It is not (yet) formally off track in its joint European Union-International Monetary Fund adjustment programme, and there's no big "forcing" event coming up to concentrate their minds.

BBC: More market alarm bells on Portugal

On this plan, the EFSF could then be a proper European Monetary Fund, with one side managing adjustment programmes and (where necessary) orderly debt restructuring, and the other side using ECB liquidity to support confidence in solvent but troubled governments, by buying their bonds on the secondary market.

BBC: Central banks and the 'spirit of 2008'

The Mexican-American Legal Defence and Education Fund, alongside the Democrats but not the Republicans, has lobbied for having a statistically estimated adjustment in the census, to take account of the many poor, migrant, homeless and illegal people whom the census may miss.

ECONOMIST: Special-interest groups