A deadline for the EU to end restrictions on imports of genetically modified foods is due to expire.

In November 2007, the World Trade Organization (WTO) gave the EU an extra two months to comply with its ruling.

The United States, Argentina and Canada brought the case, arguing their farmers lost money because of GM bans, and may now call for WTO sanctions.

The EU has difficulty complying with the ruling, chiefly because of a ban on GM products by Austria.

The European Commission says it has imposed a regulatory framework but acknowledges there are problems enforcing it.

In Georgia, tens of thousands of opposition supporters have been voicing their anger over official confirmation that President Mikhail Saakashvili has been re-elected. The Central Election Commission put him on 53 and a half per cent of the vote, more than twice the share accorded to Levan Gachechiladze, the leading opposition candidate.

The opposition are adamant the vote was rigged. They are taking little notice of the EU's Javier Solana, who called the vote "truly competitive", or the election observers, who said the ballot was competitive and broadly fair.

Leading opponent Salome Zurabishvili said: "We are asking for what is due, which is the second round of these elections. We have counted, we have protested the frauds. We have to get a second round." Despite the strength of feeling which has been simmering since anti-Saakashvili demonstrations in November sparked the election, these protests were peaceful.

The German government and the Social Democratic party are conducting a "lethal" economic policy that could inflict substantial damage on the country, according to Wolfgang Clement, a former economics minister and SPD grandee. His party, junior partner in the ruling coalition, was "gambling away the dividends of past reforms", Mr Clement told the Financial Times.

The attack - by a one-time party vice-chairman and a close ally of Gerhard Schröder, former SPD chancellor - underlines the extent of the party's departure from Mr Schröder's unpopular reform legacy under Kurt Beck, its current chairman who has taken the party sharply to the left.

It also comes at a sensitive time as Mr Beck's strategy, including a campaign for a universal minimum wage, is being tested at three regional elections this month and next. With the grudging approval of Angela Merkel, chancellor, and her Christian Democratic Union, Mr Beck managed to have jobless benefits raised last year and a minimum wage imposed on the postal sector.

Mr Clement said: "I used to shut up but I am too alarmed now . . . Everywhere in Europe resistance [to change] is rising. But you cannot stop change. Our government is not rising to its responsibility." The postal minimum wage, Mr Clement said, had been "a huge mistake". The decision had benefited Deutsche Post, the former state monopoly, against private competitors.

PARIS - French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Saturday defended banning a strain of GM corn, as a high-profile activist ended a hunger strike in response and farmers complained politics had trumped science.

Sarkozy said the decision announced late Friday placed France `on the forefront of the environmental debate'.

`It does not mean that France does not participate in GMO research. It does not mean that there will not be GMOs in the future,' he said at a meeting of his Union for a Popular Movement party (UMP).

`It simply means that with the principle of precaution at stake, I am making a major political decision to carry our country to the forefront of the debate on the environment.'

Opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) -- a fiercely contested issue in Europe--welcomed the French government's decision to invoke a European Union procedure to bar the Monsanto 810 maize.

It is the only GM crop grown in France.

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is planning to meet German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy to discuss Ankara's bid to join the 27-strong bloc.

Mr Erdogan told reporters about the envisaged meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday (10 January), during his presentation of the Turkish government's plans for 2008.

"The meeting will be held in Germany and the three of us will discuss together the process ahead," Erdogan told a press conference without giving a specific date for the meeting, AFP has reported.

However, according to diplomats quoted by a number of publications, the talks are expected to take place in the first half of the year.

Campaigners who lost their relatives in the Beslan school siege are due to be put on trial in Russia on Monday after prosecutors charged them with extremism for blaming President Vladimir Putin's regime for the 2004 massacre.

The case, brought by prosecutors in the north Caucasus region of Ingushetia, was the latest example of Russian authorities trying to stamp out criticism with a recently toughened extremism law, observers said.

Ever since Mr Putin broadened the definition of extremist activity last year to include "slander of public officials" and "humiliating national pride", officials have used it to launch investigations into journalists, human rights activists and opposition leaders, including Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion.

"The authorities are doing all they can to close us down," said Ella Kesayeva, co-chairwoman of the Voice of Beslan movement, which last summer filed a case against Russia in the European Court of Human Rights for failing to investigate the massacre properly. The movement is trying to conduct its own investigation.

PARIS: The justice minister wants to be a mayor. So does the finance minister. And the culture minister. And the government spokesman.

The races for France's municipal elections in March have not even started, but nearly two-thirds of the 33 members of President Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet have already transformed themselves into part-time politicians, declaring that they deserve to be the next mayors and deputy mayors of France.

Some, like the education minister, already are mayors and are running for re-election. Others, like the budget minister, are former mayors who want their old jobs back.

"It's a way for a minister to stay in contact with the soil," said Xavier Bertrand, the labor minister, who wants to be deputy mayor of St.-Quentin, a town in northeast France. "It's much better than looking at polls."

The European Commission has shelved plans to change rules that would allow it to retaliate against countries when goods are sold at below the cost of production in a move that illustrates deep divisions in Europe over how to deal with China's booming exports.

Acknowledging that he has no chance of getting agreement from the 27 EU countries, the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, said that the proposals would now be delayed.

But the decision also underlined the differences in European capitals over how to deal with the surge of Chinese exports, and with the job losses caused by the outsourcing of production by European countries to Asia. The commission's retreat was seen as a victory for countries including France and Italy that have sought to give European industry greater protection against Chinese imports.

Poland finds itself between a rock and hard place in regards to the planned deployment of US missiles on its territory. As a result, the Poles want assurances that they will be protected, whatever their decision.

Poland cranked up the diplomatic heat on Washington Saturday when Defense Minister Bogdan Klich called for a special military treaty ahead of negotiations on a US missile shield in Europe.

Demanding the same agreements and protection afforded the likes of Italy and Turkey, Klich suggested that the United States owed Poland for the support and concessions it had made over the years.

"Special military agreements link the United States with certain allies like Italy or Turkey," Klich told with the Dziennik daily, in an interview ahead of talks in Washington Tuesday. "The signature of such an accord with Poland seems justified in our view given services rendered to the Americans over recent years.

"The reaction by the United States to our expectations will be a sort of test to see if Washington really considers Poland as its partner in central Europe," Klich told the newspaper. At the moment, he added, the United States treats Poland like "a distant cousin."

Brussels, the capital city of Europe, boasts a vibrant international community. So far, they've lived next to, not with, Belgians. A new integration project is trying to change that.

One would think that Brussels was a melting pot of social integration and interaction, given its mix of Flemish and Francophone locals and the large number of international residents tossed in for good measure. But the international community seems to operate safely within its expat comfort zone while the locals get on with their lives alongside the distant foreigners.

 

The King Baudouin Foundation, named after the country's late monarch, is trying to change that. Its breXpat initiative aims to bring expats and local people closer together. Contacts between expats and locals are often limited or non-existent for reasons such has the temporary stay of expats, the language barrier and the financial gap, said breXpat project coordinator Nosheen Shakil.

 

"We hope to start initiatives that bridge the gap between locals and expats," Shakil said. "Locals will, in this way, discover the extra value of living in the capital of Europe and expats will feel less isolated and have the feeling to live in a real country, not on an expat island."

The fallout of the waste disposal crisis in Naples continues to spread to other parts of Italy. Some 1,500 tonnes of Napolitan garbage has arrived at an incinerator on the island of Sicily, much to the displeasure of the locals. Sicilian authorities reluctantly heeded an appeal to take on some of the rubbish from Naples, where landfill sites have been full since before Christmas. Other regions have refused to help out.

The extra waste has left a bad taste in the mouths of Sicilian residents. One protestor directed his anger at the authorities. "Shame on you," he said, "You're the ones that should be thrown onto the rubbish heap."

An estimated 140,000 tonnes of rubbish has been left uncollected on Napolitan streets. The crisis is a direct threat to public health and the local economy.

The European commission will set out new laws next week to impose swingeing limits on greenhouse gas emissions from EU heavy industries in a move that could prompt some of these to relocate lock, stock and barrel overseas.

Draft legislative proposals, due to be published on January 23 and seen by the Guardian, would cut the emissions of some 11,000 plants by 21% on 2005 levels as part of the effort to reduce EU greenhouse gas output by at least 20% by 2020.

They would also force energy companies and refiners to bid at auction for 100% of their pollution permits from 2013 in an effort to avoid the windfall profits of up to £8bn cashed in when the EU's emissions trading scheme (ETS) began in 2005.

The documents, which are still subject to ferocious debates among EC staff and with the 27 national governments, indicate that at least two-thirds of the permits, including for new sectors not in the ETS, would be auctioned from 2013 in an effort to drive up the price of carbon.

At their March summit, EU leaders agreed binding targets to reduce emissions by 20% - 30% if the rest of the industrialised world agreed - and to increase the use of renewable energy to 20% by 2020. The aim is to establish EU leadership in the campaign against climate change and create the first low-carbon economy.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain's prime minister, boasts that his country is wealthier than Italy. Overtaking France, he declares, is now a national goal. In the middle of a bitter election campaign, patriotic triumphalism is understandable. But Mr Zapatero could come to regret remarks that also appear hubristic. After three transforming decades, in which the Spanish economy has become a star European performer, it may be about to suffer the consequences of a credit-fuelled spending and property boom.

Only last September, the economic outlook was different. The Socialist government had reason to be satisfied. Growth was cooling and house price inflation slowing. This was a necessary antidote to years of consumer-led exuberance and construction spending, not helped by very low real eurozone interest rates. Third-quarter annual output growth of 3.8 per cent was still well above the long-term average.

Then came the global credit squeeze. With a current account deficit third only to the US in nominal terms and high levels of household debt, it is hard to see how Spain can avoid a serious correction. Inflation in December spiked to its highest in over a decade, house prices are falling and unemployment is rising: a potent cocktail of economic risks.

Tens of thousands of opposition supporters marched in the Georgian capital yesterday against what they denounced as massive vote fraud that helped United States-allied Mikhail Saakashvili to win a second presidential term.

Organisers said 100,000 demonstrators marched for several hours across downtown Tbilisi in freezing weather to demand a recount of the 5 January election. Official results confirmed yesterday that Mr Saakashvili had won enough votes to avoid a second round run-off against second-placed Levan Gachechiladze, who received a quarter of the votes.

Mr Gachechiladze and his supporters denounced the official count as a sham, saying it reflected a massive government effort to rig it. They said election officials responsible for ballot tinkering must be prosecuted, and demanded a run-off between Mr Saakashvili and Mr Gachechiladze.

The opposition leader also demanded regular access to state television, which has focused on covering Mr Saakashvili, 40. "Georgia doesn't have a legitimate president," Mr Gachechiladze told the rally.

Observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe gave a mixed assessment of the election, calling it a "triumphant step" for democracy but pointing to an array of violations.

Britain and its Nato allies considered organising a coup in Italy in 1976 to prevent the Communist Party from coming to power, Foreign Office papers reveal.

The documents, made public after 30 years, were unearthed by an Italian researcher in the government archives at Kew, Surrey. In 1976, the Cold War was still raging, Henry Kissinger was the US Secretary of State and Italy's political situation was a shambles.

After 30 years of domination by the corrupt Christian Democrat party (DC), the country was ready for change. The Partito Comunista Italiana (PCI), led by the moderate Enrico Berlinguer, was the only political force which seemed to offer it. In an election scheduled for 20 June 1976, there was a strong chance it would beat the Christian Democrats into second place and lead a coalition.

Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe. The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward. Nonetheless, Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again. "I could be a fisherman there," he said. "Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore."

Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa's ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.

That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe's lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa's fish population has dwindled.

The sudden fall in sterling could force a realignment of Britain's economic relationship with the eurozone, resulting in potentially painful consequences for both it and the 15-country bloc.

Since November the pound has fallen by almost 9 per cent against the euro - a rate of decline not far off that seen during sterling's enforced exit from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992, when it fell 11 per cent against Germany's D-Mark.

It is "astonishing how quickly [sterling] has gone down", said Ben Broadbent, of Goldman Sachs. The drop is rekindling memories of "Black Wednesday" in 1992, which helped to bury the then Conservative government's reputation for economic competence. Symbolically troubling, the currency's weakness makes France's economy larger than that of Britain for the first time since 1999.

[...]

But most economists think the adjustment is necessary even if it hurts in the short run. The UK's current account deficit is seen as increasingly unsustainable; it is now the largest among the Group of Seven leading economies after big downward revisions to foreign income at the end of last year.

Sterling's hitherto sustained strength had fooled people into believing "you can run the economy permanently on the back of consumer spending and rising land prices", said Martin Weale, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

Car ownership is growing at a rapid rate - turning China into the second largest market in the world.

But, after flirting with smaller vehicles, Chinese consumers are trading up.

In the first 11 months of last year, sales of cars with an engine size of one litre or less fell by 24 per cent, according to the auto industry association - and this in spite of rising petrol prices and a tax policy that encourages smaller engines. Sales of micro and subcompact cars of all engine sizes rose only modestly in the first 11 months of 2007.

It was not immediately clear why smaller cars had fallen out of favour or if the trend would continue, but some observers put the tepid demand down to a mixture of rising wealth disparities and the link between cars and social status in China.

Michael Dunne, managing director of consultants JD Power in Shanghai, says: "It is partly a reflection of income inequality, which has created an urban elite with a lot of money and that wants to buy the very best quality.

"If Chinese can afford a higher-level car, they will go for it, even if it means borrowing money from their family. Image is much more important in China, especially compared with India."

Research by Volkswagen last year found that average Chinese carbuyers spent twice his or her annual salary on the vehicle. Two years ago Su Tianping, a junior manager at Pudong Development Bank in Shanghai, bought a QQ, the microcar made by Chinese company Chery, which was a sales phenomenon in 2005. However, he sold it a few months ago.

"It was OK to drive around home," he says, "but driving a QQ to clients or to a party was a loss of face."

China has closed more than 11,000 small coal mines as part of a two-year-old safety crackdown aimed at stemming the industry's high death toll, the government reported Sunday.

The total of 11,155 represents 45 percent of all small mines slated for closure <...>

Small mines are responsible for most of the deaths in Chinese mining industry, which last year claimed 3,786 lives. The 2007 death toll marks a major improvement from the year before, but still leaves China's mines as the world's deadliest.

China relies overwhelmingly on coal power, and unscrupulous operators routinely cut corners on safety to cash in on high prices and soaring demand.

Mines closed since the crackdown began in mid-2005 represented 250 million tons of production capacity <...>

A woman who gave birth to a boy while she was being held hostage by Farc rebels in Colombia has been reunited with her child after being freed.

Clara Rojas' son, Emmanuel, fathered by one of the rebels, was taken from her aged eight months suffering from malnutrition and tropical diseases.

Now nearly four, he has been living in a foster home in Bogota.

A government official present at the reunion said that it was "a very emotional moment".

Clara Rojas and fellow hostage Consuelo Gonzalez were freed on Thursday, after prolonged efforts by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to broker the release.

RIYADH: French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew in to Saudi Arabia on Sunday at the launch of a three-nation Gulf Arab tour, ready to share France's expertise in nuclear technology. He landed in Saudi Arabia as US President George W. Bush tours the region to rally support for his policy of isolating Iran over its nuclear activities.

Sarkozy is on his first trip to the region since taking office in May and will visit three energy-rich Gulf states.

The French presidential Airbus plane touched down at King Khaled International Airport shortly after 1500 GMT, where Saudi King Abdullah welcomed the French leader, an AFP correspondent said.

The Saudi monarch was to host a dinner banquet for Sarkozy in the evening, ahead of a bilateral talks and the signing of four agreements to bolster cooperation foremost on political and energy issues.

In an interview published Sunday by pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, Sarkozy described Saudi Arabia as a key ally of France and a "pole of moderation and stability" in a troubled region.

China will leap to be the top wind turbine producer in 2009, transforming an already fast-growing renewable energy sector, a leading wind power industry official said. Steve Sawyer, secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), said wind could supply 12 percent of world electricity needs by 2020 against just over one percent in 2007 in a shift that would help curb climate change.

"We'd expect that the domestic Chinese manufacturers will have an annual production capacity of about 10 gigawatts per year...by the end of 2009," he told Reuters on Tuesday. GWEC represents more than 1,500 wind firms in more than 50 nations.

Ten gigawatts would be more than half of the current world market -- in 2007, 17-19 gigawatts of wind energy capacity were added worldwide, raising the cumulative total to above 90 gigawatts.

<...>

"For my members now, one of the big issues is to prepare for the onslaught of relatively inexpensive Chinese turbines onto the world market," Sawyer said, adding that no Chinese companies were now exporting.

<...>

"One of the nice things about wind power is that if you decide to deploy it, it happens very quickly if you have the planning permission," he said. "In China, when the government has given the green light, things happen pretty quickly."

<...>

Of the 2007 totals of 17-19 gigawatts new capacity, about four were installed in the United States, three in China and between eight and 10 in Europe. "It's far and away the fastest growing part of the energy sector," he said.

As police put the death toll in post-election unrest in Kenya at more than 700, the United States, the country's biggest aid donor, has warned both the government and opposition that it cannot conduct "business as usual" in the East African nation.

"As a major player, we need to voice our concern in the most forceful manner possible," said a US official, after Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, issued a statement expressing her deep disappointment at the failure of President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga to hold head-to-head talks. "We cannot just ignore it."

The US government is considering pruning parts of its $1bn annual lending programme - those outside the health sector -- and issuing travel bans against perceived hardliners in the government and opposition. European Union ambassadors are also trying to hammer out a common position in the wake of a December 27 poll marred by vote-counting irregularities.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will begin discussions on what are regarded as the core issues in the peace process when they meet on Monday.

These include the status of Jerusalem, the borders of a Palestinian state, Jewish settlements in the West Bank, refugees, security and water resources.

The negotiations will be led by Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei.

A landslide victory for the opposition Kuomintang Party in parliamentary elections in Taiwan has delivered a blow to the governing Democratic Progressive Party's prospects of retaining power in the March 22 presidential election.

The Kuomintang, or Nationalists, had been widely expected to perform strongly, but the scale of its success Saturday surprised political analysts and could sharply reduce the political influence of Chen Shui-bian, the pro-independence Taiwan president, in the remaining months of his second and final term.

A resurgent Kuomintang, which now holds almost three quarters of the seats in the self-ruling island's Legislative Yuan, also holds out the prospect of reduced tension across the Taiwan Strait, analysts said.

Merrill Lynch is seeking about $4bn in a second capital raising, as the hole in the US investment bank's balance sheet continues to grow.

The Kuwait Investment Authority is expected to be a significant investor in the new deal, which could be announced as soon as midweek, according to people familiar with the matter. Other investors could come from Europe.

KIA, which may also invest as much as $2bn or $3bn in Citigroup, is emerging as an large source of rescue finance on Wall Street. Once among the most conservative of sovereign wealth funds, KIA is changing its strategy in order to move more quickly than competitors and seize opportunities amid the turmoil in the US credit markets, these people say. Both Merrill and KIA declined to comment.

Both the price and the terms of the deals at Citi and Merrill are still being negotiated.

The latest round of capital raising comes at the start of a round of earnings reports during which big US banks and brokers are expected to reveal as much as $40bn in further mortgage-related writedowns. Action taken by Citi and Merrill will be closely watched by other institutions

Strong evidence is emerging that consumer spending, a bulwark against recession over the last year even as energy prices surged and the housing market sputtered, has begun to slow sharply at every level of the American economy, from the working class to the wealthy.

The abrupt pullback raises the possibility that the country may be experiencing a rare decline in personal consumption, not just a slower rate of growth. Such a decline would be the first since 1991, and it would almost certainly push the entire economy into a recession in the middle of an election year.

Merrill Lynch is seeking about $4bn in a second capital raising, as the hole in the US investment bank's balance sheet continues to grow. The Kuwait Investment Authority is expected to be a significant investor in the new deal, which could be announced as soon as midweek, according to people familiar with the matter. Other investors could come from Europe.

KIA, which may also invest as much as $2bn or $3bn in Citigroup, is emerging as an large source of rescue finance on Wall Street. Once among the most conservative of sovereign wealth funds, KIA is changing its strategy in order to move more quickly than competitors and seize opportunities amid the turmoil in the US credit markets, these people say. Both Merrill and KIA declined to comment.

The latest round of capital raising comes at the start of a round of earnings reports during which big US banks and brokers are expected to reveal as much as $40bn in further mortgage-related writedowns. Action taken by Citi and Merrill will be closely watched by other institutions

Citi is expected to announce a writedown of close to $20bn and present plans to raise as much as $14bn in new capital from the Chinese and public market investors as well as the KIA. Analysts expect Vikram Pandit, Citi's recently installed chief executive, to slash the dividend 40 per cent or more to improve Citi's capital position. The infusion would follow the $7.5bn Citi raised from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority in late November.

Merrill Lynch on Thursday is expected to announce a writedown of $10bn to $20bn. Brad Hintz, Sanford Bernstein analyst, said a writedown of more than $20bn "would significantly increase leverage and would threaten the credit ratings of the firm". Any new capital infusion from the KIA and others would follow the $6.4bn Merrill raised last month from Temasek, the Singapore government fund, and Davis Selected Advisors, a New York-based asset manager

Kazakhstan agreed a deal with an Eni-led consortium on Sunday night to develop the Kashagan oilfield.

The consortium - which includes ExxonMobil of the US, Royal Dutch Shell and Total of France - agreed to pay Kazakhstan $2.5bn-$4.5bn in compensation for the project's late start.

It will also sell shares to KazMunaigas , so the Kazakhstan national oil company's stake can be doubled to 16.8 per cent, equalling the holdings of the largest western members of the consortium. KMG will take a bigger role in running the project.

General Electric will on Monday announce plans to double its investments in renewable energies to $6bn by 2010 in the latest sign of a push by big companies to capitalise on concerns over global warming and pollution.

The financial arm of the US conglomerate believes that within two years alternative sources such as wind and solar power will account for almost a quarter of its total investments in energy and water, up from 10 per cent in 2006.

The move by GE, which has been at the forefront of corporate America's efforts to respond to environmental fears, underlines the desire by traditional industrial companies to gain critical mass in "greener industries"

UBS is trying to persuade investment bankers to stick with the company by allowing them to sell some of their share-based bonuses after just one year. The bankers'cash bonuses are due to be slashed this year after the Swiss group's 2007 profits were wiped out by losses relating to the meltdown in the US subprime mortgage market.

UBS upset employees by capping the cash portion of bonuses and announcing plans to pay the rest in stock. But people close to the bank said it told staff that they could sell the additional shares after 12 months, rather than waiting the usual three years.

Executives said UBS's depressed valuation made share-based bonuses more attractive than in previous years. The bank's efforts highlight the difficulties investment banks face in rewarding and keeping staff after a year when fixed-income losses wiped out record profits in other businesses, such as commodities and mergers and acquisitions.

Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, the US banks worst affected by the crisis, will give an indication this week of how they have tackled the bonus issue when they report full-year earnings. The banks, which both have new chief executives, are expected to boost payments as they strive to retain bankers who might otherwise defect to rival institutions.

A bit old (2007/12/14), but just found it, and I believe relevant in the context of Chinese labour law reforms threaten world.

Faced with shortages of land, electricity, water, labor and raw materials, Taiwan-backed manufacturers in the Pearl River Delta have been confronted with unprecedented challenges in recent years. Now, with the Law of the People's Republic of China on Employment Contracts scheduled to take effect on January 1, their situation may become even more untenable. The legislation has many Taiwanese businessmen in the area thinking seriously of shuttering their businesses and relocating outside of China. <...>

China's National People's Congress passed the Law of Employment Contracts on June 29, 2007. It formalizes workers' rights concerning overtime hours, pensions, layoffs, employment contracts and the role of trade unions. Considered one of the strictest in the world, it is stirring apprehensions most in the ranks of Taiwan's China-based small and medium enterprises - operations that are usually too small to support a professional human resource management framework.

Among other mandates, the law requires employers to sign written contracts with every employee. Also, after two contract renewals, workers automatically earn the right to work for the employer indefinitely. Employees can only be let go for clear cause and would still receive a pension. In the expanded role for trade unions, employers will be required to consult with them before making rules and regulations, concluding employment contracts or implementing economic dismissals.

The bill was the first major national law in China circulated in adance to gauge public reaction. As a result more than 191,800 separate comments were received via the Internet, newspapers, periodicals, and letters soon after the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress launched the plan.

Hsiao Hsin-yung, a human resource consultant specializing in China's labor regulations, suggested that complying with the law could increase the operating costs of Taiwanese manufacturers by some 30%, creating a heavy burden for already struggling enterprises.

''This law simply leans too heavily toward laborers,'' Hsiao said. ''But it is the nature of the Communist Party to protect workers.''

How twisted has the world become when that last sentence on the face of it sounds ridiculous?

I asked an Italian classmate of mine, who is considering working in China after finishing Mandarin studies, if he thinks these new labor laws would be really enforced and taken seriously.  He said, "Absolutely", and mentioned an Italian company that had been recently punished for violating labor laws.  However, he could not recall which company it was, and when I googled it, I came up with an Italian furniture maker named DeCoro that "had violated China's labour law in many aspects":

Workers at Italian-invested furniture factory DeCoro in Shenzhen who were beaten by their Italian supervisors over pay cut disputes revealed that the company had violated China's labour law in many aspects.

Liang Tian, one of the workers beaten by the Italian supervisors, told China Labour Bulletin that workers at the DeCoro factory had no day offs on Saturdays and Sundays. If they wanted to have day offs on Sundays, they would have to finish their Sunday work quotas on Saturdays. Their monthly salary was 2,000 to 3,000 yuan (about US$250 to 375), relatively high compared with other workers in Shenzhen, but they did not have pension, medical insurance and work injury insurance. The company's practice has in fact violated China's Labour Law. According to Article 36 of PRC's Labour Law, the government institutes "a working hour system by which every worker shall not work more than eight hours a day and the average working hours per week shall not exceed 44 hours." Article 73 of the Labour Law also stipulated that "workers shall enjoy social insurance treatment according to law...including retirement, falling ill or suffering job injuries..."

Italian sofa maker in Shenzhen violates China's labour law, no OSH

But this was back in 2005 and therefore must have violated earlier versions of China's labor laws.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

An 88-year-old man is set to star in his first ballet show after taking up dance at the age of 79.

Grandfather to 11, John Lowe, of Witchford, Cambs, took up dancing having watched his daughter Alison become a professional dancer.

The retired teacher said: "It's a wonderful thing to do and I can't understand why more men don't do it."

Mr Lowe is due to appear with the Lantern Dance Theatre Company, in Ely, on Sunday evening.

Pirouettes have been perfected in daily practice at home ahead of Mr Lowe's performance in Prokofiev's The Stone Flower at The Maltings.

Sterling's fall against the euro could hurt France's producers of bubbly, given that Britain is the largest export market for champagne with an annual consumption of about 40m bottles a year.

Frédéric Heidsieck, of Louis Roederer champagne, said the fall in the pound was a problem as the euro was "too strong at the moment"."Our job is to make wine, not juggle currencies," he said. "We don't have the means to deal with this. I would like to see the euro go down a little bit, and have the European Central Bank make the euro weaken a little bit. But the ECB is only focused on inflation."

Still, some of the region's producers are more worried about the fall of the dollar against the euro than they are about sterling's decline."We are not expecting any slowdown in our exports to Britain because of the exchange rate," said Alexis Petit-Gats of Canard-Duchêne champagne.

Gordon Brown is sympathetic to calls for hospitals to be allowed to remove organs from dead patients without explicit consent, but families would have a veto which would allow them to stop organs being used to save the lives of others if, as expected, the Government brings in a system of "presumed consent".

People could also opt out of the national register during their lives, in contrast to the current system of opting in and carrying a donor card.

Officials said Mr Brown had an "open mind" about the idea, but wanted a national debate before the Government takes a decision. A taskforce on organ donations will consider the proposal later this year.

Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates.

While the overall loss is a tiny fraction of the miles-deep ice that covers much of Antarctica, scientists said the new finding is important because the continent holds about 90 percent of Earth's ice, and until now, large-scale ice loss there had been limited to the peninsula that juts out toward the tip of South America. In addition, researchers found that the rate of ice loss in the affected areas has accelerated over the past 10 years -- as it has on most glaciers and ice sheets around the world.

"Without doubt, Antarctica as a whole is now losing ice yearly, and each year it's losing more," said Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking despite land temperatures for the continent remaining essentially unchanged, except for the fast-warming peninsula.

The cause, Rignot said, may be changes in the flow of the warmer water of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that circles much of the continent. Because of changed wind patterns and less-well-understood dynamics of the submerged current, its water is coming closer to land in some sectors and melting the edges of glaciers deep underwater.

Medicine's dream of growing new human hearts and other organs to repair or replace damaged ones received a significant boost Sunday when University of Minnesota researchers reported success in creating a beating rat heart in a laboratory.

Experts not involved in the Minnesota work called it "a landmark achievement" and "a stunning" advance. But they and the Minnesota researchers cautioned that the dream, if it is ever realized, was still at least 10 years away.

Dr. Doris A. Taylor, the head of the team that created the rat heart, said she followed a guiding principle of her laboratory: "give nature the tools, and get out of the way."

"We just took nature's own building blocks to build a new organ," Dr. Taylor said of her team's report in the journal Nature Medicine.

The researchers removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the valves and outer structure as scaffolding for new heart cells injected from newborn rats. Within two weeks, the cells formed a new beating heart that conducted electrical impulses and pumped a small amount of blood.

With modifications, scientists should be able to grow a human heart by taking stem cells from a patient's bone marrow and placing them in a cadaver heart that has been prepared as a scaffold, Dr. Taylor said in a telephone interview from her laboratory in Minneapolis. The early success "opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas -- you name it and we hope we can make it," she said.

DailyKos - Stranded Wind - "Al Zeitz/Iowa Lakes Community College"

Iowa Lakes Community College runs a Wind Energy Operations and Maintenance (O+M) training program already recognized as the best in the country and it may very well be the best in the world.

Last week we caught up with the unassuming retired Marine behind this program, Al Zeitz, and got the inside story on how ILCC came to be the only wind energy program in the country operating their own full sized turbine.

Missing for half a century, a cache of photos spurs sensitive research on Islam's holy text

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

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Information about the archive's survival has just begun trickling out to the wider scholarly community. Why Mr. Spitaler hid it remains a mystery. His only published mention of the archive's fate was a footnote to an article in a 1975 book on the Quran. Claiming the bulk of the cache had been lost during the war, he wrote cryptically that "drastically changed conditions after 1945" ruled out any rebuilding of the collection.

Cribbed the "Da Vinci Code" allusion from the irrepressible Spengler's latest column, though upon reading the original Wall Street Journal article, the purported similarity to Dan Brown's tale is more superficial and speculative than substantial:

The story thus far recalls the ending of another Indiana Jones film (Raiders of the Lost Ark), in which the Ark of the Covenant is filed away in an enormous warehouse, presumably never to be touched again. The Muslim world will continue to treat Koranic criticism as an existential risk, and apply whatever pressure is required to discourage it - albino monks presumably included.

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Why were the Nazis so eager to suppress Koranic criticism? Most likely, the answer lies in their alliance with Islamist leaders, who shared their hatred of the Jews and also sought leverage against the British in the Middle East. The most recent of many books on this subject, Matthias Kuntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred, was reviewed January 13 in the New York Times by Jeffrey Goldberg...

Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal article points out:

Ms. Neuwirth, the Berlin professor now in charge of the Munich archive, rejects the theories of her more radical colleagues, who ride roughshod, she says, over Islamic scholarship. Her aim, she says, isn't to challenge Islam but to "give the Quran the same attention as the Bible." All the same, she adds: "This is a taboo zone."

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Many Christians, too, dislike secular scholars boring into sacred texts, and dismiss challenges to certain Biblical passages. But most accept that the Bible was written by different people at different times, and that it took centuries of winnowing before the Christian canon was fixed in its current form.

Muslims, by contrast, view the Quran as the literal word of God. Questioning the Quran "is like telling a Christian that Jesus was gay," says Abdou Filali-Ansary, a Moroccan scholar.

Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. "Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention," a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. "Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable."

In this vein, Spengler raises the provocative question, concerning what investigations of the "lost archive" could reveal:

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals, some of whom lived a century or two apart.

Man trap, serial heart-wrecker, rocker arm candy, photogenic cipher, arrogant heiress, polling gimmick - the woman who appears likely to become the first lady of France has been called a lot of things lately. The last thing anyone would have thought of is that she's a catch.

Barely three months after his divorce from his wife, Cécilia, the polarizing but media-savvy French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has become a principal in a hyper-publicized romance that has even the normally high-minded French press gossiping about the details in goosey tabloid terms. See the lovers moon around the pyramids and Euro Disney! Watch the Saudis grapple with the free-living ways of the French! Can Indian officials invent protocol to accommodate a First Sleepover Pal? Will the French public accept a woman who espouses polyandry, has a son by a philosopher whose father she once also dated, and who has been romantically linked with Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger? Will a whirlwind courtship and marriage ultimately bring Sarkozy's approval ratings up from the dumps?

Because model is so often used as a synonym for moron, few have stopped to consider that, in pure résumé terms, Bruni may be better equipped than many for a gig at Élysée Palace. For starters, she is a stepdaughter of an Italian tire magnate and classical composer, Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, who is married to her mother, Marisa Borini, a concert pianist. She is rich and well educated (in France, where her family moved in the 1970s to escape a wave of kidnappings in Italy) and speaks three languages.

After she aged out of her career as one of the most highly paid models of the 1990s, with campaigns for Dior and Chanel and about 250 magazine covers to her credit, she became a musician, a transition less surprising when one considers her heritage and past relationships. Her first album of breathy emotive music, set mostly to acoustic guitar was released in 2003 and quickly became a success. "Quelqu'un m'a dit" ("Someone Told Me") produced a best-selling single, sold over a million copies in France, another 300,000 outside the country and in 2004 garnered Bruni the French equivalent of a Grammy as the country's best female vocalist.

In train my neighbours were two Marathas with limited knowledge of English and one old gentleman Mr Murty of Krishnamurty's Foundation, by ethnicity Andhra's brahmin but last 15 years he spent in Uttarkashi in meditating retreat. He did not visit his home many years and did not follow all recent developments whether in economy or politics but he was a pleasure as storyteller. Life is the way where we are all walking.

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15 hr 39 min ago, made popular 7 hr 45 min ago

By Wednesday morning, stories were flying all around the Internet--have you looked closely at the results of the primary? There was something strange about the votes, they said, about the difference between municipalities that hand-counted votes and those that used optical scanners. The chatter increased, and by Friday, the New Hampshire Department of State issued a press release announcing that two candidates, Democrat Dennis Kucinich and Republican Albert Howard had requested and been granted a recount, having met the following requirement:

"New Hampshire law, RSA 660:7, provides that "any person for whom a vote was cast for any nomination of any party at a state or presidential primary may apply for a recount." RSA 660:2, IV provides that if the difference between the vote cast for the applying candidate and a candidate declared elected shall be greater than 3 percent of the total votes cast in the towns which comprise the office to be recounted, the candidate shall pay the fees provided in RSA 660:2, III and shall agree in writing with the secretary of state to pay any additional costs of the recount." RSA 660:6 provides that if the person requesting the recount is declared the winner after the recount or loses by a margin of less than one percent of the total votes cast, the fees for the recount will be refunded by the State."

The recounts will begin on January 16, at a time and location to be announced after the state has completed an estimate of the cost and received payment based on that estimate.