Customers of Microsoft's Windows 7 in the EU will have to install their own Web browsers after the US software giant said regulatory wrangling has prompted it to strip Internet Explorer from its new operating system. 

"We're committed to making Windows 7 available in Europe at the same time that it launches in the rest of the world, but we also must comply with European competition law as we launch the product," Microsoft deputy general counsel Dave Heiner said in a written release.

"Given the pending legal proceeding, we've decided that instead of including Internet Explorer in Windows 7 in Europe, we will offer it separately and on an easy-to-install basis to both computer manufacturers and users."

The US software giant says it still plans to roll out its next-generation operating system worldwide on October 22.

EUOBSERVER/BRUSSELS - A "Euro-metropole" - a new form of transnational civil administration is being established at the border of France and Belgium in a pilot project of what the EU aims to gradually develop into: a series of authorities with stronger regional, cross-border focuses.

"We are a bit of a pioneer in the EU," Stefaan de Clerck, vice-president of the body and Belgium's justice minister told EUobserver, "the first to to practice this new European structure for public authorities," Mr de Clerck said, who was mayor of his native town, Kortrijk, up until December, when he was appointed minister of justice.

Belgian justice minister Stefaan de Clerck is a promoter of regional cross-border co-operation

The Euro-metropole Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai established in January 2008 covers an area of over 3,500 square metres and two million inhabitants between the French city of Lille and the Belgian towns of Kortrijk in Flanders and Tournai in Wallonia.

Unlike other voluntary forms of regional co-operation, the Euro-metropole is established as a legal entity, allowing it to hire its own civil servants, the Belgian minister explained.

Greece will impose a tobacco ban in public places on July 1 in its third attempt in a decade to stamp out the habit in Europe's biggest-smoking nation, the health ministry said on Thursday.

Under the terms of a law voted a year ago, thousands of restaurants and bars over 70 square metres will have to build sealed-off smoking areas.

Establishments under that size must choose whether to accept smokers or go entirely tobacco-free, and those lighting up illegally will face fines up to 500 euros (£425).

"Our society is more ready than ever to embrace this," said Dimitris Avramopoulos, the health minister.

It is either the biggest smuggling operation in history -- or a fraud of equally impressive proportions. Italian customs officials stopped two men at the Swiss border carrying bonds worth $134 billion (95.8 billion euros).

Italian customs officers on the Swiss border often stop smugglers -- but not of this scale. Two Japanese citizens have been detained by Italian police in Chiasso on the Swiss-Italian border after being found with $134 billion of US bonds hidden in the base of their suitcase, according to a press statement by the Italian Guardia di Finanza.

Guardia di Finanza: Bonanza find. The two men, reported to be more than 50 years old, were traveling by train from Italy to Switzerland on June 3. Financial police at a control on the border found the documents tucked inside a closed section at the bottom of their suitcase, separate from their personal items. According to their statement, the men's luggage included 249 government bonds worth $500 million and 10 so-called Kennedy bonds, each worth a billion dollars.

But details of the case remain unclear: The Japanese embassy in Rome confirmed the arrest of the two men but the news agency Bloomberg reported on Friday that it was not yet established whether they were Japanese citizens.

France's Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot says the spread of swine flu across France is too moderate to justify raising the country's alert level, despite the World Health Organisation's decision to declare a global pandemic.

AFP - France will not follow the World Health Organisation's lead and raise its swine flu alert from a level five to six, the health minister said Thursday.
   
"With 73 registered cases of type A flu, France can remain at a level 5A," said Roselyne Bachelot, who was taking part in a forum on bioethics in the western city of Rennes.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Negotiations on Ireland's guarantees on the EU Lisbon Treaty are going down to the wire with still no text on the table exactly a week before EU leaders are supposed to sign up to them.

EU ambassadors were meant to gather Thursday (11 June) to have a special meeting on the matter but agreeing wording that does not make any other member state jittery but keeps Ireland's electorate happy is proving more difficult than first thought.

Workers' rights is proving to be a significant sticking point

Ireland is looking for special guarantees on ethical issues, tax sovereignty and its neutral status. It wants them signed off by EU leaders at their summit next week and a commitment made to make them binding as quickly as possible.

Paris intends to move ahead with sections of its `three strikes' law, stripping out its most controversial aspects following a ruling from France's Constitutional Court that the bill contravenes the holiest of French documents, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789.

Those aspects of the bill not struck down by the court "will be promulgated in the coming days", Agence France Presse is reporting, citing an unnamed government official.

A funeral wreath for the Hadopi legislation

The government's aim is to get the new agency envisaged in the bill, the Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet (HADOPI), or High Authority on Diffusion of Works of Art and the Protection of the Rights on the Internet (`Hadopi'), up and running as soon as possible while it decides its next move.

The law allows the Hadopi agency to cut off the internet access of users found to be repeatedly downloading copyright content without the permission of the owner. Internet cut-off would be the 'third strike' after downloaders had first been sent an warning email and then a letter in the post.

France and Germany are refusing to give EU commission president Jose Manuel Barroso full formal backing to become head of the institution for a second time at next week's summit, insisting the support should be political only.

The two leaders on Thursday (11 June) said that their backing for the Portuguese politician was "unambiguous" but not unconditional.

Mr Barroso (l) should present a clear programme, Mr Sarkozy (r) said.

"Important personnel and policy decisions must be taken immediately. That is why Germany and France support Jose Manuel Barroso," German chancellor Angela Merkel said at a joint press conference with French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris.

The French leader echoed these statements, but explained that France and Germany wanted "a political decision" on Mr Barroso's reappointment to be reached at the 18-19 June EU summit, not a "formal" one.

THE DUTCH branch of Libertas has appealed to Declan Ganley to pay them €350,000 they say they are owed to cover the costs of their European election campaign.

Libertas Spain has also expressed disappointment at the lack of financial support they got from the Libertas founder during the campaign, which saw the 14 Libertas parties across Europe pick up just a single seat in France.

"At this moment I have total bills of €350,000, which are in Declan's name. I am not personally responsible for them," said Eline van den Broek, the 28-year-old political scientist who led Libertas in the Netherlands.

Latvia's prime minister says that he has saved the country from bankruptcy.

Valdis Dombrovskis told public radio that the decision late on Thursday to cut 500m lats ($1bn; £607m) from the budget was "very difficult".

But the cuts were needed for the country to receive the next installment of its European Union bail-out loans.

The country agreed a 7.5bn euro ($10.5bn; £6.4bn) loan package in December, but must cut the budget deficit to receive the loans.

China's factory output growth rebounded in May alongside stronger expansion in credit and consumer spending, bolstering evidence that the world's third-largest economy is on the path to recovery.

Elizabeth Dalziel / AP

The figures, which round out a batch of monthly data that has mostly surprised on the upside, suggest that the government's huge stimulus spending and tax breaks to encourage purchases of everything from cars to home appliances are helping to offset continued weakness in exports.

The acceleration in industrial production growth, to 8.9 percent compared with 7.3 percent in April, beat economists' forecasts of a 7.5 percent rise but was in line with a figure reported by two Chinese newspapers earlier this week.

Retail sales grew by 15.2 percent in the year to May, also beating forecasts and up from 14.8 percent expansion in April.

Together with the rebound in new domestic-currency lending in May, to 664.5 billion yuan ($97.3 billion) compared with 592 billion yuan in April, the data paint a picture of an economy pulling up from a bottom.

PARIS -- There was more evidence Thursday that the United States economy might be stabilizing, if not rebounding, even as economic reports in Europe remained gloomy.

The American news -- showing slight growth in retail sales and a dip in first-time jobless claims, as well as rising stocks -- was not enough to end the disagreement between bulls and bears over how soon the economy would improve.

But the apparent divergence of fortunes between America and Europe highlighted the different approaches to solving the financial crisis, and why some economists say the more aggressive American strategy may be working better, at least for now.

It is a debate that is likely to be one of the issues dominating discussions when finance ministers from the eight largest economies meet in Italy this weekend.

Some private economists are even predicting that the American economy will resume growth in the fourth quarter, while Europe's economy is expected to remain in recession well into 2010, after contracting an estimated 4.2 percent this year compared with an expected 2.8 percent decline in the United States.

Managing financial instability in capitalistic economies
Reykjavik, Iceland   September 3rd- 5th, 2009  

Background

The financial and credit sectors have a great importance in our modern service-oriented economies. as the present credit crunch and financial market crash and the subsequent severe economic recession have pointed out. According to present mainstream approaches to economics, the financial and liability structure of the economy may influence aggregate economic activity and amplify business cycles. However, capitalistic economies are viewed as essentially stable and tending towards steady growth; and the investment-finance linkage is considered as an amplifying mechanism of shocks exogenous to the economy. A complementary strand of research emphasizes the role of the investment-finance link not just as a propagator of exogenous shocks but as the main source of financial instability and business cycles, i.e., during good times economic agents take excessive risks and lend and borrow too much, generating endogenous ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. Besides, recent developments in statistical equilibrium approaches to economics, alongside with the emergence of behavioural and agent-based models, have indicated the way to overcome the limitation of traditional equilibrium-based analytical models characterized by fully rational representative agents.

Aims and scope

The purpose of the workshop is twofold: to discuss new modelling paradigms in financial economics and to design new public intervention policies aimed to recover a capitalist economy from a deep recession caused by a credit crunch or a collapse in assets values. The Icelandic economy will be discussed as a case study.

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

    * Agent-based computational economics
    * Behavioural finance and economics
    * Economics of heterogeneous and interacting agents
    * Financial Keynesianism and financial fragility
    * Financial engineering
    * Econophysics
    * Endogenous and systemic risk management
    * Financial econometrics
    * Statistical equilibrium in economics

A final round table is foreseen in discuss new possible foundations to the science of economics. A related document, called Reykjavik manifesto, will be released.
Call for Papers:

Researchers are invited to submit a paper to the First International Workshop on Managing Financial Instability in Capitalistic Economies (MAFIN 09), to be held in Reykjavik (Iceland), September 3rd - 5th, 2009.

Q1 2009 Flow of Funds results show the housing sector ran a financial surplus or net saving position of $341b in the past quarter, while paying down $155b in household debt. Monthly consumer installment credit points to the same household sector deleveraging with credit cards and non-revolving loans. We believe professional investors may be underestimating the importance of household sector deleveraging this time around. We have never seen households retire debt like this, now in three of the past four quarters, over more than a half century of results reported in the Flow of Funds accounts.

Household debt can only be reduced by three actions. Households can default on debt, and the debt is written off. Households can sell assets to another sector, and use the proceeds to pay off debt. Or households can save money by spending less than their income flows, and use the saving to retire debt. The rise in household net saving suggests the third method is playing a key role in household debt deleveraging, and this has import implications for the profile of any prospective consumer spending recovery, even one backed by massive fiscal stimulus. We suspect working from the usual business cycle playbook will not be especially rewarding in such an environment.

Furthermore, if banks are sitting on excess reserves, are perceived to now have sufficient capital, and are reporting an increased willingness to lend (which makes sense given the slope of the yield curve and the associated net interest margins), while consumers are intent on net paying down debt, then banks may need to consider a new business model. Loan volumes to households are going nowhere. Alternatively, they can ride the yield curve like they did in 1991-3, but here they will need to buy and hold longer dated Treasuries if they wish to avoid capital losses as Treasury bond yields back up.

Nevertheless, ETF's on consumer discretionary stocks are up over 50% since the March 6th lows, and the ETF on banks are up over 100%. What do equity investors know that we may be missing?

Our beef with the equity market boils down to this: the widespread perception is that the old global growth model, dependent in no small part on the willingness of US consumers (and other consumers in the developed world) to deepen their deficit spending, can and will be revived. We would merely suggest with the level of household net worth to disposable income back to a level last seen in 1995 (before household deficit spending began), and with households extinguishing debt for the first time in over half a century, this assumption deserves to be questioned. Humpty Dumpty may not be able to be put together again.

According to just-released Federal Reserve data, U.S. household wealth fell by $1.3 trillion in the first quarter, blessedly less than the previous three months' $4.9 trillion loss, the biggest quarterly decline since such records started being kept all the way back in 1952. But it was the seventh straight quarter of declines, also a record for the series.

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And unlike pervious bear markets, such as after the tech-stock bust or the 1987 crash, Treasury securities didn't rally but lost value. Also in contrast to the bear markets of 1970s and early 1980s, when money markets provided reliable double-digit yields, cash either yielded nothing for safe T-bills or even lost value as money funds "broke the buck."

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As of the end of the second quarter, the wealth bubble that began to inflate in early 1990s had been deflated. The ratio of household net worth to personal disposable fell to 4.67 times, the lowest since the third quarter of 1992, near the end of the first George Bush's term.

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In the past, the hits to wealth were concentrated in equities, which were held mainly by the well-to-do. And they were cushioned by their real estate, private business holdings, fixed-income securities and ample cash. In the bubble, however, even the rich got into hock with multiple homes that they now can't afford to carry and can't unload. There are only so many potential buyers for multi-million-dollar manses in gated communities.

TEHRAN - During the past few weeks of the presidential campaign, the level of passion and enthusiasm shown by the voters reached an unprecedented level. Supporters of various camps gathered in the main squares and intersections of the capital and stayed way past midnight, honking their horns and chanting slogans supporting their candidates.

The campaigning officially stops at eight o'clock this morning. Now, voters will have to make their final decision by Friday. The director of the Election Campaign Headquarters, Kamran Daneshjou, declared that there will be 45,713 voting centers open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. all over the country.

Outside the country, 304 polling stations will be set up for voters. Thirty-two polling stations are being set up in the United States while the rest are being dispersed in 130 countries.

U.S. envoy Dennis Ross, in a new book he co-authored, raises the possibility of the use of military force against Iran should negotiations fail to head off Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Ross, who is leading the U.S. diplomatic effort to engage Iran on a series of issues, wrote "Myths, Illusions, and Peace - Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East" with David Makovsky, a former journalist who is a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The book, released on Thursday, is significant in that Ross, who led President Bill Clinton's Middle East diplomacy in the 1990s, has said little in public on Iran since he was named in February as a special adviser to handle the issue.

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The authors included a nuanced, 30-page chapter that lays out options for dealing with Iran, which has so far not responded to President Barack Obama's overtures for better relations, with elections there coming up on Friday.

With girls' schools being closed and attacks on their troops on the rise in Afghanistan, many Germans wonder whether the deployment of their armed forces in the Hinda Kush makes sense anymore. Still, the Taliban cannot be allowed to prevail in the region.

According to Colonel Georg Klein, the kind of yellow plastic containers you can buy at the store currently pose the greatest threat to German soldiers in Afghanistan. The canisters, with a capacity of about 10 liters (2.6 gallons), may have once contained motor oil or pesticide. But then someone filled them with nails and added explosive material and a fuse. The repurposed yellow canisters are now hidden by the roadside, waiting for Germans.

 German Bundeswehr army snipers in Kunduz: The Germans would also share some of the blame for the disasters that would unfold in the wake of a German withdrawal from Afghanistan. The colonel even has a film to illustrate his point. He is sitting with a group of visitors in the darkened conference room at the German field base in Kunduz, Afghanistan. His most important guest is Peter Struck, the head of the center-left Social Democratic Party's parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, and Germany's defense minister from July 2002 until November 2005. Struck has always been in favor of the deployment of German troops to Afghanistan, and he is the man who famously said: "Germany is also being defended at the Hindu Kush (mountains, in Afghanistan)." It's 2 p.m. on Thursday, June 4, and Struck is now in Afghanistan himself.

The colonel's film depicts one of the Bundeswehr's Fox armored personnel carriers, with a red cross on a white background painted onto its rear. The Fox, driving along Afghan road, is coincidentally being filmed by someone in a vehicle traveling behind it. Suddenly a yellow fireball appears to the left of the Fox, the image shifts and the picture goes black.

India has agreed to pull its troops out of inhabited areas of Kashmir for the first time in almost 20 years in one of its boldest moves to resolve the issue at the core of its dispute with Pakistan.

It has also agreed to review the hugely unpopular Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which has given the army and paramilitary troops freedom to arrest, kill, torture and destroy homes with impunity since 1990.

P Chidambaram, the Home Minister, announced the moves today on a visit to Kashmir designed in part to ease tensions after the alleged rape and murder of two Muslim women by security forces.

The announcement also coincided with a visit to Delhi by William Burns, the US Under Secretary of State, to persuade India to pull troops back from Pakistan's border and restart peace talks over Kashmir.

The United Nations wants a global climate change agreement in place by December. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with the US deputy climate change envoy Jonathan Pershing about the difficulties of reaching such a deal. The US and China, he claims, are making progress.

SPIEGEL: The US and China are responsible for 40 percent of global CO2 emissions. Should the two countries find a solution to global warming between themselves?

 With the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen rapidly approaching, the world is trying to agree on what to do about climate change. Jonathan Pershing: My impression from our talks in Beijing is that China does not want to reduce the global climate talks to US-Chinese talks, to a kind of G-2. Like us, they want this to be part of the UN process. There are tasks we can pursue bilaterally, but ultimately the whole world has to agree on the framework to combat climate change.

SPIEGEL: Did the talks in Beijing produce any tangible outcome?

Pershing: My impression is that China and the US are finding common ground. We didn't come home with a signed agreement but we understand much better what is important for the Chinese and why. For example, access to green technology is very important for China. Their concern is that the most energy-efficient technologies are still too expensive -- that's a concern we fully share. So we can work together to reduce costs associated with employing these new technologies. In particular, we will work together on carbon capture and storage so that CO2 isn't emitted into the atmosphere but stored in the ground. The US and China now share a great interest in energy efficiency and particularly in car efficiency. That's where we ican greatly ncrease our cooperation.

Space is about to get a bit crowded.

Seven shuttle astronauts will blast off from Florida on Saturday to join up with six colleagues already on the International Space Station (ISS).

The orbiting platform has never before had so many individuals moving around it at the same time.

The Endeavour ship is scheduled to lift off at 0717 local time (1117 GMT).

The flight-time to the ISS is just three days.

Now, with the focus in Washington on clean power, some dam agencies are starting to go green, embracing wind power and energy conservation. The most aggressive is the Bonneville Power Administration, whose power lines carry much of the electricity in the Pacific Northwest. The agency also provides a third of the region's power supply, drawn mostly from generators inside big dams.

The amount of wind power on the Bonneville transmission system quadrupled in the last three years and is expected to double again in another two. The turbines are making an electricity system with low carbon emissions even greener -- already, in Seattle, more than 90 percent of the power comes from renewable sources...

Environmental groups contend that the Bonneville Power Administration's shift to wind turbines buttresses their case for tearing down dams in the agency's territory, particularly four along the lower Snake River in Washington State that helped decimate one of North America's great runs of wild salmon.

Bonneville wants to keep all the dams, arguing that they not only provide cheap power but they also make an ideal complement to large-scale installation of wind power. When the wind slows and power production drops, the agency argues, it can compensate quickly by telling the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, which operate the dams, to release more water from reservoirs to turn the huge generators. When the wind picks up, dam operations can be slowed.

The dams help alleviate a need for natural-gas-fired power plants, which are used in other regions as a backup power source when the wind stops blowing, but which release carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming.

John Hildebrand, an animated 82-year-old wheat farmer, has allowed a Spanish developer, Iberdrola, to put wind turbines on his land in Wasco, not far from the Columbia River. Power from his turbines feeds into the Bonneville system.

He and his brother Gordon sat in the front row when Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Bonneville Dam in 1937, before the region even had public power -- so they have seen the future of energy, twice.

"All we had is sky out there," John Hildebrand said, looking out toward the tall structures twirling high above his rolling land. "Now I've got turbines."

Moldavian writer Vitalie Ciobanu remembers his grandmother's love story with an Italian soldier during World War 2, and sees a metaphor for relations between Europe and Moldavia.

One of our family stories that has always fascinated me concerns a regiment of Italian soldiers (part of the German eastern offensive) who arrived in my home town of Floresti in the summer of 1942. It was a tale that had little to do with the classic war stories of the Soviet films of my childhood. What we heard of the Italians was always marked by a detached philosophical tone. As children, in a remote part of the world, this account of the forces of history on our doorstep inspired a fear of the unknown, but also a sense of curiosity.

It was a curiosity that always led to embarrassed words between my grandparents. There was a tension there that I did not understand, the source of which was only revealed many years later. The billeting of the Italians in Floresti did not achieve the epic dimensions of Captain Corelli -- a film shot in 2001, based on the novel by Louis de Bernières. But my grandparents' village did have something of the austerity of the Ionian island of Cephalonia occupied by the Italian troops in the film. Then there was the romance of my grandmother, Ioana, the village school teacher, with a young lieutenant Vincenzo, from Massa-Carrare -- the famous marble carvers' region of Tuscany.

Polish education officials have provoked anger by releasing a nursery rhyme book that includes verses saying Germans smell and gipsies sell children.

The book has been approved for use in school with the publisher saying those that have complained should not be so sensitive.

It follows the release earlier this year of a maths book that asks kids to work out an equation for saving as many Christians from a sinking ship as possible - while drowning as many Turks as they can.

Bosnian state television has broadcast several video clips it says show war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic living freely in Serbia despite genocide charges filed against him by the Hague-based UN tribunal. 

The airing on Sarajevo-based FTV television, and on the Internet video-sharing website YouTube, may have seriously jeopardized Serbia's chances of joining the European Union.

 

The airing on Bosnian television coincided with an official visit by Serbia's foreign and defense ministers on Thursday. On Monday, EU foreign ministers are due to discuss Belgrade's progress in cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal.

 

Serbia's minister in charge of cooperation with the tribunal, Rasim Ljajic, told journalists at a hastily-arranged news conference that the footage was old.

After narrow escape, fate catches up with Italian traveler

A woman who dodged death when she and her husband narrowly missed Air France Flight 447 before it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 aboard, was killed in a car accident just over a week later. 

Photos: French Plane Downed in Ocean Storm View Slideshow

An Air France airliner carrying 228 people from Brazil to Paris crashed into the Atlantic after a possible lightning strike.

Johanna Ganthaler a retiree from the Bolzano-Bozen province, was on vacation in Brazil with her husband Kurt when the pair miraculously missed the doomed flight to Paris. But their luck ran out on an Austrian road earlier this week when their car swerved into the path of an oncoming truck outside the town of Kufstein, the Times (U.K.) reported. 

Kurt Ganthaler was badly hurt in the accident.

It seems just like a short while ago that ET began, yet it is 4 years.

Please share your thoughts on and experiences with ET. :-)

UNEMPLOYED workers who take advantage of an Assembly Government-backed training initiative aimed at combating the recession are likely to find their benefits cut, it has been revealed.

Last night, serious concern was expressed about the lack of joined-up government that sees Welsh workers penalised for joining courses under the ReAct scheme...

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But even though workers have had their applications to join ReAct courses authorised by Careers Wales, some have been told that if they take up the offer of a place, they will find themselves disqualified from receiving state benefits.