Former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko must wait another five weeks for her appeal against her imprisonment to be heard. The country's high court postponed her hearing in anticipation of medical exam results.

The Ukrainian high court on Thursday postponed the appeal of imprisoned former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko for a third time, as it awaits the results of a medical examination to determine whether she can attend her hearing.

Tymoshenko's appeal hearing was pushed back five weeks to August 16. The former prime minister is challenging her October 2011 conviction of abuse of power. She was sentenced to seven years in prison and has threatened to take her case before the European Court of Human Rights.

Former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic has been taken to a hospital in the Netherlands after complaining of feeling unwell during his trial at The Hague. The 70-year-old has been in poor health.

The former leader of the Bosnian Serb army was rushed to the hospital on Thursday after asking the judge for a break and putting his head in his hands.

"Mladic was feeling unwell and he was taken to hospital as a precautionary measure," a spokeswoman for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Nerma Jelacic, told the AFP news agency.

European officials say they have received reassurance that Romania's government will comply with all EU requirements. The bloc raised the alarm over the impeachment of the country's president.

A brewing dispute between the European Union and Romania may be about to be defused after the European Commission says it has received assurances that Romania's government would implement a number of changes in light of recent political developments in the country.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement that Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta had agreed during a meeting in Brussels on Thursday to provide those assurances "urgently" in writing.

BRUSSELS - The UK government has announced it will prepare a wide-ranging study of the EU so that any future statements about 'meddlesome' Brussels may be backed up by hard evidence.

5.09pm: Scuffles have broken out in Belfast between nationalist residents and hundreds of police in riot gear following the passing of a controversial march by Ulster loyalists this afternoon.

Up to five police Land Rovers, at least three water cannon, a spotter plane and a helicopter have been deployed over the Ardoyne shops in the north of the city.

The massive security operation was put in place to ensure that three Orange lodges were able to march up the Crumlin Road, past the Catholic district.

When euro-zone finance ministers--together with representatives from the European Commission and the European Central Bank--readied Spain's bailout deal Monday night, there was much discussion over whether senior bond holders also should suffer losses when banks need official help to rebuild their capital, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

...

Instead, the memorandum of understanding, as the bailout agreement is formally known, stresses that any plan to shut down banks must be "compatible with the goals of maintaining financial stability," using only "subordinated liability exercises"--both terms are jargon for sparing senior bank-bond holders even during liquidation. In the end, it seems, fears about injecting yet more uncertainty into European bank funding markets won out over the desire to limit taxpayer risk, at least for now.

...

But in practice, that hasn't happened in the euro zone during this crisis. Even in banks the commission says aren't viable--Ireland's Anglo Irish and Germany's West LB for instance--senior bond holders haveso far been spared.

El presidente del Gobierno, Mariano Rajoy, prendió ayer una nueva mecha al anunciar el mayor hachazo al Estado del Bienestar de la historia de la democracia. En consecuencia, hoy se han sucedido protestas espontánteas repartidas por todo el país, con especial incidencia en Madrid y Barcelona, ciudades en las que han salido a la calle miles de trabajadores.

...

"Los policías somos del pueblo"

Por otro lado, la plaza Sant Jaume de Barcelona también ha sido escenario de movilizaciones, esta vez de cerca de un millar de mossos d'esquadra han esgrimido el eslogan "Los policías somos del pueblo y no queremos servir a un sistema corrupto" frente al Palau de la Generalitat, en protesta por los recortes del gobierno catalán. Esta convocatoria se ha añadido a la que esta mañana han protagonizado cientos de funcionarios frente a la Delegación del Gobierno en Catalunya.

[Spain's] Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, lit a new fuse yesterday when he announced the biggest axing of the welfare state in the history of [Spain's] democracy. As a consequence, there were spontaneous demonstrations all over the country today, especially un Madrid and Barcelona, cities where thousands of workers have gone on the street.

...

"We police are of the people"

On the other hand, Sant Jaume square in Barcelona was also the scene of mobilizations, this time nearly a thousand mossos d'esquadra [Catalan regional police] brandished the slogan "We police are of the people and don't want to serve a corrupt system" in front of the [Regional Government site] Palau de la Generalitat, protesting the cuts by the catalan government. This appeal adds to the one by hundreds of functionnaries in front of the Government Delegation in Catalonia.

Rating agency expects a further sharp increase in funding costs or even a loss of market access; Moody's is also concerned about political risks, and contagion from other eurozone economies; Silvio Berlusconi will be his party's candidate for the job of prime minister at the next election; the latest polls show him in the lead, ahead of Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement, with the Democrats close behind in third place; Confidustria expects a 2.4% fall in GDP this year, worse than the official estimates; Novagalicia Bank has become the latest Caja to request a large capital injection; the bank has previous apologised to its customers over a number of scandals, including the sale of toxic products;De Guindos says that Spain wants to follow Germany's example in reforming its labour market and social security system; Spain takes further steps to centralise fiscal policy through a special fund to help, and control, the autonomous regions; Klaas Knot says there is no "religious belief" that 0.75% constitutes a rate floor for the ECB; the cut in the ECB's deposit rate triggered a large fall in the amounts held in the deposit facility, but the money was merely diverted to banks' current accounts at the ECB; the SPD said it will support Merkel once again over the Spanish banking rescue; a poll shows that a majority of the young people in Germany believe the euro will not succeed; industrial production rebounds strongly in May, but not in France and the Netherlands; Merrill Lynch finds that Ireland and Italy have most to gain from leaving the eurozone, and Germany the most to lose; the Greek finance minister is seeking new savings ahead of the return of the Troika to be able to avoid another pay cut; Les Echos gives ten reasons why the euro might come to an end this summer; Martin Lueck at UBS, meanwhile, argues the decision of the German constitutional court is closer than you might think.

German carmaker Opel has announced the resignation of its chief executive, Karl-Friedrich Stracke. He has also stepped down from his position as president of Opel's parent company, General Motors Europe.

German automaker Opel on Thursday said its CEO, Karl-Friedrich Stracke, had stepped down from the position which he had held from April 2011. He also resigned as chairman of Opel's parent company, General Motors Europe, the company announced in a statement. The 56-year-old Stracke had been appointed to this position only a few months ago.

GM Vice-Chairman Steve Girsky was to take over Stracke's former duties on an interim basis, as the carmaker started looking for a permanent replacement.

French automobile conglomerate PSA Peugeot Citroen has said it will axe 8,000 jobs in response to increasing sales problems in crisis-stricken Europe. The announcement triggered a storm of protest among trade unions.

French auto group PSA Peugeot Citroen on Thursday announced it would cut 8,000 jobs to adapt to a sharp downturn in the European market.

A company statement said production at its Aulney site near Paris would be halted, meaning the loss of 3,000 jobs. An additional 1,400 jobs would be axed at the plant in Rennes, with the rest of the job cull to be enforced through cuts across the corporate structure.

The eurozone's permanent rescue fund (ESM) and the fiscal pact for EU budget discipline are under review by Germany's highest court. Christoph Degenhart, a constitutional lawyer and one of the plaintiffs, takes stock.

LUXEMBOURG - Some five kilometers away from the centre of Luxembourg, in a nondescript office building, lies what is known as the eurozone bailout fund.

BRUSSELS - Spain has announced a drastic series of spending cuts and tax increases in the face of an ultimatum by the EU, as the country struggles to reduce its deficit while negotiating a bailout for its banks.

"These are not pleasant measures but they are necessary," Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told parliament referring to a programme designed to bring in €65 billon in savings by the end of 2014.

"We have very little room to choose. I pledged to cut taxes and now I'm raising them. But the circumstances have changed and I have to adapt to them," he addded, according to Bloomberg.

AFP - The United States on Wednesday gave the green light to companies to invest in Myanmar including in oil and gas, in its broadest and most controversial easing yet of sanctions on the former pariah.

Hours after the arrival in Myanmar of the first US ambassador in two decades, President Barack Obama announced the latest gesture in recognition of reforms in a nation dominated by the military since 1962.

"Today, the United States is easing restrictions to allow US companies to responsibly do business in Burma," Obama said in a statement, referring to Myanmar by its former name.

Growth will slow from 4.3% in 2011, but the rate of expansion around 3% expected this year will be much higher than in most European countries.

But construction firms in the country are dropping like flies and Poland's banking sector, which lent to them, will feel the heat. Builder PBG SA and its units in June filed for bankruptcy protection, saying they were insolvent due to capital-intensive road construction contracts, continued exposure to potential claims related to the construction of Poland's National Stadium in Warsaw and a delay in negotiations with banks. Several other companies have also sought bankruptcy protection.

The banking sector's exposure to the construction industry likely reduced banks' profits in the first half of this year, said Andrzej Jakubiak, head of the Polish financial markets regulator.

OK so that is part of the EMU's problem--and note it is not a simple current account story. It is an MMT story about the constraints imposed due to the setup of the EMU, which separated fiscal policy from the currency. MMT has written about this problem since the beginning. Again, there are many quotes in my new piece at NEP; let me just repeat three examples, all from the earliest years of the Euro experiment.

...

Let me borrow, again from my NEP piece. In order to judge how correct MMT was in its predictions, of course, we have to understand what went wrong in Euroland. Our argument was that separating fiscal policy from currency sovereignty would raise questions of solvency that would constrain the ability of fiscal policy to expand when necessary. That was the basis of all these early MMT arguments. But there was an additional angle: how would the crisis begin? Would it be a recession that no individual government could resolve by fiscal stimulus? Would it be chronic current account deficits of some member states (to the benefit of Mercantilists like Germany or the Netherlands)? Or would it be a financial crisis? Well, how about a Trifecta: all three at once?

...

However, it is much more than a current account problem, as Rob Parenteau has shown. Any EMU nation can be blown up by its banks even while running a current account surplus. This is the "financialization" or "Money Manager Capitalism" story that comes from Hyman Minsky--probably well over 90% of cross-border finance has nothing to do with the current account, and it was that part of finance that blew up countries like Ireland and Spain. (We'll turn to that because it is related to the issue.)

A crashed fuel tanker has blown up in Nigeria, killing nearly 100 people. The victims literally died for oil as they were scooping up the "black gold" spilling out of the vehicle before it exploded.

At least 95 people were killed near the Nigerian oil center Port Harcourt on Thursday after an overturned oil tanker exploded.

Hundreds of impoverished bypassers had rushed towards the tanker to scoop up fuel using pans after the tanker tipped over near Port Harcourt, located more than 600 kilometers (400 miles) south east of Lagos. When the tanker burst into flames, scores of people were buzzing around the vehicle. It is not yet clear what ignited the explosion.

BRUSSELS - EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton believes Beijing is ready to step up co-operation after a meeting with her Chinese counterpart.

Her assessment comes after Dai Bingguo, a top-level Chinese foreign policy official, earlier this week invited her on a 20-minute-long boat trip on a lake in the Chinese capital.

Dai rarely meets with foreign delegates directly, preferring instead to make brief appearances in the margins of summits, a European diplomat told EUobserver.

AP - Every country competing at the London Games will include female athletes for the first time in Olympic history after Saudi Arabia agreed Thursday to send two women to compete in judo and track and field.

The move by the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom to break with its practice of fielding male-only teams followed earlier decisions by Qatar and Brunei to send women athletes to the Olympics for the first time.

"With Saudi Arabian female athletes now joining their fellow female competitors from Qatar and Brunei, it means that by London 2012 every national Olympic committee will have sent women to the Olympic Games," IOC President Jacques Rogge said.

AFP - Russia rejects as unacceptable the text of a Western-backed UN Security Council resolution on Syria and will use its veto if the draft is brought to a vote later Thursday, a deputy foreign minister said.

"If they decide this (a vote on Thursday) - knowing that for us the text is unacceptable - then we will not allow it to pass," Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov told the Interfax news agency.

Gatilov added he did not expect there to be a vote as soon as Thursday: "The process of consultations is only just starting and should take some time," he said.

REUTERS - Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and their Great Lakes region neighbours have agreed a plan to "eradicate" armed groups in eastern Congo, the Congolese and Rwandan delegations said on Thursday.

The document was signed in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa by foreign ministers of nearly a dozen regional states, who met on the sidelines of an African Union summit.

They agreed to tackle a rebellion in Congo's North Kivu province, where the latest fighting began in April, displacing more than 100,000 civilians according to the U.N. and raising tension between Congo and Rwanda.

REUTERS - Military intervention by foreign powers in Mali is "probable," France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Thursday, to end unrest in the West African nation where al-Qaeda-linked militants control significant territory.

"At one moment or another there will probably be the use of force," Fabius said, noting that intervention would be African-led but supported by international forces.

At least nine people have been killed in an avalanche that struck a mountain range in France on Thursday. Several others were being treated in local hospitals.

At least nine climbers were killed in an avalanche that hit a mountain in the French Alps on Thursday.

A spokesperson for Haute-Savoie prefecture said the victims included three Germans, two Spaniards, one Swiss and three Britons, according to the DPA news agency.

A European court has ruled that an existing EU guideline on the marketing of seeds cannot prevent independent farmers from growing trading in old, officially non-approved seeds. It's a defeat for big agricultural firms.

The European Court of Justice on Thursday ruled that farmers on the continent were allowed to both produce and market seeds even from plant varieties which were not officially registered and approved.

The Luxembourg-based judges found that the production and sale of such seeds could not be prohibited on the basis of an existing EU guideline on seed registering. French industrial seed producer Graines Baumax had taken the domestic farmers' network Kokopelli to court, because it considered as illegal the latter's marketing of 461 seeds which were not officially catalogued.

By 2020 - if the EU Commission gets its way - new cars may only emit 95 grams of CO². Heavy vehicles will manage this through a weight factor. But, manufacturers and environmentalists disagree over this exception.

The European Commission plans to force automakers to continue lowering carbon emission levels. Until 2015, the maximum value for the average fleet is 130 grams per kilometer. By 2020, new cars would only be allowed to emit 95 grams., if proposals are agreed on.

It lacks the glitz or glamour of the Olympics but the UK won a race that really does matter on Thursday, taking the gold in energy efficiency.

A report launched in Washington by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy on Thursday ranked the UK first among the world's 12 largest economies for reducing pollution in industry, transport, and buildings.

Medal power house America was humbled, dragged down to ninth place because of its long-running love affair with gas-guzzling cars.

The global battle for natural resources - from food and water to energy and precious metals - is only beginning, and will intensify to proportions that could mean enormous upheavals for every country, leading academics and business figures told a conference in Oxford on Thursday.

Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, who convened the two-day Resource 2012 conference, told the Guardian: "We are nowhere near realising the full impact of this yet. We have seen the first indications - rising food prices, pressure on water supplies, a land grab by some countries for mining rights and fertile agricultural land, and rising prices for energy and for key resources [such as] metals. But we need to do far more to deal with these problems before they become even more acute, and we are not doing enough yet."

Despite the gloomy failures of Rio+20 and David Cameron's empty "greenest government ever" promise, it's good that some parts of the UK can still come up with an enlightened approach.

At the moment, it's Wales that provides a bright light in these gloomy times. In Cardiff, the devolved administration, led by first minister, Carwyn Jones, is clearly still committed to the idea of sustainable government.

The Welsh assembly is taking a very different approach to the UK coalition. It's legislating to put sustainable development at the heart of all government and public sector decisions, as well as continuing the legacy of the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), that was foolishly scrapped by Westminster.

The British government has put a further 3,500 military personnel on standby for the 2012 Olympics, bringing the total to around 17,000. A security contractor's inability to deliver what it promised prompted the move.

Home Secretary Theresa May came under fire in parliament on Thursday after announcing that another 3,500 troops would be put on standby to make sure that security services were equipped for the Olympic Games. Roughly 13,500 military personnel had already been mobilized.

"I can confirm to the House that there remains no specific security threat to the Games and the threat level remains unchanged," May said. "And let me reiterate that there is no question of Olympic security being compromised."

The cover of a German satire magazine with an edited picture of Pope Benedict has triggered a broad discussion in Germany: What are the boundaries of satire?

The controversial front page shows Benedict XVI with a yellow stain covering his white cassock below the waist. The headline is "Hallelujah in the Vatican: The leak has been found." On the back of the issue, the pope is pictured from behind. This time with a brown stain. The text reads: "Another leak found."

For now at least, the distribution of the issue of the Titanic magazine has been stopped. A Hamburg court banned the magazine from publishing the images and from further distributing the issue. But the case has sparked a wide debate over the boundaries of satire.

The Rolling Stones are turning 50. In Germany, the band had fans from the very beginning on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In communist East Germany, though, the fans had a somewhat more difficult time.

"Wuschel didn't go to classical dance classes. He wasn't into any of that. Wuschel wasn't really into anything - except music. And even there he was only into music when it was by the Rolling Stones. And while the others went to dance classes, he tried to get hold of Exile on Main Steet, the 1972 double LP by the Rolling Stones."

Wuschel is one of the lead characters in the 1999 novel "The shorter end of Sonnenallee." Author Thomas Brussig describes the everyday life of a group of teenagers in East Germany in the late 1970s. The music from the West was only available on the black market and at horrendously expensive prices.

Nature's model of flight efficiency could help create new mini flying machines. As a first step, scientists have analyzed the flight characteristics of insects in a wind tunnel.

Aerodynamicists can only marvel at nature.

Insects, like locusts, need very little energy to fly great distances. Bumblebees can carry their own weight in pollen. And moths can hover over a particular spot - without moving - while collecting nectar.

Scientists say understanding such flight characteristics could help them and enginners build very small flying machines - even smaller than what is possible today.

What do a neurologist and politician have to say about art? For the first time, people from professions outside of the arts are giving visitors guided tours of dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel. DW went along for the ride.

Neo-Nazis are increasingly using social networks to recruit young people, spreading often skillfully disguised right-wing extremist propaganda via Facebook and YouTube.

Neo-Nazis have always used the Internet as a platform for propaganda. But for some time now, they have been turning to social networks like Facebook for a more direct approach.

"For right-wing extremists, interactive networks are a perfect recruitment platform because they are particularly popular with young people," said Stefan Glaser, head of the division on right-wing extremism at jugendschutz.net, a state-financed German group for the protection of minors.

The organization scours the Internet for criminal content and content which could be harmful to minors. Increasingly, they are finding it on social networks. "In many cases, content on Facebook and YouTube has completely replaced classic websites," the group said in its 2011 report.

BRUSSELS - Plans to re-write EU rules on music copyright have received a cool reception by artists and collecting societies, with groups criticising the narrow focus of the proposal and insisting that it will leave most existing copyright practices untouched.

Pink Floyd and Radiohead were among the biggest music names to criticise the European Commission's proposal, co-signing a letter released on Thursday (12 July) by artists' lobby group Younison.

AFP - Yahoo! on Thursday was digging into how hackers looted nearly a half million passwords and email addresses from one of its servers.

A hacker group calling itself D33DS posted online a massive trove of data it said were unencrypted in a file pilfered from the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet pioneer "as a wake-up call not as a threat."

American writer John Steinbeck allegedly said: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

A Gallup poll last May suggested that theory may be true; 63% of Americans think the US benefits from having a rich class, and the same number say they would like to be wealthy.

Republican candidate Mitt Romney's personal fortune should therefore not be a stumbling block in his presidential run. The former Massachusetts governor and ex-CEO of private equity firm Bain Capital is worth roughly a quarter billion dollars, not counting a $100-million trust for his five sons. He owns several lavish properties, including a sprawling, Spanish-style beach house in San Diego. According to Forbes, Romney would be the richest president in US history.

Given that over-zealous, churlishly administered security is the one event in which you  could expect modern Britain to take gold every time, these are soul-searching times for the Olympics.

Patdowns, scanner fascism, getting people to shuffle through checkpoints holding their shoes: these things are marginally less easy to take pride in than, say, a functioning manufacturing industry or the provision of decent education. But they're supposed to be What We Do these days. Aren't they?