The Republic of Ireland votes in a popular referendum on the EU's fiscal pact, the main agreement to emerge from the two-year-long debt crisis. Support for the pact currently polls well, but many voters are undecided.

More than 3.1 million people in Ireland are entitled to vote today on whether to join the European Union's fiscal pact, in the only popular referendum to be held among the 17 members of the euro currency union that have signed the treaty.

Serbia's new president, Tomislav Nikolic, has been sworn in. He set out his priorities in his first speech: EU entry with Kosovo as part of its territory and diplomatic lines to both the East and the West.

Nikolic was sworn in on Thursday during the first session of Serbia's new parliament. The former opposition leader reiterated his support for the country's bid to join the European Union.

"I want Serbia as a European Union member and as a country that will never renounce its territorial integrity, including Kosovo," Nikolic told the parliament.

While the trial of Anders Behring Breivik for the murder of 77 people has put a spotlight on radical right-wing currents in Norway, experts agree far-right extremists do not play a major role Norwegian society.

In a bright room equipped with desks at the Norwegian Center Against Racism in Oslo, a half dozen adult immigrants are working on their job applications. They are being trained by 24-year-old Somia Salaouatchi.

Salaouatchi, whose face is surrounded by a lilac-colored scarf, gives the immigrants tips on how to improve the look of their resumes. Born in Algeria, she said she doesn't feel that immigrants are discriminated against in Norway in general, but added that she does see structural discrimination.

As conservative leaders in France contemplate a likely defeat in parliamentary elections in June, some among them have rallied around an unlikely figure: defeated former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

The Friends of Nicolas Sarkozy Association was formally established in Paris on Wednesday, fuelling ongoing speculation about the uncertain future of France's political Right. Sarkozy, who lost the May 6 presidential runoff to Socialist rival François Hollande, repeated before and after the vote that he would quit politics if he was defeated.

According to a statement prepared for the press, the mission of the new organisation includes being "vigilant to the way the [Sarkozy] record while in office is represented in public discourse," and "upholding the ideas and values that he defended during his mandate."

Riot police on the stage of the Mariinsky, missiles rolling across the Bolshoi - opposition to Vladimir Putin's rule has suffused Russian culture to such a degree that it has reached the stages of the country's most vaunted theatres.

Last weekend, the latest production to allude to the opposition protests that have brought tens of thousands onto the streets of Moscow opened at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Putin's hometown.

Gone are the tsarist-era costumes favoured by most who put on Boris Godunov, the 19th century opera by Modest Mussorgsky about a ruthless tsar who takes the throne after murdering the rightful heir.

ECB President is fiercely critical of how member states have been handling domestic banking crises; he said the supervision of banks should be done centrally in the eurozone; Jörg Asmussen said 25 systemically relevant banks should be subject to eurozone supervision; Draghi and Ignazio Visco say ESM should be able to recapitalise banks directly - and thus act as a resolution trust company; Visco in addition wants ESM capacity to interview directly in markets; the latest data from the Bank of Spain show that the bank run has already gathered pace in March; analysts fear that withdrawals could have increased much more during April and May; El Pais has an article about how the EU's patience with the Spanish crisis management is wearing thinner; Luis de Guindos says eurozone crisis to be decided one way or another in the next few weeks; Quentin Peel writes from Berlin that Germany is much more open in the search for solutions than it appears; says Merkel wants full fiscal union, but not eurobonds on their own; southern Germany now is at full employment, according to Germany's federal employment agency; youth unemployment dropped to the lowest level since unification; VW grants its workers a 4.3% wage increase; Moscovici supports the Juncker-Tremonti version of the eurobond; Sylvie Goulard proposes a multi-stage Delors-committtee style route to a eurobond; the Irish voted in the referendum, with results due out today, and an extremely low turnout; the latest Greek polls show New Democracy ahead; in the Netherlands, meanwhile, the Far Right under Geert Wilders has made huge advances in the polls, as his anti-euro stance is paying off.

To begin with a SYRIZA government will annul the memorandum agreement in parliament, will immediately stop laws that have stopped collective bargaining, restore minimum wage to where it was till February 2012 (750 Euros gross), nationalize the banking system etc. He did not say Greece will now press for leaving NATO but he said that country will pursue a multilateral foreign policy...

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

French journalists are furious about the European Union's annual economic reports being released initially only in English.

Jean Quatremer, the Brussels correspondent for the Paris-based paper, Liberation, fired off an angry email to the European Commission, saying (in French): "Once again, all the documents published today are available only in English. This is unacceptable."

The commission had released 1,500 pages of hotly-awaited reports on the state of the bloc's 27 economies, along with proposals to redress public finances as Europe struggles with its debt crisis.

Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackerman has handed over the reigns at Germany's biggest bank after a decade of both controversy and success. But tougher times lie ahead for his successors, he thinks.

Describing his demise from Deutsche Bank as "very special day" with a "touch of sadness," Josef Ackermann said that Germany's flagship bank was "even stronger and more stable than it already was."

"I'm pleased to hand over this bank in such outstanding shape to my successors," he told his last annual shareholder meeting in Frankfurt on Thursday.

BRUSSELS - A German finance ministry official caused a stir at a Brussels conference by urging deficit countries to "become ants" rather than profligate "grasshoppers," in response to criticism by Italy's Prime Minister Mario Monti that Berlin is too slow in helping troubled euro-countries.

"More money is not the solution. We need to repair the lack of competitiveness in the eurozone, which is only feasible through reforms, investments in innovation and building up a stable legal framework," Thomas Steffen, a director general in the German ministry of finance said on Thursday (31 May) during the Brussels Economic Forum, a conference organised by the European Commission.

BRUSSELS - A Hungarian minister has accused the EU of trying to over-extend its power amid the financial crisis.

Gyorgy Matolcsy, the 56-year-old economy minister from the nationalist Fidesz party, said in an op-ed in the business weekly Heti Valasz on Thursday (31 May) that he wants a "Europe of nations" and not a "European empire" and that Hungary should stay out of the euro.

AFP - France's new Socialist government is moving to clamp down on executive pay at state-owned companies amid widespread public anger at salary packages seen as excessive in Europe's crisis-hit economies.

President Francois Hollande's government has vowed to announce measures by mid-June capping salaries for top executives at no more than 20 times the pay of a company's lowest-paid worker.

AFP - Greece's second- and third-biggest banks posted Thursday hundreds of millions of euros in quarterly losses due to a drawn-out recession and write-offs of Greek sovereign debt.

Greece's second-biggest bank Alpha posted a net loss of 107.8 million euros ($133 million), citing "the deepening recession," now in its fifth year, in an earnings statement.

AFP - Pakistan's rupee sank to its lowest level against the dollar on Thursday, as the central bank denied that it would have to return to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for assistance.

Amid panic in Pakistan's fragile forex market, the rupee slid 0.9 percent to 93.8350 per dollar, a record low, according to Malik Bostan, president of the Forex Dealers' Association.

AP - France's finance minister personally asked the former head of Air France-KLM to return a €400,000 ($497,520) payout on Thursday, as the country's new Socialist government tries to rein in executive pay.

Pierre Moscovici said on France Inter radio that the money, paid as compensation for a non-compete clause in the executive's contract, "doesn't go in the direction of decency."

The French government, which holds a 15.9 percent stake in the Franco-Dutch carrier, said it would vote against the payment at a shareholder's meeting Thursday, and the measure was in fact rejected, with 79 percent of shareholders voting against.

What can be learned from this chart?

The first conclusion is that there is no relation between the share of government revenue and the rate of growth of real output per head (that is, productivity) over the 1989-2011 period. The "regression line" is flat. We see low tax countries with low productivity growth (Japan) and high tax countries with high productivity growth (Finland and Sweden). Ireland is a striking outlier: it had relatively low taxation and relatively high growth of real incomes per head. This was partly because it was a successful catch-up story (particularly in the 1990s) and partly because it had an unsustainable boom (particularly in the 2000s).

The second conclusion is that these advanced democracies seem to fall into three groups. The English-speaking countries all have relatively low average tax rates, ranging from close to 30 per cent of GDP to Canada's 42 per cent. They share this range with Japan, Switzerland and Spain. In the next range come the continental European countries, with tax ratios from 40 per cent to 50 per cent of GDP. In this group, Italy and Germany are relatively less highly taxed and Austria and France relatively more highly taxed. Finally, there are the Scandinavian countries, whose ratios of government revenue to GDP averaged over 50 per cent.

The third conclusion is that the spread in the average tax ratio is quite large, at 26 per cent of GDP, from Japan to Denmark.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/05/31/ecb-head-draghi-eurozone-unsustainable-in-current-form/

Thoughts? What happens next then?

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

"Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty," by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, is a brilliant and sometimes breathtaking survey of country-level governance over history and around the world. Professors Acemoglu and Robinson discern a simple pattern - when elites are held in check, typically by effective legal mechanisms, everyone else in society does much better and sustained economic growth becomes possible. But powerful people - kings, barons, industrialists, bankers - work long and hard to relax the constraints on their actions. And when they succeed, the effects are not just redistribution toward themselves but also an undermining of economic growth and often a tearing at the fabric of society. (I've worked with the authors on related issues, but I was not involved in writing the book.)

The historical evidence is overwhelming. Many societies have done well for a while - until powerful people get out of hand. This is an easy pattern to see at a distance and in other cultures. It is typically much harder to recognize when your own society now has an elite less subject to effective constraints and more able to exert power in an abusive fashion. And given the long history of strong institutions in the United States, it appears particularly difficult for some people to acknowledge that we have serious governance issues that need to be addressed.

The governance issue of the season is Jamie Dimon's seat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mr. Dimon is the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, currently the largest bank in the United States. This bank is "too big to fail" - meaning that if it were to get into difficulties, substantial financial support would be provided by the Federal Reserve System (and perhaps other parts of government) to prevent it from collapsing.

....

n the Acemoglu and Robinson tour de force, I find one of the greatest elite wealth-making (for themselves) strategies of all time to be underemphasized. Persuade the government to let you build a big bank; take a great deal of risk in that bank (particularly by increasing leverage, i.e., debt relative to equity); pay yourself based on the return on equity, unadjusted for risk; get cash payouts while times are good; and when events turn against you, the central bank can bail you out - and keep you in place because you are regarded as indispensable. This is the history of modern America.

Syria's main rebel group has given the government two days to silence its guns. If Damascus does not comply, the rebels say they will formally withdraw from the cease-fire, moving Syria toward full-blown civil war.

Syrian rebels have given President Bashar al-Assad's regime an ultimatum, warning that if Damascus does not comply with the UN-backed cease-fire in 48 hours, they will no longer be bound the agreement.

A German man held hostage by a group claiming to be affiliated with al Qaeda has been killed in a failed rescue attempt, security sources say.

The German hostage has been named as Edgar Fritz Raupach, an engineer who was kidnapped four months ago in the northern city of Kano while working for a construction company.

German President Joachim Gauck arrived in the West Bank on the last day of a tour that included Israel. The issue of Israeli settlement building was expected to come up once again.

President Joachim Gauck and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met in Ramallah with a view to breathing life back into the Middle East peace discussions.

Among the topics on the agenda - as well as at later talks with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad - was the issue of Israeli settlement building in occupied parts of the West Bank.

AFP - Egypt's decades-long state of emergency came to an end on Thursday after its last renewal expired, the ruling military said in a statement, vowing to continue to "protect" the nation.

The military will continue its "national and historic responsibility, taking into account that the state of emergency has ended, in accordance with the constitutional declaration and with the law," it said.

It said it would continue in that role until it hands over power, as it has promised to do to an elected president by the end of June.

CIWEM has began calling for photographers to submit entries for its 2012 award. Honouring amateurs and professionals alike, the contest is an international showcase for the very best in environmental photography and video. Here is a selection of past entries

My conversation with Ed Davey began badly. Two weeks ago the Liberal Democrat secretary of state rang me to explain that his energy bill would be the best legislation drafted since the 10 commandments. It happened that earlier that day, Ed Davey's deputy, the Conservative energy minister Charles Hendry, whom it would be inaccurate to describe as petite, had delivered a statement to the House of Commons, after which he had tried to reverse into his seat. But he missed, and instead sat on the secretary of state. I told Davey that I hoped he had recovered, and that it seemed to me symbolic of the Lib Dems' role in the coalition.

Peru's last uncontacted tribes may be among the small minority of mankind who have never heard of Mick Jagger but conservationists are now calling on the Rolling Stones frontman to help save the Amazonian homeland of these vulnerable groups.

The British rock star - who was reportedly made an "honorary ambassador" for the environment during a visit to Peru last year - is being asked to weigh in on a controversial gasfield development that threatens the Mashco-Piro and other tribes isolated from the outside world due to the remoteness of their forest home.

Governments must end subsidies for fossil fuels and focus instead on supporting renewable energy sources, the executive director of an award-winning microfinance organisation said this week.

Speaking to the Guardian, LH Manjunath, from Shri Kshetra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project (SKDRDP) in southern India, which provides consumer loans for energy projects, said: "Most fossil fuels are subsidised. The [Indian] government is spending millions on subsidies. It must stop all subsidies for fossil fuels and increase the number for clean energy."

House Inc: Defeat High Energy Costs - Indiegogo

What is House Inc?

House Inc is a startup with one simple goal -- make it so that every homeowner can afford the energy saving technology they need. Right now, energy is one of the most regressive expenses there is, hitting middle and lower class homeowners hard while barely touching the rich. That's because the rich can afford to pay a dollar more now to save $10 later, and with House Inc, everyone else can too. House Inc gives homeowners energy efficiency devices and then charges based on the savings, making this technology available to everyone, and leveling the energy playing field.

Aside from advertising the project, maybe this could tap into the ET hive mind for comments and suggestions on the pitch (Sven Triloquist, I'm looking at you ;-P).

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

The first journey of a privately built spacecraft to the International Space Station has come to an end. SpaceX's Dragon capsule has splashed down into the Pacific Ocean as intended.

The unmanned spacecraft parachuted safely into the ocean off the California coast on Thursday as planned.

"Dragon is in the water," NASA said after the US company reported the landing at 11:42 a.m. Eastern time (1542 GMT), two minutes ahead of schedule and six hours after it left the International Space Station (ISS).

The capsule delivered food and clothing to the ISS during its nine-day trip. The Dragon was the first non-governmental craft to successfully dock at the ISS.

The European Commission has launched legal action against Germany, which has not implemented rules on data surveillance and storage that are supposed to cover the entire bloc. The justice ministry says they go too far.

The European Commission told the government in Berlin on Thursday that it should pay a fine for not implementing a new EU law allowing authorities to store Internet activity and telephone records for all civilians for a six-month period.

BRUSSELS - It killed 695,000 people in the EU last year. But despite restaurant bans and gruesome health labels, the number of smokers is hardly going down.

A European Commission survey published for the UN's international anti-smoking day on Thursday (31 May) shows that 28 percent of the EU population smokes today compared to 29 percent in 2009.

The number is still going up in the Czech Republic, Finland and Slovenia.

BRUSSELS - The number of cyber attacks targeting online banking in the EU in the past year has increased dramatically compared to 2010, Microsoft said on Thursday (31 May).

Tim Rains, director of Microsoft's "trustworthy" computing division, said the Netherlands and Germany are under constant attack from an online banking trojan called EyeStye. "It is now one of the number one threats," said Rains.

The parasite is able to bypass anti-virus software and lurk undetected for long periods. The malicious programme, once downloaded and launched, attempts to steal sensitive data and send it to an attacker.

AFP - Europe's pharmaceutical watchdog announced on Thursday that it had launched a database to inform the public and health professionals of suspected side effects in medicines.

The online library, on http://www.adrreports.eu/, so far contains information relating to around 650 drugs, the London-based European Medicines Agency (EMA) said.

"Today's launch... highlights the importance of side-effects reporting and pharmacovigilance in safeguarding public health within the European Union," it said.

AFP - European teens cut back on binge drinking and showed no increase in illegal drug use in recent years, while cigarettes remained as popular as in 2007, an EU agency said Thursday.

The Lisbon-based European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which surveyed drug use in 36 nations, found illicit drug use among 15- and 16-year-old students was at about 18 percent when it collected data last year, almost unchanged since 2007.

The stabilisation is significant because it comes after a near doubling of illegal drug use to about 20 percent between 1995 and 2003.

The classification system that makes drugs such as cannabis and MDMA (ecstasy) illegal has prevented scientists from properly researching their possible therapeutic uses for conditions such as schizophrenia and depression, according to the government's former chief adviser on drugs.

Professor David Nutt said the UK's laws on misuse of drugs needed to be rewritten to more accurately reflect their relative harms and called for a regulated approach to making drugs such as MDMA and cannabis available for medical and research purposes.

"Regulations, which are arbitrary, actually make it virtually impossible to research these drugs," said Nutt. "The effect these laws have had on research is greater than the effects that [George] Bush stopping stem cell research has had because it's been going on since the 1960s."

AFP - For almost a century, Copenhagen's iconic Little Mermaid statue has perched alone on a rock in the harbour, wistfully pining for the prince she has been promised -- and now she will finally get her man.

The city of Helsingoer, or Elsinore as Shakespeare wrote, will on Saturday unveil a suitable companion to Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale mermaid, in the shape and form of HAN (HIM, in Danish).