The war crimes trial of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic has been halted due to a prosecution error a day after opening at The Hague. Mladic is on trial for his role in the murders of over 7,000 Muslim men and boys.

The presiding judge at the war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic delayed proceedings on Thursday, citing a prosecution error.

Three hours into the high-profile trial's second day at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, judge Alphons Orie declared that the prosecution had failed to submit all its evidence to Mladic's defense in time.

A caretaker Greek cabinet has been sworn in in Athens, comprising diplomats, retired military officers, and university professors, with a limited mandate until fresh elections on June 17.

Among the newly inaugurated ministers are George Zannias, the former head of the state's council of economic advisors, as finance minister, and 83-year-old retired diplomat Petros Molyviatis as foreign minister. The former head of Greece's army general staff, Frangos Frangoulis, has been named defense minister.

On Wednesday, Panagiotis Pikrammenos was sworn in as the caretaker prime minister after elections on May 6 and subsequent negotiations between Greek political parties failed to produce a viable coalition government.

Berlin's mayor has revealed that there will be a delay of nearly ten months for the German capital's new international airport. It had been due to open in less than three weeks.

The mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, announced on Thursday that Berlin's new international airport, which was scheduled to open on June 3, will not be in service until March 2013.

Safety concerns pushed back the opening date when it was revealed earlier this month that there were deficits in mandatory fire prevention measures at Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport. It was initially believe that the delay would have been for just two to three months.

Turkey's military says its warplanes chased an Israeli aircraft from airspace off territorially disputed Cyprus, where Turkey is seeking seabed deposits of oil and gas. The incident is said to have happened on Monday.

Israeli officials did not comment immediately on Turkey's claim that an Israeli plane was chased from Cypriot airspace by Turkish fighters on Monday.

Turkey's disclosure, made on Thursday, puts the spotlight back on offshore reserves in the eastern Mediterranean and a souring of Israeli-Turkish relations since 2010.

German Finance Minister and veteran of several governments Wolfgang Schäuble is seen as a man for tough jobs. On Thursday, he received the prestigious Charlemagne Prize in Aachen.

Ever since the election in fall 2009, Wolfgang Schäuble has been the most important minister in Angela Merkel's government. He's the one with the most weight in political affairs, and, as the government's real number 2, is deeply involved in international politics - a constant presence at every important international gathering.

On Thursday, he will receive the Charlemagne Prize in Aachen for his service for European unification, an honor previously bestowed on the likes of Winston Churchill, Bill Clinton, Pope John Paul II, and indeed Merkel.

The trial in Oslo of self-confessed mass-killer Anders Breivik has started hearing testimonies of those who were hit by his bullets at the Utoya summer camp, but who survived to confront him in court.

Sitting just a few meters from the man who less than a year ago tried to kill him, Lars Gronnestad spoke in a clear voice as he answers questions from the prosecution about how he survived Anders Breivik's bullets at Utoya.

Breivik killed 69 mainly young people there, but now Gronnestad and more than 40 others are facing him in court. The defendant admitted to killing 77 people in an Oslo car bombing and during a shooting spree at the Labour party youth camp last July, but denies charges of premeditated murder and terrorism.

Occupy, block, protest - the numerous groups that belong to the so-called "Blockupy" alliance are aiming to do all of these in Frankfurt through Sunday. And many banks and shops will stay closed over the holiday weekend.

Around 40 organizations have come together under the banner "Blockupy" in Germany's financial center Frankfurt, for a long weekend of protest between May 16 and 19. They include anti-capitalist organizations like Attac and Germany's socialist Left party, and their aim is to demonstrate against the financial policies of European leaders.

The objects of their ire are the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and large financial institutions like Germany's Commerzbank - and they hope to paralyze much of central Frankfurt, particularly its banking quarter, over the coming days.

The German chancellor has parted ways with her erstwhile favorite, Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, and his successor is already in the wings. Opposition parties say the cabinet's authority is weakened.

For the first time, the order to sack a cabinet minister came from the chancellery. Angela Merkel said Wednesday that she had asked President Joachim Gauck to release Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, a fellow Christian Democrat, from his duties.

BRUSSELS - The European Union needs to become more integrated with a common finance policy and a central government, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Wednesday (16 May).

"I would be for the further development of the European Commission into a government. I am for the election of a European president, he said at an event in Aachen, reports Reuters.

"I am in favour of being more courageous on Europe," said Schaeuble, who is one of the German government's most pro-European ministers.

In February, with his presidential campaign in full swing, François Hollande dispatched Laurent Fabius to Beijing to build contacts with the Chinese regime on his behalf.

Fabius left the Chinese capital after just 24 hours with his tail between his legs after failing to persuade any senior officials to meet him.

But after Hollande appointed him as the new French Foreign Minister on Wednesday 65-year-old Fabius, who is the oldest member of the new government, will now carry more weight when he tries to do the president's bidding abroad.

Much has been made of the French President's choice of Fabius to lead the Foreign Ministry at the Quai D'Orsay in Paris.

Reports that Bankia depositors have withdrawn €1bn in a week have rattled the Spanish financial sector; Bankia's share price dropped 29% on the reports, but recovered after the government tried to calm markets; the story was never denied, but the reported withdrawals are small relative to Bankia's deposit base; Moody's downgraded 16 Spanish banks; in Greece, New Democracy has taken the lead once again in the latest poll; a technocratic caretaker government was sworn in yesterday in Athens; Fitch cuts Greece's credit rating citing risk of eurozone exit; the German government says the risk of a Greek exit are containable; finance ministry study puts the total cost to Germany at €80bn; Bundesbank says German banks are strong enough to withstand a Greek exit; Le Monde says that Laurent Fabius may still be a good choice for foreign minister despite his campaign against the Constitutional Treaty; the French government is forecasting a strong rise in unemployment to over 10% over the next two years; an Irish government minister hinted that the country might vote a second time if the referendum rejects the Treaty; Philip Stephens says time for the eurozone is running out; Jean-Claude Trichet proposes a bankruptcy scheme for states, whereby the eurozone usurps a defaulter's fiscal policy; Martin Wolf says the main problem with a Greek exit would be that the eurozone will no longer be regarded as a monetary union; Kevin O'Rourke, meanwhile, argues that it is perfectly rational for Greeks to vote for Syriza.

Shares in the Spanish bank that was partially nationalized last week slumped to a one-year low in morning trading only to recover somewhat in the afternoon. A report of mass withdrawals prompted this latest wobble.

A Spanish media report prompted Bankia shares to take another nosedive in Thursday morning trading, hitting a low-watermark of 1.17 euros ($1.48) just after lunch before recovering much of the day's losses. Still, the lender, partially nationalized by Spain last week, has shed roughly one half of its value in the month of May.

G8 leaders are meeting on Friday in Camp David to consult on international issues. The Euro crisis overshadows the summit, as well as the question whether the exclusive circle still has any meaning.

It's going to be a summit with several peculiarities. For the first time, the freshly inaugurated French President Francois Hollande will be stepping onto the international stage.

"Hollande will come under significant pressure not to unravel or take steps that would threaten to unravel the fiscal pact that has been reached among European countries," Stewart M. Patrick, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, told DW. The demands by the Socialist Hollande for a growth pact, as well as the government crisis in Greece will keep the participants in Camp David busy - and the corresponding reactions can be expected.

AP - Members of France's new Socialist-led government will promise Thursday to take a pay cut, a gesture of shared sacrifice by leaders who must now both reduce the country's massive debts and tackle spiraling unemployment.

President Francois Hollande promised during his campaign to protect France's elaborate social benefit system -- even vowing to roll back some cuts that his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy had made -- while also continuing to trim the country's deficit. France hasn't balanced a budget in nearly 40 years, and Hollande has promised to eliminate the deficit in 2017.

AFP - US President Barack Obama Thursday eased investment curbs on Myanmar but maintained sanctions against former junta members, seeking maximum leverage to encourage a "nascent" reform drive.

Obama's move followed calls from business and political figures in the United States, Europe and Asia to lift sanctions, and warnings by democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi against excessive optimism over a political opening.

"We will license certain types of investment in financial services and for businesses to do business in Burma," a US official said. "We will continue to sanction individuals associated with the former regime."

"It is a recognition of progress, it is a recognition that opening up greater economic engagement between our two countries is important to support reformers," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Barack Obama is to put pressure on Germany to ease the pain of austerity with policies to boost growth, as he uses two days of talks with the G8 industrial nations to warn Europe it needs to act swiftly to spare the world economy from a second deep recession in four years.

Ahead of the G8 summit, at Camp David this weekend, a warning from the ratings agency Fitch that Greece's days in the single currency could be numbered heightened fears in Washington that the worsening crisis in the eurozone poses a threat to America's fragile recovery and President Obama's re-election chances.

Obama will welcome the new French president, François Hollande, as a potential ally in his push for Europe to follow the US in giving a higher priority to expansionary policies, and as a counterweight to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Obama can expect support from David Cameron, who told Merkel and Hollande on Thursday that eurozone leaders must embark on a series of urgent steps to prop up the single currency, to avoid a major implosion across the continent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/17/barack-obama-eu-growth-crisis

So odd after so many "progressives" have exposed/imgained the pro-austerity slant of the US government.

Article III of the US Constitution created the judicial branch of the American government and made it independent of the legislative and executive branches. District Courts, Courts of Appeal and the US Supreme Court are all authorized under this part of the Constitution and are thus known as "Article III" courts. The Supreme Court has ruled that only Article III courts may render final judgments in cases involving life, liberty, and private property rights, with limited exceptions.

Article I tribunals consist of certain federal courts and other forms of adjudicative bodies, including federal bankruptcy and administrative law courts, and many federal agencies such as the Fed, FDIC and OCC in the banking world. Article I of the Article 1, Section 8, Clause 4 authorizes Congress to enact "uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States." These bodies are creatures of the Executive Branch and the decisions of these "adjunct" tribunals are subject to comprehensive review by the Article III courts, as noted above.

....

When it comes to business insolvencies, both Congress and the Courts have tended to want to leave bankruptcy courts in the commercial realm, operating more like mediators for corporations and social welfare agencies for individual, than as "equity courts" in the ancient sense. Out of this tradition has grown a great reluctance on the part of US Article III courts to allow the bankruptcy courts to operate outside the narrow confines of the interests of the estate of the failed individual or entity.

In the 1920s and 1930s, when financial fraud reached an apex, the Courts were not afraid to empower bankruptcy trustees also as receivers in order to protect the public from various types of criminality in existence at that time. In the landmark 1925 case Benedict v. Ratner, where Justice Louis Brandeis laid down the law on collateralized borrowing, the bankruptcy trustee in the underlying case was also appointed as a receiver.

The difference between a trustee and receiver is very significant. The trustee in a bankruptcy represents the estate and has no power to pursue other parties nor to make decisions affecting equity. The bankruptcy of the Madoff firm, for example, shows how the trustee in unable to act on behalf of the victims of the fraud. Irving Picard may only represent the interests of the failed broker dealer. Under the bankruptcy code, the trustee may only pursue money's owed to the estate and may not pursue third parties for their actions against the victims of the fraud.

JPMorgan unit has $100bn of risky bonds

The unit at the centre of JPMorgan Chase's $2bn trading loss has built up positions totalling more than $100bn in asset-backed securities and structured products - the complex, risky bonds at the centre of the financial crisis in 2008.

These holdings are in addition to those in credit derivatives which led to the losses and have mired the bank in regulatory investigations and criticism.

(...)

the CIO has also dominated market activity and built up huge positions in other, equally esoteric markets, according to leading traders.
"I can't see how they could unwind these positions because no one can replace them in terms of size. It's a bit of the same problem they face with the derivatives trade," said a credit trader at a rival bank. "They pretty much are the market."

(...)

"[The JPM CIO] has taken more than £13bn (or 45 per cent) of the total amount of UK RMBS [residential mortgage backed securities] that has been placed with investors since the market re-opened in October 2009," the BBA said.

Relief may be in sight for Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng, who hopes to leave China for the US to escape persecution. China has said it will process his passport application within two weeks.

Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has been told by Chinese officials that his application for passports for himself and his family will be processed within 15 days, the 40-year-old said on Thursday.

He has been held in virtual house arrest in a hospital for two weeks following a dramatic escape from house arrest at his home last month. He fled to the US embassy in Beijing, touching off a diplomatic row between China and the US.

A suicide attack at the compound of the Farah governor left seven dead and wounded 12 on Thursday, a police spokesman in the western Afghanistan province said.

The attacks were launched when a suicide bomber set off his explosives at the entrance to the compound. Three other attackers then began exchanging gunfire with police. In the shootout, two of the attackers were killed. The final attacker died when he set off a suicide bomb.

Thousands of Syrian refugees are stranded in Jordan. The border region has reached its limits. But Jordanians continue to show their solidarity with their Syrian neighbors, despite increasing rent and food prices.

The northern Jordanian town of Mafraq is just one of many destinations for the ongoing wave of Syrian refugees fleeing the violence in their home country. Though they have escaped the violence of the regime under President Bashar Assad, their daily lives in Jordan are anything but easy.

AFP - The United States is helping bring more and better weapons to Syria's rebels, including anti-tank weaponry, for their fight against President Bashar al-Assad regime,The Washington Post said Wednesday.

President Barack Obama's administration insisted it was not directly supplying the weapons or providing funding, with Gulf states paying for the new arms, the Post said, citing US and foreign officials.

But Washington has stepped up links with the rebels and regional militaries allied with them, playing a role in the rebel's foreign support network, according to the report.

AFP - Rwandan rebels have killed at least 50 civilians in May in the volatile east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Twenty-two of them died in an attack Monday in the village of Kamananga in Sud-Kivu province, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA said, blaming the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebel group.

"The FDLR accuse the locals of collaborating with elements" of a local militia, a statement said.

AFP - The US Commerce Department ruled Thursday that China is dumping solar cells into its market at huge margins, setting the stage for possible anti-dumping duties of 31-250 percent on imports from China.

In the same week that Japan mothballed its very last reactor, Korea broke ground on two new-build nuclear power stations - a pair of APR-1400 units now being constructed at Shin Ulchin, on the east coast. They are two of eight new stations planned to add to the country's existing nuclear fleet of 23, currently supplying 45% of the nation's electricity. To mark the occasion the country's president, Lee Myung-bak, paid a visit to the site, praising a "huge milestone" for South Korea's engineers, who had helped the country achieve "the dream of independent nuclear technology".

9.24am: Peter Hain, the shadow Welsh secretary, quit front-bench politics yesterday to focus on launching a campaign to build a tidal barrage across the Severn estuary. In a statement on his website, Hain said he hoped "to help secure Wales the biggest infrastructure project it has ever seen":

This will require a private Bill, but I hope the Government will back it...[The Barrage] will generate at least 5% of the UK's entire electricity needs, at a time when the future of nuclear power is in doubt. Nuclear power stations like Wylfa are coming to the end of their lives - that's happening right across Britain...So what is going to fill this gap? And what is going to stop the lights going off? The Severn Barrage is one of the projects, probably the key project that stops that happening. The power it can generate is equivalent to about three nuclear power stations.

The last 60 years have been the hottest in Australasia for a millennium and cannot be explained by natural causes, according to a new report by scientists that supports the case for a reduction in manmade carbon emissions.

In the first major study of its kind in the region, scientists at the University of Melbourne used natural data from 27 climate indicators, including tree rings, corals and ice cores to map temperature trends over the past 1,000 years.

Also speaking Wednesday at the forum was Santiago Seage, chief executive of Abenoga Solar, an Spanish solar-power company, with its U.S. headquarters in Lakewood. He said renewable energy "is even more important" in a world in which the controversial drilling practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has become prominent.

The focus on fracking, in which water and trace chemicals are pumped into wells to break up rock and free up oil and gas, has diverted attention from the development of renewable-energy sources, Seage said.

Political analysts have begun to use energy as a battlefield, he said, "and as a result ... we end up seeing R&D investments going down, we end up seeing the focus on transition technologies that are not the solution and we all end up compromising in technology."

"That will not solve the problem. Some of you saw this in the late '70s and the '80s," he said. "We cannot let this happen again."

Splits between reformist lay Catholics and bishops loyal to the Vatican have resurfaced at a convention in Mannheim, Germany. Organizers say there are "great discrepancies" between papal doctrine and everyday realities.

The Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) has demanded the Vatican make "improvements" by opening the church's leadership to women and ending the "exclusion" felt by divorcees and couples in mixed-faith marriages during Mass.

The so-called Mannheim Appeal issued by the committee, which has organized the annual five-day festival-like gathering in the southern Rhine river city, says reforms within the church of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics worldwide are "overdue."

Experts in prenatal and perinatal care are calling for more specialized clinics for high-risk pregnancies and newborns. DW's Nicole Goebel went to a specialists' conference for a look at the trends and latest treatments.

More specialized centers are needed to improve childbirth and care for newborns in Germany, according to the German Association for prenatal care and obstetrics.

"Children with heart defects, for instance, can't be delivered in just any perinatal clinic, they have to be delivered where there are pediatric cardiac surgeons and cardiologists," Professor Ulrich Gembruch from the University Clinic in Bonn told DW.

"Long-term, in Germany, we should aim to offer every woman the opportunity to give birth in a hospital that has 24-hour pediatric care - as in other countries."

AFP - Brazilian authorities have admitted that the Amazon's Awa, "Earth's most threatened tribe," are outnumbered 10 to one in just one of their reserves, Survival International said Thursday.

Survival International, a leading advocate for tribal peoples' rights worldwide, said officials admitted "the scale of the emergency" after receiving over 20,000 messages of protest following the launch of its drive to save the Awa from "imminent extinction" late last month.

It pointed to a Brazilian government survey estimating there could be "up to 4,500 invaders, ranchers, loggers and settlers" occupying just one of the four territories inhabited by the Awa, whose total population stands at no more than 450.

AFP - Three Russian computer whizzes were crowned the world's top collegiate programmers Thursday, when they clobbered 111 other teams from across the globe to win the 36th annual "Battle of Brains" in Warsaw.

Students Eugeniy Kapun, Mikhail Kever and Niyaz Nigmatullin from St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics managed to solve nine of 12 problems in the allotted five hours, displaying the mental gymnastics required in the field.

AFP - Political cartoons are "on the frontline of freedom" as recent attacks on cartoonists in Iran and Syria showed, famous American cartoonist Kevin KAL Kallaugher told AFP in Bucharest.

The main reason is "because the job of a cartoonist is not to make you laugh but to make you think," said the man who has caricatured the most powerful people in the world, from US President Barack Obama to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

AFP - A Frenchman who lost his limbs in an accident braved strong winds and currents to swim from Papua New Guinea to Indonesia Thursday, in the first stretch of a mission to swim between five continents.

Philippe Croizon, 43, who uses prosthetic limbs with flippers attached, took seven and a half hours to make his way from the Papua New Guinea village of Wutung to Pasar Skow in Indonesia's Papua province.

The 20-kilometre (12-mile) journey, between two points on New Guinea island which is shared between the two countries, was billed as the Oceania-Asia stretch of his challenge which involves three more stages.

Thus it's probably safe to assume that there will be no effective opposition to the status quo in this country until some movement arises that in practice--not just in theory--embraces an essentially ascetic approach.  My guess, for what it's worth, is that the first movement to do so will be a revived Marxism. I'm no fan of Karl Marx, and even less a fan of the various ideologues who filled out the framework of his system, but Marxism has features that will give it powerful appeal in the decades ahead.  It gives the poor someone to blame for their misfortunes, and does so in a far more detailed manner than (say) the vague rhetoric of the Occupy movement; it is among the few ideologies that manage to fuse a rigorous intellectual tradition with a utopian future vision of religious intensity; and it has a strong ascetic element--the figure of the Marxist revolutionary, lean, passionate, doctrinaire, and contemptuous of material goods except insofar as they might help further the cause, was a common social type in Europe for close to a century.
Marxism also has an advantage just now that no amount of money could buy it: the extraordinary campaign of unintended propaganda that the Republican party is currently carrying out on its behalf.  Right now, even the most moderate and revenue-neutral attempts to use the powers of government for the benefit of American citizens are being lambasted by the GOP as communism.  It's an embarrassing admission of intellectual poverty--one gathers that the American right spent so long belaboring the Red Peril that it really has no idea what to say now that communism isn't around any more--but it also guarantees a familiar kind of backlash. Fundamentalist churches that spend too much time denouncing Satanism, complete with lurid descriptions of Satanic living replete with wild parties and orgiastic sex, get that kind of backlash; that's why they so often find that they've merely succeeded in making devil worship popular among local teens.
In the same way, if the Republicans succeed in rebranding, say, public assistance and food safety laws as Marxist, the most likely result of that campaign will be to convince a great many Americans of otherwise moderate political views that Marx might have had something going for him after all. As suggested above, I don't consider this a good thing; in theory, Marxist revolution leads to the glorious worker's paradise of the future via the inevitable workings of the historical dialectic, but in practice the dictatorship of the proletariat reliably turns into just another dictatorship, with the usual quota of gulags and unmarked mass graves.  Still, in a country where most people are frighteningly ignorant of history, and are being driven to the wall by a corrupt and spectacularly mismanaged imperial economy in headlong decline, it's unpleasantly unlikely that this point will be remembered.

it would have to have a different name, otherwise i think he's wrong, but makes a good case...

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

AFP - Grammy-winning disco legend Donna Summer died Thursday after a battle with cancer, aged 63, her family said in a statement.

Nicknamed the Queen of Disco, the singer, whose 1970s and 80s hits included "I Feel Love," "Love to Love you Baby" and "She Works Hard for the Money," died in Florida, the TMZ celebrity news website said.

"Early this morning, we lost Donna Summer Sudano, a woman of many gifts, the greatest being her faith," said the family statement.

FHM's 'study' uses a cohort of men self-selected according to their preference for the kind of women who feature in FHM, conditions them with a monthly barrage of images labeled 'sexy', and then asks them to name some sexy women. Even if you accepted the bogus premise that sex appeal could be ranked on a universal scale, this would be a rubbish way to do it.