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Seven people have been killed and more than 20 injured in clashes in Libya's western desert town of Ghadames, the government says.

Government spokesman Nasser el-Maneaa blamed an "armed group from outside the town" for the violence.

He added that the army had been sent to Ghadames and the situation was now under control.

Unconfirmed reports say the clashes were between town residents and Tuareg tribesmen – nomads who roam the desert.

The fighting erupted over control of a checkpoint on the edge of the town – on a route often used for smuggling, local officials were quoted as saying by Reuters.

Libya's interim government is struggling to control the vast country with numerous tribal groups after former leader Col Muammar Gaddafi was ousted in the uprising last year.

Many Tuaregs supported the late leader during the fighting.

Iran says progress has been made at its latest talks with the UN's nuclear watchdog, the IAEA.

Iran's top nuclear envoy, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said the two days of discussions had been "fruitful".

An IAEA official said talks would resume on Monday after a "good exchange of views".

The agency wants Iran to address concerns over possible military aspects of its nuclear programme. Iran insists it it is purely peaceful.

"The primary focus of our discussions was how to clarify issues related to the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear programme," IAEA deputy director-general Herman Nackaerts said after the talks.

"We decided that in order to continue this work towards a conclusion we will have the next round of talks next week," Mr Soltanieh said.

Before the talks on Monday and Tuesday, Mr Nackaerts urged Iran to allow his team to visit a suspect military site at Parchin.

Neither official commented on whether the issue had been discussed at the talks, according to the Reuters news agency.

This meeting comes a week before the next round of talks between six world powers and Iran are scheduled to begin in Baghdad.

The last series of full international talks with Iran broke down in early 2011.

Since then the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has expressed concern that Iran has failed to co-operate with its inspectors and has carried out activities "relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device".

Israel believes a nuclear-capable Iran would be a direct threat to its security, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hinted that Israel may attack Iran's nuclear facilities if diplomacy fails.

But US President Barack Obama has warned against "loose talk of war", while stressing that all options remain open.

Mixing the idea of Google’s Street View with multi-spectral thermal camera technology, Massachusetts-based startup Essess is building a giant database mapping residential and commercial properties in the U.S.

The project is the idea of Sanjay Sarma, professor of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who wanted to create a way of identifying and remedying inefficiencies in buildings.

Essess currently has a fleet of five cars mounted with thermal cameras that take a matter of seconds to assess an individual building. The brighter the colors, the greater the “heat leak.”

Company CEO, Storm Duncan says they are capturing around two to three million buildings per month at the moment.

“The purpose of the approach is to provide a snapshot of the energy efficiency. It answers about 20-30% of the problems of your home.” Duncan said.

“I consider it a fabulous way to start a broader dialogue about the more comprehensive (energy) profile,” he added.

Essess have also developed computer programs that generate energy reports highlighting specific areas of concern and calculating their cost — financially and environmentally.

The beauty of the reporting system (see gallery) is its simplicity, says Duncan, with consumers immediately getting a sense of how efficient their homes really are.

The database will also create what he calls “an eco-system around building efficiency” becoming the cornerstone of a competitive hub where homeowners can link up with specialists who can remedy problems.

Buildings consume around 40% of the U.S.’s total energy requirements annually, according to the Department of Energy, with over one third of that power going to waste.

The company is evolving a business model which Duncan hopes will mean customers won’t pay a cent to view information about their home.

Instead, audits will potentially become part of the service provided by real estate databases like Zillow and Trulia, Duncan says.

Essess hope to have covered 10% of the U.S.’s 125 million properties by the end of the year.

Thermal imaging surveys are nothing new, but widespread access to them is says Stewart Little, CEO of British thermal imaging company, IRT.

“Back in the 1980s the cameras cost about £250,000 ($400,000). Now they cost around £5,000 ($8,000). So the technology’s moved on lots and lowered the barrier to entry for companies to go and do it.”

IRT have surveyed around 200,000 UK homes since they were founded in 2002, and also offer customers quantified thermal images showing the financial and carbon costs of energy leaks.

It’s a strategy that’s proved highly successful in motivating people to insulate their homes, Little says.

The UK’s Energy Saving Trust says online surveys and energy monitors can also help homeowners track their energy usage.

They estimate that savings could save up to $380 a year by improving insulation.

“The challenge is to do something about it,” says Rob Bell, a energy consultant and former business development with the Energy Saving Trust.

“With gas and electricity prices only looking like they are going in one direction, the amount you can save is also upwards as well,” he added.

“The headline figures around how much you can save could be the catalyst to get you from being aware to doing something about it.”

Story By: by Elizabeth Shogren

Explore key components of the natural gas production process — and the questions scientists are asking.

View Interactive

“That’s the one I’m worried about because it just went in,” says Tim Ray.

We’re on his front porch just after sunset. You can see the lights of drill rigs all around his small house.

“There’s actually one up here over the hill that they just put in.” He points in another direction: “There’s three or four of them up there.”

The rigs are lit up like Christmas trees and puffing different colors of smoke. People in Ray’s neighborhood feel like the rigs are so close, they call them “Close Encounters.”

Companies can drill 20 wells or more at a single site. They come back again and again over the course of years. Each time, there’s an onslaught of strange smells. People living near the wells complain about itchy eyes, scratchy throats and getting sick to their stomachs. “I worry about my health. I worry about my kids’ health,” Ray says.

What’s In Those Fumes?

But the truth is, Ray and his other neighbors are guessing. They know almost nothing about what’s happening on the well pads around them. They just wonder: What’s in those fumes that blow into their yard? What’s in that smell?

“Nobody has told us anything about the quality of our air, as far as what we’re smelling or anything,” Ray says. “I would feel better if I knew that the gases weren’t bad.”

People are asking these same questions wherever natural gas is being drilled around the United States.

Nearly a decade ago, Garfield County in Colorado started trying to tackle that question, and was chugging ahead of the whole country in pursuit of scientific truth. Local politician Tresi Houpt was the engine pushing that effort.

It pains her that people are still asking the questions that revved her up when she first learned about her county’s gas boom while campaigning to be county commissioner.

“There’s a great frustration,” she says. “I’m hearing the same stories that I heard nine years ago.”

Houpt is a Sally Field type, with bangs and all. She speaks softly and deliberately, and wears pressed Carhartt work pants and cowboy boots.

As she started to campaign to be a Garfield County commissioner, she came down from her home on a ski mountain to meet people in ranches, rural neighborhoods with the big blue skies and clear starry nights. She couldn’t believe what she saw: drill rigs right outside homes, armadas of diesel-spewing trucks, fumes wafting from equipment called compressors and condensate tanks.

“In Colorado, you can have a drill rig 150 feet from homes. The original thought was if the rig falls, it won’t hit the house,” she says. She didn’t want their rural refuge to be sacrificed to produce energy for the rest of the country.

In Search Of Answers

The current drilling boom started in Colorado around 2000. Just like in Texas, Utah and Pennsylvania, an engineering technique called hydraulic fracturing allowed drillers to tap into rock and unlock previously inaccessible reservoirs of natural gas.

Gas companies drill a well, and then deep below the surface, they perforate the rock with explosives. Next they send a high-pressure mix of sand, water and chemicals down the well shaft to widen up fractures created by the explosives to release the gas in the rock. In Colorado, drillers frack both sandstone and shale.

In 2002, Houpt won her election. And one of the first things she wanted to know was: Did scientists have any answers for what was in the air near wells?

She was shocked to learn that there were no good studies. Not local ones, state ones or studies from the Environmental Protection Agency. Not about Western Colorado gas fields or any others in the United States. The industry wasn’t required to measure or report its emissions.

She learned that her county didn’t even monitor its air quality, and she set about making it a priority for her county to study its air.

Shale Play: Natural Gas Drilling in Pennsylvania

As only one of three commissioners in charge of running the county, Houpt had her work cut out for her. She remembers that other commissioners didn’t want to upset an industry that was bringing a lot of jobs and a lot of money to Garfield County.

The same concern was raised when she was on a state panel setting regulations for drilling companies.

“The conversation was always a question about how far we should push the oil and gas industry. It was a question at the county level. It was a question when I was on the oil and gas commission, and we were rewriting the rules,” Houpt recalls.

But Houpt and the other commissioners agreed to start spending some of the county’s gas royalties to try to get answers. They brought in Jim Rada to create an environmental health office.

Rada was a public health specialist, but he had been working in ski country, where the big public health issues were whether the food in restaurants was safe to eat. “When I got here in 2005, I was definitely flying blind ’cause I didn’t even know about the oil and gas industry,” Rada says.

First, Collect The Data

He learned fast. Today, while he gives us a tour of gas infrastructure around Garfield County, he can’t help using industry jargon.

“There are pipelines, there are storage yards, compressor stations, gas plants,” he says, as we drive along in his hybrid SUV past thousands of sources of air pollution.

Diesel exhaust spews from trucks and drilling rigs. Methane, chemicals that make ozone, and fumes that contain cancer-causing benzene leak from wells and storage tanks.

The industry and regulators estimate how pollutants are being emitted, but no one actually samples the air to directly measure the emissions.

These pollution sources are spread out over a huge geographic area, and many of them move around, which adds to the challenge of trying to assess the pollution. “It’s like a moving target. The problem jumps from location to location,” bemoans Houpt.

Weather patterns affect how long the pollution stays in the air and at what concentrations. Rada figured it would be impossible to track all this pollution, so back in 2005, he set up monitors in towns where most of the people lived.

During our visit, he set up a ladder so we could climb to the top of a building in Rifle, his county’s biggest town.

Gadgets on the roof monitor soot, smog and volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs. Years of data from these and other monitors around the county have shown that the industry is putting a lot more chemicals into the air that create smog. But levels of smog and other air pollutants still meet EPA health standards.

But Rada still wanted to know what’s in the air breathed by people with front-row seats to the drilling.

So in 2008, he got permission from companies to put air sampling canisters around eight wells that were being drilled. Then, for 24 hours, those canisters captured the chemicals that were coming off the wells.

Now, that seems obvious enough, but nobody else in the country had sampled air that close to wells.

“We were pretty much breaking ground and trying to do the science that needed to be done in order to answer some of these questions,” Rada says.

He found very large amounts of chemicals. Some of them, like benzene, can cause cancer. Others, like xylenes, can irritate eyes and lungs.

Rada’s air monitoring work was rare enough that it was getting attention at some higher levels. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Colorado’s state public health agency were analyzing his data for answers.

But they didn’t really find any. For instance, Rada’s eight-well test was just a pilot study. He didn’t test the air long enough or at enough places to know how much chemicals people were really being exposed to.

At that point, Rada says the job got too big for him.

“To get to the bottom line and answer that big nagging question of what is this air quality doing to the health of the community — that takes a whole lot more resources than a single county can devote to this,” Rada says.

This was 2009. Nearly 3,000 wells had gone in the year before. The county needed help. And its next move turned out to have some pretty painful consequences.

Trying To Connect The Dots

The county moved beyond looking at what was in the air to whether or not the industry was making people sick.

Rada called in the Colorado School of Public Health to examine whether lots of new drilling within a neighborhood might hurt people’s health. To make their conclusions, the researchers were supposed to use existing studies, such as the county’s monitoring data, and whatever other science they could find.

A draft assessment by the school predicted small increases in risks of cancer, headaches and lung ailments.

“We’ve done the only study, essentially, that’s looked at the health impacts,” says John Adgate, who chairs the Colorado School of Public Health. “One of the issues here is that everyone has to agree on what the rules are, i.e., they have to agree to cooperate.”

But instead, everyone agrees, politics took over.

People who live near gas wells held up the researchers’ work to attack the industry in lawsuits and in the media. And gas companies fought back.

“Both sides were fighting,” recalls John Martin, a longtime county commissioner. “They wanted to use this document in both arguments — that it didn’t hurt anything and that it killed everyone.”

David Ludlam, executive director of the regional industry trade, West Slope Colorado Oil and Gas Association, had frequent conversations with the county commissioners. Ludlam said the researchers were jumping to conclusions by making predictions about health with such a small pool of data.

“The pen you use to create the dotted lines has to have integrity, and we didn’t feel that the data that was used did,” Ludlam says. “They used what we believe was questionable data, at best. You can’t make assumptions about health impacts if you don’t have the data to support it.”

Adgate stood by his group’s work, which has received positive reviews from public health experts around the country.

But Garfield County commissioners felt the situation was getting out of control. Martin says it became a political football for opponents and supporters of drilling. “We said enough is enough, people.”

A Polarizing Question

In May of last year, the commissioners gathered for a meeting and voted to end a contract with the Colorado School of Public Health. Tresi Houpt, who had lost her re-election and wasn’t part of the vote, saw her years of work unraveling.

“I was stunned,” she said. “I was absolutely stunned.” All that momentum the county had built up came to a screeching halt. The Colorado School of Public Health and the county tried two more times to fill research gaps, but both of those efforts failed.

And the regional industry group wasn’t interested in continuing to work with the Colorado School of Public Health.

“I sent an e-mail indicating that our operators and our organization would be uncomfortable moving forward working with the Colorado School of Public Health,” Ludlam recalls, “because things had become so polarized, we didn’t think there was a pathway forward.”

That was last summer.

Ludlam says the industry is working on a new air pollution study, but with a different research group, Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science. The study will look only at air quality — it won’t delve into health. Results are expected in three years.

So, 10 years have passed since Houpt first drove around her county, hearing complaints about air pollution and the gas industry. And Garfield County’s 800 gas wells have grown to more than 8,000. People who live near wells — whether they’re in Texas, Pennsylvania or Utah — still don’t know what they’re breathing.

Houpt believes Garfield County’s saga shows how politics, industry pressure, technical challenges and the slow pace of science have blocked the search for answers — not just for her community, but for the whole country.

Before we leave Western Colorado, Houpt wants to show us her new focus. We visit her pretty log house on a ski mountain.

She’s now trying to stop a gas company from renewing leases to drill on the wooded slope behind her house. Otherwise, she says, “we’ll have trucks running up and down this mountain, disturbance on this mountain for 30 years. It’s very painful to see.”

And all those answers Houpt has been searching for about air quality, she may now need for her own family.

The audio version of this story was produced by Rebecca Davis.

<span class="articleLocation”>(Reuters) – Australian Olympic shooting gold medalist Russell Mark is set to parade in a lime-green “mankini” made famous by the movie character “Borat” at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics as the penalty for losing a bet.

Mark, who won double trap gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games and silver in Sydney, pledged to wear the skimpy swimsuit worn by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in the 2006 film if Melbourne-based Carlton lost to St. Kilda in the Australian Football League.

Carlton suffered a shock four-goal defeat in the match on Monday night and Mark owned up to making the bet on local radio.

“Oh, I must’ve been intoxicated. Carlton promise so much and just deliver so little. It kills me,” the burly 48-year-old said on Tuesday.

“Anyway, a lot of people would think a mankini might look better than the uniform they’ve nominated for us, so I don’t know if it’s such a bad thing.”

The one-piece swimsuit would certainly stand out among the other Australian athletes, who will be kitted out in stodgy green blazers and white slacks which fashion critics have generously described as “retro”.

An Australian Olympic Committee spokesman recommended Mark keep the mankini in the closet.

“Age is the problem here. Russell is no spring chicken, his days of being a model are long gone, and we don’t think it would be a good look for the team to have Russell in a mankini,” the spokesman told local media.

“Besides, this will be his sixth Olympics and he is a chance to be named as flag bearer. Imagine the flag bearer out in front of our team in a mankini. And a big, butch shooter at that.

“As we all know the London weather is fickle and we would not want him to catch cold.”

(Writing by Ian Ransom; Editing by Peter Rutherford)

Etihad Airways has marked eight years of flights to Beirut, the airline’s first commercial destination.

Etihad Airways President and Chief Executive Officer, James Hogan, said: “Beirut holds a very special place in the history of Etihad Airways and I am delighted to be able to celebrate this important milestone today.”

The UAE flag carrier has carried more than 820,000 passengers and 700,000 tons of cargo between the Lebanese and UAE capitals since the historic first flight on November 12, 2003.

Mr Hogan led a high-level delegation to Beirut as part of the anniversary celebrations, and met the Lebanese Minister for Transport, His Excellency Ghazi AL Aridi, Middle East Airlines Chairman, Mohamed Al Hout, Lebanese Civil Aviation Authorities and senior Lebanese government officials.

The focus of the meetings was to strengthen Etihad Airways’ presence in the Lebanese market and promote tourism and travel connectivity over the airline’s Abu Dhabi hub, including the airline’s new route to Lagos, Nigeria. More than eighty thousand Lebanese live in the West African country and connectivity over the UAE capital has been optimised to fit with flights to and from Beirut.

Mr Hogan also hosted special cocktail and dinner functions attended by the UAE Ambassador to Lebanon, His Excellency Youssef Ali Al Ossaimi, the Nigerian Ambassador to Lebanon, His Excellency Amos Idowu, the Australian Ambassador to Lebanon, His Excellency Lex Bartlem, as well as leading representatives from the Lebanese Civil Aviation Authorities and Lebanese Australian Business Group.

“Lebanon is a strategically important market for Etihad Airways. We operated our very first commercial route to this beautiful city in 2003 starting with five services a week. Since then, we have invested heavily in the route, in our codeshare agreement with Middle East Airlines, and in our Lebanese staff – who today number more than 100. We now operate 18 flights a week with a two-class Airbus A320 aircraft, and we’re playing a key role in linking not only the global Lebanese expatriate community with their mother country, but also with each other across the world,” he added.

A large Lebanese community resides in Australia. More than 420,000 Australians of Lebanese origin live in Sydney, while 50,000 Lebanese now call Melbourne home. In addition more than 20,000 Lebanese live in Adelaide, Canberra and other Australian cities.

Mr Hogan said he was also committed to working with codeshare partners to deliver traffic, growth and passenger choice. “Etihad Airways believes that the partnership with Middle East Airlines which we started in December 2007 has produced significant commercial benefits for both airlines, allowing passengers to connect seamlessly from Beirut to Abu Dhabi and beyond to Sydney and Melbourne. It’s been good news for Virgin Australia too, our main codeshare partner down into Australia, because together we are able to offer unrivalled service, connectivity and a choice of destinations that people want to fly to.”

The Beirut flight schedule provides both morning and afternoon departures between Abu Dhabi and Lebanon also offers seamless connectivity over Abu Dhabi for Etihad Airways flights to and from Africa, Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent.

Crows recognise familiar human voices and the calls of familiar birds from other species, say researchers.

Lead researcher Claudia Wascher from the University of Vienna said that, although it was widely known that crows were "very intelligent", most studies had focused on their ability to recognise and communicate with their own species.

"In cities crows live alongside jackdaws, magpies and seagulls, and alongside humans," Dr Wascher told BBC Nature.

"Some of those people might be very nice to the crows and feed them and others might be nasty and chase them away.

"You even get some people hunting crows.

To find out if they might be able to distinguish between these different birds and humans, the researchers studied eight carrion crows kept in the university's aviary.

The same people feed and interact with the birds every day. So the team recorded five of these people saying "hey" and recorded the same word said by five people who "had never met the crows".

When they played these recordings to the birds, they responded much more – looking up and turning towards the speaker – when they heard the unfamiliar human voices.

"Since humans can be a serious threat for crows," explained Dr Wascher, "it's important that if they hear someone unfamiliar, they are on alert."

The researchers repeated the same experiment using calls from jackdaws that shared the crows' aviaries.

They played brief "contact calls" – short vocal greetings the birds use – from these familiar jackdaws and from jackdaws the crows had never encountered.

In this experiment, the team found the opposite result – the birds responded more to the familiar than the unfamiliar birds.

Dr Wascher said that this result suggested that crows might "team up with preferred individuals outside of their own species".

"We already know that corvids are very specific in which other crows they choose to co-operate with," she said.

Previous research has show that when the birds are foraging or solving tasks, "they avoid certain individuals and choose to work with others".

"So maybe," Dr Washcher suggested, "there's also something [like this] going on outside the species."

Barack Obama has been both praised and criticised a day after he became the first sitting US president to publicly support gay marriage.

"We cannot be silent in the face of words or actions that would undermine the institution of marriage, the very cornerstone of our society," he said in a statement. "The people of this country, especially our children, deserve better."

A Gallup poll on Tuesday suggested that 50% of Americans were in favour of legalising gay marriage – a slightly lower proportion than last year – while 48% said they would oppose such a move.

Mr Obama's announcement is seen as politically risky in the upcoming election, especially in the South, where one in three swing voters strongly opposes allowing gays and lesbians to wed. Mr Obama narrowly won North Carolina in the 2008 election.

BBC North America editor Mark Mardell says the Obama campaign hopes the announcement will energise younger voters.

But Mr Obama's remarks may not play so well with religious African-American voters, a key Obama voting bloc. Recent polling suggests that support for gay marriage among black church-goers remains lower than many other groups.

Pentecostal Pastor Charles Bargaineer, of the largely black New Fellowship Church of God in Florida, told the Associated Press he was troubled by the president's position.

"I don't think that's appropriate for the president," Mr Bargaineer told Reuters news agency. "The Bible's strictly against that."

When asked whether he would vote again for Mr Obama, Mr Bargaineer said: "I'll have to pray about that."

Reverend Scott Clark, a gay pastor from the San Francisco Theological Seminary, said it had been "deeply moving" to hear Mr Obama "finally acknowledge the full dignity and humanity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and our families".

Election results in Greece and France have shown voters opposing austerity plans and instead supporting pro-growth policies.

Comments adapted from an article written for Project Syndicate

European voters are rejecting austerity in favour of "growth".

Although governments cannot wave a magic policy wand and conjure up high output, slowing down public investment cuts must be right, as resources are idle and interest rates low.

What matters even more are long-run growth policies, the focus of the London School of Economics' Growth Commission.

First, we must create a better environment for sustainable growth through flexible markets, infrastructure and management.

For example, we should allow much sharper rewards and sanctions for teacher quality.

Second, we need a pro-active focus on areas of future comparative advantage and global growth, reducing policy obstacles.

Examples are the onerous planning restrictions stifling the hi-tech cluster outside Cambridge and the current immigration policies that are harming our universities.

Long-term UK government borrowing is as cheap as in living memory.

There are lots of unemployed workers and plenty of spare capacity and the UK suffers from both creaking infrastructure and a chronic lack of housing supply.

All these factors suggest that the government should increase investment spending very substantially.

In the short term, this would boost growth, create jobs and have no direct effect on the government's primary fiscal target.

In addition, it should introduce much more ambitious measures to help unemployed people to get jobs, especially the young.

Over the medium term, the focus should be on improving the skills and labour market prospects of our young people, especially the half who do not go to university, by reforming vocational education and focusing the education system on improving outcomes for relatively disadvantaged children.

Finally, the government should reverse its damaging approach to high-skilled immigration and to foreign students.

I don't think eurozone leaders are as far off doing what needs to be done to promote long term growth as has been suggested, particularly in terms of labour and other market reforms, although efforts on both definitely need to be stepped up.

The growth v austerity debate is somewhat of a false dichotomy.

Let's not forget that the eurozone is undergoing huge changes and many countries are rebalancing their whole economies.

Simply spending more will not change this and is not desirable, but some differentiation is needed.

Ultimately, the eurozone cannot exist with 17 German-style export-oriented economies and adjusting the approach to account for this is more important than the overly simplistic debate on growth.

The fundamental problem of the eurozone is the chasm that has opened up between the north and the south.

The north does not have a growth problem as it enjoys close to full employment, robust public finances and record low interest rates.

By contrast, the south suffers from high and increasing employment and battles high deficits.

This fundamental difference in economic conditions means that usual mechanisms the EU might consider for growth do not make sense.

The south simply does not have any fiscal room for manoeuvre and even further debt-financed infrastructure risks unsettling financial markets.

What is needed is more demand in the north, which would allow the south to grow on the back of exports, thus reducing both external deficits and unemployment.

The north, especially Germany, is unlikely to engage in deficit spending, because German politicians simply see no need for it with German unemployment so low.

The only measure that could really help at this point would be a deep liberalisation of the services sector in Germany, which should make investment in this sector more profitable (thus increasing demand in Germany).

Moreover, service sector liberalisation in Germany would also make it easier for southern countries to increase their service exports to the north and thus find employment for the masses of unemployed youth in countries like Spain and Italy.

After two years of irresponsible austerity, which has brought the predictable recession that is raging throughout Europe, policymakers seem to have realised that voters are angry.

They were asked to endure pain to close deficits, but deficits are even harder to bring down in recessions, so they feel that they suffered for no good reason.

They are right, but they will be disappointed.

The countries in trouble will find it difficult, if not impossible, to borrow from markets.

The country that can borrow, Germany, is growing fast and starting to feel inflationary pressure from workers who are now in high demand.

No wonder that policymakers are rediscovering the merits of structural reforms.

But the benefits of structural reforms accrue very, very slowly.

The sad conclusion is that individual eurozone member countries are effectively powerless.

We could issue eurobonds to cover expansionary policies, enact fast-acting tax cuts, or the ECB could underwrite newly issued national bonds, but all that would be anathema to Angela Merkel.

Other than that, I see nothing that can be done now.