BRUSSELS - The EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are at odds over how to fund Greece for two extra years, while the Greek government has still not reached a agreement on promised budget cuts needed for the next tranche of bailout money.

Greek finance minister Yannis Stournaras spent a few hours in hospital on Thursday (25 October) where he was diagnosed with extreme fatigue and a viral infection.

The news came one day after he told Greek parliament that the government reached a deal with the troika of international lenders on granting Greece two more years to reach its deficit and debt targets.

But EU officials in Brussels and the head of the European Central Bank - also part of the troika - promptly dismissed the announcement saying that talks are still ongoing.

Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt has said she will block talks on the 2014-2020 EU budget unless she is offered a rebate of 1 billion Danish crowns (€134 million).

The Danish government has already included the anticipated rebate in its tax reform plans for 2013, and the package would lack coherence without it, she said.

"We are going to get our rebate, and if we don't get our rebate, then we will have to use the veto. It's very, very simple," the prime minister told the Danish parliamentary committee on European affairs Thursday (25 October), according to the news agency Ritzau.

Other EU member states with big net contributions such as Britain, Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands and Austria already get rebates in the form of lump-sum payments or reduced VAT call rates (>> Read European Commission summary of national compensation mechanisms).

In practice, Copenhagen argues that it funds such reimbursements.

Romania has two months to react to a warning from the European Commission, which has identified serious problems in the country's anti-corruption procedures in the implementation of programmes in the field of transport, regional development and competitiveness, a spokesperson said today (26 October).

The Commission has sent yesterday (25 October) a letter to the Romanian authorities, pre-suspending the funding in the field of transport, regional development and competitiveness.

The EU executive also proposed "financial corrections" in those three areas and environment, Shirin Wheeler, spokesperson of Regional Policy Commissioner Johannes Hahn said.

"Pre-suspension" of funds doesn't mean that the funds are lost, but under this procedure, the country is given two months to react and reassure the Commission on its concerns. If it fails to do so, the funds are suspended. This again doesn't mean that they are definitely lost, but the "suspension" is usually seen as a bad political signal for the country and their re-activation will require a political decision of the College of Commissioners.

The billionaire political novice Bidzina Ivanishvili became Prime Minister yesterday, with a vow to pursue Nato and European Union membership while at the same time repairing frayed ties with Russia.

Mr Ivanishvili and his cabinet won approval from parliament, now dominated by his opposition Georgian Dream coalition after voters relegated President Mikheil Saakashvili's ruling party to the minority in an election on 1 October.

Before the 88-54 confirmation vote, Mr Ivanishvili assured the country he would not abandon Mr Saakashvili's drive to integrate with the West but would also try to rebuild relations with Russia four years after a brief war in 2008.

Thanks to John Weeks, I see this quote from Merkel speaking before the Bundestag last week:

We have made good progress on strengthening fiscal discipline with the fiscal pact but we are of the opinion, and I speak for the whole German government on this, that we could go a step further by giving Europe "real rights of intervention in national budgets".

The idea is that fiscal orthodoxy is soooo important, and individual countries shouldn't be allowed to tinker with it.  If they try to run deficits outside the (narrow) boundaries of the Fiscal Pact, officials from Brussels should step in and overrule them.

Germany, as is well known, is (or tries to be) a paragon of orthodoxy in macroeconomic affairs.  Of course, Germany also has a social market economy which violates almost every principle of orthodox microeconomics.  And what happens when proposals are put forward to regulate any of that stuff from Brussels?

You can see the answer in the stalemate over banking regulation.  As part of a quid pro quo for centralizing the lender of last resort function at the European level, an attempt is being made to assert European control over the oversight of financial institutions--and Germany is fighting it tooth and nail.

A week after the resignation of Commissioner John Dalli, who was about to table a directive that comes down hard on tobacco products, suspicions of a plot against him have continued to grow. A strange case of burglary at the Brussels offices of anti-tobacco activists adds yet more drama to the allegations of influence peddling.

It's a scenario out of John Le Carré, involving lobbying groups, "big money" and freelance spies, and it could seriously embarrass the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.

According to an investigation by OLAF (the European Anti-Fraud Agency), one Silvio Zammit, a Maltese businessman, reportedly proposed to Swedish Match, a manufacturer of cigars and Swedish chewing tobacco, that a draft European directive on tobacco might be modified - in return for an envelope containing 60 million euros.

The OLAF report was submitted to José Manuel Barroso on 15 October. The next day the European Commission announced in a press release that, following the investigation, Commissioner John Dalli, who was in charge of European tobacco legislation, had "handed in his resignation". And the day after that the European Commission opened up its newsroom - a rare event - to OLAF's Director General, Giovanni Kessler, who fed European correspondents some details from the enquiry.

These names - Bruning, von Papen, Schleicher - troublesome though they are to remember, should be as famous as the words Stalingrad, Arnhem and Dunkirk.

These were the men who tried and failed to use a mixture of austerity, tough policing and what we might now call "technocratic" rule to save German democracy. They failed.

And herein lays the parallel with Greece: a country committed to austerity, whose centrist parties are clustered into a coalition which represents the forces of conservatism and social democracy. The coalition sees itself as the last bulwark against a government of the far left and is trying to crack down on extremism using a police force which has itself been criticised for extremist leanings.

But despite these parallels, Greece is not on the brink of a Weimar-style collapse.

The former Italian prime minister's sentence was almost immediately reduced to one year, under a 2006 amnesty law designed to reduce prison overcrowding, but it included a five-year ban on holding public office which could deter him from continuing his long and controversial political career.
Given Mr Berlusconi's record of beating the legal clock and winning appeals, the 76-year-old politician and media tycoon is unlikely to spend time behind bars in the near future, if at all. His indignant lawyers immediately said they would appeal.
Despite years of legal battles, the proceedings at the packed court in Milan amounted to one of the more humiliating episodes Mr Berlusconi has faced.
Judge Edoardo d'Avossa pronounced that between 2000 and 2003, there had been "a very significant amount of tax evasion" and "an incredible mechanism of fraud" in place around the buying and selling of broadcasting rights for Mr Berlusconi's Mediaset television company. The court's written ruling said he showed a "natural capacity for crime".

Lawmakers in France passed a bill today that allows women to claim 100 percent of abortion costs while also making contraception free to girls ages 15 to 18, The Associated Press reported.

The National Assembly passed the bill as part of the Social Security budget and a campaign promise of President Francois Hollande, AFP said.

Before the new law passed the lower house of parliament, France reimbursed minors and the poor if they needed an abortion.

An average woman in France can reclaim 80 percent of the cost, which can be as high as $580, the AP said.

The bill is expected to pass the senate and become law.

LONDON -- It seems the sun never sets on the proliferation of drones.

A purpose-built command and control center for Britain's growing fleet of Reaper drones is opening Friday at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire. Currently the British operate their drones from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

At the same time, a court in London has been hearing arguments from human rights lawyers who are trying to force the UK government to lift the secrecy that surrounds its involvement in US drone strikes in Pakistan.

Just a coincidence? Yes. But when it comes to drone use in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US and UK are closely linked, and wherever drones are used there are legal questions that are as yet unanswered. The United Nations annouced this week it will establish an investigation unit dedicated to determining the legality of US drone attacks with civilian casualties, reported The Guardian.

"If the relevant states are not willing to establish effective independent monitoring mechanisms ... then it may in the last resort be necessary for the UN to act," said Ben Emmerson QC, a UN special rapporteur, in a speech to Harvard Law School.

The speaker of the Greek Parliament, several employees of the finance ministry and a number of business leaders are on a list of more than 2,000 Greeks said to have accounts in a Swiss bank, according to a respected investigative magazine. The Greek magazine, Hot Doc, published the list on Saturday, raising the stakes in a heated battle over which current and former Greek government officials had seen the original list passed on by France two years ago -- and whether they had used it to check for possible tax evasion...
Hours after the magazine hit newsstands, Athens prosecutors issued a warrant for the arrest of Kostas Vaxevanis, the owner and editor of Hot Doc, "where names from the Lagarde list have been published," Athens police said in a statement on their Web site. They said he was sought on misdemeanor charges; the Greek media reported that the charges were related to violating the privacy of those on the list...

Spiegel had some interesting points on the Lagarde list, despite not making the real connection with policy followed and the parties that the German government officially supported in the last Greek elections.

Also there is an Avaaz petition for Vaxevanis up already, do sign if you feel so inclined. It might be helpful, the only thing that might keep our pseudo-democratic government trying to behave is foreign attention.

Vaxevanis has repeatedly reported on and pissed off all and every man in serious power in Greece, and already had some sort of "robbery attempt" by militarily organized "robbers" at his house. I have a feeling that he'll be lucky to survive this winter, and an international interest in his person might just help his odds...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

Top executives at Spain's giant nationalised Bankia are to be ordered to pay back last year's annual bonuses as the bank admits to having run up record-breaking losses of €7bn (£5.6bn) in the first three quarters of this year.

The size of the losses, the biggest ever reported by a Spanish bank, was revealed on the same day that recession-hit Spain also saw unemployment rise to above 25%. Some southern Spanish provinces are now reporting unemployment at almost 40%.

Bankia will tell its executives to return the money in response to a petition from the European commission, which says they should not have been paid bonuses just months before the bank admitted it needed €23bn in bailout money.

Health experts and tobacco control activists were on the brink of a hard-fought victory against the industry this month as a tough new Tobacco Products Directive was expected to be adopted by the European Commission.

But campaigners have been left stunned after the enforced resignation of the Maltese Commissioner, John Dalli - the driving force behind the directive - and a suspicious robbery in which laptops and documents containing the evidence to support the tough new regulations were stolen in an apparent targeted attack.

Estonians are not known for their political activism. We are a calm people with a deep mistrust in government, and usually believe that activism is going to lead nowhere, so why bother? Although average salaries are low - €700 net salary a month across all sectors in 2012 - workers' strikes are rare and never last long. The government is used to this and does not exert much effort in pacifying the strikers. What, then, drove all healthcare professionals in Estonia to begin a strike on 1 October, which is yet to be resolved and has taken both the government and the public by surprise due to the uncharacteristic resilience of the strikers?

Since Estonia joined the EU in 2004, a significant number of healthcare professionals have left the country for the greener pastures of better salaries and working conditions in other European countries. This means that we not only have an ageing patient population like the rest of Europe, but also an ageing healthcare workforce, who are left to carry the burden of present and future healthcare quality. This crisis has finally reached a climax, with all major hospitals in Estonia joining the national healthcare strike. On 1 October, the strikers outlined a salary increase of 40% for nurses and care workers and 20% for doctors as part of their requested changes. Throughout the strike, the list of demands have been dropped to merely having paid working hours for medical students in residency, and an hourly wage of €2.60 (a 23% increase) for care workers, €4.50 (17.5%) for nurses and €8 (11%) for doctors from January 2013. While this is a challenge for the state budget, these are hardly unreasonable demands.

RWE Transgas, the Czech unit of Germany's RWE, has won a landmark legal dispute with Gazprom over gas contracts, after a court ruled for the first time that a company did not have to pay fines under a "take-or-pay" clause.

The verdict is likely to play into the hands of Gazprom's disgruntled clients in Europe who may follow RWE and challenge "take-or-pay" claims from the Russian giant which fine them if they do not buy a minimum amount of gas.

The "take-or-pay" clause, introduced in contracts at the insistence of Gazprom, Russia's gas export monopoly, obliges customers to pay for gas under the contract even if it is not imported.

The World Bank has produced its 2013 list of the best places in the world to start and run a business, ranking the UK in 7th place, below the US in 3rd and Singapore, which retained the number one spot. Germany could only manage 20th place and France secured a lowly berth at number 34 out of 183 countries ranked this week.

...there are many countries in or near the top 50 of the World Bank's rankings that have proved hugely controversial.

Georgia, the former Soviet satellite state, has jumped into 9th place from 112th in 2005 after a decade-long struggle with corruption that the World Bank and anti-corruption agency Transparency International claim is succeeding, but which many experts say still leaves many corrupt practices in place.

More broadly, critics argue the World Bank rankings promote a neo-liberal agenda of privatisations, welfare cuts, limited employment rights and low wages to please and entice foreign multinationals.

The anti-poverty charity Care International says incomes and living standards remain low across most of the south Caucasus despite consistently high GDP growth. In a recent report on Georgia and Armenia, which has climbed the rankings above France to the number 32 spot, the charity said poverty is "pervasive".

Israel's prime minister announced Thursday that he was joining forces with his hard-line foreign minister in upcoming elections, instantly creating a hawkish new bloc that now appears poised to lead the country.

The deal between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party and Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu makes the new ticket the clear front-runner in the January elections, giving the ultranationalist foreign minister, a staunch opponent of concessions to the Palestinians, a major say in any future peace efforts.

It also raises speculation that centrist opposition parties might now be compelled to unite as well.

Attack on Iran coming?

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

At least five people were killed and dozens more were wounded when a car bomb exploded outside a mosque in southern Damascus on Friday, undermining a ceasefire that came into effect at dawn.

...Fighting raged earlier in the day near a military base in northern Syria even as the ceasefire was supposed to be in effect, highlighting the difficulty of enforcing even a temporary truce in a country wracked by civil war.

The ceasefire agreement, proposed by joint UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and endorsed by the Security Council, was to be in force for only the four days of the Eid al-Adha holiday. But the agreement faced difficulties from the beginning, as it has no mechanism for monitoring the truce and no stated plans for what follows next.

A suicide bomber killed at least 32 people and wounded 34 when he struck inside a mosque in Maymana city in northern Afghanistan during Eid al-Adha prayers on Friday, officials said.

The attacker was wearing a police uniform when he blew himself up in the crowded Eid Gah mosque in the provincial capital of Faryab province, deputy provincial governor Abdul Satar Barez told AFP.

...Most provincial government officials were also at the mosque, which was crowded on the first day of the four-day holiday for the festival of Eid, which is celebrated throughout the Muslim world.

DJIBOUTI CITY, Djibouti -- Around the clock, about 16 times a day, drones take off or land at a U.S. military base here, the combat hub for the Obama administration's counterterrorism wars in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

Some of the unmanned aircraft are bound for Somalia, the collapsed state whose border lies just 10 miles to the southeast. Most of the armed drones, however, veer north across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, another unstable country where they are being used in an increasingly deadly war with an al-Qaeda franchise that has targeted the United States.

Camp Lemonnier, a sun-baked Third World outpost established by the French Foreign Legion, began as a temporary staging ground for U.S. Marines looking for a foothold in the region a decade ago. Over the past two years, the U.S. military has clandestinely transformed it into the busiest Predator drone base outside the Afghan war zone, a model for fighting a new generation of terrorist groups.

An Italian court has ruled in favour of closing Europe's biggest steel works on environmental and health fears. But the plant's managers are fighting to keep it open. Determined not to let that happen, citizens and workers have formed a united front.

...The plant alone is responsible for 92% of the dioxin emissions in Italy and 9% of those in Europe. The air and soil of the town are contaminated by lead, nick and iron ore. For years, residents have been breathing in these toxic particles.

This may not be the end of an ugly story, where unions and the Monti government back the polluters. See precedents up to August.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Emitting CO2 into the atmosphere is dirt cheap in Europe these days. At just 8 euros per ton, the low price is undermining the European Union's effort to establish an effective cap and trade system. Implementing necessary fixes to the system, however, won't be easy in the face of industry opposition.

Fish from the waters around the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan could be too radioactive to eat for a decade to come, as samples show that radioactivity levels remain elevated and show little sign of coming down, a marine scientist has warned.

According to a paper published in the journal Science on Thursday, large and bottom-dwelling species carry most risk, which means cod, flounder, halibut, pollock, skate and sole from the waters in question could be off limits for years, .

Sample fish caught in waters near the stricken reactors suggest there is still a source of caesium either on the seafloor or still being discharged into the sea, perhaps from what is left of the cooling waters. As the levels of radioactive isotopes in the fish are not declining as fast as they should have, the outlook for fishing in the area is likely to be poor for the next 10 years, the paper's author told the Guardian.

The Arctic is changing at a breathtaking pace, which has oil and gas companies flocking to the region. SPIEGEL ONLINE talks to Norway's new Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide about the dangers of resource extraction and China's role in the High North.

In an amusing response to a conservative French politician's incendiary comment that thugs snatched children's pastries during the holy month of Ramadan, a French Muslim rights group distributed chocolate croissants outside the Paris Grande Mosque on Friday, the start of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha.

The chocolate croissants - called "Copé" after French politician Jean-Francois Copé - were made with the same ingredients as the classic "pain au chocolat"- but baked in the shape of a crescent, according to Muslim rights activists.

Earlier this month, Copé sparked a controversy when he claimed that Muslim thugs were enforcing the Ramadan fast in some neighbourhoods. "I can understand the exasperation of some of our compatriots when there are some neighbourhoods where a mother or father will come home from work in the evening to learn their son has had his pain au chocolat snatched out of his hand by thugs, telling him it is forbidden to eat during Ramadan," said Copé at the time.

Rediscovered post-war diaries have shown that British spy-masters considered developing remote-controlled homing pigeons - perhaps to carry explosives.

Details of the scheme have emerged in the post-war diaries of Guy Liddell, then-deputy director general of MI5.

It seems the idea was discussed with Captain James Caiger, who ran the Army's pigeon loft after the war.

The fragile remains of a three-year-old girl who died about 3.3 million years ago in East Africa have revealed that our early human ancestors still spent much of their time in the trees long after they had fully mastered the art of walking on two legs.

The discovery appears to have finally ended the debate over whether this bipedal hominid still continued to climb trees, much like their earlier ape ancestors.

The fossilised shoulder blades and arm sockets belonging to Selam, meaning "peace", indicate that she and her family continued to climb trees like modern apes even though her lower body was perfectly adapted to upright walking.

...Selam is a remarkably well-preserved specimen of the species Australopithecus afarensis, an important forerunner of the human lineage. Her almost-complete skull and skeleton, embedded in sandstone rock, was discovered in 2000 in the Dikika region of northeast Ethiopia and it has taken years of painstaking work for scientists to extract the fossilised bones from the stone.

US President Bill Clinton, famously, didn't inhale -- at least that's what he said. But even as most of the country assumed he was not being entirely forthcoming about his possible marijuana consumption, there was no way to check. There was no proof.

A German politician this week, however, is having a decidedly more difficult time with his denials. After all, Martin Lindner, the deputy head of the pro-business Free Democrats in parliament, appears to have taken a drag off a joint on live television.

On Thursday evening, Lindner was a guest on Benjamin von Stuckrad Barre's talk show, "Stuckrad Late Night," when the host produced what he said was a joint. Lindner grabbed it to have a sniff and suggested that it wasn't real. Barre urged him to test it -- which he then did on a balcony outside the studio, on camera.

"I took a drag to refute the host's claim that it was a real joint," Lindner told mass-circulation tabloid Bild. "I don't know what it really was, but I didn't feel any intoxicating effect."

The abrasive former media mogul appeared on satirical panel show Have I Got News For You?, where he continued his assault on Paxman.

On Monday Black branded him a 'priggish, gullible, British fool' and said he was proud he had endured their tense exchange without "getting up and smashing your face in".

And last night he remained unrepentant, adding: "I like Jeremy, he's just an a**hole.

...He was imprisoned for three years for defrauding investors but, despite being released from a US prison earlier this year, he insisted he had nothing to be ashamed of - even indicating his potential plans to retake his seat in the House of Lords.

Earlier in the week, he branded Sky News' political editor Adam Boulton a "jackass" before telling him: "You don't know what you are talking about."

Cycling's global governing body has ruled the seven consecutive Tour de France races won by Lance Armstrong should remain forever without a champion as a warning from history, as the disgraced Texan confirmed he would not appeal against the decision to strip him of his titles.

Armstrong has not responded to the United States Anti-Doping Agency's accusation that he led "the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen", but his Texas-based lawyer Tim Herman told the Guardian on Friday that the 41-year-old would not appeal against the International Cycling Union's ratification of Usada's verdict this week.

The UCI management committee also called on Armstrong and others who have been caught doping to return their prize money, set up an independent commission to look into its own role in the affair and suspended its legal action against the journalist Paul Kimmage while that investigation is carried out.

Despite the UCI announcing on Monday that it would ratify Usada's damning verdict that Armstrong was a "serial cheat", its president, Pat McQuaid, came in for further criticism after questioning aspects of the report in a series of supporting documents later released online.

French ministers are being offered anti-sexism classes, in a bid to shed longstanding prejudices, stereotypes and gender inappropriate behavior in the annals of France's elite political circles, exemplified by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case.

Ministers in French President Francois Hollande's Socialist government don't have to be Dominique Strauss Kahn to learn a lesson about inappropriate behaviour towards women.

In a bid to clean up their conduct, French ministers are attending anti-sexism classes created by the Ministry for Women's Rights.

Among other topics covered in the hour-long course are the ins and outs of gender stereotyping, inappropriate language, and tips on avoiding gaffes. Domestic violence and wage disparity are also addressed.

VIENNA -- Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian parachutist who broke the sound barrier by jumping to earth from the stratosphere said in an interview published Sunday he backed the idea of a dictatorship, though a moderate one.

He told Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung that such a dictatorship should be "led by experienced personalities coming from the private (sector of the) economy" to solve present social and economic problems.