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Strong Quake Hits Northern Italy
(Reuters) A strong earthquake rocked northern Italy early on Sunday morning, causing at least three deaths and collapsing rural factories and ancient bell towers in towns.

Sri Lanka President Orders Release of Jailed Rival
(Reuters) Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa has ordered the early release from jail of his highest-profile political rival Sarath Fonseka, the president’s spokesman said on Sunday, in an apparent bid to quell international criticism of the government’s human rights record.

World Leaders Back Greece, Vow to Combat Financial Turmoil
(Reuters) World leaders backed keeping Greece in the euro zone on Saturday and vowed to take all steps necessary to combat financial turmoil while revitalizing a global economy increasingly threatened by Europe’s debt crisis.

U.S. Tells G8 Syria’s Assad Must Go, Cites Yemen as Model
(Reuters) President Barack Obama told G8 leaders meeting at Camp David that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must leave power, and pointed to Yemen as a model of how political transition could work there, the White House said on Saturday.

Chinese activist who fled house arrest lands in US
NEW YORK (AP)—A blind Chinese legal activist who was suddenly allowed to leave the country arrived in the United States on Saturday, ending a nearly monthlong diplomatic tussle that had tested U.S.-China relations.

Bomb kills 1 student, wounds 7 in Italy
ROME (AP)—A bomb exploded outside an Italian high school named after the wife of an assassinated anti-Mafia prosecutor, killing one student and wounding at least seven others, officials said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Suicide blast kills 13 in eastern Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP)—A suicide bomber blew himself up at a police checkpoint Saturday in a volatile area of eastern Afghanistan, killing 13 people, police said.

Thought of the Day

“It’s not what you do, but how much love you put into it that matters.”—Rick Warren

The Inexperience Advantage

By Daniel Gulati, HBR, May 16, 2012
Ever been shut down by someone who supposedly knows more than you? It happens to me daily. I get denied by people that are more senior, more polished, and more knowledgeable than me. I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed professional rejection, but I try my best to dust myself off and move forward, reminding myself that that a series of controlled failures are necessary for eventual success.

Not surprisingly, I’m not the only one getting ignored because of my inexperience, and the rejections can be downright vicious. Just last week, Kate called me in tears after attending a media conference with well-known industry bigwigs. After spending months anxiously anticipating meeting her professional heroes, she couldn’t have been more disheartened on the day of the event. Noting that she had been working in the industry for less than a year, most executives simply refused to engage in conversation with her, and the ones that did spoke to her in a condescending, suspicious manner that made her “feel like a kid who was inconveniencing a gathering of distinguished adults.” She flew home categorically disillusioned.

As a proud supporter of the young, I was disgusted at the extent to which she was repeatedly shunned for, essentially, being too inexperienced. Yes, young and ambitious people with bright eyes and open hearts need to learn to accept the cold shoulder of established industry gatekeepers, even when it seems like the only goal of the latter is to prevent new ideas and innovation bubbling to the surface of their tired companies and low-growth industries. But a line needs to be drawn between not fully engaging with the inexperienced (painful, but understandable) and making them feel like they’ve committed a crime with their lack of knowledge and years under their belt (not okay, ever).

More importantly, though, I’m disheartened at the response—at how those with limited experience beef up resumes, wear expensive suits, use industry jargon liberally, name-drop awkwardly, and generally try to paper over cracks in an effort to mask inexperience and appeal more to bosses, investors, or interviewers. Trying to sound more experienced than you are is a flawed strategy, so you need to change the way you compete.

Instead of forging the impression of experience, I’d rather we turn the tables and use our inexperience as an advantage in the organizations we work for and the companies we start. In other words, we need to start playing to our strengths.

Being inexperienced means you’re not shackled with decades of service in a narrow vertical and the accompanying entrenched biases and relationships. You have natural qualities to offer that companies spend millions of dollars per year in training budgets trying to replicate in their most senior executives. You question long-held assumptions, cross-pollinating your projects with outside ideas. You don’t have to pander to the person who did you a favor all those years ago, and more generally, you don’t have social capital within your organization to protect. This means you’re pretty free from some huge barriers to innovation: sunk costs, self-interest, and bias. That sense of freedom and independence leads you to think that hitting that stretch goal is possible, which makes achieving it more likely. You tend to think of new solutions quickly, refuse to compromise yourself out of existence, and are a native end-user of technologies that could blow existing business models to bits. All this amounts to at least two things: 1) The best organizations should wage wars for people like you, and 2) you can stop looking for opportunities to appear to be adding value. Instead, you can actually add value.

If those nagging self-doubts return, don’t look up to role models for inspiration; look around at your peers for evidence. Writing Passion & Purpose showed me how countless young people have impacted the world in incredible ways, and how they’re doing this in public, private, and nonprofit sectors, across industries, within established organizations and in their own companies. Most importantly, they’re making a difference in industries that they haven’t spent the better part of their lives in. You can join them.

Inexperience doesn’t equal ineptitude, and we need to stop treating young professionals like second-class citizens. To those of you who think that your inexperience is a chronic disadvantage, stop. Don’t let anyone confuse your inexperience in performing a task with an inability to perform it. Instead, be encouraged and seize the opportunity to remain humble, play to your advantages, and show the world you can do better.

Nearly half of online users use Internet for religion

By Jeff Kunerth, Orlando Sentinel, May, 17 2012
Almost half of all American adults who are online are using the Internet for religious purposes, according to a new study from Grey Matter Research in Phoenix, Ariz.

The research shows a variety of ways online Americans use the Internet for spiritual purposes:

 •Nineteen percent have, in the past six months, visited the website of a church or other place of worship they are currently attending

 •During that same time frame, another 17% have visited the website of a church or place of worship they were not attending

 •Nineteen percent have visited a website designed to provide religious instruction or learning during the last six months

 •Seventeen percent read religion-oriented blogs once a month or more

 •Fourteen percent have a pastor or other religious leader as a friend on Facebook or a similar social network site

 •Eleven percent have visited the website of a group or organization from a religious faith that is different from their own during the last six months

 •One out of ten have “Liked” a church or other place of worship on Facebook or a similar social network site

 •Eight percent participate in religion-oriented discussions online (e.g. bulletin boards or forums) once a month or more

 •Two percent follow a church or other place of worship on Twitter

 •Another 2% follow a pastor or other religious leader on Twitter

Among online Americans, Internet use for religious purposes is particularly common among the young. Fifty-seven percent of online adults under age 35 use the Internet for religion, compared to 48% who are 35 to 49 years old, 36% who are 50 to 64, and 31% who are 65 or older.

“Young people are especially likely to be using the Internet for religious purposes, and considering that older Americans in general are less likely than younger people to be online at all, the gap is even greater when that’s taken into consideration,” said Ron Sellers, president of Grey Matter Research. “Yet younger Americans in general are less likely than older people to attend worship services or claim any specific religious identity. Involvement in spirituality and expressions of faith differ considerably by generation—and young people are obviously looking to the Internet to be a significant part of their faith experience.”

Prisoner sees harvest of souls

By Ava Thomas, Baptist Press, May 18, 2012
CENTRAL ASIA (BP)—“Dad, I think we’re being followed.”

Yasemin* drummed her fingers nervously on the car door. Her father kept on driving the familiar route to drop her off at English class, singing a praise song to Jesus as he drove.

Yasemin turned around and looked back.

“Dad, we’re being followed.”

He sang louder.

“Would you take it seriously?”

Not missing a beat, he changed songs mid-verse and belted out lyrics of his own: “I’m going to prison today!”

James* knew the signs. He’d already been in prison once for his faith in Jesus. That day made it a second.

In the region where James and his family live in Central Asia, people bend over backward to show hospitality. Go to a neighbor’s home, and they spread out a feast and heap a visitor’s plate high with food. Leave your wallet somewhere, and people will guard it until you return.

“In lieu of an armored car, I’ve seen cars left unattended with the trunk open and piles of cash inside,” a friend of James said. “No one would dare bother it.”

In his country, they take care of each other.

But share Christ openly, and they may torture you.

“James has been blindfolded, handcuffed and held in solitary confinement,” his friend said. During the day, he has faced confinement in a room where three compressor units were blowing hot air on him, and he was not given any water or food.

Officials interrogated him, asking why he left his former religion.

“I am on this way because of Jesus and what He has done for me,” James said.

At the beginning of his imprisonment, he was put in a small jail cell at night, his hands released just long enough for him to eat a small piece of bread and drink one liter of water.

But James hardly slept—he stayed awake praying and singing praises, just as he did in the hot room during the daytime.

James has lost nearly 50 pounds since being imprisoned, his friend said.

But he has seen a lot of people found—many of them from places where he could never get access to go and share his faith. One of them had heard part of the Gospel message nine years earlier, and when he met James in prison, he heard the whole message and believed on the spot.

“This man had been waiting for nine years to hear the rest of the Gospel, just wanting to meet someone who could tell him,” James’ friend said. “He knew immediately it was God’s plan to send him to prison. He danced for joy.”

The guards came and began to beat the new believer.

“He cried out for Jesus to rescue him, and he stood firm,” James’ friend said. “He’s still standing firm with James in prison today.”

James is seeing more people come to faith in Jesus Christ during his months-long imprisonment than in the rest of his 20 years as a believer, his friend said.

“He is enduring all things, and all the time more people are coming to faith,” his friend said. “He is torn between two things—his release and the work God is doing there through him. His family is very anxious for him to be out of prison, but he is telling them to be patient, because God is doing great things.”

When James’ wife Ashti* and Yasemin got to visit him in prison, tears ran down their faces.

“He put his hands on our heads and said, ‘Why are you sad? God has a purpose for me here and He is not finished with it yet,’” Ashti recounted.

He prayed for comfort for them then told them he had a job for them to do.

“He said a man had come to believe in Jesus and wanted his wife to know,” Ashti said. “He asked James to get us to go and share with his wife.”

With nerves on edge, Ashti and Yasemin loaded up the car and went straight to her house from the prison.

“I didn’t know what we were going to do, how we were going to tell her or how we would be received,” Ashti said. “But when we got there, she said, ‘I want very much to hear what you have come to tell me—there is light all around you, and I want to know why.’”

Ashti knows the difference that the Light—Jesus—can make.

She herself came to faith when she encountered Light during childbirth, seven years after James first believed in Christ.

He was a devout Muslim before someone gave him a copy of the Gospel of John. In the middle of the night he felt someone call his name, shake him and tell him go to read.

He lit a lamp, got the book from the shelf and started reading while his family slept. The words jumped off the page at him. By the following year, he was a wholehearted follower of Jesus.

“I had been so angry with him for becoming a believer,” Ashti said. “I tried and tried to get him to return to Islam. I got my mat out and prayed with the kids in front of him on purpose.”

He didn’t change his mind, or his heart.

“Finally after years of trying to get him to come back to Islam, I was at the lowest point in my life. I decided to divorce him, even if it meant I had to leave the kids,” Ashti said.

Then she learned she was pregnant.

She headed straight to a clinic to have an abortion, not wanting to have the baby of an infidel.

“But the doctor said I was too far along to abort, so I decided I would have the baby, but that was it,” Ashti said.

She packed her bags and left to live with family until she had the baby. James didn’t see her again until he got a call while she was in labor. It wasn’t to let him know she’d have the baby—it was to let him know she’d decided to come home.

During labor, she met Jesus. “All I could see was light,” she said.

And now all her children have met Jesus, which has helped greatly with understanding why their father is in prison.

But they still struggle with his absence.

“As the trial with James has continued, remaining upbeat has grown increasingly harder,” James’ friend said. “His family struggled greatly with sadness and frustration. That being said, however, the Father has been working powerfully to strengthen their faith through it all.”

And the Father has made such an impact on James’ fellow prisoners that many of them, after their release, have traveled great distances to let James’ family know he’s safe, his friend said. “His wife and kids are encouraged by the reports from the former inmates, but they are also dearly missing their dad and spouse.”

But they know that God put him in jail with those men so that their families could also know the truth, his friend said. “Keep James lifted up so that the spirit of love pours from him into their lives and his light burns ever brighter every day.”

*Names have been changed.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews plan huge NYC meeting on Internet risks

AP, May 18, 2012
NEW YORK (AP)—Ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe that the Internet threatens their way of life have rented the New York Mets stadium for an unprecedented gathering on how to use modern technology in a religiously appropriate way.

More than 40,000 ultra-Orthodox Jewish men plan to pack Citi Field for Sunday’s gathering on the dangers of the Internet, and organizers have also rented the nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium for the overflow crowd.

“It’s going to be inspiration and education about using technology responsibly in accordance with Jewish values,” said Eytan Kobre, a lawyer who is the spokesman for the event’s organizers.

Kobre said the rally’s purpose is not to ban the Internet but to learn how to harness it.

“There is a very significant downside to the Internet,” he said. “It does pose a challenge to us in various aspects of our lives.”

He cited online pornography and gambling as well as the risk of social media undermining “our ability to pray uninterruptedly, to focus and to concentrate.”

The rally is being organized by a rabbinical group called Ichud Hakehillos Letohar Hamachane, which means Union of Communities for the Purity of the Camp. Published reports have put the cost at $1.5 million. Kobre would not confirm that amount, and he said the funders prefer to remain anonymous.

Women will not be permitted at either stadium but the rally will be broadcast live to audiences of women in schools and event halls in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. Kobre said live hookups are also being arranged elsewhere in the U.S. and internationally.

The organizers are leaders of ultra-Orthodox sects that reject many aspects of modern life. Women dress modestly and wear wigs after marriage, while men wear black hats and long beards. Children are educated in Jewish schools, and Yiddish is the first language for many.

Television is banned or discouraged, but Kobre said many ultra-Orthodox Jews use the Internet either on computers or smartphones. “There’s a spectrum of usage and there’s a spectrum of how people are dealing with it,” he said.

Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at Queens College who has written widely about ultra-Orthodox Jews, said community leaders are worried about “seepage of the outside world into their enclaves.”

“The problem of course is that they can’t keep it out because the Internet has become ubiquitous and also important for them,” he said.

Heilman said many ultra-Orthodox Jews use the Internet for online trading or to run businesses from their homes.

But the “seemingly innocuous device of a telephone or a computer” provides an opening to the outside world that the ultra-Orthodox have long shunned, Heilman said.

The lineup for Sunday’s rally has not been announced. Kobre said prominent rabbis will speak in Yiddish and in English, with the Yiddish portions translated into English on Citi Field’s big screen.

Japanese Researchers Shatter Wi-Fi World Record

Le Journal Du Geek (France), May 18, 2012
TOKYO—Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have broken the record for the world’s fastest Wi-Fi.

Using a 542GHz wireless connection in the 300GHz-3THz spectrum, they achieved speeds of 3Gpbs, reports Le Journal du Geek. If that’s a little too technical for you, what you need to know is that 3Gb/s is about 20 times faster than the fastest Wi-Fi connections that are available today.

Will we be able to benefit from this super fast Wi-Fi in the next few years? Definitely!

According to the Tokyo Institute of Technology project leader, Dr Suzuki Safumi, “everybody will use products related to THz (Terahertz) technology within the next decade.”

Last December, AT&T called Terahertz technology the “next frontier” for radio transmissions.

UK surveillance program could expose private lives

Raphael Satter, AP, May 18, 2012
LONDON (AP)—British officials have given their word: “We won’t read your emails.”

But experts say the government’s proposed new surveillance program will gather so much data that spooks won’t have to read your messages to guess what you’re up to.

The U.K. Home Office stresses it won’t be reading the content of every Britons’ communications, saying the data it seeks “is NOT the content of any communication.” It is, however, looking for information about who’s sending the message and to whom, where it’s sent from and other details, including a message’s length and its format.

The proposal, unveiled last week as part of the government’s annual legislative program, is just a draft bill, so it could be modified or scrapped. But if passed in its current form, it would put a huge amount of personal data at the government’s disposal, which it could use to deduce a startling amount about Britons’ private lives—from sleep patterns to driving habits or even infidelity.

“We’re really entering a whole new phase of analysis based on the data that we can collect,” said Gerald Kane, an information systems expert at Boston College. “There is quite a lot you can learn.”

The ocean of information is hard to fathom. Britons generate 4 billion hours of voice calls and 130 billion text messages annually, according to industry figures. In 2008, the BBC put the annual number of U.K.-linked emails at around 1 trillion.

Then there are instant messaging services run by companies such as BlackBerry, Internet telephone services such as Skype, chat rooms, and in-game services like those used by World of Warcraft.

Communications service providers, who would log all that back-and-forth, believe the government’s program would force them to process petabytes (1 quadrillion bytes) of information every day. It’s a mind-boggling amount of data, on the scale of every book, movie and piece of music ever released.

So even without opening emails, how much can British spooks learn about who’s sending them?

THEY’LL SEE THE RED FLAGS. Did you know how fast you were going?

Your phone does.

If you sent a text from London before stepping behind the wheel, and a second one from a service station outside Manchester three hours later, authorities could infer that you broke the speed limit to cover the roughly 200 miles that separate the two.

Crunching location data and communications patterns gives a remarkably rich view of people’s lives—and their misadventures.

Ken Altshuler, of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, raves about the benefits smartphones and social media have brought to savvy divorce attorneys. Lawyers don’t need sophisticated data mining software to spot evidence of infidelity or hints of hidden wealth when they review phone records or text traffic, he said.

“One name, one phone number that’s not on our client’s radar, and our curiosity is piqued,” he said. The more the communication—a late-night text sent to a work colleague, an unexplained international phone call—is out of character, “the more of a red flag we see.”

THEY’LL KNOW WHEN YOU’RE SLEEPING. The ebb and flow of electronic communication—that call to your mother just before bed, that early-morning email to your boss saying you’ll be late—frames our waking lives.

“You can figure somebody’s sleep patterns, their weekly pattern of work,” said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University expert on artificial intelligence. In 2006, he helped found New York-based Sense Networks, which crunches phone data to do just that.

Jebara said that calls made from the same location from 9 to 5 are a good indication of where a person works; the frequency of email traffic to or from a person’s work account is a good hint of his or her work ethic; dramatic changes to a person’s electronic routine might suggest a promotion—or a layoff.

“You can quickly figure out when somebody lost their job,” Jebara said, adding: “Credit card companies have been interested in that for a while.”

THEY’LL KNOW WHO’S THE BOSS. Drill down, and communication can reveal remarkably rich information. For example, does office worker A answer office worker B’s missives within minutes of the message being sent? Does B often leave colleagues’ emails unanswered for hours on end? If so, B probably stands for “boss.”

That’s an example of what Jebara’s Columbia colleagues call “automated social hierarchy detection,” a technique that can infer who gives the orders, who’s respected and who’s ignored based purely on whose emails get answered and how quickly. In 2007, they analyzed traffic from the Enron Corporation’s email archive to correctly guess the seniority of several top-level managers.

Intelligence agencies may not need such tools to untangle corporate flowcharts, but identifying ringleaders becomes more important when tracking a suspected terrorist cell.

“If you piece together the chain of influence, then you can find the central authority,” he said. “You can figure that out without looking at the content.”

THEY’LL KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING TO. Seeing how networks of people communicate isn’t just about finding your boss. It’s about figuring out who your friends are.

Programs already exist to determine the density of communications—something that can identify close groups of friends or family without even knowing who’s who. If one user is identified as suspicious, then users closest to him or her might get a second look as well.

“Let’s say we find out somebody in the U.K. is a terrorist,” said Kane. “You know exactly who he talks to on almost every channel, so BOOM you know his 10 closest contacts. Knowing that information not only allows you to go to his house, but allows you to go to their houses as well.”

A SNOOPER’S CHARTER? Detective work at the stroke of a key is clearly attractive to spy agencies. British officialdom has been pushing for a mass surveillance program for years. But civil libertarians are perturbed, branding the proposal a “snooper’s charter.”

Kane says the surveillance regime has to be seen in the context of social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, where hundreds of millions of people are constantly volunteering information about themselves, their friends, their family and their colleagues.

“There’s no sense in getting all Big Brother-ish,” he said. “The bottom line is that we’re all leaving digital trails, everywhere, all the time. The whole concept of privacy is shifting daily.”

Obama, Hollande Agree on Much—But Not Afghanistan

Reuters, May 18, 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—New French President Francois Hollande told President Barack Obama on Friday that he will stick by his pledge to withdraw France’s troops from Afghanistan at year’s end, a note of discord in an otherwise convivial first meeting between the two leaders.

“I reminded President Obama that I made a promise to the French people to the effect that our combat troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2012,” Hollande said after Oval Office talks with Obama.

“That being said, we will continue to support Afghanistan in a different way,” he said.

Hollande’s remarks, while not a surprise, underscore the challenge Obama faces in keeping NATO allies on board as he tries to chart a gradual course out of Afghanistan. The alliance agreed two years ago to a 2014 deadline for withdrawing most of its combat troops.

The Afghan war will be the central topic when NATO leaders meet in Chicago, Obama’s home town, on Sunday and Monday.

The United States may seek at the NATO summit to nudge France to rethink its Afghanistan troop withdrawal timetable, which differs from the alliance’s 2014 timetable.

Hollande’s main foreign policy pledge is popular at home.

“The exit is non-negotiable. The withdrawal of French combat troops is a French decision and it will be implemented,” Hollande said.

Hollande’s position on the war did nothing to dampen what appeared to be an instant rapport with Obama, and on the day’s other major topic—the health of the global economy—they agreed that budget austerity was not the sole remedy to Europe’s economic crisis.

Those weighty issues dominated the talks between the two, but they also joked about cheeseburgers and Hollande’s former habit of riding his scooter to work.

“I warned him that now that he’s president he can no longer ride his scooter in Paris,” said Obama, who tends to bring a business-like style to his meetings with foreign leaders but appeared relaxed in Hollande’s presence.

The bespectacled Hollande, whose low-key style contrasts with that of his flamboyant predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, spoke of U.S. friendship and France’s pride in its tendency to sometimes pursue an independent course.

Obama’s own re-election prospects in November could be in jeopardy if the euro zone crisis spins out of control and deals another blow to an already sluggish U.S. economic recovery.

He told reporters that he and Hollande spent a great deal of time discussing Europe’s currency woes.

Obama and other U.S. officials have repeatedly pressed European leaders to do more to spur economic growth.

Chile’s car boom

By Steven Bodzin, CS Monitor, May 18, 2012
If there’s one thing that defines the Chilean national character, it’s a love for the countryside. That means that the first thing people do when they can afford it is buy a car. For country-dwellers, a car or truck helps make the rural lifestyle a bit more profitable, as taking crops to market in horse-drawn wagons is more quaint than efficient. For city folks, a car helps people to see the countryside on the weekend. But of course soon enough, a big portion of both country and city folks, once they own cars, become suburban folks. And once they are living in spread-out suburbs, they need another car, and another. It’s a feedback loop we’ve seen all over the world.

I don’t know exactly where Chile is in this process, or whether it’s already too late to halt the sprawl. What’s clear is that the feedback is accelerating. There are almost a million more cars on the road than six years earlier, an increase of 37 percent.

There is a lot to say about this fast-growing vehicle ownership. First, as I said, this means sprawl, most of which is going to be on some of the world’s best farmland. Lawns and golf courses will suck up water, as subdivisions will usually be able to outbid lettuce and avocado farms for water rights. That could even affect miners.

The growing car population also represents a growing population of people who will demand lower fuel taxes. If that goes through—and by the signature-gatherers I see on my block every day, I suspect it will—Chile fuel prices will drop, creating another incentive for vehicle ownership.

There’s a macroeconomic issue here too. Crude oil is already by far Chile’s biggest import, making up 8.7 percent of the country’s imports. If the 2010-2011 rate of change persists, the vehicle population will double over the next nine years. Chile’s economic success has been based in part on its trade balance, which often reaches $1 billion a month. I realize that not every car gets driven every day, but it’s well known that once you have a car, you tend to use it. So each car that goes into circulation is essentially a commitment to importing at least a few liters of fuel a week for 10 or 20 years. A million more cars is a big change.

Europe’s debt crisis joins governments and banks at the hip

By Henry Chu and Lauren Frayer, Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2012
LONDON—The alarm over potential bank runs in Greece and Spain this week has highlighted an often-overlooked fact: Europe’s debt crisis is also, in many ways, a major banking crisis.

In capitals such as Athens, Madrid and Rome, large portions of the sovereign debt racked up by spendthrift governments are owed to the countries’ own banks, locking governments and the banks in an embrace so tight that disaster for one would almost certainly spell doom for the other.

International bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal have helped to keep not just their governments but also their banks afloat, as well as financial institutions in other parts of Europe with large exposure to those nations’ debts.

Though worried investors have mostly focused on the dire consequences of government default, reports of depositors pulling out large sums in Greece and Spain are shifting attention to those beleaguered banking systems and the catastrophic effects of a full-on run.

On Friday, the Fitch ratings agency downgraded the creditworthiness of five Greek banks. That followed a similar demotion of 16 Spanish financial institutions by the Moody’s ratings firm Thursday evening.

Neither of the two Mediterranean nations is yet experiencing anything close to a major run on their banks, analysts say. There are no lines of frightened customers desperate to withdraw cash, and the banks in both countries together hold hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of euros.

But with the euro crisis having reached yet another feverish pitch, stock markets and the values of banking shares are yo-yoing wildly.

“It’s the uncertainty that’s the principal reason for alarm in this,” Iain Begg, an expert on European economy and finance at the London School of Economics, said Friday.

Investors were unsettled by a report that about $900 million was taken out of Greek banks on Monday alone, adding to the already steady flight of capital since Greece’s debt problems broke open 21/2 years ago.

On Thursday, a newspaper report of a major withdrawal from Spain’s Bankia pushed the newly nationalized bank’s shares into free fall until a government minister publicly denied that a run was taking place.

Many of Europe’s debt-stricken countries are now caught up in a dangerous cycle. Cash-starved governments are being heavily financed by their nations’ banks through massive bond purchases. But the banks’ exposure to all that shaky sovereign debt has made it difficult for them to raise money on the open market because investors are skeptical.

That, in turn, increases the chances that the governments will have to step in and bail out the banks, giving rise to a situation akin to a dog chasing its tail until it finally collapses.

In many ways, Spain has become the epitome of a banking system in distress.

Its financial institutions are weighed down by bad real estate loans left over from a property boom-gone-bust and by huge holdings of government debt. Spanish banks now hold the majority of the country’s treasury bonds.

“It’s very unsafe for a bank to buy debt in its own government, because it’s like putting all your eggs in one basket,” said Rolf Campos, an economist at Spain’s IESE Business School. The outcome “depends on whether you drop the basket or not.”

“If Spain is able to pay off its debt, then it won’t be a problem. But if Spain has to default on some of its debt, which is not likely but is possible, it will have been a very bad investment decision.”

Where Grandma Needs A Permit To Have The Grandkids Stay Over

By Lucienne-Camille Vaudan, Tages-Anzeiger, May 18, 2012
ZURICH—Little David loves to spend the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s. The two-year-old generally spends two or three nights a week at his grandparents’ house. It’s an ideal solution for his parents, both of whom work. “For us, it’s an alternative to day care. And because my parents live at some distance from us, he often spends the night,” says the child’s father.

Many families would no doubt see young David’s situation as pretty routine—quite normal in fact. Why shouldn’t he spend quality time with his grandparents? And yet such arrangements are not something authorities in Zurich, Switzerland take lightly. There, parents who leave their children in the care of grandparents for more than two days a week on a regular basis have to report the arrangement to social services—or face a fine of 1,000 Swiss francs ($1,060). Not only that, but grandparents also need a permit.

Peter Hausherr, who heads the city office for foster children, believes that leaving one’s children with relatives can indeed be a good way to manage the demands of work and raising a family—and that as a general rule such arrangements don’t need to be reported to authorities. “However, if the focal point of a child’s life shifts to the relatives, then it must be reported,” he told Tages-Anzeiger

Concretely, that means that any arrangement whereby a child under the age of 18 regularly spends three nights or more a week—or 10 nights or more a month—with other family members must be officially declared. “Regularly” is defined as a two-month period or more, which means that vacations—assuming the child isn’t spending non-vacation time with the relatives as well—don’t count, said Hausherr.

If little David were to spend any more time at his grandparents’ house than he currently does, his grandparents would have to get a permit. The point of the permit, according to Hausherr, is both to protect the child and to make sure that the city can support the “foster parents” in their job. To make sure that children are being properly looked after at their grandparents’, staffers in Hausherr’s office make house visits. “In most cases, the relatives don’t perceive the visits as check-ups but as welcome back-up,” said Hausherr. The visits usually go off without a hitch. In 2011, only three families were subject to follow-up checks.

“And fines—to my knowledge, nobody has been fined for the past 10 years,” he said.

Rising Greek Political Star, Foe of Austerity, Puts Europe on Edge

By Rachel Donadio and Liz Alderman, NY Times, May 18, 2012
ATHENS—At 37, and looking not a bit his years, Alexis Tsipras is clearly enjoying his moment. He vaulted to prominence less than two weeks ago, when his previously obscure left-wing party placed second in national elections with the promise of repudiating the loan agreement Greece’s previous leaders signed in February.

Since then, he has engaged in a high-stakes game of chicken with Europe’s leaders. While they have scrambled to put together contingency plans in case Greece exits the euro zone, Mr. Tsipras has calmly stated his case and let the rest of Europe sweat about the possibly disastrous ramifications if it does.

“It’s true,” he said Friday, with a smile and a glint in his eye, during an interview in his small office in the Greek Parliament. “I like to play poker.”

While Mr. Tsipras clearly has much of Europe on the run, he hardly seems to be breaking a sweat. “Our goal isn’t to blackmail or to terrorize, our goal is to shake them,” Mr. Tsipras said coolly of the foreign lenders whose austerity-for-loans deal he wants upended.

“We want to convince them,” he said. “They need to change the policies in Greece and change the policies in Europe, otherwise Europe will be at very large risk.”

In Mr. Tsipras’s view—which neatly dovetails with the rising anti-austerity tide across Europe—Greece’s problem is a European problem that needs a European solution. He insisted that he wants Greece to stay in the euro, just not under the terms of its current bailout. “The euro zone is a chain with 17 links,” he said, referring to its members. “Greece is one of these links. If one of these links breaks, the link is destroyed, but the chain falls apart, too.”

Poker references aside, Mr. Tsipras insisted that it was really the financial markets driving much of the crisis, not him or Greece.

“They don’t have any moral scruples, and if they push Greece out, they’ll just move on to the next country,” he said. The next countries in the firing line, he added, happen to be Italy and Spain—both too big to fail.

While other political parties in Greece are now also calling to renegotiate the loan deal, it is Mr. Tsipras, an untested leftist who could well become Greece’s next prime minister in elections on June 17, who has positioned himself in a showdown with Greece’s lenders.

In the interview, he said he would not veer from pledges to repudiate terms of Greece’s bailout that forced wrenching hardship on average Greeks, a stance that may lead Greece’s lenders to withhold further aid and set off a default.

But as far as he is concerned, negotiations over Greece’s debt deal “have already begun,” he said, largely because European leaders are already showing signs of being more lenient on austerity. “The red lines from before no longer apply,” he said.

But while Mr. Tsipras has sometimes been portrayed in the European news media as a wild-eyed radical—he even seems at times to delight in that caricature—he is a cool strategist playing a game of brinkmanship with the rest of Europe, and particularly Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. In the past, German and other European leaders have made last-minute maneuvers to keep Greece in the euro, precisely because of fears that an exit would carry too high a cost, from bank collapses across Europe to destabilization of the global financial system.

Mr. Tsipras seems to be betting that they will blink again, but whether they will is far from clear.

Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Center for European Reform in London, said, “The Europeans may blink, but this time they might not blink enough.” He said that European leaders might propose a “mini-Marshall Plan” to stoke growth in Greece, but that what was needed were political changes to promote closer bonds among euro zone countries. “People are fed up,” Mr. Tilford added. “They would prefer that Greece stay within the euro zone, but they won’t take the political steps to make Greek membership sustainable.”

Divided but peaceful 2 years after Thai violence

By Thanyarat Doksone, AP, May 19, 2012
BANGKOK (AP)—Just two years ago, Thailand was at war with itself. Rifle shots and exploding grenades rang out in Bangkok as troops crushed through barricades to disperse a nine-week-old insurrection. A retired nurse was the last to capitulate.

“I stood before the soldiers and asked if they wanted to shoot me, or arrest me,” said Phussadee Ngamkham, now 57, who became a hero of the Red Shirt protest movement by refusing to budge while others fled a final crackdown by soldiers on May 19, 2010, after weeks of deadly street fighting.

“At that time, I had made a promise with my Red Shirt brothers and sisters that if we didn’t get democracy, I wouldn’t go home,” she said.

Those days of mayhem, which pitted Thailand’s rural masses against a government they decried as elitist and which left at least 90 people dead and almost 2,000 injured, now seem a world away.

An election has since given an overwhelming mandate to the party most closely allied with the protesters, and the normally peaceful Buddhist country has returned to its routines and tourists to its tropical beaches.

Much of the us-versus-them vitriol has dissipated, giving way—for now—to an apparent acceptance on both sides that while neither the current government nor its predecessors are perfect, elections may be better than street violence for deciding the country’s future.

On Saturday, Red Shirt supporters gathered in central Bangkok to peacefully mark the anniversary. Like most Red Shirt rallies it was to include an evening video appearance by ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra. He fled into exile after being ousted by a 2006 military coup, and was convicted of corruption in absentia.

The 2010 conflict was largely between supporters of Thaksin—whose populist policies made him the rural poor’s hero—and supporters of Thailand’s traditional powerholders in the royal palace and the military.

Part of the reason for the current state of peace is because Thaksin’s supporters have been appeased by the new prime minister, Thaksin’s sister Yingluck Shinawatra. She won her 2011 campaign by a landslide and ended the premiership of Abhisit Vejjajiva, a staunch Thaksin opponent who ordered the May 19 crackdown on anti-government protesters who were demanding that his government immediately resign.

Still, deep divisions remain, and many wonder how long this phase will last.

“It’s stability on the surface. The conflicts are still there,” said Michael Nelson, a Thai studies lecturer at Walailak University in southern Thailand. “It’s a return to business as usual, and as long as there’s no really outstanding point of conflict.”

Yingluck has continued in the spirit of her brother’s populist policies, cementing her rural base and winning over others who were not initially supporters. She has increased the minimum wage, handed out ample tax refunds to the budding middle class and endeared rice farmers with a new program that pays them above market rates for rice.

Many Thais who oppose Thaksin have come to terms with his sister’s government, saying she has managed to maintain an uneasy but welcome calm. And Thai politics has not yet produced a viable alternative to the Thaksin camp.

“I’m not satisfied with this government, but to be honest the Abhisit government wasn’t any better,” said Siriluk Pornchaitipparat, an anti-Thaksin cafe owner who had to shut her central Bangkok shop for 10 days in 2010 when the Red Shirt rioting raged in her neighborhood.

“No matter how incompetent I think Yingluck is and no matter how much I’d like to reject the current government, I don’t see any other choices who can compete with them effectively,” she said. “Life goes on as usual but we don’t know when another round of demonstrations will occur. Maybe when Thaksin returns.”

Yingluck’s unstated priority is to ease the way for her brother to return without serving the two-year sentence for corruption in office that he fled to avoid.

Thaksin himself has said he would like to return to Thailand this year, a prospect that would surely fire up the other camp of protesters in Thailand, known as the anti-Thaksin Yellow Shirts, who also have wreaked havoc on Bangkok streets over the past half-dozen years.

Headlines

Blind Chinese activist leaves for US
BEIJING (AP)—A blind Chinese activist was hurriedly taken from a hospital Saturday and boarded a plane that took off for the United States, closing a nearly monthlong diplomatic tussle that had tested U.S.-China relations.

Student killed, 7 hurt in blast near Italy school
ROME (AP)—An explosive device went off outside a high school in southern Italy named after a slain anti-Mafia prosecutor as students arrived for class Saturday, killing one of them and wounding seven others, officials said.

Greek politics, Spain banks test eurozone survival
MADRID (AP)—Chaos in Greek politics and Spanish banking combined this week to underscore just how fragile Europe’s economy remains after an eviscerating austerity regime that has spawned unemployment, desperation and misery.

France’s Hollande sticking to early Afghan pullout
WASHINGTON (AP)—In his first visit to the Oval Office, French President Francois Hollande declared he will withdraw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by year’s end.

Nine Killed by Syria Car Bomb, 100 Wounded: Agency
(Reuters) A car bomb that rocked the eastern Syrian city of Deir al-Zor on Saturday killed nine people and wounded about 100, the official SANA news agency said.

Obama Presses Ailing Europe to Focus on Growth
(Reuters) A growing chorus of world leaders on Friday pushed for a shift toward more pro-growth policies to help ease a European crisis that threatens to oust Greece from the euro zone and reverberate throughout the global economy.

Venezuela’s Chavez Says Working Less, Getting Better
(Reuters) Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ended a week-long silence on Friday to say he was resting, following a diet and trying to tame his workaholic ways as he recovers from cancer treatment.

Refloat of Italy’s Concordia Wreck to Be Biggest Ever
(Reuters) Salvage crews will employ huge cranes and air tanks to refloat the half-submerged Costa Concordia cruise liner in the largest ever operation of its kind, according to a plan unveiled on Friday.