Musical of The Third Man planned

27 June 2013 Last updated at 19:22 GMT By Bethany Bell BBC News, Vienna The racketeer Harry Lime loomed large in The Third Man The classic Oscar-winning film The Third Man is to be made into a musical in Vienna.

A major Austrian production company, Vereinigte Buehnen Wien (VBW), says it has secured the rights to make the first musical version of the cult film, set in Vienna just after World War II.

The novelist Graham Greene wrote the screenplay for the 1949 film, which features haunting zither music.

American movie star Orson Welles played the sinister racketeer Harry Lime.

The German-language musical is expected to be premiered in 2016.

The black-and-white film, directed by Carol Reed, shows a stark post-war Vienna, bomb-damaged and occupied by Allied forces.

Harry Lime meets his end in a Vienna sewer after scenes filled with suspense and intrigue.

The musical will be developed, produced and premiered in Vienna.

VBW's spokesperson, Katja Goebel, says there was huge competition to secure the rights, which are owned by Studio Canal and the Graham Greene Estate.

She says the creative team has not yet been decided, but adapting the piece will be a challenge.

"We don't have to make a copy of the film - we have to make a great work for a new audience," she says.

"For sure, there will be many fans of The Third Man who will come, but we will have to bring a new audience to the stage. That will be the great excitement, to make The Third Man live further, in another way."

Unlike the musical The Sound of Music, which has only recently started to become popular in Austria, The Third Man is better known here and is shown every week at one of Vienna's central cinemas.

The plans have been welcomed by Vienna's City Councillor for Culture, Andreas Mailath-Pokorny. "Vienna has history and there are countless stories about it worth telling," he says. "One of them is certainly The Third Man."

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Anglo bank tapes 'contemptible'

28 June 2013 Last updated at 08:15 GMT The Anglo Irish tapes sought a government bailout in 2008 The leaked Anglo Irish Bank telephone conversations are damaging democracy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said.

Bank executives are heard on the tapes mocking Germans and making jokes about the financial crisis in Ireland.

Angela Merkel told journalists on Thursday that she regarded the contents with contempt.

On one tape, an Anglo executive is heard singing Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.

The taped calls, dating from September 2008 when Anglo Irish was on the verge of collapse, were leaked by the Irish Independent newspaper.

'Huge challenge'

Speaking in Brussels following an EU leaders summit, Chancellor Merkel said the recordings were "damaging democracy, the social market and everything we strive for".

"I have nothing but contempt for this. The tone seems to be similar across all the banks," she said.

"It is for us a huge challenge to convince people who get up every day and every day do their work and always pay their taxes, do everything, even show solidarity with other people who are weaker.

"All of this is destroyed by that and so I have nothing but contempt for that."

The two bankers whose call was recorded by Anglo's phone and security system, have issued statements denying they were part of a strategy to mislead the Central Bank saying they knew of no such effort.

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EU 'first step' for jobless youths

28 June 2013 Last updated at 15:10 GMT The BBC's Gavin Hewitt says the money will be used to help people in the first four months of unemployment

EU leaders have ended their summit in Brussels by agreeing to put 6bn euros (£5bn; $8bn) into youth training schemes amid record unemployment.

They also agreed to promote lending to credit-starved small businesses, using an extra 10bn euros in funding.

Nearly a quarter of jobseekers aged 18 to 25 in the EU have no work.

Critics say the schemes will have little impact until countries return to growth but Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said they were a "first step".

In another development, outlined in the official summit conclusions, EU leaders confirmed they wanted agreement by the end of the year on a way to wind up failed banks at European rather than at national level.

They also approved accession talks for Serbia by January at the latest, as well as formalising Croatia's entry into the EU on Monday.

'Frankly appalling'

As of April, some 5.6 million young people eligible for work in the EU were unemployed, Eurostat figures show.

Greece had the highest proportion, at 62.5%, while Spain had 56.4%. This contrasted with just 7.5% in Germany.

Continue reading the main story Greece - 62.5%Spain - 56.4%Portugal - 42.5%Italy - 40.5%Cyprus - 32.7%Rep of Ireland - 26.6%France - 26.5%UK - 20.2%Germany - 7.5%EU average - 23.5%

source: Eurostat, April 2013 (Figures for Greece & UK are for February 2013, for Cyprus - March); numbers represent jobseekers under the age of 25

The UK's Prime Minister, David Cameron, said the number of young people out of work in Europe was "frankly appalling" and a huge block on the EU's ability to compete in the global race.

There was, he said, also a need to move faster and further in cutting excessive regulation and red tape. He said a new business task force would be established in the UK to take a fresh look at the impact of EU regulations on British business.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the key was improving competitiveness and not creating new pots of money.

The speaker of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, tweeted that the 6bn euros were a "start", albeit a "drop in the ocean".

"What we, the current generation of politicians, owe these young people are good ideas, courage and prompt action - in order to generate growth at long last," he said in a speech.

"After all, the most effective means of creating jobs - and thus of combating youth unemployment - is economic growth."

Budget deal

The plan to trigger much-needed bank lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involves using an extra 10bn euros in funding for the European Investment Bank.

The idea is to encourage private banks to lend by giving them EIB guarantees.

French President Francois Hollande predicted the EU would have a single banking supervisor, and a mechanism for closing failed banks, in place by the middle of next year.

There was relief on Thursday when, after months of wrangling, a deal was clinched on the EU's long-term budget.

The 27 leaders backed the deal reached with the European Parliament - a 960bn-euro budget for 2014-2020, which cuts real spending for the first time.

There was a last-minute delay, with Mr Cameron seeking reassurances that new arrangements on rural development funds would not lead to £300m being deducted from the British rebate - which some French officials had been suggesting. He was told the rebate would remain unchanged, the BBC's Europe editor Gavin Hewitt reports.

Under the new budget deal, unspent money will be transferred from one year to the next, rather than returning to national budgets as at present.

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EU set for Serbia membership talks

28 June 2013 Last updated at 17:24 GMT Serbia wants to put the violence of the 1990s behind it and join the EU EU leaders have agreed to open accession talks with Serbia, whose EU bid was long delayed by a dispute over its breakaway region of Kosovo.

EU-Serbia negotiations would begin in January 2014 at the latest, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said at a Brussels EU summit.

Talks on an EU association agreement with Kosovo will also get under way.

Tensions between Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority and remaining ethnic Serbs resurfaced this week.

Stabilisation and association agreements with the EU cover trade, economic and political relations. They are seen as important landmarks for applicant countries seeking EU membership.

The summit conclusions say that before January "the negotiating framework will be... confirmed by the European Council" - a sign of the EU leaders' commitment to membership talks with Serbia.

'This is historic'

The European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, called the Serbia decision "indeed historic".

"We very often use the word 'historic' in an abusive manner, but this is historic. Let's not forget what happened not so long ago in that part of Europe, with one of the most violent wars we saw - and now we will start negotiations with Serbia," he told a news conference after the summit.

The EU leaders also welcomed the entry of Croatia into the 27-nation bloc, which will happen on Monday. A big celebration is to take place in the Croatian capital Zagreb on Sunday night.

Croatia fought a bitter war against Serb forces during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It will become the EU's 28th member, and the second from former Yugoslavia, after Slovenia.

Mr Van Rompuy said EU officials would visit both Serbia and Kosovo on Monday, in a sign of the EU's commitment to their integration with the bloc.

Many countries recognise Kosovo as independent, but Serbia is among those, including Russia and China, that do not.

Five of the 27 EU countries do not recognise Kosovo: Spain, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Cyprus.

Clashes Protesters spattered police with paint in Pristina on Thursday

Under the April deal the ethnic Albanian government in Kosovo accepted a high degree of autonomy for Serb-majority areas in the territory's north. Belgrade insisted that the deal did not mean Serbian recognition of Kosovo's independence.

In the capital Pristina, ethnic Albanian nationalists clashed with police outside parliament on Thursday as MPs ratified the deal with Serbia, brokered by the EU in April.

Hundreds of protesters carried banners that read "The deal will not pass" and "A state cannot be built with thieves".

According to Serbian media, Serbs who gathered to commemorate a historic battle outside the city on Friday were attacked with stones after they left the site by bus, and several people injured.

They had been marking the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, when Serbian forces were defeated by an invading army of Ottoman Turks.

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Nazi Eichmann files to stay secret

28 June 2013 Last updated at 11:36 GMT Eichmann went on trial in a blaze of publicity after a dramatic kidnap A German court has rejected a journalist's request to see all German secret service files on a top Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.

The foreign intelligence agency (BND) had given the Bild newspaper journalist documents on Eichmann with some passages blacked out.

Eichmann organised deportations of Jews to Nazi death camps in World War II.

He fled to Argentina after the war, but was kidnapped by Israeli agents and hanged after a trial in Israel in 1962.

Germany's Federal Administrative Court ruled that the BND had the right to keep parts of its Eichmann records secret.

Bild has been trying to establish how much the BND may have known about Eichmann's hiding place after the war.

Agents from the Israeli spy agency Mossad tracked him down in Buenos Aires in 1960.

A senior SS officer, Eichmann had been in charge of managing the logistics of the Holocaust.

He personally directed the plunder, ghettoisation and deportation of more than 437,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1944.

Most of those deported were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland.

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