Opposition coalition Georgian Dream has claimed victory in parliamentary elections, and President Mikheil Saakashvili conceded, saying his United National Movement (UNM) party would go into opposition.

According to preliminary results by the Central Election Commission, opposition coalition Georgian Dream received 53 percent of the vote, which puts them ahead of UNM's 41 percent. Georgia's electoral system allocates 77 of the 150 parliamentary seats by party lists; the remaining seats are obtained in individual constituencies. Voter turnout was 61 percent.

Outgoing President Saakashvili announced his party's defeat

Billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili - who said he was confident to become prime minister - founded the six-party opposition movement at the beginning of this year. As soon as initial results indicated that Georgian Dream was on top, supporters celebrated on the streets in Tbilisi. Thousands gathered at the capital's central Freedom Square, overjoyed that Georgia's opposition had won an election - and not started another revolution. No clashes took place between supporters of Ivanishvili and those of Saakashvili, who had gathered at the party's headquarters in the city center.

Contracts for almost 400 NHS services, worth a quarter of billion pounds, were signed this week resulting in the "biggest act of privatisation ever seen in the NHS", Labour's health spokesman Andy Burnham has said.

In a briefing before his speech to the Labour party conference, Burnham said he had "evidence of accelerating privatisation" - citing a rash of examples across England which he said showed the government was committed to a "market in healthcare".

Burnham pointed out that non-emergency ambulance services in the north-west would soon be run by the bus group Arriva and that Lancashire county council had awarded the contract to run patient advocacy groups to a private firm, Parkwood Healthcare.

However the "biggest privatisation" so far was in community services - those areas of healthcare offered outside of hospitals. Labour used freedom of information requests to survey England's NHS primary care trusts on the range and value of community services being offered to the private and voluntary sector under the government's "any qualified provider" policy.

Three government officials at the heart of the abandoned west coast mainline franchise competition have been suspended after the transport secretary launched an urgent review into how the award of Britain's most lucrative rail service ended in fiasco.

Patrick McLoughlin said he was angry and that the fault lay "only and squarely within the Department for Transport". The shock move looks set to revive the apparently doomed Virgin Trains after the government admitted to "significant flaws" in the franchise process that was won by FirstGroup.

Taxpayers now face paying compensation of £40m to the original bidders - something the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, called a disgrace.

Virgin and McLoughlin will be holding talks to discuss options later on Wednesday, with the tender process likely to be rerun. Until Tuesday the transport secretary had, like his predecessor Justine Greening, defended the "robust" process, and he was set to invite the state-owned Directly Operated Railways (DOR) to run the service when the current franchise expires on 9 December had Virgin's legal proceedings delayed the new contract with FirstGroup.

While the topic of war reparations is a closed matter to Germans, many Greeks hope to be repaid for damages caused during the Nazi era. The Greek Finance Ministry has established an expert group to look into the issue.

Greece is evaluating asking Germany for reparations for the destruction of Greek villages and towns as well as for Nazi crimes during World War II and for the repayment of a loan worth billions of dollars the Bank of Greece was forced to make to Germany in 1942 and which has not been repaid.

A working group has been set up and the government has been going through the state archives for relevant documents, according to Deputy Finance Minister Christos Staikouras. Initial results should be available by the end of the year. Many observers, including those in Greece, have wondered if potential demands for reparations, almost 70 years after the war, are still justified.

Stelios Perakis a professor of international law at Panteion University in Athens, has called for reparations to be paid as soon as possible. These claims have not been made due to the international treaty situation after the war, but this, he said, in no way means Greece has forfeited its rights.

The former East German states have been subsidized to the tune of billions of euros - not always successfully. Struggling regions in the west now want a share of the financial support.

Twenty-two years after German unification, the gap between east and west is widening once again. The gross domestic product in the eastern states has shrunk by 2 percent, and now stands at just 71 percent of per-capita GDP in the West. Prospects are not good. Many of the young generation are moving away; not enough trainees are coming onto the eastern German job market. Wages and salaries there are about a quarter less than what they are in the western states.

But in western Germany, too, there are entire regions struggling with the consequences of structural change. The industrial Ruhr valley is just one example. For a long time now many people have been calling for an overhaul of the system, and for subsidies to be allocated differently. Two decades after the euphoria of unification, the everyday reality is hitting home.

Valérie Trierweiler, the partner of the French president, François Hollande, has issued her first public apology for the controversial tweet that caused a scandal in June, just as a poll showed the majority of French people have a negative view of her.

After three and a half months of no interviews and few public comments, Trierweiler appeared to be back on a media offensive to correct her poor image, with a carefully worded interview with the biggest-selling regional paper, Ouest France. She gave her first public mea culpa for the tweet that laid bare her animosity to Ségolène Royal, Hollande's ex-partner and the mother of his four children, and which forced the president's complex love life on to the front pages.

In the tweet, which shocked the political class and embarrassed Hollande shortly after his election, she had expressed support for a dissident Socialist running for election against Royal.

"It was a mistake, and I regret it," she told Ouest France. "I was clumsy because it was badly interpreted. I hadn't yet realised that I was no longer a simple citizen. It won't happen again." She added that she thought the media treatment of the tweet had been "disproportionate".

The remains of Turkey's former President Turgut Ozal have been exhumed from an Istanbul grave in a bid to determine whether the former leader was poisoned.

Amid heavy security mechanical diggers dug up his grave from within a grand mausoleum in an Istanbul cemetery on Tuesday, on the orders of prosecutors investigating suspicions of foul play in his death 19 years ago.

"The corpse was in its place, everything went as planned, no problem arose" - Turan Colakkadi, Istanbul's chief prosecutor

Ozal, who led Turkey out of military rule in the 1980s and drove far-reaching economic reform, died of heart failure in April 1993 at an Ankara hospital at the age of 65, and while in office.

Relatives and associates voiced suspicions he had been poisoned.

A Muslim cleric was present at the exhumation, which lasted seven hours. Ozal's remains were placed in a zinc-coated coffin which was wrapped in the Turkish flag and carried by police officers in formal uniforms to a municipal hearse.

Germany's opposition party, the Social Democrats (SPD), has closed the gap on Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats following the selection of her former finance minister to lead their general election campaign next year.

Polls show that the choice of Peer Steinbrück as the SPD challenger last week has given the party a significant boost in its attempt to oust Merkel. The SPD is now enjoying its highest level of support in a year.

A Forsa survey shows that the SPD has gained three points from a week earlier to 29% after the selection of the feisty, plain-speaking 65-year-old. Merkel's party dropped three points to 35%.

The combined support for the SPD and the party's preferred partner, the Greens, is now 41%, marginally ahead of the 39% support for the ruling centre-right coalition.

I am Beppe Scienza, I lecture at the Turin University's Mathematics Department and the topic I want to address today is that of usury.
In terms of Art 644 of the criminal code, usury is classified as a crime, remember? But exactly at what point does money lending become usury? At one point the law was rather vague, but back in 1996 the law was amended and the act of usury was determined on the basis of certain rules and certain interest rate tables published by Banca d'Italia (the Italian Central Bank). Now, however, when you pick up these tables you can immediately see that something doesn't quite add up any more because we see that in order to be classified as usury, the interest rate must be above 18% per annum in the case of overdraft facilities, above 19.4% per annum in the case of personal loans, above 19.5% per annum in the case of loans not exceeding one fifth of salary, and so on..... to the extent that, by law, in order to be classified as usury, the interest rate on fixed rate mortgage bonds must exceed 10.8%. At which point you say to yourself: "Hang on, there's something here that's not quite right". In recent times interest rates have been particularly low, interest rates on the BOTs (Government Bonds) are sitting at 1.5 %, the banks borrow money from the European Central Bank at 1% interest, the Euribor Rate is currently at 0.3 or 0.4% and yet, according to the law, the interest rates of 25% per annum currently being charged on credit cards and deposits are not classified as usury.
At this point I will have to provide some figures, not simply because I'm a mathematician but because when discussing the issue of usury and interest rates, unfortunately one simply has to mention some figures. The current issue is as follows: many Italian savers have received notifications from certain banks. Almost all the banks have sent out letters, particularly Intesa San Paolo. This is the bank that set up Mr. Passera and Ms. Fornero as pawns in the Monti Government. Now, Intesa San Paolo has sent out a letter to its millions and millions of customers, but why you ask? Well, because the Monti Government had tried to slip in a major mistake that was bigger than all the rest, but what was this mistake? The mistake was that not only was the saver having to pay interest whenever his/her current account went into the red, but in addition to these high interest rates, he/she would also be stuck with a whole series of costs, a whole range of costs with strange names, so that the bank could profit shamelessly from proportionately unjustified amounts. Here are two examples, one of which happened to me and the other to an acquaintance: I had gone just slightly into the red on my account for just one day and the Banca del Piemonte charged me 14 cents interest of interest. This may not be much, I agree, but then, in addition to this overdraft interest, they proceeded to charge me an additional €42.30 for settlement of the overdraft.
Another example: a case of being overdrawn by €800 for one month, Banco Desio charged a total of 8 Euro in interest, that's 12% per annum or 1% per month, however, they then added on another €13.50 per day of being overdrawn, supposedly for overdraft administration fees. This amounted to 405 Euro so, 8 Euro of interest plus 405 Euro of overdraft administration fees.
These are costs that are totally unjustifiable in financial terms, but there is a programme that does the calculation and they allow you to go into overdraft just so that they can take money from you.

Troika representatives want Greece to frontload more than €1bn in 2013;  recession is expected to be worse in 2013, 5% instead of 3.8%;  tight timetable  might call for an extraordinary summit in November to approve the €31bn aid instalment for Greece; Portugal announced new taxes including an extraordinary 4% income tax raising €2bn in additional income;  Portugal's trade union announced general strike for November;  Herman van Rompuy's draft on economic union will be prepared for the October European Council, followed by a final proposal in December; Financing of the common budget most likely to come from national contributions, or a share of eurozone tax receipts; Germany is likely to react positively to van Rompuy's draft, as does the European Commission;  Holger Stelzner is predictably negative,  especially if the common budget were to be funded by a solidarity tax; Luke Baker says van Rompuy's draft is more of a wish-list prone to be hijacked by other more pressing topics;  71 banks have increased their capital base by €200bn since the end of 2011 to prepare themselves against further financial turbulence; Poland's finance minister said Poland would join the eurozone provided it can be stabilised and reformed; the Italian government is mulling to sell its participations in energy companies ENI and ENEL; France plans to dampen capital gains tax increase of the 2013 budget;  Le Monde also reports that the French government prepares a significant reduction of  labour costs of some €40bn over five years; The Finnish government is divided of whether or not to support an EU financial transaction tax; Marco Onado argues that the Liikanen' report is the first step for a new Eurozone; Mark Mazower in the FT argues that democracy is at stake in Southern Europe; Wolfgang Munchau argues that Peer Steinbruck is the least useful candidate imaginable;  Paolo Menasse in his blog on inefficiencies in the Italian tax systems; Paul Krugman lays out the economic consequences of Rajoy; Reuters reports that Spain's revenue from corporate tax has dropped by 2/3 since the start of the crisis; Growth-promoting EU programmes running out of cash; Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, meanwhile, said the Spanish government's reforms should be better explained to the public in other European countries.

Other economic policy areas need to make substantial contributions to ensure a further stabilisation of financial markets and an improvement in the outlook for growth. As regards fiscal policies, euro area countries are progressing with consolidation. It is crucial that efforts are maintained to restore sound fiscal positions, in line with the commitments under the Stability and Growth Pact and the 2012 European Semester recommendations. A rapid implementation of the fiscal compact will also play a major role in strengthening confidence in the soundness of public finances. At the same time, structural reforms are as essential as fiscal consolidation efforts and measures to improve the functioning of the financial sector. In the countries most strongly affected by the crisis, noticeable progress is being made in the correction of unit labour cost and current account developments. Decisive product and labour market reforms will further improve the competitiveness of these countries and their capacity to adjust.

Finally, it is essential to push ahead with European institution-building. The ECB welcomes the Commission proposal of 12 September 2012 for a single supervisory mechanism (SSM) involving the ECB, to be established through a Council regulation on the basis of Article 127(6) of the Treaty. The Governing Council considers an SSM to be one of the fundamental pillars of a financial union and one of the main building blocks towards a genuine Economic and Monetary Union. We will formally issue a legal opinion in which we will, in particular, take into account the following principles: a clear and robust separation between supervisory decision-making and monetary policy; appropriate accountability channels; a decentralisation of tasks within the Eurosystem; an effective supervisory framework ensuring coherent oversight of the euro area banking system; and full compatibility with the Single Market framework, including the role and prerogatives of the European Banking Authority. As the Commission proposal sets out an ambitious transition schedule towards the SSM, the ECB has started preparatory work so as to be able to implement the provisions of the Council regulation as soon as it enters into force.