EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Undeterred by the eurozone turmoil and the borders debate, Serbian foreign minister Vuk Jeremic hopes to start EU membership talks as soon as possible, but warns that his country will "never" recognise the independence of Kosovo.

"EU accession is a strategic choice for Serbia, pursued by no matter what government is in place," Jeremic told this website in a video interview on the margins of the opening of a representation in Brussels for the Serbian city of Nis.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU foreign relations chief Catherine Ashton has annoyed some member states by taking part in a secretive meeting about the Middle East peace process.

Luxembourg's openly pro-Palestinian foreign minister Jean Asselborn hosted the informal dinner about the Arab-Israeli conflict at the Senningen castle in the grand duchy on Sunday (19 June), on the eve of an EU foreign ministers' meeting.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - On the eve of a two-day summit covering migration issues as well as the Greek crisis, the EU's main institutions have agreed to give extra powers to the bloc's border agency Frontex on human trafficking and other cross-border crimes.

The deal reached on Wednesday (22 June) by EU governments, the European Parliament and the European Commission will allow Frontex to buy or lease its own equipment - such as helicopters and terrain vehicles, so as to make it less dependant on assets lent by member states.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The Netherlands on Wednesday (22 June) became the first EU member state to enshrine in law the concept of net neutrality, the idea that there should be no hierarchy of information or services in the internet.

The measure, passed by a large majority in the lower house and expected to pass without hitch through the senate, will prevent Dutch mobile telephone operators from blocking or charging consumers more for using internet-based communications services.

Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders has been acquitted of charges that he offended and incited hatred against Muslims and groups of non-Western origin.

A court in Amsterdam reached the decision on Thursday after a trial that saw many starts and stops due to legal wrangling.

The politician claimed he was being persecuted for his political views. In the past, he had likened Islam to fascism and made comparisons between the Muslim holy book, the Koran, and Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf".

Romania's legal system has failed to prevent a pattern of forced evictions for Roma, leaving them in sub-standard housing next to garbage dumps and sewage plants, according to a report published by Amnesty International on Thursday.

"The human right to adequate housing is not recognized or adequately protected in Romanian law," Amnesty researcher Barbora Cernusakova told a press conference in Bucharest. "This can affect every citizen, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized ones."

The report, entitled "Mind the Legal Gap: Roma and the Right to Housing in Romania," cites a number of cases in recent years in which Roma families were forced out of their homes and sent to "temporary" housing units on the margins of society, or left homeless.

Leaders of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) have made public a draft statement that calls for the abolition of Germany's three-tier high school system, a significant change of course in the party's educational policy and federalist ideology.

The 30-page draft is to be approved by party leaders on June 27 and debated at the party's convention in Leipzig in November.

"We currently have too many school forms that confuse parents, pupils and teachers alike," the draft reads. "That is why we are calling for a reduction in school forms and the implementation of a two-way model in all states."

Belarusian police detained at least 25 people on Wednesday evening in a crackdown on opposition demonstrators gathered in the capital, Minsk.

Officers moved after up to 1,000 people gathered on Independence Prospect, a major thoroughfare, in response to calls on social networking websites for protests against the regime of President Alexander Lukashenko.

Demonstrators were rounded up and placed on police buses, with the news agency Reuters reporting scores of arrests.

AFP - Hundreds of displaced Syrians poured into Turkey on Thursday after Syrian troops backed by tanks approached their makeshift camps along the border, an AFP journalist reported.

Several hundred people broke through the barbed wire marking the frontier between the two countries and were seen advancing into Turkish territory on a road used by Turkish border guards, a few kilometres from the Turkish village of Guvecci.

Troika forces a deal on the new Greek finance minister to plug a €3.8bn hole in the austerity package; new measures include tax on businesses and the self-employed, and a reduction in the tax-free threshold for incomes; Papandreou told the Slovakian PM that he now had doubts whether the package would pass in the Greek parliament; the leader of the Greek opposition continues to oppose the tax package; EU leaders give a political pledge for a new Greek loan programme, with a voluntary private sector contribution - and specifics left to finance ministers; markets push Greek CDS to new highs, and Spanish and Italian spreads also increase significantly; leaders will discuss the nomination of Mario Draghi today;Les Echos speculates whether Draghi might not become Italian PM instead;a French senator has raised the issue whether the help for Greece could affect French public finances; ESMA threatens to impose European regulation on US rating agencies; Germany and China will hold regular governments meetings from now on; Philip Stephens argues that the deep origin of the eurozone debt crisis is the political fragmentation of the EU; the Irish finance minister, meanwhile, is considering selling T-shirts with the imprint: Ireland is not Greece.

Executed with Northern European creativity, charm, flexibility and humility and Mediterranean organisation, leadership diligence and appetite for hard work, the European rescue plan - "the grand compact" - is failing.

Racist.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - As EU leaders ready themselves to gather in Brussels amid perhaps the EU's worst existential crisis, fresh details of frustration at the new Greek finance minister have emerged.

The summit was originally to focus on the issue of migration amid unrest in north Africa and the Middle East, but all eyes are on Greece and the wider eurozone crisis even though the Athens drama is not officially on the schedule.

Heads of the 27 European Union states meet in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, with plans for a second emergency loan package for Greece at the top of the agenda.

Before the meeting, German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the Greek parliament's vote of confidence in Prime Minister George Papandreou, but said budget pruning is "an important precondition" for the aid.

In an address to a parliamentary committee, the chancellor said eurozone nations offering help to Greece wanted the Mediterranean country's conservative opposition to rally behind Papandreou and support the budget cuts.

"But that is looking harder to achieve than in Portugal's case," she said, referring to bipartisan support for budget cuts in Lisbon.

Some five weeks ago, it looked as if Saab might make it. The Dutch-owned company Swedish Automobile that owns Saab, and formerly operated under the name Spyker, had secured funding from China's largest publicly traded car distributor, Pang Da.

Pang Da said it would provide 45 million euros ($63 million) to Saab so it could resume manufacturing for export to China, and pay another 65 million euros for a 24 percent equity stake in Saab. Saab resumed production which had been idle since the beginning of April.

European lawmakers on Thursday endorsed Italian central bank governor Mario Draghi as the next president of the European Central Bank, hours before the start of a two-day European Union summit at which he was to receive final approval for the job.

The 63-year-old banker, who last year fought against the 110-billion-euro ($157 billion) emergency loan package for Greece, is expected to take over the ECB post from Jean-Claude Trichet on November 1.

Draghi and his supporters had to convince skeptics in the bloc that he was fit for the job, despite coming from a country now seen as one of the financial problem children of the EU.

The Paris International Airshow was dominated this week by the Airbus A320neo, the upgraded, more fuel-efficient medium-haul workhorse which appeared to get the better of Boeing's venerable 737 series, the world's biggest-selling plane.

The medium-haul market is the most important segment of the aircraft industry, and Boeing estimates it will likely account for nearly half of all commercial airplane sales over the next 20 years.

But it is Airbus that is currently infringing on Boeing's home market.

The European planemaker celebrated the best week of sales in aviation history on Thursday, boasting of 730 orders for jets worth 50 billion euros ($ 72 billion) at the Paris International Airshow.

AFP - French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde on Wednesday took her campaign to lead the International Monetary Fund directly to the IMF officials who will choose between her and her Mexican rival.

Lagarde is up against Mexican central bank chief Agustin Carstens, who has been billed as the candidate of the world's developing economies, which have never before been represented in the position of IMF managing director.

(Reuters) - Investors have been critical of a proposal by the deputy prime minister to give every voter shares in the country's state-owned banks, saying the plan could be counter-productive and impractical.

Members of the public also gave a mixed reaction to the proposal while the British Bankers Association only said that the idea of giving the public the opportunity to get some shares when the banks are re-privatised had "real merit."

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who heads the coalition government's junior Liberal Democrat party, said he wanted to create a "people's banking system."

He said he had written to Chancellor George Osborne and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, asking them to look into introducing a "mass share-ownership scheme" as part of the privatisation of bailed out lenders Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds.

However, fund managers were sceptical that Clegg's idea would work in practice.

World stock markets suffered another bout of heavy losses on Thursday, driven down by fears over the eurozone debt crisis and fresh evidence that global economic growth is faltering.

A flood of poor economic news from the US, China, the UK and the eurozone helped to push shares down sharply, and send the euro to record lows. The oil price also slumped, wiping more than $8 off the cost of a barrel of Brent crude at one point, as extra supplies were released in an effort to prevent the world economy stagnating.

NHK has learned that the International Energy Agency is finalizing talks to release emergency oil reserves of its oil-consuming member nations to help stabilize crude oil prices.

The autonomous organization of 28 major oil consuming countries, including Japan and the United States, is said to be close to securing agreement for the coordinated operation.

The release operation, the first of its kind since 2005, is being planned ahead of an expected rise in gasoline use in the northern hemisphere during the summer holiday season.

We are not all in this together. The UK economy is flat, the US is weak and the Greek debt crisis, according to some commentators, is threatening another Lehman Brothers-style meltdown. But a new report shows the world's wealthiest people are getting more prosperous - and more numerous - by the day.

The globe's richest have now recouped the losses they suffered after the 2008 banking crisis. They are richer than ever, and there are more of them - nearly 11 million - than before the recession struck.

In the world of the well-heeled, the rich are referred to as "high net worth individuals" (HNWIs) and defined as people who have more than $1m (£620,000) of free cash.

According to the annual world wealth report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, the wealth of HNWIs around the world reached $42.7tn (£26.5tn) in 2010, rising nearly 10% in a year and surpassing the peak of $40.7tn reached in 2007, even as austerity budgets were implemented by many governments in the developed world.

The surplus recycling problem has been a permanent feature of the eurozone from its very inception. Its nature is simple: In every currency union there will always co-exist regions (or member-states) that are permanently in surplus with the rest and others that will be deficit regions. Given that the deficit regions cannot devalue as a means of keeping their deficits in check, some mechanism must exist by which the surpluses are recycled from the surplus regions and into the deficit regions not as fiscal transfers but as productive investments that lessen the divergence and help with cohesion. The eurozone has always lacked such a surplus recycling mechanism (click here for a paper that explains this argument fully).

In a televised speech to the nation on Wednesday evening, US President Barack Obama announced plans for the withdrawal of 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by autumn next year, saying the end was in sight for the NATO-led coalition.

"We are starting this drawdown from a position of strength. Al Qaeda is under more pressure than at any time since 9/11," said Obama, referring to the attacks on the World Trade Center towers in 2001.

More than half of al Qaeda's leadership had been eliminated, added the president - Osama bin Laden's death in May being the most significant of all.

For more than seven years, according to the White House, there have been no signs of attacks on US soil being planned in Afghanistan

Germany's foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, embarked on a visit to Sudan on Thursday, some two weeks before the north and south of the country officially separate.

He began his visit in the capital Khartoum, where he told a news conference he was "deeply concerned" about the plight of civilians displaced by the ongoing conflict in central Sudan.

"The urgent situation of the refugees forced to flee the fighting in Abyei and South Kordofan makes us deeply concerned," Westerwelle told a news conference in Khartoum.

AFP - A self-styled Taiwanese "prophet" was convicted Thursday of "spreading rumours" when he said a monster earthquake would destroy the island last month and fined Tw$40,000 ($1,380), a court said.

Wang Chao-hung, better known as "Teacher Wang", stirred up a media frenzy after he "predicted" a giant quake and tsunami would hit Taiwan on May 11, urging people to move into makeshift shelters converted from cargo containers.

AFP - Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade on Thursday dropped a plan to enable a presidential candidate to win elections with 25 percent of votes, Justice Minister Cheikh Tidiane Sy said.

The minister was addressing lawmakers discussing constitutional reform amid clashes outside the parliament building between police and protesters opposed to Wade's plan, with at least one policeman hurt in the violence.

Among these changes, "one relates essentially to the retaining of the current stipulations of Article 33 of our constitution. ... The government will formally present this amendment," Sy said, without giving details.

AFP - The International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo Thursday asked judges for permission to probe alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity after Ivory Coast's disputed election.

"The office of the prosecutor is requesting judges to authorise an investigation into the alleged crimes committed in Cote d'Ivoire," Moreno-Ocampo told reporters at a press conference at the Hague-based ICC.

The investigation will look "into war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Cote d'Ivoire since November 28," his office added in a statement.

The prosecutor's announcement comes as the UN's mission in Ivory Coast on Thursday said eight people had been killed in the country in the last week by pro-Ouattara forces.

AFP - Judges at the UN court for Rwanda will on Friday hand down their verdict for the first woman to be charged with genocide before an international court, 14 years after her arrest.

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a former minister for the family and women's empowerment, has been charged with genocide and incitement to rape committed in Rwanda's southern Butare region during the 1994 genocide.

Nyiramasuhuko, 65, is the only female detainee at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

She has been appearing in court since 2001 along with her five co-accused: her son Arsene Shalom Ntahobali and four former local officials.

MercoPress: Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has a 42% vote intention and in some districts of the country her support soars to 70%, according to consultants Public Opinion Studies, Centre, CEOP, released on Wednesday. Similarly Cristina Fernandez has at least a 25 points lead over her closest runner up.

MercoPress: While air passengers in the Southern hemisphere continue exposed to the vicissitudes of the volcanic ash cloud Patagonian farmers have a much serious problem: feeding 1.5 million sheep and livestock when fields are covered with sludge of volcanic debris and snow.

McClatchy - Cable: Vatican discuss the Catholic Church, Venezuelan election and Chavez.

MercoPress: "Deficient" or "problematic" accounting practices have been exposed in 37% of Cuban government companies according to the latest report from the Comptroller General, Gladys Bejerano.

Alternet: In October 2009, Ecuador's President Rafael Correa issued a decree to improve access to medicines and support public health programs through a protocol that would reduce drug costs. Cables from US embassy personnel in Ecuador to the U.S. Department of State show the United States, multinational pharmaceutical companies, and three ministers within the government shared information and worked to undermine Ecuador's emerging policy. In a cable dated October 13, 2009, before the decree was issued, the US ambassador was troubled by Correa's plans because it would prioritize local production and eliminate pharmaceutical patents. In other words, Ecuador was about to makes changes that would negatively impact the profits of US pharmaceutical companies. Immediately following word of Correa's plans, the US embassy staff met with local representatives of US pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Merck, Sharp and Dohme, Scering-Plough, and Wyeth to share strategies that would prevent or limit Ecuador's licensing changes.

Alternet: From Bolivia to Venezuela to Peru, American diplomats are obsessed with securing the profits of multinational mining corporations at the cost of indigenous rights and the environment. At least that is the impression given by WikiLeaks cables that detail the eruption of anti-mining protests near the Ecuador border against the mining firm Minera Majaz.  In August 2005, a group of protesters in northern Peru marched to the site of a copper mine operated by the firm Minera Majaz, a subsidiary of the British mining company Monterrico Metals. Of the hundreds of people who converged at the mine site from the surrounding communities, 28 were brutally tortured and three were shot, one of whom bled to death. But you wouldn't know this from the WikiLeaks US embassy cables that describe the protests. The tone is one of sympathy for the mining company, while depicting the protesters as dark and sinister "militant anti-mining protesters" maliciously sabotaging Majaz.

Alternet: A more recent US embassy cable dated March 17, 2008, reveals that US diplomats spied on indigenous activists and their supporters who were organizing anti-summit protests against the European Union-Latin American Heads of State summit that was scheduled in Lima that year. US ambassador to Peru James Nealon identified specific indigenous activists and tracked the involvement of Bolivian President Evo Morales, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Bolivia Ambassador Pablo Solon, prominent Quechua activist Miguel Palacin Quispe and other influential community leaders.  What do all these people have in common? Their unwavering support for indigenous rights and the environment along with their successful organizing tactics and popularity among indigenous populations, which has Washington's corporate masters shaking in their boots.

A railway carriage that survived the March 11th earthquake and tsunami has been removed from a tunnel more than 100 days after the disaster.

Officials of Sanriku Railway on Friday slowly moved the carriage to a station in Ofunato, Iwate Prefecture.

The car is one of 4 carriages that plied the southern part of the coastal railway, and the only one that escaped the tsunami.

About 10 local residents gathered at the station and applauded when the familiar carriage arrived. Despite its time in the tunnel the car is in good condition.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - MEPs have said they do not support a large-scale reduction in funding for rural development schemes, amid reports that the European Commission may aim to make savings in this area in next week's highly-anticipated multi-annual budget proposals.

"We said quite clearly to [European Commission President Jose Manuel] Barroso today that we don't agree with him," Albert Dess told journalists on Thursday (23 June) after euro-deputies adopted by a large majority his report setting out parliament's position on reforming the common agricultural policy (CAP).

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Washington has officially demanded that US airlines be left out of European plans to charge airlines for carbon permits.

Opposition prior to a US-EU aviation meeting in Oslo on Wednesday (22 June) has largely come from the industry itself, but US officials have now registered their unhappiness.

The sand dunes in Shapotou, a town in the northwestern Chinese province of Ningxia, stretch for as far as the eye can see.

 

The town is located in part of the roughly 2.6 million square kilometers (1 million square miles) of China that are covered in sandy or rocky deserts - an area about seven times as large as Germany.

 

One strategy regional officials have developed to keep the desert from - literally - gaining ground is to stabilize sands at the edge of the desert with a grid of straw squares, measuring about 1 square meter each.

The French wine industry is increasingly focusing on grape type, rather than region of production, as a key factor in marketing to boost wine sales and resist competition. In a country with a proud wine tradition, the shift is not easy.

The French wine industry--a source of national revenue and pride--is changing to adapt to a globalised market, with labeling practices the latest focus of professionals in the field.

Whereas France has historically considered its wines to be products of various regions (Burgundy, Bordeaux, Médoc), other major wine markets frequently market wines as products of specific grape types (Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet, or Malbec, among many others).

REUTERS - G20 farm ministers settled a deal on Thursday to tackle high food prices, agreeing to a watered-down declaration that fell short of France's ambitious proposals to tighten regulation of commodity markets.

"The member states of the G20 concluded an agreement this morning on an action plan on volatility of food prices and global agriculture," French Farm Minister Bruno Le Maire told journalists after chairing the meeting.

A communique was not immediately available, but a G20 source said it urged finance ministers of the Group of 20 major economies to improve rules and supervision of commodity markets.

The deal appeared to lack, however, a commitment for a tough crackdown on speculators that French President Nicolas Sarkozy had campaigned for in the run-up to the summit, the first-ever G20 agriculture meeting.

Reuters) - Global action to protect the nuclear industry against possible terrorist attacks is urgently needed, a leading expert said, as are safety steps to prevent any repeat of Japan's Fukushima accident.

"Both al Qaeda and Chechen terrorist groups have repeatedly considered sabotaging nuclear reactors -- and Fukushima provided a compelling example of the scale of terror such an attack might cause," Matthew Bunn of Harvard University said.

Some countries had "extraordinarily weak security measures in place," he said in an Internet blog posted this week, without naming them.

A COUPLE living an "off-grid" lifestyle say they face prison unless they move from their own land in Willand and return to an existence in the benefits trap.

Stig and Dinah Mason bought Muxbeare Orchard after a sudden windfall allowed them to quit their impoverished lives on a Hertfordshire council estate two years ago.

<snip>

He said one of the council's reasons for refusal was based on a belief the couple had did not have a "sound enough business plan."

As well as plans to sell more produce locally, the couple say it is only likely to take them a further two years to get to a stage where they will be able to grow six to eight months' worth of vegetables.

Dinah, who is a community care worker, cub leader and also a member of the PTFA, said: "To live in an agricultural area you need to have a financial need, but this gives us enough to live on, but our whole ethos is not about making money.

"The council is saying by us living here it becomes mixed-use and is therefore no longer deemed agricultural."

The Internet platform GuttenPlag Wiki has been awarded the renowned Grimme Online prize for its work in uncovering plagiarized passages in the doctoral thesis of former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

The jury awarded GuttenPlag Wiki the prize in the "special" category for coming up with the idea and putting it into action. It lauded what it described as the "fair and impartial working methods of the administrators of the wiki." A wiki is a website that allows its users to make contributions or corrections.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been released after two and a half months in detainment. Klaus Staeck, president of Berlin's Academy of the Arts, says the worldwide protests on Ai's behalf played a decisive role. 

In Beijing, the official line is that Ai Weiwei was released after he confessed to tax fraud, and because he is chronically ill. The internationally renowned artist was arrested April 3 and subsequently detained at an unknown location. During that time, Beijing said he was being held for "economic crimes," but did not give any details.

 

Harsh criticism of Ai's arrest came from all over the world. More than 100,000 people signed a petition for his release, which had been initiated by the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Rafik Schami is passionate about storytelling. His repertoire includes pretty much everything other than traditional book readings. When he gets on the stage - generally in front of a large audience - he speaks freely for what he calls "story time."

 

Born in Syria, Schami has been living in exile in Germany for more than 40 years. He wasn't even allowed to return to his home country to attend his parents' funeral. He has a German passport and writes in German. He has received numerous literary prizes, including the Nelly Sachs Prize, which promotes understanding between peoples, in 2006. He turns 65 on 23 June.

In the auditorium of Berlin's Otto-Suhr Institute, a state of excitement prevailed ahead of a study into the upheavals that has taken hold across the Arab world. 

Several working groups of students were presenting their findings about the upheavals that have gripped much of the Arab world, and the world media, in recent months.

"These are not the distant protests of people who we have nothing to do with - these are colleagues and friends, people who we are in contact with," said Cilja Harders, a professor and Egypt expert.

Such was the enthusiasm for the subject that Harders changed two previously planned seminars to put the Arab revolution on the agenda instead.

(Reuters) - A suspected British computer hacker was being held Thursday for questioning about cyber attacks against a law enforcement agency and two music industry bodies.

Ryan Cleary, 19, was charged Wednesday with five offences under the Criminal Law Act and Computer Misuse Act after he was arrested as part of a joint investigation between London police and the U.S. FBI into recent attacks on high-profile websites.

He is accused of attacking the website of Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and sites owned by the British Phonographic Industry and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Glastonbury festival has vetoed the first major attempt to test the use of legal highs and illicit drugs at a British festival by sampling sewage.

The exercise to be carried by analytical toxicologists had the backing of the police and involved the use of the emerging science of "wastewater analysis", which can detect even very low concentrations of illicit drugs in liquids.

Dr John Ramsey of St George's medical school, University of London, who has spent months planning the project, said he was disappointed by the decision.

"It would have been a golden opportunity to test the technology and find out the actual levels of the use of 'legal highs' and new psychoactive compounds," he said.

AFP - American Media Inc. (AMI), publisher of the National Enquirer, Star and other titles, announced Thursday it has bought the US edition of entertainment magazine OK! from Britain's Northern & Shell.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

OK! magazine, which has a weekly circulation of 800,000 and a readership of 6.6 million, was launched in the United States in 2005 but has reportedly been losing money.

AFP - A former French minister and mayor with the ruling party has been charged with rape after accusations he sexually assaulted women working for him at city hall, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Georges Tron, formerly a junior civil service minister from President Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party, is facing charges of rape and sexual assault by "a person in authority", prosecutor Marie-Suzanne Le Queau said after he appeared before judges in a court in Evry, outside Paris.

Tron was released on bail. The crimes are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.