When Jean-Claude Trichet called last June for the creation of a European finance ministry with power over national budgets, the idea seemed fanciful, a distant dream that would take years or even decades to realize, if it ever came to be.

One year later, with the euro zone's debt crisis threatening to tear the bloc apart, Germany is pushing its partners for precisely the kind of giant leap forward in fiscal integration that the now-departed European Central Bank president had in mind.

After falling short with her "fiscal compact" on budget discipline, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pressing for much more ambitious measures, including a central authority to manage euro area finances, and major new powers for the European Commission, European Parliament and European Court of Justice.

She is also seeking a coordinated European approach to reforming labor markets, social security systems and tax policies, German officials say.

Until states agree to these steps and the unprecedented loss of sovereignty they involve, the officials say Berlin will refuse to consider other initiatives like joint euro zone bonds or a "banking union" with cross-border deposit guarantees - steps Berlin says could only come in a second wave.

Thousands of women joined a pro-choice rally in Istanbul on Sunday amid growing fears that Turkey's Islamist government intends, in effect, to ban abortion.

Terminations are legal in Turkey until the 10th week of gestation but the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) is reportedly working on a bill to ban them after four weeks, except in emergencies.

The bill has not been published, but fears that it could substantially curtail a woman's right to choose have been stoked by comments from senior government officials. Speaking last month at a conference on population and development, the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said: "There is no difference between killing a baby in its mother's stomach and killing a baby after birth." He said abortion and elective caesareans were "secret plots" to slow Turkey's growth.

The health minister, Recep Akdag, said that the government would present its abortion bill by the end of June, adding that women pregnant as a result of rape should let the government take care of the baby.

The mayor of Greater Ankara, Melih Gökçek, said on TV that a mother who considered abortion should "kill her herself instead and not let the child bear the brunt of her mistake".

breakfast has become a normal part of daily life for thousands of children in Portugal, whose growing vocabulary now includes the word "crisis".

Influenced by what they hear from their parents and see on television, children have started to discuss the situation in this southern European country, remember when things were easier, and even criticise political leaders.

In hundreds of public schools, children from low-income families hover around the food counter in the dining area, without buying anything. Education authorities cannot afford to offer more than a modest breakfast, and only for those in greatest need, because their budgets have been slashed.

The economic crisis rocking Portugal and many of its European neighbours "impacts on the lives of children in this country, many of whom have crossed the line into the at-risk category," Ana Filgueiras, the head of Cidadãos do Mundo (CM - Citizens of the World), a local NGO, told IPS.

The activist fears that the drastic funding cuts for NGOs decided by the right-wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho "will exacerbate the situation, especially for the poorest of the poor.

"It is not the state, but NGOs, that develop the most effective plans for protecting children," said Filgueiras, who fought against Portugal's 1926-1974 dictatorship and lived for a number of years in Brazil, where she denounced the murders of street children by death squads in the 1970s and 1980s.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has more power than ever. After his return to the presidency, he is paying the German chancellor his respects - with enormous self-assurance.

As Vladimir Putin climbed out of his black limousine in front of the chancellery, there was a hint of triumph in his face, as if he wanted to say "Here I am again, I know the way!" The Russian president gave the chancellor two friendly kisses, then moved so effortlessly past the guard of honor, as if the walk down the red carpet were his usual afternoon stroll.

It is Putin's third term as president, so a certain routine is to be expected. But his gestures and facial expressions convey far more than the professional routine of an experienced politician. After four years in the "holding position" of prime minister, Vladimir Putin is back where he always wanted to be, in the country's highest office, outfitted with more power than ever before. Now he has six years to do as he pleases. The Russian president emanated this almost monarchical self-confidence as he entered the Berlin chancellery on Friday.

Respect, but no euphoria

He spent an hour there talking with Chancellor Angela Merkel. She understands Russian, he speaks German - and yet the two often fail to find a common language. When she begins to talk about Russia's smothered civil society, his expression changes. In the past, he sometimes became loud and coarse.

Newly elected Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic has caused controversy by saying that the 1995 killing of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica constituted "grave war crimes", but not a genocide.

"There was no genocide in Srebrenica," Nikolic said in an interview with Montenegrin state television published on its website on Friday

"In Srebrenica, grave war crimes were committed by some Serbs, who should be found, prosecuted and punished," he added in the interview taped earlier this week.

"It is very difficult to indict someone and prove before a court that an event qualifies as genocide."

Bosnia and Herzegovina immediately responded to the comments, with one of its presidents saying that the statement would cause "new tension" in the region.

"Denying the Srebrenica genocide ... is not a step on the road to co-operation and restoring confidence but exactly the opposite - it is a source of new misunderstandings and tension" in the region, said Bakir Izetbegovic, the Muslim member and current chairman of Bosnia's tripartite presidency.

About 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in a matter of days after Bosnian Serb troops, under the command of General Ratko Mladic, assaulted the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in Bosnia in July 1995.

Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serbs' wartime political leader, are on trial in The Hague accused, among other things, of genocide for the killings.

"[The statement] casts serious doubts over [Nikolic's] pro-European stance and his commitment to good relations in the region," said Izetbegovic.

The Dutch Socialist Party (SP) has the most support among Dutch voters, according to the latest poll from Maurice de Hond.

The latest polling results were released Sunday and are similar to last week's results. According to the poll, were elections held today, the SP would take 29 seats in the lower house of parliament. That's one seat less than indicated last week, but 14 more seats than the SP currently holds in parliament. 

Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV) also lost one seat compared to last week's results, down to 24, the same amount that the party currently holds. The free-market liberal VVD party would take 25 seats, six less than it currently has. The Labour Party would take 21 seats and D66 would garner 16. 

Police in France are investigating two claimed sightings of a Canadian porn actor wanted in connection to a gruesome murder in Montreal.

Luka Rocco Magnotta is alleged to have videotaped the murder of Chinese student Jun Lin before dismembering the 33-year-old's corpse and sending body parts to politicians.

Authorities believe the suspect fled Montreal for Paris last weekend. Interpol has since placed him on its most-wanted list.

Prosecutors in France told the Associated Press on Sunday that they were investigating two reported sightings of Magnotta in north-west Paris. No further information was provided by the unnamed official.

Magnotta, born Eric Clinton Newman, is believed to know France quite well, having travelled there in 2010.

Montreal police have indicated that evidence found in his apartment has led them to believe that the 29-year-old suspect had fled to Europe.

The actor and model is wanted in a murder case that has seen him dubbed "Canadian Psycho".

For two years now I have been arguing that Europe is being quickmarched, sequentially (one country after the next) off the cliff of competitive austerity - without any winners standing at the end of this gruesome process. Something must end this madness. There must be a circuit-breaker. Ireland could have been that circuit-breaker, with a resounding No to the idiotic Fiscal Pact. It did not happen. On the one hand, the fear that Ireland will be frozen out of the ESM and, on the other hand, the elevation of the troika's `model prisoner' image (for the Irish) onto the Pantheon of Irish virtues, saw to it that madness (in the form of a Yes vote to a Compact that everyone knows to be daft) prevailed. Greece is the next hope that Reason may manage to score a belated victory.

If on 17th June Greeks voted like the Irish did last week (that is, against their reasoning and guided by fear and blackmail), the Eurozone will become history, with terrible consequences for the global economy. This is not the case of the Philosopher Kings blackmailing the plebs to do what is right. This is the case of `madmen in authority', to quote Keynes, who are not only steering the vessel toward the rocks but who are, in the process, punching holes in the life vests that may carry us to safety once the shipwreck is complete. Consider what they are telling the Greek people: They are saying that Greece, to remain in the Eurozone, must,
(a)  carry on borrowing from the EFSF at 4% (and thus adding to Greece's public debt) in order to pay the ECB (which will be making a 20% profit from these payments, courtesy of the fact that it had previously bought Greece's bonds at a 20% to 30% discount)
(b)  reduce public spending by 12 billion euros in order to be `allowed' to borrow for the benefit of bolstering the ECB's profits from these transactions involving bankrupt Greece.
If the Devil wanted to guarantee that Greece is pushed out of the Eurozone, he and his evil handmaidens could not make up the above, satanic, scenario. Meanwhile, the same happens in Spain, where the government is forced to borrow money (at nearly 7%) it can hardly raise in order to shore up banks that are borrowing from the ECB (at 1%) to lend to the Spanish government at (7%) so that the latter can... bail them out. Not even the sickest of minds could make this up!

To conclude, Europe's peoples are being marched into a catastrophe. They know that this is their predicament. They can see their march is leading them off a mighty cliff. But they are too afraid to veer off, in case there are beaten back into line, in case they get lost in the woods, for reasons that sheep know best. However, the only way this hideous march can end is if someone summons up the courage and does it. And steps out, showing the others that this march can stop and must stop - for everyone's benefit. Who is that someone? We, Europeans, do not have many options. As I wrote above, the Irish people had a chance but did not take it. In two weeks, the Greeks have their chance. Voting for Syriza would offer us (and by `us' I mean all Europeans) a chance of this circuit-breaker. A chance to say: Enough! Time to change course in order to save the Eurozone, so as to prevent the Great Postmodern Depression which lurks once the euro-system fragments formally.

German newspapers report of a secret master plan by Herman van Rompuy to force a banking union, a fiscal union and a political union; Welt am Sonntag denounces the plans as the introduction of a superstate through the back door; FTD talks about the reintroduction centralised planning; the Bundesbank says it opposes the ECB's designs of a banking union, warning of a mutualisation of all risk; the German saving banks federation says it does not want to subsidise foreign banks; Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schauble are pushing banks into an EFSF programme; Mark Schieritz says a partial EFSF programme for the banking sector would make the Spanish situation worse in the short term; the PP's foreign affairs spokesman in the parliament says a programme would be a setback, but no disaster; Spain is considering to offer a total centralisation of fiscal policy as a concession to its European partners; a JP Morgan analysis suggests that Spain is suffering from a withdrawal of foreign investors, rather than domestic capital flight; After a yes in referendum , Ireland now wants a deal on Irish banks; Alexis Tsipras unveils his economic programme, including a reversal of privatisations; SPD opposes Schauble as eurogroup chairman; economists are split on whether the ECB is going to cut rates further; Nikolaus Blome predicts the endgame for Greece; a report says that France needs to save €5bn a year to achieve a balanced budget by 2016; Gavyn Davies says a banking union, as outlined by the European Commission, is unlikely to allay financial market concerns about the eurozone; Wolfgang Munchau, meanwhile, argues that a banking union might work, but only if it is done properly.

The current plan for the European Stability Mechanism, the EU's permanent bailout vehicle, does not include direct recapitalization of the bloc's banks, a spokesman for the bloc's executive arm said Thursday.

"You have to distinguish between things; some things are possible now... some for the future," said Amadeu Altafaj Tardio, spokesman for Economic Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn.

"With the ESM, as it is, when it comes into force it won't cover direct recapitalization of banks," he told reporters in response to a question about the fund's role.

"We have been considering this as a serious possibility, of breaking the link between the sovereigns and the banks," EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn told a news briefing.

"This is not part of the ESM (bailout fund) treaty for the moment, in its present form, but we see that it is important to consider this alternative of direct bank recapitalisation as we are now moving on in the discussion on the possible ways and means to create a banking union," Rehn said.

"The key issue is to be able to break the link between the banks and the sovereigns so that we can go to the roots of this current debt crisis."

Spain is one of the favorites at this summer's European soccer championships, but the country is fighting for survival economically. Madrid could soon be calling for help from the European Union.

It seemed like a good sign at first. The European Commission praised Spain for its reforms and budget cuts. EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn on Wednesday even promised the country it would get one extra year to make savings than previously planned, on condition that "Spain reduce the excessive expenses of its regions and presents a solid budget for the next two years." That would mean that Spain would have until 2014 to get its deficit below the 3 percent mark.

But doubts are multiplying in the EU that Spain is capable of lifting itself out of its debt swamp. The country has a huge problem with its banks, which are holding billions of euros worth of bad loans. The fourth biggest Spanish bank, partially state-owned Bankia, for instance, reportedly needs 23 billion euros ($28.5 billion), and it remains unclear where the money might come from.

Euro-zone data out Friday showing a fresh decline in manufacturing and the highest number of jobless people in the bloc's history suggested further economic floundering as the region's debt crisis deepens.

In Spain, which is fighting to rescue one of its biggest banks and avoid becoming another casualty of the crisis, unemployment spiked to 24.3% in April, while manufacturing activity fell to a three-year low, both readings worse than even those of Greece.

Germany and France also posted manufacturing figures at or near three-year lows.

Unemployment in the 17-member bloc rose to a record 17.4 million in April, an increase of 110,000 since March and 1.8 million from a year earlier.

The euro bloc's unemployment rate remained stable at 11%, following a small upward revision to March's figure to 11% from 10.9%. The rate, while a record for the bloc, was in line with economists' expectations.

President Barack Obama told campaign donors in Chicago and Minnesota that Europe's sovereign debt crisis is largely to blame for the slowest month of U.S. employment growth in a year, seeking to counter an issue weighing on his re-election bid.

"We're not where we need to be; we're not there yet; you saw that in today's jobs report," the president said at a Chicago fundraiser, the fourth of six yesterday in the Midwest. "A lot of that's attributable to Europe and the cloud that's coming over from the Atlantic. The whole world economy has been weakened by it, and it's having an impact on us."

Obama's prospects for a second term suffered a blow yesterday with a U.S. Labor Department report showing payrolls expanded by 69,000 last month, less than the most pessimistic forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of private economists, while the unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent.

Both Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney have sought to make the economy the focus of the election. The president says the former Massachusetts governor backs policies that brought the U.S. into a crippling downturn, while Romney, a co-founder of the Bain Capital LLC private-equity firm, asserts Obama lacks the business acumen needed to lead an economic turnaround.

Central banks in emerging markets have been dumping euros to shore up their own currencies, contributing to the euro's drastic slide in recent weeks, according to traders.

The euro lost nearly 7 per cent against the US dollar in May - its biggest monthly fall since September - as fears over a Greek exit from the single currency grew and investors sold the government debt of peripheral European nations.

Currency traders said central banks were among the biggest sellers of the euro - reversing their normal pattern of buying the single currency when it weakens to diversify their stockpiles of foreign exchange reserves.

"The most recent bout of euro concerns has cooled central bank ardour for the euro considerably," said Steven Englander, foreign exchange strategist at Citigroup.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch said its trading records showed that central banks sold euros at an unusually rapid rate in May, while hedge funds and institutional investors were also sellers of the currency.

Everyday, we hear some pretty grim predictions about the markets and the economy.  But this is one of the more comprehensive and most gloomy outlooks we've ever seen.

Raoul Pal expects a series of sovereign defaults, the "biggest banking crisis in world history", and asserts that we don't have many options to stop it. 

Pal previously co-managed the GLG Global Macro Fund. He is also a Goldman Sachs alum. He currently writes for The Global Macro Investor, a research publication for large and institutional investors. 

There are three issues in today's European crisis. They should be dealt with separately and independently, for they are different problems amenable to different kinds of solutions. Instead, they are mashed together. And that is the major reason that the crisis is intractable.

The first issue is that Northern European bankers and investors loaned Greek politicians money when the Greek politicians did not have a mandate to raise taxes to pay that money back. The bankers and investors were betting on rapid growth that would produce a sufficient fiscal dividend that Greek taxpayers would not notice. Failing that, they were betting on being bailed out by somebody. It was a risky growth-or-moral-hazard play. It has gone wrong. The bankers and investors cannot collect on the "growth" portion. If they want to collect on the "moral hazard" portion, they should apply to the ECB and the German government. This issue seems to me to have very little to do with Greece: it should be settled in Northern Europe.

The second issue is how Greece is going to balance its government expenditures and government revenues going forward, for nobody--or at least nobody sane--will lend the Greek government more money for a long time to come. This, it seems to me, is an issue for the Greek political system and the Greek political system alone: it should be settled by the Greeks.

The third issue is how is Greece as a country is--and the other countries of southern Europe that also received enormous capital inflows that pushed up their nominal wage and price levels are--going to balance its exports and imports going forward without suffering a decade-long depression. The Friedmanite monetarist solution would be to let the foreign exchange market do the job: abandon the euro, and let the drachma find the level at which imports balance exports. The alternative is structural adjustment--an increase in the level of nominal wages in euros in Northern Europe and increased efficiencies and stable nominal wages in euros in Greece and Italy and Spain and Portugal and Ireland. This structural adjustment strategy preserves the euro, but it calls for adjustment on both sides: structural reform in Greece, etc, and also higher inflation in Germany.

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad said on Sunday authorities would maintain a crackdown against the armed opposition but were still ready for dialogue with political opponents.

"We will continue firmly confronting terrorism, leaving the door open for those who want to return," Assad told parliament. "I urge all those who are still hesitant to do so, to take this step. The state will not take revenge."

He said that his government faces a foreign plot to destroy Syria, and blamed "monsters" for the Houla massacre, in a rare televised speech delivered in parliament.

Assad's accusations came as Arab leaders called on the United Nations to act to stop bloodshed in Syria and France raised the prospect of military action against Damascus under a UN mandate.

"The masks have fallen and the international role in the Syrian events is now obvious," Assad said in his first address to the assembly since a May 7 parliamentary election, adding the polls were the perfect response "to the criminal killers and those who finance them".

The embattled leader, who was greeted with warm applause from lawmakers, said atrocities like the May 25-26 massacre of at least 108 people near the town of Houla, in central Syria, were committed by "monsters".

"What happened in Houla and elsewhere (in Syria) are brutal massacres which even monsters would not have carried out," he said.

The dictator was sentenced to death yesterday. Twenty-five years is death, isn't it, if you're 84 years old? Hosni Mubarak will die in jail. And Habib al-Adli, his interior minister, 74 years old, maybe he will be killed in jail if he doesn't live out his life sentence. These were the thoughts of two old Egyptian friends of mine yesterday. And Mubarak was sentenced for the dead of the 2011 revolution. That's 850 dead - 34 people for each year of his term. Quite a thought.

Of course, we were not asking about the death sentences at the military courts in the 1980s and 1990s - and we can't, can we, when the military is still in power in Egypt. Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the field marshal who runs the country, never suggested these courts - and their death sentences - were wrong. Mubarak was fighting "terror", wasn't he? On our behalf, I believe. For he was a "moderate", a friend of the West, and maybe that's why Mubarak's sons, Gamal and Alaa, got off. Will they leave the country? Will they quit Egypt? No doubt.

So that's the story. Let's not mention Bashar al-Assad here. The Egyptian court was meant to be a lesson for him. Kofi Annan was down in Qatar, talking about the Syrian government's sins yesterday. But, then, there are some problems, aren't there? Didn't Mubarak receive a few "renditioned" prisoners from George W Bush; tortured them, too, at Washington's behest? And didn't Damascus also torture a few "renditioned" prisoners - the name Arar comes to mind, a Canadian citizen, sent off from JFK for a touch of torture in the Syrian capital? Yes, our "moderate" Arabs were always ready to help us, weren't they?

Germany is helping Israel to develop its military nuclear capabilities, SPIEGEL has learned. According to extensive research carried out by the magazine, Israel is equipping submarines that were built in the northern German city of Kiel and largely paid for by the German government with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The missiles can be launched using a previously secret hydraulic ejection system. Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak told SPIEGEL that Germans should be "proud" that they have secured the existence of the state of Israel "for many years."

OAS_RICH('Middle2'); In the past, the German government has always stuck to the position that it is unaware of nuclear weapons being deployed on the vessels. Now, however, former high-ranking officials from the German Defense Ministry, including former State Secretary Lothar Rühl and former chief of the planning staff Hans Rühle, have told SPIEGEL that they had always assumed that Israel would deploy nuclear weapons on the submarines. Rühl had even discussed the issue with the military in Tel Aviv.

Israel has a policy of not commenting officially on its nuclear weapons program. Documents from the archives of the German Foreign Ministry make it clear, however, that the German government has known about the program since 1961. The last discussion for which there is evidence took place in 1977, when then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt spoke to then-Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan about the issue.

The submarines are built by the German shipyard HDW in Kiel. Three submarines have already been delivered to Israel, and three more will be delivered by 2017. In addition, Israel is considering ordering its seventh, eighth and ninth submarines from Germany.

The German government recently signed the contract for the delivery of the sixth vessel. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, Chancellor Angela Merkel made substantial concessions to the Israelis. Not only is Berlin financing one-third of the cost of the submarine, around €135 million ($168 million), but it is also allowing Israel to defer its payment until 2015.

An aviation official says that all passengers on board the plane that crashed in Nigeria's largest city have been killed. The
government says 153 people were on board.

Harold Denuren, of Nigeria's Civil Aviation Authority, confirmed that all the passengers on Sunday's Dana Air flight died. He did not say how many were on the flight.

The Lagos state government said in a statement that 153 people were on the flight going from Abuja to Lagos. The plane crashed in a densely populated neighborhood near the airport.

A spokesman for Nigeria's national emergency management agency said there were likely more casualties on the ground, but the number was unknown.

Several thousand gathered at the site as firefighters tried to put out flames and carry out survivors.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan declared three days of national mourning on Sunday night.

Jonathan "has declared a three-day period of national mourning for all those who lost their lives in the Dana plane crash in Lagos today," a statement from his office said.

The second U.S. drone attack in as many days killed 10 people in northwest Pakistan on Sunday, intelligence officials said, an incident likely to raise tensions in the standoff between Washington and Islamabad over NATO supply routes to Afghanistan.

The remotely-piloted aircraft fired four missiles at a suspected Islamist militant hideout in the Birmal area of the South Waziristan tribal region near the Afghanistan border, officials said.

A drone strike in the same area killed two suspected militants on Saturday.

The United States and Pakistan are locked in difficult negotiations to re-open overland supply routes to NATO forces in Afghanistan, with no signs of a breakthrough.

Islamabad blocked the routes last November to protest the death of 24 Pakistani soldiers by cross-border friendly fire from NATO aircraft. The supply lines through Pakistan are considered vital to the planned withdrawal of most foreign combat troops from Afghanistan before the end of 2014.

The CIA drone campaign fuels anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan and is counterproductive because of collateral damage, Pakistani officials say. But U.S. officials say such strikes are highly effective against militants.

The European Union is blocking the release of €30 million ($37 million) to a United Nations-run fund that finances Afghanistan's police force amid an investigation into alleged mismanagement and corruption at the U.N. program, Western officials in Kabul said.

The EU had previously put the funds on hold pending a determination that the Afghan police force had made certain improvements, the officials said.

European leaders, adding a new condition, decided to keep the funds frozen until they are also satisfied that the U.N. has addressed allegations, reported by The Wall Street Journal on May 10, that officials running the program haven't ensured proper oversight.

"We and all the other donors have a very strong interest in making sure it gets cleaned up and people feel as though they're confident that you put your money in there and it's not going to be stolen," said a Western official.

India's anti-corruption crusaders tried to breathe new life into their sagging movement Sunday when two of the harshest critics of the government came together for the first time to fast and protest new graft allegations.

But old rifts reopened when the demonstration was marred by a disagreement onstage, raising doubts about the movement's ability to mount a formidable challenge to India's corruption-tainted government.

The two activists who led separate protests during last year's anti-corruption movement -- popular yoga guru Baba Ramdev and 74-year-old social worker Anna Hazare -- came together Sunday to project a unified front against rising incidents of big-ticket corruption in the government. Their joint appearance was aimed at doubling the strike against the besieged national government, whose credibility appeared to hit rock bottom last week with slowing economic growth, rising prices and a fresh set of graft allegations involving coal mining contracts.

In the latest corruption scandal, revealed by an independent government audit, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's team is accused of giving away coal mining contracts to companies instead of auctioning them through a competitive bidding process. According to the report, the failure to auction the national resource cost the Indian exchequer about $33 billion, more than the alleged losses from the telecommunications scandal last year.

The home furnishing giant Ikea, founded in Sweden in 1943, is facing heavy criticism for the logging and clear-cutting of old-growth forests in the north of Russian Karelia by its wholly owned subsidiary Swedwood.

According to leading environmental organisations, such logging is destroying ancient and unique forests that have a high conservation value.

Wood is by far the primary raw material in Ikea's products. Roughly 60 percent of the products stocked in the multinational's 300 department stores around the world contain wood in any form.

For years, the company has used the "We Love Wood" slogan to promote the fact that Ikea only uses wood obtained in an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable way.

But recent reports and studies prove that this proclamation is a myth.

An investigative report released last month by Swedish public service television found that Swedwood cuts down about 1,400 acres of forest a year.

"We have a (limited) amount of old-growth forest in the north of Russian Karelia with high conservation value. Ikea says they don't operate in old-growth forests but it is not true," Olga Ilina, head of the forest department of the NGO SPOK, the Karelia Regional Nature Conservancy, told IPS.

Now only about 10 percent of the ancient old-growth forests remain in Karelia, according to Ilina.

Why is skepticism about climate change so persistent?

The answer might seem to be obvious: ignorance! People just don't understand the science. Their education has not equipped them to discern good evidence from bad, or reason properly to valid conclusions. The media is not giving them the facts. They need more, better information and improved reasoning skills.

However intuitively plausible this answer might be, it suffers from one important flaw: It is wrong. Better educated people are not less likely to be skeptics. Greater scientific literacy and reasoning ability do not incline people toward climate realism. Where skepticism exists, additional information and arguments only serve to reinforce it.

This has been evident for some time, but a fascinating new study in Nature backs it up with numbers. Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues tested the question directly: Is it true that greater numeracy and scientific literacy reduce polarization about climate science?

Beginning in late August through early October and continuing for the next several years during the Atlantic hurricane season, NASA will dispatch two unmanned aircraft equipped with specialized instruments high above tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean basin. These "severe storm sentinels" will investigate the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensity change. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will join several other NASA centers and numerous federal and university partners in the HS3 mission.

The autonomously-flown NASA Global Hawk aircraft are well-suited for hurricane investigations. They can over-fly hurricanes at altitudes greater than 18,300 meters (60,000 feet), and fly up to 28 hours at a time -- something piloted aircraft would find nearly impossible to do. Global Hawks were used in the agency's 2010 Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) hurricane mission and the Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac) environmental science mission. The Global Hawks will deploy from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and are based at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

"Hurricane intensity can be very hard to predict because of an insufficient understanding of how clouds and wind patterns within a storm interact with the storm's environment," said Scott Braun, HS3 mission principal investigator and research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "HS3 seeks to improve our understanding of these processes by taking advantage of the surveillance capabilities of the Global Hawk along with measurements from a suite of advanced instruments.

The hunt for other intelligent civilisations has a new technique in its arsenal, but its first use has turned up no signs of alien broadcasts.

Australian astronomers used "very long baseline interferometry" to examine Gliese 581, a star known to host planets in its "habitable zone".

The hunt for aliens is fundamentally a vast numbers game, so the team's result should come as no surprise.

Their report, posted online, will be published in the Astronomical Journal.

In recent years, interest in such targeted searches has begun to surge as the hunt for planets outside the Solar System continues to find them at every turn.

Astronomers currently estimate that every star in the night sky hosts, on average, 1.6 planets - implying that there are billions of planets out there yet to be confirmed.

But a number of stars have already been identified as playing host to rocky planets at a distance not too hot and not too cold for liquid water - the first proxy for amenability to life.

Scientists will know by the end of this year whether the so-called God Particle exists and the Large Hadron Collider will be switched off, according to Rolf Heuer, the director of CERN.

The search to find the Higgs Boson is one of the greatest mysteries in science.

The theory is that the particle is responsible for creating the universe as we know it.

If it can be shown to exist, it will mean that man now fully understands the visible universe and can look further back into the origins of the Big Bang and unknown `dark energy'.

CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, are using the Large Hadron Collider, a 17 mile underground tunnel, to accelerate particles so they crash into one another and create the conditions where the Higgs Boson exists.

Even as insect infestations and other factors accompanying warming have led to the "browning" of some stretches of boreal forest between temperate regions and the Arctic tundra, the tundra appears to be greening in a big way, various studies have shown. The newest such work, focused on scrubby windswept regions along Russia's northwest Arctic coast, has found a particularly noteworthy shift is under way.

In this part of the Arctic, which could be a bellwether for changes to come elsewhere with greenhouse-driven warming, what might be called pop-up forests are forming. Low tundra shrubs, many of which are willow and alder species, have rapidly grown into small trees over the last 50 years, according to the study, led by scientists from Oxford University and the Arctic Center of the University of Lapland. The researchers foresee a substantial additional local warming influence from this change in landscapes, with the darker foliage absorbing sunlight that would otherwise be reflected back to space. But the fast-motion shift to forests will likely absorb carbon dioxide, as well.

A particularly interesting aspect of this work, to my eye, is how it reveals the potential for fast-motion responses of ecosystems to environmental change in the far north. In work I covered in 2007, botanists found that Arctic plant species were extremely responsive to fairly rapid climate shifts in the past.

The new study, published Sunday in Nature Climate Change, is significant in two ways. It challenges a longstanding model of the Arctic ecological response to global warming. The old notion was that forests in boreal regions ringing the treeless tundra would slowly advance north.

Being born prematurely is linked to an increased risk of a range of mental health problems much later in life, according to researchers.

Bipolar disorder, depression and psychosis were all more likely, the study in The Archives of General Psychiatry suggested.

The overall risk remained very low, but was higher in premature babies.

Experts cautioned there have since been significant advances in caring for premature babies.

Full-term pregnancies last for around 40 weeks, but one in 13 babies are born prematurely, before 36 weeks. Heightened risk

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden analysed data from 1.3m people born in Sweden between 1973 and 1985.

They found 10,523 people were admitted to hospital with a psychiatric disorders, 580 of those had been born prematurely.

The problem with living through a revolution is that you've no idea how things will turn out. So it is with the revolutionary transformation of our communications environment driven by the internet and mobile phone technology. Strangely, our problem is not that we are short of data about what's going on; on the contrary we are awash with the stuff. This is what led Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace, to describe our current mental state as one of "informed bewilderment": we have lots of information, but not much of a clue about what it means.

For many years, the most assiduous provider of data about the ongoing revolution has been Mary Meeker, an industry analyst who once worked for Morgan Stanley, the investment bank that acted as lead underwriter for the Netscape IPO in August 1995 (and thereby triggered the first internet boom). She began making an annual conference presentation, "The Internet Report", which acquired legendary status in the industry because it distilled from the froth some elements of reality.

Ms Meeker is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firms, but she has not abandoned her old habits. Last week she presented her latest annual report - now labelled "Internet Trends" - at the Wall Street Journal`s All Things Digital conference in California.

It's a whopping 112-slide presentation, which bears serious contemplation. Buried within it are some startling numbers. For example, Meeker estimates that there are now 2.3 billion internet users worldwide, which is nearly a third of the world's population and that number is growing at 8% per year. But what's more startling is there are now 1.1 billion 3G mobile subscribers and that they are increasing at 37% per year.

What's significant about that? Two things: first it means that already a significant proportion of the world's population is accessing the internet via a mobile phone rather than via a fixed-line connection. Second, smartphones currently account for less than a fifth of all the mobile phones in the world - which means that the market for internet-enabled phones has a lot of room for further growth. So stand by for a continued increase in the number of smartphones used across the world.

Charlie Miller prepared his cyberattack in a bedroom office at his Midwestern suburban home.

Brilliant and boyish-looking, Miller has a PhD in math from the University of Notre Dame and spent five years at the National Security Agency, where he secretly hacked into foreign computer systems for the U.S. government. Now, he was turning his attention to the Apple iPhone.

At just 5 ounces and 4 1/2 inches long, the iPhone is an elegant computing powerhouse. Its microscopic transistors and millions of lines of code enable owners to make calls, send e-mail, take photos, listen to music, play games and conduct business, almost simultaneously. Nearly 200 million iPhones have been sold around the world.

The idea of a former cyberwarrior using his talents to hack a wildly popular consumer device might seem like a lark. But his campaign, aimed at winning a little-known hacker contest last year, points to a paradox of our digital age. The same code that unleashed a communications revolution has also created profound vulnerabilities for societies that depend on code for national security and economic survival.

Miller's iPhone offensive showed how anything connected to networks these days can be a target.

He began by connecting his computer to another laptop holding the same software used by the iPhone. Then he typed a command to launch a program that randomly changed data in a file being processed by the software.

The alteration might be as mundane as inserting 58 for F0 in a string of data such as "0F 00 04 F0." His plan was to constantly launch such random changes, cause the software to crash, then figure out why the substitutions triggered a problem. A software flaw could open a door and let him inside.

Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God's guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.

Gallup has asked Americans to choose among these three explanations for the origin and development of human beings 11 times since 1982. Although the percentages choosing each view have varied from survey to survey, the 46% who today choose the creationist explanation is virtually the same as the 45% average over that period -- and very similar to the 44% who chose that explanation in 1982. The 32% who choose the "theistic evolution" view that humans evolved under God's guidance is slightly below the 30-year average of 37%, while the 15% choosing the secular evolution view is slightly higher (12%).

Chemin Vert | G̶i̶a̶c̶o̶m̶o̶ ̶M̶i̶c̶e̶l̶i̶

Chemin Vert is an immersive video of a trip on the road at supersonic speed spanning across five continents and four seasons. The title "Chemin Vert" refers to its soundtrack from musician A Ghost Train. The video exists in three forms: immersive at normal resolution, high resolution and lastly a "regular" video you can see on vimeo.

 

The bone shattering speed is in most of the video over 1500 km/h (that's close to 1000 mph, you imperialists). The whole concept is the visualization of one of my childhood fantasies, riding a rocket launched at full speed just above the ground of a long road.

Lembit Opik had to be stretchered out of a wrestling ring by paramedics on Saturday after a bruising encounter with a professional fighter.

The former Lib Dem MP was taking part in the wrestling show in Welshpool, Powys, but did not last long after being confronted by his old nemesis Kade Callous.

Wearing a red t-shirt and black trousers, Opik was lifted into the ring by Callous who then slammed the flailing former politician onto his knee.