Welcome to the final set of news articles for the academic year 2005/6. I'm now taking a break for the summer from this monthly trawl through the papers. The next set of articles will be in September and monthly thereafter. In the meantime, if you're searching for news, there is a wide range of sites out there. Google news remains one of the best sites as it 'aggregates' news from a wide range of sources. However, if you want a slightly different view of the aggregated Google news, why not have a look at Newsmap? Don't forget also the The Guardian World News Guide (this gives you easy access to newspapers from around the world and gives a brief description of each one) and the main Guardian news archive. The economy section of the BBC news site also makes an excellent reference source to keep up to date and if you want constant access to the news from your PC, you could always download the BBC News ticker. If you have a web site of your own, you can even get an RSS feed from the BBC site or from Biz/ed. Biz/ed also has podcasts of news stories for you to download.

The news this month has been dominated by turbulence in markets. Commodity markets have risen high and many of the poorer nations have benefited but in News Item 15 we look at whether this situation can last. High commodity prices have also lead to the odd situation of 2p actually being worth 3p (see News Item 3). However, the Royal Mint does recommend you don't go melting all your coins down as that is actually illegal! Financial markets have also had a turbulent month and with inflation rising, we have also learnt of a split in the MPC over inflation policy (see News Item 12). At least our inflation isn't as bad as that in Zimbabwe where the publication of the figures has been delayed, but inflation is thought to be touching 1000% (see News Item 11).

As always, I hope that you find the articles useful for your studies. If your academic year is coming to an end, good luck with any exams and have a good break.

Recent months have seen a lot of attention paid to the term energy security. With North Sea gas running out and our dependence on gas for electricity generation rising all the time, commentators have expressed concerns that we will become dependent on other countries for our gas supplies. One of those countries is Russia which has around 16% of the world's gas reserves. But should we be afraid of the Russian bear or do they have more to fear from us? The article below from The Economist looks in more detail at the relationship between Europe and the Russian gas giant Gazprom.

The article linked to below is a commentary from the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland looking at how public goods should be delivered. Should the mechanism be through the public sector or can the private sector deliver public benefits? Current philosophy is to have essentially market-based solutions to public problems. As Jonathan Freedland puts it:

"The pre-1979 consensus was broken by Margaret Thatcher's determination to reshape Britain in the image of the market, a neoliberal philosophy that formed a new consensus of its own. That belief in markets remains entrenched, accepted more or less by all the main parties. The New Labour government of 1997 accepted it wholeheartedly."