German Chancellor Angela Merkel is prepared to let Greece leave the eurozone if Greeks elect a government that jettisons the country's current austerity course, Germany's Der Spiegel news weekly reported Saturday.

The report, which cited sources close to the German government, comes as polls show a radical leftist party leading the field three weeks ahead of a snap election in Greece.

The Syriza party of Alexis Tsipras has pledged to reverse reforms imposed by Greece's international creditors and renegotiate its bailout deal.

"The German government considers a eurozone exit (by Greece) to be almost inevitable if opposition leader Alexis Tsipras leads the government after the election and abandons budgetary discipline and does not repay the country's debts," Der Spiegel reported on its website.

Both Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble had come to view a potential Greek exit from the 19-currency eurozone in a less dramatic light, the report explained.

They both now felt such an outcome would be "bearable", Der Spiegel quoted unnamed sources as saying.

Published: 04 January 2015

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Lithuania joined the eurozone at the stroke of midnight on Thursday, hoping to anchor itself in Europe as its former master Russia flexes its military muscle in the region.

The first Soviet republic to declare independence, in 1990, Lithuania is the last of the three Baltic states to join the currency union and will be the last country to do so for the foreseeable future, with remaining European Union members at least two years, and probably much more, away.

By becoming the 19th member of the euro bloc, Lithuania hopes for a boost in trade and lower borrowing costs to help it recover from a 15 percent contraction in 2009 at the height of the global financial crisis.

But central bank Governor Vitas Vasiliauskas stressed the “geopolitical” significance of the move which puts the former Soviet state firmly in the sphere of what used to be considered Western Europe.

“You live where you live, you have to keep that in mind,” he told Reuters when asked about benefits of euro zone entry, referring to the recent flare-up in tensions in the region.

Russia’s role in the Ukraine crisis, which included the annexation of Crimea, has awoken fears in the Baltics, which have sizable ethnic Russian minorities, that they could be next.

NATO scrambled its jets more than 150 times in 2014 in response to Russian sorties, three times more than the previous year. Moscow also held surprise military exercises in Kaliningrad, its enclave that borders Lithuania, in December, with 9,000 troops and 55 ships.

Despite rising political tensions, Lithuania’s credit rating is now well into investment grade, and rating agency Fitch expects its economy to growth by 3.5 percent in 2015, three times as fast as the euro zone as a whole.

Published: 02 January 2015

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Pakistan on Sunday executed four more militants after ending a six-year moratorium on the death penalty following a Taliban school attack that killed 149 people, officials said.

The hangings follow those of two convicted militants on Friday after death warrants for the six men were signed the day before.

"Ghulam Sarwar, Rashid Tipu, Zubair Ahmed and Akhlaq Ahmed have been hanged for an assassination attempt on General Pervez Musharraf", Pakistan's former leader, a prison official in the eastern city of Faisalabad told AFP.

Pakistan's decision to reinstitute executions was slammed by human rights groups, with the United Nations also calling for it to reconsider the move.

Two senior government officials of central Punjab province, where the executions took place, confirmed the hangings.

"The brutal killers were clearly frightened and sought mercy from the jail staff on their cruel, inhuman and un-Islamic act," the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) said.

"They admitted that their brutal and inhuman acts had finally brought them to the gallows," it added.

The government ended the six-year ban on capital punishment for terror-related cases following Tuesday's bloody rampage on an army run school that killed mostly children.

Pakistan's military chief on Thursday signed the death warrants for the six militants who were on death row, after the government ended the moratorium on Wednesday.

On Friday two militants Aqil, alias Doctor Usman, and Arshad Mehmood were hanged in Faisalabad jail.

Aqil was convicted for an attack on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi in 2009 and was arrested after being injured.

Arshad Mehmood was convicted for his involvement in the assassination attempt on Musharraf in 2003.

Published: 24 December 2014

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Word spread quickly: a polar bear, then two, were spotted near this remote Inuit village on the shores of Hudson Bay, about 1,800 kilometers (1,120 miles) north of Montreal.

Children were whisked indoors. Hunters armed with rifles set out from Kuujjuarapik on snowmobiles in a blizzard to kill the intruders, before the bears could get close enough to take a bite out of any of the town's 1,500 residents.

Clashes between bears and people so far south of the Arctic were unheard of a century ago.

"Polar Bears were just stories when I was growing up in the 1920s," said elder Alec Tuckatuck.

But there have been more and more sightings of late, he said, as warming forces the world's largest carnivore to abandon its traditional ice-covered hunting grounds and migrate further south.

As of early December, stable ice had not yet formed on Hudson Bay, where the bears would traditionally feast on seals, adding layers of fat that would carry them through the next summer.

The summers in Kuujjuarapik are getting longer and winters are relatively "very short," Tuckatuck commented. "We now have (only) seven months of snow," he lamented.

This is having a dramatic impact on the lives of Inuit and bears alike -- and leading to more unwanted clashes between them, some even further south than Kuujjuarapik.

A polar bear was spotted in 2010 in Shamattawa, Manitoba, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) south of Hudson Bay.

In the Nunavut hamlet of Taloyoak, six intrepid polar bears had to be put down in the past three months after wandering into the community.

"They're not cuddly little Coca-Cola bears," Bob Lyall, of the local Hunters and Trappers Organization, told Canadian media. "They're hungry bears coming through town and looking for food."

In Kuujjuarapik, Inuit hunters have also had to search elsewhere than ice floes for food.

The bay ice, Tuckatuck said, "can break up (underfoot) at any time."

Hunters cannot safely venture onto the ice in search of seals or beluga whales, and so they have turned their sights inland on caribou -- marking a major cultural shift away from the ice that long sustained their people.

- 'Climate bomb' -

In his bright yellow ski pants and parka, Tuckatuck recalls the effects of global warming started to be felt here in the 1980s, long before nations began negotiations to cut greenhouse gas emissions linked to the phenomena.

That's when people here started noticing a change in "the timing of the ice (forming), the timing of melting," said Tuckatuck.

Published: 24 December 2014

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There may be no corner hardware store at the International Space Station, but that doesn't mean the astronauts can't get what they need.

In a first, the space station crew was able to craft a new tool in space, using their specially designed Zero-G 3D printer and a design emailed from the ground.

The tool, a ratchet, was designed by Made in Space, the California company that created the 3D printer on board the orbiting space lab.

The 3D printer has been used on the space station before, but only for designs that were tested and loaded before it left Earth.

This time, the tool was designed and tested on the ground and then emailed to the printer, which spit it out in about four hours, the company said in a statement.

"The ratchet was designed as one print with moveable parts without any support material," the company said.

Published: 23 December 2014

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His motives are a mystery and his acts described as random and deranged, but analysts say the gunman who took a Sydney cafe full of terrified people hostage could still score a propaganda coup for jihadists.

Bearing a black jihadist flag, the Iranian-born Islamist created precisely the sort of lone-wolf attack urged by groups such as the Islamic State -- replete with bomb threats, hostages and panic in a major Western city.

Although any link to a specific group has yet to be established, the explosions and flashes of the dramatic police storming of the cafe that left two hostages and the hostage-taker dead, drove home the increasing reality of the "lone wolf" threat.

The gunman was named in Australian media as an Iranian-born "cleric" called Man Haron Monis, aged 49, who had sent offensive letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers and was out on bail on charges of being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife.

He was described as a "fringe Islamist" who acted on his own, and while the reasons for his acts remained murky, analysts said IS could take it as a win for their cause.

"The key thing with these attacks isn't to cause lots of casualties, it is to cause a media buzz, get everyone focused on it, everyone talking about it," said Matthew Henman, the head of London-based IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre.

Published: 17 December 2014

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Ratings agency Fitch cut France's credit grade by one notch to "AA" on Friday, saying Paris's efforts to trim its fiscal deficit have fallen short to avoid a downgrade.

"The weak outlook for the French economy impairs the prospects for fiscal consolidation and stabilizing the public debt ratio," Fitch said.

The AA grade -- two steps below the top triple-A rating -- was decided despite France having reduced its projected deficit for fiscal 2015 to 4.1 percent of GDP, down from 4.3 percent, under pressure from the European Commission.

"On its own, this will not be sufficient to significantly change Fitch's projections of France's government debt dynamics," the agency said.

"The 2015 budget involves a significant slippage against prior budget deficit targets."

It noted that the draft 2015 budget projected government debt to GDP ratio will peak at 98 percent in 2016, higher and later than previous projections.

But Fitch doubted those targets could be met.

Published: 15 December 2014

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Dressed as Santas and sexy snowflakes, exuberant revelers roared out Jingle Bells, gulped down beer and danced in Times Square on Saturday, kicking off New York's controversial SantaCon bar crawl.

Thousands -- many young and a few old -- are expected to frequent more than 30 Manhattan bars which are opening their doors to a party slammed by critics last year after drunk merrymakers brawled, vomited and urinated in the streets.

But when one neighborhood in Brooklyn tried to ban this year's gathering, civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel played Santa to SantaCon, coming to the rescue to help redesign a festive, but law-abiding gathering.

To ease pressure on New York police, who will be out in force at a major civil rights rally to condemn police killings, the organizers agreed to start early and restrict themselves to Midtown.

"It's going to be a crazy day," said Greg Packer, a retired highway maintenance worker, taking part for the first time.

"It's part of the holiday season, it's New Year's, it puts you in a festive mood," he added, squeezing his portly frame into a Santa suit, buckle and hat.

Revelers gathered in Times Square from 9:00 am, dressed as Santas, reindeers, elves and snowflakes, drapped in Christmas lights and tinsel. A few young men sipped beers hidden in paper bags.

- Good Santas this year -

Bellowing out Jingle Bells, they danced and hoisted each other onto one another's shoulders as women in stockings and suspenders, mini skirts and thigh-high stilettoed boots huddled in the cold.

Jose Solorzano, a 23-year-old student, and accountant friend Benny Riccardo said complaints were unjustified, pointing out SantaCon ("con" for "convention") raises money for charity.

Published: 15 December 2014

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From her days as a local politician to her role as the US Senate's chief intelligence overseer, Dianne Feinstein has been forced to confront human wickedness on levels personal and political.

As a San Francisco official she held a slain colleague in her arms moments after a gunman's bullets cut him down.

As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, she has been privy to details of the war on terror and extremists who have killed Americans.

Feinstein pushed back against the savagery this week, in a way that could define her career.

She released a 500-page report summary detailing ghastly interrogation practices by the CIA which she and others say amount to torture of detainees.

It capped a years-long effort to investigate and expose the enhanced interrogation techniques of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose leaders she infuriated last March when she dropped a bombshell by publicly accusing its agents of spying on Senate computers.

"I have grave concerns that the CIA's search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution," Feinstein declared in a dramatic floor speech.

The case recalled the dark years of the agency, and Feinstein said it pained her to expose it to the public.

It triggered one of the worst rows between Congress and the intelligence community, but the matter was too grave to ignore.

As investigators put finishing touches on their massive probe, she said, the CIA breached Senate computers in a bid to delete files confirming the committee's suspicions.

It was amid such frayed ties that Feinstein, following an intense tug-of-war with the CIA and White House, released a declassified version of the report Tuesday, offering 20 damning conclusions about the ineffectiveness and brutality of many post-9/11 interrogations.

"Excellent," is how Senator John Rockefeller described Feinstein's performance this week.

"I've worked really closely with her," Rockefeller told AFP on Friday.

"We've dealt with the same issues. I sit right beside her, and I think she's done a wonderful job."

Feinstein, 81, has lost none of her fighting spirit, but the intensity of negotiations over the report appears to have left a mark.

Approached by reporters as she headed to yet another classified briefing ahead of the report's publication, she said "I don't even know what day it is."

Published: 13 December 2014

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US Secretary of State John Kerry Tuesday urged lawmakers to adopt a new legal authorization to underpin military action against Islamic State militants for at least three years.

But during a heated debate, the top US diplomat came under fire from Republicans and Democrats who argued that if President Barack Obama wanted new powers to combat the jihadists, he should have drawn up a draft text to propose to the Senate.

The US-led coalition has already carried out some 1,100 airstrikes in Syria and Iraq since September targeting IS extremists in a bid to defeat the group which has seized a large territory and imposed harsh Islamic law.

So far, the Obama administration has used the existing authorization for use of military force against Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their branches approved in the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks as the legal justification for going after IS.

Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations committee: "I think we all agree that this discussion must conclude with a bipartisan vote that makes clear that this is not one party's fight against ISIL (IS), but rather that it reflects our unified determination to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL."

"Our coalition partners need to know it. The men and women of our armed forces need to know it. And ISIL's cadres of killers, rapists, and bigots need to understand it."

He asked the committee to help draw up a new authorization which "provides a clear signal of support for our ongoing military operations against ISIL," referring to the group by another acronym.

Kerry also urged that the text should not limit US actions geographically to just Syria and Iraq, and suggested it should be valid for three years with room for a possible extension.

Controversially, the top US diplomat also appealed to senators not to rule out the use of ground troops.

Obama has insisted he will not send US ground troops into combat operations against IS, saying that "will be the responsibility of local forces."

"That does not mean we should preemptively bind the hands of the commander-in-chief -- or our commanders in the field -- in responding to scenarios and contingencies that are impossible to foresee," Kerry said.

Published: 11 December 2014

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