Economic growth in Ireland shrank by 0.6 percent, making its third successive quarter of contraction, and it’s official re-entrance into recession, Central Statistics Office reports.

The island nation’s gross domestic product contracted by 0.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted rate for a third successive quarter, meaning the economy is back in recession for the first time since 2009, the data shows.

Similarly, the statistics office has revised its GDP contraction in Q3 2012 to 1.0 percent, down from the 0.4 figure delivered three months ago, and five times the number originally forecast last winter. 

Similarly, the statistics office has revised its GDP contraction in Q3 2012 to 1.0 percent, down from the 0.4 figure delivered three months ago, and five times the number originally forecast last winter.  

Overall, the economy grew by 0.2 percent in 2012, missing the 0.9 predicted by economists.

Ireland lost out big on capital investment, which decreased by 19.8 percent from the previous quarter.

Gross national product performed better, as preliminary estimates for first quarter of 2013 increased by 2.9 percent, seasonally adjusted.

The recently bailed out euro member’s recovery from the financial crisis has been slow, and today’s data indicates it may be slower than originally anticipated. Ireland has one of the highest budget deficits, and will continue to cut spending and increase taxes in austerity measures.

The budget deficit is astronomical largely due to the burden inflicted by the failure of six banks and recapitalization of the main three - Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish Bank and Anglo Irish Bank. The total cost of the bailout is nearing 64 billion euros, of which 40 percent was paid by taxpayer contributions.

Prime Minister Enda Kenny is hoping to wrap up her country’s three-year international bailout plan by the end of 2013.

Economies across Europe are slipping back into recession. France’s economy shrank by 0.2 percent in Q1, and with the exception of Austria and Germany, all euro member states have been sluggish in their growth due to the general economic slowdown of the continent.

Bond market returns in Ireland had some investors optimistic that it was moving towards growth, and not contraction.

Bonds dropped Tuesday after European Central Bank President Mario Draghi delivered a negative regional economic outlook, which he said will continue to necessitate monetary policy.

Overall the economy grew by just 0.2 percent last year, rather than the 0.9 percent initially thought, and the export-led recovery stalled in the second half of 2012 due to the slowdown in much of the rest of the eurozone. 

A picture shows a Statoil gas processing plant in Kaarstoe, Norway (AFP Photo)

 Russia lost its position as the main supplier of gas to EU last year as Gazprom exports fell by 10% knocked down by coal and high prices.

High gas prices in the EU coupled with cheap coal from the US, have made coal a more attractive fuel for power stations, according a new energy report from BP. On average, generating power in Europe is 45% cheaper with coal than with gas, BP chief economist Christof  Rühl explains in the report. That’s why Europe did not compete for liquid natural gas (LNG) and its imports to Europe fell by 25%. EU imports from Gazprom also dropped by 10%, as Russia’s gas prices are tied to oil prices and therefore remained high, BP’s economist said.  Norway’s gas pricing is not pegged to oil and are therefore lower. Imports from Norway rose 12%, and 2012 became the first year when Norway sold more gas to the EU than Russia, Rühl said.

Gazprom CEO Aleksandr Medvedev circulated an email on June 24 in which he reacts to a Financial Times article which claims that the Russian gas monopoly is in decline and that it is losing its hold in the EU market.

“Recently, Gazprom Export set a new record in daily gas deliveries. We pumped 466 million cubic metres of gas to Europe in a single day, pushing existing pipeline capacities to their limits. And Gazprom posted a whopping $38bn profit in 2012. In challenging economic times this is hardly a sign of weakness,” euractiv.com quotes Medvedev.

Although Russia remains a key supplier to Europe, the country is also seeking to diversify export markets for its gas to the booming Asia Pacific Region betting on growing demand in emerging economies.

Just 7 percent of Russia's gas exports were sold to Asian consumers last year, all in the form of LNG, from the Sakhalin II project, the Moscow Times reports.  But Russia's gas exports to Asia will expand dramatically if the construction of two new LNG terminals goes ahead: Gazprom's Vladivostok and Novatek's Yamal projects. Rosneft also plans to build a terminal in Sakhalin. If these three projects are realized by 2020, Russia's LNG capacity would increase from 10 million tons per year to about 45 million tons, equal to 18 percent of global LNG exports in 2012, according to the Moscow Times.

Globally gas consumption rose 2.2% faster in 2012 compared to a year earlier, but below the long-term average, according to BP’s energy report.  The growth is largely US-driven, as gas consumption in the world’s largest economy has increased more than in any other region of the world. At the same time, the EU and the former Soviet states have registered the largest regional declines in gas consumption, according to the report.

Barack Obama is a “war criminal” and a “hypocrite,” an Irish politician has said in a damning attack on the US president. The MP slammed the Irish treatment of Obama during his G8 visit as akin to ‘prostituting’ Ireland for a “pat on the head.”

Irish MP Clare Daly took no prisoners in her heated attack on the visit of the Obama family to Ireland during this year’s G8 summit, which was held in the five-star resort of Lough Erne, Northern Ireland.

During a session of the Irish parliament last Tuesday, Daly slammed media coverage of the visit as tantamount to "a nation of pimps, prostituting ourselves in return for a pat on the head."

“It’s hard to know which is worse, whether it’s the outpourings of the Obamas themselves, or the sycophantic fawning over them by sections of the media and the political establishment,” said Daly, saying that the Irish nation had been subjected to “unprecedented slobbering” over the presidential family.

 Rounding on the president, she condemned his speech to children in Northern Ireland about the peace process as the “biggest irony of all.” Citing Obama’s decision to supply the Syrian opposition with arms, she asked: “Is person going for the hypocrite of the century award?”

“By any serious examination this man is a war criminal,” said Daly, accusing the Obama administration of purposely stalling the Geneva talks by increasing their backing for the Syrian opposition and undermining secularism in the region as a whole.

She called on the Irish government to take steps to “ensure no weapons go through [Dublin’s] Shannon [Airport] to Syria in breach of the international laws”

Letting rip on the on Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, she said there was speculation "whether the Taoiseach [PM] was going to deck the cabinet out in leprechaun hats decorated with a bit of stars and stripes to really mark abject humiliation."

US First Lady Michelle Obama (C) comforts her daughter Sasha (L) as Malia (R) looks on during a visit to Glendalough in the Wicklow Mountains National Park in Ireland, on June 18, 2013. (AFP Photo)

 Clare Daly’s comments were condemned as “disgraceful” by Kenny, who debated with the MP following her initial speech. He said her comment were a “do-down” to Irish people living throughout the world. Addressing, Daly’s words on Syria, Kenny said that she seemed to have a very “biased” view on the “wanton slaughter of the Syrian people” by the regime of President Bashar Assad.

Daly later questioned what was so “outrageous” about her comments in a column in the Irish examiner, stressing the “unquestionable adoration of the Obamas is ludicrous.”

“Of course the Obamas, like anyone else, have a right to visit our country and enjoy the benefits we have to offer. However, we cannot afford to let a sideshow develop whereby the situation becomes completely depoliticized,” Daly wrote.

Barack Obama, his wife and two daughters touched down in Belfast for the G8 summit on June 17. While the president attended high-level meetings as part of the summit, his family toured the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. 

Italian police have seized documents from Italian and foreign clubs, including 18 in the top league, as part of an investigation into tax evasion and money laundering involving player transfers, Reuters reports.

Apart from the Series A  teams, 11 B league teams and 12 from the lower divisions are being investigated, according to a police spokesman. The probe also includes 12 player agents. The names of the clubs involved have not been disclosed, although judicial and police sources informed Reuters that clubs SS Lazio and Juventus FC are among those under investigation.

A Naples court ordered the searches as part of an investigation into criminal conspiracy, international tax evasion, money laundering and invoice falsification.

Irish officials has promised a state investigation into the 'arrogant' actions of Anglo Irish Bank, in which executives allegedly covered up their losses in order to secure large bail-outs from the government in the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

The Irish public must learn the full truth of how Anglo Irish Bank deceived government officials and nearly led Ireland to bankruptcy, Prime Minister Kenny told lawmakers Tuesday. "Believe you me, I understand the rage and the anger of so many people who have been affected by all of this," said Kenny.

The Prime Minister’s terse words follow a scandal that broke out after a leaked recording capturing a 2008 conversation of two senior Anglo managers was published by The Independent on Monday in which their plot to conspire to conceal the bank's true scale of losses was revealed. 

The internally recorded phone calls reveal how bank bosses misled the Central Bank of Ireland that Anglo bank required 7 billion euros to prevent its collapse. Anglo's losses reached 30 billion euros, nearly half of a total bank-bailout bill that forced Ireland to seek IMF bailout money.  

"I mean the degree of arrogance, the degree of hubris, the degree of couldn't-care-less-about-the-taxpayer, about the Irish people, that seemed to be part and parcel of the culture of that bank," deputy prime minister Eamon Gilmore said.

Gilmore said the tapped phone recordings could 'complicate' Dublin's negotiations in receiving crisis-relief funds.

“It makes it more difficult, of course it does, but we’re going to continue to work to get the best possible outcome for the Irish taxpayer,” Mr Gilmore said.

The parliamant's plan at present is to use €500 billion of the bailout money to recapitalize the country's banks, but the recent scandal may derail this vision.

The recordings contained lewd language in which two executives at the Anglo Irish Bank were recorded as they joked about their ability to convince lawmakers to invest in a bank they knew was failing, citing figures they had 'picked out of my arse' - with no plans on paying back the government. John Bowe, the head of capital markets for Anglo Irish, was recorded laughing as he explained to Peter Fitzgerald, the former head of banking, how Anglo Irish had fleeced the Irish government into providing billions of euro to keep the bank solvent.

The government will launch an investigation into the disastrous bailout of Anglo Irish Bank, which was the first bank to receive a government bail out which cost Irish taxpayers nearly $40 billion. Ireland has yet to fully recover from the financial crisis, and has been hit especially hard by austerity measures.

Mr Drumm and Mr Bowe joked with one another about the bank's strategy to attract deposits from overseas, in rather explicit language:
“So f***in’ what. Just take it anyway . . . stick the fingers up.”

Even though he knew their business wasn't solvent, Drumm encourage Bowe to seek deposits for a bank he knew was going to fail:
“Correct and right. So OK, so just keep nursing along . . . jack the [interest] rates up. That’s what I really meant, get the f***in’ money in, get it in,” he said.

The revelation that one of its national banks intentionally may have worsened the Irish economy in a time of national crisis, has shocked many. 

"We are not able to say who has used chemical agents or chemical weapons and we are very worried about the chain of custody of the substances," Pinheiro told reporters after an informal meeting with UN Security Council ambassadors.

UN experts investigating the use of chemical weapons say they need to access Syria to determine where the alleged chemical weapons have been used. But Syria has thus far refused to grant them entry, citing concerns for their safety and doubts about their impartiality, as neither China nor Russia were allowed to participate.

Pinheiro's commission said in a report published this month that there were "reasonable grounds to believe that chemical agents have been used as weapons".

"Allegations have been received concerning the use of chemical weapons by both parties," said the commission, adding that "the majority concern their use by government forces."

Pinheiro believes that a "diplomatic surge" is needed to resolve the long-standing conflict, which has left more than 93,000 dead, according to UN figures.

However, just before foreign ministers from the "Friends of Syria" group met in Doha on Saturday, the main armed opposition group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), told the AFP that it had new weapons that could beat President Bashar Assad's regime.

  "We have begun distributing them on the front lines, they will be in the hands of professional officers and FSA fighters," he said.

These reports come after the US decided to arm the Syrian rebels, which reportedly sparked feuds among various rebel factions dominated by radical Islamist fighters.

President Barack Obama said on Friday that the US will leave about 700 combat-equipped troops in Jordan after a training exercise there, which would increase the number of US troops stationed there to almost 1,000. The US announced earlier that it will leave Patriot missiles and warplanes in the country.

The Qatari foreign minister supported and encouraged the idea of arming the Syrian opposition fighters during the foreign ministers’ meeting in Doha.

The EU lifted its arms embargo on Syria last month, and the UK and France spoke favorably about arming the rebels, though no decisions have been due to increasing concerns about the Islamist element within the Syrian rebel forces.
Risks of arming Syria

There are fears that a power struggle may be brewing in the rebels’ ranks, with fighters from the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front reportedly assassinating a large number of officers of the Free Syrian Army.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned the West against arming Syrian rebel forces, which he said included "terrorist" groups.

He reiterated that weapon supplies to the Syrian rebels would violate international law and threaten to further destabilize the war-torn state.

"Why supply weapons to militant forces in Syria when we are not sure of the composition of these groups?” he said Friday at the Economic Forum, adding that it remains unclear where these arms will end up.

"If the United States ... recognizes one of the key Syrian opposition organizations, al-Nusra, as terrorist ... how can one deliver arms to those opposition members? … Where will (those weapons) end up? What role will they play?" Putin said, arguing that a quick exit by President Bashar Assad would create a dangerous power vacuum.

Earlier on Friday, Pinheiro warned that sending more weapons into Syria would lead to more war crimes. "States that provide arms have responsibilities in terms of the eventual use of those arms to commit ... war crimes or crimes against humanity," Pinheiro said.

Putin also defended Russia’s contract to deliver advanced S-300 long-range air defense systems to Damascus, saying that Moscow maintains that all arms supplies to Syria are being carried out under a contract signed with the country several years ago.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (RIA Novosti)

Putin has supported Pinheiro’s idea of a “diplomatic surge”, and insisted that an international peace conference is the right way to proceed to solve the Syrian conflict, referring to the earlier proposed peace conference in Geneva on June 25.

But the conference has been continually postponed. After the clash of G8 leaders with Russia over the nature of transitional government, the conference may be delayed until late August or early September. 

  The US decision to arm the Syrian rebels fighting government troops has sparked feuds among various rebel factions dominated by radical Islamist fighters. RT contributor Afshin Rattansi warns against the move, as internal schisms among the rebels deepen.

A power struggle may also be brewing in the rebels’ ranks: Fighters from the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front have reportedly assassinated a large number of officers of the Free Syrian Army.

RT: The Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front is now said to be targeting Free Syrian Army (FSA), but these two share a common goal – to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad. Is there some sort of power struggle we are seeing within the rebel ranks?

Afshin Rattansi: The rebel ranks were in Istanbul recently, where they could make no type of agreement between themselves. Now they are actually killing each other. This power struggle has been going on for months and months.

And presumably President Obama and the NATO powers are saying that they will give weapons to the Free Syrian Army. Well, if Al-Nusra Front is murdering members of the Free Syrian Army, then presume they take some of those arms and use them. Disunity in the rebel ranks is high, and is now extending to attacking Kurds in the northern part of Syria.

RT: Reports say that many FSA fighters are leaving more modern brigades for hard-line groups. What are the dangers of that, and why are they doing it?

AF: The dangers are everywhere to be seen in neighboring Iraq and Lebanon, as the Al-Nusra Front becomes the lead faction in the opposition. No amount of arming the so-called ‘moderate rebels’ is going to work against the hundreds or thousands, millions or billions – we don’t know – coming from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the American allies in the Persian Gulf.

So, the dangers are everywhere to be seen. Another danger is the blowback that is occurring even now, with some of those militants returning to their home countries in Europe and perhaps to the US to fight their jihad on European and American soil.

RT: Any clearer about who or what is actually making up the FSA?

AF: The Free Syrian army seems to have deposed some of the initial leaders, but rather like the pre-Iraq-War time, we don’t really know. It isn’t stopping the Americans. They seem to know exactly who the Free Syrian Army is, and they have 2,000 marines over the Jordanian border putting in Patriot missiles and getting ready for war. They were flying F-16s over the past 48 hours.

France does not seem to know who the FSA is either, as Paris is saying “no more arms, no more weapons, until we find out who the personnel really are in this rebel movement.”

RT: What is the right way forward here with the rebels calling on Western backers to send in weapons?

AF: The right way of going about it in Syria is keeping money on the humanitarian groups that are going to help the refugees. The US should be bombing Syria not with weapons, but with airlifts of medicine and urgent medical care for all of these millions of refugees.

Syria already had a refugee crisis in the fallout of the Iraq war, and it has its own one now. So the way forward is to pour humanitarian aid into the country, and of course get those talks going in Geneva. Hopefully, all sides will be talking soon without the preconditions of this loose coalition of rebels.

The Obama administration has admitted to spying on two Icelandic citizens with ties to WikiLeaks in the latest revelation pertaining to both the US government’s widespread surveillance practices and its war against the whistleblower website. Documents surfaced on Friday showing that the United States Department of Justice demanded that Internet giant Google provide federal investigators with the personal emails sent and received by two Icelanders once involved in WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy website under investigation for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified US documents.
Herbert Snorrason and Smári McCarthy, both known publically as one-time associates of the website, released Justice Department-issued search warrants and court orders for their Gmail accounts on Friday that had up until recently been kept under seal. The documents compelled Google, the owner of the Gmail service, to provide metadata and content pertaining to emails that have passed through the accounts of both men. The documents are redacted in part and are absent of information confirming that the intelligence is sought pursuant to the investigation of WikiLeaks, but Snorrason wrote on his website “it’s not a tricky guess” to figure out why they were targeted.
“All this is pretty much par for the course; I had assumed that I was caught in the dragnet cast around Julian Assange,” Snorrason wrote.

A team of volunteers, including McCarthy, readied the footage for an April 2010 release just weeks before Manning was arrested and charged with disclosing classified intelligence. “It was chaotic and hectic and also sort of very varyingly frayed nerves,” McCarthy said of working on the film in a scene from the just-released movie We Steal Secrets. “It wasn't really cloak and dagger stuff, it was just, you know, yes, another cool project.” In a July 2010 interview with journalist Sam Knight, McCarthy discredited the notion that WikiLeaks volunteers were being surveilled to a significant extent. “I know that it is nonzero. Beyond that it’s hard to estimate,” he said. “I am aware of one person being approached by an undercover US official requesting information about Julian Assange’s whereabouts, but that had absolutely no effect. Honestly, I think the US federal government has a lot of better things to do than trying to monitor WikiLeaks. One suggestion would be that they open up their document repositories and datasets before WikiLeaks does.” Publication of the DoJ documents come amid an escalating scandal involving the US government’s questionable surveillance practices that have pitted President Barack Obama and his administration against the American public and press. Documents leaked by The Guardian newspaper throughout the month of June have exposed evidence that the Nation Security Agency and other authoritative bodies have continuously accumulated information about the telephone habits of millions of Americans daily while also shining light on the little-known FISA court’s secret and undeniable requests for email and other intelligence, similar to what's seen in the court orders sent to Google. President Obama and officials from the NSA and DoJ have applauded the surveillance programs and contest to their constitutional legality, despite a myriad of complaints from privacy-concerned citizens and civil liberties groups.

Ok, technically it isn't a leak Google is allowed to send it but I'm guessing @smarimc's publication is considered a leak by the government.
— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) June 21, 2013