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However, Irish companies and banks are very highly indebted to foreign banks -- three times more than the Greeks.

According to Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, German banks are Ireland's biggest creditors, to the tune of €166 billion ($226 billion), and that includes hundreds of short-term loans to Irish banks. How dangerous is the Irish crisis for Germany?

The situation is very dangerous. The German government has a vital interest in ensuring the solvency of the Irish state and its banks.

the ECB gears up to go full throttle into a business that, according to its statutes, is verboten: buying the debt of member states.

The ECB is about to turn into a money machine, into a lender of last resort, and damn the treaties that mandate an inflation-fighting commitment to “price stability”. The magic phrase now is “capping bond yields”, meaning the ECB buys up the debt of Italy and others in order to depress their borrowing costs.

The immediate consequences of Greece leaving or being forced out of the euro area would certainly be devastating. Capital flight would intensify, fuelling depreciation and inflation. All existing contracts would need to be redenominated and renegotiated, creating financial chaos. Perhaps most politically devastating, fiscal austerity might actually need to intensify, since Greece still runs a primary deficit, which it would have to correct if EU and International Monetary Fund financing vanished.

But this process would also produce a substantially depreciated exchange rate (50 drachmas to the euro, anyone?) And that would set in motion a process of adjustment that would soon reorient the economy and put it on a path of sustainable growth. In fact, Greek growth would probably surge, possibly for a prolonged period, if it adopted sensible policies to rapidly restore and sustain macroeconomic stability.

Just look at what happened to the countries that defaulted and devalued during the financial crises of the 1990s. They all initially suffered severe contractions. But the recessions lasted only one or two years. Then came the rebound. South Korea posted nine years of growth averaging nearly 6 percent. Indonesia, which experienced a wave of defaults that toppled nearly every bank in the entire system, registered growth above 5 percent for a similar period; Argentina close to 8 percent; and Russia above 7 percent. The historical record shows clearly that there is life after financial crises.

As a result, technocrat prime minister Mario Monti is considering cutting back on public holidays in a bid to increase growth after officials said even slashing days off by a working week would boost growth and raise GDP by as much as 1%.

Italy has a total of 11 recognised public holidays a year but unlike Britain these remain fixed and if they fall mid-week people traditionally take the days off either side as well in order to ''make a bridge'' until the weekend, which has drastic consequences on industrial output.

Sources say the Government will keep the ''main religious festivals such as Easter and Christmas'' but are looking at scrapping some of the secondary ones such as Boxing Day, Epiphany on January 6th and the Immaculate Conception on December 8th.

In New York and London, banks have set up dedicated crisis teams, and rehearsed elaborate responses.

Citigroup has $84 billion in loans, bonds and other types of exposure to troubled European countries, plus France. The bank’s filings indicate that all but $8 billion of that exposure is offset with collateral it has collected and hedges on the portfolio.

Some banks are testing their systems to deal with the possibility of new currencies and preparing guidance for clients on how to operate in such an environment.

Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.

For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.

Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company

In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.”

Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)

To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.

“It’s sad to note that the state of education is worse now than it was 20 years ago,

“How is it that a segment of our youth cannot realize their legitimate aspirations at professional, physical and social levels?”

They say that their education has left them ill-equipped for the workplace.

Russia is making increasing efforts to deter the biggest country in its former empire from looking west and to prod it into joining the rival, Kremlin-led Eurasian Customs Union instead.

Solar and Wind Energy Start to Win on Price vs. Conventional Fuels

In Texas, Austin Energy signed a deal this spring for 20 years of output from a solar farm at less than 5 cents a kilowatt-hour.

Without subsidies, the firm’s analysis shows, solar costs about 7.2 cents a kilowatt-hour at the low end, with wind at 3.7 cents.

this aircraft, which can hold more than 500 passengers. The plane dwarfs every commercial jet in the skies.

Its two full-length decks total 6,000 square feet, 50 percent more than the original jumbo jet, the Boeing 747.

The A380 was also Airbus’s answer to a problematic trend: More and more passengers meant more flights and increasingly congested tarmacs. Airbus figured that the future of air travel belonged to big planes flying between major hubs.

Pupils in Finland, Korea, Japan and Canada consistently score much higher than their peers in Germany, Britain, America and France.

In each country, the Americans are startled by how hard their new peers work and how seriously they take their studies. Maths classes tend to be more sophisticated, with lessons that show the often fascinating ways that geometry, trigonometry and calculus work together in the real world.

Classrooms tend to be understated, free of the high-tech gadgetry of their schools back home. And teachers in every subject exhibit the authority of professionals held in high regard.

Back to reality

Picking Lesser of Two Climate Evils

ound for pound, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But in stark contrast to CO2, methane breaks down quickly in the atmosphere.

He argues, essentially, that the world has yet to mount a serious effort to control carbon dioxide, which will be vastly more harmful in the long run, and that methane and other short-term pollutants should largely be ignored until that bigger problem is fixed.

Blueprints for Taming the Climate Crisis

Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. In fact, by midcentury more than half of the American economy will run on electricity. Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal’s footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply.

“This will require a heroic cooperative effort,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who directs the Sustainable Development Solutions Network at the United Nations,

Hewlett-Packard, which turns out over 50 million computers a year through its own plants and subcontractors, makes many of its larger desktop personal computers in such higher-cost areas as Indianapolis and Tokyo to save on fuel costs and to serve business buyers rapidly.