German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and Greek premier Lucas Papademos held a joint phone call on Friday (17 February) in which they said they were "confident" a long-postponed deal to help Greece avoid bankruptcy will be sealed off at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers on Monday, Monti's office said in a statement.

The "detailed" and "constructive" phone call took place after Merkel cancelled her planned visit to Rome Friday following the resignation of the German president.

EU officials in Brussels also said that the "pieces are falling into place" ahead of the Monday meeting, with Germany and its triple A rated allies - Finland, Netherlands and Luxembourg - backing off from the idea of a partial deal to keep pressure on Athens after the elections.

Britain and France agreed today to accelerate plans to create a joint control and command centre for future military operations.

Prime Minister David Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy want to put in place the rapidly deployable headquarters following joint working in Libya.

At a UK-France summit in Paris today, the two leaders also agreed to push ahead with the next phase of plans to build a new generation of pilotless "fighter drone" aircraft.

They say an EU army headquarters is superfluous because of NATO, but this isn't?...

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Francois Hollande "lies from morning to night," Sarkozy told cheering supporters at the Alpine town of Annecy, the day after officially declaring his candidacy for the election in 10 weeks.

"When you tell the English press that you are pro-market (economically liberal) and when you come to explain to the French that finance is the enemy, you are lying, you are lying from morning to night!," he said.

The president was referring to an interview in The Guardian published Monday in which the Socialist favourite said he wanted to reassure the City of London that it need not worry about his plans to regulate the financial world.

Hollande said in his first campaign rally late last month that the "enemy" was "the world of finance."

Rupert Murdoch declared his "unwavering support" for the Sun's journalists today and announced he is lifting the suspensions of all arrested staff.

The media mogul also confirmed he will begin publishing the top-selling tabloid seven days a week by launching a new paper called the Sun on Sunday "very soon".

The Sun has been rocked by the arrests of 10 current and former senior reporters and executives since November over alleged corrupt payments to public officials.

Mr Murdoch, who is visiting the headquarters of his British newspapers in Wapping, east London, sought to reassure Sun staff in a memo (click here to read it).

The possibilities being discussed include Norbert Lammert, 63, the president of the federal parliament, the Bundestag. But he's angered fellow CDU members with his efforts to reach out to opposition parties. "Lammert will get more votes from the opposition than he'll get from us," a Bundestag coalition member said.

Klaus Töpfer, 73, the former environment minister, was already being discussed for the job in 2010. He's accepted by the opposition Social Democrats and Greens, but disliked by the junior coalition partner, the Free Democrats. They consider Töpfer to be a rosy-eyed environmental activist.

Cabinet members Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister and Defense Minister Thomas de Maziere are also being talked about, but are not likely to move into the presidential palace. Both are too valuable to Merkel in their current jobs.

...Finally there's the former head of the east German secret police documents office, Joachim Gauck. He was the SPD-Green candidate in 2010 and enjoys FDP and also widespread public support. But recently Gauck has advocated positions that run counter to the SPD and he will surely not accept an SPD-Green candidacy. However if Merkel asks him to accept the job, he would not refuse. That's at least the impression of people who have spoken to him in recent days.

A scheme under which jobseekers can lose benefits if they do not complete up to 30 hours a week of unpaid "work experience" is in disarray after companies and charities abandoned it in the wake of public anger.

The clothing retailer Matalan suspended its involvement in the Government project pending an internal inquiry after claims that the scheme was exploitative. Tesco delivered an ultimatum to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) demanding that ministers guarantee no one would lose their benefits, while both Oxfam and Shelter added their names to the list of organisations which have left it altogether.

The discount shop 99p Stores said it had also signed up to the scheme but was withdrawing because of the negative publicity, having not yet taken on a single worker through it. Waterstones, Sainsbury's and TK Maxx have also expressed their opposition.

The Greek state, let me remind you, is quite close to a primary surplus. With judicious top-down reductions wages and pensions, plus the issue of tax-bonds, the Greek public sector could finance itself for the foreseeable future. All that is needed is that the ECB continues to provide liquidity to the Greek banks. Some say that it cannot do this because it won't be able to accept Greek government bonds as collateral (since the Greek state will have defaulted). True but irrelevant: Greek banks have already posted whatever government bonds they owned with the ECB for collateral. That creek has dried. Nowadays they are posting domestic mortgages and other such paper titles (which are, by the way, no worse in quality to those posted by Italian and Spanish banks). All that it would take to allow Greece to stay in the eurozone, in a better state than it is today (and less austerity for that matter), is the continuation of the present ECB policy toward Greek banks. As for those who argue that the ECB will take an aggressive stance, think again: the ECB will not knowingly take steps which will destroy the eurozone.

Naturally, while a defaulted Greece can easily (and optimally, under the present constraints) remain in the eurozone, a long term resolution of its insolvency will have to be plotted by Europe. But is that not the case anyway? Is it not time that Europe deals with the various insolvencies in its midst, rather than continue to push their under the carpet (like a spolit 5-year old)?

To conclude, Europe's optimal strategy is to let Greece default, to allow the Greek government to find ways to live within its tax take for the next year or so and, at the same time, work out the Overall Solution to the euro crisis that was promised last year and never delivered. A Greek default will provide the clarity and the time-space to do this properly. The other two alternatives (more bailouts or a Greek exit) constitute cruel, unnecessary and unusual punishment. For the whole of Europe.

BRUSSELS - EU firms have joined the gold rush on military and civilian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). But ethical and legal questions dog the technology.

The global UAV market is worth $6 billion (€4.6bn) a year and will hit $12 billion by 2018, according to US forecaster Teal Group.

It is not a real market. Currently, military-industrial complexes in China, Israel, the EU, Russia and the US make drones for their armed forces and sell them to close allies only. Almost half the spending is government research.

But with big money at stake, some analysts predict rapid proliferation.

New York, NY - Nothing illustrates better the political crosscurrents, special interests and shortsighted economics now at play in Europe than the debate over the restructuring of Greece's sovereign debt. Germany insists on a deep restructuring - at least a 50 per cent "haircut" for bondholders - whereas the European Central Bank (ECB) insists that any debt restructuring must be voluntary.

...The ECB's stance is peculiar...

There are three explanations for the ECB's position, none of which speaks well for the institution and its regulatory and supervisory conduct. The first explanation is that the banks have not, in fact, bought insurance, and some have taken speculative positions. The second is that the ECB knows that the financial system lacks transparency - and knows that investors know that they cannot gauge the impact of an involuntary default, which could cause credit markets to freeze, reprising the aftermath of Lehman Brothers' collapse in September 2008. Finally, the ECB may be trying to protect the few banks that have written the insurance.

None of these explanations is an adequate excuse for the ECB's opposition to deep involuntary restructuring of Greece's debt. The ECB should have insisted on more transparency - indeed, that should have been one of the main lessons of 2008. Regulators should not have allowed the banks to speculate as they did; if anything, they should have required them to buy insurance - and then insisted on restructuring in a way that ensured that the insurance paid off.

AFP - Syrian forces unleashed their heaviest pounding of Homs in two weeks on Friday, activists said after the UN General Assembly backed an Arab initiative calling on President Bashar al-Assad to stand down.

Rockets crashed into Khaldiyeh and Bayyada, centres of resistance in the central protest hub, at the rate of four a minute, according to an opposition activist inside the beleaguered city.

...The latest bombardment comes after the UN General Assembly on Thursday demanded an immediate halt to Syria's brutal crackdown on dissent, which human rights groups say has cost more than 6,000 lives in the past 11 months.

...The resolution calls on Damascus "to stop all violence or reprisals immediately, in accordance with the League of Arab States initiative."

It was referring to a peace plan put forward by the pan-Arab bloc calling on Assad to hand power over to his deputy and for the formation of a unity government ahead of elections.

A suicide bomber on a motorbike targeted a market in a Shiite area of Parachinar in north-west Pakistan on Friday, killing at least 26 people. Parachinar has been the site of sectarian violence between the majority Sunni and Shiite populations.

In mid February 2011, pro-democracy activists in the Gulf state of Bahrain took to the streets of the capital Manama in an attempt to win the kind of dramatic results achieved by their counterparts in Egypt and Tunisia. At first the demands of this predominantly Shia-led group were for constitutional reform and a reduction of the powers of King Hamad and the ruling Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty. But opinion soon hardened into calls for the end of the monarchy when seven demonstrators were killed during a police action at Manama's Pearl Roundabout.

After a month of continued protests, Bahrain's government invited some 1,500 troops from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to enter the country in support of local security forces before imposing martial law and instituting a fierce crackdown. Hundreds of activists were arrested; many were beaten and tortured in detention. Medical staff at the island's main Salmaniyya Hospital, where many injured protestors were treated and where demonstrators gathered after Peal Roundabout was cleared, were also targeted for arrests - and many of them subsequently received long prison sentences for their alleged complicity in plots to overthrow the government. 

In November last year, the government was forced to acknowledge that its security forces had used unnecessary force against mostly unarmed civilians. A commission of inquiry, established by King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, but led by respected international human rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouini, reported in November and documented widespread abuses by the security services - routine torture, arbitrary arrests, detainees held incommunicado for weeks, unfair trials and people dismissed from their jobs without cause. Since then a further commission has been set up to institute some of the inquiry's recommendations - though critics say that so far little has been achieved.

Pakistan will not provide any support to U.S. forces if the United States attacks Iran, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said in Islamabad at a press conference with the presidents of Afghanistan and Iran following a trilateral summit on Friday.

Pakistan and Iran "need each other and no foreign pressure should hinder their ties," Zardari said.

According to the Afghan news agency Pazhvak, referring to the proposed Iran-Pakistan gas project, Zardari made it clear that Islamabad will not tolerate Washington's stance and the United States is "not to tell Pakistan who it can and cannot trade with."

The Heartland Institute, an influential rightwing thinktank based in Chicago, which has long pushed misinformation about climate change, is currently having its own Wizard of Oz moment following the leaking of internal documents which reveal the true extent of its funding and efforts to cast doubt on climate science.

The Register - a website well known for promoting climate scepticism - is describing the leak as "at least as good as the 'Climategate' e-mails". This refers, of course, to the dumping online in 2009 of thousands of private emails exchanged between climate scientists over the previous decade.

...The document entitled "2012 Climate Strategy" (pdf) is also already getting lots of attention. It shows that Heartland will "increase climate project fundraising" by "pursuing additional support from the Charles G. Koch Foundation" who "returned as a Heartland donor in 2011 with a contribution of $200,000". It adds: "Other contributions will be pursued for this [climate] work, especially from corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies." ...

Perhaps more unsettling is the document's revelation that Heartland is actively developing a "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms":

...His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain - two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science...

Dissuading teachers from teaching science – where have we heard that before? Creationists, of course.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

AFP - French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron put recent disputes behind them Friday to unveil a nuclear power deal and renew their own sometimes shaky political alliance.

...Cameron said the British engineering firm Rolls-Royce will secure a £400 million (481 million euro, $632 million) share in the work to build Britain's first French-pioneered EPR reactor at Hinkley Point in southern England.

Other British firms will sign deals worth a total of £115 million with France's state-owned energy giant EDF as part of the Hinkley project.

For many years solar energy was only profitable because of state subsidies. But photovoltaic cell prices recently dropped significantly, making solar energy as cheap as standard electricity.

...Such rapid development on the solar energy market has even surprised analysts. Thanks to the price drop for photovoltaic cells, private solar parks in Germany now offer cheaper power for the consumer than traditional energy providers. Even when taking into account the initial investment, one kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity costs 0.24 euros ($0.31). Electricity from a traditional provider costs about four percent more...

...Solar energy's newfound competitiveness is best shown by a case study from the Atacama desert in Chile where operators have set up a major solar farm without any government assistance. The plant is meant to provide power for a copper mine. According to the magazine "Photon," each kWh of solar electricity produced on site costs less than 0.10 euros.

...On Wednesday, researchers at the Swiss Space Center, based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), presented their plans for "CleanSpace One." They envisage a launch of their clean-up mission within the next three to five years, with the aim of taking out a recently-discarded satellite. If it proves successful, further space cleanup jobs could follow.

...The proposed cosmic disposal service will be only slightly larger than the flying objects it targets for destruction. While traveling at 28,000 kilometers per hour (17,400 mph), it will approach and catch its target using a technique reminiscent of the one that sea anemones use to catch their prey. "It sticks out its feelers and pulls its prey to its chest at the right moment," Gass explains. Once that is done, the dance becomes deadly: The conjoined satellites race toward Earth together and burn up upon re-entry into the atmosphere.

BRUSSELS - The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has struck the latest blow in the debate over internet policing, ruling on Thursday (16 February) that online social network sites cannot be forced to construct measures to prevent users from downloading songs illegally.

The court, which is the highest judicial authority in the EU, stated that installing general filters would infringe on the freedom to conduct business and on data privacy.

In a press statement accompanying its judgement, the court stated that forcing sites to police their network for illegal downloads "would not be respecting the prohibition to impose on that provider a general obligation to monitor nor the requirement that a fair balance be struck between the protection of copyright, on the one hand, and the freedom to conduct business, the right to protection of personal data and the freedom to receive or impart information."

Christians who think they should be exempt from equality legislation are like Muslims trying to impose sharia law on Britain, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission has said.

Trevor Phillips said faith groups that provide a public service must abide by the law.

Speaking at a debate in London on diverse societies last Wednesday, Mr Phillips singled out Christian adoption agencies that fought legal battles against rules requiring them to treat gay and straight people equally.

"You can't say because we decide we're different then we need a different set of laws," he said.

Google has been accused of bypassing the privacy settings of users of the Safari web-browser.

The Wall Street Journal said Google and other companies had worked around privacy settings designed to restrict cookies.

Cookies are small text files stored by browsers which can record information about online activity, and help some online services work.

However Google says the story "mischaracterises" what happened.

New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, has died in eastern Syria after slipping into the country to report on the uprising against its president.

Mr Shadid, 43, shot in the West Bank in 2002 and kidnapped for six days in Libya last year, apparently died of an asthma attack, the Times said. Times photographer Tyler Hicks was with him and carried his body to Turkey, the newspaper said.

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