Cyprus has told the European authorities that it intends to apply for financial assistance, the fifth eurozone member to do so.

It said it needs help to shore up its banks, which are heavily exposed to the Greek economy.

The announcement came on another day of nervousness about the single currency.

Shares in Italy, Spain and Greece fell sharply amid concerns that an EU summit this week will again fail to produce a deal to shore up the euro.

The Spanish prime minister called for Thursday's European Union summit to "dispel doubts" about the euro.

The Italian and Spanish indexes both closed about 4% down. The fall on Spain's Ibex index was exacerbated by a Reuters report that the Moody's credit rating agency is planning to downgrade Spain's banks.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has resisted pressure for common eurozone bonds or a more flexible use of Europe's rescue funds but agreed with leaders of France, Italy and Spain on a €130 billion package to revive growth.

After four-way talks in Rome's Renaissance Villa Madama on Friday (22 June), Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti said the European Union should adopt pro-growth measures worth about 1% of the region's gross domestic product at a EU summit on 28-29 June.

But the three others made no perceptible progress in pushing Merkel, who leads Europe's most powerful economy and the main contributor to its rescue funds, towards mutualising Europe's debts or using existing bailout resources more flexibly.

"Growth can only have solid roots if there is fiscal discipline, but fiscal discipline can be maintained only if there is growth and job creation," Monti told a joint news conference after talks that lasted just an hour and 40 minutes.

The measures, already in the works in Brussels, include increasing the European Investment Bank's capital, redirecting unspent EU regional aid funds and launching project bonds to co-finance major public investment programmes. No new steps were announced on Friday.

The four leaders did agree to move ahead on creating a tax on financial transactions even though not all EU members will be on board. About a dozen EU states support setting up the so-called "Tobin tax", more than the nine required to go ahead as a group within the EU, a French presidential source said.

At least nine countries led by Germany are expected to ask the European Commission to draw up plans for a so-called "enhanced co-operation" on the financial transactions tax (FTT) following a meeting of EU finance minister in Luxembourg on Friday (22 June).

Finance ministers took the decision after their Austrian colleague Maria Fekter told them that Vienna's support for the EU's permanent bailout fund - the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) - depended on progress on the FTT.

"If I do not get this [enhanced] co-operation, then the ESM will not be ratified and this would really be a pity," Fekter told the ministers.

At least nine member states must indicate that they want to proceed with an enhanced co-operation and a qualified majority of all 27 member states have to agree to the procedure, which has been used only twice before - on cross-border divorce rules and on a common patent scheme.

If the procedure goes through, these countries will go their separate ways and implement the tax without the other EU countries on board.

Bulgarians make it nine member states

Ministers broadly fell into three camps at the meeting: in favour of the enhanced co-operation; against the FTT but not opposed to the enhanced co-operation being introduced by other countries; and in favour of the FTT, but wanting more time to decide whether enhanced co-operation is the best way forward.

EurActiv understands that Germany is likely to lead in making the official request to the Commission for the procedure - the first stage in the process - acting on behalf of Austria, Belgium, France, Poland, Portugal and Spain.

Ukraine readjourned the trial of jailed former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Monday as pressure mounted on the Euro 2012 co-host to drop the controversial case.

The presiding judge set the next hearing for July 10 - more than a week after the final this weekend of European football's premier international event, when Ukraine will be under less international scrutiny.

Several thousand of Tymoshenko's supporters and foes held rival rallies outside the courtroom in the eastern city of Kharkiv where the fiery opposition leader is standing trial on fresh tax evasion charges while serving a seven-year sentence for abuse of power.

"Freedom for Yulia", Tymoshenko's supporters chanted while those on the other side of a line of riot police held up signs saying "The country suffered and she just kept talking" in reference to her 2007-2010 term as premier.

Tymoshenko herself was absent from the hearing - this one focused on her tax dealings dating back to the 1990s - after being allowed to continue recuperating in a Kharkiv hospital from her persistent back problems.

The court on Monday agreed with a prosecution request to order Tymoshenko to undergo a health examination by authorised doctors who could determine her actual fitness to stand trial.

Tymoshenko has refused medical care from Ukrainian doctors and her treatment is being overseen by doctors from Germany.

The closure of one of Spain's eight immigration detention centres on Wednesday was celebrated by human rights groups, which for years have denounced the prison-like conditions in the centres.

"We are pleased with the closure of the Centro de Internamiento de Extranjeros (CIE - immigrant detention centre) of Málaga, and we congratulate all of the organisations that took part in the struggle to achieve this," Mamen Castellano, president of the NGO Andalucía Acoge (Andalusía Welcomes), told IPS.

The activist, who works for the rights of immigrants in the southern Spanish region of Andalusía, where Málaga is located, mentioned the "unnecessary suffering of thousands of people who were held there."

The CIE in Málaga was closed because of its ruinous condition - a situation that was long protested by activists.

Castellano said people should not forget "the history of sexual abuse of female inmates by police, and of fires and suicides" in the Málaga CIE, which opened in 1990 in an old
military barracks in the poor neighbourhood of Capuchinos.

The Interior Ministry had ordered that the CIE be shut down because of the "ruinous state of the installations." Over the space of 22 years, it housed 20,000 undocumented immigrants, and gained a reputation as the most inhumane of the country's immigrant detention centres.

The EU's joint judicial authority, Eurojust, is struggling to get member states to stop human trafficking.

Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands fall victim to the crime in the EU each year.

Many are exploited sexually. Others are domestic slaves or are forced into hard labour under threat of physical violence, deception or debt bondage.

Just 2,000-or-so people in 19 member states were indicted for the crime in 2009 - the latest figures aviailable - and only around 1,250 were convicted, however.

Eurojust, which is tasked with co-ordinating criminal cross-border investigations by EU national authorities, oversaw a mere 79 cross-border human trafficking cases in 2011, down from 87 in 2010.

Its president, Michele Coninsx, told this website that member states are withholding information. "We want them to inform us," she said.

She noted that only 10 out of 27 EU countries have implemented a 2009 EU decision that would require them to inform the agency of cases involving organised crime. The deadline for transposing the EU law expired in June 2011.

The German chancellor formally rejects any notion of debt or risk mutualisation at this point - no deposit insurance, no euro bills, no euro bonds; she called these proposals "economically wrong and counterproductive"; Merkel also criticised the lack of ambition by van Rompuy group in terms of creating a genuine political union; Jens Weidmann endorsed the chancellor, saying a banking union should not proceed with a full political union; Spanish bond yields came under pressure yesterday, as markets become sceptical about the European summit; Cyprus becomes the fifth country to apply for the ESM; the country has just four days to raise the funds to recapitalise the banking system; Fitch had earlier cut Cyprus' ratings; Spain applied, as expected, formally for its programme yesterday; Moody's cut the ratings of Spanish banks; El Pais says there is a sense of foreboding that the whole euro edifice might collapse; Vassilis Rapanos gave up on the Greek finance ministery, citing health reasons; news reports suggests that he is also deeply concerned about the new coalition's policies; Portugal gave assurances that it will meet the targets despite increase risks; the French government introduced a spending freeze for three years; Merkel aims at a two-thirds majority for the ESM in defence of any future constitutional court challenges; she has also distanced herself from Wolfgang Schauble's idea of a referendum on political union, saying this was for the day after tomorrow; Wolfgang Proissl writes that the Bundesbank is reverting its old coronation theory in the discussion about banking union - and is likely to fail again; Paolo Manasse and Luca Zavalloni argued that the best anti-crisis response would be reform to encourage growth and employment - the exact opposite of what government have been doing.

The boss of RBS has confirmed that a software change was responsible for the widespread computer problems affecting millions of customers' bank accounts.

"It shouldn't have happened and we are very sorry," Stephen Hester said.

The software upgrade failed last week, and although it was put right it caused the huge backlog of transactions that are still being sorted out.

He told the BBC the bank's systems were working normally but it would take a few days for the backlog to be cleared.

The failed software upgrade meant that hundreds of thousands of customers failed to have money transferred either into or out of their accounts.

Mr Hester said: "There was a software change which didn't go right and although that itself was put right quickly, there then was a big backlog of things that had to be reprocessed in sequence, which is why on Thursday and Friday customers experienced difficulty which we are well on the way to fixing."

I already explained last week in this column that the Germans are losing patience with the other EU member countries, especially France, that don't "get" the argument for why currency and political oversight must be joined together tightly. Germany wants political concessions on fiscal oversight from all eurozone countries before increasing fiscal solidarity. And for all that the Germans might be criticized for in their handling of the EU's crisis management over the past two years, this time Germany is right: If the proposed banking union and a common European guarantee scheme for deposits, let alone a complete fiscal union, were a marriage proposal, it is time for the other countries to put up their political dowry.

...

In essence, the Maastricht Treaty delinked the relationship between state and market in Europe, and this is what needs to be remedied now. The treaty put oversight of Europe's economy and currency on the European level, while leaving redistributive policies and many regulatory policies, such as on wages, at the national level. Now, member states must either create a European-level state, at least in significant dimensions, or else devolve oversight of currencies and economies back to the national level, something that is inconceivable at this point.

...

Over the past few weeks, Germany has been pretty actively setting the agenda for what should come next in terms of the institutional and democratic architecture the eurozone needs to move beyond the euro crisis. On Tuesday, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle presented the interim report (.pdf) of his working group on European integration, where he had invited 10 like-minded EU foreign ministers to sketch out what is needed for political union: The results, if they are taken seriously, are breathtaking. The report calls for a European Monetary Fund, a European treasury and a full-fledged European-level democracy, including a completely recomposed European parliament that would have the right to propose legislation and a second upper chamber, proportionally weighted based on each country's size. It also calls for direct popular election of an EU president and, finally, the creation of a European army.

...

In short, the document proposes the founding of a European republic and is nothing less than a Hamiltonian moment for Europe. If pursued, it would represent a historical precedent: sovereign nation states engaging in a system change without war, civil war, revolution and bloodshed. Throughout history, game-changing moments in which a country or empire shifted from one form of sovereign state to another were accompanied by convulsions. The U.S. needed a revolutionary war to arrive at its Hamiltonian momentum, and a civil war to solidify it; the Deutsche Bund needed the Franco-German war to shift to the Deutsches Reich of Bismarck; and even France needed the war in Algeria to shift from the fourth to the fifth republic. The EU now hopes to shift to a truly political union and a fiscal federation by choice, negotiation and consensual constitutional change. If successful, this would be another unique selling point of modern Europe.

Do those who financed these wasteful investments not deserve to lose money, too? Yet some of them must be among the creditors of Spanish banks who are now to be rescued by the €100bn loan that the Spanish government is planning to take, thereby risking its solvency: this is surely unconscionable.

Above all, how could Spain have prevented this crisis, which was unambiguously generated in the domestic private sector and fuelled by private sector capital inflows? If it could not have prevented the crisis, how can it bear some deep moral fault? Surely, a far more sensible - indeed moral - approach would be to recognise that this is more misfortune than misdeed and offer Spain the help it needs to adjust its economy to the post-crisis reality, without letting it either be pushed into sovereign bankruptcy or humiliated. Yet that is what is now threatened.

In my view, Spain made only one big mistake: joining the euro. Without that, it would probably now look more like the UK: yes, the economy would be in serious trouble, but its exchange rate and its long-term interest rates would both be far lower. After all, its fiscal position is even now no worse than the UK's, as I note in my blog post here. But reconsidering that choice is no longer possible. Now it needs help to survive the crisis. Will Spain get enough of what it needs? I doubt it.

Ein Urteil des Landgerichts Köln betrifft einen weitverbreiteten, aus religiösen Gründen durchgeführten medizinischen Eingriff: Danach ist die Beschneidung von Jungen künftig als Körperverletzung zu werten

Greece is struggling to cope with a collapse in corporate tax receipts, according to the latest figures from the Greek finance ministry.

The steep fall in corporation tax income - from €737m (£590m) between January and May 2011 to €448m in the same period this year - is likely to weigh heavily on the new coalition government as it prepares for a European summit later this week.

Without the ability to tax company profits, the government will be forced to step up its demands on households for tax income at a time when most families are already suffering cuts in wages and falling living standards.

The figures will also undermine the message from Greek leaders that the new government is capable of arresting the country's decline and paying the interest on a new tranche of debt funding from Brussels.

Overall, government income declined by €1bn, from last year's €19.9bn to €18.9bn. Receipts from personal income taxes rose slightly, but were unable to offset the collapse in corporate receipts and falls in property taxes and "other direct taxes", which fell to €816m from last year's €1.4bn.

VAT and other indirect tax revenues also fell heavily between the first five months of last year and the first five months of 2012,

France's new Socialist government will need to find between €7 billion (£5.6 billion) and €10 billion (£8.1 billion) for the 2012 budget to meet its deficit-cutting goals, the country's finance minister said today.

But Pierre Moscovici insisted the shortfall would not be made up by painful spending cuts.

"I object to all talk of austerity," he said on i-tele television.

The government will present a new budget on July 4 which is expected to include new tax measures.

President Francois Hollande has promised to cut the deficit to 4.5% this year.

France is a big contributor to bailouts of weaker European states.

Mr Hollande, who is pushing a Europe-wide stimulus package ahead of an EU summit this week, is meeting European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi in Paris today.

Where do banks invest their depositors' money? Whose interests do they serve, and what criteria do they apply? Increasing numbers of dissatisfied customers want to know what happens to their money, and are opting for alternative financial services which are growing in spite of the economic crisis choking Spain.

"As soon as a loan is approved, it is posted on our website," Ernesto Juárez, a member of the local FIARE group in the southern city of Málaga, told IPS. Transparency is a core feature of this ethical banking project, presently operating in Spain as an agency of the Italian credit cooperative Banca Popolare Ética (BPE).

With 2,618 members and capital equivalent to 3.4 million dollars, FIARE finances organisations with development aid, social inclusion or agroecology projects that have been affected by spending cuts or delays in public or private support, said Juárez, who added that the total value of loans increased by 40 percent between 2010 and 2011.

"Financially, we are very stable. We do not lend more than we have," said Juárez. The organisation provides "responsible" savings and investment plans, in contrast to the commercial and savings banks that have exacerbated the crisis with their obsession with speculating and maximising profit, he said.

Between 64 and 77 billion dollars of capital is needed to rescue the Spanish banking sector, rocked by the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2008, two foreign auditing firms commissioned by the government reported Thursday Jun. 21.

On Jun. 9 the EU approved a credit line of 127 billion dollars for the government of rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to bail out the banks; once the actual amount needed is determined, the government must formally request the rescue package and accept its terms.

Meanwhile, the people of Spain are fed up with the drastic spending cuts in health, education, social protection and public services aimed at reducing the fiscal deficit to the levels insisted on by the EU and paying down the public debt.

Oil fell below $80 a barrel for a third day in New York on concern that a meeting of European Union leaders this week will fail to check the region's debt crisis, leading to a reduction in fuel demand.

Futures dropped 0.7 percent as George Soros warned that a failure by EU leaders to produce drastic measures may spell the demise of the bloc's shared currency. Crude climbed earlier as oil and gas installations in the Gulf of Mexico were shut because of Tropical Storm Debby. Prices slid as the storm moved toward Florida and away from energy fields.

"The market is hanging on every development out of the euro zone," said John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital LLC, a New York-based energy hedge fund. "Things don't look promising for the summit. Nothing appears to be in the cards that will end the crisis and an ultimate breakdown looks likely."

Oil for August delivery declined 55 cents to settle at $79.21 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures are down 20 percent this year. Prices have fallen 23 percent since the end of March, heading for the biggest quarterly decline since the final three months of 2008.

I thought it might be worth talking for a second about how the various conventional wisdoms of the past few years -- the enthusiasm for austerity that swept the VSPs in 2010, and now the chin-stroking doubts about monetary expansion -- add up to an insistence that we refuse to do anything that might help us avoid a sustained depression.

What, after all, is the story of this crisis? The simple take many of us have now adopted, which I think gets at most of it, runs along the lines of my Sam and Janet story. At any given time there are some people who would like to borrow more at current interest rates, but are constrained by norms about how much debt is too much. If these norms are loosened, they will borrow more -- which is in fact what happened between around 1980 and 2007, as deregulation, financial innovations nobody understood, and general complacency led to a broad willingness to accept higher leverage.

Now, if people are borrowing, other people must be lending. What induced the necessary lending? Higher real interest rates, which encouraged "patient" economic agents to spend less than their incomes while the impatient spent more.

OK, so that's what happens when an economy is engaged in increased leveraging. Then something makes people remember the dangers of debt, and leveraging gives way to deleveraging.

You might think that the process would be symmetric: debtors pay down their debt, while creditors are correspondingly induced to spend more by low real interest rates. And it would be symmetric if the shock were small enough. In fact, however, the deleveraging shock has been so large that we're hard up against the zero lower bound; interest rates can't go low enough. And so we have a persistent excess of desired saving over desired investment, which is to say persistently inadequate demand, which is to say a depression.

Banking revenues and earnings were not stellar in 2011.  

But still, some bank bosses saw double-digit annual pay raises.  

The Financial Times reports that top US and European bank executives, including Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan, have seen annual pay raises averaging at 11.9%.

The study, completed by Equilar, shows that with the 11.9% annual pay increase to 15 bank CEOs, total compensation for the 15 executives reached an average of $12.8 million for 2011.   

The main driver of the rising annual pay raises comes from a average 22% rise in stock and options awarded.  The increase in stock and options awards has been used to offset cash bonuses awarded, as banking regulators crack down on cash awards.    

Jamie Dimon's pay, the highest in the group of 15, was $23.1 million in 2011.  

In the end, all it took was a small chemical spill -- perhaps less than a barrelful -- to bring down the newest, mightiest oil refinery in the United States.

Three weeks ago, while workers repaired a minor leak at the Port Arthur, Texas plant owned by Motiva Enterprises, a few gallons a day of so-called "caustic" was inadvertently seeping into the newly built crude distillation unit (CDU), the 30-story-high network of interconnected cylinders and latticed pipelines at the heart of the refining process.

While harmless when mixed with crude, the undiluted caustic vaporized into an invisible but devastating agent of corrosion as the chamber heated up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit (370 Celsius); the chemical gas raced through key units, fouled huge heaters and corroded thousands of feet of stainless steel pipe.

Now, just weeks after they commissioned the biggest U.S. refinery project in a decade, two of the world's biggest oil titans -- Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco, which own Motiva -- are rushing to repair the potentially billion-dollar glitch that has added an embarrassing and costly coda to a landmark $10 billion expansion.

After a five-year effort to double the plant's capacity, making it the largest in the country, they must now reassemble many of the same people and parts for a blitzkrieg fix that may exceed the original $300 million cost of the unit: corrosion experts are flying in from across the world; hundreds of workers are being hired; bespoke 30-inch (75-cm) stainless steel pipelines and 30-story cranes may need to be obtained quickly, according to sources involved in the repairs.

Following the latest Greek election, I was interviewed on the ABC's 7.30 Report. In the interview (which you can watch here), I presented a gloomy, yet realistic, view that it really matters little now what happens in Greece. "Greece is finished", I argued, as long as the derailment of Europe's euro-system is proceeding unhindered. Read on for the transcript:
Following the latest Greek election, I was interviewed on the ABC's 7.30 Report. In the interview (which you can watch here), I presented a gloomy, yet realistic, view that it really matters little now what happens in Greece. "Greece is finished", I argued, as long as the derailment of Europe's euro-system is proceeding unhindered. Read on for the transcript:

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Joining us now from Athens is the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.

The obvious question is: what happens now?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS, ECONOMICS, ATHENS UNIVERSITY: Well, the derailment of the train that is the eurozone, which started with Greece and then other carriages started leaving the tracks sequentially - Ireland, Portugal, now Spain - is continuing. And yesterday's vote is not going to change that at all. All exuberance and celebrations are completely and utterly misplaced. I'm afraid that the eurozone and Europe is continuing along the path of the last two years of a cascade of errors, a comedy of errors. Just look at Spain, what is happening there today. Look at what is happening in Italy. Unless the logic or what passes as logic in the European approach to this crisis alters and alters fast, very soon the eurozone will be history.

LEIGH SALES: Well, let's stick with the big picture for the moment before we drill down into Greece. What do you think could happen then to avert that disaster as you see it?

....

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Three things, the very simple steps that need to be taken. Look, in Europe, whether it's Greece or Spain, what we have now is we have insolvent banks that are in a deadly embrace with insolvent states. So, the states get - borrow money from the centre of Europe in order to give to the banks and banks borrow to give to the state and both banks and states are sort of locked into a deadly embrace with another sinking very fast. So what we need to do is we need to break this nexus between insolvent banks and insolvent states. So, the way to do this is to unify the banking system, to Europeanise it in the European Union and have it being funded directly not through national governments. That's a very simple step, but it's a step it seems too far for the European Union.

Secondly what you need is a mutualisation, a kind of common debt, like in Australia we have, you know, the Federal Government having its own debt over and above states. And thirdly we need an investment policy which runs throughout the eurozone. Because you have a secondly currency area, you need to have an investment strategy, a recycling mechanism for the whole thing. Unless we have these things, and Germany doesn't want to have these things, I'm afraid there is absolutely nothing to avert the continuation of this slow motion derailment.

Turkey has sharply raised the stakes in a military standoff with Syria, claiming one of its search and rescue planes was shot at as it attempted to find a Turkish jet that was shot down on Friday by Syrian gunners.

Bülent Arınç, the deputy prime minister, said the second plane had been attacked as it flew above the Mediterranean searching for two pilots. The claim undermines Damascus's insistence that mistaken identity caused the attack on the first jet.

Members of Nato are to hold consultations in Brussels on Tuesday morning over the incident, but the meeting will not lead to any form of military response, according to diplomats.

The downing of the Turkish military plane over what Ankara says were international waters was denounced by European Union foreign ministers. They called for full Syrian co-operation with an investigation and imposed a new round on sanctions on Bashar al-Assad's regime.

"The European Union condemns the unacceptable shooting down by Syria of a Turkish military plane on 22 June. It offers its sympathies to the families of the airmen involved and commends Turkey's measured and responsible initial reaction," the foreign ministers' statement said.

Turkey has called a meeting of the National Atlantic Council, Nato's political steering body made up of ambassadors from member states, under the article four of the North Atlantic treaty, which allows any member to consult its allies whenever it believes "the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened".

Turkey's conservative government has dropped plans for a controversial bill that would have slashed the time limit for abortions.

"The government has backed away from initial plans to curb abortion rights," an unnamed parliamentary source told the AFP news agency on Friday.

The source said that the Islamist-rooted government would instead seek to limit the number of Caesarean sections being performed in the country.

The legislation, initially proposed by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), would have required all abortions to take place within the first six weeks of pregnancy, down from the 10 weeks currently allowed.

Experts said the limit would have effectively outlawed abortions, since most women do not realise they are pregnant until around the sixth week of pregnancy.

Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi has won the presidential election in Egypt, marking a new age for the country. But some consider him a pale figure that represents continuity - not post-revolutionary Egypt.

Over 80 million Egyptians were on tenterhooks for the final results of the first free presidential election in the country. The electoral commission needed a week to count the votes, but now it's official - Mohammed Morsi is the new president of Egypt.

For many Egyptians, the new president is a typical apparatchik - a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and chairman of the Freedom and Justice Party.

A doctor of engineering, Morsi joined the Islamist movement three decades ago. Since then, he has made his career within the Muslim Brotherhood - first in its religion department, then in its head office, and finally as its officially independent candidate in the Egyptian parliament.

Fernando Lugo, the deposed Paraguayan president, says he is aiming to return to power, rallying allies at home and abroad to force congress to reverse a vote to remove him that he called a break with democracy.

Lugo. 61, has created a parallel cabinet, attacking the legitimacy of the government that replaced him, and says he will plead his case on the international stage at this week's summit of the Mercosur, South America's biggest trading bloc, in Mendoza, Argentina.

He also called on domestic backers, who so far have been relatively quiet, to turn up the pressure.

"I want to resist until we regain power because here there was a parliamentary coup,'' Lugo said on Monday.

"I call on people from the countryside, the youth and all citizens to resist until we are back in the office we unfairly had to leave.''

Meanwhile, aides to Lugo's former vice-president, Federico Franco, who took the oath of office on Friday after politicians overwhelmingly voted to impeach his boss, has sworn in a new cabinet, most of whose members were drawn from Paraguay's traditional Liberal and Colorado parties.

He also condemned a resolution by Mercosur preventing his new government from attending the summit.

"We reject Mercosur's decision to suspend us from the right to attend the Mercosur meetings, but I would like to make clear that Paraguay is not out of the bloc," Jose Felix Fernandez, Paraguay's foreign minister, said.

Indian police have taken a man into custody in connection with the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008. According to local media, he's believed to have been involved in planning the siege on the financial capital.

Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna said on Monday that police had arrested Abu Hamza in New Delhi. The arrest was in connection with the 2008 terrorist attacks on the city that claimed 166 lives.

Local media reported subsequently that Hamza was a suspected member of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, blamed for the attacks that severely dented already touchy relations between India and Pakistan. The reports said he had coached the attackers in speaking Hindi and spoke to the attackers by phone from Pakistan in the planning stages of the attack. Krishna, however, urged patience.

"Let the Delhi police go through the investigation first, and then they will send a report to the government," Krishna said. "And then we will certainly see what appropriate ... action can be taken."

Hamza, also known as Sayed Zabiuddin, is an Indian-born member of Lashkar-e-Taiba who has lived in Saudi Arabia for several years. It's not clear how or why he came from Saudi Arabia to India. Citing police sources, Indian media said he was 30 years old and came from the western state of Maharashtra; Mumbai is the state's capital.

Japan's new defense minister said the government is preparing to enhance its air and sea defense capabilities to protect islands and waters in the nation's southwest, part of the broad swath of the western Pacific where China has increased its maritime activities in recent years.

"Japan has 6,800 islands, and territory that stretches over 3,300 kilometers; it's necessary to have troops at its southwestern end to beef up our warning and surveillance capability," Satoshi Morimoto told The Wall Street Journal Monday in his first interview with a non-Japanese news organization since he took office earlier this month.

"We must defend without fail our sovereign rights and our land that includes the Senkaku islands," he added, referring to a chain of islands also claimed by China, which calls them Diaoyu. "We must strengthen our overall defense capability in the southwest."

Mr. Morimoto also said one of his priorities as defense minister is to push for policies that will strengthen the bilateral alliance with the U.S. "The most important task for people who think about Japan's national security and build its policy is making the alliance even more reliable," he said.

Mr. Morimoto brings to the embattled government of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda a combination of a nonpolitical résumé and first-class knowledge on national security that has generated rare excitement among the public.

He also comes with unapologetically hawkish views on how Japan should protect itself amid rising geopolitical tensions in East Asia.

Tapping Mr. Morimoto was a gamble for Mr. Noda, who is struggling to pass a controversial tax bill in a divided Parliament and facing a possible breakup of his own party.

A large majority of Israelis - 69 percent - supports the renewed social-justice protests, but Israelis are about evenly split over who was responsible for the violence that characterized Saturday night's rally in Tel Aviv, according to a Haaretz-Dialog poll conducted on Monday.

לשאלה, מה יחסך לנזק שגרמו המפגינים לבנקים, השיבו רוב הנשאלים (61%) כי הם מתנגדים תמיד לגרימת נזקים כאלה. עם זאת, מיעוט לא זניח של 23% השיב כי "זה חבל, אבל לפעמים אין ברירה וזה קורה". תשעה אחוזים מהציבור מצדיקים את האלימות כלפי הבנקים, וטענו כי הם "תומכים בזה כחלק מהמחאה". עד כה לא נרשמה כל התייחסות של ראשי הבנקים או דובריהם לנזקים שנגרמו להם במוצאי שבת.

South Carolina businesses are feeling the effects of a global helium shortage that's squeezing supply lines dry. Balloon shops, florists and others are experiencing financial pressure as the government sells off its supplies.

The long-running shortage means businesses around the country must conserve the helium they have, and in some cases, turn customers away.

Those hoping for a "Get Well" or "Birthday" balloon to go with their flower bouquet from Flowers by Sue on Hilton Head Island are out of luck because the shop is out of the gas.

Disappointed over the failure of the Rio summit to produce ambitious commitments on sustainable growth, conservationists say Europe must now redouble efforts to tackle its own environmental challenges.

Replete with declarations on sustainability, poverty reduction and expanding electricity to disadvantaged people, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development's final document contained none of the firm commitments on resource conservation and economic sustainability that EU officials and environmental groups had urged.

"When governments come here with absolutely no ambition, it will mean that their documents have no ambition," Asad Rehman, head of global climate and energy campaigns at Friends of the Earth in Britain, said from Rio de Janeiro.

The conference also failed to lay out a plan backed by the European Union to give the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) more firepower - putting it on par with the world body's trade, health and labour organisations.

EU must `do more'

Saying he was dispirited by the lacklustre outcome of the 20-22 June meeting, German MEP Jo Leinen (Socialists and Democrats) said the EU shouldn't back down on its own environmental agenda.

"Rio should not be an excuse in Europe to do less, but should be a motivation to do more because we have a special role to play," said Leinen, a member of the Parliament's environment committee and one of the few MEPs to attend the Rio conference.

Despite growing evidence that biofuel production is causing food insecurity around the world, the new European Union policy blueprint on renewable energy ignores the social effects of biofuels. Last week, Guatemalan victims of the food crisis came to Brussels to make European policy makers aware of the problem.

In a bid to reduce the of amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the European Union decided three years ago to increase biofuel use in transport. With the 2009 directive on renewable energy, the Union set a mandatory target of a ten percent share of agrofuels in transport petrol and diesel consumption by 2020.

But even before the directive had been approved, NGOs around the world had already pointed out a series of problems with agrofuels.

The British NGO ActionAid calculated that reaching Europe's target would require converting up to 69,000 square kilometres of natural ecosystems into cropland, an area larger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Furthermore, because of the conversion of forests, grasslands and peat lands into crop fields for biofuel, total net greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 56 million tonnes of extra CO2 per year, the equivalent of an extra 12 to 26 million cars on Europe's roads by 2020.

ActionAid estimated that the extra biofuels entering the EU market would be, on average, 81 to 167 percent worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

NGOs also found that the EU's planned increase in biofuel use would push oilseed, maize and sugar prices up. According to a study by the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the 10 percent target would put an extra 140 million people at risk of hunger, with the poor urban populations, subsistence farmers and the landless in developing countries particularly vulnerable. Finally, the Rome-based International Land Coalition recently stated that the demand for biofuels is driving more than 50 percent of large-scale land acquisitions globally.

Earlier this month the European Commission published its post-2020 communication on renewable energy. Despite the relentless campaigning of several international NGOs to cancel out the 2020 target, the new communication remains completely silent on the effects of biofuels on food security in developing nations, leaving a similar target for 2030 open.

Massive geopolitical shifts seldom announce themselves with a bang. They tend instead to creep up slowly, until it's hard to be sure exactly when they began. I remember going to buy some steel about six years ago, and being staggered by the price. "Ah," the man in the hardware store explained, "it's the Chinese, you see. They're buying up so much steel, the price has gone through the roof." The last time I visited my brother, all the lead had been stripped from his garden shed - the second theft in two months - thanks to rocketing lead prices. And it must have been around the time of the Iraq war that I recall first hearing someone say the next big war would be fought over water. At the time the prediction had sounded far-fetched; these days, it's a commonplace.

These sort of random, disconnected events look neither random nor disconnected once you read Dambisa Moyo's account of what's happening to the world's commodities. In 1950 the world's population stood at 2.5 billion; by last year it had reached 7 billion, and is projected to hit 10 billion by 2050. With almost all the population growth occurring in the emerging economies, by 2030 some 2 billion people will have joined the global middle classes. "Put another way," Moyo writes, "in less than 20 years we will witness the creation of a middle class of roughly the same size as the current total population of Africa, North America and Europe." Naturally, they will want mobile phones, fridges, cars and washing machines; 2,000 new cars already join Beijing's streets every day. In 2010 China had 40 cities with populations of more than a million; by 2020 it plans to have added another 225. The implications for the world's commodity resources are stark and sobering: global demand for food and water is expected to increase by 50% and 30% respectively by 2030, the pressure on copper, lead, zinc and corn is already becoming unsustainable, and no one has a clue where the energy we'll need is going to come from.

If Moyo's calculations are correct, we are in big trouble - which makes the central premise of her book, Winner Takes All, all the more arresting.

Unless the Netherlands increases its investment in sustainable energy, the country will fail to meet targets on green power production, according to a report by Rabobank, quoted in Monday's Volkskrant.

In 2011, just 4% of Dutch energy was produced from sustainable sources and without a new strategy, that will rise to just 9% by 2020. The EU target is 14%.

'The greening of Dutch energy production has stood still for years,' Rabobank analyst Clara van der Elst told the paper. 'Thanks to the household waste imported from Naples, we went up to 4% last year.'

The report - An Outlook for Renewable Energy in the Netherlands' - also criticises government policy for being ineffective, partly because it is altered every year.

Costs

'The industry needs a long-term vision,' she said. 'Companies which invest in ships to place wind turbines [at sea] need to know they will recover their costs.'

RWE chief Peter Terium said in Saturday's AD that the shift towards green energy could lead to poorer households struggling to pay their bills.

Tell-tale signs that an El Niño climate event is looming are detectable up to 18 months beforehand, scientists have found, nine months earlier than current models can predict.

Early warning of these events, which usually bring dry, hot conditions to much of Australia, would be welcome news for the country's farmers, fire fighters and weather forecasters.

The vital clues lie beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean north of Australia, say climate scientists Nandini Ramesh and Raghu Murtugudde in the journal Nature Climate Change.

El Niño events appear when waters in the tropical eastern Pacific start to warm up, resulting in cooler oceans near Australia with less clouds and reduced rainfall. Scientists have struggled to understand the early steps in this process.

Ramesh, who is currently based at the University of New South Wales'sClimate Change Research Centre, studied El Niño events from 1958 until 2011 to try to identify climate factors that were present during all of them.

She found that although not all El Niño events follow the same course, they all begin with a discharge of massive volumes of sub-surface warm water from the equatorial western Pacific.

"This is an important discovery," saysProfessor Matthew England from the Climate Change Research Centre. "Improving our skill at predicting El Niño events is one of the holy grails of climate research. This research should significantly improve our ability to forecast El Niño events."

This sub-surface process had not been noticed before because the discharge of warm water is not easy to detect using satellite measurements.

"When we looked below the surface, there was this big blob of warm water that was there far before anything was visible on the surface," says Ramesh, who is a pre-PhD student.

The planned unveiling in London of a memorial to the 55,573 Royal Air Force Bomber Command airmen killed in World War II has sparked muted criticism in Germany, where many regard the Allied air raids that destroyed entire cities and killed over 500,000 civilians as unjustified and criminal.

OAS_RICH('Middle2'); Helma Orosz, the mayor of Dresden, which was devastated in an Allied attack in February 1945, criticized the plans for the monument when they first became public in 2010, and spoke to London Mayor Boris Johnson about it.

"The planned memorial triggered astonishment in Dresden and was judged critically by us in diplomatic terms," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "I am pleased that this exchange of views led to the monument now featuring an inscription commemorating the victims of the bombing war. The objections many people in Germany had to such a memorial have been taken seriously and I welcome this very much. It's a further gesture of reconciliation between Britain and Germany."

The 73-meter- (240-foot-) wide memorial, a tall pavilion flanked by colonnades, will be inaugurated in a ceremony in Green Park near Buckingham Palace at midday on June 28. Queen Elizabeth will unveil a nine foot high bronze sculpture inside it showing seven Bomber Command aircrew.

Thousands of Bomber Command veterans, widows and families are expected to attend and there will be a flypast including the RAF's last flying Lancaster bomber, which will drop red poppies over the park as a symbol of remembrance.

Late Recognition

The ceremony will complete a decades-long campaign by Bomber Command veterans to get acknowledgment for their losses and for the contribution they made to winning the war. The scale of the civilian casualties inflicted in the raids made Britain reluctant to honor them publicly. The airmen weren't recognized by medal or memorial, and Winston Churchill didn't mention them in his victory speech.

"A rental bike is the most convenient way to travel in Paris," says Marion. The 28-year-old, who works in marketing, lives in the smart 16th Arrondissement and uses a Velib cycle two or three times a week, undeterred by Paris' bustling city streets. "Motorists and cyclists are now used to one other. We respect each other," she explains. Valentine, 22, a trainee insurance clerk who moved to Paris a year ago, says the city's fleet of chunky bikes is "just cool!"

OAS_RICH('Middle2'); France has a long cycling history: People in brightly colored, tight-fitting jerseys, helmets and streamlined sunglasses speed along country roads. Water bottle within easy reach, they propel themselves up the winding mountain roads between the Massif Central and the Pyrenees. Emerging during the summer months, these pedal-pushing athletes are in the mould of their legendary "Tour de France" heroes.

But Velib has brought affection for two-wheeled travel into the country's capital city. The self-service network of 23,500 bikes parked at 1,400 stations across Paris has made mobility more flexible for city dwellers willing to pay an annual €29 ($36) membership fee. The first half hour on the bike's solid, heavy frame is free of charge. After that the hourly rental rate gets increasingly expensive, a price structure designed to push Velib as an alternative to car, bus and metro trips.

'Not Just A Weekend Hobby'

Some 130 million trips have been clocked up since the bike network's launch five years ago. The anniversary was marked on Sunday with a mass cycle ride down the Champs-Elysées. The success story has shifted attitudes to mobility in the French capital. A few years ago it was unimaginable that suited businessmen or elegantly dressed women would mount a bike.

Eric, a sociologist at the University of Seine-Saint-Denis, swears by the city's bikes which he uses "at least twice a day." The 48-year-old is faster on the saddle than in the subway: "The Velib station is just over the road from my front door," he says.

And the daily newspaper Le Parisien quoted a member of the Velorution cycling organization as saying, "The invention has proved that a bicycle can be a serious means of transportation, not just a weekend hobby."

"The image of the bicycle has changed," says Dominique Lebrun, Paris' inter-ministerial coordinator for bicycle use, referring to the 700,000 French workers who commute by bicycle.

The rental bikes have proved their worth, particularly for short trips. While cars grind through the boulevards at walking pace, speedy cyclists can cover about five kilometers (three miles) in 20 minutes, whizzing past the gridlock. The system's teething problems, such as where to find bikes and which stations have parking space, have largely been solved: More than a dozen free smart phone applications, including "Open Bike," "Cycle Hire" and "molib," direct Velib riders to the nearest parking space.

France's minister for women is to organise a consultation on ways to abolish prostitution in France and Europe, she has told the Guardian.

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the high profile women's rights minister and government spokeswoman, said in an interview that she would be organising a conference of experts on how to contain the sex-trade and human-trafficking and was seeking to meet the home secretary Theresa May for input from the UK.

"Since the 19th century and the role of [the Victorian feminist] Josephine Butler, Britain and France have been the core countries in the international mobilisation against prostitution. I really hope that these common roots are still alive," she said. She wanted a meeting with May on how Britain and France approach prostitution and human-trafficking. In France prostitution is not illegal, but activities around it are. Brothels were outlawed in 1946 and pimping is illegal.

In 2003 a controversial law against soliciting was introduced by Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, making it illegal to stand in a public place known for prostitution dressed in revealing clothes.

Last year, the French parliament adopted a resolution on the abolition of prostitution saying its objective was a "society without prostitution".

The consultation would consider recommendations made last year by a cross-party commission of French MPs that it should be illegal to pay for sex. The MPs had suggested all clients of sex workers, meaning anyone who buys sex from any kind of prostitute, would face prison and a fine. Clients of sex-workers face prison in a handful of European countries, including Sweden, Norway and Iceland.

More businesses are using unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and research. While the technology is cost-efficient and practical, some are worried about its potential to violate privacy and data protection laws.

The western-German town of Düren was in turmoil. A small drone was circling slowly and deliberately over the local school. The result: nervous residents, curious glances, frightened whispers. Many locals asked if this was a secret military operation or some sort of new state surveillance program. But in the end it turned out that a photo and film production company had been using the drone to make 360-degree aerial shots.

Such scenes are increasingly common, as more and more private companies in Germany employ the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones. They're used for photography, map-making and surveillance of large solar farms, industrial complexes, gas pipelines or construction sites. According to an unpublished report by Germany's Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development, businesses, universities and individuals have submitted 500 applications to use drones in the last two years, and most of them have been approved.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Monday called for diplomatic guarantees he will not be pursued by the United States for publishing secret documents if he goes to Sweden to face criminal allegations.

The Australian, 40, said he is prepared to go to Sweden to face questioning over sex assault claims, but fears Stockholm will turn him over to the US where he could face espionage and conspiracy charges over revelations by WikiLeaks.

"Ultimately it may be a matter of what guarantees the United Kingdom, the United States and Sweden are willing to provide," he told the Sydney Morning Herald from the Ecuador embassy in London, where he is seeking asylum.

Staff at the Galapagos National Park in Ecuador say Lonesome George, a giant tortoise believed to be the last of its subspecies, has died.

Scientists estimate he was about 100 years old.

Park officials said they would carry out a post-mortem to determine the cause of his death.

With no offspring and no known individuals from his subspecies left, Lonesome George became known as the rarest creature in the world.

For decades, environmentalists unsuccessfully tried to get the Pinta Island tortoise to reproduce with females from a similar subspecies on the Galapagos Islands.

Park officials said the tortoise was found dead in his corral by his keeper of 40 years, Fausto Llerena.

While his exact age was not known, Lonesome George was estimated to be about 100, which made him a young adult as the subspecies can live up to an age of 200.

Lonesome George was first seen by a Hungarian scientist on the Galapagos island of Pinta in 1972.

Environmentalists had believed his subspecies (Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni) had become extinct.

Lonesome George became part of the Galapagos National Park breeding programme.

After 15 years of living with a female tortoise from the nearby Wolf volcano, Lonesome George did mate, but the eggs were infertile.