Europe | featured news

The royal family is dealing with yet another nude photo controversy, but one of a very different sort. Closer, a French gossip magazine, has published topless photos of Kate Middleton , formally Duchess Catherine of Cambridge, sunbathing on the terrace of a private home in the south of France where she and husband Prince William, formally the Duke of Cambridge, vacationed.

Spain, deflecting pressure to spell out whether it needs more European financial support, told euro zone finance ministers on Friday it will set clear deadlines for structural economic reforms by the end of the month.

The trial of a former trader accused of causing the largest unauthorised loss in British history - £1.4bn at UBS - will start later.

The German chancellor says it's a "good day for Germany and a good day for Europe". Better than that, it's been a good week. First, the European Central Bank delivered on its pledge to do more - possibly quite a lot more - to hold the euro together. Now the German constitutional court has ruled in favour the new European bailout fund, the ESM.

Now Greece is making it easier for the rich and famous to fulfill their dreams by preparing to sell, or offering long-term leases on, some of its 6,000 sunkissed islands in a desperate attempt to repay its mountainous debts.

The U.S. trade deficit grew to $42 billion in July, widened by fewer exports to Europe, India and Brazil that offset a steep decline in oil imports.

A Swedish man deported from Cambodia to serve a prison sentence for his involvement with file-sharing site The Pirate Bay faces new suspicions of hacking against the Swedish tax authority.

French President Francois Hollande has set himself a deadline to turn around the economy by the end of 2014, but having hamstrung the effort with tax rises to meet deficit targets, economists doubt his growth goals will ever fly.

Some countries are hard-hit, like Portugal, Greece, and Italy in the case of textiles, but most countries actually come out ahead. So is rising Chinese productivity good? To quote Sam Shakusky, who’s to say? Portuguese workers certainly don’t seem to win from an increase in textile productivity. But most European workers actually come out ahead. What’s more, productivity growth will also almost certainly lead to rising wages in China, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and raising the standard of living considerably in the world’s largest country. That may be the most important factor here.

Two years after eurozone began its downward financial spiral, the European Central Bank is about to unveil a widely-anticipated plan to pump more money into the system to stem a wider collapse. But the plan, similar to the massive bond-buying undertaken by U.S. central bankers four years ago, may be too little, too late. “It’s going to take a lot more than a few rate cuts here and there to give us a lift,” said Peter Dixon, a senior economist at Commerzbank Securities. “Monetary policy is effectively running out of options.”