Bulgarians have begun voting in parliamentary elections.

The main issues in the run-up to the polls were the impact of the global economic crisis and the Socialist-led cabinet's efforts to fight corruption.

Opinion polls give an opposition party, Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, a comfortable lead over the Socialists.

Silvio Berlusconi's domestic troubles have caused a serious headache for planners of next week's G8 summit.

Normally the wife of the Prime Minister would be the host for a series of events for the spouses of the leaders -- but Mr Berlusconi's better half has filed for divorce and so Clio Napolitano, the wife of the Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano, has been asked to step into the breach.

She will take Michelle Obama and Sarah Brown and the others on tours of the earthquake region around L'Aquila, host meals for them, and perform other duties expected of the hostess. "The wife was not available, the other women in his life appear to be less than suitable, the president's wife has stepped up to the plate," a summit insider said. "Protocol will be observed."

.....

Mrs Napolitano, at least, is likely to prove a stimulating hostess. A former labour lawyer from a left-wing family who married Mr Napolitano in 1959, she is noted for her strong social conscience and down-to-earth sense of humour. She once overheard a teenage girl exclaim, on seeing her husband: "It's the President, I feel faint!" She observed, drily: "Calm down my dear, he's hardly Brad Pitt."

A close call. Sarkozy's party only got 4% of the votes in the first round, and called to vote for the left against the National Front.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Russia will seek assurances from President Barack Obama tomorrow that Washington will cease pressing for the former Soviet states of Georgia and Ukraine to join Nato -- a policy that was aggressively pursued by George W Bush.

On his first visit to Russia as president, Obama is due to hold nine hours of talks with President Dmitry Medvedev and share a breakfast with prime minister Vladimir Putin. Russian sources say both men will warn him about a risk of repeating last year's war in Georgia.

Russia strongly opposes Georgia and Ukraine joining Nato as this would extend the alliance's reach to its borders. Obama is said to be less enthusiastic than Bush about putting pressure on them to join. Russian military analysts say that in return, Moscow could make concessions over Iran, such as banning future arms sales to the Islamic republic and agreeing more robust UN sanctions to help curb its nuclear programme.

Russia has signalled its readiness to open supply routes for American forces fighting in Afghanistan. The deal could be signed this week and would see up to 10 flights a day crossing Russia, so boosting the war against the Taliban. Both sides are keen for the meetings to "reset" relations between their countries -- at their lowest ebb since the end of the cold war, in the wake of the Georgia conflict.

The new centre-right Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria party (GERB) of Sofia mayor Boyko Borisov won Bulgaria's general elections with 39.7 percent support, official results showed, with 99.88 percent of the ballots counted.

...

The outgoing Socialists of Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev suffered a stinging defeat, garnering only 17.72 percent support. They had won the last election in 2005 with 33.98 percent.

The Turkish minority MRF party, a junior coalition partner in the last government, won 14.47 percent. The ultra nationalist Ataka party came fourth with 9.37 percent.

Two other right-wing parties also entered parliament -- the Blue Coalition with 6.73 percent and the newly-formed Order, Lawfulness, Justice party with 4.13 percent.

...

The centist NMSP party of former king Simeon Saxe Coburg, that formed a cabinet in 2001 and was the third partner in the outgoing cabinet, failed to pass the four-percent threshold to enter the legislature. It had come out second in 2005 with 21.83 percent.

The Bank of England's monetary policy committee (MPC) is expected to extend its programme of quantitative easing (QE) by £25 billion, though there are doubts whether it will take action beyond that.

The Bank has so far committed £125 billion of QE in an attempt to boost the money supply, mainly through purchases in the markets of gilts and other assets. It has permission from the Treasury for a further £25 billion of such purchases, which analysts expect to be announced this week. Beyond this, it would have to seek new approval from the Treasury, which indemnifies the Bank against losses on the scheme.

Lagos -- Three African countries yesterday signed an accord to build a $10 billion trans-Saharan gas pipeline linking vast reserves in Nigeria to Europe.

The project would convey gas destined for the European market more than 4,000 kilometres (2,485 miles) from the Niger Delta in Nigeria via Niger and Algeria.

Gordon Brown has come under fresh pressure over the public finances after John Hutton, the former defence secretary, said that voters expect "honesty" about the need for cuts in Government spending. &nbsp

Mr Brown is trying to frame the next election as a choice between "Tory cuts" and "Labour investment", despite predictions from independent economists that Labour's huge Government borrowing will mean that whoever wins the next election will have no choice but to cut spending.

[Murdoch Alert]

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Pranab Mukherjee, Finance Secretary, has said the country needs to invite foreign supermarket chains, insurance, defence and engineering companies to help modernise agriculture, financial services and transport infrastructure.

His proposed reforms would shake up the country's strictly regulated labour market, allowing companies to increase working hours and make staff redundant without government approval.

The annual Economic Survey he presented to parliament has recommended private companies be allowed to provide passenger train services on the country's nationalised railways, privatisation of the coal industry, lifting of price controls on petrol, and allow foreign supermarkets to set up stores.

Ministers are particularly keen to boost rural incomes and encourage investment to stop so much Indian farm produce rotting on the road to market.

[Torygraph Alert]

Exporters squeezed by euro strength

The strength of the euro is forcing European companies to step up cost-cutting to compete with rivals from the US and elsewhere amid fears that it could slow their recovery when demand picks up.

The euro, which has risen to $1.40 from $1.25 in March, was making life "difficult", Pier Francesco Guarguaglini, chief executive of Italian defence group Finmeccanica, told the Financial Times.

"We have to survive in this situation . . . We have to reduce costs and increase efficiency."

Economists are concerned that, even when demand picks up, the strong currency will penalise European groups, many of them reliant on exports.

"It is going to weigh on the recovery," Julian Callow, chief European economist at Barclays Capital, said.

Private equity set to become a weapon of mass destruction

The world of private equity seems eerily becalmed. Logic suggests a lot of companies owned by private equity must be on the point of expiring under the weight of their debt. But the bankruptcy rate, though rising, is still historically low.

It is as if the insanity of the bubble years had never happened. So when will the storm finally break?

Any time now, it seems. Last year, the default rate in European leveraged loans - in effect, private equity debt - was under 5 per cent. So far this year, it is about 8 per cent. But for the full year, according to industry specialists, it could be a record 15 per cent.

Repeat that next year, as is expected, and a third of European companies bought in the bubble years will have gone bust - many of them in the UK.

As a weapon of corporate mass destruction, private equity's place in history seems assured.

During his interview with ABC's This Week on Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden made what will be a much-discussed admission in the week ahead. The Obama administration, he said, had "misread" the extent of the economic catastrophe it inherited.

"The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy," declared Biden. "The figures we worked off of in January were the consensus figures and most of the blue chip indexes out there."

"We misread how bad the economy was, but we are now only about 120 days into the recovery package," the vice president said later in the interview. "The truth of the matter was, no one anticipated, no one expected that that recovery package would in fact be in a position at this point of having to distribute the bulk of money."

bold mine

All of this is par for the course; the WSJ editorial page has been like this for 35 years. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: what do these people really believe?

I mean, they're not stupid -- life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they're not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth -- one that is, in effect, told only to Inner Party members, while the Outer Party makes do with prolefeed.

The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?

Whenever you encounter "research" from the Heritage Foundation, you always have to bear in mind that Heritage isn't really a think tank; it's a propaganda shop. Everything it says is automatically suspect.

Greg Mankiw forgets this rule, and approvingly (yes, it's obvious he approves -no wiggling out) links to a recent Heritage attempt to explain away Medicare's low administrative costs

...

You should always remember:

1. Don't believe anything Heritage says.

2. If you find what Heritage is saying plausible, remember rule 1.

Tensions are rising in Honduras ahead of a promised expected return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

Mr Zelaya, who was removed by troops a week ago, says he will fly back to the Central American nation later today.

But the new government says it will arrest him if he comes back and the capital's archbishop has warned of a possible "bloodbath".

His promised return comes a day after the top regional body suspended Honduras over the crisis.

Supporters of the ousted leader were said to be gathering in the capital, Tegucigalpa, in order to meet him at the airport.

"I imagine there'll be blood and I'm ready for it. We're not afraid," supporter Marisol Velasquez told AFP.

The BBC's Stephen Gibbs, in the capital, says there are growing fears of violence.

A signal has been detected from the flight data recorders of the Yemenia airliner that crashed in the Indian Ocean on 30 June, officials say.

Comoran and French investigators say the signal was picked up during an underwater search.

They gave no indication when the flight recorders might be recovered.

The Airbus 310, going to the Comoros Islands from Yemen, came down in bad weather with 153 on board. A 12-year-old girl was the only survivor.

Two British soldiers have been killed in separate attacks in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence has said.

A soldier from 2nd Battalion The Mercian Regiment was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade, the MoD said.

A soldier from The Light Dragoons was killed in an explosion. Both families have been informed about the attacks, which happened on Saturday.

The deaths in Helmand province bring the total number of UK personnel killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 173.

A group of clerics in Iran has called Iran's presidential vote invalid, contradicting official results.

The pro-reform group's statement pits it against the top legislative body, which last week formally endorsed the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On Saturday, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said that post-election events had caused bitterness.

Britain said one of two UK embassy employees detained for "inciting protests" would be released.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in the aftermath of the poll to protest at what they alleged was a fraudulent election.

The protests died down after the authorities deployed lethal force, killing at least 20 demonstrators. More than 1,000 were arrested.

A bomb blast outside a Roman Catholic cathedral in the southern Philippines has killed five people and injured at least 26 others, officials say.

The military immediately blamed the attack in the town of Cotabato, Mindanao, on a militant group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

The group has been fighting to establish a separate Islamic state.

One of its leaders denied any involvement in the attack, saying there was no religious conflict in the south.

The bomb went off outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception as people were leaving Mass, the army said.

Police told AFP news agency that two of the dead were soldiers guarding the cathedral.

One of America's most unconventional politicians, she left the country reeling on Friday evening by declaring that she is resigning her office this month and deriding the "superficial political blood sport."

Almost a year after bursting on to the national scene as John McCain's presidential running mate, Mrs Palin, 45, has now made an unpredictable leap into the unknown. Speculation is at fever pitch that she will seek her party's nomination for the 2012 presidential race.  

Mrs Palin offered few clues about her future plans and said she was quitting in order to protect her children, especially her Down syndrome infant Trig, who she complained had become the butt of adult humour. She also said she wants to escape the legal cost of repeated ethics investigations which have hampered her ability to govern.

Some of the last, frank thoughts and confessions of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq have been revealed in transcripts of a remarkable series of interviews with the former dictator's interrogators.

Under questioning by the FBI during 20 formal interviews and at least five "casual conversations" over a four-month period from February to May 2004 after his capture by US troops in December 2003, Saddam said he had made a mistake in destroying Baghdad's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) without independent verification from UN inspectors. He also told FBI interrogators that claims he had links with Osama bin Laden were incorrect.

A teenage girl shot while helping her father in their family's small furniture and appliance store died yesterday, becoming the fifth victim of a suspected serial killer terrorizing a small South Carolina community, authorities said.

Abby Tyler, 15, died at a Spartanburg hospital after fighting for her life for two days, Cherokee County Coroner Dennis Fowler said.

Tyler was wounded and her father was killed Thursday as they worked to close the Tyler Home Center near downtown Gaffney.

County Sheriff Bill Blanton said investigators believe the killings are linked and the search is on for a suspected male serial killer. An 83-year-old mother and her daughter were shot to death Wednesday, and a 63-year-old peach farmer was found dead at his home a week ago.

Blanton said all the victims were shot, but he would not say how the deaths were linked. The shootings all occurred within about 10 miles (16 kilometers) of each other in Cherokee County, a rural community of 54,000 people set amid peach orchards and farms some 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad on Saturday said that Jews would enjoy freedom and full civil rights in a future Palestinian state, according to a report in the Aspen Daily News.

"Jews, to the extent they choose to stay and live in the state of Palestine, will enjoy those rights and certainly will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the state of Israel," Fayyad said in response to a question from former CIA director James Woolsey at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival.

The death toll has risen to 140 following Sunday night's riot in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the regional government said Monday.

    Fifty-seven dead bodies were retrieved from Urumqi's streets and lanes, while all the others were confirmed dead at hospitals, said Liu Yaohua, the region's police chief, at a press conference midday Monday.

    He said the death toll would still be climbing.

The acquisition of farmland from the world's poor by rich countries and international corporations is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe's farmland targeted in the last six months, reports from UN officials and agriculture experts say.

Today it emerged that world leaders are to discuss what is being described as "land grabbing" or "neo-colonialism" at the G8 meeting next week. A spokesman for Japan's ministry of foreign affairs confirmed that it would raise the issue: "We feel there should be a code of conduct for investment in farmland that will be a win-win situation for both producing and consuming countries," he said.

America's 4 July bonfires served a dual purpose yesterday. They burned the wood of trees destroyed by a trio of bugs that are devastating parts of the nation's forests.

With 750 million acres of forests in the United States, the scale of the problem is massive. Since 1999, the country has lost, on average, 1 per cent of its tree cover per year. This means these small insects have killed about 10 per cent of all US forests in 10 years.

The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, has defended traditional biblical teachings on homosexuality and said the Church should not be "rolled over by culture".

Dr Nazir-Ali spoke as tens of thousands of people, including Sarah Brown, the Prime Minister's wife, joined the annual Pride London march to celebrate homosexual culture. A war of words broke out between Labour and the Conservatives over the issue of homosexuality last week after a minister accused the Tories of having a "deep strain of homophobia" running through the party.

The bishop's controversial comments will reignite the battle over homosexuality in the Church of England ahead of what promises to be a divisive week for Anglicanism.

Tomorrow, a new coalition of evangelical and Anglo-Catholic parishes, backed by Dr Nazir-Ali, will get under way, which critics have claimed is an attempt to create a "church within the church".

At first I thought this was a joke: But this article on Beliefnet [via Jezebel]  that discusses how women should fight societal acceptance of gay marriage, because homosexuality will become as normal as it was in ancient Rome, appears to be legit. Apparently, if gay marriage becomes the norm,  all men will turn gay, because they are better lovers!

That's right ladies: 'the historical precedent suggests that tomorrow's women will have a harder time finding and holding on to suitable men,' who will leave us for 'smooth-skinned boys'.  

Interesting thread that follows...

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A woman whose talent for maths helped foil German V2 bombs in World War II has published her life story.

Eileen Younghusband, 87, from the Vale of Glamorgan, received the coded message that the first V2 rocket had been launched against Britain.

She had the secret task while in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF).

She said: "It was our information that gave air-raid warnings, it told the Royal Observer Corps where the aircraft were coming in."

Mrs Younghusband added: "The girls who worked on that section, many of them now nearly 90 years of age, have never felt that the work they did has been recognised, so this is one of the reasons that made me write this book."

BT and Phorm's stormy relationships looks to be over, with BT announcing it is not to adopt the controversial web-tracking system.

While the trial with BT ended back in December, Phorm had been hoping that something significant would come out of the link-up.

This is a huge blow to Phorm, who has been hoping big-name companies would adopt its WebWise tracking service that monitors what you look at on the internet and feeds you targeted advertising.

The UK foreign secretary has defended the next head of MI6 after details of his private life were removed from social networking site Facebook.

David Miliband denied security had been compromised after the wife of Sir John Sawers posted family photographs and details of their children and home.

Mr Miliband told the BBC: "You know he wears a Speedo swimsuit. That's not a state secret."

Some Tories said the disclosure was damaging and Lib Dems want an inquiry.

However, other senior Conservatives have played down the risks.

Sir John is the UK's ambassador to the United Nations and is due to take up his new post in November.

The Mail on Sunday said information published on Facebook included the couple's friendships with senior diplomats and actors, including Moir Leslie from BBC Radio 4's The Archers.

A Turkish game show is challenging atheists to reassess their views and win "the biggest prize ever".

Penitents Compete will bring together an Islamic imam, a Jewish rabbi, a Buddhist monk and a Greek Orthodox priest seeking to convert the atheists.

Thirty chimpanzees have escaped from their enclosure at a zoo in Cheshire, forcing it to be closed.

The animals found their way into a nearby keepers' area, where their food is usually prepared, at about 1240 BST, Chester Zoo said.

A spokeswoman for the zoo said the animals had been contained and the zoo was closed as a security measure.

How the animals came to leave their quarters is not known but they were not in an area accessed by the public.

Sarah Jones, from Chester, was among the visitors at the zoo when the animals left their enclosure.

"My two young boys had only just gone into the chimpanzee house when we heard terrifying loud noises," she said.

Still applies.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

Melanchthon will recognize the prestidigitator ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

MICHAEL Jackson fans are in a frenzy over a possible sighting of the star's GHOST at Neverland.

An eerie shadow resembling Jacko's figure appeared on a wall in the singer's former home during a live television programme last week - and walked across the corridor. It moved quickly from left to right before disappearing.