The largest survey to date of ethnic minorities living in Europe has found that the majority experience racism and discrimination on a day-to-day basis, with Roma and Africans feeling especially vulnerable. 

The survey of 23,500 people revealed that discrimination, harassment and racially motivated violence were far more widespread than recorded in official statistics.

"The survey reveals how large the 'dark figure' of racist crime and discrimination really is in the EU. Official racism figures only show the tip of the iceberg," agency director Morten Kjaerum said.

The report by the EU's agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) said that around 55 percent of minority residents and migrants felt ethnically inspired bias was widespread. But of the 12 percent who reported witnessing a racist crime in the past 12 months, 80 percent did not go to the authorities about it, reflecting the belief that little could be done to tackle the problem, Kjaerum said.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission has conceded that its current fishing policy is not working and instead has resulted in alarming levels of overfishing.

In response, it says swingeing cuts are needed to Europe's fishing fleet via the next reform of the Common Fisheries Policy, scheduled for 2012.

Almost 90 percent of EU fish stocks are overfished, the commission says

In a position paper adopted on Wednesday (22 April), the commission reports that 88 percent of the bloc's fish stocks are overfished, with 30 percent of stocks "outside safe biological limits"

"Most of our problems stem from overcapacity," said fisheries commissioner Joe Borg.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Parliament on Thursday (23 April) decided to delay until November approval of the Council of the European Union's accounts for 2007, in a bid to gain more financial scrutiny over the bloc's main decision maker.

MEPs hope to gain momentum ahead of the June elections and scrap a "gentlemen's agreement" dating back to 1970, according to which the parliament does not look into the books of the Council, which are checked by the Court of Auditors and national experts.

Inside the Council building in Brussels during a meeting of foreign ministers

"That was 39 years ago, when the EU wasn't even called like that, with six member states, a non-elected parliament and way before security and defence policy. To think that it can be prolonged forever is ridiculous," said Danish MEP Soren Bo Sondergaard, who was the parliament's rapporteur for the 2007 EU accounts.

All EU institutions received a green light regarding the way they spent their budget in 2007, except for the Council, an administrative body in charge of organising EU summits, ministerial meetings, ambassadors and expert groups on various topics ranging from fisheries to security and defence.

US semiconductor manufacturer Freescale intends to close its French plant, which employs some 1,700 people, by the end of 2011. The group also plans to shut down one of its Japanese plants, in an effort to remain "competitive".

AFP - US semiconductor manufacturer Freescale announced on Wednesday that it was closing plants in France and Japan.
  
The Austin, Texas-based Freescale said that "in order to remain competitive and maintain an efficient manufacturing footprint" it was closing facilities in Toulouse, France, and another in Sendai, Japan, by the end of 2011.

Turkey and Armenia have said they have agreed on a "framework" to normalise their bilateral ties, putting decades of strained relations behind them.

A statement by their foreign ministers said they had "achieved tangible progress and mutual understanding".

But it did not say how the neighbours would resolve their dispute over the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915.

Turkey has condemned widespread efforts to have them defined as genocide.

Italy's cabinet has backed plans by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to move this summer's G8 summit to the earthquake-struck town of L'Aquila.

Other G8 member states would need to back the move.

Italy had previously planned to hold the 8-10 July summit on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.

An earthquake on 6 April devastated L'Aquila and the surrounding area, leaving 295 people dead and at least 50,000 homeless.

The decision to back the summit move was made at a cabinet meeting held in L'Aquila.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Progress on upgrading EU-Israel relations will remain frozen until Israel takes steps to repair the peace process with Palestinians, the European Commission said on Thursday (23 April).

"We do not believe the time is right to go beyond the current level of relations," external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said in Brussels during an annual stock-taking of ties with its neighbours.

Gaza after Operation Cast Lead: The strip remains closed to reconstruction

"We expect a clear commitment from the new [Israeli] government to pursue negotiations with the Palestinians. We expect a stop of all activities undermining our objective to a two-state solution - and this includes in particular settlement expansion, which is continuing on daily basis."

"The ball is now in the court of Israel."

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Parliament has approved stricter rules on timber sold in the European Union in order to take on illegal logging - one of the major causes of deforestation.

According to the rules, all operators in the timber supply chain - from lumberjack to lumber yard - must prove the legality of their timber.

Deforestation causes almost a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions

Those that are found to be supplying illegal timber illegal timber will be slapped with fines - imposed at the EU member state level - that reflect the degree of environmental and economic damage.

The penalties must represent at least five times the value of the timber products obtained by committing a serious infringement and will go up in the event of repeat infringements.

I'm publishing an appeal to the Internet from Luigi de Magistris.

Text:

"Well, I've been inspired by Beppe Grillo. This is a political press release that I am issuing to the Web.
Men and women of the Web, let us all unite! I believe that it is the moment to get committed, each one of us with our own history, to change this country.
What I have been experiencing in the last few days and the last few hours is very important. There is the feeling of something absolutely vital that could happen, there is an unbiased role to be played by everyone. Each one of us can feel we can play an essential part in this political journey that has to change this country. It has to change from every point of view. In an apparent act of preservation that is the decisive defence of the Constitution, but above all it has to change in new ways, a new way of doing politics in a sector that up until now, has been characterised by dishonest practices and baseness.
Thus, first and foremost an economic model that has to be completely different, compatible with the environment and able to produce an economy that is completely different from that done in recent decades, that has been founded almost exclusively on oil, thus conditioning whole generations. On this point, the young people can be fundamental. Why am I making this appeal? I am making this appeal because I believe that each one of us, the independent candidates in this election competition within "Italia dei Valori", needs suggestions, ideas, and the enthusiasm of everyone.
It is an appeal not just for confrontation, but also for union. I believe that it is the moment for mobilisation in the whole of Italy, to form a network of people just like has been done on the Internet. We need to do it also on the streets, with the people, with the public, in such a way that by June we are all aware that we have lent a hand for the start of a journey that I feel is really revolutionary. Thank you."

Poor well-meaning ideas. They come out of the EU meeting room bright, shiny and swollen with good intentions. A few days, or hours even, in the public eye and their practical manifestations are misinterpreted, derided, hijacked by cynicism and even peed on (yes literally.)

The European Parliament's pre-election campaign with its giant posters, TV spots and roadshows has had several unplanned (I assume) confrontations with the great EU public.

A solution appears to be emerging in the bid to find a major investor for beleaguered German carmaker Opel. SPIEGEL has learned that Italian automaker Fiat is planning to buy shares in the GM subsidiary. A letter of intent is expected to be signed next week. However, workers have said they would resist the deal.

Fiat is soon expected to take over General Motors' European operations. Information obtained by SPIEGEL from sources familiar with the negotiations say that Fiat will sign a letter of intent on Tuesday. Afterwards, the Italian carmaker would obtain a majority stake in the troubled German auto manufacturer Opel.

Good news from six US banks has raised hopes that an end to the financial crisis might be in sight. But German experts think the euphoria is wishful thinking. As they see it, things are going to get worse soon -- and banks will be forced to make billions more in write-downs.

The news spreads like wildfire and hope starts to bloom. One after the other, six US banks -- including the largest, Bank of America -- have submitted performance figures for the first quarter of 2009 that are far better than experts had predicted.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Credit-rating agencies operating in the European Union are to be subject to greater oversight in the future under radical new rules agreed by MEPs in Strasbourg on Thursday (23 April).

Under the new legislation, which was steered through the European parliament by French centre-right MEP Jean-Paul Gauzes and backed by a large majority of parliamentarians, credit-rating agencies will soon face mandatory registration and greater supervision.

Standard and Poor's headquarters

Debating the document a day earlier with other MEPs, Mr Gauzes said the compromise text agreed with member states was "exemplary legislation" that "could be the basis for an international agreement."

Internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy reacted to the vote by saying: "We expect the conduct of the credit rating agencies to be significantly improved as a result of this regulation, with clear benefits to the integrity and stability of the financial markets."

One reason for the rise in defaults is that this is a severe recession. But it is not the principal one. Junk, circa 2009, is the worst junk ever.

-Skip-

The default rate on leveraged loans and speculative grade bonds is rising rapidly. "We expect the default rate to get to the range of 14 percent by the end of the year," said Kenneth Emery, a senior vice president of Moody's. That compares to peak default rates of 10 to 12 percent during the last two recessions, in 1991 and 2001.

That could turn out to be an optimistic forecast. Edward I. Altman, a finance professor at New York University, says he thinks the rate will probably be in the range of 13 to 15 percent, but could go as high as 19 percent this year. If the recession continues into 2010, he fears that year could see a comparable default rate.

Martin S. Fridson, a veteran high-yield analyst who now runs his own research firm, FridsonVision, looked back at the 1991 default rates for various quality high-yield bonds. Since there are many more low-quality bonds now, he says equivalent default rates would produce an overall rate of 24 percent -- twice the old peak.

California, always a place of fresh ideas, has a big one for Uncle Sam: Treasurer Bill Lockyer wants a federal guarantee on the massive short-term borrowing the cash-strapped state must undertake this summer.  Just as with a federally insured bank savings certificate, a U.S. backstop of California's debt would assure investors that their money was completely safe.  In theory, that would mean the state could get away with paying a much lower interest rate on the debt -- saving California taxpayers a bundle.

Lockyer doesn't just want a federal guarantee for California's IOUs. He thinks the U.S. should do the same for all states, counties, cities and other municipal entities that need help getting through the recession.  This is exactly what it sounds like: a call for a major expansion of the federal bailout of the nation's financial system -- but this time ostensibly to buttress Main Street, not Wall Street.

The populist argument is a slam-dunk. If the government can save Citigroup and American International Group, why can't it extend a hand to California?  In terms of who's truly deserving of help, "We think California taxpayers stack up pretty well compared with Wall Street firms," said Tom Dresslar, Lockyer's spokesman.

The treasurer has an ally in Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Frank will hold a hearing May 5 as a prelude to drafting legislation that could create a federal insurance program for municipal debt.

Regulation and supervision of banks in the EU is a mess; liquidity and solvency support of banks in the Euro Area is a mess.  Lender-of-last resort operations in the Euro Area need fiscal backing for the national central bank participating in it, including a full indemnity by the national treasury involved.  This is not a problem as long as the national identity of the bank is clear.  Whenever this in not the case, disaster can strike.

...

Let me quote from the Commission's website: "The Commission's policies in the field of regulation of banks and financial conglomerates contribute to the relevant sections of the financial services action plan. These policies are based on the principles of mutual recognition and the "single passport", a system which allows financial services operators legally established in one Member State to establish/provide their services in the other Member States without further authorisation requirements." This means that foreign branches of a bank are regulated and supervised by the home country (parent bank country) regulator/supervisor.  This brought us the Icesave disaster where UK, Dutch and German branches of Landsbanki raised billions in deposits in these countries without any effective regulation or supervision from the home country (Icelandic) regulator/supervisor.   It is highly unlikely that these branches would have been able to operate in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany had they been subsidiaries, and therefore regulated and supervised by the host country supervisor-regulator.

...

But though I favour more Europe, I recognise that we are currently in an unsustainable halfway house.  Without deeper integration, we will get less Europe. Unless we integrate banking regulation and supervision and create a fiscal Europe adequate for the task of backing up crossborder banking (and the ECB/Eurosystem), we will witness the repatriation of crossborder banking and the re-creation of 27 national banking markets.

Hillary Clinton today vigorously defended President Obama's recent overtures to Iran, insisting that the US would be in a better position to organise "crippling" international sanctions should diplomacy fail.

Giving her first congressional testimony on US foreign policy since becoming Secretary of State, Mrs Clinton said stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon was one of the Obama administration's highest priorities.

"We actually believe that by following the diplomatic path we are on, we gain credibility and influence with a number of nations who would have to participate in order to make the sanctions regime as tight and as crippling as we would want it to be," Mrs Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

"We know the imperative of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons," she added. "After years during which the United States basically sat on the sidelines, we are now a full partner" in international talks with Iran.

ISLAMABAD -- Dozens of militants armed with guns and gasoline bombs attacked a truck terminal in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday and burned five tanker trucks carrying fuel to NATO troops in Afghanistan, police said.

NATO and U.S. commanders are seeking alternative transport routes into landlocked Afghanistan amid mounting assaults on the critical main supply line through Pakistan.

Militants attacked the truck depot near the city of Peshawar before dawn, hurling gasoline bombs which set fire to the five tankers, said Abdul Khan, a local police official.

Security guards fled and the assailants made their escape before police arrived, Khan said. Several truckers drove their vehicles out of the terminal to save them from the flames, which were later doused by firefighters, he said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued an appeal for funds to help Somalia as a donors' conference got underway in Brussels. The subject of piracy threatened to dominate proceedings. 

As international donors gathered at a conference to help bring stability to Somalia, it seemed  rampant piracy in busy shipping lanes off the Somali coast  - a subject that has topped international news bulletins for months - was likely to dominate the talks.

The one-day conference in Brussels aims to raise at least 128 million euros ($166 million) to finance African peacekeepers and support Somalia's fledgling police and security forces.

But European Commission President Jose Manuel Barrosso said ahead of the talks that he was worried that the piracy problem might divert resources in the lawless nation.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice verbally OK'd the CIA's request to subject alleged al-Qaida terrorist Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002, a decision memorialized a few days later in a secret memo that the Obama administration declassified last week.

Rice's role was detailed in a narrative released Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee. It provides the most detailed timeline yet for how the CIA's harsh interrogation program was conceived and approved at the highest levels in the Bush White House.

The new timeline shows that Rice played a greater role than she admitted last fall in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

BAGHDAD -- Two massive suicide attacks killed at least 50 people and possibly dozens more Thursday in Iraq.

The first explosion took place in Baghdad around 12:30 p.m. and killed at least five people, Iraqi police said.

Witnesses estimated that many more died, however. They said that the bomber blew herself up near a crowd of humanitarian workers who were delivering aid.

In the second attack, a bomber wearing an explosives vest detonated in a crowded restaurant in the southern province of Diyala, killing at least 45 people and wounding scores more, police said.

The financial crisis in the US has triggered a social crisis of historic dimensions. Soup kitchens are suddenly in great demand and tent cities are popping up in the shadow of glistening office towers. Even drug dealers are feeling the pinch.

Business is poor in the New York banking district around Wall Street these days, even for drug dealers. In the good old days, they used to supply America's moneyed elite with cocaine and crack. But now, with the good times gone, they spend their days in the Bowery Mission, a homeless shelter with a dining hall and a chapel.

Alvin, 47, is one of them. His customers are gone, as is the money he earned during better times. And when another dealer higher up the food chain decided he was entitled to a bigger cut of the profits, things became too dicey for Alvin. "I'm afraid," he says.

BANGALORE - United States-based rating firm Standard & Poor's downgraded its outlook for India's sovereign debt from stable to negative on February 24, while retaining the country's BBB- rating - the lowest investment grade. In essence, India's sovereign debt is just a step away from being declared junk. Not only does that indicate that the economy is in a perilous state - it drives up the cost of borrowing.

...the ratings given to the East European countries. As we all know, this region has the ability to have a severe impact on even the developed European economies. The S&P rating column shows that only one East European country, Latvia, had a BBB- rating similar to that of India. All others have higher rating than that of India, at times substantially higher.

Yet consider that fact that Hungary, Ukraine and Romania have already gone to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout. In contrast, India is talking of making contributions to the IMF's coffers to finance these bailouts.

India is not unique case with discrimination at the hands of dodgy Wall Street rating firms. If you don't know Russia since the war with Georgia has had junk rating for its bonds despite having 3rd biggest reserves in the world after China and Japan. At the same time bancrupt UK and US have triple A rating as well as numerous virtually bancrupt Western financial institutions. No need to say that rating firms have vested interests.

Tony Blair has said he does not regret leading Britain to war in Iraq when he was Prime Minister and has called on the world to take on and defeat Islamic extremists. He believes that, without intervention, the problem will continue to grow in countries such as Afghanistan.

He called for a battle to be waged against militant Islam similar to that fought against revolutionary communism.

Was Iraq Islamic? Was Saddam a communist?

WTF is this incoherent wobbling balloon of Christian bile talking about?

Look, I get it, "real America." After an eight-year run of controlling the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, this latest election has you feeling like a rejected husband. You've come home to find your things out on the front lawn -- or at least more things than you usually keep out on the front lawn. You're not ready to let go, but the country you love is moving on. And now you want to call it a whore and key its car.

That's what you are, the bitter divorced guy whose country has left him -- obsessing over it, haranguing it, blubbering one minute about how much you love it and vowing the next that if you cannot have it, nobody will.

But it's been almost 100 days, and your country is not coming back to you. She's found somebody new. And it's a black guy.

At the heart of both the Japanese and Chinese systems is a commonsense observation: if you give workers better tools and better know-how, they will produce more. Much of the peculiar structuring of these economies is geared to building up capital investment and know-how at a far faster rate than can be achieved under classic free-market conditions. A basic policy is to suppress consumption and thereby to boost the savings rate. The resulting huge flows of capital are then channelled via state controlled banks towards those corporations deemed most likely to  make  effective use of the money in boosting productivity.

How is consumption suppressed? The most obvious method is via tight controls on consumer credit. Less obviously the economy is regulated to make it physically difficult for consumers to consume (for instance, by severely limiting access to imported luxuries and by tightly restricting the supply of housing space). Sometimes the resulting savings arise in the hands of consumers. In  many cases, however, they accrue to corporations in the form of super-high retained profits. Such profits are then used to build national muscle in targeted industries. A typical arrangement is that cartels keep consumer prices high, thereby allowing  member firms to earn the necessary high returns to keep investing at a fast pace in the export side of their business. Cartels are generally given free rein provided only that they serve the national goal of boosting productivity. Although Western theorists argue that cartels make for slack management and general inefficiency,  both China and even more so Japan have shown that such problems can be minimized, with the result that on balance East Asian-style cartels play a strongly positive role in growth.   

One of the most noticeable aspects of economic policy in both China and Japan is the degree to which manufacturing is emphasized. This is not an accident. Manufacturing lends itself to a strategy of ever increasing capital intensity. Moreover valuable know-how acquired in manufacturing is generally easier to keep secret than know-how in service industries. Perhaps most important of all, manufactured goods  generally need less adaptation for different cultures around the world and thus are  much more widely exportable than services.

A molecule that until now existed only in theory has finally been made.

Known as a Rydberg molecule, it is formed through an elusive and extremely weak chemical bond between two atoms.

The new type of bonding, reported in Nature, occurs because one of the two atoms in the molecule has an electron very far from its nucleus or centre.

It reinforces fundamental quantum theories, developed by Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, about how electrons behave and interact.

It might not look like much, but this image represents one of the most distant objects astronomers have ever seen, 12.9 billion light years away.

It is a "Lyman-alpha blob" and is 55,000 light years across - as large as present-day galaxies.

Though younger such blobs have been found, "Himiko" confounds the idea that such large objects grew more recently by the merger of smaller ones.

The research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Rarely has Senator Fritz Hollings used his renowned wit to more devastating effect than when he was interviewed in 1990 on the ABC program, This Week with David Brinkley. Some weeks earlier he had reportedly bought a bargain-priced Korean-made suit on a field trip to Seoul. Given his role as a leading critic of Korean dumping in the American textile market, the alleged purchase was the sort of trivia that passed for news in some quarters. Although Hollings had arrived at the ABC studio expecting to talk about the federal government's worsening budget deficits, the interviewer Sam Donaldson lost no time in getting to the nub of the matter: whether or not Hollings was at that moment wearing the notorious suit.

"Senator," Donaldson said, "you're from the great textile-producing state of South Carolina. Is it true you have a Korean tailor." Before Hollings could respond, Donaldson pressed on: "Let's see the label in there. What is the label in there?"

"I bought it," Hollings replied, "the same place right down the street where, if you want to personalize this thing, you got that wig, Sam."

The entire studio erupted. The blustery -- and bewigged -- Donaldson had had, if not his head handed to him, at least his tonsorial codpiece. But he was to exact a terrible revenge. Although Hollings had previously been a favorite on the program, Donaldson made sure that the courtly Southern Senator (and a man who still sports a full head of hair -- all evidently securely attached to its owner) was never invited back. Hollings had insulted a vain and not overly intelligent member of the new aristocracy of Big Foot media interviewers and for punishment he would be cast into outer darkness.

Jack Dorsey , co-founder of Twitter microblogging network, is on a mission to save Iraq.

And he is not alone. Mr Dorsey is joined on a trip to Baghdad by executives from other web powerhouses, such as YouTube and Google.

Their trip to the war zone, sponsored by the US government, hopes to highlight the high-tech horizons in a place that still can't guarantee round-the-clock electricity and whose internet service is lumbering at best.

The lake in Webster, Massachusetts - known as Webster Lake for short - was always going to be a challenge for sign writers.

But after researching historical spelling combinations, the local newspaper the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester said local Chamber of Commerce officials agreed that some signs at the lake were wrong.

His PC, mainboard dies. Use other PC in family, it decides it won't boot. (Just fixed it, the mainboard CR 2032 battery had part-lifted out of its socket... after he used the machine yesterday).

Huge amounts of grass growing in this wet spring after a wet winter. He starts in with the strimmer (yes, the strimmer...) and do fifteen square metres before it dies. It seems a widget in the petrol tank jumped out of where it should be. He must now fish around in the tank to get it back into place.

Afew declines to tell us about the three hours learning to take apart, descale and reassemble the taps and associated mechanisms of a bathroom washbasin that flooded the place. Or the septic tank overflow yesterday afternoon fuck-up and two hours dismantling and cleaning a pump to get the whatever flowing again.

Now he can't get into ET to leave one or two more comments.

In a rare display of conspiranoia and faith in astrology, Afew "want[s] to know who is doing this. Or what the stars say."

His final comment to this reporter was "Aaaargh."

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith

Eighty eight years of the day Trotsky directed the suppression of the anarchist uprising in Krondstadt, a group of bandits scaled the walls of his former house in Mexico City during the late hours at night. We broke the lock on his mausoleum and we expropriate the content inside it: a silver large vase that bears the inscription of his name, wrapped in the red scarf that he carried around the neck, containing the ashes of the corpse inside. We replace with care the lock in the monument with a reproduction that was similar in the appearance and escaped into the night.