France's Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has declared his intention to run for the presidency next year.

The announcement has been widely expected, and Mr Sarkozy is the favourite to win the election, according to recent opinion polls.

Seattle PI:  New library a haven for the homeless

As the sky darkened and the rain blew sideways, Tiberious Shapiro tucked into the Central Library, his favorite place to pass the hours before the homeless shelters opened. He picked up a paperback and escaped into a Harlequin romance.

Around him were dozens of hard-edged, solitary men. There was bushy-bearded Kevin, who slept in a park; the mohawked regular who panhandled for beer money; a young man who slapped his head with a magazine; an old man who strode in with a garbage bag rustling around his shirt.

For them, Seattle's renowned downtown library is more than architectural dazzle and literary splendor. It is a harbor from autumn and winter and an oasis from an increasingly wealthy and unwelcoming downtown.

"I'll sit here and let the day's stress come down," said Shapiro, who is 38, thin, toothless and scraped up.

Every year, as the weather turns nastier, more people seek refuge inside the celebrated, $165 million, glass-and-metal tourist attraction.

radiation contamination found on 2 Boeing 767's reported on ITV news, nothing on the web as yet.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

I genuinely don't understand the concept of buying everybody else cakes etc on your own birthday.  It is just British or does it happen elsewhere?

Ad astra per aspera

Here's a story that does an excellent job of summing up.

http://www.forbes.com/business/manufacturing/feeds/ap/2006/11/29/ap3212484.html

"Such a decision is unacceptable," private NTV television quoted Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying during a NATO summit in Latvia.

"We will not allow anyone to trample on our rights," Egemen Bagis, an aide to Erdogan, told NTV. He said Turkish leaders would still try to avert a partial suspension.

The European Commission's recommendation, drafted by Rehn, called on EU governments not to open negotiations on issues that touch upon Turkey's relations with Cyprus. These include such issues as the free movement of goods, financial services, agriculture, fisheries, transport policy, customs union policy and external relations issues.

Rehn also recommended that no chapter of the package could be finalized until Turkey moves to open its ports to Cyprus.

The important facts: Ollie Rehn has recommended that eight very significant chapters of the 34 under discussion be frozen. Previously, it was thought the EU would only freeze three tops. This means that key chapters will not be discussed. One year in, there is a major standstill in negotiations since these chapters cannot be reopened unless there's a breakthrough on the rather minor and irrelevant issues the Finnish Plan touched upon.

They were: 1. Opening up an EU port in the north for direct trade between N. Cyprus and the EU. 2. Handing over the town of abandoned ghost town of Varosha to the UN with a timetable (of between 3 and 6 years) for the return of its former inhabitants.

Until this happens, those chapters will not open, and mind you, now that the EU has made its position known in no uncertain terms, the only thing that will allow negotiations to recommence are either a Turkish backdown on the terms of the Finnish proposal or else the solution to the entire Cyprus problem.

Frankly, I'm astounded that diplomats allow themselves to ever get into such wrangles, because the Finnish Plan is so inncocuous as to be politically palatable for both sides. Literally nothing would change. The North already trades with the EU through Turkish ports, and also the British bases (as a report laid out this morning). Furthermore, the town of Varosha is already abandoned and unoccupied, and under the Finnish terms no one would return there for a half decade or more.

As someone who sympathizes with the Greek Cypriot position, I'm now very concerned that what I see as the only terms for a real resolution of the entire problem--namely Annan Plan 3--has been further undercut by yet another diplomatic debacle. The Turks did not go for this Finnish Plan precisely because the same thing was broached to them a year ago. They walked away from the negotiating table entirely BEFORE Turkey's application was accepted. Tony Blair himself brought them back. What were Blair's terms? What were Blair's promises? How did he get Turkey to sign the Customs Protocol last December when the terms of the protocol were obvious to all? Maybe Blair had a lot of backing from other members when Turkey signed the protocol, and in the next breath they disavowed it?

I'm of the opinion that Turkey was somehow inveigled in the signing, but that's immaterial now. Perhaps no one expected political opinions to change in the ensuing year, and perhaps many fell away from the UK's position.

The reason that these debacles keep happening is because the EU does not have a singular foreign policy voice. Everyone is trying to game the negotiations. So the UK, Italy and Spain put their weight on one side, France, the Netherlands and Denmark put their weight on the other, and Germany is left to tip the balance. In this case, Germany has apparently tipped toward the French side.

Leftist lawmakers who brawled with rivals in Mexico's Congress vowed on Wednesday to camp out there and wreck conservative President-elect Felipe Calderon's inauguration later this week.

The leftists say Calderon stole July's presidential election with fraud and say they will not let him swear in on Friday at a ceremony in Congress to be attended by some Latin American leaders and former U.S. President George Bush.

Chaotic scenes of dozens of rival lawmakers punching and kicking each other on the floor of the lower house on Tuesday were a new blow for Mexico, already reeling from leftist street protests over Calderon's election, violence in the popular tourist city of Oaxaca and a spate of bombings in the capital.

I give 2 to 1..

According to the guardian:

The broadly weak dollar touched new lows this afternoon amid another day's frantic trading and conflicting data from the US.

Fears of a slowing US economy and speculation that central banks across the world may be moving their reserves away from the dollar have already contributed to a steady decline of the currency.

This continued as figures on new home sales showed a drop of 3.2% in October, ticking the dollar down to a fresh record against the pound of $1.9545.

The dollar pushed past the two-year low set yesterday and placed the pound within even closer reach of the $2 level, a high not reached for 14-years during the Sterling Crisis when Britain had to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the pound collapsed.

Que fuerte que fuerte que fuerte...

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6191462.stm

You can't be me, I'm taken

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article2023861.ece

There is a standing joke about the Indian development story which goes something like this: What's changed about India? Answer: the telephone system is much better, the traffic congestion is much worse, but otherwise, nothing very much.

It is almost exactly 20 years since I was last in India and I can confirm the first two observations to be absolutely correct.

Yet alongside this old India, becalmed in a bygone age, there is a new one. This is the India of booming IT services, outsourcing, Bollywood, state-of-the-art communications, and the legion of service industries that support these fast-growing areas of income generation.

With its huge, aspirational middle class - highly skilled, self-confident and determined to succeed - this is an India which seems to have more in common with the first world economies of America and Europe than its own subcontinent.

In many industries, from modern retailing and logistics to utilities and automobiles and even agriculture, India is thought virgin territory there for the taking. There are also powerful lessons Western companies hope to draw from the low cost and highly inventive business models being developed in India to meet the country's own particular challenges
It was a message repeated by Sonia Gandhi, chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance and still undisputed first lady of Indian politics. The country was moving ahead with economic growth, but formidable challenges remained. She identified education, health and nutrition as the primary tasks, as well as tackling the growing problems of HIV/Aids and terrorism. Yet her comments were perhaps more instructive for the challenges she missed out than the self-evident ones she alluded to.

Prime among these are still crippling levels of government bureaucracy, both at a federal and regional state level, intrusive regulation and hidden forms of patronage and taxation, for which read corruption. Despite the government's programme of reform and deregulation, these impediments to free trade in goods and services are still so overpowering that some Western business leaders with commercial interests here refer, only half in jest, to it being more difficult to do business in India than Iraq.

The news this week is that Wal-Mart has outmanoeuvred Tesco in the race to partner with Sunil Mittal, one of India's leading industrialists, in the race to establish a Western-style supermarkets chain in India.
On the fringes of the meeting, Mr Mittal told me that it was one of the toughest business choices he had ever had to make, but in the end, Wal-Mart was able to give the project a size, scale and speed which Tesco was unprepared to match.

Yet though India is plainly in a hurry, Tesco may have been right to show caution. Things change slowly and incrementally in India, not in great leaps and bounds, and to enter into a business partnership which you don't control and yet are expected to provide all the capital and expertise for, as Wal-Mart apparently has, may not be entirely wise.

Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, one of India's leading IT services companies and very much a part of the new India, perhaps put it best when he warned foreign investors not to get carried away by the apparent attractions of the Indian market. "Our American friends in particular," he said, "are either in honeymoon or divorce mode. There is nothing in between. There is a huge groundswell of interest in India, and rightly so, but please don't come here with unrealistic expectations". Quite so.

The awards exist to draw attention to and eliminate unnecessary and badly-written sex scenes in otherwise good books.

Other nominees included Will Self and Irvine Welsh, but the panel deemed them to be 'beyond help at this point.'