Detectives investigating the death of Alexander Litvinenko were last night examining the possibility that the former spy killed himself to discredit Vladimir Putin.

Increasing concerns over the reliability of the Russian dissident's death-bed testimony have prompted police to check every detail of Mr Litvinenko's version of events on 1 November, the day he said he was poisoned.

The Russian dissident's death on British soil has triggered an unprecedented investigation headed by Scotland Yard's anti-terror branch and involving forensic experts and nuclear scientists from the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. They are still trawling through hours of CCTV footage and conducting detailed searches of the places he visited on the day he fell ill.

Meanwhile, nuclear scientists are frantically trying to establish just how radioactive was the dose of polonium-210 that killed Mr Litvinenko. Traces of the material - powerful enough to trigger a nuclear warhead - were found on tables at the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly, a London hotel, and his home in Muswell Hill.

But yesterday the Metropolitan Police were still treating Mr Litvinenko's death as an "unexplained death", not as a murder inquiry. One source close to the investigation said: "He was a guy with a colourful past. It's not straightforward."

MADRID, Spain -- Leaders of Spain and Portugal agreed Saturday to give fresh impetus to the construction of bullet train rail links between the two countries and to improve cross-border cooperation with the creation of a joint research center.

Meeting at the end of a two-day summit focusing on issues including immigration, the European Union's stalled constitution and plans for an all-Iberian electricity grid, prime ministers Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain and Jose Socrates of Portugal signed the deal in Badajoz, a southwestern Spanish city on the border with Portugal. They were accompanied by 18 ministers from the two nations.

Zapatero highlighted the importance of bilateral agreements because trade between Spain and Portugal was around €2 billion (US$2.6 billion) a month.

Both governments agreed to pursue the creation of a three-hour, high-speed rail link between capital cities Madrid and Lisbon in the south, and a one-hour Vigo-Oporto link in the north. Finance for the completion of the railways would be applied for from EU community funds, the leaders said.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark: Denmark's defense minister criticized some NATO members, accusing them of shirking responsibility in Afghanistan, a newspaper reported Saturday.

Denmark has 290 soldiers serving in volatile southern Afghanistan and has pledged to increase the number. Previously, Britain, Canada and others who have troops fighting Taliban forces in the southern heartland have complained that Germany, Italy, Spain and France are keeping their soldiers in the more peaceful north and west.

"All countries should deliver," Defense Minister Soeren Gade was quoted as saying in the Politiken daily. "If we get hurt, are the others just going to stand there and watch?"

"This is, of course, unsatisfactory. It's also not a good signal to give the Afghan people, and it hurts NATO's credibility," he told Politiken.

A NATO summit next week in Latvia is expected to focus on the alliance's Afghan mission.

This is hard to believe. "Here comes the breakdown"

You can't be me, I'm taken

Washington - The US army will soon mark a milestone that the commander in chief, US President George W Bush, hardly anticipated.

On Sunday, the US will mark its 1,347th day in Iraq - the same amount of time the United States fought Germany and Japan in World War II.

With one of the worst 24-hour periods of carnage since the US-led invasion in 2003 - more than 170 people were killed from Thursday to Friday - Washington has no quick solution in mind.

To the contrary, US government officials and military leaders, including General John Abizaid, the top commander of US forces in the Middle East, warn of failure and civil war if the murdering militia and death squads are not quickly brought under control.

The Pentagon estimates there are at least 23 serious militia in Iraq. The biggest danger, US military experts say, is the Mahdi Army, the militia of the young Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

US commentators like the Washington Post`s Colbert King point out that Sistani and his followers owe a debt of gratitude to the US for freeing them from oppression under Saddam Hussein.

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - Lebanon's U.S.-backed government on Saturday approved the creation of an international tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, overriding objections by Hezbollah and the country's pro-Syrian president.

The approval, though widely expected, was bound to deepen the country's political crisis and spark mass street demonstrations threatened by Hezbollah and its allies to topple the government of Prime Minister Fuad Saniora.

Saniora insisted the decision was not ``a provocation'' against its opponents.

``On the contrary, it is aimed at protecting everybody,'' he said, according to a statement read by Information Minister Ghazi Aridi after the tribunal's approval.

An ongoing U.N. investigation into the February 2005 truck bombing that killed former Hariri and 22 others has said the killing's complexity suggests the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services played a role in the assassination. Damascus has denied any role in the killing.

Saniora, according to Aridi, stressed that the creation of the international tribunal would help in uncovering ``the truth'' in former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's assassination.

In his diary of a week which saw yet another assassination, our man in Beirut reflects that the present violence in Lebanon creates longings for a supposedly peaceful past

 Sunday 19 November

To Khiam, in the far south of Lebanon, to photograph Israeli bomb craters in which a British scientific team say they have found traces of enriched uranium. Spanish troops - along with Indian soldiers - now patrol this dangerous corner of Lebanon, and their UN vehicles hum past us as we drive under a white-bright winter sky.

All of this has a screen of irrelevance over it - journalists writing yesterday's story for tomorrow's paper - as the dangerous political war between supporters of the Lebanese government - Sunni Muslims and Christians - and the pro-Syrian forces opposed to it, especially the Shias, employ increasingly incendiary language. The Shia Hizbollah's leadership demand an end to the democratically-elected Fouad Siniora cabinet, set up after the murder of the ex-prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, last year. The Christians are calling Hizbollah fascists. Tomorrow the cabinet is supposed to sign up to the new UN tribunal to try suspects for Hariri's murder, even though all six Shia ministers (largely pro-Syrian, of course) have resigned.

Monday 20 November

Sure enough, Syria's faithful Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, claims the cabinet is constitutionally unable to approve the UN's tribunal, which just might point a finger at Emile Lahoud himself.

My driver, Abed, mourns for the French mandate of Lebanon under which he was born. The French, according to Abed, provided a respite between the brutality of the Ottoman Empire - Abed's father was taken from his young bride only days after his marriage to fight for the Turks against General Allenby in Palestine - and the corruption of post-independence Lebanon.

A ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants was agreed last night, with a pledge to end all rocket fire into Israel in return for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

In a surprise development, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, agreed in a telephone conversation to cease the bloodshed in a sign of increased co-operation between the two sides.

The deal is a sign that the log jam in the peace process has been broken, and there was hope last night that negotiations between the two sides could commence. Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas, said the militant group was willing to allow negotiations with Israel but warned of a fresh uprising if talks fail to reach a deal for a Palestinian state within six months.

The breakthrough came after the Palestinian leadership reached an agreement with resistance groups and factions to stop firing rockets into Israel. President Abbas told the Israeli premier of the development yesterday in a telephone call and Mr Olmert pledged to stop military operations in the Gaza strip.

How Windows XP Wasted $25 Billion of Energy

Microsoft has been touting Vista's new power saving features, saying that upgrading to Vista could easily save consumers and corporations $50 to $75 per computer per year in energy costs. The question, though, is what marvelous new code makes this miracle possible. The answer? They fixed three stupid mistakes that have cost the world billions of dollars and millions of tons of CO2 in the past five years.

Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the average number of employees filing whistle-blower disclosures with the government has risen 43%, from an average of 376 annually in the four years before the attacks to 537 annually after. The statistics are kept by the Office of the Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative agency that handles whistle-blower cases if employees prefer not to directly confront their bosses about suspicions of wrongdoing.

An increasing number of whistle-blowers allege that rather than being embraced, they're being retaliated against for coming forward.

In the four years before the terrorist attacks, whistle-blowers filed an average of 690 reprisal complaints with the OSC annually. Since the attacks, an average of 835 complaints have been filed each year, a 21% increase.

The number of whistle-blower reprisal complaints is higher than the number of whistle-blower disclosure complaints because employees can file reprisal complaints with the OSC even if they had not previously filed their disclosure with the OSC.

"The sad reality is that rather than learning lessons from 9/11, the government appears to have become more thin-skinned and sensitive," says Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit group that offers legal aid to whistle-blowers.

<...>

For those who are fired or have their security clearances revoked -- tantamount to firing in the intelligence agencies -- there is little recourse.

Most national security whistle-blowers are not protected from retaliation by law. That's because the intelligence-gathering agencies are exempted from the 1989 whistle-blower Protection Act, which guarantees investigations into disclosures made by federal employees and protects whistle-blowers from retaliation.

Whistle-blowers employed by these agencies must seek recourse within the same agency they are blowing the whistle on. And even if the investigators within their own agency confirm reprisal allegations, the investigators have no power to remedy the situation.

Devine says the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled against whistle-blowers in 125 of 127 of the reprisal cases seen by the court since 1994. "They've gutted the law," Devine says, "and it's degenerated into a rubber stamp for retaliation."

The labor ministry is taking a look at exempting white-collar workers who make 10 million yen [€66,000] or more a year from legal limitations on their work hours, sources familiar with the discussion said Saturday.

The ministry has been studying the feasibility of implementing a system in which employees would no longer be protected by the Labor Standard Law provision limiting regular hours to eight hours a day, 40 hours a week.

<...>

Workers who earned more than 10 million yen last year accounted for 4.8 percent of all employees in the private sector, according to the National Tax Agency.

<...>

The ministry developed a set of conditions for applying the system and recommended them Nov. 10 to an advisory panel subcommittee in charge of the issue, the sources said.

The conditions include those workers whose tasks cannot be appropriately assessed through the length of working hours, that the work implies significant power and responsibility and that the workers' annual income is considerably high.

Under the system, which has been modeled on one in the United States, overtime pay would not be paid to workers under certain conditions in terms of wages and the nature of the work.

Migeru?

Fifty-seven Bic Biros are sold every second (and then "borrowed" by passing colleagues) - not bad for a 60-year-old product. But did the pens really make that much of a difference?

It was a familiar frustration that led to the invention of the modern ball-point pen - leaky ink.

In 1938, Hungarian newspaper journalist Laszlo Biro noticed the ink used on the printing presses dried quickly and so tried using it in a fountain pen to avoid the problem of leaks, blots and smudges.

But the ink was too thick to flow into the nib. So Biro, with the help of his brother, a chemist, devised a pen tipped with a metal ball bearing that used capillary action to draw ink through the rotating ball.

They brought their invention with them when they fled to the West during a crackdown on Jews later that year. A British firm took over the patent to produce pens for the RAF, and the first Biros went on sale in the UK 60 years ago this week.

Barring tweaks and improvements, the pen is still recognisable as the ball-point Biro devised to make writing easier, and it regularly features in top 100 design lists, says Libby Sellers, the curator of the Design Museum.

NEW YORK: The mystery surrounding the Liao civilization known by the name given in Chinese sources to the dynasty that ruled its lands from A.D. 907 to 1125 may never be unraveled.

A major show on view at the Asia Society until Dec. 31 puts together the documented visual evidence that gives us reason for desperately wanting to find out more about the Khitan people who played the lead role in this multi- ethnic culture. It flourished on a territory covering Inner Mongolia in present-day China, independent Mongolia to the north, and parts of Manchuria.

The art can be seen to have absorbed influences coming from China and the Iranian world far away in the west. Yet, its originality never weakened. Its sculpture, its painting as we now know it from murals in burial chambers, its gold and silver vessels, its superb ceramics are highly distinctive - as distinctive, say, as the corresponding categories in the art of Korea.

The big difference is that, unlike the Koreans, the people of the Liao Empire took their secrets with them as their state succumbed under the blows of the Jurchen, another people of the steppe. Whoever the Khitan were, they vanished, diluted in a mass of Mongolic and Turkic speakers later absorbed into the Chinese empire.

The growth in the popularity of owning second homes has helped fuel a property boom in parts of Britain.

But the very things which can attract prospective second-home owners - the picturesque scenery and relative tranquillity - can also put pressure on the housing market, because development is restricted.

In Pembrokeshire, in south Wales, where 6% of all houses are second homes - rising to 50% in some coastal areas - average property prices are now close to seven times the average wage and many local people struggle to get onto the property ladder.

One idea being considered by planners involves relaxing restrictions on land which is currently protected from development, so sites can be used for affordable homes.

Communities 'eroded'

Former estate agent Matthew Owens has been appointed as the county's rural housing enabler. His job is to work with town and community councils to identify demand for affordable homes and find sites where they can be developed.

"It sounds a bit dramatic but we are slowly seeing the erosion of local communities in Pembrokeshire," he said.

Revealed: UK fur imports at record levels, 'IoS' investigation shows
Top designers and celebrities defy the anti-cruelty lobby

 Record numbers of Britons are buying real fur, overturning decades of campaigning by activists who say substitutes should be worn instead.

Sales of fur clothing have hit £500m for the first time, up 30 per cent on two years ago, with £40m of new fur products being imported every year.

To the fury of the anti-cruelty lobby, the championing of real fur by supermodels and top designers is sending sales soaring, with, say protesters, young animals being clubbed and shot by hunters as a result.

The fashion designer Stella McCartney last night told The Independent on Sunday: "The continuing use of fur is a real problem in the fashion industry, and there is an issue with people assuming that fur trim is fake when most of it is real."

More than a decade after top models posed in placards with "I'd rather go naked than wear fur", new figures show that sales of fur have risen by 30 per cent in the past two years.

In a perfect world, scientists share problems and work together on solutions for the good of society. In the real world, however, that's usually not the case. The main obstacles: competition for publication and intellectual property protection.

Is there a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving? Yes, and it comes from an unexpected and unrelated corner of the universe: open source software development.

That's the view of Karim R. Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School with an extensive research background in open source software communities and their innovation and product development strategies. His latest research analyzes how open source norms of transparency, permeable access, and collaboration might work with scientists.

What he and his coauthors discovered: "broadcasting" or introducing problems to outsiders yields effective solutions. Indeed, it was outsiders--those with expertise at the periphery of a problem's field--who were most likely to find answers and do so quickly.

<...>

[Karim R. Lakhani:] People often think about open source as a special case as if such openness can only happen in software, and this is an attempt to work on generalizing what we see.

<...>

[Karim R. Lakhani:] Recently, an internal science team at a U.S.-based major biotechnology firm was assigned to develop a method for rapid and simple detection of DNA sequences in unconventional field settings. Their mission was to produce a DNA sequencing test that was cost effective, robust, and operable in extreme field conditions. After several months of effort, the team in consultation with company experts concluded that no viable solution existed for their problem. Since solving the problem was of critical importance for the firm, management decided to break from convention and the disclose the specifics of the problem to a large group of unknown "outside" scientists requesting a solution in return for substantial prize money.

In a four-week period of time, over 574 scientists investigated the problem statement and forty-two of them submitted potential solutions for considerations. The winning solution was proposed by a scientist from Finland who did not work in this field. The solution involved the novel application of an existing methodology to the problem at hand. Besides solving the problem, the solution information opened up a new knowledge domain for future investigations and resulted in a valuable patent for the firm. This case example illustrates how the disclosure and wide dispersion of scientific problem information allows R&D organizations to access a broader range of scientific knowledge, and can help accelerate internal and proprietary research efforts.

Cherie Blair has launched an extraordinary attack on the media claiming there is "no professional morality in journalism".

The Prime Minister's wife took her revenge on a profession that has bedevilled her for years when invited to address students at Roehampton University on Wednesday.

She told a stunned audience that it was "not a noble calling" and journalists "have no ethics". Then, Mrs Blair - who was at the university in south-west London to open its Human Rights Centre - turned her attention to the Daily Mail and the Press Complaints Commission.

Since the latter has repeatedly failed to uphold the Blairs' complaints about the former, Mrs Blair's words - "the pathetic PCC dominated by the Daily Mail - are not, perhaps, surprising.

Her spokeswoman yesterday sought to play down the incident. "Mrs Blair was merely playing devil's advocate to stimulate discussion amongst the students."

Reuters via Yahoo!:  Fan's love turns house into "Christmas" present

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - When it comes to Americana, Cleveland has collected a number of calling cards. It is home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It is the birthplace of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. And it also is the setting for the 1983 holiday classic "A Christmas Story," directed by Bob Clark.

This weekend, Brian Jones, a fan of the movie, is making a daring bet that the main exterior location used in the movie can become a veritable Cleveland tourist attraction. Last year, he bought the Cleveland house used in the movie, which told the story of a boy named Ralphie and his quest to get a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. (The movie's interiors were shot mostly in Toronto.) On Saturday, Jones is opening the house to the public.

(...)Actors from the film will be among those in attendance at Saturday's grand opening. Ian Petrella, who played Ralphie's brother Randy, and Zack Ward, who played bully Farkus, are among those who are slated to attend. Across the street, Jones is opening a museum and gift shop. He expects 3,000-5,000 people on the first day.

"'Christmas Story' is like this generation's 'Miracle on 34th Street' or 'It's A Wonderful Life.' It's something important that needs to be preserved and saved," he says.

I love this movie, although it's tied for first with The Ref as my favorite Christmas movie.

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes

Singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright will re-create stage and screen legend Judy Garland's celebrated 1961 Carnegie Hall concert for London and Paris.

ollowing his successful June 2006 performances at the concert's original New York City venue, Wainwright - with the help of Sam Mendes and Stephen Oremus - will now bring the event to former Garland haunts: London's Palladium (Feb. 18 and 25, 2007) and Paris' L'Olympia (Feb. 20, 2007). A Los Angeles visit - aiming for the Hollywood Bowl - is reportedly in the works.

(...)Complete with a 40-piece orchestra, Wainwright re-creates the original April 23, 1961, concert Garland performed at the height of her late career. "The greatest single night in show business,' as it was called, featured the "Wizard of Oz" star singing 26 standards, show stoppers and songs from her films. Wainwright performs his own interpretations of the songs - not mimicking Garland - over the same orchestrations.

Among the songs featured in the evening are "When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)," "Almost Like Being In Love / This Can't Be Love (Medley)," "Do It Again," "You Go to My Head," "Alone Together," "Who Cares? (As Long as You Care for Me)," "Puttin' on the Ritz," "How Long Has This Been Going On," "Just You, Just Me," "The Man That Got Away," "San Francisco," "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "That's Entertainment," "Come Rain or Come Shine," "You're Nearer," "A Foggy Day," "If Love Were All," "Zing! Went The Strings of My Heart," "Stormy Weather," "You Made Me Love You / For Me And My Gal / The Trolley Song (Medley)," "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with A Dixie Melody," "Over The Rainbow," "Swanee," "After You've Gone" and "Chicago."