Lawmakers have narrowly voted to charge outgoing Czech President Vaclav Klaus with high treason.

The upper house voted to refer the president to the constitutional court to rule on whether he had violated the constitution with a New Year amnesty.

The wide-ranging measures were controversial as they resulted in multiple high-profile corruption cases being suspended.

Mr Klaus's term as president of the country is due to end on Thursday.

Thirty-eight senators in the 81-seat house, controlled by the left-wing opposition, voted to impeach the president, with 30 voting against. Only the Senate has such power in the Czech legal system.

The worst punishment he faces is the loss of his presidential job, a role the 71-year-old must relinquish later this week having served two terms in office.

Germany will veto Romania and Bulgaria's bid to join the border-free Schengen area at a meeting of interior ministers in Brussels on Thursday (7 March), due to insufficient progress against corruption.

"If Romania and Bulgaria insist on having a vote, their push will fail because of a German veto. The idea to gradually open up, meaning air and sea borders first, is also off the table," German interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told Der Spiegel magazine in an interview published on Monday.

Romania and Bulgaria, which joined the EU in 2007, initially hoped to become members of the passport-free zone in 2011, but they ran into a joint Franco-German veto.

Germany and France later agreed to a phased-in membership, opening up airports and sea ports and keeping the land borders closed until more progress is made in fighting graft and organised crime.

Latvia pegged its currency to the euro after joining the European Union in 2004. It and Lithuania, which pegged in 2002, stuck with the links through two years of turmoil after 2008 which saw their economies shrink by up to a fifth.

Both have recovered strongly - in Latvia's case helped by an EU and IMF bailout in 2009 - and have been on track to seal membership of the 17-member club after neighbouring Estonia joined successfully in 2011.

Small and limber economies, Latvia and Lithuania should slide more easily into the currency bloc than larger states like Poland and the Czech Republic and have remained keener on joining throughout the banking and debt crises.

Many Latvians' mortgage loans are in euros meaning a switch would decrease currency risk and most see the currency as a lesser long-term risk than the lat. They are also keen to entrench their links with western Europe to keep former imperial master Russia at arms length.

Only a few weeks ago, they hardly would have thought it was possible. But now here they are; their first public appearance following their surprise success in the Italian general election. In a hotel in Rome, not far from the Piazza San Giovanni, eight of the 162 newly elected parliamentary representatives of Movimento 5 Stelle (the Five Star Movement, or M5S) are squinting into the spotlights and speaking softly -- and what they are saying actually sounds reasonable.

They are talking about empowering Italians and giving people more of a say in political decisions -- and they want to know how their tax money is being spent. Grassroots politics is the goal. Their efforts remain somewhat clumsy, but they are sincere.

This group includes a male nurse, an IT specialist and a single mother -- all in their 30s or 40s with good educations and no previous political experience. Soon, they will enter the newly constituted parliament, which will be younger, have more women and, on the whole, be best less politically experienced than any other in Italian history. M5S emerged as the strongest single party in the lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies, and the second strongest party in the upper house, the Senate. The party garnered nearly one-third of its votes in Sicily. The "Grillini," as the followers of former comedian Beppe Grillo are called, are the true miracle of this otherwise so chaotic election.

They are not clowns, but rather sincere young people who see themselves as a mouthpiece for everyday Italian citizens. These fledgling politicians do not rant and rave like Grillo, the founder of their movement.

Cardinals from around the world gathered Monday inside the Vatican for their first round of meetings before the conclave to elect the next pope, amid scandals inside and out of the Vatican and the continued reverberations of Benedict XVI's decision to retire.

Cardinals were treated like rock stars as they entered the Vatican on Monday morning, with television crews swarming around the red-capped churchmen and their handlers pushing their way through the crowds.

"A Latin American Pope is possible, everything is possible!" said Portuguese Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins as he entered.

The core agenda item is to set the date for the conclave and set in place procedures to prepare for it, including closing the Sistine Chapel to visitors and getting the Vatican hotel cleared out and de-bugged, lest anyone try to listen in on the secret conversations of the cardinals.

The elderly man who sold me my apartment was clear about Spain's King Juan Carlos. "He is a traitor," he said.

That was more than a decade ago, and it was a shocking - almost blasphemous - thing to say. Only diehard republicans and even harder-headed former Francoists criticised the monarch. Heliodoro was one of the latter, an unreconstructed extremist who never forgave Juan Carlos for using the powers he received from General Francisco Franco in 1975 to usher in democracy. Few would have agreed.

These days, however, Madrid seethes with discontented talk about the monarchy. The upset is proportional to the awed respect once accorded by almost everyone, including journalists who decided Juan Carlos was untouchable after he stopped a coup when civil guardsmen stormed the parliament in 1981.

As the 75-year-old monarch lies in a hospital bed this week, recovering from his fourth operation in 10 months, there is talk of both abdication and of controlling his use of taxpayers' money. The king is not as weak in mind or body as Pope Benedict, but in Madrid there is also a feeling that an old institution needs shaking up - possibly with a new face.

The relationship between Hungary's government and Constitutional Court has been uneasy. The Court recently turned down several government moves, and now the government may take revenge, a Princeton University professor said.

Hungary threw out its old constitution soon after the governing Fidesz party came into power in 2010. A new constitution went into effect at the start of this year, much criticized by European Union institutions and civil liberty groups.

It is about to be amended for the fourth time in the coming weeks. Kim Lane Scheppele, director of Princeton University's Law and Public Affairs program, said the government through this change seeks to take revenge "for various defeats it has suffered."

Che non comprende l'ideologia del fascismo, che prima che degenerasse aveva una dimensione nazionale di comunità attinta a piene mani dal socialismo, un altissimo senso dello stato e la tutela della famiglia.

The House of Lords voted on Monday to outlaw discrimination against people on the basis of their caste.

A group of internationally renowned economists are aligning themselves with Beppe Grillo's anti euro movement; the coordinator of the group is Mauro Gallegati; Pier Luigi Bersani has set another ultimatum to Grillo, calling on him to support a minority government, or face new elections; Grillo says No, but says he is open to a technical government, but without involvement of the traditional parties; Italian retail sales fell 10% on 2012 and 35% on 2011, according to Confcommercio; German newspapers report that the Bundesbank wants the ECB out of the troika because its put the ECB under political pressure; Suddeutsche says this is very unlikely to happen; the Bundesbank says the new governing board structures of the single supervisory mechanism are so convoluted that they are ineffective; Spanish police believes that Barcenas kept 80% of kickbacks he obtained in the PP's name; after a recent disastrous press conference, the PP has a completely new idea: not to say anything anymore about the affair; Spain's chief prosecutor is seeking to remove the chief prosecutor of Catalonia; Spain's bank restructuring fund FROB has failed to auction off Catalunya Caixa; the eurogroup agreed a loan extension for Ireland and Portugal; but Germany and the Netherland remain inflexible on the question of direct bank recapitalisation; tax shortfalls, unemployment and pending court decisions threaten to derail the Portuguese budget target; the troika and Greece are running into a wall over the agreement to reduce the number of public sector workers by 25,000; Cyprus has agreed to an external bank audit; German car sales plunge 10% yoy; a consensus is emerging in the coalition in support of a widening of minimum wages; Latvia, meanwhile, has applied to become the 18th member state of the eurozone.

The variety of potato at the root of the Great Famine will be widely available in Ireland for the first time in almost 170 years from next week after being re-cultivated by an Antrim potato farmer with a keen interest in the history of the humble spud.