German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Photo: MICHAEL SOHN/AP

Stephen: The latest figures estimate that 19.4m people in the Eurozone were unemployed in April.The highest increases were registered in Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Portugal. Separately, data showed that Italy’s jobless rate reached a 36-year high in April of 11.9pc. And this is Angela Merkel’s message to them… There’s definitely something very wrong if such ‘influential’ leaders think this is the answer.

Angela Merkel’s Advice for Europe’s Unemployed: Move

By Jeevan Vasagar, Berlin – The Telegraph, UK – June 14, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/k9p94m7

Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel has a simple message for the millions young people in the Eurozone who are out of work – move.

In an interview, Mrs Merkel said the high levels of youth unemployment in Europe represent a “huge crisis”, comparing the Eurozone’s difficulties with post-Communist eastern Germany.

Speaking to the BBC, she said that when unemployment soared after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “many young people … only had jobs because they moved to the south.”

Mrs Merkel said: “I think it’s unfair that it is the young people especially who have to pay the bill for something they didn’t do.

“But there’s no way around it. We have to manufacture products or offer services in Europe that we can sell.”

Her comments are the latest indication of Germany’s concern that the prolonged economic crisis in southern Europe is putting the European project under strain. Germany is seeking to attract more migrants from crisis-hit countries to meet its own shortage of skilled workers.

In the interview, the German chancellor emphasised the need for economic reforms that would make Europe more competitive rather than insisting on limits to government spending.

She pointed out that deficit-cutting targets had been relaxed, with France being given more time to gets its deficit below the European Commission’s ceiling of 3 per cent of GDP.

She said: “With regard to jobs and growth, the eurozone and other countries are in a difficult situation. The issue is not austerity, the issue is to get back to growth.

“This process is under way. Europe has to decide: how do we make a living?

What do we want to produce? What do we want to manufacture? How can we cut red tape? How can we intensify trade?” Asked about her reaction to anti-German demonstrations abroad, Mrs Merkel said: “We have demonstrations not just abroad but also in Germany. As a government, as politicians, we have to accept that. I want these countries to recover quickly.”

Key issues facing Iran

The following are the main domestic and international issues facing Iran's incoming president, Hasan Rowhani:

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NUCLEAR QUESTION: Four rounds of revived talks between Iran and world powers since last year have produced no important headway in Tehran's impasse with the West. The U.S. and allies worry Iran's uranium enrichment could lead to atomic weapons, which could shift the balance of power in the region and give allies such as Lebanon's Hezbollah access to nuclear material. Iran denies it seeks nuclear arms, often citing a religious edict by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejecting such weapons and saying it only seeks nuclear reactors for energy and medical applications. But it refuses to consider giving up any part of the "nuclear cycle," which includes processing and enriching uranium. Israel has said it keeps options open to attack Iran's nuclear sites, but Washington and other Western allies appear committed for now to a combination of diplomacy and economic sanctions to pressure Tehran.

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SANCTIONS: International sanctions led by the U.S. and European Union have sharply increased in recent years, targeting Iran's vital oil exports and limiting its access to global financial networks for trade payments. Oil sales — Iran's main foreign currency source — have been cut by more than half, although shipments still go to major Asian markets such as China and India under U.S. waivers. On July 1, the U.S. could put in motion tighter sanctions seeking to limit gold sales to Iran, which have become a critical financial lifeline. Much of the gold trade has flowed through U.S. allies Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Iranian leaders claim they can ride out sanctions through a "resistance economy" that encourages domestic manufacturing and sale of refined petroleum products, which are not covered by sanctions.

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ECONOMY: Iran's economy has been locked in a downward spiral from a mix of sanctions and domestic fiscal mismanagement, blamed on outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's policies of subsidies and handouts. The national currency, the rial, has plummeted in value from about 10,000 to the U.S. dollar two years ago to just under 35,000. This has driven up inflation, with prices for some goods tripling. Unemployment is officially at 13 percent, but most economists believe it could be more than twice that figure.

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OPPOSITION: Years of widespread crackdowns have left the opposition movement shattered and without a guiding hand. Authorities have placed under house arrest the leaders of the protest movement after Ahmadinejad's disputed 2009 re-election. No serious attempts have been made to mobilize street demonstrations since early 2010. In the intervening years, Iran's Revolutionary Guard has grown in power and expanded its networks, including paramilitary groups known as the Basij corps that are present in nearly every town or neighborhood around the country.

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U.S. RELATIONS: Despite hopes for a breakthrough after President Barack Obama's election in 2008, no significant progress has been made to end the more than three-decade diplomatic freeze. Iranian and U.S. envoys have had contact during nuclear talks, and the two countries found a common cause earlier this year to keep wrestling on the 2020 Olympic program after the International Olympic Committee dropped the sport from its core program. Many of the Iranian presidential candidates, Rowhani included, had suggested the possibility of a less antagonistic relationship with Washington, but any such decision rests with the supreme leader.

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The 3 biggest obstacles to a solar energy boom

The cost of solar energy is plummeting. But it's still way more expensive than coal and natural gas

Optimism surrounding a solar energy boom seems to be hitting new highs: Game-changing technologies seem to hit the market nearly every week, and new government policies, like a series of solar mandates in Japan, has people and businesses all over the world installing solar panels at record rates.

Nonetheless, several challenges stand between us and a true solar revolution. Here are three:

Cost

The cost of solar is down to just 10 percent of what it was five years ago. But for solar to be viable without government subsidies (like the ones driving Japan's solar boom), the price per megawatt-hour will have to keep sinking. Solar still costs $156.90 per megawatt-hour, more expensive than coal at $99.60 per megawatt-hour, and natural gas at $65.50 to $132 per megawatt-hour, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Materials like cadmium telluride, a crystalline compound used to make thin film solar cells, have helped drive down the price. These thin film cells can be manufactured much more quickly and inexpensively than silicon-based technologies, and they collect more energy, reaching 18.7 percent efficiency — well above current commercial CdTe modules, which reach between 10 percent and 13.1 percent efficiency.

Infrastructure

Integrating new solar energy into existing energy grids poses many challenges, says a recent study in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy. Our current generators allow utility plants to balance the amount of energy generated with the amount used. But with solar cells, the amount of energy generated is sensitive to environmental changes, like the passing of a cloud, which can reduce electrical output by 50 percent within just a few seconds, says Inside Science. Fixing this problem could prove expensive:

To compensate for solar power fluctuations, engineers currently incorporate fast but relatively expensive generators that perform frequency regulation services. These generators inject extra power into networks when fluctuations in PV output cause the generated electricity to dip below the desired frequency of 60 Hertz.

The use of solar power cannot be increased without also increasing existing frequency regulation services, [Mohamed ElNozahy, an electrical and computer engineer at Canada's University of Waterloo] said. "This will increase the cost of solar electricity, which is already much higher than other sources," he said.

Some experts predict that without increasing the number of frequency regulation generators in use, solar power won't be able to supply more than 5 percent of our current power demands. [Inside Science]

Night

The hours when demand for energy is at its highest are the same hours the sun is nowhere to be found. Scientists have devoted a lot of effort to figuring out how to store solar energy to use at night. One option is solar batteries, which are effective, but can cost as much as $6,500 per household (underscoring the first challenge on this list).

Another system, currently the most common, uses thermal power plants to store heat in molten salt, oil, or beds of packed rocks at scorched temperatures to be used later.

A new method developed by the University of Arkansas uses "a structured thermocline system in which there are parallel plates of concrete with steel pipes running through them," says Clean Technica. "The steel pipes transfer heat absorbed by solar panels into the concrete, which stores it until it is needed to boil water and produce steam (which is usually the case), or supply heat to other heat-powered generators such as Stirling engines or thermoelectric modules."

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France condemns attack on Chinese wine students

PARIS (Reuters) - France's interior minister has condemned as racist an assault on six Chinese students by drunken locals in the Bordeaux wine-producing region that left one seriously injured.

The attack comes amid reports that wealthy Chinese tourists are being increasingly targeted by muggers in Paris. It will do little to ease tensions between France and China, locked in a trade dispute ranging from solar panels to wine.

The assault in the village of Hostens, 50 km (30 miles) south of Bordeaux late on Friday came after one of the Chinese, who have been living in France for two months to study wine-making, complained about the noise a group of locals were making in the street.

One student in her twenties was rushed to hospital in Bordeaux after being struck in the face with a bottle when the locals tried to break into the students' house, local newspaper Sud Ouest reported. Two suspects have been arrested.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls' office issued a statement saying Valls "condemns very severely this xenophobic act, for which perpetrators will have to face justice".

With France's domestic economy languishing in recession, French luxury groups are counting more heavily on Chinese tourists to purchase luxury goods and other local delicacies.

The Bordeaux region has also attracted many Chinese visitors and Chinese entrepreneurs have snapped up several dozen of the less illustrious chateaux, most of them in Bordeaux.

Responding to an EU move to impose duties on Chinese solar panels, China launched an anti-dumping inquiry into European wine sales earlier this month, angering some French wine producers who said they had been taken hostage by the Chinese government's threat.

(Reporting by Michel Rose; editing by Mark John)

Boston hospital to offer hand transplants for kids

A Boston hospital is starting the world's first hand transplant program for children, and doctors say it won't be long until face transplants and other radical operations to improve appearance and quality of life are offered to kids, too.

The move shows the growing willingness to do transplants to enhance a patient's life rather than to save it as donated hearts, livers and other organs have done in the past. More than 70 hands and at least 20 faces have been transplanted in adults, and doctors say it's clear these operations are safe enough to offer to children in certain cases, too.

"We feel that this is justifiable," Dr. Amir Taghinia said of the pediatric hand program he will lead at Boston Children's Hospital.

"Children will potentially benefit even more from this procedure than adults" because they regrow nerves more quickly and have more problems from prosthetic hands, he said.

Only one hand transplant is known to have been done in a child — a baby in Malaysia in 2000. Because the donor was a twin who died at birth, her sister did not need to take drugs to prevent rejection.

That's the main risk in offering children hand transplants — the immune-suppressing drugs carry side effects and may raise the risk of cancer over the long term.

However, one independent expert thinks the gains may be worth it in certain cases.

"We understand so much more about immune suppression" that it's less of a risk to put children on it, said Dr. Simon Horslen, medical director of the liver and intestine transplant program at Seattle Children's Hospital. "This is never going to be done as an emergency procedure, so the families will have plenty of opportunity to weigh the options."

Also, a hand can be removed if rejection occurs, and that would not leave the child worse off than before the transplant, Horslen said.

Several types of kids might be candidates — those born without hands, children who lose them in accidents and children with infections that wind up requiring damaged hands to be amputated.

Quality of life is a key concern for people missing arms and hands — prosthetics for those limbs are not as advanced as those for feet and legs. In December, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore did a double-arm transplant for former soldier Brendan Marrocco, who lost all four limbs while serving in Iraq. It was the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant performed in the U.S.

For a child missing two hands, "the quality-of-life issues are a big deal," said Dr. Douglas Diekema of the Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children's Hospital and a member of the American Board of Pediatrics' ethics committee.

"In terms of how we interact with the social world, it's mostly our face and our hands," so a transplant "is a reasonable thing to offer a family," he said.

Boston Children's Hospital plans to make its first cases healthy children 10 or older who are missing both hands.

"Some of them can't feed themselves, they can't go to the bathroom, someone needs to assist them with almost every activity," Taghinia said.

The hospital also will consider children missing one hand who already are taking immune-suppressing drugs because of transplanted organs, or those with only one hand that doesn't work well.

The hospital will cover the cost of the operation and care for three months afterward, then ask insurers to pay for immune suppression and follow-up.

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Online:

Boston program: http://www.bostonchildrens.org/handtransplant

Support groups: http://www.helpinghandsgroup.org/

and http://www.amputee-coalition.org/

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