Americans and Latinos. And now the city is trying to encourage business development downtown, while ensuring patrons' civil rights. <...>

... "You can't put a major attraction like that right next to the center of the African-American community and expect them to feel comfortable restricting what they wear, and only what they wear, really." <...>

Cordish Vice President Zed Smith says they adopted the dress codes on the advice of police.

"We had two specific goals in mind -- public safety and decorum," Smith says. "It has absolutely nothing to do with race." <...>

Brian Bass is a contributing editor to Nightclub & Bar Magazine. He says dress codes are standard at nightclubs -- they help bouncers keep troublemakers out.

"[Because] without a dress code, then it certainly becomes a lot more sticky," Bass says. "You know when people are dressing up, there's some thought there that people will behave better than they do on a normal day as well."

Marcus McMiller disagrees. In September, he was turned away from Power and Light for wearing a chain with a cross on it, and long shorts.

"We have different styles in the way we dress; we have different styles in the way we wear our hair," McMiller says. "You know, so again it just comes back to, who are you trying to cater to with this dress code?" ...

The background is a campaign by a feminist activist group ("Bara bröst", translated into "Bare breasts" or "Just breasts") to get equal clothing rules by breaking them. This has led the municipality to revaluate the rules and - after failing to formulate a non-discriminatory basis for the rules  - the municipality opted to change the rules.

I somehow find it appropriate that this comes in the same week as the burqa discussion.

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