The interview was conducted by Martin Hesse and Thomas Schulz | May 24

Speigel Online - In a SPIEGEL interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that this is not the time to worry about debt and inflation. To save the euro zone, he argues that the European Central Bank should loosen monetary policy and the German government should abandon austerity.

Aleksandar Vasovic & Matt Robinson | Belgrade | May 20

Reuters - * Pro-Western incumbent Tadic bidding for 5 more years
* Opposition alleges fraud, threatens street protests
* Low turnout favours opposition challenger Nikolic
* Economy stalling, unemployment at 24 percent

Voter apathy and accusations of fraud marred a presidential run-off in Serbia on Sunday, where pro-Western incumbent Boris Tadic is vying with rightist Tomislav Nikolic for the right to lead the nation into talks on joining the EU.

Seven hours after polls opened, just 23.2 percent of the 6.7 million Serbs eligible to vote had done so.

Tadic began the day as the frontrunner, but analysts have said a low turnout might favour Nikolic, whose supporters are considered more disciplined voters.

Twice elected president since 2004, Tadic, 54, was part of the reformist bloc that ousted strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 after a decade of war and isolation during the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Under Tadic, Serbia in March became an official candidate for EU membership, but there is deep frustration among Serbs over the grinding transition from socialism to capitalism and an economic slowdown that has driven unemployment up to 24 percent.

Nikolic, 60, was an ultranationalist ally of Milosevic when Serbia was bombed by NATO in 1999. But, since losing to Tadic in 2008, he has tried to rebrand himself as a pro-European conservative, accusing his opponent of presiding over a creeping culture of elitism.

Berlin | May 19

AP - At least 20,000 people held a major rally of the local Occupy movement in Frankfurt on Saturday to decry austerity measures affecting much of Europe, the dominance of banks, and what they call untamed capitalism.

The protesters peacefully filled the city center of continental Europe's biggest financial hub on a warm and pleasant afternoon, said Frankfurt police spokesman Ruediger Regis. He said 20,000 people were there, while organizers put the number at 25,000.

Frank Dohmen & Alexander Jung | May 19

Speigel Online - With the planned Nabucco natural gas pipeline in southern Europe hitting snag after snag, Russian natural gas giant Gazprom is considering the construction of a second Baltic Sea pipeline to go with the just-finished Nord Stream. With unconventional natural gas from the US flooding the market, however, the strategy is not without risk.

Conal Urquhart | May 19

The Guardian - German-Greek relations were further strained on Friday after the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was heard advising Greece to hold a referendum on its membership of the euro.

Greek politicians reacted angrily, but Merkel's aides insisted she had not suggested a referendum during a telephone call on Friday with the Greek president, Karolos Papoulias.

The Greek government's spokesman, Dimitris Tsiodras, said: "[Merkel] relayed to the president thoughts about holding a referendum in parallel with the elections on the question whether Greek citizens wish to remain in the eurozone."

A German government spokesman rejected the idea that Merkel had proposed a referendum. "This is false and we completely dismiss this," he said.

Some commentators suggested that the misunderstanding was due to an error in translation. One said that Merkel had said that the 17 June elections in Greece would be like a referendum on the country's membership of the euro.

But Greek politicians criticised Merkel's perceived interference in Greek affairs.

Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the leftwing Syriza party that wants to renegotiate Greece's bailout by the EU and the IMF, said: "Ms Merkel is used to addressing Greece's political leaders as if the country was a protectorate."

Washington | May 19

AFP - France's President Francois Hollande used his White House debut on Friday to restate his intention to get French combat troops home from Afghanistan this year - breaking with NATO's 2014 schedule.

Hollande met President Barack Obama for the first time since taking office three days ago, ahead of a testing weekend of international summits, with G8 leaders at Camp David and NATO chiefs at a 61-nation gathering in Chicago.

"I recalled to President Obama that I had made a promise to withdraw our combat troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2012," Hollande said, as the two leaders spoke to reporters in the Oval Office.

"I also stipulated that there would still be support in another form," Hollande said, adding that the French withdrawal would be done in consultation with French allies in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Obama did not dispute Hollande's position, but stressed that NATO states must sustain their commitment to help "Afghans build security and continue down the path of development."

Washington is currently soliciting funding from its allies to ensure training and financing for Afghan armed forces after NATO combat troops leave - which it estimates could cost around $4 billion a year.

Apart from Afghanistan, both sides sought common ground, with Obama styling the partners as complimentary as cheeseburgers and French fries, though alarm over the euro zone tempered Hollande's visit.

Athens | May 15

AP - Greece will hold a new election in June after days of talks failed to resolve the country’s political deadlock, party leaders said Tuesday.

The Athens Stock Exchange plunged on the news, diving 4.86 percent minutes after the announcement before recovering somewhat.

The May 6 election left no party with enough votes for a majority in parliament and repeated efforts over nine days to cobble together a coalition government proved fruitless.

Raphael Minder | Madrid | May 13

NYT - Tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets during the weekend to protest austerity budget cuts and commemorate the anniversary on Tuesday of a movement that inspired other groups on Wall Street and across the Western world.

Over all, protesters gathered in about 80 Spanish cities, but again, one of the biggest turnouts was in Puerta del Sol, the Madrid square that almost a year ago became the center of a nationwide, youth-led movement seeking to overhaul Spain’s political parties and other traditional institutions. About 40,000 people gathered in the square on Saturday evening, while a similar number of protesters rallied in a square in Barcelona.

Angela Merkel is a pleasant practitioner of the art of suffering. She loves to share the crackpot notion that belt-tightening in times of Depression represents sound policy. Reminds me of Krugman's statement of shock when, at a gathering of academic economists, he realized that about 1/2 of them knew little about John Manyard Keynes. Now Merkel is getting another message from the German public (this happened a few years ago but this is harsher).

Merkel's party humiliated by shock election defeat
German voters reject austerity programme in favour of pro-growth opposition in state poll Tony Paterson, May 14, Berlin The Independent

"Angela Merkel's ruling conservatives suffered a humiliating defeat in key elections in Germany's most populous state yesterday when voters rejected her party's austerity policies and handed a resounding victory to her pro-growth Social Democratic Party opponents.

"Ms Merkel's Christian Democrats were shell-shocked by the devastating result they returned in the poll in North Rhine Westphalia, which has a total population of 18 million. Exit polls showed that they secured a mere 25.5 per cent of the vote – their worst performance ever in the state.

Douwe Miedema & Sarah White | London | May 11

Reuters - Banks are quietly readying themselves to start trading a new Greek currency. Some banks never erased the drachma from their systems after Greece adopted the euro more than a decade ago and would be ready at the flick of a switch if its debt problems forced it to bring back national banknotes and coins.

From the end of the Soviet Union - which spawned currencies such as the Estonian Kroon and the Kazakh Tenge - to the introduction of the euro, they have had plenty of practice in preparing their systems to cope with change.

Planning behind the scenes has been underway since Europe's debt crisis erupted in Greece in 2009, said U.S.-based Hartmut Grossman of ICS Risk Advisors who works with Wall Street banks.

"A lot of the firms, particularly in Europe and also here, have been looking at that for a long time," said Grossman, who added that the latest Greek political crisis had brought matters "to a little bit of a head".

"But there really has been contingency planning at all of the financial institutions for that to happen ... Greece leaving the euro zone is not a new idea," he said.

May 5

BBC - French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his challenger Francois Hollande are observing a mandatory election silence ahead of Sunday's run-off vote.   

Konstantin von Hammerstein, Christian Neef and Ralf Neukirch | Apr 30

Speigel Online - After years of pragmatic foreign policy, Chancellor Angela Merkel is suddenly putting human rights on center stage in her dealings with Ukraine. The country's handling of former opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko has Berlin up in arms. And Merkel is hoping to score an easy political victory.

- She still hopes that Yanukovich will eventually give in. Meanwhile, the Chancellery is already mapping out other scenarios for the event that he doesn't come around. If Tymoshenko is not released before the European Football Championship kicks off in June, the German team will probably have to play without Merkel in attendance.

That will show them! Of course if she really cared about human rights she would pull the team out and would have also pulled the German teams out of the Bahrain grand Prix

Apr 30

BBC - French President Nicolas Sarkozy is to file a complaint against a website that claimed Libya's Col Gaddafi had offered to fund his 2007 election campaign.

In six days' time, he faces Socialist Francois Hollande in the second round of the presidential election.

The Mediapart site has published a 2006 document signed by former head of Libyan intelligence Moussa Koussa proposing up to 50m euros in funding.

Mr Sarkozy called it a "crude forgery" and Mr Koussa said it was a fake.

"Do you think that with all that I'd done to Mr Gaddafi, he'd have made me a bank transfer? Why not a signed cheque?" he told France 2 TV on Monday.

The allegation that Col Muammar Gaddafi had offered illegal funding for Mr Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign first surfaced in March 2011 when the late Libyan leader's son, Saif al-Islam, said he was ready to reveal all the details.

Martin Enserink | Amsterdam | Apr 27

Science Mag - The Dutch government has given virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC an export license for his controversial H5N1 transmissibility study, allowing Fouchier to send a revised manuscript of his paper to Science.

The license "is in my inbox," says Fouchier. "Now we can move on."

The decision by Henk Bleker, minister for agriculture and foreign trade, was announced this afternoon in a press release (Dutch) posted on the ministry's Web site. It comes 4 days after a closed meeting in The Hague, where government officials discussed the risks and benefits of the research with an international group of scientists and security experts.

** Secret Briefing Helped Sway H5N1 Flu Papers Decision
** Scientists have engineered a deadly bird flu virus, but are there dangers in publishing their research?

Valeria Criscione | Apr 26

CSM - Forty thousand Norwegians marched and sang in Oslo today in an impromptu protest against mass killer Anders Behring Breivik for calling the popular children's song “Children of the Rainbow” a Marxist song used to brainwash youth.

The man behind last summer’s twin terror attacks said in court testimony last week that the Norwegian song by Lillebjørn Nilsen, based on US folksinger Pete Seeger’s original version “My Rainbow Race” in 1967, was an example of how Norwegian schools function as an “indoctrination camp” for “cultural Marxism and multiculturalism.”

Mr. Breivik, a self-described militant nationalist, blames his bombing of government buildings in Oslo and shooting rampage at Utøya island on the ruling Labor party for promoting multiculturalism with its lenient immigration policies and allowing mass immigration to undermine Norwegian society.

Tony Cross | Paris | April 22

RFI - French voters turned out for the first round of France’s presidential election Sunday, many of them critical of a campaign they say failed to address their true concerns. Incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy hopes his loyal supporters will rally to his side but many voters say they’ve had enough of him.

“I voted for change and I also voted against Nicolas Sarkozy,” says Christine, a voter in Champigny-sur-Marne, a working-class town on the outskirts of Paris. She likes the left’s ideas on jobs and small businesses but judges many of hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s policies “totally unrealistic”.

Prague | April 21

Agencies/The Guardian - Tens of thousands of Czechs have staged one of the country's biggest protests since the fall of communism, marching in Prague against spending cuts, tax rises and corruption, and calling for the end of a centre-right government already close to collapse.

Police estimated between 80,000 and 90,000 workers, students and pensioners marched through the capital on Saturday to rally in Wenceslas Square. Chanting and whistling, the crowd held banners reading "Away with the government" and "Stop thieves".

Helena Smith | Athens | Apr 19

The Guardian - thens' fondness for weaponry, and willingness of Germany and France to feed it, under fire as Greece struggles with debt crisis

Former defence minister Akis Tsochadzopoulos has been charged with accepting an €8m bribe from German company Ferrostaal. Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP
A few months before submarines became the talk of Athens, Yiannis Panagopoulos, who heads the Greek trade union confederation (GSEE), found himself sitting opposite Angela Merkel at a private meeting the German chancellor had called of European trade unionists in Berlin.

When it came to his turn to address the leader, he instinctively popped the question that many in Greece have wanted to ask. "After running through all the reasons why austerity wasn't working in my country I brought up the issue of defence expenditure. Was it right, I asked, that our government makes so many weapons purchases from Germany when it obviously couldn't afford such deals and was slashing wages and pensions?"

Merkel's reaction was instant. "She immediately said: 'But we never asked you to spend so much of your GDP on defence,'" Panagopoulos recalled. "And then she mentioned the issue of outstanding payments on submarines she said Germany had been owed for over a decade."

Greek profligacy may be blamed for triggering the debt crisis that now threatens to tear the eurozone apart, but if there is one area where Berlin is less excoriating of state largesse it is in Athens's extravagant taste for arms.

Behind the frequent exhortations that Greece rein in spending after living "beyond its means" – admonishments made most loudly by Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble – there is another reality that paints Germany in a less than flattering light, according to MPs, military experts, economists and scholars.

"If there is one country that has benefited from the huge amounts Greece spends on defence it is Germany," said Dimitris Papadimoulis, an MP with the Coalition of the Radical Left party.

Andrew Curry | Würzburg, Germany | Apr 9

Speigel Online - German Firm Uses Aerial Photos to Find Bombs

A small German firm offers a unique service to the country's construction industry: It uses historical British and American aerial photography from World War II air strikes to determine the location of unexploded bombs. Thousands of tons of bombs still lie in the soil and the duds are becoming more dangerous.

In 1938, German General Werner von Fritsch made a prediction. "The military with the best photo reconnaissance," he said, "will win the next war." Barely six years later, he was proven correct. Between 1940 and 1944, 2.7 million tons of bombs were dropped on Germany and occupied Europe by British and American bombers. Each bombing raid was guided by extensive analysis of aerial photography that was cutting-edge for its time. The effect of each raid was measured by yet more aerial photos.

More than 70 years after the first bombs fell, those photos are being used with increasing frequency to heal the wartime damage that still lingers, hidden under the city streets and open fields of modern Germany. Using images from vast wartime archives in Britain and the United States, German authorities and private companies locate buried, unexploded bombs and avert the risk that construction workers set them off accidentally during building projects.

Apostoli Fotiadis | Athens | Apr 9

IPS - The broken display cases at Greece’s Museum of Olympia, the site where the first Olympic Games were held thousand of years ago, have stunned members of the Archaeological Service who have been registering a stream of missing cultural artefacts.

Despina Koutsouba, president of the Association of Greek Archaeologists (SEA), says treasure dating back to the Classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine periods has disappeared from the museum, including "a golden ring stamp, copper sculptures from the eighth century BC, coins and clay vases".

The burglaries in the National and Municipal Galleries during February, as well as the armed robbery at the Museum in Olympia on Mar. 5, have exposed weaknesses in the protection of cultural heritage sites around the country, made worse by the so-called austerity programme that is slashing all national public service budgets.

To add insult to injury, the Greek Minister of Culture has decided to cut funding for museum security by 20 percent. According to a new law, the Greek government is also planning personnel cuts of 30-50 percent at the Ministry of Culture.

Athens | April 4

BBC - Protesters have clashed with riot police in Athens hours after a pensioner shot himself dead outside the Greek parliament.

The man, named in the Greek media as 77-year-old Dimitris Christoulas, killed himself in the city's busy Syntagma Square on Wednesday morning.

In a suicide note reported by Greek media, he accused the government of reducing his pension to nothing.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the square outside parliament on Wednesday evening, the scene of many large protests in recent months. Violence erupted, with petrol bombs hurled at police, who fired tear gas in response.

Toulouse, France | March 31

RFI - Over 20,000 people demonstrated in the south-western French city of Toulouse in defence of the local language, Occitan, on Saturday. Supporters of Socialist François Hollande pledged that he would act to endorse Europe-wide actions in defence of regional languages if he becomes president in May.

Green presidential candidate Eva Joly and MEP José Bové joined the demonstrators, as did the Socialists Senate president Jean-Pierre Bel and Toulouse mayor Pierre Cohen.

“In many places regional languages are threatened,” Joly said, calling for them to be taught in junior schools.

Apr 2

Speigel Online - The railway track at the main gate of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Germany's national railway, Deutsche Bahn, has hired a law firm and PR agency in the United States to prepare for legislation being considered by Congress that would allow Holocaust survivors to sue European railway companies for damages in American courts. Deutsche Bahn fears victims could sue for millions if the legislation passes.

Florian Gathmann & Stefan Simons | Mar 31

Speigel Online - Angela Merkel initially refused to receive French presidential candidate François Hollande when he offered a meeting recently. But as his victory against Nicolas Sarkozy seems more likely, the German Chancellery has made its first contacts with the Socialist Party politician's camp. After all, Berlin and Paris must stick together.

Andrés Cala | Madrid | March 29

CSM - Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards marched Thursday in the first general strike against strangling austerity, only the most recent challenge to the new conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy fending off resistance from all sides.

“We can’t take this anymore,” says Eva Cañamares, a station manager in Madrid’s subway system. Her 11 and 9-year old children were passing out union flags beside her in the central Puerta del Sol plaza, where tens of thousands chanted against government economic policies.

“I’m here for my children. They are taking away all our rights and this also affects them,” Mrs. Cañamares says, echoing the strike’s slogans. “They want to do away with everything.… The government just wants to take away everything and not even negotiate."