Between 2008 and 2009, 35 employees of France Telecom committed suicide. Former executives are now facing probes into whether harsh layoff and restructuring plans contributed to a stressful work environment.

The first former Telecom executive to be placed under investigation was Didier Lombard, who was the company's CEO from 2005 to 2010. He was told by police Wednesday that he was being investigated for workplace harassment and put on a 100,000 euro ($125,000) bail.

On Thursday, the company's former head of human resources, Olivier Barberot, and Telecom's former second-in-command, Louis-Pierre Wenes were also due to appear before the magistrate.

France Telecom itself could also be placed under investigation.

Scotland Yard announced on Thursday that it had arrested six people in a series of raids in the British capital. One residential address raided was near the Olympic Park, but police said there was no tie to the Games.

British police carried out a string of raids in London on Thursday morning, arresting six men aged 18 to 30. Scotland Yard referred to the action as a pre-planned anti-terror operation, also saying that the arrests were not connected to the Olympic Games, which begin on July 27 in London.

How could a murderous neo-Nazi trio remain undetected for years? Germans want an answer. But before jumping to conclusions, warns DW's Peter Stützle, it's best to wait for the results of the investigation.

Some of the facts that have emerged since two neo-Nazis died in a campervan in Zwickau late last year seem simply outrageous. For instance, the two men and their female companion from the National Socialist Underground group were able to go into hiding even though the police were searching for them. And then, for an entire decade, the trio went around robbing and killing people. Tip-offs given by the public always ran into the sand.

The opposition is talking of a coup as the power struggle in Romania intensifies. Now the government has started proceedings to get rid of the president.

On Tuesday, the presidents of both houses of the Romanian parliament were sacked. In two extraordinary sessions called at short notice, the social-liberal majority voted to remove the president of the senate, Vasile Blaga and the president of the assembly, Roberta Anastase, as well as the national ombudsman, Georghe Iancu. The two presidents are members of the opposition liberal democrat PDL, and all three were replaced by supporters of the governing USL coalition, made up of the social democratic PSD and the national liberal PNL.

BRUSSELS - Existing Dutch border mobile surveillance and a new camera system to be launched in August on the Belgian and German borders do not contravene rules governing the EU passport-free area, the European Commission says.

"The legal analysis conducted by the commission led to the conclusion that Dutch mobile surveillance does not contravene the Schengen borders code," EU home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told MEPs in Strasbourg on Wednesday evening (4 July).

After a disappointed reaction to the ECB's rate cut to 0.75%, Italian and Spanish spreads have returned to the crisis levels that prevailed before the summit; the euro fell below $1.24, and Germany 10-year yields to below 1.4%; markets were also disappointment by any absence of a hint that the ECB might rekindle its non-conventional programmes; Spain yesterday managed to sell €3bn in bonds of various maturities,  but had to pay an unsustainably high price; virtually all the buying had come from Spanish banks, as international investors continued to divest out of Spain; there was some good news from Ireland, which had a successful return to the market for Treasury bills; Mario Draghi said the cut in interest rates will not do much in reviving economic activity; Fabrizio Goria said the ECB had reached the end of the line; Paul Krugman says the ECB had done only the minimum needed for the eurozone to survive another day; Joseph Stiglitz compares the euro to a prisoner on death row who had been given another short reprieve; Jens Weidman sharply criticised the summit's decision to relax conditionality for bond purchases; Draghi yesterday warned the Commission not to water down proposals for a common bank supervisor, and not to play the usual inter-institutional games for fear of a loss of power; a group of pro-European German economists are launching a counter-appeal to Hans-Werner Sinn's anti-banking union movement; Mark Schieritz says the argument of Sinn's motion is based on a deliberately misleading interpretation of bank debt figures; Francois Hollande plans to ratify the fiscal pact this month; Angela Merkel's popularity rating in Germany has reached the highest in three years; the Greek finance ministry find it impossible to collect tax fines to due understaffing and outdated system; the Wolfson prize, meanwhile, has a winner.

German car maker Volkswagen has said its August 1 takeover of luxury sports vehicle producer Porsche will enable the company to save costs and open up new strategic markets for the company.

Volkswagen Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn told reporters on Thursday that his company's takeover of Porsche on August 1 will save the company up to 700 million euros ($877 million) annually.

"The unique Porsche brand will now become an integral part of the Volkswagen Group," Winterkorn said in Hanover. "That's good for VW, good for Porsche and good for Germany as an industrial location."

The European Central Bank has reacted to market pressures by lowering borrowing costs for loans by 25 basis points. The record-low interest rate of 0.75 percent is intended to support a deteriorating eurozone economy.

The European Central Bank (ECB) on Thursday trimmed its interest rate to a mere 0.75 percent after already lending money at historically low rates of 1.0 percent. It is the third time that ECB Chief Mario Draghi has agreed to a rate cut since taking over as the head of the bank in November of last year.

The European Union's extensive oil embargo against Iran has been in place since July 1. The trade and financial sanctions are aimed at Iran's nuclear program, but the population is affected more directly.

The regime in Tehran has had to admit that the sanctions are painful. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the measures "the most severe and strictest sanctions ever imposed on a country."

Ahmadinejad added that the sanctions gave the country an "opportunity to eliminate the country's current reliance on oil revenue." The regime has called on the population to be patient. Vice president Reza Rahimi appealed to the Iranian people to support the government in fighting the impact of the sanctions.

NICOSIA - Cypriot President Demetris Christofias has said he is happy to wait and see whether Brussels or Moscow offers him the best deal for the Mediterranean island's troubled banks - and has not ruled out taking loans from both.

Exploring the reaches of pragmatism, the Russian-speaking, Russian-educated communist leader on Thursday (5 July) said: "We have asked Russia and the European Union. We applied to both at the same time."

The first thing worth to note is that Europe is not undertaking true austerity measures, but very modest cost savings. In fact, in most cases the cuts have only slowed down the speed of spending growth. As we explained here to reduce the "deficit" from 8.9% to 5 % is not austerity, it's just fiscal prudence. It is not the same to aim for debt reduction than to reduce its increase.

...

In the thirties quantitative easing was not used as a tool to mitigate the risk of deflation and stagnation. But there is a huge problem to solve. The QE (quantitative easing) that the U.S. Fed makes floods the system with money directly, skipping the banks as an intermediary. In Europe, the monetary policies have been directed solely at banks, which hold on to the funds, buying sovereign debt, without extending credit to the real economy.

...

It is relatively easy, austerity would help: Not only stop paying unnecessary subsidies and reduce billions of euros of cost of additional debt, but austerity attracts capital and reduces the loss of tax revenue by bringing new investors. And instead of removing 0.3% of GDP increasing debt, GDP would be up reducing the financial burden.

Fund manager in Oil,Gas and utilities. Voted Number 1 Pan-European Buyside Individual in Oil & Gas in Thomson Reuters' Extel Survey 2011, the leading survey among companies and financial institutions.

Specifically, functional finance.

If you are not convinced, try it on someone who has not been entirely debauched by economics. — Piero Sraffa

The debate around banking is once more dominating the news.  I've long argued there are three primary issues that banking reform must aim to address (making banks safer, making banks serve the rest of the economy and dealing with the remuneration issues). But yesterday a very important post on the FT's Alphaville blog (which also includes an excellent Game of Thrones reference) got me thinking - maybe the issue is actually even deeper than I thought.

...

As Kaminska writes:

this could be because in a negative carry universe -- one in which goods, collateral and assets are expected to permanently outnumber money in the future -- bank profits can only be achieved through pariah practices rather than lending. Banks are ironically encouraged to destroy capacity, disincentivse investment, borrow money from the economy rather than lend it, and hoard wealth. All phenomenons we are currently seeing. All phenomenons which are economically destructive.

Now,  I'm not entirely convinced that this is the case but it is at least worth considering seriously, because if this is the world we are living in, everything just got a lot more complicated.

...

In a `negative carry universe', if that is indeed what we are now in, the imbalance between the goods markets and the money markets is much more difficult to fix than is suggested by DeLong's Malthus-Say-Mill framework. If we are in such a universe than maybe macroeconomics is a lot harder than we originally thought.

French investigators say faulty sensors and inadequate pilot training caused Air France's Rio-to-Paris flight to crash into the Atlantic in 2009. Their final report caps a bitter row between the airline and Airbus.

In its report, the French aviation safety authority, BEA, made 25 new safety recommendations on Thursday, including better cockpit design and better training for pilots.

Chief investigator Alain Bouillard said the two co-pilots - left at the controls while the captain rested - never understood that their plane was in a stall and "were in a situation of near total loss of control" in darkness during the final four minutes before the plane slammed into the ocean 1,500 kilometers off Brazil's coast.

The destruction of shrines in Mali's northern city of Timbuktu has prompted the UN Security Council to pass a resolution calling for sanctions. But it didn't give a mandate for a regional intervention force.

The Security Council convened less than a day after Mali's national assembly called for army intervention in the country's north, where Islamists have enforced strict sharia law, destroyed ancient shrines and trapped residents with landmines.

In a statement released on Wednesday calling for "restoration of territorial integrity," the parliament called on "the entire Malian people for implacable resistance to the occupation and boosting solidarity by all possible means."

Leaders have headed to Paris for fresh Syria due to kick off tomorrow. But China and Russia look set to snub the event, as the bloodshed on the ground continues.

Foreign ministers headed to Paris on Thursday ahead of a Friday meeting on how to resolve the Syria conflict, although the talks look set to be boycotted by Russia and China.

The Friends of Syria meeting, due to kick off on Friday, is being attended by the United States, Germany, Britain, France, and Arab nations including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, among other countries. Talks will focus on strategies for ending the violence in Syria. It follows similar talks in Tunis in February and in Istanbul in April.

There's an air of anticipation outside a one-story house in a leafy neighbourhood of the Libyan capital of Tripoli. White vans, emblazoned with the rearing stallion logo of the Muslim Brotherhood's Justice and Development Party, stand ready to go. Youth volunteers, in party white-and-blue T-shirts, dart between the vans noisily hailing each other.

AFP - Mexico's Enrique Pena Nieto hoped definitive election results expected Thursday would officially crown him president-elect, while challenger Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador held out for a shock reversal.

Officials at the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) were hard at work Thursday tallying the final results, which included a vote-by-vote recount of results at more than half of the country's polling stations.

MercoPress: Mexico's election officials on Wednesday recounted votes from more than half the polling booths in Sunday's presidential and congressional elections, responding to claims of fraud and requests for recounts in areas where the race was tight.  Officials with the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) said the recount would not significantly change preliminary results of the presidential vote that showed Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) winning with more than 38% of the vote, 6.5 points clear of his nearest rival.

AP, ASUNCION, Paraguay -- Paraguay's government withdrew its ambassador from Caracas on Wednesday and declared Venezuela's envoy no longer welcome in Asuncion in a dispute over alleged Venezuelan meddling in the impeachment of former President Fernando Lugo. The steps taken by Paraguay fell short of a full break in diplomatic relations. Venezuela's ambassador had already left the country a week earlier.

The Cuban Triangle: Raul Castro is visiting China, met his counterpart Hu Jintao, and signed eight agreements for loans and assistance to agriculture and other sectors, Granma reports.

Also, if you missed yesterday's LACB.

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

An independent Japanese commission that investigated last year's nuclear disaster at Fukushima released its findings on Thursday, leveling harsh criticism at the Japanese government and the plant's operator.

The panel, called the National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC), found that shortcomings in the Japanese government as well as the Toyko Electric Co (TEPCO), which ran the plant, contributed to the disaster that followed an earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011.

"The TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties," the report said, adding that the direct causes of the accident were foreseeable and that the plant was incapable of withstanding the forces of nature that hit it that day.

AFP - An experimental solar-powered aircraft will leave the Moroccan capital on Friday for Madrid on its return journey to its home port in Switzerland, Morocco's news agency MAP reported.

Strong winds grounded the Swiss-made Solar Impulse plane in Morocco on Tuesday, delaying its flight to Spain.

But MAP said on Thursday that the plane would depart the Rabat-Sale airport at 0700 GMT on Friday and is due to land in Madrid's Barajas airport after midnight.

It is not known exactly when it is due to return to Switzerland -- capping its first round-trip between Europe and North Africa.

A new study by the Robert Koch Institute says 53 percent of women and 67 percent of men in Germany are overweight. The researchers are concerned about a rise in obesity.

With Libya's historic parliamentary elections just days away, the streets of the capital Tripoli have been plastered with campaign posters. Yet walking around, a trend becomes apparent - many of those featuring female candidates have been destroyed while those of men are left largely untouched. Our Observer in Tripoli says that the vandalism may be a sign that many in Libya are simply not ready to see a woman in office.

This video is the second episode of "Cartoonists Capture the Arab Revolutions", a five-part series about cartoonists in the Arab world. It was first aired in French on FRANCE 24 on June 21.

REUTERS - Rising like a gleaming splinter of glass into a grey sky, London's tallest building is designed to mirror a dynamic city living ahead of its time.

But for Londoners dwelling in its shadow, the futuristic new skyscraper known as the Shard is more a reflection of their own unease at the city's fast-changing and confusing identity.

Still an empty shell and yet to secure any office tenants, the giant Qatari-funded spire, the highest in western Europe, also stands as a powerful symbol of tough and unpredictable economic times.

Towering 310 metres (1,016 feet) over the south bank of the River Thames, the Shard already dominates London like no other building, its spire sometimes obscured by cloud in the British capital's often overcast skies.

The quest for physics' holy grail may be nearing its end after more than twenty years of research. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced Wednesday that it had identified a new subatomic particle, or boson, that is "consistent" with the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle".

However, CERN scientists stopped short of claiming they discovered the much sought-after boson.

Instead they explained they had either isolated the Higgs boson, the missing link in the standard model of particle physics that explains the structure of the universe, or a completely unknown particle.

CERN - a research centre that stradles the French-Swiss border and is home to the world's largest atom smasher - announced it would conduct further experiments to refine results.

But in both scenarios, a scientific milestone has been reached, physicist Anne-Isabelle Etienvre told FRANCE 24 on Wednesday. Etienvre, who works at ATLAS, one of the two particle detectors involved in the discovery, explained its implications.

The solar panels will generate an estimated 900,000kWh of electricity every year, providing 50% of the station's energy and reducing CO2 emissions by an estimated 511 tonnes per year. In addition to solar panels, other energy saving measures at the new station will include rain harvesting systems and sun pipes for natural lighting.

AFP - Former US president George W. Bush on Thursday launched a $3 million initiative to fight cervical cancer in Botswana on the last stop of an Africa tour.

The funds would be used to improve treatment and streamline operations at the Princess Marina hospital, south of the capital Gaborone.

"It is important to empower women and make a positive change in their lives," said Bush as he launched the programme.

A treat. Marxist reviews of Mr Men books via @mrjamesmack Ab-so-lute genius http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member- ...

And finally, the Wolfson prize has a winner...

It seems that Eurointelligence was the only organisation on the planet that did not submit its proposal for a breakup of the eurozone to the Wolfson prize committee. The winner is Roger Bootle and his team at Capital Economics. It is not often that one reads a big paper that advocates the breach of hundreds of European and national laws, and that requires full co-operation of the military  to implement it. But if you feel like it, this is where you can read it in full.