The fundamental problem of the euro is widely seen as one of "herding cats" - the impossibility of coordinating complex policies among 17 discordant nations, each with different interests, traditions and ideas. This is not true. The dividing line in Europe is much simpler. On one side are France, Italy, Spain and every other significant country, backed by the U.S., Britain, the IMF, the European Commission and the leadership of the European Central Bank, proposing serious and complex technical solutions based on genuine fiscal federation, which means the sharing of national debts. On the other side is Germany, occasionally supported by Finland, Austria and Slovakia, always saying Nein!

Every new veto threat from Angela Merkel increases Germany's embarrassing isolation, as Joschka Fischer, its former foreign minister, recently warned: "Germany destroyed itself - and the European order - twice in the 20th century. It would be tragic and ironic if a restored Germany ... brought about the ruin of the European order a third time." But if Germany's role as spoiler is increasingly recognized, why don't the other countries do what this column suggested last week: Tell Merkel to put up or shut up - either abide by majority decisions or leave the euro?

(Reuters) - Angela Merkel was portrayed across Europe as the big loser of a euro zone showdown in Brussels after the German chancellor was forced to accept the crisis-fighting measures championed by countries struggling with their debts.

Newspapers in Spain, Italy and France on Saturday toasted the triumph of their leaders - Mario Monti, Mariano Rajoy and Francois Hollande - in pushing Merkel into a U-turn that would long have been unthinkable.

Even German newspapers said Merkel had been made to accept demands for the euro zone rescue fund to be able to inject aid directly into stricken banks from next year and intervene on bond markets to support troubled member states.

"There's no doubt about it - the chancellor was blindsided at the euro summit," wrote influential columnist Nikolaus Blome of Bild, a daily with 12 million readers.

(Reuters) - A European Union police mission in Bosnia ended on Saturday after a decade of training local police forces and overseeing law enforcement agencies that were rebuilt almost from scratch after the 1992-95 war.

The pullout of some 130 European Union Police Mission (EUPM) officials came as the small Balkan country is hoping to apply for EU membership this year.

Bosnia, which is lagging behind its west Balkan neighbours in the queue for EU membership, will have to show Brussels that its law enforcement officials are now capable of fighting widespread corruption and organised crime.

The EUPM, the first police mission set up by the EU, was deployed in 2003 and it initially comprised some 500 police officials in charge of training local police and monitoring law enforcement agencies. Over the years, the mission has been reduced to about 130 officials.

BRUSSELS - The final deadlock blocking a unified EU patent court was removed on Friday (29 June) when EU leaders agreed to place the seat in Paris.

"After thirty-years of negotiations we now have an agreement on the European patent," Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt told reporters in Brussels.

Leaders agreed to divide the court between London, Paris and Munich - breaking an eight-month impasse on the location issue.

The compromise hinged on UK Prime Minister David Cameron's insistence on excluding references to the European Court of Justice - a demand that his colleagues eventually agreed to.

Each city will be responsible for a specific set of topics with the main seat based in Paris.

From his ancient schloss, dramatically perched on a clifftop high above his tiny capital city Vaduz, the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein rules his subjects as one of Europe's last truly powerful monarchs.

On Sunday he will find out if that is to end, when the result of a hard-fought referendum is announced on whether to cut his power.

The prince himself has warned that he might withdraw from his official duties if the vote goes against him - a threat, made in parliament, which many understood to mean that he and his family would pack up and leave for exile, with their wealth of around £3 billion.

(Reuters) - Oil surged on Friday in heavy trading to the fourth biggest daily gain on record, as a deal by European leaders to shore up euro zone banks triggered frantic short-covering by funds that had been riding crude's price collapse over the last quarter.

Despite the sharp gains, both international benchmark Brent and U.S. oil futures posted their biggest quarterly declines since the fourth quarter of 2008 due to weak demand, ample supply and economic worries.

(...) Brent crude oil futures rose more than $6 a barrel to near $98

(Reuters) - The British government ordered an independent review into the workings of key lending rates between banks, after Barclays was found guilty of rigging them, and summoned the bank's boss to answer questions about the scandal.

U.S. and British authorities fined Barclays $450 million for manipulating the London Interbank Offer Rate (Libor), the interest rate on loans that banks make to each other. Barclays was the first to settle in an investigation that is expected to name others and reaches across Europe, Japan and North America.

The scandal has fuelled public outrage at the culture and practices of the banking industry and prompted calls from MPs across the political spectrum for an inquiry.

The British government plans a short, urgent review that would allow it to amend the Financial Services Bill currently going through parliament, a spokeswoman for the Prime Minister said. The review will examine Libor and the possibility of criminal sanctions.

Xi Jinping, the man in line to be China's next president, warned officials on a 2004 anti-graft conference call: "Rein in your spouses, children, relatives, friends and staff, and vow not to use power for personal gain."

As Xi climbed the Communist Party ranks, his extended family expanded their business interests to include minerals, real estate and mobile-phone equipment, according to public documents compiled by Bloomberg.

Those interests include investments in companies with total assets of $376 million; an 18 percent indirect stake in a rare- earths company with $1.73 billion in assets; and a $20.2 million holding in a publicly traded technology company. The figures don't account for liabilities and thus don't reflect the family's net worth.

No assets were traced to Xi, who turns 59 this month; his wife Peng Liyuan, 49, a famous People's Liberation Army singer; or their daughter, the documents show. There is no indication Xi intervened to advance his relatives' business transactions, or of any wrongdoing by Xi or his extended family.

While country A's import from country B should be equal to the export from country B to country A, statistics from different countries do not always perfectly confirm each other.  That is understandable, of course, as there could be differences in how things are counted. 

In the China case, the difference itself is not what interests us for the moment. 

We were digging into the data from the FRED, Eurostat, and China Customs.  Unsurprisingly, China's exports to the other two economies as per China's data are wildly different from those imports data reported by the US and the European Union.  The chart below, for instance, shows the difference between data from China and the US.  But that does not really concern us.

World powers have opened a crisis meeting on Syria with the West at odds with China and Russia over how to end 16 months of bloodshed and agree on a transition plan for the country.

Before the closed-door talks started on Saturday, Britain pointed to persistent opposition from Beijing and Moscow to a transition deal, while the United States signalled differences, even though Russia put up an upbeat front on the meeting.

The divisions delayed by two hours the opening of the gathering of the foreign ministers of the five permanent Security Council states as well as regional countries Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait and Iraq.

Before going into the main conference, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met her French and British counterparts, while the Russian and Chinese foreign ministers held separate talks.

Mohamed Morsi has been sworn in by Egypt's highest court as the country's first freely elected president, succeeding Hosni Mubarak who was toppled 16 months ago.

He took the oath on Saturday before the Supreme Constitutional Court in their courthouse near the Nile River built to resemble an ancient Egyptian temple.

Morsi became Egypt's fifth head of state since the overthrow of the monarchy some 60 years ago.

Morsi has vowed to reclaim presidential powers stripped from his office by the military council that took over after Mubarak's overthrow.

Kenya's security forces have stepped up their search on the border region with Somalia for the kidnappers who killed a Kenyan national and seized four foreign aid workers from the outskirts of Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp.

"The search is intensifying and more security forces have been sent to make every effort possible but, so far, no one has been recovered," Cyrus Oguna, the Kenyan army spokesman, told the AFP news agency on Saturday.

Despite fears the gunmen and their hostages would head for Somalia - some 100 km from Dadaab - Oguna said that he was still hopeful they remained inside Kenya.

(Reuters) - Russia has warned the United States that their relations would suffer "serious damage" if Washington adopts a bill to penalise Russian officials for human rights abuses, a state news agency reported on Saturday.

Itar-Tass said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stressed to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at talks on Friday in St Petersburg that "the possible endorsement in the United States of the 'Magnitsky law' will bring serious damage to relations between our countries."

The Russian Foreign Ministry had no comment on the report.

The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week passed the "Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act", named after a Russian anti-corruption lawyer whose death in 2009 while in pre-trial detention drew widespread condemnation.

The bill would deny visas and freeze the assets of Russians suspected of involvement in his death

WASHINGTON, Jun 29 2012 (IPS) - The administration of President Barack Obama is waiving tough financial sanctions that would have taken effect Thursday against both China and Singapore because it said the two countries had made "significant reductions" in their crude oil purchases from Iran.

The announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought to 20 the number of major importing countries that have been issued waivers from the sanctions in exchange for reducing their consumption of Iranian crude.

Among them are some of Tehran's most important customers, notably India, South Korea, Turkey, Japan, as well as China and a number of European Union (EU) countries.

Under its own separate sanctions regime, the EU has set Jul. 1 as the date by which all of its member must cease buying Iranian oil to increase the pressure on Tehran to curb or abandon its nuclear programme.

ועדה מיוחדת שמונתה על ידי מבקר המדינה, ותפקידה לבחון את הקשרים הבעייתים בין הון ושלטון בישראל, תגיש אחר הצהריים (ראשון) שורת המלצות דרמטיות לפיקוח על יחסי הון ושלטון. בין היתר, הוועדה ממליצה לאפשר פגישות בין בעלי הון לשרים או ח"כים רק בליווי גורמים מקצועיים ממשרדי הממשלה, ושהפגישות יתועדו

(HTML question: why can't I use the "dir" attribute in BLOCKQUOTE?)

BELGRADE, Jun 30 2012 (IPS) - Wildlife is being increasingly threatened around the Danube river, the "Amazon of Europe". The need for profit is taking over from the need to protect natural resources along the river.

Austria and Croatia are engaged in a major project to tame the Danube, to `correct' its meandering stream into a straight one to facilitate commercial shipping along the river to the Black Sea.

"Threats to wildlife are serious," head of the Worldwide Fund for Nature in Serbia Duska Dimovic told IPS. "Wildlife is trans-border; birds and fish go freely between Serbia and Croatia. Major works in one of the countries will influence all the immediate neighbours along the river."

This Amazon of Europe comes with 800,000 hectares of green belt along its banks and those of its tributaries, the Drava and Mura, in five countries - Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia.

This is a unique natural reserve of floodplain and wetland wildlife, home to a third of the region's plant species, half of fish and mammal species and 63 percent of bird species.

Wind power is poised to play a greater role in meeting Latin America's growing demand for electricity. Brazil, Chile and Mexico are expected to have added more than 3.7 GW of wind power from 2010 through the end of 2012, according to a study from IHS Emerging Energy Research (EER). Brazil comprises 70 percent of the Latin America wind market, but has tapped just a fraction of its wind power potential.

Demand for diversity of supply is expected to grow wind generation in Latin America, as is a decline in costs through local manufacturing. Renewable energy developments in North America are largely driven by climate change concerns, which are not of primary concern in Latin America. Instead, Latin American developers and governments are turning to wind energy because of the proven technology and its potential to grow local industrial activity.

While the economic crisis softened electricity demand in many portions of the world, Latin America was relatively unaffected by the recession. Instead, power demand has continued to rise at an astonishing rate. Brazil experienced a 4.5 percent power demand growth rate between 2003 to 2008, while Mexico saw a 3.8 percent growth rate from 2003 to 2007. Chile was also unaffected by the recession. Pablo Faúndez, general manager and co-founder of Ecoingerios, said that demand for electricity in Chile grew 6 percent per year during the economic crisis. "The recession was virtually inexistent here."

Despite what the coal industry would have you believe, the days of affordable coal-fired power are over. That's the conclusion of the Sierra Club's recent "Locked In," a report that analyzes the wide array of financial risks coal plant investments face.

We looked into these risks because while the environmental and human health impacts of coal plant investments are increasingly well-known, the financial impacts are not. What we found was eye-opening: Some of the world's largest coal plants are on the verge of bankruptcy, but an emerging Organization of Coal Exporting Countries (OCEC) is on the rise. As the title of our report suggests, avoiding locking ourselves into this risky environment is tremendously important because, social and environmental damages aside, new coal plants are just lousy investments.

Here are the biggest risks coal plant financiers face:

The French government on Friday slapped an immediate ban a pesticide made by Swiss giant Syngenta used in rapeseed cultivation that has been found to shorten bees' lifespan.

The agriculture ministry had signalled at the beginning of the month that it planned to ban Cruiser and Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll said Syngenta failed to provide satisfactory information to call into doubt findings on the pesticide.

France's National Food, Environment and Work Safety Agency (ANSES) issued a damning report on the pesticide after the journal Science published a French study demonstrating the harmful effects on bees of broad-spectrum insecticide thiamethoxam, found in Cruiser.

The leaking of environmentally damaging pollutants into our waters and atmosphere could soon be counteracted by a simple mathematical algorithm, according to researchers. Presenting their research in IOP Publishing's journal Inverse Problems, the researchers, from Universite de Technologie de Compiegne, believe their work could aid efforts to avoid environmental catastrophes by identifying the exact location where pollutants have been leaked as early as possible.

In the event of an oil spill across a region of the sea, researchers could collect samples of pollutants along certain sections of the body of water and then feed this information into their algorithm.

The algorithm is then able to determine two things: the rate at which the pollutant entered the body of water and where the pollutant came from.

This isn't the first time that mathematical algorithms have been used to solve this problem; however, this new approach is unique in that it could allow researchers to 'track' the source of a pollutant if it is moving or changing in strength.

(Reuters) - - Interred a quarter century ago in Pakistan, the remains of Afghan poet Ustad Khalilullah Khalili now lie in a forlorn corner of Kabul University, brought here to be reburied so that no one else can lay claim to the revered poet-philosopher.

He has no epitaph; only a few wilted bouquets lie at the grave of Afghanistan's most prominent 20th century poet. Three policemen guard the site.

But if President Hamid Karzai - who ordered the remains be disinterred from a grave in the Pakistani city of Peshawar last month - has his way, the reburial will become an assertion of Afghan culture over encroachment by Pakistan and Iran.

"We brought him back from Pakistan because he was our poet and scholar," said Mohammad Hussain Yamin, head of the Persian and Dari department at Kabul University.

"We don't want someone in future to say that he belonged to Pakistan just because he lived the final years of his life there."

PATRICK FEASTER, SOUND HISTORIAN, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, SAYING: "I've been taking images of sound recordings taken on paper in ink and converting them back into sound just as though they were playable disks." Feaster says it's a daunting task. He resurrected the sound file by scanning the image and de-coding it. Then he re-linked and formatted the file using a specialized computer programme. Listening to the recording for the first time, Feaster says he couldn't believe his ears.

(video)

Bits of the oldest known pottery, some 2,000 years older than previously found pieces, have been uncovered in China, researchers said in the US journal Science on Thursday.

The fragments were believed to belong to a community of roving hunter-gatherers some 20,000 years ago and apparent scorch marks indicate they may have been used in cooking.

However, their early dating, determined by a recent radiocarbon analysis of the nearby sediment, indicates that the pottery came long before the advent of agriculture, perhaps by as many as 10,000 years.

And the pieces are older than other similar finds in hunter-gatherer contexts in China, Japan, and the Russian Far East, said the study.

The pottery was found in the Xianrendong Cave in northern Jiangxi Province, China, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of the Yangtze River.

An American research student was in a critical condition in a South African hospital on Friday after he was dragged by chimpanzees into an enclosure at a primate sanctuary and attacked.

The mauled body of the student, identified in local media as Andrew Oberle, was retrieved from the enclosure by paramedics under armed guard at the Jane Goodall Institute Chimp Eden near the eastern town of Nelspruit.

"When we found him, he was in a foetal position underneath a lapa (a roofed, open-walled structure) with massive injuries, lacerations, abrasions, partial amputation from his head to toe," said Lloyd Krause, spokesman for the ER24 emergency service.

"He lost an ear, he lost a number of fingers and toes, he's got very deep wounds, he's got total removal of skin and muscle off his one leg and his one arm, fractures all over the place."

The man was with a group of tourists when the attack took place on Thursday. The Beeld newspaper said he had been at the sanctuary for two weeks and was giving a lecture to the group.

A hardline religious group occupying northern Mali has destroyed 15th-century mausoleums of Sufi Muslim saints in Timbuktu and have threatened to demolish the remaining 13 UNESCO world heritage sites in the fabled city, witnesses have said.

The attack by Ansar Dine group on Friday came just four days after UNESCO placed Timbuktu on its list of heritage sites in danger after the seizure of its northern two-thirds in April by rebels.

"They have already completely destroyed the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmoud (Ben Amar) and two others. They said they would continue all day and destroy all 16," Yeya Tandina, a local Malian journalist, said by telephone.

"They are armed and have surrounded the sites with pick-up trucks. The population is just looking on helplessly," he said, adding that the Islamists were currently taking pick-axes to the mausoleum of Sidi El Mokhtar, another cherished local saint.

"It looks as if it is a direct reaction to the UNESCO decision," Timbuktu deputy Sandy Haidara said by telephone, confirming the attacks.

The Islamist Ansar Dine group backs strict sharia, Islamic law, and considers the shrines of the local Sufi version of Islam idolatrous.

A group of about 150 Mormons quit their church in a mass resignation ceremony in Salt Lake City on Saturday in a rare display of defiance ending decades of disagreement for some over issues ranging from polygamy to gay marriage.

...

"This feels awesome," said Alison Lucas, from West Jordan, Utah, who took part in the rally amid soaring temperatures. "I don't know if I would have had the courage except in a group."

The Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is known for its culture of obedience, and the mass ceremony was a seldom-seen act of collective revolt.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Cecilia Attias, Sarkozy's ex-wife, both slammed Hollande's partner Valerie Trierweiler for her feisty attitude in the Elysee Palace.

"I didn't complain when there was an article in the press I didn't like," says Bruni alluding to Trierweiler in an interview with the weekly VSD. France's unofficial First Lady has often criticised articles about herself in the press. 

"And I only had two advisors," she adds. Trierweiler reportedly has four to six advisors at the Elysee Palace.

Laurent Blanc is leaving as France coach after deciding against renewing his two-year contract.

A brief statement on Saturday by the French Football Federation says that Blanc contacted the body's president, Noel Le Graet, on Saturday with his decision. The FFF said there would be no comment before a news conference on Tuesday.

The favorite to replace Blanc is former France captain Didier Deschamps, who is set to leave as Marseille manager after a difficult last season.

The Tunisian party Al-Majd wants to deport far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen who is on holiday in the seaside resort of Hammamet. 

"Mr Le Pen, either you like Tunisians or you leave them," writes the Al-Majd party in a press release on Tuesday. It calls for a "simple and straightforward" deportation of Le Pen.