As disparate but linked militant youth protests simultaneously erupt in a number of countries across the continent, French President Nicholas Sarkozy has retreated on two controversial pieces of domestic legislation out of fear that a spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of 1968.

A new Spanish law on "historical memory" has given the right to descendants of exiles of the fascist Franco regime to apply for Spanish - and EU - citizenship, with up to 500,000 people living mostly in Uruguay, Chili, Venezuela and Argentina expected to come forward, Spanish media report.

The move came 10 days after Prime Minister Yves Leterme stepped down in the so-called "Fortisgate" scandal, with his aides accused of trying to influence a court case linked to the break-up of the major bank Fortis.
   
"The king has charged Mr Van Rompuy to form a government. He has accepted the mission," said a short statement, after the speaker had held almost 90 minutes of talks with the monarch.
   
Van Rompuy, a Flemish Christian Democrat like Leterme, had affirmed -- as late as this weekend -- that he would never accept the post of premier, but is now likely to handle one of the kingdom's worst-ever political crises.

"Democracy has given ETA three opportunities to finish its dreadful campaign of senseless crimes," Zapatero said, referring to the attempts at negotiations made by him and his two predecessors.
   
"ETA has wasted the three opportunities. There will not be any others," the Socialist leader said at a news conference following the last cabinet meeting of 2008.
   
The government began talks with ETA after the group declared a "permanent ceasefire" in March 2006. But the government called them off after ETA detonated a car bomb at Madrid airport nine months later, killing two people.
   
ETA officially announced the end of the ceasefire in June 2007 and has assassinated six people since then.
   
Zapatero highlighted the recent blows dealt to ETA, including the arrests of the group's suspected military chief Garikoitz Aspiazu, also known as Txeroki, in November and his alleged successor three weeks later.

AFP - Several dozen protesters, mainly women and children, briefly occupied the entrance patio of one of France's most famous and prestigious hotels on Friday to demand better low-cost housing.
   
Around 50 police moved in and removed the group, many of them African immigrants, after they moved into the Intercontinental Paris-Le Grand on Place de l'Opera in the heart of Paris' main shopping and tourist district.
   
"We are demanding a meeting at the prime minister's office, and for the time being we're warming ourselves up in this prestigious establishment," protest spokesman Jean-Baptiste Eyraud told AFP by telephone before police moved in.

Two weeks ago, the country's biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch "tolerance."

It came at the same time Nicolas Sarkozy was making a case in France for greater opportunities for minorities that also contained an admission that the French notion of equality "doesn't work anymore."

But there was a difference. If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims' obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor's chairperson, was  exceptional.

The paper said: "The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance."

The German government whipped its €480 billion bank bailout package through parliament in record time, but now the program has run into trouble. The banks are still fighting for survival, the money market isn't functioning properly, and taxpayers' money is being burned.

...To date, Soffin [Special Fund for Financial Market Stabilization] has approved government guarantees for €90 billion ($126 billion) in loans. After prolonged negotiations with the European Union, Soffin now plans to release the first equity assistance package, worth €8.2 billion ($11.5 billion), for the German bank Commerzbank.

Soffin has already received requests for at least another €100 billion ($140 billion) in liquidity assistance. Even German carmaker Volkswagen is now lining up for money.

...HRE is still the most troublesome case. The mortgage bank is requesting new guarantees at a breathtaking pace. At first, the federal government and other financial institutions assembled a €50 billion ($70 billion) packet to provide the necessary liquidity and keep the Munich-based lender afloat.

A short time later, Soffin was forced to approve an additional €20 billion ($28 billion) bailout. The next €10 billion ($14 billion) followed in early December. "What else is coming?" asks a concerned member of parliament, pointing out that a single institution cannot possibly absorb the bulk of the government rescue package.

...In Rochdale, Lancashire, as many as 26 per cent of properties for sale have languished on the market since the beginning of 2008. A string of other northern towns have been hit by problems as difficulties finding mortgages have prevented buyers completing deals and over-optimistic sellers have failed to react to tumbling house prices.

...By contrast, only 5 per cent of properties were on the market for a year in London and 6 per cent in Birmingham, although that figure rose to 13 per cent in Manchester, where there has been a boom in speculative development.

Daniel Lee, chief executive of Globrix, said the figures reflected a "terrible year for the property market". He said: "The gridlock in the market has been a result of the banks' reluctance to lend and an unwillingness by sellers to lower their asking prices to more realistic levels."

Just a week after one cabinet minister warned The Independent of an impending unemployment "bloodbath", the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is predicting that as many as 600,000 staff face redundancy in 2009 alone, taking the unemployment total to 2.8 million.

Next year's forecast - combined with the number of positions already lost and those expected to go in 2010 - adds up to a grim total, according to John Philpott, the CIPD's chief economist. "The period from mid-2008 until the end of 2009 will witness the loss of around three quarters of a million jobs," he said. "Assuming the economy bottoms out in the second half of 2009, job losses are likely to continue into 2010, in all probability taking the final toll of lost jobs to around 1 million."

Capitalism in Crisis: The Broken Pact with the People - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

By Dirk Kurbjuweit Trust capitalism and shun government interference we were told. But irresponsible bankers saw a chance to get rich quick and went for it. Their failure has become ours -- and the promise of a common good has evaporated along with faith in democratic capitalism.

...Who would have thought that Ackermann would one day join the ranks of Germany's unemployed and low wage earners in asking for government aid? The poor had long hoped that the state would help them out of their economic plight. People like Ackermann though -- those who place a great deal of faith in the power in the power and freedom of the individual -- blasted them. Now, taxpayers are expected to help Ackermann's industry out of a jam.

The insanity of the situation becomes clear when we look back to the years 2003 to 2005. At the time, then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the center-left Social Democrats pushed through his Agenda 2010 reform package. Long-term unemployment payments were scrapped. Those who lost their job knew that time was short before benefits would shrink to those mandated by the new welfare plan known as Hartz IV.

During those years, the economic debate was dominated by true-blue capitalists who sought to limit government intervention. This was the heyday of a neo-liberal ideology that placed its faith in the strengths of the individual and the free market. The word "government" became virtually synonymous with harassment, suffocation, inefficiency and a lack of freedom. Deregulation was the magic formula of the day.

Trust Us

This was the theme music -- played by politicians, business people and journalists -- that accompanied Agenda 2010, an orgy of black-and-white thinking that glorified the individual and demonized the state.

But Agenda 2010 was the right approach. The reforms didn't go too far; actually, they should have gone even further. They should have harnessed the political momentum at the time to prepare Germany's healthcare and convalescent care systems for the challenges of the future.

He goes on to claim that the problem is people not capitalism; and people adopting US-style capitalism that gambles instead of conservative German business practices.

It was hard enough pushing through Agenda 2010. But the current crisis is making Germany virtually unreformable. Now nobody will follow politicians who say that you have to do good things for the economy so that everyone benefits. People will laugh out loud should anyone say that freedom leads to the best results.

It is no coincidence that gamblers have created this chaos, people who fabricate unreal worlds where they can seek their happiness.

Record volumes of government bonds from the industrialised nations - intended to reverse what could be the worst recession since the Great Depression - threaten to curb access to credit markets by emerging economies.

Analysts warn that emerging market borrowers could be crowded out of the credit markets by $3,000bn of government bonds expected to be issued by the big developed economies in 2009 - three times more than in 2008. The US alone is expected to issue about $2,000bn next year.

Emerging market governments and corporates need to repay $6,865bn of debt in 2009, according to ING Wholesale Banking. This includes bonds, loans, interest payments and trade finance.

David Spegel, global head of emerging markets strategy at ING, said: "Refinancing risk is going to be one of the biggest problems for emerging market issuers in 2009.

The pound dropped to a fresh low against the euro on Monday, falling closer to parity against the single currency on expectations that UK interest rates were heading lower.

The pound has suffered against the euro, dropping a record 17 per cent this month, as investors bet that the Bank of England would slash interest rates, which stand at 2 per cent, at its policy meeting next month.

Reports over the weekend suggesting that the UK economy could shed 600,000 jobs next year also weighed on sterling.

The pound fell to a record low of £0.9799 against the euro before recovering some poise to stand down 1.9 per cent at £0.9770 by midday in New York.

A year ago, Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, aspired to be the largest corporation in the world. Buoyed by high oil prices and political backing from the Kremlin, it had already achieved third place judging by market capitalization, behind Exxon Mobil and General Electric.

Today, Gazprom is deep in debt and negotiating a government bailout. Its market cap, the total value of all the company's shares, has fallen 76 percent since the beginning of the year. Instead of becoming the world's largest company, it has tumbled to 35th place. And while bailouts are increasingly common, none of Gazprom's big private sector competitors in the West is looking for one.

That Russia's largest state-run energy company needs a bailout so soon after oil hit record highs last summer is a telling postscript to a turbulent period. Once the emblem of the pride and the menace of a resurgent Russia, Gazprom has become a symbol of this oil state's rapid economic decline.

Chalk up another victim for the crashing real estate market: the easy divorce.

With nearly one in six homes worth less than the mortgage owed on it, according to Moody's Economy.com, divorce lawyers and financial advisers around the country say the logistics of divorce have been turned around. "We used to fight about who gets to keep the house," said Gary Nickelson, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. "Now we fight about who gets stuck with the dead cow."

As a result, divorce has become more complicated and often more expensive, with lower prospects for money on the other side. Some divorce lawyers say that business has slowed or that clients are deciding to stay together because there are no assets left to help them start over.

"There's an old joke," said Randall M. Kessler, Ms. Needle's lawyer. "Why is a divorce so expensive? Because it's worth it. Now it better really be worth it."

In a normal economy, couples typically build equity in their homes, then divide that equity in a divorce, either after selling the house or with one partner buying out the other's share. But after the recent boom-and-bust cycle, more couples own houses that neither spouse can afford to maintain, and that they cannot sell for what they owe. For couples already under stress, the family home has become a toxic asset.

Hedge funds are bracing themselves for a raft of more stringent requirements by investors and increasing regulatory scrutiny, following the revelations this month that up to $50bn has been lost through alleged fraud by Bernard Madoff.

Half a dozen lawsuits have been filed by Madoff investors, mainly focusing on the failure of due diligence by the middlemen, such as hedge fund of funds, which channelled money to Madoff.

The affair is likely to lead to a crackdown on due diligence by fund of funds - which hold more than 40 per cent of hedge fund money - according to hedge fund marketers and advisers.

One hedge fund adviser, who looked into investing with Madoff and declined, said: "This is just the start. Third party administrators, greater transparency in investments, more regulatory oversight - we can expect them all."

Israeli air strikes flattened bastions of Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip today in the third day of an offensive that has killed more than 325 Palestinians in the deadliest violence in the territory in decades.

"We have an all-out war against Hamas and its kind," Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said in parliament, using a term he has employed in the past to describe a long-term struggle against Israel's Islamist enemies.

Broadening their targets to include the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, Israeli warplanes bombed the Interior Ministry, which supervises 13,000 members of the group's security forces. The building had been evacuated and there were no casualties.

Israel also targeted the homes of at least two top commanders in Hamas's armed wing. The commanders were not at home at the time but several family members were killed.

...The United Nations Relief and Works Agency said at least 57 of the dead were civilians. It based the figure, which an UNRWA spokesman called "conservative", on visits by agency officials to hospitals and medical centres.

Liu Jianjun is wearing a brightly coloured African tunic, the tall hat of a tribal leader, a string of red beads round his neck and carrying a stick with a secret knife in the handle. Beside him sits a portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong. It is a slightly incongruous scene but one that mirrors the ever-closer relationship between Asia's economic giant China and the world's poorest continent.

"The African people yell, 'Mao Zedong is all right' and they are very warm-hearted when I'm there," says one of China's most prominent private sector ambassadors. "The minute Chinese people get off the plane, the Africans are friendly. Chinese do not bring rifles and weapons; they bring seeds and technology."

China's Ministry of Commerce triumphantly announced this month that its bilateral trade with the continent is set to hit $100bn (£67.8bn) by the end of 2008, two years ahead of schedule. Africa's plentiful oilfields and rich mineral deposits are top of China's imports, and in return the world's most populous nation is exporting tens of thousands of its countrymen.

By A.C. Thompson

December 17, 2008   This article appeared in the January 5, 2009 edition of The Nation.

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions--his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.

Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that nigger!"

NEW DELHI -- After two years of army-backed emergency rule, democracy returned to Bangladesh as the secular Awami League party scored an apparent landslide victory in election results announced on Tuesday.

Voting on Monday had proceeded in a largely peaceful atmosphere, and in many locations it was even quite festive.

According to the Associated Press, the election official Humayun Kabir said the Awami League, in alliance with a smaller party called Jatiya, won a more than two-thirds majority in Parliament after votes in most districts had been counted. "This has been a very free and fair election," Mr. Kabir told reporters at his office in Dhaka. The league's leader, Sheikh Hasina, urged her supporters to remain calm and off the streets, fearing that any victory rallies would result in clashes with rivals.

Ms. Hasina, a former prime minister, has promised to quash Islamist extremist groups in the largely Muslim country.

She has been a target of the extremists' ire already, having been wounded by a grenade at a 2004 rally in an attack linked to Islamist radicals that killed 23 people.

Call it CSI: Thermal Police -- energy experts armed with mostly low-tech tools but strong sleuthing skills, finding flaws that let the air inside a house go through a full exchange with the outdoors twice an hour, instead of once every two or three hours.

Correct those flaws, and heating and cooling costs are typically cut by 20 percent to 30 percent, a saving of more than $1,000 annually in some households. In addition, carbon dioxide emissions and the strain on the national electric and gas systems are reduced.

About 140,000 houses will be weatherized with public help this year, a total that President-elect Barack Obama has promised to raise to one million, to reduce energy consumption and cut energy costs for households and taxpayers, who often absorb those costs for the poor. This would represent a historic shift in emphasis for the federal and state governments, reducing poor people's energy bills instead of helping to pay them.

Weatherizing a million homes annually would also create about 78,000 jobs for a year, according to the federal Energy Department's weatherization project director, Gil Sperling.

In a single year, a coal-fired electric plant deposited more than 2.2 million pounds of toxic materials in a holding pond that failed last week, flooding 300 acres in East Tennessee, according to a 2007 inventory filed with the Environmental Protection Agency.

The inventory, disclosed by the Tennessee Valley Authority on Monday at the request of The New York Times, showed that in just one year, the plant's byproducts included 45,000 pounds of arsenic, 49,000 pounds of lead, 1.4 million pounds of barium, 91,000 pounds of chromium and 140,000 pounds of manganese. Those metals can cause cancer, liver damage and neurological complications, among other health problems.

And the holding pond, at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a T.V.A. plant 40 miles west of Knoxville, contained many decades' worth of these deposits.

For days, authority officials have maintained that the sludge released in the spill is not toxic, though coal ash has long been known to contain dangerous concentrations of heavy metals. On Monday, a week after the spill, the authority issued a joint statement with the E.P.A. and other agencies recommending that direct contact with the ash be avoided and that pets and children should be kept away from affected areas.

[...]

"They think that the public is stupid, that they can't put two and two together," said Sandy Gupton, a registered nurse who hired an independent firm to test the spring water on her family's 300-acre farm, now sullied by sludge from the spill. "It took five days for the T.V.A. to respond to us."

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

The threats posed by climate change are worse than those imagined by most governments, warned Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute for Research on Global Warming Effects and acts as an adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate-change issues.

Schellnhuber warns that previous predictions about climate change and its catastrophic effects were too cautious and optimistic.

"In nearly all areas, the developments are occurring more quickly than it has been assumed up until now," Schellnhuber told the Saarbruecker Zeitung newspaper in an interview published Monday, Dec. 29. "We are on our way to a destabilization of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realize."

...The Arctic sea ice is melting more quickly than expected. There are also signs that the entire climate pattern at the North Poll has been disrupted to the extent of causing irreversible change.

For the Arctic, the global warming which has already occurred of 0.8 degrees Celsius has already stepped over the line, Schellnhuber said. If Greenland's ice cap ice melts completely, water levels will rise by seven meters (23 feet).

Starting January 1, 2009 Romanians will pay a tax of 0.2 Romanian Ron for each non eco friendly plastic bag. The eco tax will be charged by all economic operators that introduce such bags and will be sent to the environment fund.

The tax will be paid each month by economic operators and they are compelled to inform all buyers of its existence. The main goal of the tax is to decrease the consumption of plastic bags and discourage their free distribution.

Children are being fed misleading information about healthy eating habits by food companies which try to pass off marketing as educational resources for schools, a report reveals today.

Switzerland is host to two test tunnels where methods of storing nuclear waste are tested. In many countries, including Germany, locations used for such testing are often sites intended for storage. The Swiss tunnels are not, and that has made them popular for research with international scientists.

...Just like his colleague Blechschmidt, Bossart is quick to assure anyone who asks that a final storage site will never be built here. "That would be very unwise, directly next to the freeway!" He likes to refer to it as a playground. "Mistakes can be made in our laboratory." If an experiment goes wrong, it doesn't automatically discredit the site. "The French, for example, like to conduct tricky experiments here," says the geologist, "so they succeed afterwards back in France."

Gay rights groups, politicians and a prominent German theologian have criticized remarks made earlier this week by Pope Benedict XVI. They accuse him of attacking same-sex marriages and sex change operations.

The United States launched a so-called "Escapee Program" in 1952 to help resettle people who had fled Communist Eastern Europe for the West. But the program had a hidden side.

The US assessed whether refugees could be used for intelligence or propaganda purposes. Some were secretly offered money to return home and spy for the West.

A new Associated Press investigation shows that the International Tracing Service (ITS) played a role in this secret program, screening "escapees" at the request of the US government. The ITS has been part of the International Red Cross since 1955.

Rail union leaders have urged the Government to halt plans by South West Trains - which operates services across the region - to reduce ticket office opening times, which they warned would lead to a "vastly poorer" service.

The Rail Maritime and Transport union said South West Trains should not be allowed to "slash" ticket office opening times.

A Government decision is expected soon on whether to allow cuts in hours at 114 stations that would leave some stations without ticket offices at weekends and dozens more without evening and early morning cover.

Kevin Rudd, it seems, can do no wrong. Not only is he the most popular Australian prime minister for decades; he is kind to animals, too.

On Christmas Day, Mr Rudd and his wife, Therese, were out for an evening stroll in the streets around their harbourside Sydney residence when they noticed an injured bird that had fallen out of its nest on to a parked car.

According to The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Rudd, "ever the caring sort", immediately removed his sweater and gently wrapped up the bird, a tawny frogmouth, inside it. Since no veterinary clinics were open, he transported the bird back to the official residence, Kirribilli House, where he made a little home for it in his garage.

Gossip over substance.


*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

It was a drunken act of madness that went tragically wrong: An inebriated German man decided to play Russian roulette with a loaded revolver in front of his family at Christmas, and lost.

Police said in a statement that the man had a licence for his weapon and had engaged in "improper use of a handgun."

His family is in shock and receiving counselling.