More than half of British women pay for themselves on a first date, even though men still want to pay, according to a survey on Monday. A poll of 1,924 adults for online bank first direct found that 58 percent of women expect to split the bill on a first date, double the proportion of
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Euro 2012 co-hosts Poland face a "huge image problem" over hooliganism, European soccer's governing body UEFA said on Wednesday. The criticism, from Martin Kallen, UEFA's director of the championship Poland will stage with Ukraine in 14 months' time, comes days after the latest hooligan outbreak when Polish fans wreaked havoc at a friendly with Lithuania
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. By Shavasb Bohdjalian The German conservatives lost power in a regional stronghold on Sunday, with early poll results showing the Greens, buoyed by Japan's nuclear crisis, surging to their first premiership in the Baden-Wuerttemberg state. This capped off a barrage of bad news for the euro last week including the collapse of the Portuguese
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Cyprus ranks first amongst EU member states in the number of asylum applicants per million inhabitants, Eurostat data show. According to data released on Tuesday, 2.875 individuals applied for asylum in 2010. The figure corresponds to 3.580 applicants per million inhabitants, which is the common method of comparison amongst member states in the EU. Sweden
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. DR ANDRESTINOS N. PAPADOPOULOS Ambassador a.h. The Arab uprising in northern Africa and the Arab peninsula against their rulers, coined the ‘Arab Spring’, represents a historic milestone especially in the quest for liberty and democracy. It is not unique. The French revolution aimed for liberty and equality, likewise the popular tempest which demolished the
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* Fund worth €500 mln euros to be ready by September The Central Bank of Cyprus will create a financial stability fund worth around 500 million euros to create an additional safety buffer for the island's banks, governor Athanasios Orphanides said on Monday. "As an initial target, our aim is to build a fund of
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* Debts could be subordinate to EU loans * Bond yields shoot higher on downgrade Standard & Poor's downgraded Greece and Portugal on Tuesday, citing risks that the countries' debts to a new European bailout fund would be repaid before bond investors, sending their borrowing costs sharply higher. The downgrades left Portugal one notch above
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President Bashar al-Assad will on Wednesday give his first public speech since pro-democracy protests in which more than 60 people have been killed erupted in southern Syria and swept through the country. The state news agency said Assad would address "the internal issues and the latest occurrences". There has been speculation he will announce the
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Japan upgraded its safety standards for nuclear power plants on Wednesday, the first official acknowledgement that norms were insufficient when an earthquake wrecked one of its facilities, triggering the world's worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. The announcement came as the government conceded that there was no end in sight to the crisis and
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Moody's Investors Service has downgraded the government of Belarus' foreign and local currency bond ratings from B1 to B2 and has assigned a negative outlook to the ratings due to the country’s significant near term external financing gaps, and the medium term difficulties of reorienting the current external debt funded, domestic demand-led growth model. In
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