EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Despite an intensive lobbying effort on the part of European Jewish groups, the European Parliament has endorsed the Goldstone report, the UN's official investigation into the bombardment of the Gaza Strip in January 2009, a report that accuses Israel of war crimes and calls for the prosecution of Israeli officials in The Hague.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Wednesday (10 March) sought to draw a line under her stormy first 100 days in office by giving a wide-ranging speech to MEPs outlining her vision for future European foreign policy.

The keenly-anticipated address emphasized the importance of the EU pulling together on foreign policy or facing the alternative of other powers - notably Asian powers - taking a leading role in world affairs instead.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have warned that member states could opt out of EU foreign policy unless they get a fair share of power in its new diplomatic corps.

"The eventual lack of [member states'] involvement in shaping and implementing policies could lead to the loss of their interest in EU foreign policy and could even result in a widening gap between EU and national policies," the group of four countries said in a policy paper circulated in Brussels late last month.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The EU commission on Tuesday (9 March) proposed to widen an existing "European heritage" label for sites related to the bloc's common history to all 27 member states

"The European heritage label will help increase public awareness of our common yet diverse cultural heritage and stimulate cultural tourism," EU culture commissioner Androulla Vassiliou said at a press conference.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The EU's next ambassador to Washington has defended the controversial manner in which his appointment was made.

Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday (9 March) at an event organised by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, a German think tank, Joao Vale de Almeida said his surprise nomination for the post was due to the "need to appoint" somebody to head up the EU's most important delegation as soon as possible.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Defendants' rights to proper translation when involved in a criminal case in an EU member state whose language they do not speak are facing yet another delay due to an inter-institutional power struggle.

The cause is noble: ensuring minimum common EU standards for defendants when they do not speak the language of the country.

The US has added Greece to a list of 35 countries whose citizens can enter the country without a visa, in a decision coinciding with the Greek leader's visit to Washington. Twenty three EU countries are now on the list, but not Poland, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria.

A spokesman for Italian PM Berlusconi has said that EU law on granting "subsidiary protection status" lay behind a decision to deny protection to the family of murdered Russian spy Litvinenko. The family has alleged that Mr Berlusconi's friendship with Russian PM Putin is the real reason.

The centre-right EPP group in the EU parliament has blocked a draft resolution demanding implementation of the "Goldstone report" accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza due to Jewish lobbying, Haaretz reports. A new resolution urging Hamas and Israel to investigate abuses is likely to pass instead.

French Prime Minister François Fillon on Tuesday night denied any tension with President Nicolas Sarkozy, after a government source leaked a rumour to French media that their relationship was undergoing a new phase of mutual "irritation".

"The truth is that the duo the president of the Republic and I have formed for almost three years is one that surprises, and I would almost say bothers, people", Fillon said in an interview on TV channel France 2's nightly news bulletin.

Fillon said he was on "stable" terms with Sarkozy, and noted that they had "succeeded in building a relationship of trust".

LONDON (Reuters) - TheLabour party will remain the largest in parliament, but fall short of an overall majority after an election expected on May 6, an opinion poll showed Wednesday.

The daily poll in the Sun newspaper indicated the Conservatives would win 36 percent of votes at the election, down three percentage points from Tuesday's poll.

Just weeks ahead of regional elections - which Silvio Berlusconi himself called an "important national test" of his support - the Italian Prime Minister's People of Freedom (PDL) party finds itself in a state of chaos.

After a court confirmed that the PDL had missed a deadline to submit its list for the regional assembly in Lazio, Italy's third largest region, Berlusconi held a press conference on Wednesday during which he attacked and blamed the opposition for the pre-election fiasco.

"The behavior of the left has been and remains anti-democratic and wretched, while we have behaved in the opposite way," a pugnacious and visibly fatigued Berlusconi told reporters.

Remember the "ricin plot" where there was no ricin, where the recipe which Kamel Bourgass had could not have produced ricin and where his plan, to smear it on doorknobs and car door handles wouldn't have killed anyone as the poison needs to be either injected, ingested or inhaled to work? It was the first real "terror plot" post-9/11 in this country, came two months before the invasion of Iraq (in the context of which it was used by Colin Powell during his now notorious presentation to the UN), and the press coverage was massive in both response and in its hyperbole, the government doing its best to help it along by not bothering to inform anyone until Bourgass' trial was over that there had been no ricin after all.

You would then expect a case where ricin actually was found to provoke a similar media response. After all, while ricin is not the most deadly of potential "biological/chemical" warfare poisons, it is still usually deadly when used "properly", as in the assassination of Georgi Markov, a cold war precursor to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

The US and Russia are currently negotiating a successor to the START nuclear disarmament treaty. But continued American plans for a missile shield in Europe have proven to be a major stumbling block. President Obama's vision of a nuclear-free world is in danger.

There is good news on the disarmament front: US President Barack Obama is fine-tuning a new nuclear strategy. As White House officials said last week during a meeting between Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, he plans to reach a decision by April. The new strategy could include the scrapping of "thousands of nuclear weapons," and even a commitment by the United States not to develop any new nuclear weapons.

In addition, what may be the final round of Russian-American talks on the further reduction of strategic offensive weapons started on Tuesday in Geneva. The successor for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is "almost 100 percent complete," says a Moscow negotiator. "We have agreed on the number of launch systems and the warheads, as well as the inspection and destruction of the nuclear payloads. All problems have been solved."

Fishsubsidy.org today publishes a list of 42 convictions of fishing vessel owners that have also received EU subsidies under the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The study, which focuses on two major EU fishing nations, Spain and France, involves matching records of court convictions with data on EU fisheries subsidy payments. Between them, the 36 law-breaking vessels received 13,510,418 euro in EU subsidies between 1994 and 2006.

Illegal fishing contributes to the overfishing of valuable fish stocks, many of which are at dangerously depleted levels. While previous studies have shown that many EU fisheries subsidies have directly contributed to the overfishing of fish stocks, this is the first study that draws the link between subsidies and illegal fishing. While there is no obligation to take criminal behaviour into account when deciding which vessels should get subsidies, EU Member States are free to consider this information. There is little evidence that any of them are.

Medvedev's administration is in charge of creating the new party, the Moscow-based newspaper reported today, without saying where it got the information. Anatoly Chubais, first deputy prime minister under the late President Boris Yeltsin, may become a leader of the as yet unnamed party, Trud said.

Vladislav Surkov, Medvedev's first deputy chief of staff and chief political strategist, gave his backing to the creation of the party, Trud said. The party will contest national parliamentary elections in 2011, the newspaper said.

Putin's United Russia controls 70 percent of seats in the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, and dominates government at all levels from the exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean.

Chubais, the chief architect of Russia's state-asset selloff in the 1990s, now heads state-run Russian Nanotechnologies Corp. In 2004, he quit as co-chairman of the opposition Union of Right Forces party.

Medvedev's new party will be business-oriented, Trud said. The president has made modernization of Russia's oil-dependent economy a priority and repeatedly called for an overhaul of the political system he inherited from Putin, his predecessor in the Kremlin.

Ochen' interesno....


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

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A European Commission proposal on greater economic co-ordination and member state surveillance is set to explore the sensitive topics of greater tax and budgetary co-ordination.

Speaking on the basis of anonymity, an EU official with an understanding of next month's communication told EUobserver the document's aim was to "stimulate debate" and to "correct the imbalance of what was not agreed at Maastricht."

French leader Sarkozy in a meeting with UK opposition leader Cameron on Friday will warn that if the Tories get into power, they risk losing French co-operation on energy, defence and the economy unless they adopt a more pro-European stance, The Guardian reports.

AFP - The idea of a European-style International Monetary Fund to help debt-stricken eurozone members should be examined "rapidly," French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Wednesday.
   
"We think this is an idea that should be looked at by experts rapidly in order to create the means with which the eurozone and its members can have at their disposal to respond to financial tensions that threaten monetary stability," Fillon said in a speech at Berlin's Humboldt University.
   
"But this form of support is only acceptable if the states confronted by financial difficulties make in parallel all necessary efforts to fix their structural problems and balance their books."

LONDON (Reuters) - Big domestic banks need to raise as much as 750 billion pounds in the next three years to support balance sheets and liquidity as the government prepares to wind down support for the sector, analysts said.

The banks have shown they can stand on their own feet in the bond markets over the past year, raising billions of euros without any government backing.

Reforming the expensive German health-care system is a key objective for the German government. One of Health Minister Philipp Roesler's proposals is to tackle the relationship between the pharmaceuticals industry and Germany's numerous health insurers.

At present, drugs firms can set their own prices for new and potentially crucial, patented medication, which the insurers can either take or leave. The system is unique in Europe, making the German market particularly lucrative for the industry.

Roesler now wants to introduce compulsory price negotiations between industry and health insurers.

A trip back to the financial world this week has crystallised a feeling that's been nagging at me for a few days: the Conservatives are in trouble on the economy.

After Gordon Brown's appearance at Reuters' Canary Wharf base on Thursday, I spoke to a City type who also attended a similar event last week with George Osborne, David Cameron and Kenneth Clarke last week. For all the undoubted anxieties in the City about Labour's (lack of) fiscal plans and all the doubts about Mr Brown's own agenda, my financial friend was clear about which presentation he found more credible.

"Whatever you think of it, Brown looks like he's offering a clear message. I can't say that for the Conservatives," he said. It was not an unusual view in such company.

Rewind to last autumn. Mr Osborne was on top form, effectively setting the economic agenda, just has he did in 2007 on inheritance tax. His public sector pay freeze plan, outlined at the Conservative conference, was a calculated gamble, but one that paid off. The pay freezes for senior public servants confirmed by the Government week are a result of Mr Osborne's October gambit.

More than a year ago I coined a phrase that seems to have made its way into the econolexicon; writing about how cutbacks at the state and local level would tend to undermine fiscal stimulus at the federal level, I said that we had fifty Herbert Hoovers.

But I was wrong. Via Mark Thoma, we have at least fifty-one -- because we have to add David Broder to the list.

Before I get there, let's note that fears about fiscal drag at the state and local level have, in fact, proved justified. Aizenman and Pasricha have a fairly definitive analysis; you can get the quick and dirty version just by looking at government purchases of goods and services:

Larry Summers and I are tight. I mean we're tighter than a fox butt-fucking a gnat. Not that I know the guy; never seen him and wouldn't know it if we passed on the street. What I mean is that he and I have an ideological lip lock that can't be broken. Somewhere in an alternate universe our brains merged and became one thrombulating organ oozing the black bile of creative thought. The only difference between the two of us is that he gets paid for shoveling his bullshit and I don't.

Here is an example of Larry's poetry, written when he was with the World Bank:

Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries}?"

This is Larry at this best. His reasoning is impeccable. The way he sees it, poor people value economic harm less than rich people. Look at it this way: a dust mote on a dung heap is barely noticed; a dust mote on the highly-polished lens of a telescope screams for attention. Why should a poor country with its open sewage ditches, filthy streets, rampant diseases, garbage rotting beneath the tropical sun and factories relocated to escape the environmental regulations and labor costs of the developed countries care about another dollop of pollution?

Gated communities keep the riff-raff out, and it's no different with rich countries. Turds don't rise, they drop.

Larry's brilliance is his ability to quantify misery and in doing so sanitize it and make it acceptable to polite society. In Europe it costs a corporation $1,000 a ton to dump its crap. In Somalia, the same ton of shit costs $2.50 to dump.

Do the math.

The nice thing about numbers is they never bleed, never get sick and never die. They look so sweet as they dance across a screen or arrange themselves in neat columns on a spreadsheet. (Spreadsheets are always printed on thick paper so the blood of the victims can't soak through.)

But, let me tell you the real reason I love Larry. The man is a with-it anachronism, a relic of an age passing into oblivion. He is the product of an era so awash in a sea of funny money that it was possible to float any ideology, no matter how absurd, such as the divinity of "The Invisible Hand." Well, the sea is drained and no more, but Larry is still rowing away on the seabed to a cadence called by his coxswain Tim.

REUTERS -  U.S. Vice President Joe Biden publicly condemned on Wednesday Israel's new plan to build 1,600 homes for Jewish settlers, saying on a West Bank visit the project undermined Washington's peace efforts.   "It is incumbent on both parties to build an atmosphere of support for negotiations and not to complicate them," Biden said in a media statement alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

REUTERS - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates traded barbs on Wednesday during briefly overlapping visits to Afghanistan, where Washington has troops at war but Tehran has growing clout.   Ahmadinejad, who arrived as Gates was wrapping up a three-day visit, told a news conference alongside Afghan President Hamid Karzai that U.S. and Western troops would never defeat terrorism by waging war in Afghanistan.   Gates said earlier in the week Iran was playing a "double game" in Afghanistan by being friendly to the government while trying to undermine the United States. He said on Wednesday he had passed those concerns on to Karzai.

AFP - New laws released by Myanmar's junta mean the opposition National League for Democracy must expel its detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi ahead of elections this year, a party spokesman said Wednesday.
  
Details of the Political Parties Registration Act published in state newspapers state that anyone serving a prison term cannot be a party member. Suu Kyi is serving an 18-month suspended sentence under house arrest.

AFP- Two US missile strikes on Wednesday killed at least 12 militants in Pakistan's tribal region near the Afghan border, officials said.
   
The first strike took place at 8:00 pm (1500 GMT) in Mizar Madakhel village, some 50 kilometres (31 miles) west of Miranshah, the main town in North Waziristan, followed swiftly by a second attack.
   
Eight militants were killed when the drone fired four missiles, hitting a vehicle and a compound which were being used by the insurgents, a senior security official in the area said.

AFP - Sunni Islam's top cleric, Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, died on Wednesday in Saudi Arabia of a heart attack suffered while boarding a plane, Egyptian officials and state media said.
   
Tantawi, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar -- Sunni Islam's highest seat of learning -- was in Riyadh to attend the King Faisal awards ceremony, the official MENA news agency said.
   
Tantawi was boarding a plane early Wednesday morning when he suffered severe pain and fell on the stairs, Egyptian television said.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Initial results from Iraq's national election are likely to be released by Thursday, Iraqi and U.N. officials said on Wednesday, as further signs emerged of a strong showing for Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The Iraqi National Alliance (INA), a largely Shi'ite group that is challenging Maliki's bid to win a second term, told a news conference that according to their informal tallies the prime minister was ahead in at least 10 of Iraq's 18 provinces.

Brussels is against member states exporting their nuclear waste to countries outside the EU or to store it in joint sites, energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger said, as the commission is working on a set of common safety standards for this dangerous material.

"It is the duty of national politicians to do their homework," Mr Oettinger told Financial Times Deutschland in an interview published on Wednesday (10 March). The German commissioner warned against common storage sites, as well as exporting the radioactive material outside the EU, for instance Russia.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Union's climate chief on Tuesday (9 March) told the European Parliament she wants the bloc to forge ahead with cuts in carbon emissions of 30 percent - despite competing powers having yet to make similar pledges - in an attempt to win back EU leadership on the issue, believed to have been lost at the UN climate summit in her native Copenhagen last December.

Factories close to polluted areas could be forced to help clean them up if there is "plausible evidence" of a link, the EU court has ruled. The case concerns alleged pollution by Italian energy firms ERG, Eni and Syndial in the Priolo-Augusta-Melilli area in southern Sicily.

The government unveils plans for a high-speed rail network linking London, Birmingham and other major cities across the UK with 250mph trains.

It is likely to be 2025 at the earliest before the first stage of the plan - from London to Birmingham - is completed.

The second stage is expected to extend from Birmingham through cities such as Manchester and Leeds and up to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Announcing the plans today, Transport Secretary Lord Adonis said the London to Birmingham section of the route would run from Euston station in London.

He also backed the the creation of two high-speed forks - one going through the East Midlands to Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle, the other travelling to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow and Edinburgh.

There would also be a Crossrail Interchange station near Paddington, providing a link with Heathrow.

REUTERS - Irish police arrested seven people on Tuesday in connection with an alleged plot to murder a Swedish cartoonist over a drawing depicting the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog. The police said they had detained four men and three women in the southern counties of Waterford and Cork as part of an investigation into a "conspiracy to murder an individual in another jurisdiction".   They declined to give details of the suspects except to say their ages ranged from mid 20s to late 40s. National broadcaster RTE said the detainees were originally from Morocco and Yemen.  

The credibility of France's controversial anti-piracy law (known in France as "Hadopi") has taken a dive after a study revealed that its main effects were to educate illegal downloaders in new ways of viewing copyrighted material for free.

Marsouin, a Brittany-based network of specialist research centres which interviewed 2,000 Internet users, yesterday published a damning report claiming that Hadopi is divorced from reality, overly repressive and has the opposite effects of those it sets out to achieve.

LONDON (Reuters) - Two women who were repeatedly raped and violently abused by their father, bearing him seven children over 25 years, were given a formal apology by child protection agencies on Wednesday for systemic failure.

The admission was made during the publication of an executive summary into a review of the case, which acknowledged the family concerned had had contact with 28 different public agencies and 100 members of staff over 35 years.

No one has been sacked or disciplined for the catalogue of errors, the multiple agencies involved said at a joint press conference in Derby where they lined up to apologise.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A serious bout with a stomach bug can raise a child's risk of having irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) later on, new research shows.

People with IBS often have stomach pain, bloating, gas and altered bowel habits such as diarrhea and constipation. While the root cause of the condition isn't known, adults who have had stomach infections are known to be at greater risk. The relationship between these infections and IBS in children is not as clear.

The head of Germany's Catholic bishops, Robert Zollitsch, is set for an audience with Pope Benedict XVI to discuss recent reports of sexual abuse at church schools.

Zollitsch, chairman of the German Bishops Conference, is due to meet Pope Benedict XVI on Friday, to brief him on some 170 abuse cases at Catholic schools.

After coming under pressure from police, small producers of cannabis have been threatened with extinction. As a result, coffee shops are selling lower quality merchandise sourced from major criminals.

You hardly hear or see them any more, but the small-time growers who lovingly nurture a few plants in their homes are still common in the Netherlands. They produce cannabis for their own consumption, for the medical needs of close friends and family, or to sell to coffee shops. And they are constantly harassed by the courts and police, which have been meting out increasingly harsh treatment since 2004. "They are the ones who always get in trouble," explains Nicole Maalsté, a sociologist at Tilburg University.

"It is easy for the police to organize a raid in a working class neighbourhood but the major criminals are usually not effected. Longer investigations are required to successfully prosecute the big players." According to Maalsté, the aggressive police raids have created new opportunities for organized crime. "Driving small growers out of the market has created a vacuum that is being filled by hardcore criminals, and coffee shops are forced to deal with intimidating individuals they would much rather avoid."

BARCELONA, Spain -- Here in the principal city of Catalonia, the native language, Catalan, is heard just about everywhere except in the movies. But that may be about to change because the local government is expected to pass a bill requiring that at least half the copies of every film from outside Europe, including all major American productions, be dubbed in Catalan.

That prompted 576 of the 790 movie houses in Catalonia, a region slightly bigger than Maryland, to close for a day last month in protest.

Industry leaders recalled that Catalonia's government, which enjoys a broad measure of autonomy from Madrid, made a similar proposal in 1998 but backed down in the face of opposition from theater owners, film distributors and foreign production companies. "They say it's necessary for the government to make a rule, because the private sector doesn't do it," said Camilo Tarrazón Rodón, president of the Association of Film Businesses in Catalonia, which opposes the bill.

....paper would benefit greatly from operating in the same stable as the London Evening Standard. This free title could be used to help entice advertisers, he says, while operating out of the same offices in Kensington, London, would mean sharing resources and reducing costs.
Limited access

But the most intriguing option would be to give both titles away for free.

Professor Luckhurst says this is the way Mr Lebedev would like to go: "To offer Britain's first quality free national newspaper."
Mr Lebedev has already made the Standard freely available, boosting circulation from 250,000 to 600,000 in the process, Professor Luckhurst says.

[Important updates below - Facebook says the Daily Mail knew its story was untrue, but printed it anyway. Legal action is promised. The BBC has now picked up on Global Dashboard's story. Journalism.co.uk has a piece as well.]

In the early hours of this morning, the Daily Mail published an astonishing attack on Facebook under the title "I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What followed will sicken you."

Here's the opener:

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has referred two solicitors from London firm Davenport Lyons to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal over claims that the firm sent `bullying' letters accusing hundreds of people of illegal file-sharing.

Consumer group Which? complained to the SRA in 2008 that Davenport Lyons partner David Gore and former partner Brian Miller had engaged in `bullying' and `excessive' conduct, while acting on behalf of client copyright holders.

It said the firm had sent out hundreds of letters, demanding compensation and costs for copyright infringements, and threatening court action.

Deborah Prince, head of legal affairs at Which?, said: `We're pleased to see some action at last from the SRA and hope the tide is finally turning in favour of consumers. We want to see some decisive action to stop these bully-boy tactics.

There are pasted-on half pages, numerous cross-outs and insertions in meticulous penmanship and an open acknowledgment that some of the mathematics was beyond even him. Albert Einstein personally rewrote the laws of physics in a sparsely furnished central Berlin apartment nearly a century ago and the resulting manuscript, profoundly human and surprisingly moving to examine, has been put on display here for the first time.

<...>

"Dear Mother!" it begins, "Today some happy news. Lorentz telegraphed me that the British expeditions have verified the deflection of light by the sun." So sorry, he adds, to hear that you are not feeling well.

Einstein's relationship to Israel was complex. A self-described universalist, he became a Zionist when he witnessed anti-Semitism in Europe. Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, was a key influence on him. Walter Isaacson, who wrote a 2007 biography of Einstein, said by telephone that Einstein wanted Jews to move here but did not back a separate Jewish nation-state until after it was declared in 1948. ...

Last year, I had mumps. I blame the libel laws.

The recent case of Simon Singh being sued by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) is one example of the out-of-control libel laws in this country, and how they can stop people telling good information from bad. This week is Libel Reform Week and there is no shortage of cases bringing the health risks of such lawsuits to light.

Public discussion - journalism included - involves freely debating topics in the public interest. It is similar to what scientists do in peer-reviewed journals. But because most people don't read those, we depend on trusted sources like Singh to bring the facts and arguments to us.

Pink Floyd have won a High Court battle to stop their record label EMI selling individual songs online.

The rock legends, signed to EMI since 1967, said their contract meant their albums could not be split up without their permission.

A judge agreed, saying the contract contained a clause to "preserve the artistic integrity of the albums".

EMI has been ordered to pay £40,000 ($60,000) in costs, with a further fine to be decided.

The group, whose latest contract was signed before download stores like iTunes appeared, also disputed the way royalties for digital sales were calculated.

Almost 200 shows broadcast on Welsh TV channel S4C last month attracted zero viewers, according to a report.

The Western Mail claimed leaked figures showed 196 out of 890 programmes in a three week period had less than 1,000 viewers - an official zero.

S4C chairman, John Walter Jones, said it was important to consider the wider contribution of the channel to Wales.

The Welsh-language broadcaster is funded by a grant of more than £100m a year from the UK government.

Most of the programmes with a zero viewer rating were children's shows, the newspaper added

Corey Haim, the star of The Lost Boys and Lucas, has died aged 38. We pay tribute to an actor who grew up in the limelight, but whose adult career was spent sadly in search of it

It isn't my fault I grew up in the 80s but I really liked him.

Ad astra per aspera

The suggestion that the couple were both committing adultery first emerged on Twitter, the microblogging website. It was followed by a report in the Sunday newspaper le Journal du Dimanche.

The first 'tweet' claimed that Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy had become romantically involved with Benjamin Biolay, a musician and a winner at France's recent Victoires de la Musique award

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle faces accusations of blurring the lines between his office, party politics and his private life. He has taken his partner Michael Mronz, an entrepreneur, on an official trip to South America this week along with several former donors to his pro-business FDP party.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who is openly gay, has rejected criticism of his decision to take his partner, Michael Mronz, on an official trip to South America with him.

Mronz is an event manager who organizes sports events. Critics have accused Westerwelle and Mronz of failing to keep their professional and private lives separate.

Lord Ashcroft was asked to respond by 9.30am this morning to the invitation by the Public Administration Select Committee to appear before it next week to discuss the circumstances surrounding his elevation to the peerage.

No response.