An ugly row over who should represent Poland at Wednesday's (14 October) EU summit has ended with both Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Lech Kaczynski coming to Brussels, without a decision on who will lead the delegation or take part in top-level meetings.

Mr Tusk, foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski and finance minister Jacek Rostwoski will fly to the EU capital on Tuesday evening on Poland's "Air Force One" - a Tupolev TU-154M - carrying official summit accreditation and Poland's negotiation mandate for the EU talks.

President Kaczynski at a Polish folk gathering - wants to advise in the EU corridors

With just three golden ID badges available for entry into the EU summit chamber and two chairs at the top table itself, the prime minister has said he wants his men beside him for the main discussions - on the financial crisis and CO2 emission cut plans.

"On this I will not compromise, because it's about bigger issues than a dispute between politicians," the prime minister said on TV, after last-ditch talks in Warsaw on Monday night in which the pair reportedly called each by the Polish polite form "Mr" - a sarcastic way of indicating dislike.

The Republic of Ireland is braced for a budget which is predicted to be the harshest for more than a decade as its government struggles to increase the stability of its economic system.

Finance minister Brian Lenihan is expected to announce in the Irish parliament today both increased taxes and spending cuts in a budget which will mark the ending of the "Celtic Tiger" period.

The new mood of parsimony has led to the leader of the opposition voluntarily taking a cut in his official salary, leading to speculation that ministers may follow suit.

The period which took Ireland to unprecedented levels of prosperity is now wistfully regarded as a thing of the past, with the Republic now facing into years of difficulties.

In a revelation that could tarnish the legacy of one of the best-known Eastern European writers, a Czech research institute published a report on Monday indicating that the young Milan Kundera told the police about a supposed spy.

According to the state-backed Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in 1950, long before he became famous for darkly comic novels like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "The Joke," Kundera, who was then 21, told the local police about a guest in a student dormitory where he lived.

The police quickly arrested the man, Miroslav Dvoracek, who had defected to Germany in 1948 and was said to have been recruited by United States-backed anti-Communists as a spy against the Czech government. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Dvoracek narrowly escaped the death penalty, a common punishment for espionage, and eventually served a 14-year sentence, including hard labor in a uranium mine.

The allegations could diminish Kundera's moral stature as a spokesman, however enigmatic, against totalitarianism's corrosion of daily life.

Several thousand Montenegrins, angry at their government's recognition of Kosovo's independence from Serbia, held a rally Monday evening. About 30 people were injured and 35 arrested after the protests turned violent.

Opposition parties organized a rally in the Montenegrin capital of Podgorica to protest the government's recognition of Kosovo.

Opposition leaders demanded that Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic's cabinet revoke recognition of the breakaway Serbian region and demanded a referendum on the topic, according to the daily newspaper Vijesti.

Toward the end of the protests, some demonstrators began throwing stones and flares at police officers guarding the parliament building. Police reacted by using teargas, according to the newspaper's Tuesday edition.

The crowd dispersed within 20 minutes, but clashes in side streets continued over the next hour, Vijesti said. Belgrade media on Tuesday claimed rubber bullets were also fired.

Sarkozy confirmed that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy had personally delivered the news to Petrella. Sarkozy said that Petrella's hunger strike needed to be stopped and he thought that the news could put an end to it.

"My wife was there for a very simple reason: I asked her to do it," Sarkozy told a news conference in Paris. "I asked her to go because Ms Petrella was in danger of dying."

But Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, the first lady's sister, said she had asked Bruni-Sarkozy to go to the president and urge him to block the extradition. Bruni-Tedeschi said she and her sister had together broken the news to Petrella last Wednesday.

"I just felt that it would be a terrible thing for her to die," Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi reportedly told Europe 1 radio.

Petrella had been convicted of plotting to murder a senior Rome police officer and to kidnap a judge. She had been living in France since 1993.

Residents of Jersey will vote on whether to scrap Greenwich Mean Time and adopt a European time zone.

A referendum will ask residents whether they want to switch to Central European Time (CET), which is an hour ahead of Britain.

Supporters of the move claim it would boost tourism on the island, as it would mean more sunlight in the evenings.

But critics say it would damage commerce, as it would leave Jersey out of step with its main trading partner, London.

Senator Jimmy Perchard, of the "Yes" campaign, said: "We have historical connections with France. Our streets have French names. The prayers in our parliament are in French.

Major tuna-fishing nations have backed calls for temporary closure of the Mediterranean tuna fishery, branded a "disgrace" by a recent expert report.

The World Conservation Congress passed a motion calling for closure of the bluefin fishery until scientifically sound recovery plans are in place.

Catches are estimated to be about four times higher than scientists recommend.

Spain, which has the biggest quota for Mediterranean tuna, and Japan, the biggest consumer, voted in favour.

BRUSSELS: Relief over the success of Europe's intervention in the banking crisis will give way Wednesday to discord over climate change, with nations battling over whether a looming recession makes European Union carbon-reduction targets unaffordable.

After two weeks of crisis diplomacy over the banking meltdown, European leaders will gather in Brussels for a two-day summit meeting that probably will be dominated by the impact of the economic turbulence and expectations of a sharp downturn.

On the eve of the meeting, Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister and former European commissioner, called for "flexibility" over the EU's ambitious plans to reduce planet-warming emissions by 20 percent by 2020, pointing out that such measures would cost 1.14 percent of his country's gross national product. Speaking in Rome, Frattini called for the proposals to be accompanied by an "impact study on the real economy," the news agency Ansa reported.

Germany is arguing for protection against foreign competition for sectors like steel, cement and aluminum, and Poland says it should have to shoulder less of the burden of combating global warming.

The dispute is one example of how the financial crisis has changed Europe's political landscape in several respects.

LONDON -- With his brooding aspect and sagging poll numbers, Prime Minister Gordon Brown had seemed to personify the bleak mood of a world traumatized by collapsing house prices, lost jobs and banks that would not lend.

But that was last week.

After devising a bank rescue plan that has now been endorsed by European and American officials -- and has sent global stocks soaring -- he is being celebrated worldwide and has revived a political career that the "commentariat," as Mr. Brown disdainfully refers to the chattering classes, had predicted would soon be at an end.

While Mr. Brown, 57, has moved up in the polls, he still trails his younger conservative rival, the fresh-faced David Cameron, 42, whose months of deft parliamentary jabs helped define Mr. Brown as a leaden, out of touch leader.

But for all the troubles of the British economy, and after a 10-year apprenticeship as chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Brown is suddenly in his element, proudly pointing to his long experience.

"Now is not the time," he said in a pointed jab at Mr. Cameron, "for a novice."

Big changes are in store for European banks after the latest round of bailouts were announced. In the long term, it could mean more EU-wide regulation.

Recent days have seen European governments galloping to the rescue of struggling banks, approving mergers and announcing billion-euro bailouts. In the process, they've threatened to ride roughshod over the European Union's strict limits on state aid to the private sector.

That is the view of Neelie Kroes, the commissioner in charge of competition for the EU, who used the Wild West analogy in a sharply-worded speech in Brussels on Monday, Oct. 13. An anything-goes atmosphere would be a "recipe for chaos," Kroes warned.

Yet it's unlikely that Europe's financial crisis will turn into a Spaghetti Western. In the long run, the banking crisis will likely mean more unity in Europe's financial sector, say leading economists and EU banking experts.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - As EU governments put aside hundreds of billions of euros in rescue plans to shore up their financial sector, the European Commission has tabled fresh guidelines so that the union's economy does not "descend into chaos."

According to the rulebook published on Monday (13 October), the commission recognises that member states may consider it necessary to adopt appropriate measures to safeguard the stability of the financial system.

Competition rules are needed even in time of crisis, the commission says

But such measures, it says, may not result in unnecessary distortions of competition between financial institutions operating in the market or negative spillover effects on other member states.

"A jungle is what we would get if we suspended or abandoned competition policy," EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Monday, according to Reuters.

In a violent swerve away from the laissez-faire capitalism that has underpinned Western society for the past three decades, EU states on Monday (13 October) outlined the details of a historic state bail-out of Europe's financial sector.

The total size of the rescue promise remains fuzzy, with newspapers across the continent totting up the the mind-boggling sums announced in slightly different ways.

The sums come close to the annual budgets of some countries

But Europe has so far announced the release of around €2 trillion to save banks from collapse in the biggest government intervention in markets since the creation of the post-war welfare state.

On Monday afternoon, the governments of Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain unveiled bail-out packages that hovered near the annual public spending budgets of the countries involved.

Are the banks safe?

A lot safer than they were. The state owns Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock, partially owns the Royal Bank of Scotland and the soon-to-be-merged Lloyds TSB/HBOS group. They should be more confident about lending to each other.

Will it be easier to get a mortgage now?

it ought to be. The part-nationalised banks are committed to returning to 2007 levels of lending. New mortgages are at only 30 per cent of last year's levels, so something had to be done. We'll see big cuts in interest rates too.

What will it mean for staff?

It is hard to see the Government pushing for redundancies to cut costs. Some jobs may be lost anyway but in a slow, orderly fashion.

What about the fat cats?

No bonuses this year and future bonuses will be paid in shares. Packages for traders and top execs should be restructured to align them with the consequences of their actions.

To calm the financial panic, the British government has stepped in to save three major banks. So far, the markets like the news.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's reputation has improved through his handling of the financial crisis. Hoping to stem financial meltdown and avoid a deep recession, the British government on Oct. 13 moved to take stakes in three of the five largest British banks at a cost of $62.5 billion (€45.7 billion). So far, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, and HBOS have agreed to take government funding, while Barclays continues to resist. The move was part of a three-point British plan that also includes a $338 billion Bank of England facility to boost liquidity and up to $422 billion in possible guarantees for interbank lending.

At this point the news has been well-received by the markets, which had been under relentless selling pressure. The benchmark FTSE 100 index ended the day up nearly 8.3 percent, though shares of the three banks opting for government ownership were all down. HBOS was hardest hit, falling about 27 percent on news that Lloyds TSB would be lowering an outstanding offering price to take over the mortgage lender.

The United States is expected to announce Tuesday it will invest in top banks and thousands of others in a partial nationalization of the finance sector that mirrors British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's plan. Meanwhile, European governments are moving forward with similar bailouts.

 Washington is now hopping on the European bandwagon by partially nationalizing banks to rescue Wall Street.

Henry Paulson is first expected to announce his new plan to solve the credit crisis on Tuesday, but details that the United States Treasury Secretary is planning to shift his strategy to combat the financial crisis began leaking on Monday night. According to reports in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, the Bush administration is planning to use much of the money provided in the first tranche of the Congressional bailout package to make direct government investments in US banks.

According to the papers, Washington is planning to invest $250 billion in the banks, forcing nine of the country's biggest banks to accept Treasury Department stakes. The Wall Street Journal reports that stakes in "possibly thousands of other banks" are expected. The paper also claims that "some of the big banks were unhappy about the government taking equity stakes, but acquiesced under pressure" from Paulson. The "extreme steps," the paper writes, would "intertwine the banking sector with the federal government for years to come."

President Bush today confirmed a $250 billion plan for the US Government to buy shares in America's largest banks, insisting that the move was "not intended to take over the free market but to preseve it".

Following a model first adopted in Britain last week and copied across the rest of Europe, the partial nationalisation will be accompanied by a series of measures designed to break the credit logjam paralysing lenders.

The $250 billion (£142 billion) will come from a $700 billion bailout package already agreed by Congress. "This is an essential short-term measure to ensure the viability of America's banking system," Mr Bush said in a statement from the lawn of the White House.

The initial plan for the bailout, negotiated by Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, was for the money to be used to purchase "toxic" sub-prime assets from lenders to allow them to clear up their balance sheets. It quickly became apparent, however, that that might not be enough to end the credit crunch.

Germany's state-owned banks are emerging as winners from the financial tumult that has rocked Europe's largest economy and its neighbours in the last two weeks.

Sparkasse savings bank and other state-run banks like it are awash in new business since late September, as Germans rush to deposit money where they perceive it will be safest.

According to a survey conducted by Bild, deposits at Germany's 16,000 branches of Sparkasse have increased by more than 1bn euros since the financial crisis unfolded two weeks ago. Meanwhile, Haspa, Germany´s biggest savings bank in Hamburg, has recorded fresh deposits of 500m euros.

As Chancellor Angela Merkel prepared to announce a 480bn euro rescue package for German banks with around 80bn in fresh capital and 400bn slated as loan guarantees the trend being seized upon by the average German investor was clear.

"A while ago banks could not be international enough. The only ones that were 'modern' were those that were active on international markets," Michaela Roth, spokesperson for the German Savings Bank Association said.

The German bailout package, presented by Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday, was unprecedented in size. And, so far at least, it seems to be working. German commentators, though, are skeptical about its long-term prospects.

 German Chancellor Angela Merkel hopes her bailout plan will nip the financial crisis in the bud. On Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel unveiled the German contribution to the world wide bailout of financial institutions: €500 billion ($679 billion) in total, including €400 billion in loan guarantees for the country's ailing banks. Underlining the gravity of the crisis, Merkel signalled that she would request that the German parliament expedite its passage of the plan.

But, cautious optimism was the order of the day. "We're taking rigorous action to ensure that what we have experienced doesn't get repeated," Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters.

The markets took her at her word: the German blue-chip index, DAX, closed Monday with gains of over 11 percent and on Tuesday saw continued growth.

Merkel's bailout plan also elicited an immediate reply from German commentators, who likewise welcomed the news, if with slightly more hesitation than the stock market.

Dexia denies market rumour of nationalisation

PARIS (Reuters) - Dexia (DEXI.BR: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the multinational bank that received support from the French, Belgian and Luxembourg states earlier this month, on Tuesday denied a market rumour that Belgium was set to nationalise the bank completely.

"The chairman of the board and the chief executive deny formally any rumour about nationalisation of the bank by the state of Belgium," a spokesman told Reuters.

(...)

"Maybe investors are fearing a Fortis-style scenario, but with Dexia its's an entirely different investor community. There are a lot of public bodies with holdings, so they can't just leave them dry. There are a lot of political issues that you cannot put aside," a Brussels-based trader said.

orrowing costs remain high

The costs for banks to borrow money from each other remain at highly elevated levels in spite of the global government action taken to cure the paralysis at the heart of the financial system.

Stubbornly high interbank lending rates indicate that tensions remain in the money markets even though the US, UK and various European governments have pledged to inject capital directly into banks and guarantee many types of bank debt.

Analysts said that while stock markets had rallied and the cost of protecting bank debt against default had tumbled by record amounts in the US, it would take time for the reduced costs of what is in effect government-sponsored funding to show through.

Three-month Libor, the most important interbank lending rate that is used to price loans, derivatives and many other kinds of financial products, has barely moved in sterling markets, which have had full details of the UK government guarantee since Monday morning.

Reinhart Cotton Losses May Force Sale After Trading Cash Crunch

By Yi Tian

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Paul Reinhart Inc., one of the biggest U.S. cotton merchants, told farmers last month it faced a ``severe liquidity crisis'' after suffering ``significant losses'' when futures prices jumped to a 12-year high in March.

An ``unexpected, historic run-up'' in cotton led to margin calls on futures contracts, stripping the company of ``virtually all available cash,'' R. Dale Grounds, president of Richardson, Texas-based Reinhart, said in a Sept. 23 letter sent to farmers. In the six days ended March 5, cotton jumped 15 percent, prompting a government probe of potential market manipulation.

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Cotton traded on ICE Futures U.S. jumped as high as 92.86 cents a pound on March 5, the highest for a most-active contract since September 1995. U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Walt Lukken said June 3 the agency was investigating the surge.

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The dispute involves more than 400,000 bales of cotton to be harvested this year in Arkansas, Mississippi and Missouri, and may lead to $60 million in market-value losses, Ward said in a telephone interview on Oct. 6. Reinhart agreed to buy about 300,000 bales of the cotton for about 85 cents a pound under sales booked from December 2007 to February 2008, Ward said. Cotton closed Oct. 10 at 49.44 cents on ICE Futures in New York.

Reinhart failed to make the payment after producers in South Texas submitted invoices and made the delivery, Jonathan Rowe, a vice president at East Cotton, alleged.

The euphoria that swept Wall Street on Monday gave way to a sober reality on Tuesday: a recession, perhaps the deepest one in decades, may be unavoidable.

A day after the stock market staged one of its biggest rallies in history, buoyed by the government's plan to rescue banks, investors retreated once again. Worries about the economy came to the fore. Many people fear that corporations -- and by extension their workers and shareholders -- will face harder times in the months ahead.

"Everything the government has done is not going to prevent further deterioration in the economy," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Bank. "At the end of all this, what matters is what the economy does."

The flow of credit, which has been choked for weeks, began to trickle through the financial system on Tuesday. But the credit markets remained shut to many companies and municipalities. Home mortgage rates, which some had hoped might decline once the government's plans became clear, rose instead. The fear is that the financial rescue will add to an already-swelling federal budget deficit and force the Treasury to borrow heavily in the capital markets.

At a meeting in Jordan, Mediterranean countries urged Israel and Palestine to work through differences over issues such as the expansion of Israeli settlements and the restrictions of movement of Palestinians.

The Euro-Med Parliamentary Assembly (EMPA) ended a two-day session Monday, Oct. 13, at the Dead Sea resort in Amman by urging continuation of peace talks between Israel and Palestine.

President of the European Union Hans-Gert Pottering, who also serves as president-in-office of EMPA, called for speedy solutions to two issues that hinder the peace negotiations: "the expansion of settlements, which is undermining the Palestinians' confidence" in the peace process, and "the extremely restricted freedom of movement of Palestinians," which has hindered investment in the Palestinian economy and prevented economic recovery.

NEW YORK: If the U.S. government moves ahead with a plan to take ownership stakes in American banks, as seems likely, it would be an exceptional step - but not an unprecedented one.

The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal, but the practice is sometimes different. Over the past century, the U.S. government has nationalized railways, coal mines and steel mills, and it has even taken a controlling interest in banks when that was deemed to be in the national interest.

The corporate wards of the state typically have been returned to private hands after short, sometimes fleeting, stretches under government stewardship.

Finance experts say that having Washington take stakes in U.S. banks now - like government interventions in the past - would be a promising step in addressing an economic emergency. The plan being weighed by the Treasury Department, they say, could supply banks with sorely needed capital and help restore confidence in financial markets. Across Europe, governments rolled out similar initiatives Monday.

China will transform itself into a working democracy in just over a decade, according to one of the country's most influential reformers

Zhou Tianyong, an adviser to the Communist Party's Central Committee and one of its most liberal voices, told the Daily Telegraph that "by 2020, China will basically finish its political and institutional reforms".

He added: "We have a 12-year plan to establish a democratic platform. There will be public democratic involvement at all government levels."

Mr Zhou also predicted "extensive public participation in policy-making, such as drawing up new legislation".

Mr Zhou is deputy head of research at the Central Party School, the most important institution for training senior leaders. President Hu Jintao is among its former directors.

Peruvian President Alan Garcia has sworn in a new, leftist-led government days after the previous cabinet resigned over corruption allegations.

The biggest change is the choice of Yehude Simon, a leftist regional governor from outside the ruling party, as prime minister.

Most of the other 16 posts have gone to members of the previous cabinet.

Analysts say the choice of Mr Simon is an attempt by President Garcia to boost his own popularity after the scandal.

JOHANNESBURG -- Zimbabwe's military commanders have pressed President Robert Mugabe to shield them from prosecution for the violent crackdown on his political foes this year, senior government officials say, and his response is threatening to derail a power-sharing deal that was supposed to halt the country's dizzying downward economic spiral. (October 14, 2008) Times Topics: Zimbabwe

Mr. Mugabe's efforts to placate his generals, as well as senior politicians in his party who are disgruntled about their loss of clout, culminated in his decision last week to unilaterally claim control of ministries that have been pivotal to his 28 years of unbroken political dominance and are seen as critical to protecting his senior generals from the risk of being charged with crimes.

Mr. Mugabe, 84, signed an agreement on Sept. 15 to share power with the political opposition, after an election season in which more than 100 opposition supporters were killed and thousands were beaten -- a campaign of violence that senior officials in Mr. Mugabe's party said was organized by the military.

A collapse of the deal would probably intensify Zimbabwe's status as an international pariah, deepen hunger and poverty, and set off a fresh exodus of refugees to neighboring countries. Yet since the agreement was signed, the country's three senior military commanders have worried about their fate under a unity government that includes the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, as prime minister -- a man they deeply distrust, who was himself viciously beaten by the police last year -- three officials close to Mr. Mugabe said in recent interviews.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the first Western leader to contest an election since the financial meltdown, won a second minority government mandate Tuesday, two television networks projected.

The Conservatives convinced voters they were the best choice to steer Canada through the economic turmoil, but projections by Global Television and CTV put them short of winning a majority. That means they would still need opposition party support to govern.

The official opposition Liberals, who have historically governed Canada for longer than any other party, trailed far behind in second place and looked set for their worst showing in at least 20 years.

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page

The big winner from the Canadian electoral system is the Bloc Québécois. But the main problem with the system isn't even that it's unfair -- the US Senate is horribly unfair -- but that the system is incredibly unresponsive to shifts in voter sentiment or behavior.

All other things equal, the system isn't just unresponsive, it's perverse. If certain moves towards the right by the conservative party (say, building nuclear power stations to extract oil from the Alberta tar sands) radicalise the left, the resulting splits benefit the right as long as it hangs onto its own base (it doesn't need more than 40%).

It might still be cured by better leadership among the liberals.

Antonio Banderas says he's tired of Hollywood, where he has lived since 1992, and wants to return to his Spanish homeland to develop his career as a director.

The 48-year-old, whose triumph in Hollywood as a Latin lover/villain figure paved the way for Spanish successors like Javier Bardem, says he now wants to create the sort of movies suffocated by Hollywood.

His latest project may be a case in point. Mr Banderas, with his film star wife Melanie Griffith by his side, is travelling the Arab world raising money for his forthcoming movie "Sultan", which he has written and hopes to direct and star in. It tells the story of Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Spain, who was forced to surrender his beloved Granada to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, a historic turning point that marked the birth of modern Spain.

The ageing Malaga-born screen star wants to tell the story from a pro-Arab viewpoint, and has been busy in recent days gathering funds from several Arab countries, tapping into their nostalgia for the legacy of 800 years of Arab rule in Andalusia.

It's the fault of male academics on the judging panels, says author Louise Doughty, one of tonight's Booker judges. They pick the literary and the obscure to impress their colleagues

One of the judges of this year's Man Booker Prize has launched an outspoken attack on male academics who sit on literary judging panels, ahead of the award ceremony tonight.

Louise Doughty, who has written five novels, said such men should not be invited on to judging panels as they "always have their eye on their reputations" and are too concerned with picking a "highbrow" author rather than a readable one. She added that they tended to made judgements based on "how well the winning book reflected on them", often choosing the most obscure and self-consciously highbrow novelist, rather than considering the best entry.

"I don't think it's a good idea to have academics as judges on these prizes," she said. "Academics always have their eye on their reputations and always have a vested interest to pick someone as literary and obscure as possible. I think academics are always looking over their shoulder. Academics automatically feel it [the choice of Booker winner] will reflect on their career," she said.

While widely considered to be the pinnacle of literary accomplishment, popularly acclaimed writers such as Sebastian Faulks, Mark Haddon and Robert Harris have never won the Booker. Critics like Doughty believe it is those authors' accessibility which counts against them.

STAR CITY, Russia: Garrett Reisman was on his way to this formerly secret military base for several weeks of training, making his way through Kennedy Airport, when his cellphone rang. It was his boss, Steven Lindsey, the head of NASA's astronaut office.

"Come back to Houston. They've canceled your training -- they're playing hardball," Reisman recalled his boss saying. He was caught in a momentarily important dispute between NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.

Ultimately, Reisman's aborted trip was just a bump in the road on the way to space: he spent three months aboard the International Space Station earlier this year, performed a spacewalk and even traded jokes over a video link with Stephen Colbert.

Everyone who works with the Russian space program has similar stories to tell of implacable bureaucrats, byzantine rules and decisions that seem capricious at best. And many of those stories are played out here in Star City, where cosmonauts and, now, astronauts from all over the world train to fly on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to go to the $100 billion International Space Station.

A team of archaeologists, scientists and software programmers has created a 3D virtual model of the city of Cologne as it was 2,000 years ago. Though not yet online, the software allows visitors to fly through the city in its Roman glory.

A new computer program will allow the curious to see Cologne, Germany's fourth-largest city, as it was almost 2,000 years ago, when it was a major northern outpost of the Roman Empire.

 "Now, for the first time, people will be able to visualize what an amazing city Cologne already was in antiquity," said Hansgerd Hellenkemper, the director of the city's Romano-Germanic Museum.

The city's history stretches back to 38 B.C. After Julius Caesar pushed the empire north during his conquest of Gaul in the mid-first century B.C., the Romans resettled the Germanic Ubii tribe on the banks Rhine River. In 50 A.D., the settlement was granted the status of an official Roman city and was given the name Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium. The city grew to be a major trading center, a status it still preserves today.

ISTANBUL: High school hurt for Havva Yilmaz. She tried out several selves. She ran away. Nothing felt right.

"There was no sincerity," she said. "It was shallow."

So at 16, she did something none of her friends had done: She put on an Islamic head scarf.

In most Muslim countries, that would be a nonevent. In Turkey, it was a rebellion. Turkey has built its modern identity on secularism.

Women on billboards do not wear scarves. The scarves are banned in schools and universities. So Yilmaz had to drop out of school. Her parents were angry. Her classmates stopped calling her.

Black widow spiders accidentally brought to Britain in consignments of fruit could soon establish colonies as the climate becomes milder, experts have warned.

Some fear it is only a "matter of time" before the venomous American arachnid follows other exotic species of spider and establishes itself in Britain as climate change makes the country warmer.

The warning comes amid calls from conservationists for import rules to be tightened up to prevent more and more non-native species being inadvertently introduced to the country and altering the eco-system.

Recent years have seen a raft of reports of "black widows" being spotted in bunches of bananas and other fruit by members of the public.

Many such sightings are thought to have been the so-called "false widow" - steatoda paykulliana, a spider from southern Europe which closely resembles the black widow.

When Clare Longrigg saw two Mafia clans tie the knot it was meant to end the feuding - but far worse was to come.

Outside a church in the centre of Naples, on a sunny September day in 1996, a teenage bride heaved her huge crinoline out of a massive black limousine. She was visibly pregnant as she swayed towards her husband-to-be, a spotty youth in a white tuxedo.

The groom looked nervous, as well he might. This wedding represented the union between two Naples mafia dynasties: the Giulianos and the Mazzarellas, who had fought each other in the struggle for domination of the drug trade, and were now joining forces.

I had crept in unnoticed, and slipped into a back pew. I sat, rapt throughout, taking in the fabulous outfits from Versace and Valentino, the couple's teenage friends clad mostly in fashionable, if funereal, black.

At the same time I was on edge, not knowing if this gunshot wedding would end in gunfire, given that the two families had previously sent killers after each other

"I like to say it's rather like being an archaeologist and opening up a tomb in a pyramid and finding an astronaut sitting inside. It shouldn't be there."

Science News Share   Blog   Cite Print   Email   Bookmark Did Termites Help Katrina Destroy New Orleans Floodwalls And Levees?

ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2008) -- Three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, people still speculate over causes of the destruction of the city's floodwall system. A new article in the fall issue of American Entomologist (Vol. 54, No. 3) suggests that Formosan subterranean termites played a large role.

Author Gregg Henderson, a professor at the Louisiana State University AgCenter, discovered Formosan subterranean termites (Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki) in the floodwall seams in August, 2000 - five years before Katrina struck - and noticed that the seams were made of waste residue from processed sugarcane. Known as bagasse, this waste residue is attractive to Formosan termites.

After the dikes were breached in 2005, Henderson and his colleague Alan Morgan inspected 100 seams for evidence of termites, including three areas where major breaks in the walls had occurred. 70% of the seams in the London Avenue Canal, which experienced two major breaks during Katrina, showed evidence of insect attack, as did 27% of seams inspected in the walls of the 17th Street Canal.

Česká spořitelna

Where does the stress come? What sounds differ from English expectations?

Thanks

You can't be me, I'm taken

Simply priceless.

- Jake

640 kiloton should be enough for anybody