The leader of the party that narrowly won Greece's election has begun urgent talks to form a coalition, saying he wants to forge a "national consensus".

New Democracy's Antonis Samaras met leaders of the other two largest parties, but no deal on a coalition has yet been announced.

Mr Samaras says he will seek changes in the terms of a bailout agreement reached with the EU and IMF.

Market responses to the poll result were mixed and bank stocks plummeted.

Mr Samaras called for a "national understanding" as he met President Karolos Papoulias earlier to be given a formal mandate.

Under the constitution, Mr Papoulias has given Mr Samaras three days to form a government.

Mr Samaras said he believed he could form a working coalition.

The Socialist Party of President François Hollande won a historic victory in parliamentary elections held yesterday (17 June) and will dominate both legislative chambers. EurActiv France reports.

The Socialists won 291 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, the Parliament's lower chamber, two more than the 289 majority threshold.

This is a historic victory for the Socialists, who together with their Green and leftist allies, are expected to control 341 deputies.

The conservative UMP party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy will have 191 MPs, down from 313 they won in the 2007 election.

The French Senate has been dominated by the Socialists since September 2011 and they also control most of the country's regions.

The victory was overshadowed by the defeat of Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, who was hoping to become speaker of the National Assembly. Royal was beaten in the La Rochelle constituency by a dissident Socialist candidate, Olivier Falorni, who refused to withdraw in her favour.

The defeat of Royal, Hollande's former companion, comes as an embarrassment to the French president whose new partner, Valérie Trierweiler, tweeted her support for Falorni before the election. The incident unleashed sarcastic comments about the failure of the new head of state to keep his private life under control.

Far-right enters Parliament

In another twist, the far-right National Front entered parliament for the first time since the mid-1980s, winning two seats.

Swiss voters yesterday dealt a heavy defeat to a plan for more referendums on international treaties.

A nationalist group wanted voters to have an automatic say when the government signs a major agreement. But with votes from 17 of 26 cantons counted, none had voted in favour. Opponents of the move won 73.3 per cent support, TV reported. Since a proposal needs a majority of both voters and cantons to pass, that meant it had failed - as had been expected.

Most major parties opposed the plan, saying it could cause gridlock with constant ballot calls. Switzerland already holds about half a dozen national referendums each year as well as local ones. All it takes is 50,000 signatures to force a national vote on a new law or treaty in Switzerland, a country of more than seven million people. The bar is higher - at 100,000 signatures - if grassroots groups want to propose new legislation. But these sorts of measures are often voted on and are sometimes successful.

The trial of Bosnian Serb Gen Ratko Mladic has been suspended until further notice, the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia says.

Mr Mladic's trial was due to resume on 25 June after it was halted in May.

Monday's suspension is a result of an error in the disclosure of documents to the defence, the court in The Hague said in a statement.

He denies 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity dating back to the 1992-1995 Bosnian War.

The trial was first halted in May when it first emerged that the prosecution had not disclosed evidence to the defence.

Seventy-year-old Mr Mladic is the last of the key figures wanted for war crimes during the Bosnian War.

On the run for 16 years before his arrest, Mr Mladic has refused to enter a plea.

Some of the relatives of victims and survivors of the war have expressed concern that if the trial takes too long, Mr Mladic, who has suffered from heart problems, will die before a verdict is reached.

For the Romanian liberal-democrats, the outcome of last week's local elections continue to plague them, kindling debates as to who should lead the party to better results in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

With less than six months before the crucial parliamentary elections, the ex-ruling party, marred by recent internal disputes, has decided that a new leadership will be voted in during the upcoming extraordinary congress scheduled for June 30.

Citing the need for radical change, the outgoing leader decided not to run for the top party job as he follows through with his interim at party helm.

The center-right Democrat Liberal Party won just 13 per cent of votes in the recent local elections, well below its 33 per cent showing in the 2008 elections.  This is mostly blamed on the fact that while in government party representatives were pressured into implementing unpopular measures and austerity cuts that didn't fare well with public sector workers. Many said that as these measures were essential in steering the country out of the crisis they damage the party's image and popularity. 

MILAN prosecutors called for former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi to be sentenced to three years and eight months for tax evasion linked to his Mediaset empire, Italian media reported.

MILAN prosecutors called for former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi to be sentenced to three years and eight months for tax evasion linked to his Mediaset empire, Italian media reported.

Prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale said the media magnate was clearly "heading the chain of command" when the tax evasion is alleged to have taken place, and that Mediaset's slush funds abroad "bear his fingerprints."

Berlusconi founded Mediaset, which includes Italy's three main privately owned national television channels, in the 1970s.

The trial is based on allegations that Mediaset artificially inflated the price of film rights sold to companies that belonged to Berlusconi and then sold back to Mediaset, allowing the firm to reduce revenues and pay less tax.

Mr De Pasquale said the price of film rights had been "inflated" by $368 million (292 billion euros) between 1994 and 1998 alone.

If found guilty, Berlusconi, 75, faces between 18 months and six years in jail.

I - What do you think of the "grassroots movements" and, in particular the MoVimento 5 Stelle in Italy??
D - If the truth be told, I know very little about the Movimento 5 Stelle but I think that it is very interesting indeed that there are people who are trying new ways to unite democracy with existing institutional structures. Naturally, as a self-confessed anarchist, I have certain reservations regarding the level of possible democratisation of institutions which are, by definition, based on a system whereby those above practice coercion on those below them however, I most certainly have the greatest respect for those who trying to do this and I am fascinated by the reform attempts that are being proposed. One has to respect people who come along with new ideas by creating direct democratic consultation institutions because they demonstrate the effort that is being put into creative thinking, which is something that should be respected in any event. We should respect people who come along with new ideas on how to resolve these problems, whether it be through the creation of direct democracy institutions, like the Movimento 5 Stelle is doing, or by abandoning simple representation and moving towards a combination of representation and some sort of draw, or lottery, as they are doing or proposing elsewhere, or even by creating a direct democracy from the bottom up, like they have in Bolivia, with a sort of dual power system aimed at reigning in the power of government.
There are many different experiments taking place and I find it extremely encouraging that there are so many different ideas being tested. I always say that if there is one thing that this world does not lack it is people with creative ideas on how to resolve all our problems. The problem we have is not a lack of vision or options, but rather finding the political will to implement them and ensuring that the solutions are actually implemented. This is precisely what we are trying to do through the Occupy Wall Street movement, in our own way ... and, if we can do that... but you could well be in a position to do so right here because a particular system like the Italian one is much more open than the system that we have in America, which is truly totally dominated by money. In one way we would love to have the luxury of having a system like the current one in Italy. For example, here in Italy you have an anti-corruption campaign that is aimed at kicking out those politicians that are guilty of corruption. In America, that would obviously not be possible because corruption has been legalised and indeed the entire system is based on legalised corruption. I think that you are advantaged here in Italy because you guys are not as totally uncivilised and backward when it comes to your type of democracy and I am very interested to see whether it is possible for you to utilise these means, namely the attempt to introduce direct democracy within a representative system like the one you have. In Greece and elsewhere too, they are proposing a combination of a lottery and representation systems, which is an interesting idea. In Bolivia they have a dual power system involving bottom line communities and the government that they have elected, a system in which the communities can oust the government at any time by means of a revolt. So these are all ways of integrating direct democracy institutions and classic representation systems.

Spanish 10-year yields are close to 7.3% this morning following the end of another short-live market rally; financial markets have now concluded that Spain will have to fall under the EFSF/ESM; Spain to issue €2-3bn in new loans today in a further test of market conditions; yields have also risen dramatically at the short end; a banking survey by the Bank of Spain shows further increase in interest rates paid by the private sector; the rise is having a negative effect on Spanish exporters; G20 summit in Mexico is unlikely to produce anything, except for another bland communique; New Democracy, Pasok and Democratic Left are en route to forming a coalition; an agreement is expected later today; Alexis Tsipras formally ruled out to be a member of any government; Democratic Left demands that the bailout terms be eased, and that Greece disengages from  the memorandum by 2017; The economic and monetary affairs committee of the European Parliament proposes Eurobills; the German coalition disagrees on whether to extend the austerity timetable for Greece, with Guido Westerwelle seeking a longer pay-back period; the troika looks at doubling the pay back term for Ireland, the French government is to impose a new tax on dividends; a Moody's report says the private sector in the periphery is facing serious liquidity constraints; Hugo Dixon says a banking union is not realistic in the short term; Erik Izraelewicz says Francois Hollande must now save Europe; Günter Nonnenmacher says we will now see the true Hollande; Larry Summers says a eurozone breakup would be the defining moment of our time; Jakob Augstein, meanwhile, draws the parallels between Europe today and the end of the Weimar Republic.

Greece survived to fail another day, say economists at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Citigroup Inc. (C)

An election result yesterday that defused expectations of an imminent euro exit by Greece left the threat hanging over the global economy and put European leaders under pressure to speed efforts to protect the rest of the region. Spanish 10-year bond yields soared above 7 percent for the first time in the euro era, showing investor concern of the relentless financial turmoil.

"The election has solved little and in our view is actually just another iteration towards the risks of a euro exit," said Harvinder Sian, senior rates strategist at RBS in London. `The adjustment path is likely to remain too much for Greece to bear."

Greece, dependent since 2010 on emergency loans from the European Union and International Monetary Fund, has to meet the creditors' conditions to keep the aid flowing. The route to continued support involves axing 11.5 billion euros ($14.5 billion) from the budget and 150,000 civil service jobs, said Sian, leaving him holding fast to his pre-election view of a 90 percent chance Greece quits the euro within two years.

Can the euro crisis be contained until the euro leaders summit in Brussels on 28-29 June? On current form, it'll be a close-run thing.

The Greek relief rally lasted an hour on Monday. Worse, Spain's borrowing costs hit another euro-era high - the yield on 10-year bonds reached 7.2%. The Spanish banking bailout, announced amid triumphalism in Madrid only nine days ago, seems like another age.

There were at least three problems with it. First, it destroyed the notion that Spain's saving grace was its relatively low debt-to-GDP ratio: the €100bn, or whatever the final figure turns out to be, goes directly onto the government's books since the bailout is not, as Rajoy had wished, a direct injection of funds into the Spanish banking system. Second, investors in Spanish bonds feared being relegated down the pecking order of creditors if the loans directed via Madrid to the banks carry preferred status. Third, investors made the straightforward calculation that a country that cannot raise money at attractive rates to fund its banks cannot raise affordable capital full stop.

At 7.2%, the cat is out of the bag. Spain can tolerate such rates for a while (there will be an auction of short-dated debt on Tuesday and another later in the week) but the only sure-fire remedy is a direct sovereign bailout. That's the reality the eurozone leaders may have to confront in Brussels at the end of this month.

The Federal Reserve could step in with a new round of Operation Twist this week to bolster the fragile American recovery as Europe's woes continue to rattle the US economy, experts believe.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) meet Tuesday and Wednesday this week, amid fresh developments in the eurozone crisis and signs that the US economy is picking up.

Analysts predict that while the FOMC will stop short of a major intervention in the form of a third round of quantitative easing, they are more likely to take the smaller scale option of Operation Twist.

This involves the Fed selling medium-term bonds, and using the proceeds to buy longer-term bonds -- such as 10-year treasuries. In theory, such a move drives down the interest rate on 10-year bonds, taking down interest rates across the board. Mortgages are tied to 10-year Tteasury rate and the move should bring down home loan rates.

The housing market has been a major drag on US recovery, but there have been signs that prices have bottomed out ,and on Monday the National Association of Home Builders said its housing market index, a poll of builders' confidence, had reached its highest level in more than five years.

The Fed is facing calls to act as events in the eurozone continue to threaten the US economy.

The global recovery has stalled again as confidence in policy makers' ability to provide conditions for growth has slipped away, according to the latest FT/Brookings Institution Tiger index of world economic conditions.

Professor Eswar Prasad of Brookings said: "The global economic recovery is being held hostage by political brinksmanship that has created policy paralysis, undermined confidence and stymied the effectiveness of macroeconomic policy tools".

As leaders of the most powerful economies gather on Monday in the Mexican beach resort of Los Cabos, expectations are low that the G20, billed as the world's "premier economic forum", will offer co-ordinated action rather than hot air.

Felipe Calderón, Mexico's president who will chair the summit, added to this perception at pre-G20 conferences at the weekend. "Even though we don't expect to reach specific agreements on Europe ... I want to see language and promises which are much more oriented to a new, stronger Europe, a Europe of the 21st century," he told journalists. Mr Calderon hopes to raise the agreed $430bn recapitalisation of the International Monetary Fund further, even without US backing.

It's feeling like 2007 all over again. The New York Times has a bizarre and prominent story (now the lead item on its business page) on how the lack of integrated bank supervision in Europe is causing a breakdown in interbank lending. Gillian Tett at the Financial Times covered this very topic three weeks ago, and the culprit for the caution over cross border funding is Eurobreakup risk, not the lack of a pan-European bankmeister. The New York Times (and the Wall Street Journal) getting it wrong when the FT gave straightforward, informed accounts was a frequent feature in the early phases of the crisis (both US papers upped their game considerably as the bad financial news increased).

Now the headline is accurate ("Worried Banks Resist Fiscal Union"), the main argument of the story is another matter:

The seemingly endless series of euro zone crises has European officials pushing for a banking union that would watch over and bind together the currency group's faltering financial institutions.
Europe's commissioner for competition, Joaquín Almunia. His patriotism was questioned when the Spanish-born commissioner recently said that at least one Spanish bank might need to be shut down.

But for Europeans, there seems to be little appetite for such a compact right now. In fact, banks and their national regulators, anxious about the Greek elections and Spain's hastily arranged bailout, are behaving more parochially than ever.

That poses a threat to the interbank lending across borders that is crucial to maintaining liquidity -- the free flow of money that is the lifeblood of the global financial system.

French and German banks have clamped off much of the lending to their counterparts in Italy and Spain, which in turn are primarily giving loans to their own debt-laden governments.

And in Madrid, even after European finance ministers agreed to a 100 billion euro, or $125 billion, rescue of Spain's failing banks, the always proud Spanish government is insisting that it -- and not Brussels bureaucrats -- will take charge of how and where the funds are deployed.

Let's unpack this.

several readers have asked me whether I am familiar with the 1943 article by Polish economist Michal Kalecki - The Political Aspects of Full Employment [PDF]. The answer is that I am very familiar with the article and have written about it in my academic work in years past. So I thought I might write a blog about what I think of Kalecki's argument given that it is often raised by progressives as a case against effective fiscal intervention.

Quite clearly we are witnessing an obscene campaign that is successfully opposing the use of fiscal stimulus and undermining the well-being of a great many people. But it is also undermining the core industrial sectors like manufacturing and construction where the old "captains of industry" were prominent.

...

The point I would make is that the major political blockages are no longer those that Kalecki foresaw. The opponents of fiscal activism are a different elite and work against the "captains of industry" just as much as they work against the broader working class.

The growth of the financial sector and global derivatives trading and the substantial deregulation of labour markets and retrenchment of welfare states has altered things considerably since Kalecki wrote his brilliant article in 1943.

John Kampfner asks: "Which politician will be brave enough to tell voters the days of abundance are over?" and describes the need for a new paradigm (Opinion, 18 June). Can I suggest that with nearly $2trn secreted "offshore" in 2011 alone the new paradigm starts with closing all the offshore tax havens: the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Jersey, Isle of Man, Luxembourg, Monaco, and ending the rights of Swiss citizens to travel freely in the EU.

If there is to be any semblance that "we are all in this together", equality of taxation has to be a priority. If the period of "abundance" is over then we can no longer afford the self-indulgences of the untaxed rich who choose to reside here free of their proper responsibility as citizens.

It is perhaps not astonishing that this aspect of "sustainability" seems to be entirely overlooked by the 50,000-strong "professional village" that has decamped to Rio+20.

Peter Hack

Bristol

It should b noted that the Independent is owned by Alexander Leedev, a russian who I presume is one of the "untaxed rich who choose to reside here free of their proper responsibility as citizens".

keep to the Fen Causeway

Syrian security forces pounded opposition areas across the country on Monday and at least 79 people were killed in violence that has escalated since international observers suspended their mission, activists said.

Intense artillery fire was reported in Douma, a town 15 km (9 miles) outside the capital Damascus that has for weeks been under the partial control of rebels who have joined the 15-month-old revolt against President Bashar al-Assad.

"We can't even accurately count the dead because we have so many injured people to treat, there's no time to think about anything else," said an activist in Douma who called himself Ziad.

"The army attacks all the time. They have tanks, missiles, mortars, and artillery. Even helicopters have fired on us. People can't escape because the army is surrounding the town."

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists across Syria, said 51 civilians and rebel fighters had been killed on Monday, seven of them in Douma.

It said 28 members of the security forces were also killed in clashes with rebels in Deir al-Zor, Damascus and Deraa.

The timing couldn't have been more carefully chosen. While Egyptians were focused on the emerging results of their first free presidential election held on Sunday, the ruling military council issued eight amendments to the country's interim constitution that effectively secure the generals' power.

OAS_RICH('Middle2'); The move means that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) will take on parliament's lawmaking duties until the parliament -- which was dissolved on Saturday -- is elected again. At the same time, the military council has also taken charge of the national budget and the development of a new constitution. The new president, to whom the council says it wants to hand power over to at the end of June, will have no sway over the country's military forces. Already on Tuesday, the army gave itself far-reaching legal authority through a sort of emergency law, which will allow them to try any Egyptian before a military court. The military now holds legislative, executive and judicial power -- at least in part.

But Egyptians didn't seem to realize what had befallen them until Sunday night. The country's citizens had been fixated on the votes being counted on live television for the presidential election. Late in the evening, both candidates made victory announcements, with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood's candidate Mohammed Mursi and former Mubarak associate Ahmed Shafiq each claiming they recieved 52 percent of the vote. The official count isn't expected until Thursday.

The predictable conflict over the election result was the perfect distraction, but then the outrage spread quickly. In an interview with broadcaster Alhayat, renowned commentator Aiman Sadshad warned that the future president would have no possibility of controlling or stopping decisions by the military council. "The president will be unable to change the defense minister or the members of the council," he said, adding that the SCAF was now "untouchable."

Iran's signal of willingness to compromise over the most contentious part of its nuclear program failed to convince the European Union to reconsider a pending embargo on oil shipments from the Persian Gulf country.

Diplomats adjourned in Moscow after five hours of meetings and will reconvene talks tomorrow over Iran's atomic work that officials say probably won't yield enough progress to end the threat of military strikes. Chinese, French, German, Russian, British and U.S. negotiators met with their Iranian counterparts behind tight security at a hotel near Russia's Foreign Ministry.

"All the sanctions that are supposed to come into force on July 1 will come into force on July 1," EU foreign-policy spokesman Michael Mann said in an interview today in the Russian capital. "We've taken a political decision that this is an important measure to put pressure on the Iranian regime."

The so-called P5+1 group wants Iran to suspend production of uranium enriched to 20 percent, while the Islamic republic is pressing for relief from sanctions set to tighten when the EU oil embargo kicks in. European insurers and shipping companies carrying Iranian crude to other parts of the world will be affected by the embargo and shouldn't expect relief, Mann said.

Today's talks were "constructive and serious,'' Iran's deputy negotiator, Ali Bagheri, told reporters after the meeting ended. Mann said that while the negotiations were "very intense, tough," they had been more substantive than those in Baghdad last month.

Rwanda's community courts, known as gacaca, have finished their work, after 10 years of trying those accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide.

The courts were set up to speed up the prosecution of hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects awaiting trial.

Human rights group say the gacaca fell well short of international legal standards.

About 65% of the close to two million people tried have been found guilty, according to latest government figures. Controversial justice

Rwanda's legal system was left in ruins after the massacres by ethnic Hutu militia and soldiers of some 800,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in 100 days between April and June 1994.

The UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was set up in neighbouring Tanzania to try the ringleaders of the genocide - it has convicted 38 people and acquitted eight so far. It is due to be closed down at the end of the year.

But this left hundreds of thousands of people accused of involvement in the killings, leading to an enormous backlog of cases in Rwanda.

Correspondents say up to 10,000 people died in prison before they could be brought to justice.

Myanmar's government says 50 people have been killed in two weeks of fighting between Buddhists and Muslims in the western state of Rakhine.

While there has long been tension between the ethnic Buddhist Rakhines and the Muslim Rohingyas, regarded as
illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, the recent clashes began when a Buddhist woman was raped and murdered, allegedly by three Muslim men.

With no near end in sight, more than 30,000 people have now fled their homes to escape the violence.

Hundreds of mayors from across the United States this weekend called for new laws letting parents seize control of low-performing public schools and fire the teachers, oust the administrators or turn the schools over to private management.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, meeting in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday unanimously endorsed "parent trigger" laws aimed at bypassing elected school boards and giving parents at the worst public schools the opportunity to band together and force immediate change.

Such laws are fiercely opposed by teachers' unions, which stand to lose members in school takeovers. Union leaders say there is no proof such upheaval will improve learning. And they argue that public investment in struggling communities, rather than private management of struggling schools, is the key to boosting student achievement.

But in a sign of the unions' diminishing clout, their traditional political allies, the Democrats, abandoned them in droves during the Orlando vote.

The French president François Hollande, one of the only major western leaders scheduled to attend the Rio+20 Earth summit this week, will argue that sustainable development and the fight against poverty must be united in one agenda.

In an interview with the Guardian, Pascal Canfin, the new French development minister who will prepare the French negotiations in Rio, said: "We want one single agenda, to integrate sustainable development within the millennium development goals of poverty reduction. It's not about saying we'll replace the millennium goals with sustainable development goals.

"I know there are fears about that. It's about saying that in today's world, where the planet is at the limit of its ecosystem's capacity, the fight against poverty has to take into account environmental issues such as water, energy, urban development. "

While David Cameron and Angela Merkel are sending deputies and Barack Obama has yet to confirm, Hollande will fly to Rio on Wednesday, joining two French cabinet ministers. Asked whether France is seeking to take the lead while other western powers step back, Canfin said: "France is not there to take anyone else's place or speak in their name; we simply want it to be a success. We'll be in Rio because we want it to work."

Hollande, who has already warned against the risk of failure in Rio and "words that aren't met by actions", is under pressure to prove his environmental credentials in France and show the economic crisis has not knocked the environment and development off the agenda.

A European Union court has annulled a Commission decision rejecting two environmental groups' request for an internal review of a pesticide regulation.

The General Court's decision on 14 June called into question the narrow wording of the regulation that obliges the EU's institutions to protect the rights of civil society to participate in environmental decision-making.

The plaintiffs in the case - Stichting Natuur en Milieu, a Dutch environmental foundation, and Pesticide Action Network Europe, a group that campaigns against the use of chemical pesticides - welcomed the outcome. François Veillerette, who heads the Pesticide Action Network, urged the commission to accept the decision and not appeal it to the European Court of Justice.

Jeremy Wates of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a Brussels campaign group, said the ruling "vindicates longstanding concerns in the NGO community that the EU has failed to provide sufficient opportunities for NGOs to hold EU institutions to account."

The pesticide regulation at the centre of the case specifies maximum residue levels of pesticides for certain food and feed products.

When the two environmental groups asked the Commission to review the pesticide regulation, they based that request on the Aarhus Regulation. The latter applies to EU institutions the protections provided by the United Nations' Aarhus Convention on access to information.

That convention was introduced to supplement substantive environmental protections with procedural rights to enforce violations of those standards. It was approved on behalf of the European Union by a Council decision in February of 2005.

First came the coffee growers. Then the charcoal makers. And finally, when the last trees had been cleared, there came the cattlemen, who grazed their cows on the denuded hillsides.

Several centuries of human activity have left a deep scar in the Atlantic rainforest north of Rio.

Between patches of primary forest which are a haven to rare birds and mammals, hill after hill has nothing but thin grass and eroded soil.   Reversing this loss would seem like a lost cause, yet another defeat in the long battle to preserve the environment.

But nothing appears to deter Mauricio Ruiz, whose encounter at the age of 15 with a Brazilian poet made him resolved to bring the phantom forest back to life.   He invested every cent in his pocket -- 20 reals, around $10 -- to start a tree-planting initiative.

Fourteen years later, his organisation, the Instituto Terra de Preservacao Ambiental, is beginning to see the rewards of struggle.   Spades and seedlings in hand, its 130 employees and army of seasonal workers are marching across the hills. In their wake, they have left 670,000 young trees, drawn from 55 native species.   "We hope to reach the million mark by the end of 2012. Our goal is to plant 18 million trees covering 18,000 hectares (69.5 square miles)," Ruiz said.

Africa may be about to get a whole lot more power.

For years, nonprofits have worked to make lighting available and affordable to Africans who aren't connected to a power grid. But they've managed to help only a tiny percentage of that population, mainly by selling them inexpensive kerosene lamps.

Now, some of the world's biggest energy companies are thinking on a much grander scale. They're conducting projects to test the viability--and marketability--of solar-powered systems to provide electricity for lighting and other purposes in villages all over Africa.

The companies are aiming to sell the systems to governments and nonprofits, which could use them to provide power to villages at a discount or for no charge. The systems cost less than it would to expand traditional power grids--offering a relatively swift, economical way to boost living standards.

The pilot programs have improved people's lives. And the market potential is enticing to the energy companies: Some 600 million people in Africa live without reliable access to electricity, according to the International Finance Corp., a division of the World Bank. The big question is how willing governments and nonprofits will be to invest in solar systems.

Japan ordered a pair of reactors back online for the first time since last year's nuclear accident, but the chaos and confusion surrounding the decision highlight how unready the country may still be to restart its atomic-energy engine.

A group of cabinet ministers led by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda decided Saturday to restart the reactors, in a bid to wrench the economy back on track, 15 months after an earthquake and tsunami caused devastating meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. The government has estimated that if Japan doesn't turn any reactors back on, its economy could shrink as much as 5% by 2030.

Yet the restart decision comes a month ahead of deliberations over a new energy plan, which could call for phasing out nuclear power for good. And the restarts would come a few months before the setup of a new Japanese nuclear regulator, which will craft new safety guidelines and is expected to take a harder line on vetting reactors.

Opinion polls consistently show more than half of Japanese are opposed to nuclear power, though they fret over energy shortages expected as soon as this summer and higher electric bills if the reactors stay off. Even some of those who favor atomic energy worry the government hasn't done enough to ensure nuclear plants will be safe from a Fukushima-type accident.

Many businesses have strongly backed restarts, stating the need for stable power supplies.

A Chinese spacecraft carrying three astronauts has docked with an orbiting module where they will live and work for several days as part of preparations for crewing a permanent space station.

The Shenzhou 9 capsule completed the manoeuvre as scheduled shortly after 7am UK time on Monday as the Tiangong 1 module orbited 213 miles above Earth.

The capsule's crew includes 33-year-old Liu Yang, an air force pilot and China's first female astronaut.

Monday's docking was completed by remote control from a ground base in China. A manual docking carried out by one of the crew members is scheduled for later.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- They live on your skin, up your nose, in your gut - enough bacteria, fungi and other microbes that collected together could weigh, amazingly, a few pounds.

Now scientists have mapped just which critters normally live in or on us and where, calculating that healthy people can share their bodies with more than 10,000 species of microbes.

The European Parliament sent a bold message to the world last week with its comprehensive and ambitious resolution to put an end to the illicit global arms trade. But analysts regret the new resolution ignores several key factors, such as the impact of the arms trade on the socio-economic development of recipient countries, and the involvement of civil society in future negotiations.

Next month member states will gather at the United Nations headquarters in New York to negotiate the first binding Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a potentially ground-breaking humanitarian treaty regulating international trade in conventional weapons. Currently, there is no universal set of rules controlling the global arms trade.

According to several analysts the poorly-regulated market fuels armed conflicts and causes unnecessary human suffering. In order to address the problem, Nobel Peace laureates like the Dalai Lama, Betty Williams, Elie Wiesel and José Ramos- Horta - supported by international NGOs - have been actively advocating a binding global agreement since 1997.

According to data gathered by Control Arms, a global civil society alliance, one million of the eight million firearms produced every year are lost or stolen. As many as 747,000 people are killed in armed violence annually, while ten times that number are injured.

The final report into the PIP breast implant scandal has concluded that the gel material does not cause a long-term threat to human health.

It says the implants, which were made with unauthorised silicone filler, are not toxic nor carcinogenic.

The review, led by Prof Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS medical director, said they do have double the rupture rate of other implants.

Around 47,000 women in the UK have had the implants fitted.

Around 95% were fitted privately. A minority of operations were carried out on the NHS, mostly for breast reconstruction following cancer.

In January Prof Keogh's team concluded there was insufficient evidence to recommend the routine removal of PIP implants. But it recognised the concern that the issue was causing.

It found there was no link between PIP implants and cancer, and the evidence on increased rupture rates was inconclusive.

His final report has just been published.

IBM's Sequoia has taken the top spot on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers for the US.

The newly installed system trumped Japan's K Computer made by Fujitsu which fell to second place.

It is the first time the US can claim pole position since it was beaten by China two years ago.

Sequoia will be used to carry out simulations to help extend the life of aging nuclear weapons, avoiding the need for real-world underground tests.

It is installed at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"While Sequoia may be the fastest, the underlying computing capabilities it provides give us increased confidence in the nation's nuclear deterrent," said National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) administrator Thomas D'Agostino.

"Sequoia also represents continued American leadership in high performance computing."

Around 4.3 million people around the world fled their homes as refugees last year. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says this is the largest number of new refugees since the beginning of the century.

The UNHCR report Global Trends 2011 catalogues a series of humanitarian crises beginning in Ivory Coast at the tail end of 2010 and swiftly followed by Libya, Somalia and Sudan.

"2011 saw suffering on an epic scale,"  says High Commissioner António Guterres. "For so many lives to have been thrown into turmoil over so short a space of time means enormous personal cost for all who were affected."

Despite the large number of new refugees, the total number of refugees worldwide fell slightly last year, from 43.7 million to 42.5 million.

The UNHCR distinguishes between internally displaced people - those who stayed in their own country - (26.4 million), those who fled across the border (15.4 million) and those who applied for asylum (895,000).

The UN refugee agency is concern that the number of refugees has been above 42 million for the past five years, particularly since refugees can be expected to remain displaced for several years. Of the ten million refugees that the UN helps, almost three-quarters have been waiting for a solution to their problems for more than five years.

Loneliness stings at any age. But in older people, it can have serious health consequences, raising the risks of an earlier-than-expected death and the loss of physical functioning, according to a study published on Monday.

The report, in the Archives of Internal Medicine, is the largest yet to tease out the impact of loneliness on people in their later years. Geriatricians at the University of California, San Francisco, asked 1,604 adults age 60 and older how often they felt isolated or left out, or lacked companionship. The researchers were attempting to quantify the feeling of loneliness -- a sense of not having meaningful contact with others, accompanied by painful distress.

Answers were recorded in 2002 and every two years after through 2008. The number of older adults who reported feeling lonely -- just over 43 percent -- didn't change significantly over that period, according to Dr. Carla Perissinotto, an assistant clinical professor at U.C.S.F. and the study's lead author. About 13 percent of older adults said they were often lonely, while 30 percent said loneliness was sometimes an issue.

What did change over the six-year period was the health status of elderly men and women who felt isolated and unhappy. By 2008, 24.8 percent of seniors in this group reported declines in their ability to perform the so-called activities of daily living -- to bathe, dress, eat, toilet and get up from a chair or a bed on their own. Among those free of loneliness, only 12.5 percent reported such declines.

Lonely older adults also were 45 percent more likely to die than seniors who felt meaningfully connected with others, even after results were adjusted for factors like depression, socioeconomic status and existing health conditions.

With its soaring skyscrapers, ever-green golf courses and even a ski resort, the desert city of Dubai is testament to a determined battle between man and nature.

Yet with the global downturn and mounting debts threatening its future, it is not hard to imagine this sun-seared metropolis being swallowed back up by the surrounding sands as a financial meltdown prompts its wealthy sponsors to leave, followed by the 2million mainly foreign workers depending on them.

That is the post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario realised in eerie images created by the award-winning British photographer and artist Richard Allenby-Pratt.