European politics won't consider an orderly divorce at an early stage, but it is preferable to a messy split down the line

Whether the eurozone is viable or not remains an open question. But what if a breakup can only be postponed, not avoided? If so, delaying the inevitable would merely make the endgame worse - much worse.

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Financial firms in London, besieged by Europe's sovereign-debt crisis, probably will shrink their workforce this year, snapping a hiring rebound from 2008's credit crisis as New York's industry ekes out job growth. Banks, insurers and other financial-services firms may eliminate about 3,000 jobs across greater London as companies in the New York region add 9,000, according to U.K.-based researcher Oxford Economics Ltd.

London's proximity to the debt crisis is undermining the city's efforts to gain on its trans-Atlantic rival. While Wall Street also is suffering from a global slowdown in trading and deal-making, North American banks are benefiting from a surge in consumer lending.

"Europe is still going into deeper waters, which would make London less attractive, more risky" for employers, said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., which advises firms on workforce reductions. "Momentum for the lead has turned back toward New York and the U.S."

Reductions will be particularly acute in London's wholesale financial-services industry, which may cut 25,200 positions this year, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research Ltd.

BRUSSELS - Eurozone leaders will this week begin a round of shuttle diplomacy focussed on debt-stricken Greece amid reports that Athens' deficit problems are greater than previously thought.

Eurozone chief Jean-Claude Juncker will travel to Greece on Wednesday (22 August). Antonis Samaras will make his first trip as Greek Prime Minister to Germany on Friday before heading to France the following day. The French and German leaders will have a get-together in Berlin on Thursday (23 August).

At the centre of all the meetings is the question of whether Greece should be allowed two extra years to fulfil the conditions demanded by its international creditors. But any extension implies extra money, considered an almost impossible sell in fiscally prudent nations such as Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.

Ahead of Samaras' Berlin visit, German politicians have already been indicating that there will be no more concessions.

According to Der Spiegel, the ECB is after all considering unlimited intervention based on maximum interest rate guarantees; no decision has been taken, but the issue will come up at next ECB council meeting; ECB will become more transparent with its bond purchases by providing country-by-country breakdowns; Luis de Guindos has called on the ECB to undertake unlimited interventions; El Pais writes that a Spanish rescue programme is now a certainty; Mariano Rajoy will do whatever it takes to achieve the 6.3% deficit target this year; German politicians have signalled caution about a Greek programme extension, as there is no majority for a third Greek programme; Greece is close to finalise an €11.6bn austerity programme; the political support for Portugal's ruling party is waning; Alexander Stubb qualifies eurozone breakup remarks by Finnish foreign minister; EU Commission to propose a plan whereby the ECB has ultimate systemic responsibility for all banks, with national regulators in charge of day to day activities; Hans-Jurgen Jacobs argues that most of eurozone's toxic debt are hidden in bad banks, or other off-balance sheet vehicles and are outside political control; Jesús Fernández-Villaverde and Luis Garicano say time is running out for Rajoy, who has made a career of sitting things out; Expansion advises its Spanish readers to invest their money outside Spain; there is more evidence of erratic policy making in Spain - this time in the context of renewable energy; Mario Monti says a solution of the eurozone crisis requires more integration; crisis had a disastrous effect on Italian tourism; Piero Ghezzi, meanwhile, argues that limited and contingent support by the ECB will be insufficient.

Europe and the United States condemned Russia over the two-year prison sentences handed down to three members of the Pussy Riot punk band, while protestors took to the streets in 60 cities around the world after the verdict.

The three women, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, were convicted on Friday (17 August) of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for performing a "punk prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral in which they called on the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of President Vladimir Putin.

In Bulgaria, the monument to the Soviet Army awoke on Friday with a new look, with heads of Russian soldiers' sculptures hooded with coloured balaclavas, a trademark for the punk group. In Brussels, some 100 demonstrators gathered in front of the Russian Mission to the EU, but were moved by the police next to the neighbouring US Embassy.

Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said the two-year sentences give to the women were "disproportionate" to the crime and added to the intimidation of opposition activists in Russia.

There is no more time - nor even, perhaps, room, in an atmosphere that has grown oppressive - for cumbersome constitutional machinery that would involve amendments to the treaties, with highly unpredictable outcomes. But we do still have ample time to decide on some key points.

Without changing the treaties, states could adopt a "uniform electoral procedure", which would allow the big European parties to exchange candidates among countries and present joint lists of front-runners. It would thus give meaning to a political space formed not by fears but by hopes, and not just at the national level.

The states, through joint pre-election statements, could also decide to appoint the Commission President elected by a majority in Parliament as the President of the European Council. This European Union president, too, could be feasible without changes to the treaties.

States could alter the non-constitutional rules that today distribute the bulk of European cohesion funds among the regions, often wastefully and more or less out of sight. They could regain control of these funds to make them instruments of a common economic policy.

And finally, the national and European parliaments could declare with one voice that they accept the prospect of future work on major issues of the Union through "Euro-national" conferences and conventions.

In their bid to cope with debts, governments are taxing the middle classes, and overlooking the fact that bad investments -- banks, property, public debt -- made by the wealthy, are the cause of the current crisis. Taking up this idea, the liberal Der Tagesspiegel argues that the well-off should dig deeper. Harald Schumann

Once again this year, Sigmar Gabriel joined with the unions in demanding an increase in taxes paid by the wealthy to ensure a fairer distribution of the burden of the crisis. For the social-democrat leader, the imposition of further demands on the rich is a matter of "social patriotism". However, at the other end of the political spectrum the Christian-Democrats and the liberals were quick to step up to the plate to defend the better off, and to accuse Gabriel of wheeling out a well-worn socialist routine. As a result, debate on this issue has now assumed the wearisome air of an electoral squabble.

But we should not be beguiled by this impression.

6. The solution to the problem facing the eurozone is not increased political integration via more sovereign EU economic and political institutions.

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... governments cannot produce this growth through deficit spending; it must come from either domestic or foreign demand. Lowering government expenditures or raising taxes to generate the required fiscal surplus will only reduce domestic demand. This leaves external demand as the only solution. But without the ability to improve external competitiveness through exchange rate adjustment, internal depreciation through wage reductions or productivity increases in advance of wage increases will be required. However, this is also a policy that reduces domestic demand, offsetting the benefits of higher foreign demand. And here is the paradox: all the policies proposed to increase growth of incomes and generate fiscal surpluses ultimately have a negative impact on income growth. Keynes called it the paradox of saving; here, it is the paradox of euro survival.

And this is why the proposal for more intensive EU unification cannot solve the problem. It can only be solved if some member-state is willing to run a fiscal deficit that allows the indebted countries to run a surplus. But this would simply shift the burden of the debt from one country to another. Germans have rightly objected to their having to take on the debt burdens of the Mediterranean countries, for this would simply turn Germany into a higher-credit-risk country. Indeed, this might even create problems for Germany in terms of refinancing its debt, which is also substantial. Thus the paradox: the survival of the euro and the refinancing of government debt require a fiscal surplus across the system, and a foreign surplus is only possible if the unified EU treasury can itself run a fiscal deficit.

Of course, the problem could be resolved if the ECB were able to act as the lender of last resort to allow governments to achieve an acceptable rate of growth, since the sustainability of the ECB's debt is independent of its net income. The current ECB policy of requiring more EU political action on fiscal policy is thus just the opposite of what is required. The ECB should be asking for the European Commission to run a fiscal deficit financed by the issue of a global European security. The solution to the problems of the euro does not lie in increased political integration; the solution is to allow the new fiscal agent or the Commission to run a fiscal deficit that would generate a surplus in the highly indebted countries sufficient to allow them to service and retire debt that the market will not refinance.

China's official GDP growth rate has fallen sharply - on Friday Beijing announced that GDP growth for the second quarter of 2012 was a lower-than-expected 7.6% year on year, the lowest level since 2009 and well below the 8.1% generated in the first quarter. This implies of course that quarterly growth is substantially below 7.6%. Industrial production was also much lower than expected, at 9.5% year on year. In fact China's real GDP growth may have been even lower than the official numbers. This is certainly what electricity consumption numbers, which have been flat, imply, and there have been rumors all year of businesses being advised by local governments to exaggerate their revenue growth numbers in order to provide a better picture of the economy.

Some economists are arguing that flat electricity consumption is consistent with 7.6% GDP growth because of pressure on Chinese businesses to improve energy efficiency, but this is a little hard to believe. That "pressure" has been there almost as long as I have been in China (over ten years) and it would be startling if only now did it have an impact, especially with such a huge impact occurring so suddenly. Adding to the slow economic growth, the country may be tipping into deflation.

China's stocks fell, dragging the benchmark index down to the lowest level since March 2009, on concern the government will tighten property curbs after real- estate prices rose in the largest number of cities in 14 months.

China Vanke Co. and Poly Real Estate Group Co., the nation's bigest property developers, slid more than 3 percent. China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co., the fourth-largest insurer, dropped 2.2 percent after first-half profit slumped. Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Co. retreated to the lowest this month after it said first-half profit declined and the China Securities Journal reported the government is studying a resource tax on rare earths.

"A rebound in property prices is bad for the economy as the government will refrain from conducting further policy easing," said Li Jun, a strategist at Central China Securities Co. in Shanghai. "Investor sentiment is bad and the market will test new lows."

Apparently, the only thing worse (for 'investors') than a drop in real estate prices is a rebound --- because the government sponsored feeding trough will be closed off.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

I am currently working on a presentation for the up-coming Jobs for Europe: The Employment Policy Conference - which the European Commission is staging in Brussels on September 6-7.

The EC describe the event "a major conference on employment policy" and, in addition to the Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, the President of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy and the Secretary-General of the OECD, Angel Gurria being present, the conference will "bring together members of the EU Employment Committee, the Social Protection Committee, heads of Public Employment Services, representatives of national parliaments, as well as national and EU-level social partners."

I have been invited as a speaker to discuss employment guarantees. I was very pleased to be invited by the Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion Commissioner, who is organising the conference.

I will rehearse all the unimaginative and wrongful criticisms of large-scale PSE programs.

In the blog I link to above I consider many of them. Many of them - from those that espouse the primacy of market forces, actually reflect their fear of letting market forces work when it comes to providing advantages and opportunities to the most disadvantaged workers in our communities.

Two children were among at least 19 people reported killed in shelling by the Syrian army, as clashes with rebels continued on the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday.

Activists said the children were killed on Sunday during continued shelling on the town of Maaret al-Numan in Idlib province.

The violence came as Lakhdar Brahimi, the new UN-Arab League Joint Special Representative in Syria, denied making comments that that it was too soon for Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, to step down.

In other parts of the country, troops were also reported to have bombarded the besieged city of Rastan, in the central province of Homs, and the eastern city of Deir Ezzor.

Children across the Muslim world were set to receive new clothes and gifts for Eid, but in Syria there was no respite from the bloodshed which the activists say has killed more than 23,000 people since March last year.

"There is no holiday," said Mohammed Radwan, 34, standing near an apartment building in Aleppo's Tariq al-Bab neighbourhood, which was hit by an airstrike the day before.

At least two people were killed when two car bombs exploded near interior ministry and security buildings in the Libyan capital, the first lethal attack of its kind since Muammar Gaddafi's fall last year, security sources have said.

Ambulances and firefighters rushed to the scenes of Sunday's dawn blasts, and large numbers of police cordoned off the sites before starting to remove the charred vehicles.

The first bomb blew up near the interior ministry's administrative offices in Tripoli but caused no casualties, the sources said. Police found another car bomb at the site of the explosion that had not blown up.

Minutes later, a car bomb exploded near the former headquarters of a women's police academy on Omar al-Mokhtar Avenue, which the defence ministry has been using for interrogations and detentions, the sources said, killing two people, both civilians, and wounding two.

The avenue, one of Tripoli's main thoroughfares, was closed to traffic, a correspondent with the AFP news agency reported. Checkpoints were set up on other major streets in the city centre.

A cabinet ministers was among 31 government officials killed in a plane crash in Sudan, according to state television.

The group was an official delegation to Southern Kordofan, a war-torn state that has seen ongoing fighting between the Sudanese army and rebel groups. They were travelling to attend a function marking the Muslim Eid holiday.

"All people on board were killed," said Abdelhafiz Abdelrahim, the spokesman for the Sudan Aviation Authority, according to the AFP news agency.

He said the plane was landing in Talodi, a small town about 600km southwest of Khartoum, when "an explosion was heard and the plane was destroyed."

Ahmed Bilal Osman, the culture and information minister, told the official Radio Omdurman that the plane "crashed into a hill" because of bad weather.

Seven people have been killed and eleven wounded after a gunman opened fire on a mosque during Eid prayers in southern Yemen, a defence ministry official has said.

The shooting in the province of Dalea came during prayers on Sunday to mark the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Security forces said the man did not appear to be related to fighters who have been staging attacks for the past months, but no further details were immediately available.

In a separate attack on Sunday, a suicide bomber with suspected links to al-Qaeda blew himself up in the southern Abyan province, killing at least one and wounding two, an official from the province told the Reuters news agency.

The suicide bombing took place in the town of Mudiya in Abyan, the provincial official said.

"One of the dead was a local pro-army militia commander, Nasser Ali Mansur," he said.

The US has been pouring aid into Yemen to stem the threat of attacks from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and to try to prevent any spillover of violence into neighbouring Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter.

Last year, a US-backed offensive drove al-Qaeda offshoot Ansar al-Sharia (Partisans of Islamic Law) from cities it had seized in an uprising against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Taiwan summoned Japan's representative Sunday to protest against the "provocative" act by a group of Japanese nationalists who landed on an island at the heart of a territorial dispute.

A group of about 150 Japanese right-wing activists and lawmakers sailed to the disputed islands in the East China Sea and some of them early Sunday set foot on one of the islands, which are administered by Tokyo and also claimed by China and Taiwan. <...>

The landing comes just days after Tokyo deported pro-Beijing 14 protesters from Hong Kong and Macau who had landed on the island. ...

NarcoNews: A high-ranking Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization member's claim that US officials have struck a deal with the leadership of the Mexican "cartel" appears to be corroborated in large part by the statements of a Mexican diplomat in email correspondence made public recently by the nonprofit media group WikiLeaks.

Tim's El Salvador Blog: The Central American Court of Justice (CACJ) issued its ruling on the constitutional crisis in El Salvador.   The CACJ ruled in a 5-1 decision, that the decisions of El Salvador's Constitutional Chamber, which invalidated the elections of magistrates in 2006 and 2012, were themselves invalid. (...) The Constitutional Chamber promptly issued a decision that the CACJ ruling had no legal effect.

MercoPress: The Union of South American Nations (Unasur) called for dialogue to solve the crisis between Ecuador and Great Britain regarding the diplomatic asylum granted by the Andean country to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who is holed in at the embassy in London.

Collateral Damage of a Drug War: The May 11 Killings in Ahuas and the Impact of the U.S. War
on Drugs in La Moskitia, Honduras.  PDF

Several organisations are filing a complaint against a decision by the commission to authorise a new genetically engineered monsanto soybean.

Although the soybeans will be mostly sold and grown in Brazil the harvest will be imported to the EU for use in food and feed.

The EU gave permission for use of the soybeans in food and feed at end of June.

However, it is claimed that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has not carried out the risk assessments for the product "in the way" as legally required.

The European Network of Scientists for Social Testbiotech and Environmental Responsibility (ENSSER) has now filed a complaint about the matter to the commission.

Other complainants include the Society for Ecological Research, Sambucus, the foundation Manfred-Hermsen-Stiftung for Nature Conservation and Environmental Protection and the Foundation on Future Farming.

European governments are rushing to boost stockpiles of crude oil and fuel, anxious to comply with new EU rules and amid reports that Israel is preparing to launch an attack on Iran.

Belgium and the Netherlands have issued tenders to import a total of around 250,000 tonnes of diesel and gasoline for delivery in September and October, their agencies said.

France has also bought diesel and awarded a crude oil tender this week while Belgium is increasing its crude stocks.

"This is yet another unexpected source of support for oil demand... [It] shows how the geopolitical concerns about Iran and Syria are bullish for oil even in the absence of an actual supply disruption," said Seth Kleinman, head of energy research at Citi.

Droughts in southern and eastern Europe are contributing to the global decline in grain production while also elevating concern about the long-term impact on freshwater supplies.

The European Commission, which has declared 2012 the Year of Water, is preparing a review some of Europe's water legislation partly with climate change and extreme weather events in mind.

Food security and how the EU safeguards its liquid resources are among the topics due to be discussed during World Water Week events that begin in Stockholm on 26 August.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organisation reports that food prices rose 6% overall in July, with maize soaring 23% and wheat up 19%. The higher prices are mainly blamed on a devastating drought in the American heartland and lower than expect wheat yields in Russia.

(Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange berated the United States on Sunday from the balcony of the Ecuadorean embassy where he has sought refuge from arrest, challenging President Barack Obama to end what he called a witch-hunt against his whistle-blowing website.

Speaking from within the London mission to avoid being detained by British police who want to extradite him to Sweden for questioning over rape allegations, Assange said the United States was fighting a war against outlets like WikiLeaks.

Pitching himself alongside Russian punk band Pussy Riot and the New York Times newspaper, Assange said the United States risked shunting the world into an era of journalistic oppression. He did not mention the rape allegations.

"As WikiLeaks stands under threat, so does the freedom of expression and the health of all of our societies," Assange said, dressed in a maroon tie and blue shirt, flanked by the yellow, blue and red Ecuadorean flag with dozens of British policemen lined up on the pavement below.

(Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first appearance in public since a July bomb attack, attending prayers at a Damascus mosque to mark the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid, state TV showed.

The first day of Eid on Sunday also gave Assad's opponents a chance to rally and activists reported protests around Syria, including in the capital, on a holiday that marked the end of the Islamic holy fasting month of Ramadan.

Fighting raged on around Syria, killing more than 100 people, an activist group reported.

Battling a 17-month-old uprising against 42 years of rule by his family, Assad was filmed at prayer with his prime minister and foreign minister but not with his vice president, Farouq al-Shara, whose reported defection was denied the previous day.

Pakistani police have arrested a mentally disabled 11-year-old girl after a mob accused her of desecrating pages of the Koran.

The mob demanded the Christian girl's arrest and threatened to burn down Christian homes outside the capital Islamabad, local media say.

Officials said the girl could not properly answer police questions.

Her parents have been taken into protective custody following threats and other Christian families have fled.

It is thought that the girl has Down's syndrome.

(Reuters) - The ministry overseeing Brazil's new $66 billion infrastructure plan was also ground zero for a spectacular corruption scandal last year in which officials allegedly demanded 5 percent kickbacks on highway construction projects and then pushed carts down the hallways to hand out the cash.

The transport minister and most of his staff resigned or were fired in July of last year, and a new, supposedly more scrupulous group is now in charge.

Yet the incident helps illustrate why President Dilma Rousseff's plan to involve the private sector in more public works projects is not a cure-all - and why she still must make major inroads against graft, red tape and other obstacles in order to succeed.

The comment was a quick one -- a by-golly insistence that despite paying a relatively low tax rate on his vast income, the millions he has given to charity show that he's not a greedy guy.

But experts who research public attitudes on philanthropy on both sides of the political spectrum said it was an inadvertently revealing moment, a brief window into the deep philosophical differences between how liberals and conservatives view government and society.

"Taxes are a form a of charity," said Michael Tanner, a scholar at the Cato Institute who has studied philanthropy, explaining the conservative viewpoint. "If we think of the point of taxes, it's not to be punitive. We tax people because there's some use, some public good, for which they're needed."

If you're going to slander the estimated 32,000 women a year who become pregnant after being raped, it's probably not wise to do it on a Sunday, when it will lead the next week's news coverage. Republican nominee for Missouri Senate Todd Akin chose not to follow this bit of wisdom, instead declaring in a television interview yesterday that women can't get pregnant from rape.

"First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare," Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

For people who don't follow the anti-choice movement closely, this statement might be a stunner for the simple reason that it makes no biological sense; a rapist's sperm swims as well as a non-rapist's. But for those of us who do, it's no surprise. The myth that "real" rapes don't result in pregnancy is widespread among anti-choicers--and not just the fringe (Akin, for instance, used to be on the board of Missouri Right to Life). You can see a variation of this myth at the anti-choice website Abortion Facts:

To get pregnant and stay pregnant, a woman's body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain which is easily influenced by emotions. There's no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy.

Akin's comment should serve as a reminder that despite its sentimentality surrounding the fetus, the anti-choice movement is motivated by misogyny and ignorance about human sexuality. In this case, what underlies the rape-doesn't-get-you-pregnant myth is the notion that sex is shameful and that slutty women will do anything--even send an innocent man to jail to kill a baby--in order to avoid facing the consequences of their actions.

Patrick Ricard, the French head of the global spirits company Pernod Ricard, whose father founded the Ricard firm, has died at the age of 67.

The firm said Mr Ricard had passed away on Friday. French media reports suggested he had heart problems.

Paul Ricard founded the company, which began selling the anise-flavoured liqueur pastis, in Marseille in 1932.

His son transformed the firm into the second largest wine and spirits company in the world.

There was a huge amount of LSD research going on then, as well as a flourishing underground scene. It has been reliably reported that Alexander Dubc̆ek himself had participated. Here is a recent follow-up report.

MAPS: LSD in Prague

A fascinating overview of the global connections from psychedelic historians Bruce Eisner and Peter Stafford produced this gem:

Who Turned On Who

Then Spofa Pharmaceuticals in Czechoslovakia began manufacture, providing a high-quality product which became available to anyone in Prague who wished 10 try the experience under medical supervision.

Communist parry leader Alexander Dubcek and most of the city's artistic community took advantage of the offer, which many claim led to the "Prague Spring" of 1968 that ended in a Soviet invasion. Spofa, however, continued to supply the drug until just very recently.

And of course there's always Dr. Stan Grof.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

Heydon Prowse was not questioned by armed police guarding the West London house and was allowed into the doorway by a maid, in the stunt filmed for a new BBC programme.

He was wearing a T-shirt bearing the words "Foundation for the Glorification of Tony Blair" and told a policeman that he was in discussions with the Vatican about the ex-Labour leader being canonised.

Mr Prowse was carrying a semi-circular window showing Mr Blair surrounded by doves and Iraqi children, in a further sign that should have raised questions.

Niall Ferguson: because if your history is Eurocentric, simplistic and context-free, you should move onto economics, where that is the norm.