A new study shows that Germany has already reduced greenhouse gas emissions to the level pledged in the Kyoto Protocol. But a greater reliance on coal-fired power plants may soon reverse the trend.

When it comes to global warming and concurrent efforts to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, Germany has always tried to present itself as a leader. New data set to be released on Friday shows that the country has earned its bragging rights.

Germany has steadily reduced its greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. According to the most recent numbers collected by the "national emissions inventory," which keeps tabs on Germany's CO2 emissions, the country has already lowered its emissions to the level set out by the Kyoto Protocol agreement. In 1997, Germany pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent by 2012 relative to 1990 levels. New numbers indicate that the country has managed to reduce emissions by 22.4 percent, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung which saw the report before it was published.

According to the Munich-based daily, the study points to the mild winter of 2006-2007 as being a factor in the recent decline. But it also says that greenhouse gas emissions from German households have been declining for years. The same trend has been observed when it comes to emissions from cars and trucks on the nation's roads.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Georgia may have staged the shooting of a convoy carrying the Polish and Georgian presidents, say leaked Polish security service reports.

South Ossetian paramilitaries fired shots near a motorcade carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to the border of the disputed Akhalgori district last weekend.

The incident in Akhalgori originally discredited Russia

The incident highlighted the continuing presence of Russian-backed forces deep inside Georgia in violation of earlier peace treaties, but its impact has been dulled by suspicions that Tbilisi set up the events.

"At the current time and on the basis of the information obtained, the most likely scenario is that the situation may have been created by the Georgian side," a leaked Situation Report by the Polish Internal Security Agency, the ABW, published in the Dziennik daily on Thursday (27 November), says.

The report points out that the Akhalgori visit was not consulted with Polish security services, that Mr Saakashvili stopped the convoy and asked Mr Kaczysnki to step outside the car near the checkpoint and that the Georgian president and his men showed no signs of distress when the shots rang out.

A new EU report accuses drug makers of keeping prices for medication high by thwarting less expensive generic products from coming to market. In the US, far more generic drugs are sold than in Europe.

Drug companies are blocking or delaying the entry of cheaper generic medicines from coming to the market, according to an EU report released on Friday, Nov. 28.

"The Commission will not hesitate to open anti-trust cases against companies where there are indications that the anti-trust rules may have been breached," said Neelie Kroes, the 27-nation bloc's competition commissioner.

The report examined a sampling of medication from 17 European Union member states in which the patents have expired and estimated that the delays involved in getting generic versions of those brand names on the market had cost health care providers around three billion euros ($3.9 billion) between 2000 and 2007.

The results of the sample probe prompted Kroes to comment that competition in the pharmaceutical industry was not functioning as well as it should.

KALININGRAD, Russia: This is what passes for humor in Kaliningrad these days: Iskander missile tourism. Dipping deep into his reservoir of black humor, Vladimir N. Abramov tries out this sales pitch for his region, a cold war garrison turned European trade hub that may, once again, become a staging ground for missiles pointed west.

"Attracting tourists to see an Iskander is a creative idea," said Abramov, a political scientist. "Especially for the Poles. When it is flying toward them, they may not be able to see it. Come to Kaliningrad! Pose next to the missile which is going to kill you."

Somewhere behind the joke is a real question about the future of Kaliningrad. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow has devised a series of plans for this old military outpost, wedged on the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Poland.

Former President Boris Yeltsin saw it as the Russian Hong Kong, a free trade zone to entice foreign investors. Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, drew it closer to Moscow, planning a nuclear power plant that would export energy to Europe. As oil and gas wealth poured into Russia, more ideas emerged: Las Vegas-style gambling, for instance, and a constellation of luxury resorts.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A meeting of European Union parliamentarians and their counterparts in African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries has called on European and other developed countries not to let the global crisis hit development aid budgets.

As the ongoing financial turbulence causes European governments to turn attention inward, development aid budgets could be first in the firing line, they fear, and if developed countries such as Iceland or Hungary are hit hard, the global south will be hit that much harder.

The 16th ACP-EU joint parliamentary assembly's meeting ended on Friday in Papua New Guinea.

"The world financial crisis should not be used to justify cuts in development aid," demands a declaration by the 16th ACP-EU joint parliamentary assembly, which ended on Friday (28 November), after week-long deliberations in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

Twice a year, the assembly brings together 78 members of the European Parliament and 78 parliamentarians from ACP states - the grouping of developing countries that for the most part were once colonies of EU member state empires.

EU should tackle English football dominance, France says

France's sports minister, Bernard Laporte, warned on Thursday (27 November) that English football pre-eminence was getting out of hand and that Brussels needs to referee the situation.

"We see European competitions between participants of two or three nations," he told a two-day summit of EU sports ministers. "Where is the uncertainty in such a sporting contest?"

The dominance of English clubs is "out of hand" says France

English clubs have won the UEFA Champions League the last four years, and were runners up for the last three as well. Critics in France and in UEFA complain that lax financial rules in the UK allow teams to borrow heavily to attract more top players and to regularly increase salaries to keep them, while stricter regulation in other European jurisdictions prevents similar action.

The French EU presidency has complained this is unfair and that the EU - which has no mandate to legislate around sport - should step in and regulate.

The flawed proposal to extend the term of copyright protection afforded to sound recordings, robbing consumers in the name of performers but for the benefit of the world's four major record labels, is being fast-tracked through the democratic process. Earlier this month MEPs from the relevant European Parliament committees presented their draft reports at a meeting of the legal affairs committee (JURI), the Committee which will make recommendations to the European Parliament on how to vote on the Directive early next year. They proposed a host of worrying new amendments which threaten to:

• Weaken further already inadequate measures intended to allow orphan works, and commercially worthless but culturally significant recordings to pass into the public domain (Culture (CULT), Internal Market (IMCO) and the Industry, Technology and Research (ITRE) committees draft reports).

• Allow record labels to deduct "costs" from a fund intended to benefit session musicians, further shrinking the pot of money made available to performers in favour of labels (IMCO committee draft report).

• Dramatically widen the scope of the Directive to include audio-visual recording, even though no relevant impact assessment has been conducted into what effect this might have on consumers and follow-on innovators. (JURI and ITRE committee draft reports).

Inflation in the eurozone tumbled to its lowest level in over a year last month, giving the ECB more scope to cut interest rates aggressively next week.

The Eurostat European Union statistics office said today that consumer price inflation dropped 1.1 percentage points last month to stand at 2.1%. This is the lowest level since September 2007 and suggests that inflation is bound to fall back below the European Central Bank's target rate of 2% in December.

It added that unemployment rose to 7.7% last month, from an upwardly revised 7.6% in September. The biggest increase in unemployment was in Spain, where the jobless rate rose to 12.8%, from 12.1% in September.

Economists now expect the European Central Bank to slash rates by at least half a percentage point next week, which would leave rates standing at 2.75%. The ECB has so far cut rates twice by 50 basis points in October and November.

Senior French officials have admitted that they plan to block attempts to cut European Union farm subsidies worth more than £7 billion a year to France's farmers.

France, which currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, had tabled "conclusions" to a meeting of farm ministers urging that the Common Agriculture Policy should be continued unchanged beyond 2013, the date when a new five year Brussels budget period begins.

But Britain, through Huw Irranca-Davies, Minister for Rural Affairs, has joined with Sweden and Latvia to block France's attempts which would threaten to break promises made three years ago when Britain gave up £7 billion in its annual rebate from Brussels in trade off for an understanding there would be a future cut in farm subsidies.

"There were three or four areas within the text that, despite assurances that it did not predetermine any budget outcome, in our eyes did presuppose that there was a different direction of travel," Mr Irranca-Davies said.

The Daily Telegraph has learned that France is using its EU presidency to try and find ways of protecting the CAP from reform during negotiations in 2009.

Kosovo authorities released three German intelligence agents Friday, 10 days after they were arrested and accused of throwing a bomb at a European Union office, a UN official and the men's lawyer said.

Germany, the second biggest donor to the new ethnic Albanian republic after the United States, was angered by the arrest. It reportedly sent a government plane to immediately pick up the

trio, who work for the clandestine BND foreign intelligence service.

 

Robert Dean, head of the justice department of the United Nations administration in Kosovo, confirmed that the three had been released.

 

The previous day a panel of Kosovo judges had declined to release the three, and asked an international judge to join in a review of the case. The closed-door hearing lasted nearly 10 hours Friday.

Paris - A homeless man was found frozen to death in Paris early Friday, the sixth homeless individual to have died of the cold in the Paris area in the past month, France Info radio reported. Reacting to the report, President Nicolas Sarkozy called for immediate action. "We must act so that no one else dies of the cold in 2008. It's a scandal," Sarkozy said. Sarkozy said Friday that one could not force anyone to go to a shelter "if he does not want to." The French president suggested that the homeless person should be convinced at least to look at the bed and food he would be provided in the shelter. "If he doesn't like it, then he can go," Sarkozy said.

A few days ago, the housing rights' association Droit Au Logement was condemned to about €20 000 because of the tents it had installed for the homeless - the police had confiscated them, and the association was sued for "leaving objects in the street"... A strange way to help the homeless live through the winter.

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères

On Friday, residents in Mumbai, India were still dealing with the aftermath of the terror attacks that left 143 dead. In Germany, commentators were wondering whether the incident puts India's rising economy in jeopardy -- and whether it was a harbinger of more violence to come.

On Friday, the battle to regain control of the city of Mumbai was continuing as special forces regained control of one of the luxury hotels attacked by militants on Wednesday. Commando units stormed a Jewish center and are soldiers are deployed at another hotel, where at least one militant is still holed up.

While most of the 143 killed in the coordinated attacks were Indians, there are some Europeans among the dead. On Friday France sent a special flight to Mumbai to bring back up to 150 Europeans caught up in the terror attacks. Ties between Europe and India have been increasingly close in recent years -- a fact underscored by the presence of seven EU members of parliament who were in Mumbai on a trade delegation at the time of the attacks. On Friday some German commentators wonder whether this relationship needs to be reevaluated in the light of this week's events. Some editorialists suggest treating India with more caution in the near future.

Hungry residents allowed to take food from stores

ITAJAI, Brazil -- Flood victims waded through waist-deep water into mud-filled houses yesterday in a devastated part of southern Brazil where neighbors set up patrols to keep looters away and lined up by the thousands for government food handouts.

As waters from torrential rains receded after causing at least 99 deaths, returning residents hurled soaked furniture and damaged electronic goods into the streets of this coastal city along the Itajai-Acu River.

Hunger and thirst were so widespread in the city of 170,000 that police were ordered to let residents take food and water from stores because they were "driven by despair to steal," said Joao Carlos Santos, the state public-safety spokesman.

Officers instead focused on thieves who paddled rickety canoes to loot abandoned homes.

The official death toll from the rains in Santa Catarina state rose from 97 to 99 a day earlier. Mudslides killed most of the victims, and 19 people were officially missing. The death toll could climb as high as 150, authorities said.

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Despite widespread optimism that President-elect Barack Obama will adopt policies more to their liking, some European officials are preparing to be disappointed on global warming.

European leaders have expressed hopes Obama would quickly break from the Bush administration and support a global agreement to limit greenhouse emissions blamed for global warming. But some are tempering their expectations that the United States can shift quickly enough to sign a deal by the end of next year.

Though Obama has supported the kind of limits on emissions envisioned by international negotiators and spurned by President George W. Bush, it appears that Congress may not be ready to back him immediately.

The top European Union official in Washington, John Bruton, says there is growing concern that Congress could upend a global deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol that they hope to sign at a meeting in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Thursday blamed French President Nicolas Sarkozy's planned meeting with the Dalai Lama for pulling out of a China-EU summit which may have forged a joint response to the global economic crisis.

France confirmed Sarkozy would meet the Tibetan spiritual leader, whom China brands a separatist, at a Dec. 6 ceremony in Poland to mark the 25th anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize to former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

China this month warned France, which holds the rotating EU presidency, that the European Union risked losing "hard-won" gains in ties with Beijing if Sarkozy met the Dalai Lama.

The decision could make it harder for the EU and China to cooperate on a host of pressing global issues and spill over into an often tricky bilateral trade relationship.

A Wal-Mart worker died after being trampled when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island store Friday morning, police and witnesses said.

The 34-year-old employee, a temporary maintenance worker, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

On Thursday morning an uninvited guest showed up to a breakfast-meeting of Frankfurt mothers with young children. Despite the shock of seeing a wild boar burst through the glass door of a church, nobody was injured.

Over the last several months, turmoil in the international economy has made Frankfurt on the Main, Europe's financial capital, a pretty scary place to live. Still, the city's Martinus Evangelical Church got a special shock on Thursday as a rampaging wild boar burst through a glass porch door and terrorized a group of 10 mothers eating breakfast with their young children.

Wild boars can be dangerous and terrifying. Even city-dwellers are threatened. The mothers, who dine regularly in the church as part of a "mini-club," were seated with their offspring, ages one to three, at small, appropriately-sized children's tables. At about 11 a.m., police reports indicate that a feral beast leapt into the room through a glass door, shattering its pane into hundreds of pieces. The boar then dashed frantically around the room before exiting through the very same portal from which it had made its violent entrance.

The mothers and children took cover by getting up on top of the tables and chairs, and although no one was hurt, all were visibly rattled when the police arrived later. According to the police report, the parish is providing "psychological support" for all those who need it.

The birds first came to Britain as pets but some escaped into the wild and are now a common site in suburban South East England, particularly west London and Kent, although they have been as far north as Scotland.

While native woodland birds have suffered from climate change and loss of habitat, the tropical birds have thrived in warmer temperatures.

In the latest estimate, the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) said the population has now reached a record 20,000, the majority of which are living in the South East.

Bedecked with emerald green feathers and a rose-red beak, the ring-neck parakeet was brought to the UK from India and was first reported in the wild in 1969.

By 1996, there were 1,500 of the birds living in the wild, by 2002 there were 6,000.

President-Elect Barack Obama is to have a street named after him in a Spanish town as part of a nationwide move to abandon symbols of General Franco's dictatorship.

The central avenue in Naquera, a town of 5000 people in the eastern region of Valencia, is currently named after Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the right-wing Falange movement and Franco's ideological mentor.

But under the Law of Historical Memory brought in by the socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero last year, all statues, plaques and symbols of the Franco regime must be removed.

A gun disguised as a mobile phone has been discovered by police in Italy.

The .22 calibre weapon was found during an early morning raid on a property near Naples.

Officers also seized bullet proof vests, drugs, ammunition and thousands of pounds in cash.

The halting pace of the building project at the center of Berlin will move ahead this week by two full steps: a Communist building will be gone and designs for a Prussian building will be unveiled. None of which means the arguments around the project will be coming to an end any time soon.

It's fitting that on the day that the final remnant of the Palast der Republik, the former capital building of communist East Germany, was scheduled to be cleared, a hydrolic shovel broke down, thereby forcing the foreman to push back the demolition from Wednesday to Friday.

It is not the first form of delay and postponement, second-guessing and backtracking encountered by this project. Ever since its 1989 reunification, the city of Berlin has been involved in one form or another with the clearing of the old East Berlin landmark -- most recently as a prelude to the reconstruction of the Prussian-era Berlin City Palace that once stood on the site and had been itself demolished to make way for the communist building.

Pope Benedict XVI today launched a crusade against climate change in his own tiny country by holding his first "ecologically friendly" public gathering at a Vatican audience hall newly powered by solar panels. Solar panels are seen on the roof of the Paul VI Hall, at the Vatican, today. The panels became functional on Wednesday, illuminating and heating Pope Benedict XVI's weekly general audience, held inside the Paul VI hall. (Alessandra Tarantino/AP Photo)

The 2,400 solar panels placed on more than an acre of undulating roof of the Vatican's hall were officially activated today, providing the energy required by the the hall itself and the adjacent large buildings.

The audience hall is a striking modernist construction amid centuries-old historical buildings. Built in 1969 and designed by the renowned Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi, it is used for concerts and indoor papal audiences that are held there when the weather is poor.

... She persuaded Queen Victoria to appoint a Royal Commission on the Army medical department, and she herself wrote an 830-page report. Her stories, she decided, weren't enough. She turned to William Farr, who had recently invented the field of medical statistics, to help her identify the reasons for the calamity and the necessary policy changes. He advised her, "We do not want impressions, we want facts."

Under Farr's tutelage, Nightingale compiled vast tables of statistics about how many people had died, where and why. Many of her findings shocked her. For example, she discovered that in peacetime, soldiers in England died at twice the rate of civilians -- even though they were young men in their primes. The problem with the military health service, she realized, extended far beyond a few terrible hospitals during a war.

Furthermore, the statistics changed Nightingale's understanding of the problems in Turkey. Lack of sanitation, she realized, had been the principal reason for most of the deaths, not inadequate food and supplies as she had previously thought. Deaths from disease began to fall only in March 1855, after a Sanitary Commission arrived in Turkey. They did what she could not do alone: They flushed the sewers, removed putrid animal carcasses that were blocking the water supply, replaced rotten floors and improved ventilation. Almost immediately, the mortality rate dropped from 52 percent to 20 percent.

As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change. In doing so, she ignored the express advice of her mentor, Farr. "You complain that your report would be dry," he wrote to her. "The dryer [sic] the better. Statistics should be the dryest [sic] of all reading."

CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW FOR AN ANIMATION Animation credit: Ian Short at understandinguncertainty.com.

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, "I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it's silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers." I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar's Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual.

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

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sorry if it's already been flagged...

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." -Harriet Tubman .

It would be great if you all would support the other FP's taking over the Salon while I am out. :-)