Bosnia's Muslim and Croat leaders have commemorated 20 years of independence from Yugoslavia, while a boycott from Bosnian Serbs outlined the country's deep ethnic divisions.

Bosnia and Herzegovina marked its 20th anniversary since independence from the former Yugoslavia at a ceremony in Sarajevo on Thursday, although a large portion of the ethnically-divided country refused to recognize the holiday.

The semi-autonomous Muslim-Croat Federation is the only region in the country to celebrate independence, while the Serb-majority Republika Srpska boycotts the day. Milorad Dodik, president of the Republika Srpska, called it a "completely normal workday," highlighting the ethnic divisions that still run deep in the country.

A "no thrill" EU summit starting today (1 March) will avoid several contentious issues against the background of the French election campaign. Instead, leaders are poised to give speeches about "growth",  congratulate themselves for the re-election of Herman Van Rompuy as Council president and sign the 'fiscal compact' treaty.

As a senior EU diplomat described it, this was shaping up to be the first "quiet, normal" summit since the world economic crisis broke in 2008.

However, he admitted that it was difficult to judge whether this was a "return to normalcy", or if leaders had decided that contentious issues should be swept under the carpet.

Leaders are expected to speak about growth, which according to an EU diplomat is the new mantra after EU countries exhausted their fiscal policy resources.

Commission President José Manuel Barroso is expected to deliver the message that the EU needs to invest in order to get out of the crisis.

The German Parliament has held its first debate on a government draft bill, which is geared towards luring more foreign, non-EU workers into Germany. Holders of a so-called Blue Card would face fewer restrictions.

What the Green Card is for the United States of America, the Blue Card is meant to be for Europe. A guideline from the European Commission dating back to 2009 stipulates that skilled workers from non-EU nations should have similar regulations as to their residence status than foreign workers in the US.

The German government has been dragging its feet on implementing the Blue Card, maybe because many still don't see Germany as an immigration country.

It was - almost - a first for Chancellor Angela Merkel. In a "townhall meeting" Germans were given the chance to offer suggestions for a better society. The format worked, but the substance was lacking.

The small eastern German town of Erfurt became the laboratory for a new experiment in German democracy on Wednesday. Chancellor Angela Merkel and her team arrived by helicopter from Berlin, accompanied by dozens of correspondents - though they got stuck in a train for 90 minutes.

And it even looked as though some of the décor from the German parliament had been transported from the capital - the beautiful, baroque, white-and-gold Kaisersaal in Erfurt's old town had been decked out with the dull, gray and blue color scheme of the Bundestag.

BRUSSELS - Herman Van Rompuy, the Haiku-writing, self-styled "grey mouse" of European politics, has been elected to a second term as head of the European Council, with his understated style credited with keeping the "show on the road" during the ongoing eurozone crisis.

With little ado, and early on in the EU leader's meeting beginning Thursday evening (1 March), the former Belgian prime minister - unchallenged - was tasked with carrying on for a further two and a half years.

"Very honoured that all European Council members have decided to ask me to continue as European Council President for a 2nd mandate," Van Rompuy tweeted after the result.

French President Sarkozy arrived late to an EU summit in Brussels after getting held up by protestors at an election rally in Bayonne, south west France. He took refuge in a bar to get away from the dozens of young demonstrators.

Two and a half million people signed a petition this week urging the European Parliament to say 'no' to the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, Acta. The multinational treaty - which among other things aims to protect artists' rights to remuneration - has been met with protests all over the European Union. According to critics, the agreement will result in censorship of the internet and restrict access to life-saving medicines in developing countries.

The French government announced officially on Thursday that all cars must carry a single-use breathalyzer kit from July 1st.

The move, which has been widely reported for some time, was made official in a decree on February 28th and published on Thursday.

"Every driver of a motorised land vehicle, excluding mopeds, must possess an unused and immediately available breathlyzer," said the decree, published in the official gazette ("Journal Officiel de la République Française").

Transport ministry officials told The Local that the rule would apply equally to vehicles from outside France.

Sarkozy gave a key speech this week saying teachers should work longer hours to earn more - but Libération says they've got hold of his speech text, and he missed a sentence - where he'd planned to partially reverse his policy of only replacing half of all teachers who retire.

Le Figaro says teachers don't work long enough hours anyway - while Le Monde says Sarkozy feels comfortable attacking them, as they don't plan to vote for him anyway.

Merkel insiste en que hay que firmar el Tratado fiscal antes de poder generar crecimiento

Europa ha jugado este jueves a las grandes palabras en una cumbre que servirá para consagrar la austeridad en los tratados y que viene a ilegalizar el keynesianismo, con la imposición de prohibir los déficits en las constituciones. Hasta aquí los hechos. Todo lo demás es retórica: los mandatarios europeos se han empeñado en un cambio de tono para tratar de convencer a la ciudadanía -y puede que a los mercados--de que los recortes no son la única obsesión en una eurozona muy maltratada por la crisis fiscal, pero que también va de cabeza hacia una recaída en la recesión.

"Lo primero que hay que hacer es firmar el tratado fiscal. Lo segundo es ver cómo generar crecimiento", ha dicho la canciller alemana, Angela Merkel. Ese es el orden. Y "lo segundo" queda para más adelante: el Eurogrupo previo a la reunión de jefes de Estado y de Gobierno ha pospuesto una vez más la entrega del dinero del rescate para Grecia y su crisis interminable, y apenas ha debatido el llamamiento de España a flexibilizar los objetivos de déficit para evitar que el exceso de tijera acabe en un descosido para algunos países.

Merkel insists on the need to sign the Fiscal Treaty before being able to generate growth

Europa has played the big-word game this Thursday in a Summit which will serve to consacrate austerity in the treaties and to outlaw Keynesianism, with the imposition of constitutional deficit bans. Those are the facts, the rest is rhetoric: European rulers went to pains to change their tone to try to convince the citizenry ---and maybe the markets--- that cuts are not the only obsession in a Eurozone battered by the fiscal crisis, but which is also diving head first into a renewed recession.

"The first think that must be done is to sign the fiscal treaty. The second is to see how to generate growth", said the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. That's the sequence. And "the second" is left for later: the Eurogroup before the summit of heads of stete and government has postponed once more the disbursement of the rescue moneys for Greece and its neverending crisis, and has barely debated Spain's plea to make the deficit goals more flexible to prevent a scissor abuse ending up leaving some countries naked.

Mariano Rajoy gets no sympathy from the EU summit over his request to re-examine the Spanish deficit target for 2012; the EU fears that the credibility of the new fiscal rules would be at stake if one were to grant an early exemption; Frekerik Reinfelt and Jyrki Katainen say it would send a completely wrong signal to loosen the target right now; Luis de Guindos, Spanish economy minister, also got a hostile response from the ECB and from Olli Rehn, and there was no support from other finance ministers; lack of support means that Spain now faces the choice of a 4.1% budget adjustment this year, or whether to overshoot; Rajoy said he would produce a budget that was "sensible", indicating that he is ready to break the target; debate raises huge questions about the credibility and feasibility of the EU's new fiscal rules; EU summit gave a conditional approval to the Greek bailout, but delayed a final decision until the IMF rules over the implementation of the recently approved measures; summit approved the sweeteners for the bond swap, and the funds to recapitalise the Greek banking system; a final decision is due March 9; ISDA has ruled that there will be no CDS trigger for now;ruling on concerns whether PSI and the redenomination of ECB bond holdings constituted a credit event; FT Alphaville said the decision was also influenced by a wish to secure a successful outcome of the bond swap; decision to increase the size of the ESM is now likely to be taken at the end of March; Reuters Breakingviews says Jens Weidmann may be more dangerous to the ECB than Axel Weber after his request to securitise Germany's Target 2 claims; Mark Schieritz says securitising is pointless, as it would still depend on the country's co-operation in delivering the promised assets; James Saft says the LTRO has no effect on Portugal, which is heading for slow default; two Italian mayors, meanwhile, have given up their salaries as a sign of solidarity with Greece.

The German luxury carmaker Audi's profit soared to a new record in 2011 as it sold as many cars as never before. In spite of rising costs weighing on profits, Audi expects bumper sales in 2012, too.

Audi's net profit soared by 69 percent to 4.4 billion euros ($5.9 billion) in 2011, on the back of a similarly steep rise in its operating profit by 60.1 percent to 5.35 billion, the German luxury carmaker reported Thursday.

The Ingolstadt-based company - an offshoot of Europe's biggest auto maker Volkswagen - also said that car deliveries jumped by 16.9 percent to 1.512 million vehicles, resulting in annual revenue of 44.1 billion euros - up 24.4 percent compared with the previous year.

Unemployment in the 17-nation eurozone unexpectedly spiked to 10.7 percent in January. The jobless rate across the wider European Union also soared, surpassing the symbolic 10 percent threshold.

Data published by the European Statistics Office, Eurostat, on Thursday showed 16.9 million people were out of work in the 17 countries making up the euro currency area. Compared to the same month a year ago, the number of people on the dole rose a staggering 1.4 million.

This was the highest rate since the introduction of the euro in 1999, Eurostat said.

In the whole of the 27-nation European Union, more than 24.3 million people were unemployed in January - an increase of 191,000 from December and of 1.488 million compared to January 2011.

EU leaders are meeting in Brussels to discuss new measures to encourage long-term economic growth. Hours into the summit Herman Van Rompuy was reappointed president of the European Council.

European Union leaders have opened a two-day summit in Brussels that they were expected to use to try to shift the focus away from the ongoing Greek debt crisis and onto measures aimed at fostering long-term growth in the 27-member bloc.

Among the measures up for approval is a German-backed financial regulation agreement designed to make sure that member states get their financial houses in order.

Deutsche Bank has said it will not pay costly out-of-court compensation to the heirs of Germany's late media tycoon, Leo Kirch. The turnaround came after comprehensive legal counseling.

Deutsche Bank on Thursday rejected a proposed out-of-court settlement in a 10-year court case surrounding the bankruptcy of Germany's late media tycoon Leo Kirch.

The long-running legal disputes were initiated by Kirch and his associates, who claimed that comments made by Deutsche Bank's former chief executive Rolf Breuer were at least partly responsible for triggering the 2002 bankruptcy of the publishing group Kirch Media.

EU leaders are meeting in Brussels to examine policies to boost growth, and to sign a treaty on budget discipline. DW spoke to Norbert Walter, the former chief economist at Deutsche Bank.

AP - The finance ministers of the 16 other countries that use the euro on Thursday agreed in principle to give Greece a first batch of bailout money to finance a massive debt relief deal with private investors.

However, the final green light for as much as €93.5 billion ($125.69 billion) -- which Greece needs to implement the debt swap -- will come next week.

After a three-hour meeting in Brussels, the ministers said the payout can go ahead once Athens has passed "a few pending implementing acts" for promised austerity measures and the ministers how many banks and investment funds will actually participate in the bond swap.

AP - General Motors and France's PSA Peugeot Citroen said Wednesday that they're forming an alliance to share car platforms and purchasing power.

As part of the alliance, GM intends to take a 7 percent stake in the French automaker. Peugeot will raise $1 billion (€0.74 billion) in new capital.

The two companies are seeking efficiencies that will make them more competitive in Europe's car market. GM's European business lost $700 million there last year and the company has said it's determined to turn it around.

German, American and other non-governmental organization staff have been allowed to leave Egypt. Germany is demanding that the trial against them be terminated.

Two employees of the Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation were among 15 foreign non-governmental-organization workers facing charges of receiving foreign funds, who were allowed to leave Egypt on Thursday.

A spokesman for the Berlin-based organization said the two Germans and the other non-governmental-organization workers had left Cairo on a plane bound for Larnaca in Cyprus, after an Egyptian court decision to lift a travel ban on them.

The Costa Allegra cruise liner has docked on the main island of the Seychelles, days after it was stranded because of a fire that cut the ship's power.

The Italian cruise liner that was stranded in the Indian Ocean arrived at port in the Seychelles on Thursday, three days after a fire onboard left the vessel without power.

The Seychelles Red Cross had prepared several tents to administer medical care to passengers, and representatives of the British, Italian and French governments stood by to assist their citizens.

Gordon Bradwell, a 72-year-old American leaving the ship with his wife, said while the experience "could have been disastrous ... We're here, we're alive."

The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Sudan's defense minister over his alleged involvement in atrocities in Darfur. He is one of several senior regime officials sought by the court.

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant on Thursday for Sudan's defense minister, Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein.

The Hague-based court said in a statement that it was seeking the arrest of Hussein on 20 counts of crimes against humanity and 21 war crimes including murder, persecution, rape and torture.

Hussein is suspected of coordinating the attacks against civilians in villages in Sudan's western Darfur region while serving as interior minister from 2001 to 2005 and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's special representative for Darfur from 2003 to 2004

The UN Security Council has demanded "immediate" humanitarian access to besieged cities in Syria after government forces took hold of the Baba Amr district of Homs.

United Nations Security Council members issued a joint statement on Thursday saying they "deplore the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation" after intense bombardment forced rebel troops to withdraw from the besieged Homs district of Baba Amr.

Notably, Russia and China joined other council members calling for Syria "to allow immediate, full and unimpeded access of humanitarian personnel to all populations in need of assistance, in accordance with international law and guiding principles of humanitarian assistance."

The sudden agreement between the US and North Korea over its nuclear program was a positive surprise to many, but the reaction in Washington is still cautious.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described it as a "modest step in the right direction." White House spokesman Jay Carney said it was "a positive first step toward complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in a peaceful manner."

With the new bilateral agreement, North Korea has agreed to stop nuclear testing, stop building long-range missiles and stop enriching uranium, and has promised to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit its Yongbyon nuclear research center.

A secret network of some 500 Syrian activists is attempting to unite an opposition scattered around the world. Despite some challenges, the group has become a powerful tool to coordinate protests in Syria.

A fresh pack of Syrian baklava lies next to Sham's laptop as she scrolls through the Facebook group that connects her in the US to about 500 other Syrian activists. All of them are members of a secret network Sham started soon after the Arab Spring blossomed in Syria a year ago.

"In the beginning, it was mostly for moral support," said Sham, a Syrian woman living in New York City. She didn't give her real name because she feared reprisals against her family in Syria.

French journalist Edith Bouvier, who was wounded and trapped in the besieged Syrian city of Homs more than a week ago, has arrived in Lebanon, her family told FRANCE 24 late on Thursday.

Bouvier was wounded in the same shelling that killed French photographer Remi Ochlik and American reporter Marie Colvin on February 22.

AP - Presidential election results published late Wednesday dealt a humiliating blow to Senegal's aging leader, who had boasted that he would win the race outright and instead will have to face his former protege in a runoff election next month.

President Abdoulaye Wade, whose decision to seek a third term at age 85 has infuriated many Senegalese, got 942,546 votes, or 34.82 percent. That's far short of the 50 percent that he needed to win the contest outright, as he did five years ago when his campaign was run by his former Prime Minister Macky Sall.

"Charles G. Koch has filed a lawsuit as part of an effort to gain control of the Cato Institute, which he co-founded with me in 1977. While Mr. Koch and entities controlled by him have supported the Cato Institute financially since that time, Mr. Koch and his affiliates have exercised no significant influence over the direction or management of the Cato Institute, or the work done here.

"Mr. Koch's actions in Kansas court yesterday represent an effort by him to transform Cato from an independent, nonpartisan research organization into a political entity that might better support his partisan agenda. We view Mr. Koch's actions as an attempt at a hostile takeover, and intend to fight it vehemently in order to continue as an independent research organization, advocating for Individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace."

Cato is one of the largest think tanks in Washington, with a $39 million budget in 2011, according to its tax form. It espouses an ideology of limited government and free-market economics

The EU's 2020 energy targets will be imperilled if a three-year guillotine for transmission line permit appeals is watered down, the head of Europe's electricity network operators warned yesterday (29 February) at the launch of a 10-Year network development plan.

In a far-reaching projection, the European Network Transmission Systems Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) says that €104 billion will be needed to finance some 51,500km of high voltage power lines in the next eight years.

The lion's share of this investment will take place in Britain (€19 billion) and Germany (€30 billion).

But the ENTSO-E report also found that one in three planned investments is currently being held up by delays in the permitting process, which have been known to drag on for decades. 

Wheats and barleys are the staple food for humans and animal feed around the world, and their wild progenitors have undergone genetic changes over the last 28 years that imply a risk for crop improvement and food production, reveals a new study.

"The earliness in flowering time and genetic changes that are taking place in these important progenitor wild cereals, most likely due to global warming, can negatively affect the wild progenitors. These changes could thereby indirectly deteriorate food production," says Prof. Eviatar Nevo of the Insitute of Evolution at the University of Haifa who directed the study.

Wheats are the universal cereals of Old World agriculture.The progenitors, wild emmer wheat and wild barley, which originated in the Near East, provide the genetic basis for ameliorating wheat and barley cultivars, which as earlier studies have shown, are themselves under constant genetic erosion and increasing susceptibility to environmental stresses.

Sharks are among the most threatened of marine species worldwide due to unsustainable overfishing. Sharks are primarily killed for their fins alone, to fuel the growing demand for shark fin soup, which is an Asia delicacy.

A new study by University of Miami (UM) scientists in the journal Marine Drugs has discovered high concentrations of BMAA in shark fins, a neurotoxin linked to neurodegenerative diseases in humans including Alzheimer's and Lou Gehrig Disease (ALS).

The study suggests that consumption of shark fin soup and cartilage pills may pose a significant health risk for degenerative brain diseases.

Local opposition to onshore windfarms has tripled since 2010, a new Guardian poll reveals, following a series of political and media attacks on the renewable technology.

However, a large majority of the British public (60%) remains firmly in favour of wind power, while also opposing the building of new nuclear or coal power plants in their local area.

The poll shows that the national debate over wind energyis becoming sharply polarised, with the percentage of Britons strongly supporting the building of a new windfarm in their area going up by 5%, and the percentage strongly against rising by 14%.

A tiny Spanish country town believes it has found a way to make unemployment, debt and economic crisis disappear in a puff of smoke - by leasing out its land for marijuana plantations.

The town hall of Rasquera in Catalonia on Wednesday voted to sign a €1.3m (£1.1m) agreement with a cannabis association in nearby Barcelona to plant marijuana for its 5,000 members.

It will allow the association to plant on a seven-hectare stretch of town hall land - roughly the size of 10 football pitches. "This is a chance to bring in money and create jobs," explained mayor Bernat Pellisa of the Catalan Republican Left party, as older townsfolk worried that he was turning Rasquera into a drugs mecca.

The habitat of the endangered Sumatran tiger is being rapidly destroyed in order to make tissues and paper packaging for consumer products in the west, new research from Greenpeace shows.

A year-long investigation by the campaigning group has uncovered clear evidence, independently verified, that appears to show that ramin trees from the Indonesian rainforest have been chopped down and sent to factories to be pulped and turned into paper.

The global mining, oil and gas industries have expanded so fast in the last decade they are now leading to large-scale "landgrabbing" and threatening farming and water supplies, according to a report by environment and development groups in Europe, Africa and India.

"The catalogue of devastation is growing. We are no longer talking about isolated pockets of destruction and pollution. In just 10 years, iron ore production has more than doubled, coal has risen 45% and metals like lithium by 125%. Across Africa, Latin America and Asia, more and more lands, rivers and aquifers are being devoured by mining activities.

Different arrangements and combinations of electronic circuits have different functions, ranging from simple light switches to complex supercomputers. These circuits are in turn built of different arrangements of circuit elements, like resistors, inductors and capacitors, which manipulate the flow of electrons in a circuit in mathematically precise ways. And because both electric circuits and optics follow Maxwell's equations -- the fundamental formulas that describe the behavior of electromagnetic fields -- Engheta's dream of building circuits with light wasn't just the stuff of imagination. In 2005, he and his students published a theoretical paper outlining how optical circuit elements could work.

Now, he and his group at Penn have made this dream a reality, creating the first physical demonstration of "lumped" optical circuit elements. This represents a milestone in a nascent field of science and engineering Engheta has dubbed "metatronics."

Engheta's research, which was conducted with members of his group in the electrical and systems engineering department, Yong Sun, Brian Edwards and Andrea Alù, was published in the journal Nature Materials

A study on Muslim integration in Germany has found nearly one in four Muslims without German citizenship holds hostile views toward the West and are reluctant to integrate.

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said Thursday that anyone who opposes freedom and democracy in Germany would have "no future here," reacting to a report that found nearly a quarter of non-German Muslims hold anti-Western views and have no interest in integration.

"Germany pays attention to the cultural background and identity of its immigrants," he said in the Thursday edition of the mass-circulation Bild newspaper. "But we do not accept the import of authoritarian, anti-democratic and religiously extremist views."

Ötzi the Iceman had a predisposition to cardiovascular diseases and suffered from other ailments when he died in the Italian Alps. Researchers have decoded the 5,300-year-old's full genome and published their results.

Ötzi had brown hair and brown eyes - and if he hadn't been killed by an arrow millenia ago, he might have died of a heart attack shortly thereafter. These assertions were among many released in a study published in the journal Nature Communications on Wednesday, providing new details on the the so-called "Iceman."

Researchers from The University of Nottingham have demonstrated how a species of flatworm overcomes the ageing process to be potentially immortal. The discovery, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of a project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) and may shed light on the possibilities of alleviating ageing and age-related characteristics in human cells.

Planarian worms have amazed scientists with their apparently limitless ability to regenerate. Researchers have been studying their ability to replace aged or damaged tissues and cells in a bid to understand the mechanisms underlying their longevity.

Dr Aziz Aboobaker from the University's School of Biology, said: "We've been studying two types of planarian worms; those that reproduce sexually, like us, and those that reproduce asexually, simply dividing in two. Both appear to regenerate indefinitely by growing new muscles, skin, guts and even entire brains over and over again.

BRUSSELS - Serious human rights violations in Azerbaijan have harmed the image of Europe's yearly festival of camp pop - Eurovision.

If Irish twins Jedward or French singer Anggun make finals in Baku in May to sing lines such as "never been in love so deep before" and "in my heart, in my mind I see you and I" viewers might spare a thought for families whose homes were destroyed to make the city look nice on TV.

AFP - Yoko Ono, the widow of Beatle John Lennon, on Thursday won the 2012 Oscar Kokoschka prize, Austria's highest award for applied contemporary art.

Tokyo-born Yoko Ono, 79, is an avant-garde artist who has shot a number of experimental films and has been involved in writing music and singing

In the latest twist in a damaging `spying' scandal, Swedish furniture giant IKEA was on Thursday accused of "harassing" its employees after media reports emerged Wednesday that the company had illegally obtained police files on French workers, clients and union leaders. The latest allegations centre on a former employee who told Europe 1 radio that she had been asked to profile her colleagues and to keep the information on a USB key and to avoid leaving it on company computers "for security reasons".

Google pushed ahead Thursday with its controversial new privacy policy despite a warning by the European Union, led by France, that the company could find itself in breach of European law.

The California-based Internet search and advertising giant announced in January that it was streamlining its privacy policy.

Google will now offer a single unified policy to cover its range while pooling usage information and user profiles, a move, it says, will improve its services. The changes apply from Thursday March 1 and affect all of Google's millions of users. Until today, each of its 60-odd products, including YouTube, Google Docs and the popular Gmail service, had separate privacy policies and did not aggregate data collected from users.

AFP - The ability to share knowledge and learn from each other may be the key difference between people and chimpanzees that helped humans to dominate the modern world, scientists suggested on Thursday.

The research in the journal Science aimed to discover what has allowed humans to establish what is known as cumulative culture, or a gathering of knowledge that ratchets up with technology improvements over time.

A controversial system of mobile euthanasia units that will travel around the country to respond to the wishes of sick people who wish to end their lives has been launched in the Netherlands.

The scheme, which started on Thursday , will send teams of specially trained doctors and nurses to the homes of people whose own doctors have refused to carry out patients' requests to end their lives.

The launch of the so-called Levenseinde, or "Life End", house-call units - whose services are being offered to Dutch citizens free of charge - coincides with the opening of a clinic of the same name in The Hague, which will take patients with incurable illnesses as well as others who do not want to die at home.

AK: How do you see the history of nonviolent action since Unconquerable World was published? What were you thinking about the Tunisian uprising, the Egyptian uprising, the Occupy movement, the general global protest movement of the present moment that arose remarkably nonviolently?

JS: I was astonished. Even now, I don't feel that I understand what the causes were. I'm not even sure it makes sense to speak of the causes.  If you point to a cause -- oppression, food prices rising, cronyism, corruption, torture -- these things go on for decades and nothing happens. Nobody does anything. Then in a twinkling everything changes. Twenty-three days in Egypt and Mubarak is gone.

How and why a people suddenly develops a will to change the conditions under which it's living is, to me, one of the deep mysteries of all politics. That's why I don't blame myself or anyone else for not expecting or predicting the Arab Spring. How that happens may, in the end, be undiscoverable. And I think the reason for that is connected to freedom.  Such changes in opinion and will are somewhere near the root of what we mean when we talk about the exercise of freedom. Almost by definition, freedom refers to something not visibly or obviously caused by anything else. Otherwise it would be compelled, not free.

And yet there is nothing obscure -- in the sense of clouded or dark -- about freedom. Its exercise is perhaps the most public of all things, as well as the most powerful, as recent history shows. It's a daylight mystery.

Ever since the 1920s scientists had realised that the universe wasn't static - it was expanding. There was a furious dispute about what this meant. One group of cosmologists said it meant that the universe had begun with an enormous explosion. Hoyle thought this was ridiculous, and he derisively gave his opponent's theory a name. He called it "the big bang" on a radio programme in 1949.

Hoyle thought this idea was silly because it meant that everything that now exists in the universe would have had to have been created in that one explosive moment. Hoyle believed that the universe had no beginning and no end - and that fiery stars throughout the cosmos were continually creating new matter that filled up the universe as it expanded.

And in 1948 Hoyle published a paper that was more than just a piece of scientific theory. It amounted to a new philosophical description of the universe, and it captured the public imagination. Two years later the BBC invited Hoyle to give a series of lectures on the radio, and millions listened to his dramatic vision.