EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - If the Lisbon Treaty is not in place by June 2009, member states should keep their word on slimming down the European Commission, centre-right MEPs have argued, warning that parliamentarians would be reluctant to support a prolonged mandate for the current team of commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

Fewer MEPs, fewer commissioners, argues a Spanish deputy

"Time is against us," Spanish conservative deputy Inigo Mendez de Vigo from the constitutional affairs committee in the European Parliament told journalists on Thursday (9 October), following this week's visit by the Irish foreign minister Micheal Martin in Brussels.

Ireland was originally supposed to indicate what it wants to do about the Lisbon Treaty, a reform of the 27-strong Union that was rejected in June by Irish voters, to the heads of states and governments set to gather for a two-day summit on 15 October.

But Mr Martin confirmed to MEPs on Monday (6 October) that Dublin needs time for "comprehensive research" and only by December does the country "expect to be able... to outline the necessary steps to achieve our objective of continued full engagement in the Union."

Belgrade has expelled the Montenegrin and Macedonian ambassadors in reaction to the two countries' recognition of Kosovo, reports said Friday.

Podgorica and Skopje recognized Kosovo, a territory Serbia still claims as its province, Thursday night, some eight months after it unilaterally declared independence.

Though it was certain to strain ties with Serbia, a major trade and economic partner, Montenegro and Macedonia jointly said they "remain committed to further promotion of ... relations with Serbia."

Montenegrin ambassador, Anka Vojvodic, was immediately told she had 48 hours to leave Serbia. "It is not a clever and political move," Vojvodic was quoted as saying.

Montenegro and Macedonia brought the tally of countries that now recognize Kosovo to 50.

One of the German government's most ambitious and arduously negotiated projects fell victim to the financial crisis on Thursday. The planned IPO of Deutsche Bahn have been put on hold. German commentators have their doubts if it will ever get back on track.

Wave bye-bye to the privatization of German rail. With the global financial crisis showing no sign of abating, German crisis managers find themselves both adjusting future budgetary expectations and reconsidering earlier economic decisions. Among the objects of second-guessing are plans to privatize Deutsche Bahn, Germany's national railway company. The initial public offering process had been scheduled to begin on Monday and the company, expecting to take in upwards of €4 billion, had already been courting international investors for months.

Thursday, government officials announced that the privatization would be delayed until further notice. "We are not going to put the assets on the capital markets at the wrong time," Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück said.

The postponement is a bitter pill to swallow for Germany's ruling "Grand Coalition" between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. The privatization plans -- which called for the company's passenger, freight and logistic divisions to be spun off into a holding company, 24.9 percent of which was to be privatized -- were the product of months of arduous negotiations between the coalition partners. It was also among the government's few headlining achievements during its three years in power.

OSLO: The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 2008 peace prize on Friday to Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president who has been associated over decades with peace efforts and quiet, cautious diplomacy from Asia to Africa and Europe.

Out of 197 people nominated for the annual prize, the committee said, Ahtisaari had been chosen "for his important efforts in several continents and over three decades to resolve international conflicts."

To outsiders, Ahtisaari, 71, has often seemed an undemonstrative and aloof figure. But some people who worked with him praised what Gareth Evans, the head of the nongovernmental International Crisis Group in Brussels called "charm and humor" in dealing with his various negotiating partners.

He has played a central role in ending conflicts that took root in the late 20th century and threatened the early 21st century with conflagrations in many places, some of them remote and all of them complex, presenting mediators with tangles of ethnic

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - With EU states nearing agreement on relaxing Belarus sanctions on Monday (13 October), the man that Minsk hired to help do the job - British public relations magnate Lord Timothy Bell - tells the EUobserver about unmaking the image of a dictator.

"The whole world is absolutely overwhelmed by an off-the-cuff remark by Condoleezza Rice, who as far as I know has neither met him nor been there," Lord Bell said, on the US secretary of state's 2006 bon mot - "the last dictatorship in Europe" - to describe Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko's regime.

Lukashenko talks to media during the latest elections, but selling him in Brussels is about more than placing newspaper stories

"When I go there, I mix perfectly happily with ordinary people. I see a country that has a perfectly nice atmosphere about it, people are very relaxed, people I talk to in hotels, bars and restaurants don't keep looking over their shoulder. But it's being described in the media in the way Ceausescu's Romania was described."

The Belarussian government hired the British peer - who once advised former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and today also represents anti-Kremlin exile Boris Berezovsky - in July to help persuade the EU to drop a visa ban list on Belarus top brass.

EUOBSERVER/TBILISI - Russian troops still remain in some parts of Abkhazia and South Ossetia previously controlled by the Georgian police, moves that will be brought up at the upcoming talks in Geneva, minister for re-integration Temuri Yakobashvili told the EUObserver on Friday (10 October).

On the sunny streets of Tbilisi, bordered by impressive plane trees, life seems back to normal after the conflict. "It looks normal, but it's not quite the same", a teenager says when asked about the daily life in the aftermath of the Russian war. The scars are still fresh and visible. Buses still carry English-speaking banners with "Stop the Russian aggression on Georgia," while some bookshops have posters in their windows with the word "Fuck" under Putin's image.

Russian troops still occupy territories that were under Georgian control before the August war.

Meanwhile, in Gori, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said at a press conference on Friday that Russian troops have "partly" withdrawn from the outposts outside the two breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in line with the 10 October deadline contained within the ceasefire agreement, AFP and Reuters report.

The representative of the French EU presidency who brokered the agreement also stressed that the Russians need to withdraw to the positions they held prior to 7 August, including the Akhalgori district in South Ossetia, which used to be under Georgian control before the war.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is to propose a revision of EU state aid rules to encourage car makers to produce greener cars, as well as an EU aid plan which would allow European car producers to get loans at preferential rates.

Mr Sarkozy, also the current EU chair-in-office, said while attending the World Automobile Fair in Paris on Thursday (9 October) that the EU needs looser state aid rules in order to reach its own goals in the field of its climate and energy package, namely to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to boost the use of renewable energy by 20 percent by the year 2020.

France pledged €400 million over the next four years to support the development of more eco-friendly cars

He added that the US is already offering state aid to its car manufacturers, referring to a vote by the US Congress last week to give cheap loans to Ford, General Motors and Chrysler to help them adapt to new emissions rules.

"The US Treasury is preparing to grant $25 million in long-term loans at unbeatable rates to US car makers for them to renovate their plants that are more than 20 years old," the French president said.

TBILISI, Georgia: European leaders confirmed Friday that Russians had met an Oct. 10 deadline to withdraw troops from buffer zones outside South Ossetia and Abkhazia, though Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France said Russia had only "partially complied" with a European-brokered peace accord.

Georgia formally protested the continuing presence of Russian troops in Akhalgori District, an ethnically Georgian section of South Ossetia, and of the Kodori Gorge in Abkhazia, held by Georgian forces until the August war.

In a statement, the Georgian state minister for reintegration, Temuri Yakobashvili, said, "It has become evident that the Russian government is not intending to fulfill" a provision of the French-brokered peace accord that requires both sides to pull back troops to prewar positions. Georgia also said Russia was keeping 7,600 troops in Abkhazia and South Ossetia - more than were present before the war.

After visiting villages recently ceded back to Georgian control, Kouchner said the peace accord was "being fulfilled gradually." He said European leaders would discuss "the full liberation of Georgia from Russian troops," including the return of refugees and the status of Akhalgori and Kodori, at a meeting in Geneva on Oct. 15.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus says that greed has destroyed the world's financial system. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with him about the profit motive, social consciousness and what should be done to end the financial crisis.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Yunus, for years you have been preaching a more socially conscious way of doing business and have denounced the narrow focus on maximizing profit as harmful. Now, the entire financial system is wobbling ...

 Muhammad Yunus says that profit should not be the only reason that businesses exist. Yunus: The current turn of events makes me sad. It is certainly not something I am happy about. The collapse has hurt so many people and has suddenly made the entire world unstable. We should now be concentrating on making sure that such a financial crisis does not happen again.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What should be done?

Yunus: There are huge holes in the current financial system that need to be plugged. The market is clearly not able to solve these problems itself, and now people are having to run to the governments to ask for emergency assistance. That is not a good sign because it shows that trust in the markets has evaporated. At the moment, there is unfortunately no other option than for government takeovers and government support. That is currently the method being used to combat the crisis -- a method kicked off with the $700 billion bailout package passed in the US. In Germany, the government has likewise jumped into the fray.

It is a steep bill. Our shrinking forests cost us up to $5 trillion a year -- far more than the current banking crisis. Environmentalists hope the sobering calculation, made by a European Union commissioned team, will focus political will on funding conservation.

 Deforestation costs more than the banking crisis, a study shows. How to put a price tag on nature? That conundrum is at the heart of research by a team headed by Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev. They have found a way of calculating a figure for environmental damage and loss of biodiversity in forests. And the price is high: At between $2 trillion and $5 trillion per year it dwarfs the cost of the current financial crisis which economists gauge at about $1.5 trillion.

Entitled "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity," the report was originally published in May but has returned to the spotlight at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona this week. Conservationists gathered at the event have said it underscores the need to ramp up funding for environmental protection.

And when making traditional economic calculations, it is all too easy to overlook natural reserves like food, fibers, fuel, clean water, healthy soil and protection from floods, the report said. "Though our well being is totally dependent upon these 'ecosystem services' they are predominantly public goods with no markets and no prices, so they often are not detected by our current economic compass."

Here we go again.

Having fought three rather pointless - though at times bitter - little wars over fishing limits, Britain and Iceland have now allowed a problem over British deposits in a failed Icelandic bank to become a crisis.

Instead of two North Atlantic islands who are partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and who both charged into financial danger zones quietly sorting this out, prime ministers have swapped insults. Echoes of those cod wars are heard.

The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has publicly declared Icelandic actions to be "effectively illegal" and "unacceptable" and the Icelandic Prime Minister, Gier Haarde, has expressed his annoyance that the UK used anti-terrorism legislation to seize assets in Britain of the one of the Icelandic banks.

In a situation where people's money is at stake, one government tends to blame another and vice versa.

The credit crisis is spilling over into the grain industry as international buyers find themselves unable to come up with payment, forcing sellers to shoulder often substantial losses.

Before cargoes can be loaded at port, buyers typically must produce proof they are good for the money. But more deals are falling through as sellers decide they don't trust the financial institution named in the buyer's letter of credit, analysts said.

"There's all kinds of stuff stacked up on docks right now that can't be shipped because people can't get letters of credit," said Bill Gary, president of Commodity Information Systems in Oklahoma City. "The problem is not demand, and it's not supply because we have plenty of supply. It's finding anyone who can come up with the credit to buy."

So far the problem is mostly being felt in U.S. and South American ports, but observers say it is only a matter of time before it hits Canada.

"We've got a nightmare in front of us and a lot of people are concerned it's going to get a lot worse," said Anthony Temple, a grain marketing expert based in Vancouver.

Hat tip to Zandar1 on BT

"Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char

"There's all kinds of stuff stacked up on docks right now that can't be shipped because people can't get letters of credit," said Bill Gary, president of Commodity Information Systems in Oklahoma City. "The problem is not demand, and it's not supply because we have plenty of supply. It's finding anyone who can come up with the credit to buy."

U.S. stock markets gyrated wildly yesterday as the world's top finance ministers met in Washington to hammer out a joint set of principles aimed at containing the financial crisis and restoring badly damaged confidence.

[...]

Over the past five days, the Dow Jones industrial average has registered the biggest weekly percentage decline in its 112-year history, surpassing the record decline set during the Depression, in the week ending July 22, 1933.

Finance ministers from the world's seven biggest industrialized economies, in Washington for a regularly scheduled meeting, issued a communique last night vowing to "take all necessary steps to unfreeze credit and money markets" and to "use all available tools" to prop up and prevent the failure of institutions critical to the financial system.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. confirmed earlier reports that the United States is drawing up plans to buy equity stakes in financial firms. He said federal money would be offered on a "standardized" basis to all banks in a way that would attract new private capital, as well.

The finance ministers' communique was designed to assure investors that world leaders would work in concert rather than at cross-purposes in forging measures to aid besieged financial institutions. It laid out common guidelines that endorsed the injection of capital into the banking system, the purchase of troubled assets from banks and broader guarantees of deposits. Europeans were also pressing for guarantees of interbank lending, though the Bush administration was reluctant to embrace the measure.

Call it a crash, call it a rout, but please don't describe yesterday's selling as irrational. The frightening part is that so many of the pressures on the market could be explained. If you were a shareholder in an American bank, would you want to own your stock over a long weekend? You know that $400bn or so of losses from Lehman Brothers' bonds are about to emerge, but you don't know where. Your shareholding could be worthless on Tuesday.

If your bank emerges unscathed, you might pay a 10% premium to buy back your investment next week, but that can seem a reasonable price to pay for a few nights of more restful sleep.

Equally, would any investor wish to put faith in a coordinated response to the crisis from leaders of Group of Seven wealthy nations? The world's major central banks managed to cut interest rates in a coordinated manner on Wednesday, but saving the global banking system in an afternoon is a bigger job.

DETROIT -- General Motors is in preliminary talks about a possible merger with Chrysler, a deal that could drastically remake the landscape of the auto industry by reducing the Big Three of Detroit automakers to the Big Two.

The talks between G.M. and Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm that owns Chrysler, began more than a month ago, and the negotiations are not certain to produce a deal. Two people close to the process said the chances of a merger were "50-50" as of Friday and would most likely still take weeks to work out.

A merger would be a historic event, with two of the most iconic names in American industry coming together to survive in an increasingly difficult environment. Both have roots dating back decades in Detroit and, with Ford, long dominated the auto industry -- until Japanese and other foreign car makers began making inroads into the American market.

The auto industry is being pummeled from all sides -- by high gas prices that have soured consumers on profitable S.U.V.'s, by a softening economy that has scared shoppers away from showrooms, and by tight credit that is making it difficult for willing buyers to obtain loans. Both G.M. and Chrysler have been struggling with product lineups that are out of sync with consumer demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.

General Motors' stock has fallen from more than $43 a share last year to less than $5, and it is burning through its cash hoard at a rapid rate. Chrysler, as a private company, no longer needs to report its finances.

In the shade of the trees where they have been picking olives all morning, in this wadi, south-east of Nablus, a Palestinian farmer, Jamal Otman Koarik, and two of his daughters share a lunch of home-baked bread, zatar, oil, courgettes and salad with three visitors. It's a bucolic scene that could have happened any time in the past century. But what makes it notable in 2008 is that the guests who have been helping Mr Koarik pick the olives are Israeli Jews: a rabbi, an anthropologist and a youth worker, Hellela Siew.

Born in Tel Aviv, Ms Siew served in the army, took a university degree, then a teacher's diploma. Thirty-six years ago, she took the tough decision to emigrate to London, telling her parents: "I won't come back until there's peace." Ms Siew, who is now 64, remains an Israeli citizen but now lives with her British husband in Hebden Bridge. She has kept to her word, except that each autumn she comes back to stay in her hometown with her relatives and spends each day of the two-month harvest season picking olives on Palestinian farmland in the West Bank.

And Ms Siew does that for a purpose. Up on the ridge above us, you can see the red roofs of Itamar, a notably hard-line Jewish settlement, and she is here to help protect the Palestinian farmers from the threat of settler violence which has so often scarred the olive harvests.

NATO defense ministers reached a deal over controversial plans to launch direct attacks on the thriving drugs trade in Afghanistan, which the US says helps fund the Taliban insurgency raging in the country.

Ministers overcame resistance to the plans from several NATO states -- notably Germany, Italy and Spain -- by accepting that any attacks against opium laboratories would be coordinated with the Afghan authorities.

"There is a formal agreement between the NATO nations to fight drug trafficking," a diplomat confirmed as defense ministers met in the Hungarian capital Budapest for a two-day meeting to discuss issues ranging from the war in Afghanistan to Georgia's NATO membership bid and piracy off the Somali coast.

NATO spokesman James Appathurai said the alliance's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would "act in concert with the Afghans, against facilities and facilitators supporting the insurgency."

The linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky has long been a critic of American consumerism and imperialism. SPIEGEL spoke to him about the current crisis of capitalism, Barack Obama's rhetoric and the compliance of the intellectual class.

SPIEGEL: Professor Chomsky, cathedrals of capitalism have collapsed, the conservative government is spending its final weeks in office with nationalization plans. How does that make you feel?

 A happy purchaser of a new iPhone. "Consumption distracts people. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption." Chomsky: The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable, its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

SPIEGEL: What exactly did you anticipate?

Chomsky: In the financial industry, as in other industries, there are risks that are left out of the calculation. If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion. Those are the external costs of our transaction. In the case of financial institutions, they are huge.

A deadly outbreak of cholera in Iraq is being blamed on a scandal involving corrupt officials who failed to sterilise the local drinking water because they were bribed to buy chlorine from Iran that was long past its expiration date.

The centre of the epidemic is in Babil province, south of Baghdad, in the marshy lands east of the Euphrates river, not far from the ruins of ancient Babylon. In Baghdad, where half the six million population has no access to clean drinking water, people are now drinking only bottled or boiled water.

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has appointed a commission of inquiry to find out why ineffective chlorine was being used. He is also refusing to release three officials under arrest despite demands from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) to which they are linked. In the town of al-Madhatiya, in southern Babil, a councillor involved in buying the chlorine was reportedly released after militiamen connected to ISCI intimidated police into freeing him.

The scandal over the contract is becoming a test case of the Maliki government's willingness to tackle the pervasive corruption in Iraq where officials see their jobs primarily as a way of enriching themselves through bribes. It is also a test of his ability to exercise central control over ISCI and parties which have been hitherto dominant outside Baghdad.

On Sunday, en route to Astana, Kazakhstan, after a "very nice trip to India", US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters accompanying her, "I just wish I could have stayed longer in India". New Delhi must be one of a handful of capitals where officials from the George W Bush administration receive an expectant welcome, and the doomsday warnings emitted from New York and Washington do not seem to matter.

But there was another reason for Rice's trepidation as her jet descended to Astana - US influence and prestige in Central Asia and the Caspian region has again plummeted. Rice realizes there is hardly any time left to retrieve lost ground, and the Bill Clinton administration's legacy in the Caspian and Central Asia has largely dissipated. Central to this has been the failure of the Bush

administration to handle relations with Russia. The stocktaking has already begun.

Writing in The Washington Post on Wednesday, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz rebuked the Bush administration for its "drift towards confrontation with Russia" and pointed out that "isolating Russia is not a sustainable long-range policy". They said much of Europe is "uneasy". Their target was Rice, a self-styled "Sovietologist", and her inexcusably vitriolic attack on the Kremlin in a speech at the Marshall Fund of Germany in Washington on September 18.

Find out which US states are suffering the most in the current economic and financial crisis.

(move the mouse over the indicators on the left)

"Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char

Venezuela's government has shut all branches of restaurant chain McDonald's for 48 hours, citing tax irregularities, officials have said.

The head of the country's tax agency, Jose David Cabello, said the chain had inconsistencies in its accounts.

The 115 branches in Venezuela were closed from Thursday to Saturday.

Peace efforts in Pakistan received a major blow yesterday when a gathering of the country's nascent anti-Taliban tribal movement was bombed, killing up to 50 and injuring 100.

The suicide attack occurred in the tribal belt running along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, in the strategically important Orakzai area, which is used as a crossing point by Taliban and al-Qaida militants.

Some 600 tribal members had come together for a traditional gathering, known as a jirga, when the bomber struck.

The meeting was finalising the establishment of a militia, according to officials, and plans had been made to demolish a local Taliban headquarters immediately afterwards. A cleric from Orakzai, Maulana Jamil Hasan, said: "If peace committees are not safe, then who in this country can feel secure?" [They were going to demolish their opponents' headquarters? How peaceful is that? -ed.]

Tribesmen in Pakistan's wild north-west have been forming militias, known as lashkars, to fight extremists as Pakistan's security forces struggle. But the polarisation of tribesmen between pro-Taliban and anti-Taliban elements has led to predictions of civil war in the area.

Gov. Sarah Palin abused the powers of her office by pressuring subordinates to try to get her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired, an investigation by the Alaska Legislature has concluded. The inquiry found, however, that she was within her right to dismiss her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, who was the trooper's boss.

A 263-page report released Friday by lawmakers in Alaska found that Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had herself exerted pressure to get Trooper Michael Wooten dismissed, as well as allowed her husband and subordinates to press for his firing, largely as a result of his temperament and past disciplinary problems.

"Such impermissible and repeated contacts," the report states, "create conflicts of interests for subordinate employees who must choose to either please a superior or run the risk of facing that superior's displeasure and the possible consequences of that displeasure." The report concludes that the action was a violation of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

What now lies ahead is not fully known at this point. Ms. Palin could be censured by the Legislature, but that is unlikely.

Ms. Palin, who had been elected governor in 2006, was tapped as Senator John McCain's running mate in late August, about a month after an inquiry was opened into her firing of Mr. Monegan. Her political ascendancy took what was essentially a state personnel matter and elevated it into a national issue, one that has been simmering in the background of an increasingly heated presidential race.

TEHRAN -- Merchants in traditional bazaars in several large cities closed their shops this week to protest a decision by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to enforce the nation's first ever sales tax.

The protests, the largest since Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, began Saturday in the central city of Isfahan when jewelers closed their shops, newspapers reported Wednesday. The strike spread, and by Tuesday bazaars in the cities of Shiraz, Tabriz, Qazvin and Mashhad had followed suit. The police clashed Wednesday with a group of shopkeepers who gathered outside the bazaar in Isfahan, the daily newspaper Sarmayeh reported.

In Tehran, only the gold merchants joined the strike.

Bazaars are the backbone of the country's traditional economy. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, merchants allied with the clergy, and their strikes helped overthrow the government.

They still wield significant power, and this is the first time since the revolution that they have protested on such a large scale. The news media refrained from reporting the protests until Wednesday because of the delicacy of the issue.

[...]

"These protests are not the result of the tax law," said Saeed Leylaz, a political analyst and an economist in Tehran. He added, "These shopkeepers are the middle class who are fed up with the pressures and are now showing their frustration in a civil protest."

LAKEVILLE, Minn. -- After a week of trying to portray Senator Barack Obama as a friend of terrorists who would drive the country into bankruptcy, Senator John McCain abruptly changed his tone on Friday and told voters at a town-hall-style meeting that Mr. Obama was "a decent person" and a "family man" and suggested that he would be an acceptable president should he win the White House.

But moments later, Mr. McCain, the Republican nominee, renewed his attacks on Mr. Obama for his association with the 1960s radical William Ayers and told the crowd, "Mr. Obama's political career was launched in Mr. Ayers' living room."

The dizzying statements came on a confused day when Mr. McCain's campaign pounded Mr. Obama as a "liar" in an incendiary television commercial about Mr. Ayers and as Mr. McCain abruptly announced another economic policy proposal, this time a plan to suspend mandatory withdrawals from 401(k) retirement accounts.

The events reflected Mr. McCain's frequently lurching campaign. For the past several weeks, as the polls have shown Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, gaining increasing ground, Mr. McCain's traveling road show has veered from message to message and from pumping up hostile crowds to trying to calm them down. Each news cycle seem to bring another tactic as the campaign appears to be trying anything and everything to see what might work.

I know, this is lacking in intrinsic information value. But this is an example of a "McCain=confused" frame emerging in the MSM.

"Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease." - Kurt Vonnegut

For days, New Yorkers had walked past workmen installing a pet shop. Spotting what appeared to be a leopard and monkey through the window on 7th Avenue, a few had even marched in to complain about the small space in which the wild animals were confined. But yesterday, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill was revealed to be the latest work by the street artist Banksy, complete with convincingly real "animatronic" creatures that moved around the store to beguile onlookers.

The pet shop is open for business every day until midnight until 31 October and although people cannot buy its contents, they can walk in and view the "exhibition", Banksy's first in New York.

Artworks inside include two fish fingers floating in a fish bowl, robotic rabbits wearing pearl necklaces, a couple of chicken nuggets which appear to be sipping ketchup, hot dogs writhing underneath heat lamps and a CCTV camera nurturing its young. A middle-aged man in overalls, employed by Banksy, dragged an "Open for Business" sign on to the pavement yesterday to mark its opening.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2008) -- The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 kilometers (1.74 miles) beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat (140 degrees