“The pensions scheme isn’t based on magic. It is a welfare ambition based on large-scale re-distribution and citizens’ own work. If people think that we can live longer and shorten our work life, then pensions will get lower,” Reinfeldt said in interview with daily Dagens Nyheter (DN).

According to Reinfeldt, the expectation to retire at 65 is a problem in Sweden today.

He thinks that Swedes may have to stretch their working life to 75 years of age in order to keep the same living standard. Not many would be willing to sacrifice the way they live, he said to the paper.

“Are people on a large scale willing to give this up? I think not,” he said.

To keep going that long, Reinfeldt isn’t ruling out that Swedes would need to have more than one career during their working life.

“It is a very challenging view. Our entire life is characterized by the idea that once we have spoken to the student career counselor, we think we are going to do the same thing our entire life,” said Reinfeldt.

But instead, Swedes need to be able to change their career at a later stage in life, said the prime minister

He also said that student loans for the over 55s wasn’t out of the question.

“Maybe it is worth looking into that,” he told DN.

Reinfeldt also said that those who are 55+ would immediately become more attractive with employers if they were expected to work for another 20 years instead of ramping down after 5-6 years.

“But it is important to understand that a 30-year-old wouldn’t do the same work as a 70-year-old,” said Reinfeldt.

The prime minister is scheduled to host a meeting in Sweden on Wednesday with the leaders of the Nordic nations, as well as with British PM David Cameron, to discuss among other things the implications of an aging population.

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The leaders are caught between their increasingly frustrated partners in the European Union for failing to pass the reforms quickly and workers who went on strike on Tuesday to protest against the austerity measures.

European Union (EU) officials say the full package must be agreed with Greece and approved by the euro zone, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund before February 15 to allow time for complex legal procedures involved in the bond swap to be completed in time for a March 20 bond redemption.

In some euro zone countries, including Germany and Finland, parliamentary approval is required to raise the bailout money.

In Paris, German Chancellor Angel Merkel on Monday expressed the exasperation among euro zone leaders at seemingly endless arguing in Athens that has yet to produce a definitive acceptance of the austerity and reform demanded by the lenders.

“I honestly can’t understand how additional days will help. Time is of the essence. A lot is at stake for the entire euro zone,” she told a news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

But leaders of the three parties in the coalition government appeared to need at least one additional day.

The office of Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, a former central banker who heads a government of politicians, said that a meeting of leaders from the conservative, socialist and far-right parties due on Monday had been postponed to Tuesday.

No reason was given for the delay. Papademos held further talks with the “troika” of lenders – the European Commission, ECB and IMF – on Monday.

The party leaders, positioning themselves for a likely general election in April, have balked at accepting another package of deeply unpopular wage and pension reductions, job cuts and tougher tax enforcement measures.

Alarmed by the prospect of yet more budget cuts, Greece’s two main trade unions said they would hold a 24-hour strike on Tuesday in protest against policies they say have only driven the economy into a downward spiral.

Demonstrations are planned in central Athens.

PATIENCE WEARING THIN

Greeks watched the political drama with the same exasperation they have shown throughout the nation’s nearly three-year crisis, mixed with fear of the consequences of leaving the euro.

“We are stuck between a rock and a hard place. We are lost either way but political leaders have to agree,” said Kosmas Georgiou, a 31-year old company inspector. “Going back to the drachma is not an option, it’s disaster.”

“They are delaying this just to look like heroes.”

Merkel made clear that her patience was wearing thin on a deal that affects not only Greece but the wider currency bloc, which fears that a default would hit much larger economies such as Spain and Italy.

One government official said the entire Greek side had to agree terms of the rescue, which would be the second for Athens since 2010, with international lenders before the next meeting of the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers.

No date has been set for the Eurogroup meeting, and a European Commission spokesman said it would be held only when Greece had made a commitment to the deal.

Papademos said after five hours of talks on Sunday that party chiefs had agreed measures including wage cuts and other reforms as part of spending cuts worth 1.5 percent of gross domestic product.

But leaders of the PASOK socialist party, the conservative New Democracy and the far-right LAOS party still have to reach agreement on several unresolved issues.

These include labour market reform and shoring up domestic banks. Greece needs the bailout money by mid-March to meet big debt repayments but tempers are rising in the EU over what it sees as Greek dithering on implementing reforms.

Greeks have been worn down by a deep recession, now in its fifth year, and wave after wave of austerity measures imposed under the first bailout.

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The first demonstration demands fair elections at the March 4 presidential polls, at which Putin is expected to secure a third term in the Kremlin. It also calls on Russians “not to give a single vote” to Putin.

The opposition rally is widely seen by analysts as a litmus test of protesters’ ability to maintain momentum after two earlier protests against alleged vote fraud in favor of Putin’s United Russia party at December’s parliamentary polls.

“We are prepared for a long tough struggle,” protest organizer and opposition figure Boris Nemtsov on the eve of the rally. “One peaceful march will not change the country.”

Around 30,000 have signed up on social networks to attend the demonstration. The protests are to include a march through downtown Moscow and a rally across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. The two previous rallies drew an estimated combined total of 100,000 people.

Protesters were set to gather by the downtown Oktyabrskaya station starting 12 p.m. local time, when temperature in Moscow stood at minus 22 degrees Celsius.

President Dmitry Medvedev, widely seen as Putin’s junior partner in Russia’s ruling tandem, proposed a host of political reforms after the initial vote protests, including the return of direct elections for regional governors and easier registration for political parties and presidential candidates. His proposals were dismissed by protest leaders on Friday as “imitation reforms.”

Putin has also ordered the installation of video cameras at polling stations and has encouraged independent monitors to oversee the presidential vote.

The organization of Saturday’s march has seen the involvement of the Voters League, a freshly-minted public group that claims no involvement in politics and is led by popular figures such as novelist Boris Akunin, TV journalist Leonid Parfyonov and rock musician Yury Shevchuk.

A separate rally, expected to draw some 15,000 people, will urge protesters to resist what organizers say are attempts to instigate an Orange Revolution in Russia. So-called Color uprisings took place in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia in the early 2000s after contested presidential elections.

Putin thanked late on Friday those people who planned to attend the rally in his support.

“I share their views,” he said.

There have been numerous reports in the Russian media of state employees being coerced to attend the Anti-Orange rally, but the authorities have said these are untrue or the actions of over-zealous, low-level officials.

Both demonstrations have been authorized by City Hall. Moscow police say they will deploy 9,000 officers to maintain order at the rallies.

Rallies by both the opposition and Putin’s supporters took place in cities across Siberia and the Far East, most of them gathering several hundreds of protesters. An opposition rally in Novosibirsk was attended by an 1,500 to 2,000 people, according to police estimates, while a pro-Putin indoors rally in far eastern Birobidzhan had 600 participants, organizers said.

Police said some 11,000 gathered for the opposition rally at Moscow’s Kaluzhskaya Ploshchad as of 12:30 a.m. Saturday, though video feed from the site indicated the figure was considerably higher.

About 35,000 were in attendance for the rally in support of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Poklonnaya Gora an hour before its scheduled start at 1 p.m., Moscow police said. No video feed from the site was available at the time.

“People keep on arriving, the situation is changing constantly,” police said in a statement.

Police estimates of attendance during two previous opposition rallies in December were considerably lower than those by organizers and independent observers.

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In a proposal presented on Friday, the justice ministry said the new identity cards would help tackle illegal immigration.

“The residency card system will increase security surrounding residency permit documentation, thereby contributing to the prevention of illegal immigration and illegal residency,” said Justice Minister Grete Faremo (Labour Party) in a statement.

The move follows pressure from the European Union to ensure that immigrants from outside the European Economic Area, of which Norway is a member, are provided with residency cards that include fingerprint details.

Faremo said the cards would benefit immigrants with legitimate residency permits, enabling them to display fully reliable ID to prospective employers and banks.

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“Yes, it’s true. I am in love with captain (Francesco) Schettino,” Domnica Cemortan, who has joint Moldovan and Romanian citizenship, was quoted by La Stampa daily as saying to investigators looking into the January 13 tragedy.

The 52-year-old captain is married and has a daughter. Cemortan in earlier interviews had dismissed gossip that she was Schettino’s lover saying he was a faithful family man because he had shown her pictures of his daughter.

The woman was also quoted as saying that she was on the bridge when the luxury liner hit rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio on January 13, which caused it to keel over with a loss of 32 lives out of 4,229 people on board.

In an interview with AFP earlier, however, she said that she had been dining with friends when the accident happened. Schettino had told investigators that there was no-one apart from authorised staff on the bridge at the time.

Italian newspapers say that the testimony of the mysterious Moldovan — a former employee of cruise ship operator Costa Crociere — has become a key part of the investigation that is trying to work out who was where when.

Cemortan in earlier interviews in the Moldovan capital Chisinau said Schettino was “a hero” whose actions after the impact saved thousands of lives and she dismissed the accusations against him as “absurd”.

The captain, who is under house arrest at his home on the Amalfi coast, and first officer Ciro Ambrosio are accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all the passengers were evacuated.

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Much of the high-tech surveillance equipment has already been installed on the Dutch borders with Belgium and Germany. The cameras apparently collect data on the models and colours of cars crossing the border.

The idea is that if, for instance, it is thought that convoys of white vans moving at night are being used to transport illegal foreign workers to the Netherlands, the cameras can be set to alert police to this sort of suspicious convoy. The police can then intercept the vans.

More free movement
Mr Leers has written to the European Union defending the idea of using the cameras in this way, saysEUobserver. He argues that the cameras provide an alternative to more invasive policing of the borders of the Netherlands, which is a member of the ‘borderless’ Schengen group of countries.

By ensuring that Dutch border police run sample checks “at the right time and right place”, the minister says, fewer bona fide travellers will be stopped unnecessarily. He maintains this will actually guarantee more freedom of movement – the basic principle of the Schengen treaty.

At the moment, the Dutch police carry out border checks at random.

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The previous arrest, in June 2011, occurred after police identified a 36-year-old man from the Stockholm suburb of Täby, who was committed to a psychiatric ward after being convicted of child rape, child sexual abuse, and aggravated child pornography offences.

“We found in his material a load of chat conversations. I have extracted a number of these that both shared and received child porn files,” said Henrik Westerberg of the local police to TT news agency.

Westerberg used the chat history to form a list of 60 potential suspects, 20 of whom were traceable residents of Sweden.

Of these 20, three were already known to police from previous arrests. The remaining 17 were all men, with no known connection to one another.

The police began questioning the suspects on Tuesday, and some offenders have already been released, though they are still under suspicion. One man has been detained.

“We are really pleased to get confirmation that our work in tracking these people has been worthwhile,” said Westerberg, who spent several months tracing the suspects through the previously seized material.

Almost 20,000 child porn images and 127 films were seized from the 36-year-old’s home in June.

An earlier raid on the man’s home had uncovered almost 7,000 pictures and 171 films. Several of the films showed young children and were “especially ruthless”, according to police.

The man confessed to aggravated child pornography.

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If the court rejects his case, the 40-year-old Australian will have exhausted all his options in Britain but he could still make a last-ditch appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, prosecutors have said.

The Supreme Court, England’s highest, granted Assange permission to appeal in December.

It said his case raised an issue of “great public importance”, namely whether Sweden’s state prosecutor had the right to sign the European arrest warrant under which he was held.

The case will be considered by seven judges, rather than the usual five.

The Supreme Court usually takes about 10 weeks to deliver a judgement but the parties have requested that this case be speeded up.

Wednesday marks 421 days since the arrest of the former computer hacker, who has been living under tight bail conditions at the country mansion of a wealthy supporter in Norfolk, eastern England.

Assange was arrested in Britain in December 2010 after two women made allegations of sexual molestation and an accusation of rape in Sweden, which he strongly denies.

He says the sex was consensual and claims the allegations are politically motivated, linked to WikiLeaks’ release of hundreds of thousands of classified US files about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic cables.

Assange’s extradition to Sweden was initially approved by a lower court in February. An appeal to the High Court was rejected in November, but it subsequently granted him permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.

If this appeal fails, the WikiLeaks founder will have only one other option to stop his extradition — an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

“If the ECHR takes the case then his current bail conditions would remain in force and he would remain in the UK until the proceedings at the ECHR have concluded,” the Crown Prosecution Service said in a commentary on the case.

“If the ECHR declines to take the case then he will be extradited to Sweden as soon as arrangements can be made,” England’s state prosecutor said.

Concerning Assange’s case before the Supreme Court, Julian Knowles, an extradition law specialist with the Matrix Chambers law firm, said the question of whether a public prosecutor was a valid judicial authority had been comprehensively tested.

“The courts have always reached the clear answer that while it may look odd to English eyes … European systems don’t have the same structure,” he was quoted as saying Tuesday in The Guardian newspaper.

“The courts have always said that to make extradition work, you have to be flexible in your approach to what extradition is.”

Were Assange to win, the consequences would be “very profound”, he said.

“It would basically mean, until the law is rewritten, that extradition to Europe (would) become very difficult, if not impossible.

“Because in the vast majority of European extradition requests, the arrest warrant is issued not by a court, as it would be in England, but by a prosecutor.”

Assange announced last week that he was launching his own television chat show and promised interviews with “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries”.

No guests have been unveiled, but a statement on the WikiLeaks website said the show would go on air in mid March in 10 weekly half-hour episodes.

Russian state television channel RT said it had the rights to show the episodes first.

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But the announcement that that 25 of 27 European Union nations had adopted the new pact on budgetary discipline was overshadowed by outrage over a German suggestion heavily indebted Greece submit its finances to EU review.

The idea of placing the cradle of European democracy under the supervision of an EU budget tsar quickly failed to gain traction at the summit in Brussels.

“There cannot be any talk of putting any nation under wardenship. It would not be reasonable, democratic and efficient,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a news conference.

Sarkozy said that German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not back the idea, suggesting the proposal came from others in her government.

Merkel, however, did not repudiate the controversial proposal which Greece’s education minister termed “the product of a sick imagination.”

“I think that in light of the discussions, which are often very emotional, it is important that we come to a conclusion” about the extent of the surveillance of Greece, she told reporters.

Greece is already essentially under supervision with European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund auditors in Athens to ensure the government implements reforms in return for bailout loans.

Athens has been under constant pressure to implement drastic budget cuts and radical economic reforms in return for installments from a first €110-billion bailout it was granted in May 2010.

Merkel noted that a second €130-billion rescue package for Greece, which the eurozone hopes to finalise this week, was conditioned on some form of “surveillance that we are now thinking about how to make more efficient.”

Under the radical German proposal, a commissioner appointed by the 16 other eurozone finance ministers could veto budget decisions made by Athens.

“I am strongly against the idea of imposing a commissioner with that mission only to Greece. That’s not acceptable,” said Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the key group of eurozone finance ministers.

Calling the German proposal “vexing,” Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said it “doesn’t achieve anything and it goes in the wrong direction.”

However, the plan drew cautious support from Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who complained that Greek authorities “are not delivering on reforms.” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte echoed those sentiments: “Greece must also honour the commitments it has made with us.”

Merkel did not push this plan further, however, said it was about “how Europe can help Greece accomplish the tasks given to it.”

The EU focus on bailouts was supposed to give way at Monday’s summit to a renewed push to stimulate growth and create jobs across European economies.

This idea even saw tentative moves to place an ambitious free-trade deal with the United States on the coming agenda. But at its root was the announcement that 25 of 27 countries had adopted the new pact on budgetary discipline.

The Czech Republic joined Britain on the outside looking in, but a threat by Poland to withdraw evaporated after France gave ground in an argument about the influence of non-euro countries on eurozone summits.

Pushed by Germany and the ECB, the treaty – to be formally signed in March – will require governments to introduce laws on balanced budgets and impose near automatic sanctions on countries that violate deficit rules.

Only those countries that sign up will be able to access bailout aid from a new rescue fund whose legal basis was also ticked off at the talks. It will enter force after 12 nations ratify it.

The pact is a “first step toward a fiscal union,” said European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi amid hopes among some governments that the pact will prompt the ECB to step up a controversial bond purchase programme.

With Italy and Spain still fragile, EU leaders will discuss in March whether to add half as much again to a new rescue fund’s initial €500-billion size, amid wider moves to beef up IMF resources.

“We are getting the feeling that there is a shift in Germany’s position and I am optimistic,” said Italian premier Mario Monti.

European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said €82 billion of unspent EU funds could kick-start growth and job creation – but with the catch that money is matched locally.

Among ideas adopted by the summit for boosting growth in Europe, there were calls to lower the tax burden on employers to get more people hired, and give all young people guaranteed options in work, training or study.

However, a summit statement concluded: “There are no quick fixes. Our action must be determined, persistent and broad-based.”

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Norwegian national Mikael Davud, a member of China’s Uighur minority considered the mastermind behind the plot against the Jyllands-Posten daily, was sentenced to seven years behind bars.

Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak, an Iraqi Kurd residing in Norway, received a three-and-a-half-year prison term.

The two men were found guilty of planning to blow up the offices of the Danish newspaper that in September 2005 published 12 caricatures of the Muslim Prophet.

The judges said the prosecution had proved “beyond any doubt that Davud knowingly and voluntarily plotted with Al-Qaeda to carry out a bomb attack against Jyllands-Posten with a bomb that was so powerful that he understood human life could be lost.”

The prosecution, which also accused them of planning to murder Kurt Westergaard, author of the most controversial of the drawings, featuring Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse, had demanded they receive prison sentences of 11 and five years respectively.

The court however said there was not enough evidence to prove the men had planned to kill Westergaard, whose drawing has already earned him numerous death threats and an assassination attempt.

The men’s lawyers said they would advise their clients to appeal the ruling.

A third man, David Jakobsen, an Uzbek arrested at the same time as Davud and Bujak in July 2010, was meanwhile acquitted of the most serious charges but was sentenced to four months’ jail for helping the two others to procure bomb-making material.

The three Oslo District Court judges insisted in their ruling there was “no doubt that it was Davud who took the initiative in the preparations for a terrorist act and that he was the central character”.

“The court also believes that it was he himself who would have carried out the terrorist attack since he has explained that he planned to lay out the explosives himself,” they added.

According to Norway’s intelligence service PST, Davud, a short, bearded 40-year-old, received training in making and using explosives from Al-Qaeda members and sympathisers in Pakistan’s region of Waziristan between November 2008 and July 2010.

Davud’s lawyer Carl Rieber-Mohn told AFP that his client “does not deny having entered into contact with members or sympathisers of al-Qaeda while he was working out his plan.”

However, the lawyer stressed, “he denies that there were any conditions linked to the help he received and denies any deal with al-Qaeda.”

While all three men pleaded not guilty to the charges when the trial opened, Davud, of the oppressed Uighur minority in China, confessed he planned an attack, but said it was directed at Chinese interests in Norway and not at Jyllands-Posten.

He said he had been acting out of purely personal motives and that he had manipulated the two others so they would help him get hold of chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, that he needed to build a bomb.

Jyllands-Posten’s publication of the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed provoked violent and even deadly protests across much of the Muslim world.

On Monday, the Danish paper refused to comment on the verdict in Oslo.

Bujak, 39, meanwhile admitted that he had spoken with Davud about the possibility of punishing Jyllands-Posten for the cartoons, but insisted the comments were vague and did not constitute a terrorist plot.

“Bujak helped Davud with the preparations … and there is no doubt that he was very much involved,” the judges ruled, nonetheless lending credence to his insistence he had had no intention of participating in the attack itself.

As for Jakobsen, who contacted police voluntarily in November 2009 and was the only one of the three to have been released from custody until the verdict, he categorically denied any intention to participate in the plot.

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