EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Despite the EU's headline grabbing efforts at combating climate change, a coalition of ten green pressure groups has given the outgoing commission a failing grade for its efforts on the environment over the past five years.

The 'Green 10', a group of the ten main environmental NGOs operating in Brussels, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the WWF, say that from 2004 to 2009, though there have been some bright spots, for the most part, the Barroso commission was "worse than the [previous] Prodi commission".

The environment commissioner, Greece's Stavros Dimas, emerged as an unlikely hero

"The EU is still on the road to environmental degradation," Jorgo Riss of Greenpeace, told reporters on Wednesday (10 June) when presenting the report.

In an examination of 12 policy areas including climate, biodiversity, transport, agriculture and health, the groups gave the Barroso commission a rating of 4.4 out of ten.

France's highest legal authority has blocked the central part of a controversial internet piracy law that would deny offenders web access, in a humiliating blow for President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The law, known by the acronym Hadopi, set up a new state agency with the power to cut off internet access for up to a year for people who download music and film illegally.

The legislation, one of the toughest in the world to date, won final approval on May 13 after a heated battle in parliament.

Who will be Germany's new EU commissioner in Brussels? The grand coalition is divided, with both the CDU and SPD backing their own politicians for the job. Now Chancellor Angela Merkel is throwing her weight behind Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, according to media reports.

After their strong showing in the European elections, Germany's conservative Christian Democrats are pushing for a CDU politician to become Germany's new European Commissioner. Now Chancellor Angela Merkel is backing Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble to represent Germany in the EU, according to a report in Thursday's edition of the newspaper Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung.

 Merkel's man in Europe? Information from sources close to Merkel suggested the chancellor is backing her fellow Christian Democrat in keeping with remarks made after her party's European election win that she wanted a CDU politician to assume the post. The paper dubbed him "the hot candidate." The Chancellery declined to comment on the report, while a spokesman for the Interior Ministry described the report as "pure fiction."

Britain's highest court has ruled against the government over the use of secret evidence to justify imposing home curfews on people accused of "terrorism".

Nine judges unanimously upheld an appeal by three men on Wednesday, who argued it was against their human rights to be subject to "control orders" - a form of house arrest based on secret evidence they are not privy to and cannot challenge in court.

The cases of the three men, two foreign nationals and a joint British-Libyan national, will now return to the country's high court, a lower court than the House of Lords which made the ruling, for further consideration.

The decision does not overturn the use of control orders, introduced by the government in 2005 and which allow "terrorism" suspects to be kept under curfew for up to 16 hours a day, but it does call into question a central element of the policy.

Britain "obviously" remains committed to joining the euro following the currency's "success" in helping its members to weather the economic crisis, Lord Mandelson said.

The newly promoted First Secretary of State, speaking in Berlin, hailed the euro as a saviour that had brought stability to the European Union during financial turmoil.

"It is perfectly clear that the euro has been a great success in anchoring its eurozone members during this financial crisis," he said.

Die Sache war der Botschaft ernst genug, um bei den SBB direkt zu intervenieren - um nicht zu sagen zu protestieren. «Wir haben der polnischen Botschaft vor einigen Wochen mit einem Brief geantwortet», sagt SBB-Sprecher Roland Binz. Das abgebildete Sujet bezeichnet er als «Wasserball in abstraktem Weltkugel-Design». «Abstrakt» kann man dies gewiss nennen - wenn selbst grosse Länder wie Polen in der Versenkung verschwinden.

«Die Produktverantwortlichen haben bei der Sujetauswahl bedauerlicherweise die historischen Hintergründe nicht beachtet», ergänzt SBB-Sprecher Binz: «So war ihnen leider nicht bewusst, dass dieser abstrakte Wasserball die Gefühle polnischer Staatsangehöriger oder solcher anderer Länder verletzten könnte. Das war nie unsere Absicht. Es tut uns sehr leid, wenn dem so war.»

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU leaders meeting for a summit in Brussels next week must appoint a new head of the European Commission and not delay the decision, said the current head of the institution and only candidate for the job, Jose Manuel Barroso.

Mr Barroso, whose mandate expires at the end of October, said EU leaders should take a decision on the next commission president based on the bloc's current treaty, the Nice Treaty.

French Green leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit has called Mr Barroso a political "chameleon"

"It's up to the council [EU member states] and the European parliament to decide, of course based on the treaty, and the treaty in force at the moment is the Treaty of Nice," he said at a press conference in Brussels.

"The European parliament was elected according to the Treaty of Nice," he stressed.

But some member states, notably France and Germany, are reportedly favourable to delaying the decision and giving a simple "political backing" to Mr Barroso next week.

Leading European politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a dual citizen of Germany and France, argues in an interview that national political leaders are responsible for the miserable turnout in last week's election. The Green Party veteran says its time to create a real European election.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Many environmentalist parties gained seats in the European Parliament elections. France's Green Party, for whom you were a candidate this time, scored over 16 percent of the vote and has become France's second-biggest party in the European Parliament -- at least by a hair.

Cohn-Bendit: We have become greener, but not green enough. Nevertheless, more Europeans than ever before now like our proposals for the environmental restructuring of our society. That is a reason for hope.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Like chocolate and mustard, or orange juice and toothpaste, the various flavours of far right in the new European Parliament just don't seem to go together and are already having trouble cooking up a united bloc in the chamber, despite the gains the extremists made in the European elections on the weekend.

Far right on the march, but maybe not so much in the European Parliament

The `softer' far-right parties so far seem more interested in jumping aboard the UK Tories' proposed European Conservatives grouping than cobbling together a nationalist bloc, but it is an open question whether the attraction will be requited.

The European elections on the weekend delivered a moderate advance of eight seats on the number of MEPs in the last parliament, eliciting fears that they might club together in a political grouping in the parliament, a move that would open a tap to thousands of euros in EU funds.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Blears: My resignation 'regrets'

Ex communities secretary Hazel Blears says she regrets "enormously" the timing of her shock resignation - just before local and European elections.

The Salford MP said she thought as two other ministers had announced they would stand down, she could do so without sparking a "huge firestorm".

"In the end, that judgement was wrong," she told the Manchester Evening News.

She also said she regretted mocking the PM's YouTube video and wearing a badge saying "rocking the boat" as she quit.

Her resignation as communities secretary was seen as a deliberate attempt to destabilise Gordon Brown on the eve of key elections.

This proves that:

a. Blears has the political instincts of a turnip.

b. Now that Gordo isn't going anywhere, she wants a cabinet job again.

The European Central Bank announced plans to lend €3 billion to Sweden's central bank on Wednesday (10 June) as the country comes to terms with its heavy exposure to the crisis-hit Baltic region and in particular Latvia.

The loan - part of a swap agreement whereby the Riksbank can borrow up to €10 billion from the ECB in exchange for Swedish kronor - will help the Swedish central bank in turn to provide greater support to the country's private banks that currently face extensive loan losses.

Swedish banks lent extensively to the private sector in the Baltic states in recent years

"As a substantial part of the Swedish banks' funding is in foreign currency, the Riksbank needs to have a sufficiently large foreign-exchange reserve to be able to meet a potential need from the banks," the Riksbank said in a statement.

The ECB move is also intended to shore up confidence in the Baltic area where a collapse of Swedish banks - the main lenders in the region - could prove disastrous.

Thanks to its fiscal prudence, Slovakia's economy is relatively healthy. But troubled neighbors could keep foreign investors from rewarding it.

Jan Rollo, CEO of Slovenska Sporitelna, Slovakia's largest bank, has a problem you don't encounter too much these days. While banks worldwide struggle to raise capital, Slovenksa Sporitelna, a unit of Vienna-based Erste Group, has more money in deposits than it does in outstanding loans. "We're long on deposits," Rollo says with a wry smile in his eighth-floor office on the outskirts of Bratislava.

 Slovakia's fiscal discipline has helped the country weather the economic storm. The bank's headquarters overlook a small lake where a handful of bathers could be seen sunning themselves on a balmy day recently. The placid scene was not misleading. In fact, Slovakia is an island of relative calm in a troubled region. Growth has fallen sharply in line with all of Europe, but the country, as well as neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic, are in relatively good shape from a financial point of view.

Slovakia's government balance sheet, for example, is healthy compared to its European neighbors. The public budget deficit equals 28 percent of gross domestic product, less than half of Germany's debt ratio and a pittance compared with Italy's, where the national debt exceeds a year's total economic output. Unlike Hungarians or Romanians, the Slovaks did not take out large numbers of mortgages and loans denominated in Swiss francs or other foreign currencies, which then became ruinously expensive to repay when their domestic currencies plunged. Slovakia's current account deficit was about 6 percent in 2008, compared with nearly 25 percent in Latvia.

EU ministers have agreed on a framework for improving financial supervision but the 27 member states remain split over what powers new regulators should have.

The financial crisis exposed gaps in cross-border supervision, which meant institutional problems in one country had a knock-on effect on neighbours.

But next week EU leaders will have to consider how much power they want new EU-wide supervisory bodies to have.

The UK is wary of EU regulators encroaching on the City of London.

UK Chancellor Alastair Darling said he was happy with the EU plans "in many respects". But he opposed a proposal to give EU regulators powers over national taxation.

Germany said no, so the tiny island nation of Palau jumped into the void and said it would accept up to 17 Uighurs held in Guantanamo. Palau President Johnson Toribiong told SPIEGEL ONLINE that it was "spurious" to claim money was the reason.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Germany has spent weeks discussing whether it should accept Uighur detainees who are set to be released from Guantanamo. Now Palau has offered to take them. How did that come about?

 In November, Johnson Toribiong became the seventh elected president of Palau, a small group of islands located in the Pacific, about 800 kilometers east of the Philippines. Toribiong, 63, was born in the Airai area of Palau. A nephew of Palauan founding father Roman Tmetuchl, Toribiong was educated in the United States and obtained an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1969, and his J.D. and masters in law from the University of Washington Law School. Johnson Toribiong: I received a personal request from US President Barack Obama, through his envoy Daniel Fried, to help the US resolve this thorny political issue. Based on our long friendship with the US, we agreed to make a humanitarian gesture and offer a helping hand. We are honored and proud to be able to help the US with this issue, which has implications for the US justice system and human rights.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Like President Obama, you attended law school in the United States. How did your background as an attorney inform your understanding of the Uighur issue?

Toribiong: The Uighurs are ethnic Chinese who have been struggling to create their own nation and they were picked up in Afghanistan and brought to the Guantánamo Bay detention center on the suspicion that they were members of the Taliban or terrorists. Subsequently, the appropriate authorities in the United States determined that they were not enemy combatants. The only other place they could be returned is their homeland, where they would face persecution and perhaps execution.

The Obama administration has proposed a 25 percent cut in the research and development budget for one of the most promising renewable energy sources in the Northwest - wave and tidal power.

At the same time the White House sought an 82 percent increase in solar power research funding, a 36 percent increase in wind power funding and a 14 percent increase in geothermal funding, it sought to cut wave and tidal research funding from $40 million to $30 million.

The decision to cut funding for tidal and wave power came only weeks after the Interior Department suggested that wave power could emerge as the leading offshore energy source in the Northwest and at a time when efforts to develop tidal power in Puget Sound are attracting national and international attention.

A CNN headline, reporting Obama's plans for his June 4 Cairo address, read `Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.' Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted.

Keeping just to Israel-Palestine--there was nothing substantive about anything else--Obama called on Arabs and Israelis not to `point fingers' at each other or to `see this conflict only from one side or the other.' There is, however, a third side, that of the United States, which has played a decisive role in sustaining the current conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change or even be considered.

Those familiar with the history will rationally conclude, then, that Obama will continue in the path of unilateral U.S. rejectionism.

Obama once again praised the Arab Peace Initiative, saying only that Arabs should see it as "an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities." How should the Obama administration see it?

Israeli tanks have crossed the border into the southeast Gaza Strip after the regime's gunboats opened fire at Palestinian fishing boats off the coast across the strip.

According to witnesses and local sources, four tanks provided cover for six bulldozers to roll hundreds meters deep into the strip on Tuesday and flattened the cultivated fields in al-Shouka neighborhood in eastern Rafah city.

Meanwhile, Israeli gunboats opened fire at Palestinian fishing boats off the coast in northern and southern Gaza Strip, Xinhua reported.

The incursion came a day after Israeli forces backed by a helicopter gunship killed four Palestinians at the border with the southern Gaza Strip.

There are five states competing for control of the Artic's oil and gas reserves, with Russia leading the pack. The US looks likely to remain on the sidelines, but what opportunities will the natural resource grab present for Canada, Norway and Greenland?

In the game Monopoly, players try to amass as much property as possible. The course of the game quickly becomes clear -- whoever owns Boardwalk is on a winning streak and whoever owns Baltic Avenue is sure to end up empty-ended. Money, meanwhile, is the sole means to reach the game's goal. In real life, however, things aren't always as simple as a board game.

In the case of the Arctic region, the major players use scientific data and the somewhat vague rules of international law. Increasing their territory means a gain in prestige for these countries, and serves to provide energy security as well. It's also a chance for them to take responsibility for the environmental risks in the region that will eventually affect all countries. But which of the nations around the polar region will emerge as the winner of this Arctic Monopoly game? Is there even such a thing as a winner here?

A vixen has stolen more than 120 shoes from doorsteps in the German town of Föhren over the last year, amassing a collection that would impress even Imelda Marcos. Little bite marks on the laces suggest they're intended as toys for her cubs.

For more than a year, the people of Föhren, a small town in the wooded Eifel hills of western Germany, wondered who was going around stealing shoes from their doorsteps and garden terraces at night. Well over 100 muddy hiking shoes, wet Wellingtons, steel-capped workman's boots, flipflops and old slippers went missing.

Imelda probably looks something like this. The mystery has now been solved after a forestry worker discovered an Imelda Marcos-scale collection of footwear in a fox's den in nearby woods.

The bushy-tailed culprit, believed to be a vixen with a family of cubs, is still at large, and locals have two explanations for her kleptomania. Either she amassed them as toys for her children, or she simply likes collecting shoes, or both. So far 120 stolen shoes have been retrieved.

PARIS -- Every president of France's Fifth Republic has had his Pharaonic project, by which he believes he will leave his mark on the capital and French culture.

François Mitterrand, a fierce Socialist known as the Sphinx, left the new French national library and, to continue the Ozymandias theme, the controversial glass pyramid in the Louvre. Jacques Chirac left the Musée du Quai Branly, an anthropological museum, with an argumentative design by the French architect Jean Nouvel.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, no slouch, wants nothing more than to leave behind "Le Grand Paris." In more than a year of discussions, there have been some spectacular ideas and drawings by 10 teams of famous architects, drawn by the president's invitation to reimagine Paris as a city integrated with its suburbs and responsible in its environmental footprint.

Antoine Grumbach imagines Paris stretching along the Seine to Le Havre and the sea. Roland Castro, whose team included a sociologist and a philosopher, proposed a 250-acre park circled by skyscrapers in La Courneuve, one of the grimmest of the poor Paris suburbs. Richard Rogers plans rooftop gardens and parks built above railway lines. Yves Lion sees Paris sprouting with fields and forests, with citizens able to cultivate their own vegetable patches, an unfortunate similarity to the necessities of Soviet cities.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - It's the season for getting the trunks out of the cupboard or buying a new bikini and heading to the beach, and Europeans and tourists that visit the continent can take a plunge knowing that most bathing waters in the European Union are safe for a swim.

After a slight dip in the number of places safe to take a dip in 2007, the cleanliness of sea sides, river banks and watering holes was back on track and improving in 2008 - the latest year for which there are figures.

100 percent of Greece's coastal waters meet mandatory standards and stricter voluntary standards

The uptick is in line with a two-decade long trend of otherwise steadily improving waters, according to the European Commission's annual publication of a report on bathing water quality, put together by the European Environment Agency.

The report is based on results supplied by authorities in each member state, of tests for the presence of faecal bacteria, residues of petrol-based mineral oils, detergent, toxic acids such as phenol and overall water colour. Other tests can investigate the presence of salmonella in the water, and its acidity.

The World Health Organization told its member nations it was declaring a swine flu pandemic today - the first global flu epidemic in 41 years - as infections climbed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere.

In a statement sent to member countries, WHO said it decided to raise the pandemic warning level from phase 5 to 6 -- its highest alert -- after holding an emergency meeting on swine flu with its experts.

The long-awaited pandemic decision is scientific confirmation that a new flu virus has emerged and is quickly circling the globe. It will trigger drugmakers to speed up production of a swine flu vaccine and prompt governments to devote more money toward efforts to contain the virus.

"At this early stage, the pandemic can be characterized globally as being moderate in severity," WHO said in the statement, urging nations not to close borders or restrict travel and trade. "(We) remain in close dialogue with influenza vaccine manufacturers."

The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it's easy to forget, for example, that the two big server farms that keep Yahoo's family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today's online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you're reading them.

holy cow! is that true, anyone know?

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

A nuclear leak, which could have caused a major disaster, was only averted by a chance decision to wash some dirty clothes, according to a newly obtained official report.

On the morning of Sunday 7 January 2007, one of the contractors working on decommissioning the Sizewell A nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast was in the laundry room when he noticed cooling water leaking on to the floor from the pond that holds the reactor's highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel.

By the time of the next scheduled safety patrol, the pond level would have dipped far enough to expose the nuclear fuel rods - potentially causing them to overheat and catch fire sending a plume of radioactive contamination along the coastline.

The great gusting winds of the American midwest - and possibly the hopes for the most promising clean energy source - may be dying, in part because of climate change, according to a new report.

Areas of the midwest have seen a 10% decline in average wind speed over the past decade. Some places - such as Minnesota - have seen a jump in the number of days where there was no wind at all.

Three centuries after his death, the philosopher is enjoying a new vogue in The Netherlands, which is finally paying tribute to its native son with a series of monuments, websites, conferences and exhibitions. Everyone seems to cherry-pick his work and put their own slant on it - which might not have thrilled the philosopher himself.

The two monuments for Baruch de Spinoza in Amsterdam are poles apart: a massive statue by Nicolas Dings near city hall and an interactive wood construction by artist Thomas Hirshhorn in Bijlmer [a multicultural suburb]. Everyman's a Spinozist these days.

Spinoza even found himself flung into the fray about immigration and the multicultural society after the fallout from 9/11 and the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. With two cardinal concepts centre-stage: tolerance and freedom of expression. In the course of this controversy, some said the overtolerance extended to Muslims was jeopardising freedom of expression. The left retorted that neoconservatives were exploiting the principle of freedom of thought to undermine tolerance, a fundamental value of democratic society. It was a dialogue of the deaf and not exactly a rekindling of Spinoza's ideas.

And yet Spinoza (1632-1677) has seen a striking renascence of late. Last year British polymath George Steiner recounted how he had looked in vain for monuments to Spinoza in Holland. No-one could tell him where to go. He was utterly appalled at the Dutch indifference to their greatest philosopher. Macedonian writer Goce Smilevski was similarly shocked. The young people he asked about Spinoza replied, "Never heard of the guy." Smilevski's advice: invest in philosophy classes at Dutch schools!

One hundred and fifty years after his death, the Austrian Empire's ambassador in chief remains politically incorrect. With the Lisbon treaty, however, the twenty-seven member states are recreating 1814's Congress of Vienna that gave rise to modern Europe, argues Czech daily Lidové Noviny.

Do you fear that once they ratify the Lisbon Treaty, the big nations will get along well amongst themselves and discount the small ones? That under their baton Europe will be reduced to a "concert of great powers"? Today we remember Prince Metternich, the man who demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of such a policy.

It is quite astonishing that we do not celebrate a Metternich year, although 2009 was proclaimed the Year of Darwin. We celebrate Darwin for two reasons: he was born in 1809 and published its magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. Those two years were watersheds in Metternich's career: he became Austria's Foreign Minister in 1809 (de facto, executive head, and later State Chancellor), and he died on June 11, 1859. He was lain to rest in the family tomb at Plasy, in western Bohemia.

Veronica Lario, the wife of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, has broken her silence over their acrimonious public divorce, saying that nobody knows the "true story" behind the break-up and that she and her marriage have been "brutally besmirched".

In her first public statement since she asked for a divorce at the end of April, Ms Lario said in a brief letter to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, published on its front page, that "during these last weeks I have watched in silence without reacting in the media to the brutal besmirching of myself, my dignity and the story of my marriage".

She added "What is certain is that the truth of the relationship between myself and my husband has not even been touched on, nor has the reason for which I had to turn to the press to communicate with him. It is also certain that I have always loved him, and that I have lived my life at the service of my marriage and my family."

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been raising eyebrows by telling one of the country's most famous artists how to paint better.

Visiting 79-year-old artist Ilya Glazunov, Mr Putin stopped in front of a large painting of a medieval knight.

"The sword is too short," he is reputed to have said. "It's only good enough for cutting sausage."

Not wishing to displease his powerful guest, Mr Glazunov immediately agreed to correct his mistake.

An article by Rupert, too!  Where has he been recently?  Seems like he disappeared for a while.

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.