BRUSSELS - The Greek government and its creditors are guilty of "denialism" about the scale of the public health crisis caused by the country's harsh austerity programme, leading international medical researchers have claimed.

A huge rise in suicides, HIV infections and infant mortality rates are just a few of the consequences on public health of Athens' spending cuts, according to a report published on Friday (21 February) by the Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals.

The number of HIV infections among drug users soared from 15 in 2009 to 484 in 2012 as a result of cuts to AIDS prevention programmes, while infant mortality also rose by 43 percent. Meanwhile, locally transmitted malaria, which had previously been effectively eradicated, has returned to the country.

Though the Danish prime minister currently has no plans of calling for a referendum of Denmark's euro opt-out, Thorning-Schmidt personally believes the country should still join "eventually".

The Scandinavian country held a euro referendum in 2000 where 53.2% voted against adopting the EU's common currency. And since there is no sign that public opinion has changed since then, Thorning-Schmidt said she was "careful" about holding another vote, even though she believes joining the euro would be in Denmark's best interest.

She does believe however that Denmark should get rid of some of the opt-outs it has negotiated in four EU policy areas - security and defence; citizenship; freedom, security and justice; and the economic and monetary union.

"What I'm saying is that we would gain more influence over matters that already affect us which a small country doesn't have much influence over anyway. This is what the EU is about, basically," Thorning-Schmidt said in an interview with the online media Altinget.

As David Cameron tries to win over wavering voters by holding the first meeting of his cabinet in Scotland next week, John Curtice said that the gamble on a currency union had failed to boost the pro-UK camp amid signs of an increase in support for independence.

The professor of politics at Strathclyde University issued his warning as Alex Salmond said that George Osborne's decision to rule out a currency union in a speech in Edinburgh last Thursday had "backfired in spectacular fashion".

...The first minister turned on Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats after a poll in the Scottish Daily Mail showed an increase in support for the pro-independence side in the week since the chancellor's speech. The Survation poll found that 38% support independence (up six points on a poll two weeks ago) compared with 47% who support the UK, down five points. Survation cautions that a direct comparison cannot be made between its two polls because of a change in its methodology.

The armed Basque separatist group Eta has put beyond use a token part of its arsenal in a move verified by international mediators who said they were confident this was a first step to complete disarmament by a terrorist organisation that has killed more than 800 people.

Footage of masked Eta members showing pistols, explosives and detonators to mediators was posted on the BBC's Spanish-language website on Friday. The weaponry shown in the film coincided with an inventory supplied by the mediators from the International Verification Commission, who made the announcement in the Basque city of Bilbao.

Ukraine's president, Viktor Yanukovich, and three opposition leaders have signed an agreement intended to end a crisis that sparked bloody clashes between protesters and police on the streets of the capital, Kiev.

The deal sets out plans to hold early presidential elections, form a national unity government and revert to the 2004 constitution, removing some of the president's powers. Yanukovich did not smile during a signing ceremony lasting several minutes in the presidential headquarters, but he did shake hands with the opposition.

The deal was also signed by two European Union foreign ministers who helped broker it in tortuous negotiations that lasted more than 30 hours. "This agreement is not the end of the process. It's the beginning of the process," the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said after the signing.

...Parliament subsequently began to vote to make the agreement law, supporting immediately a return to the constitution of 2004 and an unconditional amnesty for people detained in the unrest. It also voted to allow the release of the former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko after more than two years in prison.

Der Betreiber Meridian, ein Tochterunternehmen der Bayerischen Oberlandbahn (BOB) in Holzkirchen im Landkreis Miesbach, bestätigte nun entsprechende Medienberichte. Demnach war der nagelneue Zug vom Typ "Flirt" bereits am Montag mitten auf der Strecke liegengeblieben. Das Begleitpersonal bat daraufhin die Fahrgäste auszusteigen und den Zug anzuschieben.

Der Lokführer hatte nicht auf eine Diesellok warten wollen, die den Zug zur Oberleitung hätte schieben können. Tatsächlich schafften es die Passagiere mit vereinten Kräften, das tonnenschwere Gefährt so weit anzuschieben, bis es aus eigenem Antrieb wieder fahrbereit war. Die Elektronik hatte ausgerechnet auf einem sogenannten Streckentrenner gestreikt.

BRUSSELS - A European Parliament vote on Thursday (20 February) to set up public registers to identify company owners has been hailed as ground-breaking by pro-transparency groups.

MEPs in the civil liberties and economic committees backed the European Commission's anti-money laundering directive but then added a public register provision to help crack open shell companies and trusts.

If this becomes actual legislation with teeth, it could be a truly major change.

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

BRUSSELS - MEPs have backed plans to cap card payment fees charged to shops by credit card giants Mastercard and Visa in a move aimed at saving €6 billion per year.

In a vote of the parliament's economic affairs committee on Thursday (20 February), deputies backed a proposal to limit the bank's fee for credit card payments at 0.3 percent of the transaction value.

They also set a cap of €0.07, or 0.2 percent of the transaction value, for debit card payments. The restrictions are to enter into force after one year and apply to both domestic and cross-border payments.

The EU executive has set a deadline of this year to complete the regulatory framework for the single European energy market and is taking action against member states that have failed to implement existing legislation.

Ireland should have put the bloc's laws - including requirements to ensure those who own transmission networks do not also own the energy they carry - onto its statute books by March 2011, the Commission said a statement.

Ireland's Department of Energy said it expected to have most of the technical provisions of the law in place "as early as possible in 2014", but it was awaiting details from the commission about what measures need to be taken on unbundling.

The government's welfare shakeup has survived two legal challenges at the court of appeal after five disabled tenants failed in their attempt to get the bedroom tax declared unlawful and judges ruled against claims the £500-a-week cap on benefits violated the human rights of vulnerable families.

Another week of British "justice", together with the Miranda detainment decision.

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

The Socialist government in France was planning to invest up to 400 million euros ($548 million) over the next five to seven years in newly-established state-owned mining company Compagnie National des Mines de France (CMF), French industry minister Arnaud Montebourg announced Friday.

Speaking in an interview for French daily newspaper Le Parisien, Montebourg said the government considered the state as an intelligent economic actor serving the interests of the nation.

Montebourg also said CMF would prospect for resources in France, French overseas territories and elsewhere around the world, including Africa, Central Asia and South America.

Domestic industrial policy is one thing, and I would clap if it would be only that, but mines in the Third World are usually just colonialism by other means.

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

This NYT timeline of what the Fed was saying during the 2008 crisis is fantastic http://t.co/7cLtueQDqT

— Matt O'Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) febrero 21, 2014

Partners on both sides of the Atlantic have expressed hope to finish negotiations on the trade deal swiftly, perhaps even before the end of this year.

But experts argue this target is over-optimistic. "There is no evidence that they can get this done before [that date]," Bruce Stokes, director of the global economic program at the Washington-based Pew Research Center, told EurActiv.

The real deadline negotiators should focus on, Stokes said, "is whether they can get it done before the presidential elections in the US, in 2016."

A longshot push to get the professional association of US psychologists to consider banning its members from providing aid to military interrogations failed on Friday, but gathered enough support to make supporters optimistic about a follow-on effort in August.

A resolution brought by University of Dallas psychologist Scott Churchill to add the interrogations ban to the agenda of the American Psychological Association's (APA) legislative body received the support of 53% of representatives to the group's biannual convention.

That didn't clear the two-thirds threshold required to add the proposed ban to the agenda for this weekend's conference. But the simple majority showing prompted Nadine Kaslow, the APA president, to express her openness to adding consideration of the proposed ban to the body's next meeting.

A laudable initiative; but I wish they did this a decade ago.

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

US television newscasters have often slipped up and spoken of an Iranian nuclear "weapons program," even though no UN inspectors have found firm evidence of any such thing and Iran maintains that its program is for peaceful purposes.

Now that there is positive evidence of thorough Iranian cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, US television news is ignoring a clear sign that Iran is hewing to the breakthrough agreement of last November. I'm saying this should be a headline on tv news but it is not:

Reuters reports that the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that Iran is abiding by the commitments it made last November to mothball its enrichment of uranium to 19.25 percent for its medical reactor, to produce isotopes for treating cancer. Iran committed to ceasing enrichment to that level, sticking to enriching to 5 percent, the level needed for fuel for Iran's three Bushehr nuclear reactors.

Some of the damage caused by the recent flooding could have been prevented by better planning and land management, experts from 15 professional bodies have told David Cameron.

As the Met Office confirmed it has been the wettest winter on record, a group led by the Landscape Institute expressed concerns that the government's approach to flood management is too focused on short-term results.

In an open letter published in the Telegraph, they called for measures such as tree-planting to hold back water in the upper stages of a river and better protection for new homes on flood plains.

...The group is particularly worried about the political mood in favour of dredging, reversing advice from the Environment Agency, after David Cameron said the measure would be a critical part of flood management in future.

...In the same newspaper, Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, promised Labour would take a longer-term view of flood management.

SAN FRANCISCO -- In an unprecedented challenge, Tesoro Corp. has barred federal authorities from going inside its refinery near Martinez to investigate an incident in which two workers were burned by acid spewing from a broken pipe, The San Francisco Chronicle has learned.

State officials ordered a partial shutdown of the Golden Eagle Refinery following the Feb. 12 incident after inspectors with California's workplace safety agency found numerous suspected safety violations, state officials said.

The investigators with Cal/OSHA went to the plant at 150 Solano Way in the unincorporated community of Pacheco when a pipe containing sulfuric acid burst, spraying the two workers in the face with the caustic chemical. The two were flown by helicopter to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, where they were treated for first- and second-degree burns and released later that day.

A red carpet welcome awaits two distinguished Chinese visitors to Belgium on Sunday. Arriving at Brussels airport in a chartered Boeing 747, the couple and their entourage will be met on the tarmac by prime minister Elio Di Rupo, before being whisked to their new home: a zoo.

The two - male panda Xing Hui (which means Twinkling Star) and female Hao Hao (Cute) - are already celebrities in China. They already have their own Twitter feed and Hao Hao was last year China's favourite panda at the international Giant Panda Zoo Awards.

But their imminent arrival in Belgium has prompted an outbreak of political infighting, with Flanders grumbling that the country's oldest and most well-known zoo, in Antwerp, was deliberately snubbed by the French-speaking Di Rupo when he helped broker the deal to bring the pandas to Belgium.

The pandas will stay in the Pairi Daiza animal park near Mons, which happens to be the city where Di Rupo is still mayor. But Antwerp Zoo, founded in 1843 - just 13 years after Belgium's independence - insists its pedigree and prestige should have made it the first choice.

Calling someone a "foreign pig" or "dirty asylum seeker" is insulting but is not against Switzerland's anti-racism law, the country's top court has ruled.

The federal tribunal found in favour of a police officer who had used the slurs when he arrested an Algerian suspected thief.

The incident took place at a trade fair in the northern city of Basel in April 2007, where the Algerian was detained for allegedly snatching a Russian man's bag. After checking the suspect's identity papers, the policeman discovered that he was an asylum seeker and insulted him.

It must have been a pretty special child, otherwise the two-year old wouldn't have been buried in such a ceremonious manner. The boy was sprinkled with celebratory red dust and given distinctive stone artifacts for his last journey.

The characteristic fluting of the stone weapons serve as archeological evidence that the boy, who died some 12,600 years ago, came from the Clovis culture. It was one of the earliest New World groups, disappearing mysteriously a few centuries after the child's burial in present day Montana. From the summit of a hill towering over the burial site near the Yellowstone River, the boy's Ice Age contemporaries could monitor their hunting grounds for mammoth and bison.

Now a team of scientists led by the Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev has analyzed the boy's origins and discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy's ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany.

Their findings go even further: More than 80 percent of all native peoples in the Americas -- from the Alaska's Aleuts to the Maya of Yucatan to the Aymaras along the Andes -- are descended from Montana boy's lineage.

The language is misleading and thus leaves out what should be the most important part of the findings. Some of his roots trace back to Europe, and the boy's lineage is a part of the genetic heritage of 80% of modern native peoples of the Americas. What this and a Siberian finding also mentioned in the article indicate is that the spread of humans was more complex than the branching of a tree: with significant mixing, even between distant populations, in prehistoric times already. (Similarly, in the tracer of the spread of humanity in the cultural sphere, linguistics, it would also be advisable to move away from thinking in trees.)

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

Almost 700 people, including Tom Hanks and Angelina Jolie, have paid between £125,000 and £155,000 to book a two-hour journey on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, which would include a planned five minutes of weightlessness.

However, despite Branson's regular insistence that the first six-passenger flight is imminent - he has confidently announced it for more or less every year from 2007 - the service has completed only three test flights with a peak altitude of little more than 13 miles. To achieve the necessary US Federal Aviation Administration licence, the craft will need several tests at its full speed and 62-mile height.

The journalist and author Tom Bower, who has just published a biography of Branson, says he believes SpaceShipTwo's engine will need to be redesigned before it can achieve Branson's stated aims, making a full-blown space flight by autumn extremely unlikely.

"The rocket still hasn't flown at the required speed and to the required height," Bower said. "The point about his rocket is it's very primitive. He's burning rubber with nitrous oxide, and it's never been done before for that size of rocket.

"For the last 10 years he'd been trying to make it work for the extended rocket and it just isn't working. Where's the evidence he can make it work in the next six months?"

This is near the end of the article. Earlier, Branson is quoted with a boasting excuse for the delays, implying that it's because a private carrier has to be much safer than the government (that is, NASA with its 3% death rate). If that's not spurious enough, his boast is based on the shuttlecock re-entry aerodynamics of his spaceship. However, while the shuttlecock is safer in not requiring active steering, past deadly accidents upon re-entry weren't due to pilot error, but due to damage to the exterior – and SpaceShipTwo would stop being a shuttlecock and disintegrate if something would break, too.

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

22 February 1744 – in the Battle of Toulon, an outnumbered Spanish fleet and its French reinforcements defeat a British fleet, breaking British control of the Mediterranean and thereby prolonging the War of the Austrian Succession

23 February 1944 – the Soviet Union launches Operation Lentil, the internal deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush population from their homes in the Caucasus to Central Asia

At the end of a flawless performance, it seemed that nothing could come between Yuna Kim and her bid to become only the third woman to win back-to-back Olympic gold medals in figure skating.

But Kim, the undisputed darling of South Korean sport, and the millions of her compatriots who had stayed up into to the early hours to watch her decisive long programme at the Sochi Olympics on Thursday, had not reckoned with the sport's opaque, and controversial, scoring system.

...South Korean skating fans immediately cried foul play. "Queen Yuna," they said, had been denied the gold that was rightfully hers by questionable judging and the looming presence of the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.

As of Friday, more than 1.5 million of them had signed an online petition demanding an inquiry into Kim's shock defeat. The petition could end up breaking change.org records - previous most-signed campaigns have included Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin's successful attempt bring the man who shot their son, Trayvon Martin, to court (2.3m signatures) and a protest against YouTube and Google (4.3m).

I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of the second Skategate the sport will finally be expunged from the Olympics...

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

Genius "@randomdijit: "[Crimea] was the site of much of the fighting in the Crimean War, for example." http://t.co/Gj00D0rLOq"

— Cvetin Chilimanov (@Cvetin) febrero 22, 2014

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Bayer CEO Marijn Dekkers said that his company's new cancer drug, Nexavar, isn't "for Indians," but "for western patients who can afford it."

The drug, which is particularly effective on late-stage kidney and liver cancer, costs approximately $69,000 per year in India, so in March 2012 an Indian court granted a license to an Indian company to produce to the drug at a 97 percent discount.

Bayer sued Natco Pharma Ltd., but in March of last year, the High Court in Mumbai denied its appeal. Bayer CEO called the compulsory license issued by the Indian court "essentially theft," then said "[w]e did not develop this medicine for Indians...[w]e developed it for western patients who can afford it."