NEED TO KNOW

To catch a spy. Step one: tackle him. Next, show off his “spy kit” of wigs and sunglasses. Release some embarrassing photos of the spy looking unhappy. And then kick him out of the country.

This has been the rough course of events since Russia announced it had caught an alleged CIA spy following a sting operation. It all seems torn from the Cold War era, with Russian state television broadcasting the moment Ryan Christopher Fogle, officially an American diplomat, was jumped by agents.

Russia has accused Fogle of trying to recruit an officer of the Russian secret service, while one report says the suspected agent was likely seeking information about the Boston bombing suspects.

The spy scandal comes as relations between Moscow and Washington appear to be warming, with plans to step up security cooperation. Maybe not any more — the US Ambassador to Russia has been summoned.

Elsewhere in the diplomatic world, Taiwan is recalling its envoy to the Philippines amid a row over the killing of a fisherman — and a lame apology.

The fisherman, Hung Shih-cheng, was shot by the Philippine coast guard last week in the disputed Bashi Strait. Taiwan slammed an apology from the Philippines as insincere and too informal. Say it like you mean it, Manila!

WANT TO KNOW

Cyclone Mahasen is coming. Bangladesh has ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from low-lying areas, while neighboring Myanmar says it will moveroughly 166,000 people before the cyclonic storm hits early Thursday.

So far, Mahasen is classified as the lowest-level category one on a one-to-five scale, with winds up to 55 miles per hour. But even as a category one storm it could unleash a storm surge of up to seven feet high, and affect millions of people living in low-lying coastal and river areas.

France slips into recession. Hit by sluggish growth, record unemployment and low consumer confidence, France has returned to recession. The country’s gross domestic product contracted 0.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, official figures show. 

This is France’s second recession in four years, with a recession defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Times are tough across the eurozone, with nine EU members now in recession, according to separate figures. Germany’s economy grew by just 0.1 percent in the quarter.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Death and taxes. As the saying goes, these are the only two certainties in life. We at GlobalPost live by a third certainty: The world is a weird and wondrous place.

But who says taxes and weirdness can’t overlap? From extra charges on flavored vodka in the US to beards in Russia, check out the top six wackiest taxes we’ve found around the world.

LONDON — Tougher curbs on immigration, boosts to the private sector and further reforms to public benefits are all part of the legislative year ahead, Queen Elizabeth II announced at the official opening of Parliament today.

Of the many legislative bullet points laid out in the queen’s speech – an annual preview of the legislative agenda written by the government and read aloud by the monarch – the promised restrictions on migrants drew the most attention.

Following the elective success of the anti-immigration UK Independence Party in local polls last week, the speech was expected to allude to a forthcoming bill that “will ensure that this country attracts people who will contribute and deters those who will not.”

Queen tackles immigration in annual speech

csmonitor:

The eurozone crisis explained in 5 simple graphs

Governments have collapsed and bailouts have run into the hundreds of billions of euros, and still the eurozone crisis lingers. How did we get here?

Graphics by CS Monitor staff

Conversely: Austerity with a human face?

BRUSSELS, Belgium — Ever since they broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991, Slovenes have liked to present their country as a sober, Swiss-like Alpine land, nothing like their hot-tempered Balkan and Mediterranean neighbors.

So the wave of speculation that Slovenia is poised to follow Cyprus as the next victim of the euro zone crisis sweeping southern Europe has left them mortified.

“People here are very worried,” says Tanja Fajon, a Slovene member of the European Parliament. “If I look back over the 20 years since independence, the negative atmosphere has never been so bad.”

Who will be the next Cyprus?

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

NEED TO KNOW

Ready, set, withdraw. Banks reopened in Cyprus today for the first time since the government agreed to a punishing EU bailout. Armed guards manned the doors as account holders were allowed into their banks for the first time in 12 days. They’re forbidden to withdraw more than 300 euros per day, to prevent money flooding out of the island’s tottering banking system.

You’d be forgiven for asking whether Cyprus’ rescue looks very much different from the “unruly bankruptcy” that the EU insisted its terms would avoid. As the Cypriot economy faces up to a 20-percent contraction, GlobalPost asks whether the EU’s botched bailout has left another fine mess.

WANT TO KNOW

Get well soon, Nelson Mandela. South Africa’s 94-year-old national hero was readmitted to hospital last night with a recurrence of the lung infection that kept him there for 18 days last December.

President Jacob Zuma asked “the people of South Africa and the world to pray for our beloved Madiba and his family and to keep them in their thoughts.” You’ve got it.

Biggest cyber attack ever? Net watchers say that the internet has been under unprecedented virtual fire for more than a week. The apparent target is spam blocker Spamhaus, which has made some powerful enemies by blacklisting suspected spammers. Those enemies have mounted a furious distributed-denial-of-service attack bigger than ever any seen before – and millions of ordinary netizens have been caught in the crossfire.

Thankfully that crossfire has so far been limited to making the internet “a bit more sluggish.” Experts warn, however, that an attack of this scale could set a dangerous precedent.

Malala’s story. The 15-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by the Taliban for daring to say girls should go to school, Malala Yousafzai, has signed a book deal for a rumored $3 million. Her autobiography will be published next year under the title ‘I Am Malala.’

Now attending school in the UK, she says she wants to tell not just her own story, but also “the story of 61 million children who can’t get education.”

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Here’s something that will put you off your breakfast burger. Tests on processed meat in South Africa revealed a queasy-making quantity of unwelcome species’ DNA, including donkey, water buffalo and even – shudder – human. (Though it behooves us to stress there’s no suggestion that people are being ground up to make sausages.)

On the upside, however, testers said they found not a trace of horse. Buffalo bobotie all round!

NEED TO KNOW

Cyprus is bailed out. Hours before the European Central Bank was due to cut off its lifeline to struggling Cypriot lenders, the country’s leaders reached a deal with the EU to bail out their banking system and keep Cyprus in the euro zone.

The agreement means Cyprus can access loans of up to €10 billion from the EU, ECB and IMF. For that, it will break up its second-biggest bank and drastically restructure its biggest – and anyone with more than €100,000 in their account will have to swallow the losses. It’s no secret that many businesses will suffer. Cyprus may be in the euro zone, but it’ll also be in recession.

WANT TO KNOW

Bye bye, Bagram. The US has formally handed over its infamous prison in northern Afghanistan to the Afghan authorities. The transfer, which began several months ago, was finally completed today, reportedly after Washington received Kabul’s assurances that suspected extremists would not be allowed to go free.

Afghanistan’s Guantanamo, as Bagram was not-so-affectionately known, has now become the Afghan National Detention Facility. It’s a symbolic step in the transfer of security from American to Afghan forces – an ongoing and often thorny process which US Secretary of State John Kerry is in Kabul, on an unannounced visit, to discuss with President Hamid Karzai.

The right to work, but not to live. The highest court in Hong Kong has ruled that foreign domestic workers cannot apply for permanent residency despite long years of service there.

The decision ends a two-year legal battle fought by two Filipino workers who, between them, have lived in Hong Kong for more than 45 years. Now, if they or any other of he territory’s 300,000 foreign domestics leave their employer, they have two weeks to find another job, or get out.

Bail for Beatrice. Zimbabwean human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa, detained for more than a week, has been granted bail.

Mtetwa faces charges of obstructing justice during a police raid on the office of four of her clients who work for Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. Her lawyer calls her arrest “not just an attack on her profession but on the people of Zimbabwe.”

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Could this be the worst ad ever? Ford has issued an apology after running a print campaign in India that featured three women bound and gagged in the back of one of its Figo cars, driven by a smirking Silvio Berlusconi. (It’s something to do with having extra trunk space, apparently.)

Ford has since pulled the ad, which it said was “contrary to its standards of professionalism and decency.” You think?

NEED TO KNOW

Go West Bank, young man. President Barack Obama is in Ramallah today for talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, 24 hours after getting up close and allied with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.

His welcome in the West Bank wasn’t quite as warm: police had to clear protesters from the presidential compound, where Palestinians accused him of failing to keep early promises to promote a two-state solution. Obama will spend just a few hours in the West Bank before returning to Israel without, it seems fair to predict, having done much more.

D-Day for Cyprus. Or should that be B-Day? For Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades is due to present a plan B for funding the island’s bailout, after parliament resoundingly rejected the terms of the EU’s offer.

The president’s alternative is thought to propose nationalizing pension funds, securing some unspecified help from Russia, and taxing bank deposits – though only ones of €100,000 or more. Lawmakers are expected to vote on the plan this afternoon. They’d better: the European Central Bank says it will cut off emergency funding to floundering Cypriot banks unless a deal is in place by Monday.

WANT TO KNOW

It came from China. Investigators in South Korea have traced yesterday’s cyber attack to a Chinese IP address, a detail which Beijing says means nothing and which the more skeptical say strengthens their suspicions that North Korea was involved.

South Korea stresses it’s still investigating, and meantime will keep “all kinds of possibilities open.” Proving anything for sure is expected to take weeks or even months – and with tensions as they are, a lot else could happen before then.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word, for world leaders especially. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard nonetheless managed to get it out, issuing Australia’s first formal apology for the thousands of forced adoptions it mandated between the 1950s and 1970s.

The government policy saw as many as 250,000 babies taken from their unwilling, unmarried, mostly teenage mothers and given to childless married couples. Gillard called the practice “shameful” and said it had created “a lifelong legacy of pain and suffering.” And since actions speak louder than words, she pledged A$5 million to help support those affected – some of which will go toward helping biological families reunite.

So you think you’ve got a tough job? If you work in the US, you can at least be fairly certain that the walls won’t cave in; that the air your breathing won’t cause your lungs to seize up; that your clients won’t open fire to pilfer the contents of your wallet. But those are comforts that many of the world’s 3 billion workers lack.

From cleaning up Fukushima to mining a man-eating mountain, from hazardous scrap ships in Pakistan to jewelry literally to die for in India, GlobalPost explores the world’s most dangerous jobs.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Cheat me once… cheat me a thousand times. In the northern Indian state of Bihar, some 1,600 students were disqualified from their national school exams for using “unfair means.” What’s worse, 100 of their parents were also reprimanded for helping them to cheat.

One shameless dad described sending a younger sibling to pass a textbook to his son through a classroom window. Is it still cheating if everyone and their brother’s doing it? Er, yes.

The Cypriot Parliament sent European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund officials back to the drawing board on Tuesday by rejecting their controversial bailout package.

Why were the terms of the bailout controversial? What does it mean for the rest of the eurozone?

What’s the big deal about Cyprus? Q & A

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

Tens of thousands of horses were killed in 2012, as the economic crisis had owners abandoning the once prized status symbols.

The Spanish government said nearly 60,000 were slaughtered in abattoirs in 2012, a number twice those killed in 2008.

Horses abandoned in Spain due to economic crisis

Photos by AFP/Getty Images

How to cook your horse

Equine recipes from around Europe.

Photo by Kyle Kim/Flickr Commons/GlobalPost