If the Lisbon Treaty addressed issues of special concern to the Irish, such as the country's stance on abortion, taxation and political neutrality, a new poll indicates more "yes" than "no" votes.

Irish voters, who had rejected the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum last June, plunging the European Union into a crisis, said they may approve a revised document, according to a TNS poll conducted by the Irish Times.

In the poll, the public was asked how they would vote if the treaty was modified to contain opt out clauses for issues of special concern, such as Ireland's abortion laws, which are far more restrictive than most members of the 27 nation bloc and the country's special stance on political neutrality and taxation.

The poll, which was carried out for the European Commission and the Irish government last week, surveyed a broad swath of voters. It showed that if such issues were clarified in special declarations, 43% of voters would vote in favour of the treaty and 39% would vote against it, with the remaining respondents expressing no opinion.  A representative sampling of 1,000 voters were questioned in face to face interview and is subject to a three percent margin of error.

A Russian military court will allow public and media access to the trial of three men charged over the murder investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, it ruled in a crucial first hearing.

Family members and supporters of the slain Kremlin critic had called for a public trial, though many observers had thought the case would be held behind closed doors.

 

"We will demand that the trial be open," Politkovskaya's son Ilya Politkovsky told the news agency AFP. "My mother was a journalist and I think it's impossible to have... a closed trial."

 

One of the four defendants in the case, Pavel Ryaguzov, is a Federal Security Service agent, meaning special attention will likely go towards keeping the minutia of the case out of public reach.

 

Ryaguzov is suspected of having provided Politkovskaya's home address to her killers and is charged with abuse of office. Three others, including a former police investigator, are also being tried for the killing.

The European Commission and China agreed Monday to beef up controls on potentially dangerous Chinese products and food exported to the EU in the wake of high profile scares involving Chinese goods.

A major scandal involving contaminated milk powder that left at least four infants dead and 53,000 others hospitalized in China provided impetus for the deal, although European officials have been concerned about the safety of products made in China for some time now.

 

Under the agreement, China will now be obliged to inform the European Union about what it is doing to track down dangerous goods. The deal allows for officials from the EU and China to carry out coordinated checks on producers to ensure safety standards are being met.

 

Chinese officials will also be given access to the EU's Rapid Alert System for Feed and Food (RASFF), where authorities can exchange information about what measures are being taken to ensure food safety.

 

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Prague and Warsaw have poured cold water on French calls for a moratorium on a planned US missile shield in Europe, with both capitals saying that president Nicolas Sarkozy overstepped his mandate.

"I don't think that third countries, even such good friends as France, can have a particular right to express themselves on this issue," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Saturday (15 November).

At the NATO summit in Bucharest in April this year, the entire 26-nation Alliance - including France - backed the planned US missile shield in Europe

The Polish leader described Mr Sarkozy's comments as his "own point of view, [with] no impact of the future of the project," according to AFP, adding that "The question of the anti-missile shield is governed by an agreement between Poland and the United States."

A similar message came from the Czech republic, with the country's deputy prime minister Alexandr Vondra saying he was taken by surprise.

"France did not discuss its viewpoint with us ... As far as I know, the French presidency mandate for the EU-Russia summit did not contain a position on the US missile defence system," he said.

EUOBSERVER / FOCUS - Extreme right parties, from anti-immigrant and xenophobic populists to outright neo-fascists, are almost certain to increase their presence in the European Parliament after the 2009 elections unless the European Union and mainstream parties wake up to the threat and take action, long-time monitors of far right activities are warning.

Far right rally in Germany

UK Labour MEP Glyn Ford, one of the parliament's own leading experts on extreme right parties and author of the European Parliament's landmark 1991 inquiry into racism and xenophobia in Europe, has said that ahead of the financial crisis, the various far-right parties were already on track to achieving a rise in their numbers from the current 57 deputies to between 60 and 70 in the June 2009 elections.

However, if the financial crisis results in a sharp increase in unemployment across the bloc, Mr Ford worries that such parties will take advantage of the anger and bitterness such economic dislocation causes and achieve an even higher seat count.

"The 'Fascist Right' would probably win high twenties to low thirties," given their current levels of support in different member states, Mr Ford predicts. "Equally, the 'Fascist Lite' parties would gain thirty to forty seats."

For years an Estonian government official has apparently been collecting the most intimate secrets of NATO and the EU -- and passing them on to the Russians. The case is a disaster for Brussels.

Communications between the suspected top spy and his commanding officer seemed like a throwback to the Cold War. Investigators allege that in order to send messages to his Russian contact, Herman Simm, 61, used a converted radio which looked like a relic from yesteryear's world of consumer electronics. But there was nothing old-fashioned about what Simm, a high-ranking official in the Estonian Defense Ministry in Tallinn, reportedly transmitted to Moscow over the years. It was the very latest intelligence information.

Although Simm was arrested with his wife Heete in the Estonian capital Tallinn on Sept. 21, this spy story -- which has been largely kept under wraps until now -- primarily concerns the European Union and NATO based in faraway Brussels. Since Simm was responsible for dealing with classified information in Tallinn, he had access to nearly all documents exchanged within the EU and NATO. Officials who are familiar with the case assume that "virtually everything" that circulates between EU member states was passed on to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR -- including confidential analyses by NATO on the Kosovo crisis, the war in Georgia and even the missile defense program. Investigators believe that Simm was a "big fish."

Estonian capital city Tallinn: For the former Soviet state, the scandal has become the downside of a political success story. Meanwhile, a number of investigative teams from the EU and NATO have flown to Tallinn to probe the extent of the intelligence disaster. The investigation is being led by the NATO Office for Security, which is headed by an American official. As investigators pursue their work, they continue to unearth mounting evidence pointing to the enormity of the betrayal. A German government official has called the situation a "catastrophe," and Jaanus Rahumägi, a member of Estonia's national parliament who heads the parliamentary oversight committee for the government security agency, fears "historic damage."

A weekend of strife has brought the French Socialist Party to its knees, setting the stage for a leadership showdown this week between two female enemies: Ségolène Royal, the former presidential candidate, and Martine Aubry, a former leftwing Cabinet minister.

The pair emerged in front yesterday from the wreckage of a party conference at Rheims that collapsed into a festival of loathing between Ms Royal's upstart camp and an old guard now backing Ms Aubry, 58.

Ms Royal, 55, finished second in last year's presidential election but, for much of the party executive, she remains a lightweight usurper with an evangelical streak. After being drowned out by jeering at the conference, she appealed in vain for an end to the internecine bloodshed. "We will have to forget all the unpleasant and at times violent words, erase them and one day forgive each other," she said.

The former presidential contender is popular at the grass roots as a charismatic modern politician - unlike Ms Aubry, who is seen by many as an old-guard warhorse.

A UMP MP killed a woman (presumed to be his parner or lover) and then killed himself. I don't know the story behind it, nor care, but the comment about Sarkozy is priceless, given that he uses the opportunity of any highly visible crime to push publicly for new tougher laws (just last week, someone ran off from a psychiatric ward and stabbed someone to death in Grenoble - Sarkozy of course called for a law to toughen conditions in psychaitric wards).

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Chancellor Merkel is holding an emergency meeting with Opel's management to work out a plan to aid the troubled carmaker. But two Cabinet members emphasized an industry-wide bailout was not the solution.

"I have invited the head of (Opel) Germany, the head of Europe and the union representative so we can discuss on Monday the situation at Opel," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters ahead of an emergency meeting of major economies here to deal with the global financial crisis.

 

"The federal government, the economy minister and the finance minister are going to take control of this matter," she said of the talks with Opel, a unit of faltering US auto giant General Motors.

An weekend agreement could see Iceland getting the international aid it needs to emergy from the crisis that has devastated its economy. Iceland will repay thousands of foreign savers who had money in now-frozen accounts

The European Commission on Monday said the agreement reached with several EU states on how to repay thousands of foreigns who had accounts in Iceland paves the way for aid to start flowing to the country, including a package from the International Monetary Fund worth as much as $6 billion.

 

Those accounts have been at the center of a tensions between Iceland and its European neighbors. Britain and the Netherlands have been delaying the IMF package, which has deprived Iceland of badly needed funds to revive its currency trade and restart the economy.

 

"We welcome the announcement by Iceland that it will apply EU rules on the protection of bank deposits," Amelia Torres, spokeswoman for the European Commission, said at a press conference on Monday.

The world's 20 leading industrialised and emerging nations have backed fiscal stimulus plans to boost their economies but reached no agreement to co-ordinate such action - the preferred option of a number of European Union nations.

The gathered leaders pledged to take over next four months a series of steps to "support the global economy and stabilise financial markets."

G20 leaders have agreed to some new regulation of banks and insurance houses, but there will be no new global financial architecture

"We are determined to enhance our co-operation and work together to restore global growth and achieve needed reforms in the world's financial systems," the group of 20 nations stated after a top-level meeting in Washington on Saturday (15 November).

However, leaders reached no agreement on any internationally co-ordinated series of tax cuts and government spending to prime the economic pump, as some European leaders had favoured heading into the summit.

The final conclusions also came well short of delivering any construction of a new global financial architecture or "refounding capitalism" as the current chair of the EU presidency, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, had famously demanded.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) could help out struggling European car makers with a credit programme worth up to €40 billion, with details expected next week, the Financial Times reports.

With car sales dropping 15.5 percent in Western Europe in the past month, car makers on the continent are turning to national governments and EU institutions to rescue them from the spreading recession.

European carmakers are lobbying Brussels, Berlin, London and Paris to help secure their future

The €40 billion rescue package from the EIB would be double the amount the American congress is proposing to save US car giants General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler.

Details of the bail-out could be put forward next week, when the European Commission expected to make proposals to bolster struggling industries in the face of the economic slowdown.

Top executives of German car maker Opel are to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday (17 November) in a special cabinet session. Opel is struggling "not to go under" with its American owner General Motors, threatened by bankruptcy, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports.

In the end, delegates to the financial summit of industrial and emerging economies delivered a closing statement without any concrete decisions. Host Bush has nothing left to say as the world eagerly awaits his successor Obama. What is clear, though, is that G-20's influence will grow.

Washington's National Building Museum is an impressive structure. In this splendid setting, President George W. Bush stood in front of a blue and green map of the world. The members of the G-20 had just finished their summit on the global financial crisis and Bush spoke as optimistically as a foreman at a topping out ceremony. The leaders were "adapting our financial systems to the realities of the 21st century," he said. "Our nations agree that we must make the markets -- the financial markets more transparent and accountable."

TV coverage of Saturday's speech kept breaking up due to the stormy weather in Washington. News stations switched instead to cover firestorms in California. It was suitably symbolic: In these stormy times, Bush's rhetoric cannot hide the fact that the most he can do is lay the foundations for future construction.

Bush at the closing press conference: "Goodbye"

The outgoing president quoted the summit communiqué, in which the participants committed themselves to continuing the "vigorous efforts ... to stabilize the financial system." Explicitly, the 20 countries advocated greater oversight of ratings agencies and stronger regulation of hedge funds. Consumer protection is to be bolstered and international financial institutions should be reformed. In addition, there should be clearer accounting standards and a review of the way managers are paid. There was no announcement of a global stimulus package, only initiatives by individual states. The declaration amounts to five pages. It is an impressive list. However, the many sentences describe principles rather than concrete measures.

The summit merely showed that the leaders have understood the roots of the crisis. They even devote a paragraph to explain how there was no "adequate appreciation" of the risks the financial markets posed.

The real message from Washington, though, was the following: We understand the gravity of the situation, but real action will have to wait. It will have to wait until one of the primary architects of any new financial structure takes office: US President-elect Barack Obama.

By the time the next G-20 summit rolls around on April 30, the new president will be in office. In the meantime, G-20 delegations are to circulate detailed proposals by March 31 in preparation for that summit, which may be held in London.

Gordon Brown will claim today that his plans to cut taxes to keep the British economy moving have won the endorsement of leaders from the world's 20 largest economies.

The Prime Minister will use the conclusions of the G20 summit in Washington to justify plans to raise tax credits for the low paid and speed up building projects on schools, hospitals, housing and transport projects.

In the pre-Budget report a week today, the Government may also announce a boost to winter fuel payments. Changes to tax credits could help the 1.1m "losers" from last year's scrapping of the 10p income tax rate who missed out on compensation this year.

Government sources dismissed as "complete garbage" speculation that taxes could be cut by a massive £30bn. But the Washington meeting may have given the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, more room for manoeuvre.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the IMF, who attended, called for nations to approve a fiscal stimulus equal to 2 per cent of gross domestic product - about £30bn in Britain. Such a move, he said, would result in a 2 per cent increase in growth. When asked where fiscal stimulus was needed, he said: "Everywhere. Everywhere where it is possible."

WASHINGTON, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Italy is preparing a multi-year plan worth 80 billion euros ($101.5 billion) to help its ailing economy, Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti announced after the meeting of 20 nations to discuss the global financial crisis. Speaking at a news conference with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Tremonti said the plan would rely heavily on European Union funds and have a modest impact on the budget deficit. It will be presented as an emergency decree "in the coming days," Tremonti said. Both Tremonti and Berlusconi said the plan was worth 80 billion euros, but Tremonti explained that half of this would actually come from the use of EU funds Italy already receives. Before the end of this month the government will "set out the utilisation of EU funds of 40 billion euros over three years for the environment, research and development", he said. Italy has generally had a poor record in managing to find a use for funds allocated to it by the EU.

Sir Win Bischoff, chairman of Citigroup, today admitted that staff numbers in London and New York will be hit "heavily" as the US banking giant revealed plans to cut 52,000 staff across the globe.

The bank announced one of the biggest single employment culls in corporate history in electronic briefings with staff today.

Citigroup employs 11,000 people in the UK, including 1,800 staff at Egg, the internet banking group that it acquired from Prudential, the British insurance group, in May last year.

Speaking in Dubai, Sir Win said it would be irresponsible for Citigroup and other banks not to look at staff numbers in the current climate.

A new report released by the United Nations shows that climate-damaging CO2 emissions in the industrialized world have rebounded in the 21st century after dropping in the 1990s.

After a sharp dip following the collapse of the Soviet Union, global greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries began rising again between 2000 and 2006, according to a disappointing new report released on Monday by the United Nations.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought emissions tumbling down in the nineties, but they've crept back up since 2000.

Although CO2 levels are still down almost 4.7 percent compared with the baseline year of 1999, they rose 2.3 percent in the first seven years of the new century, from 17.6 billion tons in 2000 to 18 billion tons in 2006.

The report, which gathered information about 40 industrialized economies, showed an especially sharp rise in emissions from former Soviet bloc countries, whose emissions shot up 7.4 percent since 2000. The spike was not unexpected given the rapid recovery many post-Soviet economies have made after floundering in the 1990s.

Significantly, the report includes no information about economies in the developing world. Under the Kyoto Protocol, non-industrialized countries are under no obligation to either reduce emissions or even gather data on them.

Barack Obama's election as America's first black president has unleashed a wave of hate crimes across the nation, according to police and monitoring organisations.

Far from heralding a new age of tolerance, Mr Obama's victory in the November 4 poll has highlighted the stubborn racism that lingers within some elements of American society as opponents pour their frustration into vandalism, harassment, threats and even physical attacks.

Cross burnings, black figures hung from nooses, and schoolchildren chanting "Assassinate Obama" are just some of the incidents that have been documented by police from California to Maine.

THE future of one of the world's best known freedom struggles is being reassessed by Tibetan refugees in exile attending an unprecedented meeting at the Indian hill town of Dharamsala.

Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, called for the gathering to determine the "best possible future course of action to advance the Tibetan cause".

About 500 legislators, former ministers in the government-in-exile, heads of Tibetan associations and other prominent Tibetans gathered yesterday at a school auditorium in upper Dharamsala, for the five- day meeting.

For two decades the Dalai Lama has championed a "middle way" for the movement, incorporating a moderate demand for Tibetan "autonomy" under Chinese rule and a strict adherence to non-violent protest.

But there is agitation, especially among many young Tibetans, for the movement to adopt a tougher stance.

The president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, Tsewang Rigzin, said it was likely the issue of demanding independence rather than just autonomy would be canvassed at the meeting.

"I think that will come out," he said. "But we also have to talk about how to solve the current emergency situation inside Tibet."

Mullah Omar, the elusive leader of the anti-government Taliban, appears to have rejected an offer from Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, of protection in exchange for peace talks.

A Taliban spokesman rejected on Monday the offer of safe passage and reiterated that foreign troops had to leave before negotiations could start.

"As long as foreign occupiers remain in Afghanistan, we aren't ready for talks because they hold the power and talks won't bear fruit," Mullah Brother, the purported deputy leader of the Taliban, told the Reuters news agency by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.

"We are safe in Afghanistan and we have no need for Hamid Karzai's offer of safety".

Brother said the Taliban jihad, or holy war, will continue.

The Taliban has ruled out any talks as long as foreign troops remain in Afghanistan.

Karzai said on Sunday that condition was "unacceptable".

President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to pull US troops out of Iraq, crush al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and shut down the Guantanamo Bay camp as part of a dramatic foreign policy break with George W. Bush.

In his first major post-election interview, Mr Obama said repairing the stricken US economy will be his first priority, even at the cost of still-bigger budget deficits.

Following his election triumph of November 4, Mr Obama said at least one Republican would be in his cabinet and confirmed that he had met former Democratic primary rival Hillary Clinton last week.

But the president-elect refused to comment on speculation linking the former first lady to the job of secretary of state.

Mr Obama is accelerating his transition to inauguration day, resigning his Senate seat and appointing three more top aides to serve in his White House once he succeeds President Bush.

President-elect Barack Obama and John McCain are holding their first meeting since the US election, vowing to work together to "fix up the country".

The former rivals for the presidency are meeting at the Chicago offices of Mr Obama's transition team.

Also present at the meeting are Rahm Emanuel, who is to be Mr Obama's White House chief of staff, and Senator Lindsey Graham, an ally of Mr McCain.

Mr McCain said he "obviously" planned to help Mr Obama's administration.

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia -- Pirates captured a Saudi-owned supertanker loaded with more than $100 million worth of crude oil off the coast of Kenya, seizing the largest ship ever hijacked, United States Navy officials said Monday.

The hijacking follows a string of increasingly brazen attacks by Somali pirates in recent months, but this appears to be the first time that pirates have seized a full oil tanker.

"This is unprecedented," Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the Fifth Fleet, told Reuters. "It's the largest ship that we've seen pirated. It's three times the size of an aircraft carrier."

The International Maritime Bureau, the global clearinghouse for piracy reporting, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, has seen a sharp increase in maritime piracy this year.

Noel Choong, head of the piracy reporting center at the bureau, said Tuesday that 88 ships have been attacked in the Gulf of Aden alone this year. And 14 hijacked ships remain in the gulf -- the heavily armed hijackers still on board, with the crews, cargo and the vessels themselves being held for ransom.

Meanwhile:

Piracy gained a new level of international attention in September when a Ukrainian freighter packed with tanks, antiaircraft guns and other heavy weapons was captured. That freighter is still under pirate control.

BAGHDAD -- The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is systematically dismissing Iraqi oversight officials, who were installed to fight corruption in Iraqi ministries by order of the American occupation administration, which had hoped to bring Western standards of accountability to the notoriously opaque and graft-ridden bureaucracy here.

The dismissals, which were confirmed by senior Iraqi and American government officials on Sunday and Monday, have come as estimates of official Iraqi corruption have soared. One Iraqi former chief investigator recently testified before Congress that $13 billion in reconstruction funds from the United States had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste by Iraqi government officials.

The moves have not been publicly announced by Mr. Maliki's government, but word of them has begun to circulate through the layers of Iraqi bureaucracy as Parliament prepares to vote on a long-awaited security agreement.

SEOUL, South Korea -- To conservative critics, a widely used textbook's version of how American and Soviet forces took control of Korea from Japanese colonialists in 1945 shows all that is wrong with the way South Korean history is taught to young people today.

The fact no one disputes is that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet military swept into northern Korea and installed a friendly Communist government while an American military administration assumed control in the south.

But then the high school textbook takes a direction that has angered conservatives. It contends that the Japanese occupation was followed not by a free, self-determining Korea, but by a divided peninsula dominated once again by foreign powers.

"It was not our national flag that was hoisted to replace the Japanese flag. The flag that flew in its place was the American Stars and Stripes," reads the textbook, published by Kumsung Publishing.

"Our liberation through the Allied forces' victory prevented us from building a new country according to our own wishes," it adds.

The critics include the government of President Lee Myung-bak, the conservative who came to power this year with a pledge to overturn a decade of liberal policies that he said had coddled North Korea and denigrated the American alliance -- the alliance that liberals have accused of propping up South Korean dictators in the name of anti-Communism.

Just weeks before leaving office, the Interior Department's top lawyer has shifted half a dozen key deputies -- including two former political appointees who have been involved in controversial environmental decisions -- into senior civil service posts.

The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions, called "burrowing" by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs.

Similar efforts are taking place at other agencies. Two political hires at the Labor Department have already secured career posts there, and one at the Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to make the switch.

[...]

The personnel moves come as Bush administration officials are scrambling to cement in place policy and regulatory initiatives that touch on issues such as federal drinking-water standards, air quality at national parks, mountaintop mining and fisheries limits.

A Dutch couple visiting India's Bihar state, were charged an astronomical 10,000 rupees ($204) for four samosas, the spicy potato-stuffed snack.

They paid the sum to a hawker at the famous cattle fair in Sonepur after a "heated argument".

The price worked out at $51 per samosa. They normally cost about two rupees 50 paise, about five US cents.

The tourists then sought help from police who forced the salesman to return 9,990 rupees ($203.87).

The Sonepur cattle fair runs for a month every year from the middle of November and is attended by a large number of foreign tourists.

It is as thick as your arm, gungy and smells disgusting - and it has just been caught on camera for what is thought to be the first time.

A crew has managed to record a whale shark - the world's biggest fish - expelling food waste, which was then scooped up for research.

Biologist Mark Meekan said the sample had helped him to discover more about the giant creature's feeding habits.

The footage forms part of a BBC Natural World wildlife programme: Whale Shark.

Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) are related to great whites, but are far less fearsome - they are filter feeders, swimming about with their enormous mouths open to scoop up tasty morsels floating in their paths.

Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose was sunk by a French cannonball and this was covered up by political spin, according to a new academic study.

Until now it was believed a combination of wind and tide pressed Mary Rose over, causing her gun ports to flood in a 16th Century battle in the Solent.

But University of Portsmouth geographer Dominic Fontana said the truth was withheld to maintain the Navy's image.

Mary Rose sank with the loss of more than 400 lives on 19 July 1545.

By claiming the ship was toppled by wind and an incompetent crew, the Navy's supremacy was maintained, Henry VIII's pride remained intact and the French were unable to claim victory, said Dr Fontana.

Your body is mine
By Bruce Bower  Science News
Web edition : Monday, November 17th, 2008

A new experiment indicates that, under the right circumstances, people feel like they have swapped bodies with someone else
 

WASHINGTON -- It sounds like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone. A man enters a laboratory, dons a special headset and shakes hands with a woman sitting across from him. In a matter of seconds, he feels like he's inside the woman's skin, reaching out and grasping his own hand.

Strange as it sounds, neuroscientists have induced this phenomenon in a series of volunteers. People can experience the illusion that either a mannequin or another person's body is their own body, says Valeria Petkova of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She and Karolinska colleague Henrik Ehrsson call this reaction the "body-swap illusion."

"Our subjects experienced this illusion as being exciting and strange, and often said that they wanted to come back and try it again," says Petkova, who reported the findings November 17 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Illusory body-swapping could provide a new tool for studying the nature of self-identity and psychiatric disorders that involve distortions of body image, she suggests. This phenomenon might also be tapped to enhance user control over virtual reality applications and to prompt a person's sense of really being part of a virtual world.

Volunteers experienced the body-swap illusion by receiving simultaneous visual and motor input from another's body. In one experiment, each participant stood across from a male mannequin, and in another experiment volunteers faced a female experimenter. A headset covering participants' eyes displayed a three-dimensional view of the other's visual perspective, transmitted from a small video camera positioned on the mannequin's or the woman's head.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2008) -- Water vapor is known to be Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change.

[...]

"This new data set shows that as surface temperature increases, so does atmospheric humidity," Dessler said. "Dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere makes the atmosphere more humid. And since water vapor is itself a greenhouse gas, the increase in humidity amplifies the warming from carbon dioxide."

Specifically, the team found that if Earth warms 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the associated increase in water vapor will trap an extra 2 Watts of energy per square meter (about 11 square feet).

"That number may not sound like much, but add up all of that energy over the entire Earth surface and you find that water vapor is trapping a lot of energy," Dessler said. "We now think the water vapor feedback is extraordinarily strong, capable of doubling the warming due to carbon dioxide alone."

They used to be lovers, but now they are bitter political rivals.

As Hugo Chavez prepares for regional elections next Sunday which will prove the biggest test yet for the Venezuelan President, he faces opposition from an unexpected corner - his former wife.

Marisabel Rodriguez, 43, is to stand for mayor in Barquisimeto, Venezuela's fourth largest city, about 270 km of Caracas. She is supported by a left-wing independent party Podemos (We can).

She has proved both a political irritant and a social embarrassment for Mr Chavez, who faces falling popularity as he enters elections for 22 governors, 328 mayors and 233 regional deputies.