Euro zone leaders should do more to help lower Italy's borrowing costs, the country's prime minister Mario Monti said in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper on Tuesday. Monti urged Germany, a major creditor, to realise it was in "its own enlightened self-interest" to help lower the borrowing costs of Italy and other highly
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From Darwinian evolution to the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance, the favorite theories of the world's most eminent thinkers are as eclectic as science itself. Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle
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Retail trade growth slowed in October according to provisional data, rising by 0.2% compared with October 2010, having grown by 0.6% in September and 2.7% in August. For the first ten months of the year, retail sales are provisionally estimated to have grown by 0.3% compared with the first ten months of 2010. The value
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**Construction declines while civil engineering costs soar ** Construction output in Cyprus posted its 12th quarter of decline in the third quarter, with production dropping by 16.8% compared with the same period of the previous year, after a decline of 3.1% in the second. Production in the third quarter was affected not only by weak
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Public expenditure on public and private education reached EUR 1,357.7 mln (EUR 1.4 bln) in 2009, according to the annual report "Statistics of Education" for the school year 2009/10. This is equivalent to around 8.1% of GDP in 2009, according to our calculations. The current public cost per pupil/student in public schools by level of
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Uncertainty over fixing Greece's debt crisis is more of a threat to Europe's stability than the downgrade of nine euro zone countries' credit ratings by Standard & Poor's, British finance minister George Osborne said on Monday. S&P cut the ratings of France, Italy, Spain and other states on Friday, while talks on how Greece will
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Germany is optimistic about the outcome of a bond swap deal aimed at slashing Greece's towering debt pile, Germany's foreign minister said during a visit to Athens on Sunday which he said brought a message of solidarity. Pressure is mounting on Athens to complete a deal with private bondholders to cut its debt to more
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European leaders promised on Saturday to speed up plans to strengthen spending rules and get a permanent bailout fund up and running as soon as possible, a day after U.S. agency S&P cut the ratings of several euro zone countries' creditworthiness. In a conference call with reporters and analysts after downgrading nine of the euro
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A stricken Italian cruise liner shifted on its rocky resting place as worsening weather disrupted an increasingly despairing hunt for survivors and authorities almost doubled their estimate of the number missing to 29 people. As the Costa Concordia's owners accused their captain of veering too close to shore in a bravura "salute" to residents of
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Mass euro zone ratings downgrades are unlikely to shake up investors too much, but with Greek debt talks at an impasse, pressure has been loaded on the bloc to shore up its defences and glimmers of optimism from last week have been firmly doused. With the United States and Japan already downgraded from "AAA", the
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