The deadly capsizing of a migrant boat in the Mediterranean has been caught on camera by the Italian navy as it rescued 562 people.

The trawler overturned apparently as a result of people on board rushing to one side after spotting a rescue ship, and five were found dead.

People clung desperately to the deck or dropped into the sea.

Italy's Bettica patrol boat threw life rafts and jackets while another Italian ship sent rescue boats.

En raison d'un mouvement de grève dans notre imprimerie parisienne et dans nos centres de distribution, à la suite du refus du Monde de publier un communiqué de la CGT, notre édition papier ne paraîtra pas dans la plupart de nos points de vente, ce jeudi 26 mai. C'est également le cas des autres quotidiens nationaux français, à l'exception de L'Humanité, qui a accepté de publier ce texte.

Ukraine's president has appointed a former Nato secretary general as a special adviser, drawing a derisive reaction from Russia.

Petro Poroshenko announced the appointment of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark who was Nato secretary general from 2009 to 2014, on Friday.

MPs in Russia, which has viewed Nato's eastward expansion as a security threat, were quick to speak out against the appointment. "This is of course in large part a gesture, but it's a gesture that will be backed up by actions. And it's a hostile gesture," Leonid Kalashnikov, deputy head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia's lower house of parliament, told Interfax.

A poll commissioned for the Observer and carried out by Ipsos MORI, which drew responses from more than 600 economists, found 88% saying an exit from the EU and the single market would most likely damage Britain's growth prospects over the next five years.

A striking 82% of the economists who responded thought there would probably be a negative impact on household incomes over the next five years in the event of a Leave vote, with 61% thinking unemployment would rise.

Those surveyed were members of the profession's most respected representative bodies, the Royal Economic Society and the Society of Business Economists, and all who replied did so voluntarily.

Paul Johnson, director of the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the findings, from a survey unprecedented in its scale, showed an extraordinary level of unity. "For a profession known to agree about little, it is pretty remarkable to see this degree of consensus about anything," Johnson said. "It no doubt reflects the level of agreement among many economists about the benefits of free trade and the costs of uncertainty for economic growth."

The poll also found a majority of respondents - 57% - held the view that a vote for Brexit on 23 June would blow a hole in economic growth, cutting GDP by more than 3% over the next five years. Just 5% thought that there would probably be a positive impact.

In what European science chief Carlos Moedas calls a "life-changing" move, European Union member states today agreed on an ambitious new open access (OA) target. All scientific papers should be freely available by 2020, the Competitiveness Council--a gathering of ministers of science, innovation, trade, and industry--concluded after a 2-day meeting in Brussels. But some observers are warning that the goal will be difficult to achieve.

The OA goal is part of a broader set of recommendations in support of Open Science, a concept which also includes improved storage of and access to research data. The Dutch government, which currently holds the rotating E.U. presidency, had lobbied hard for Europe-wide support for Open Science, as had Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research and Innovation.

If the Somme is always the focus of British memory in this centenary, for France - and to some extent also for Germany - that role is occupied by Verdun. Verdun is to the first world war as Stalingrad was to the second. Even in a war that set new standards for slaughter, it was a battle beyond compare. Shelled night and day, mined from below and continually rocked by artillery attack, Verdun's attritional intensity and importance were unequalled. On both sides, killing as many enemy as possible was central. When it was over, there were so many unidentifiable human remains that the bones of 130,000 unknown dead of both armies were entombed together in the vast ossuary at Douaumont that commemorates Verdun. The military and psychological significance for France of Verdun cannot be overstated, and had much to do with its victor Marshal Pétain's reemergence in 1940.

Verdun's importance dictated that it was there, in 1984, that France's president and Germany's chancellor held hands in a symbolic gesture that embodied the two nation's reconciliation. On Sunday, in the same cemeteries at Verdun, François Hollande and Angela Merkel stood where François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl stood more than 30 years previously, and with the same message. As Mr Hollande put it, Verdun was where Europe lost itself 100 years ago and where it has now enabled Europe to come together for peace and friendship.

Jag har svårt att bli arg på min arbetsgivare. De har ju rätt. Börjar jag klockan nio ska jag vara där klockan nio. Jag är arg på hela situationen med gränskontrollerna, det funkade så bra med tågen tidigare. Nu är allt förändrat - och jag förstår inte till vilken nytta, säger Sarah.

Student missar tid

I en annan del av Malmö träffar vi Jake Maczynski som är musiker, althornist, och fram tills nu student på ansedda musikkonservatoriet i Köpenhamn.

- Jag har beslutat att ta paus från utbildningen nästa år. Kursen kräver att jag övar väldigt mycket på mitt instrument och det går bara inte ihop, när man som nu tvingas sitta på tåget fyra timmar vissa dagar, säger Jake och tillägger:

As Sweden-Denmark travel is hindered by border controls, living in Sweden and working or studying in Denmark is becoming to time consuming, unraveling the Copenhagen-Malmoe region. The article presents one phone support worker and one student, among the many, many similar stories.

Less than a month after their last successful mission, SpaceX is back at it. Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 5:40pm EDT tomorrow with telecommunications satellite Thaicom 8 on board.

What's truly notable is that tomorrow's launch will be the fifth one for SpaceX this year, demonstrating an increased launch frequency compared to last year.

In 2015, SpaceX conducted a total of six successful Falcon 9 launches, putting their launch frequency at about one launch every other month. So far this year, they've doubled that frequency with nearly one launch per month.

In March, president of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, stated that the company actually plans to launch a total of 18 times in 2016, which would triple the number of launches compared to 2015. She also said that they plan to increase that launch rate even further the following year, with 24 hopeful launches in 2017.

China's finance ministry will issue Rmb3bn ($458m) of bonds in London's offshore renminbi market, a test of foreign investors' appetite for Chinese assets amid concerns about the currency's depreciation and capital flight.

The UK government has aggressively courted renminbi business for the City of London as part of a broad push to promote greater economic ties with the world's largest economy in terms of purchasing power.

BEIJING: For years, Jim Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates, has been telling the world that the Chinese economy is a "treadmill to hell" running on debt.

Now, with a few big market scares coming from China over the last year -- a currency devaluation, a few stock market crashes and economic indicators flashing red -- he's looking pretty prescient. His view on what's happening in China right at this moment is still pretty grim.

To even come close these days to what is considered a reasonably strong return of 7.5%, pension funds and other large endowments are reaching ever further into riskier investments: adding big dollops of global stocks, real estate and private-equity investments to the once-standard investment of high-grade bonds. Two decades ago, it was possible to make that kind of return just by buying and holding investment-grade bonds,

Techdirt has written hundreds of stories about TPP over the years. So many of those have revealed troubling aspects of the deal that it's hard to single out the worst. But there can be no doubt that one of the most extraordinary facts is that the US and the other TPP nations were negotiating for eight years the biggest so-called trade deal in history with only the sketchiest idea about its likely benefits. Instead, politicians and supporters simply assured the public that it would all be great, honest. And yet when the rigorous econometric studies began to appear, they consistently showed that TPP would produce almost no benefits whatsoever.

Upon hearing that a planned course of action designed to bring financial gains would do nothing of the kind, most rational people in ordinary life would try something else. But not the politicians and TPP negotiators, who carried on despite these clear signs that TPP was simply not worth the effort. They either ignored these studies completely, or at most said that the only reliable predictions worth considering were the official ones, which would come from the US International Trade Commission (USITC) once TPP's text had been finalised. Last week, the USITC released its massive 792-page report (pdf). Here's a key part of the summary:  

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's new foreign minister, Jose Serra, has ordered diplomats to rebut any government, media or international organization that criticizes the impeachment of suspended President Dilma Rousseff, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

The nine-page document cited a dozen examples of censure of the impeachment process that removed Rousseff from office this month made by governments and other entities to which diplomats needed to respond in defense of Brazil's political process.

"The press, academics and members of civil society and also leaders of international organizations and government representatives have manifested frequently in improper and ill-informed ways about Brazil's domestic politics," the memo said.

The US nuclear weapons force still uses a 1970s-era computer system and floppy disks, a government report has revealed.

The Government Accountability Office said the Pentagon was one of several departments where "legacy systems" urgently needed to be replaced.

The report said taxpayers spent $61bn (£41bn) a year on maintaining ageing technologies.

It said that was three times more than the investment on modern IT systems.

On the one hand, this is obviously laughable. But on the other hand, it does raise a question - how much IT investment is really going to just keeping stuff workign at the same level it always did, and should we start thinking more carefully about always replacing everything with the newest and greatest?  Is there ever a point where "good enough" can be reached?

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Australia's deputy prime minister has come under fire for suggesting that a temporary ban on cattle exports to Indonesia five years ago hindered ties with Jakarta that contributed to an influx of asylum seekers arriving on Australian shores by boats from Indonesia.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce linked the 2011 events during a campaign debate on agricultural policies Wednesday night ahead of elections on July 2. Australia suspended its live cattle trade to Indonesia for a month in June 2011 over cruelty concerns in Indonesian slaughterhouses.

"When we closed down the live animal export industry, it was around about the same time that we started seeing a lot of people arriving in boats in Australia," Joyce said, prompting jeers at a public meeting in the rural town of Goulburn. "I think it's absolutely the case that we created extreme bad will with Indonesia when we close down the live animal export."

Joyce is the first Australian official to suggest the suspension undermined Indonesian efforts to prevent people smugglers trafficking asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa and Asia to Australia.

The Chinese military is poised to send submarines armed with nuclear missiles into the Pacific Ocean for the first time, arguing that new US weapons systems have so undermined Beijing's existing deterrent force that it has been left with no alternative.

Chinese military officials are not commenting on the timing of a maiden patrol, but insist the move is inevitable.

They point to plans unveiled in March to station the US Thaad anti-ballistic system in South Korea, and the development of hypersonic glide missiles potentially capable of hitting China less than an hour after launch, as huge threats to the effectiveness of its land-based deterrent force.

In 2014, the year Hairup died at age 38, one-third of adults in Utah had a prescription for opioid painkillers, most notably a powerful opiate at the heart of the crisis, OxyContin. Many of them were among the 65% of state residents who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. Sometimes, opioids take hold of several members of the same family. Hairup's father is dependent on prescription painkillers and her brother's addiction to prescription opioids set him on the path to heroin.

[...]

Carol Moss, a Mormon and Democratic state legislator, also said religion is a factor in the spread of opioid addiction. "What's unique about Utah is that the LDS church forbids alcohol and tobacco. People around the world have a drink to relax or drink socially," she said. "When those things are not part of the cultural acceptance for people, they look for an acceptable palliative for aches and pains and depression and that's become pills."

Most of the women and girls who have travelled to the battle have done so at the grooming of ISIS recruiters. Joanna Palani, a 23-year-old politics and philosophy student from Copenhagen, went to fight for the Kurds; first for the People's Protection Unit in Syria (the YPG) and then the Peshmerga, the Western-trained and backed army of the Kurdish Regional Government. The Peshmerga (Kurdish for "one who stands in front of death") are credited with playing a role in both the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the capture of Osama Bin Laden, and are gaining significant if slow victories over ISIS in Iraq.

The YPG has also assisted in the tortuous work of helping Yazidi families smuggle out their loved ones from Islamic State territory. Palani described receiving detailed correspondence from girls in captivity attempting to organize their own escape or plead for rescue.

"Even though I am a fighter it is difficult for me to read about how a ten-year-old girl is going to die because she is bleeding from a rape," she says. The letters and creditable testimony of sexual torture began as early as October 2014. Palani was assigned to a new role at the start of 2015--she was part of a battalion that liberated a village near Mosul, she says, and found a large group of children being held for sexual abuse by ISIS militants. It was a 'holding house,' where young girls were locked up, raped, and loaned out to lower ranking fighters on the front lines

"We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom. Now don't you forget it."  So said a National Parks Service guide as I filmed last week at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He was addressing a school party of young teenagers in bright orange T-shirts. As if by rote, he inverted the truth about Vietnam into an unchallenged lie.
<snip>
The 2016 election campaign is remarkable not only for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also for the resilience of an enduring silence about a murderous self-bestowed divinity. A third of the members of the United Nations have felt Washington's boot, overturning governments, subverting democracy, imposing blockades and boycotts. Most of the presidents responsible have been liberal - Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.

The breathtaking record of perfidy is so mutated in the public mind, wrote the late Harold Pinter, that it "never happened ...Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. It didn't matter ... ". Pinter expressed a mock admiration for what he called "a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

Paul Ryan is angry with Donald Trump, not so much for failing to espouse conservative values, as for exposing America's dirty little secret -- white rage: that deep-seated determination to block black progress in this country. For years, conservative politicians have relied upon the cover of high-minded principles and slogans - "protecting the integrity of the ballot box," or waging a "war on drugs" -- in order to cloak their determination to restrict African Americans' citizenship rights. The racism fueling Trump's campaign and his followers, however, is so overt, that it is undoing decades of hard covert work by the GOP.

When Trump didn't immediately disavow an endorsement from Klansman David Duke; when the GOP front-runner condoned the beatings African Americans endured at his campaign rallies; and when 20 percent of his followers insisted that the Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery, was bad policy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's carefully stitched plan of "racism with plausible deniability" began to unravel.

Shortly before he died, Reagan's strategist Lee Atwater explained the game plan of the Southern Strategy in a matter-of-fact clinical policy. "By 1968 you can't say `n***r' -- that hurts you, backfires," Atwater emphasized. "So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. And you're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites." But Donald Trump doesn't do abstract and that is what has sent the GOP into a tizzy

A North Korean editorial on Tuesday said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump can bring about North Korea's "Yankee Go Home" slogan and ultimately help unify the Korean Peninsula.

The article published in state media outlet DPRK Today also referred to Trump's proposal to hold direct talks with Kim Jong Un, praising the likely Republican nominee as a "wise politician" and "far-sighted presidential candidate."

"In my personal opinion, there are many positive aspects to the Trump's `inflammatory policies'," wrote Han Yong Mook, who introduced himself as a Chinese North Korean scholar.

"Trump said `he will not get involved in the war between the South and the North,' isn't this fortunate from North Koreans' perspective?"

The German Parliament overwhelmingly adopted a symbolic but fraught resolution on Thursday declaring the killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 a genocide, escalating tensions with Turkey at a diplomatically delicate juncture.

The Turkish government angrily denounced the vote as "null and void," and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called his ambassador in Germany back to Ankara for consultations.

Every winter in Spencer Gulf, a large inlet intruding into Australia's south coast, hundreds of thousands of giant cuttlefish gather to breed. They're about the size and weight of a corgi, with ever-changing displays of shadow and colour rippling across their dynamic skins. At the height of the breeding season, these amorous, multi-armed, living rainbows can get so numerous that there's one of them in every square meter of water.

But lately, these mating swarms have dwindled to a small fraction of their former glory, and no one knows why. Pollution, warming waters, and a dearth of prey are all possibilities. But Bronwyn Gillanders from the University of Adelaide suspected that the decline might just be part of a natural cycle, a downward trend stuck between upward ones. She couldn't test that idea, since no one had any long-term data on giant cuttlefish numbers. But such data did exist for other cephalopods--octopuses, squid, and other species of cuttlefish. Gillanders's team member Zoe Doubleday pulled it all together, by scouring earlier studies and contacting other scientists.

To her surprise, she didn't find evidence of either cycles or declines. Instead, she found that since the 1960s, cephalopods numbers have been increasing.

Scotland is set to strengthen its credentials as a world leader in wind energy after a £2.6 billion ($3.8 billion) offshore wind farm got the okay, it was announced on Monday.

SSE, the FTSE 100 energy company behind the wind farm, forecast it would power 450,000 homes and described the project as "one of the largest private investments ever made in Scottish infrastructure."

The Beatrice Offshore Windfarm will consist of 84 turbines, provide 588 megawatts (MW) of power and hopefully go online in 2019, SSE said in a news release.

The German wind and renewables sector is up in arms over the German federal government's restrictive outlook for wind and renewables expansion in the draft revision of the renewable energy act EEG 2016 due to be passed later in 2016.

The draft legislation relegates onshore wind to a supporting role, dependent on developments by all other renewables.

More than 170 wind and renewables organisations across Germany are participating in a "one-minute warning" action today (25 May) with the joint support of industry trade union IG Metall and the German farmers federation Deutschen Bauernverband.

A year ago the Imperium was seen as an absolute--a kind of immutable law of the universe in EVE Online [official site]. They were the biggest coalition backed by the richest players armed with the most cunning diplomatic team. Around their central alliance, the Goonswarm Federation (`goons'), were staunch allies who would hold the line if anyone dared invade. Their capital in the region of Deklein was thought to be an impregnable fortress from which flags with little bees waved in the solar wind. That's not what Deklein looks like today. Their home system, YA0-XJ, now has a new flag flying above it, and the Imperium's list of allies seems to be growing shorter by the month.

Bizarre story which is hard to jump right into - but basically, a bunch of people running an off-game casino where people can bet their in-game money have used their profits from this casino to fund a giant mercenary army to destroy the game's biggest empire.  Since their economic base is outside the game, nobody can really do anything about the fact that the casino's owner has a pocket deep enough to buy the loyalty of enough players to do anything.

For the first time, a US patient has been infected with bacteria resistant to an antibiotic used as a last resort, scientists said Thursday.

The patient, a 49-year-old woman in Pennsylvania, has recovered but health officials fear that if the resistance spreads to other bacteria, the country may soon see supergerms impervious to all known antibiotics.

"It is the end of the road for antibiotics unless we act urgently," Dr Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in Washington.

This winter, a small group of advocates, teachers, parents and students began meeting each week at a church in Portland, Ore., to figure out how their schools could do a better job of preparing the next generation to fight climate change. Together, they wrote a resolution that, with some changes, was unanimously adopted by the Portland Public School Board on May 17. The district, the board resolved, "will abandon the use of any adopted text material that is found to express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities."

But a few days after the vote, the story took on a life of its own, mostly outside Portland: Some websites called the move a "ban" on specific books, while another claimed that the district would scan its libraries and remove all books that weren't up to snuff. One of the advocates fielded emails calling him an "idiot" and a "d-bag."

The Heartland Institute, a conservative group, posted on its blog that the school district was "demanding that their unshakable faith in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming be the only thing taught in school." In an email, Heartland's director of communications, Jim Lakely, said the resolution was harmful because "it teaches kids in Portland public schools the falsehood that the science is settled." He said he's concerned that kids will be "indoctrinated instead of taught how the scientific method works."

The company behind a Chinese advert for detergent that has been dubbed the most racist ever has defended the bizarre content, saying any discrimination is in the eye of the viewer.

In the advert a pouch of Qiaobi cleaning liquid is applied to a black man, who is then bundled into a washing machine by a smiling woman. After a cycle of muffled screams, she opens the lid and a grinning Asian man climbs out. He winks at the viewer before the slogan flashes up on screen: Change begins with Qiaobi.

China's lack of diversity - it does not encourage long-term immigration, and the UN says it hosts only 150 refugees in a population of over 1.3 billion - can spill over into overt discrimination, particularly for people of colour. In 2009 the vicious response to a contestant on an TV talent show who had mixed Chinese and African-American heritage highlighted some of China's problems.

One African-American who spent several years in China recalled being fired as an English teacher, despite his excellent professional skills, because students were obsessed with his skin colour. Marketus Presswood wrote: "I overheard students talking in Chinese about how they were paying so much money and wanted a white instructor. One went so far as to say, `I don't want to look at his black face all night'." Presswood added that he hoped attitudes were changing as Chinese engagement with the world increased.

At a February 23 rally in Sparks, Nevada, Donald Trump pandered, as politicians are wont to do. He mentioned how "nobody loves the Bible more than I do," and that "we have to change our system, folks," and other things he believes to be pleasing to the median caucus-goer's ear.

But if you listen closely, you can detect how he panders not just with his words, but with how he says them:

"By the way I think I'm going to win the Hispanic vote," Trump says, and then a little more loudly and emphatically, "Do you know in the state of Nevada I win with Hispanics?!" Then, softly again: "They know I'm going to bring jobs in. They know I'm going to take jobs away from Mexico and China and all these places."

It's this variation of pitch and volume, deployed strategically by politicians, that interests Rosario Signorello, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Head and Neck Surgery at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine.

Johnny Depp's wife has filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences after just over a year of marriage.

Court records show that Amber Heard filed for divorce on Monday and is seeking spousal support from the Oscar-nominated actor.

I know, not particularly enlightening news, but through it I learned of this, which struck me as another perfect example of arrogant glitz tomfoolery, and one can't help but wonder whether there is a relation:

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's video is a terrifying insight into state mind control | Film | The Guardian

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard have taught us all a valuable lesson - declare everything when you enter Australia. Failure to notify the authorities that you're bringing dogs into the country means there's a good chance the government will kidnap your family and force you to record a grovelling apology while you watch a live-streamed video of them crying and begging for their lives.

I've seen the Depp and Heard apology video five times now, and that can be the only possible explanation. There is no universe, theoretical or otherwise, in which Depp and Heard are saying any of this stuff willingly. Something, clearly, must have happened to them.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, has admitted that he is the secret funder of Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against online news site Gawker.

Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, sued for invasion of privacy after Gawker published an excerpt of a leaked sex tape in 2012. In March this year, a Florida jury awarded Bollea $140m (£95.1m) in damages against the media organisation.

Unknown to the jury or public, Thiel had secretly bankrolled Bollea's legal case to the tune of about $10m. In 2007 Gawker had published a story revealing Thiel was gay. Publicly confirming his funding of the Bollea case after a report by Forbes, Thiel told the New York Times "it's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence".

After his opening monologue Bill had as his first special guest Berne Sanders. That was great. Then he went to his panel, which included Journalist Michael Moynihan, professor Melissa Harris-Perry and businessman Wayne Allyn Root. Root is a Trump wannabe. So it was three to one against Root - until Scott Adams arrived. Adams was the only one who had a clue about Trump or Root. Then it was four to one. It was a rout - by Root.

I also am conflicted about Maher. At times he is great - as with the Sanders interview. Other times he is an arrogant asshole - as he proved to be by re-inviting Root. Root just walked all over Maher and the others. Every time he opened his mouth he dropped a steaming pile of stinking shit - much faster than it could be cleaned up - and he never stopped talking. Maher is a comedian and is much more adept at dealing with outrage than most and the rest of the panel were hardly slouches, but they were just overrun. It didn't matter for the most part with Maher's audience. Most are predisposed to hate Trump anyway. But that performance made me shudder at the thought of Hillary in a debate against Trump.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."