Erasmus Mundus Scholarships

The Erasmus Mundus scholarship programme, funded by the European Commission (EC), has awarded over 7000 scholarships for students and scholars from all over the world since 2004. Through this scholarship programme, 204 Indonesians have studied Masters Courses and 16 Indonesian Scholars carried out teaching and research in universities across the European Union (EU).
The scholarship for the Erasmus Mundus Master Course (EMMC) is now open for application for academic year 2010. The scholarships are offered to:

- Graduate students to undertake EMMC in at least two or more universities in two or more EU countries.
Scholars/ Academicians/ Researchers to conduct teaching and research periods of three months at two or more universities in two or more EU countries.

-The Erasmus Mundus scholarship is a full scholarship programme – covering tuition fees, living costs and return airfares.

Worker Woman Day

International Women's Day, March 8, was born in struggle. On that day in 1908 hundreds of working and poor women, mostly East European immigrants, surged out of needle-trade sweatshops and tenements on New York's Lower East Side and marched defiantly to Union Square, where they held a militant rally.
The women marched under the suffragist banner of "Votes for Women," but their demands for higher wages and better working conditions also struck a blow against capitalism.
Their speeches denouncing the bosses, the landlords, the bankers, and all who oppressed them showed extraordinary revolutionary working-class consciousness.
That hundreds of working women dared to voice demands for a better life for themselves and their families made headlines. When news of it was telegraphed to Europe, German socialist Clara Zetkin saw it as the sign of the working-class women's movement she had been waiting for since she first raised the demand for equal rights for women within the socialist movement in 1889.
Finally, in 1910, under Zetkin's leadership and with the support of Rosa Luxemburg and the Russians Alexandra Kollantai and V.I. Lenin, the Second International Conference of Socialists in Copenhagen declared March 8 to be International Women's Day.

5 Reasons For Spanish Economic Struggles

 Spain's financial crisis is a lot like peeling an onion: remove one troubled layer and you expose another.

Repeated efforts since 2009 by successive governments to fix the country's problems have managed to undermine confidence in the fourth-largest economy among the 17 nations that use the euro.

A recession is deepening in Spain and a growing number of its regional governments are seeking financial lifelines. These developments are adding to the problems of a government already struggling to prop up its shaky banking system.

Spain's main IBEX stock index has lost 3 percent over the last three days while the government's borrowing costs for its debt have soared to their highest levels since the country joined the euro in 1999.

Last Friday, Spain finally got approval from the other 16 members of the eurozone to access up to (EURO)100 billion ($121 billion) in loans to prop up its banks which are weighed by down by (EURO)180 billion in soured real estate investments.

Spanish officials had hoped a solution for the banks would ease some concerns about the state of the country's finances and prompt investors to stop demanding unmanageably high interest rates for government debt. Such high rates forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek full-blown public finance bailouts.

But instead of easing off, investors panicked again.

On Monday the country's central bank said that the economy shrank by 0.4 percent during the second quarter, compared with the previous three months. The government predicts the economy won't return to growth until 2014 as new austerity measures hurt consumers and businesses.

On top of that, Spain is facing new costs as a growing number of regional governments that function like U.S. states ask federal authorities for assistance.

By Tuesday, investors had sent benchmark borrowing rate for Spain's 10-year bonds to 7.53 percent, just the latest in a series of records. By contrast, Germany's is just 1.26 percent.

If Spain's borrowing rates continue to rise, the government may end up being locked out of international markets and be forced to seek a financial rescue that would push Europe's rescue funds to breaking point.