Trouble in Lisbon.

Portugal 2010 budget deficit overshoots target

LISBON (Reuters) - Portugal's budget deficit surged past its 7.3 percent target last year, figures on Thursday showed, deepening the scale of its problems as it faces a daunting debt repayment schedule over the next three months.

The revision of the deficit to 8.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) piled more pressure on Lisbon to follow Ireland and Greece in seeking an international bailout, sending the country's bond yields to new euro lifetime highs.

The losses followed a visit by the EU's Eurostat statistics body and are caused by higher than expected losses for a nationalised bank and public transport companies.

But they add to the problems for the government that emerges from elections which are expected within months after a debt crisis which has forced eye-watering budget cutbacks, crippled growth and forced the current administration to resign.

Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said Lisbon would honour its debt payments even though it has no power to seek a bailout.

"The negative element is that we are appearing more like Greece than we would like, indicating that in the past there must have been some carelessness in the accounts," said Cristina Casalinho, chief economist at Banco BPI.

"It is a question of methodology. Eurostat has made the rules tougher."

POLITICAL LIMBO

Portugal's troubles were already mounting before last week's resignation by Prime Minister Jose Socrates after parliament rejected his minority Socialist government's latest austerity measures to help to cut the budget deficit.

That move prompted downgrades by credit rating agencies and warnings by economists that the country could be forced to quickly seek a bailout.

The president is expected to decide on Thursday to call a snap election for late May or early June.

But the political limbo left by the crisis ahead of the expected election made it impossible for the interim government to seek a bailout now, Teixeira dos Santos said.

"We have to face these difficulties and understand that the government doesn't have the conditions nor the powers to ask for any kind of external help," the minister told reporters.

Portugal has to redeem 4.2 billion euros of bonds in April and 4.9 billion euros (4.3 billion pounds) in June.

"The government is not irresponsible and will guarantee that there is the necessary financing for the country to honour commitments to creditors," he said.


Opinion.

The message and recommendation for Portugal is clear yet radical. Crises such as these will be followed by ever more crises. Within the EU, a club of bankers, Portugal will be for ever a vassal state. The solution is to leave the EU and join the revitalised Commonwealth we propose. Also reconnecting with Luso-tropical Africa in order that they too together come into the fold of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth given a real economic dimension, not for the furtherance of neo-con "free trade", but as a zone for a trans-continental managed trade and exchange, guided by an indicative economic plan formed by us all.

Camelots Du Roi

http://camelotsduroi.canalblog.com/archives/p1-1.html Archive of photos/stories/documents from the Camelots Du Roi - Action Francaise. French monarchist integralists.

Association of British Muslims

Brief History of the ABM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Daoud Rosser-Owen In 1889, the Shaykhu-l Islam of the British Isles, HE Shaykh Abdullah Quilliam Bey (born William Henry Quilliam in 1857 of Manx parents), a Liverpool solicitor (who famously, as borough solicitor for Bradford, inaugurated the new Town Hall at its Grand Opening with a recitation of the first surah of the Quran "Al Fatihah"), founded the English Islamic Association. He published a newspaper and a magazine, and wrote a number of illuminating articles and pamphlets on Islam - attracting some opprobrium from Stanley Lane Poole in the Letters column of The Times. He also translated some parts of the Quran into Manx Gaelic (Gaelg). After Quilliam and his community were forced to migrate to the Ottoman Empire in 1908, the Association fell into abeyance. Just before the outbreak of World War I, Quilliam (disguised as "Professor Henri Marcel Leon", sometimes "Haroun Mustapha Leon" under which name he is buried at Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking) returned to England. He revived his organisation on 20 December 1914 as the British Muslim Society, basing it at the Shah Jehan Mosque in Woking, with Lord Headley as President and Khalid Sheldrake as Secretary. The organisation was revived again in 1924 as the Western Islamic Association. By 1927, it was located in London's Notting Hill and the Amir was HE Khalid Sheldrake (né Bertram William Sheldrake, known as "the Pickle King"). In 1930 he had established a branch of it in South Shields. He was for a while in 1934 the Emir of Islamistan (Kashghar in East Turkestan) on the invitation of the Emirs of Khotan. It was located at 111 Campden Hill Road where there was a library, lectures were held, and the Friday Prayers led by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, the famous polymathic translator of the Quran. It absorbed the activities of the Muslim Literary Society (founded 1916 and headed by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, himself a famous translator of the Quran, classical scholar, and sometime Collector in the ICS) that had become effectively defunct after 1917. Since its gradual decline and virtual demise in the late 1940s with the death of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, there have been several attempts to revive it. In 1969, Daoud Rosser-Owen, Abdur Rashid Craig, Abdul Rashid Ansari, Dr Ya'qub Zaki, and Kamaruddin Peckham held meetings but received extreme opposition from nationality organised immigrant Muslim organisations that were accusing them of racialism. In 1975, no longer willing to accept further marginalisation of the converts, Rashid Craig, Daud Relf, Daoud Rosser-Owen and others went ahead and re-established it as the Association of British Muslims, with Shaykh Daoud Rosser-Owen as Amir, and the endorsement and authority of Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani. In 1978, on advice from Kamaruddin Peckham, Yusuf Islam and others, it was renamed the Association For British Muslims with Hajji Abdur Rasjid Skinner as Amir and Abdullah Ibrahim, rahmatu-Llahi 'alayh, as Secretary although it has continued all along using both names. This was the most recent revival of Quilliam's organisation. It has struggled to survive, and still functions with Shaykh Daoud as caretaker Amir. Conscious of the earlier accusations, but aware that activity by functional groupings was most effective and conscious of the Shari"i requirement for Muslims to engage with communities through their own people, the ABM affiliated to the "Union of Muslim Organisations in the UK and the Republic of Ireland" as an appropriate umbrella body soon after that organisation was founded.