Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- European Union finance ministers tussled over a plan to cushion their 27-nation economy from the effects of the global recession and may need to revisit the multibillion-euro package later this month.

The debate over how much fiscal stimulus EU members can afford and how it should be paid for is fueling tensions between countries as European leaders struggle to coordinate 200 billion euros ($254 billion) in stimulus measures -- equivalent to 1.5 percent of EU economic growth -- without breaking their own budget rules. EU heads of state will discuss the package next week at a summit in Brussels.

"There was a reasonable degree of consensus in discussions today, not total consensus unfortunately," EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told reporters in Brussels following today's meeting of finance ministers.

Central banks and governments around the world are slashing borrowing costs and boosting spending as the biggest economies slide into the first simultaneous recession since the Second World War. The U.S. economy, the world's largest, entered a recession a year ago, the panel that dates American business cycles said yesterday, making the contraction already the longest since 1982.

"We agreed that 1.5 percent of gross domestic product was a necessary figure to launch this recovery plan," French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who led today's meeting, said at the Brussels briefing. "We also agreed that it should include a mixture of national measures as well as European-funded measures."

BRUSSELS: Alexander Just, a European Union archivist, may not be a coffee connoisseur. But the espresso from a new, state-of-the-art Italian machine at his office tasted strange enough that he was willing to shell out €70 from his own pocket to have it tested.

The findings? Astronomically high levels of nickel and elevated amounts of lead. Enough for the European Commission to pull the plug on all 20 of the machines - installed in January at a cost of about €5,000, or $6,350, each.

Soon the machines may be removed from the upper floors of the iconic Berlaymont, the building in Brussels where top European Commission officials have their offices.

There has been no evidence of anyone getting sick, but the problem is likely to give ammunition to EU critics who complain about excessive spending in Brussels - and trouble the commissioners themselves, who now may have to line up in the cafeterias with thousands of less lofty bureaucrats to get a cup of coffee.

A commission spokesman said it was "premature" to comment on whether the EU would need to ask for its money back - a sum amounting to about €100,000. The brouhaha has already degenerated into a court battle involving the Belgian authorities, who issued a Europe-wide health alert in November, and the manufacturer, Cimbali, which said its machines were not to blame.

SARAJEVO: Several thousand demonstrators took to the streets of Pristina, Kosovo's capital, on Tuesday to protest the planned deployment of a European Union judicial mission that many ethnic Albanians fear will partition the new country.

The protesters marched through the city center holding banners saying "No Partition" and "Kosovo Is Ours," witnesses said. Some chanted "Thaci is a traitor," referring to Kosovo's prime minister, Hashim Thaci.

Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leadership declared independence from Serbia in February after nine years of being administered by the United Nations.

At issue now is who will control the country. Under a six-point plan agreed to last week by the United Nations Security Council - and backed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Belgrade and the European Union - the 2,000-strong EU mission would be deployed under a UN mandate and would take a neutral position regarding Kosovo's independence.

A report by the International Organization for Migration shows that Germany is the number one country of destination for migrants to Europe. The search for employment is at the heart of most movement in the 21st century.

Germany hosted 10.1 million migrants in 2005, according to the World Migration Report 2008 by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Geneva. This was an increase from 9.8 million in 2000 and kept Germany in the number one spot as the principal country of destination for migrants.

The report published on Tuesday, Dec. 2 said that labor movement made up a substantial share of total migration flows.

"People are becoming increasingly mobile within and across borders to meet the social and economic challenges of globalization with the search for employment at the heart of most movement in the 21st century," the report said.

Europe's migrant population growing

Western and central Europe is one of the most important regions of destination for migratory flows, it said. Within Europe, Germany with its 10.1 million migrants in 2005 is followed by France (6.5 million), the UK (5.4 million), Spain (4.8 million) and Italy (2.5 million) as migrant destinations.

Benefit claimants will face lie detector tests and will lose benefits for a month if found guilty of fiddling the system under proposals unveiled by Gordon Brown on the eve of today's Queen's speech.

The "one strike and you're out" proposal is contained in a tough summary of the speech released yesterday by the Cabinet Office. The government is also proposing to give the public clearer information, mainly via the internet, on how criminals are sentenced in local courts. Communities are to be given a bigger role in deciding what form of community punishment local criminals should be forced to undertake.

The proposals mark a break by the prime minister from his focus on the economic crisis for the past five months and suggest he knows he needs to broaden his political agenda if he is to claw back lost votes.

The introduction of a lie detector test for benefit claimants is the most striking shift to a more populist programme, similar to Tony Blair's respect agenda.

So far, 25 local councils administering housing benefit to 500,000 claimants are using "voice risk analysis technology" to test whether a claimant is providing false information.

The government introduced the technology in Harrow, north-west London, last year, but says it plans to make the technology available nationwide. In the first three months of using the technology Harrow saved £300,000, suggesting that levels of benefit fraud may be higher than government estimates. Ministers are cracking down on benefit fraud even though it is officially at its lowest recorded level, down 66% since 2001.

Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. said November U.S. sales tumbled more than 30 percent as the recession and Detroit automakers' aid pleas kept buyers away from showrooms.

GM, the largest U.S. automaker, said sales dropped 41 percent, while No. 2 Ford was down by 31 percent. Toyota, Asia's biggest automaker, posted a 34 percent decline and Honda Motor Co. slid 32 percent.

Their results showed the strain of the deepening economic slowdown and GM's announcement last month that it might not have enough cash to last through the year. GM, Ford and Chrysler LLC were presenting their survival plans to Congress today.

(Reuters) - The U.S. credit-card industry may pull back well over $2 trillion of lines over the next 18 months due to risk aversion and regulatory changes, leading to sharp declines in consumer spending, prominent banking analyst Meredith Whitney said.

The credit card is the second key source of consumer liquidity, the first being jobs, the Oppenheimer & Co analyst noted.

"In other words, we expect available consumer liquidity in the form of credit-card lines to decline by 45 percent."

Bank of America Corp (BAC.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) represent over half of the estimated U.S. card outstandings as of September 30, and each company has discussed reducing card exposure or slowing growth, Whitney said.

China's top economic planning agency Monday removed price controls on grain and other food products that were imposed early this year when inflation was a bigger concern.

Caps on the prices of grain, edible oil, meat, dairy products and eggs were lifted with immediate effect, the National Development and Reform Commission said on its website.

Requirements on enterprises to submit price-raising schemes for government approval were also eliminated to "allow business operators to set the prices on their own," according to the statement.

Beijing imposed strict price controls on a range of energy products, foods and other key commodities in January amid concern about inflation that at the time seemed dangerously close to spiralling out of control.

China's inflation rate hit a near 12-year high of 8.7 percent in February, but has been weakening since then.

BRUSSELS (AFP) -- NATO agreed Tuesday to gradually resume high-level talks with Russia, which were frozen over the August conflict in the Caucasus, and to deepen ties with former Soviet states Georgia and Ukraine.

NATO foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels, decided on a return to informal meetings of the so-called NATO-Russia Council, despite concern that Moscow is still not respecting a ceasefire that ended its brief war with Georgia.

"The allies agreed on a conditional and graduated re-engagement with Russia," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told reporters at alliance headquarters.

He said that he has been "mandated by the foreign ministers as I see fit, and of course if the other party would agree, to see what political contacts will be possible, can be possible."

He added that the NATO-Russia Council will meet on an informal basis "to re-engage and to have discussions on the issues on which we will agree and, I would also like to add, on the issues on which we disagree."

Scheffer later told AFP that the informal meeting of the 26 NATO allies with Russia would take place at the level of ambassadors.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group based in Pakistan may have been responsible for the attacks by militants in India's financial hub of Mumbai that killed 183 people, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday.

The Pakistani government has offered to cooperate with India to find the attackers amid rising tensions between the two nuclear-armed rivals over the three-day assault at two luxury hotels and other landmarks.

"There are a lot of reasons to think it might be a group, partially or wholly a group, that is located on Pakistan's territory," the official told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels.

The official, who did not identify the source of his information, spoke hours before U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to leave for New Delhi to discuss last week's attacks with the Indian government.

Even by the standards of a deep-cyclical industry, the "golden age" of oil refining has proved remarkably brief, lasting no more than three years, before giving way to a new dark age.

Particularly in the United States, refiners have returned to the state of chronic unprofitability that plagued the industry before 2005.

U.S. refiners now have too much capacity and produce the wrong products (gasoline) in a fuel economy increasingly dominated by ethanol and diesel. Capacity cuts of as much as 0.5-1.0 million bpd (equivalent to 4-8 average refineries) and expensive investment to reconfigure the system to increase the diesel yield seem inevitable.

EVAPORATING PROFIT MARGINS

In May 2007, U.S. refiners paid an average of about $64 a barrel to acquire high quality West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude (less for other grades) and sold gasoline for $97 per barrel - a margin of $33 per barrel or 52 percent.

By November 2008, U.S. refiners were paying $62 to acquire WTI but selling gasoline at a loss for just $52 - a negative margin of $10 or 16 percent.

Other outputs are still profitable (notably diesel and heating oil) and many refineries will have acquired lower-quality crudes for less than the WTI price. The overall gross margin was still (just) positive.

WASHINGTON: One of the most difficult challenges facing Barack Obama's national security team is the U.S. president-elect's vow to send thousands of U.S. troops to help defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Military experts agree that more troops are required to carry out an effective counterinsurgency campaign, but they also caution that the reinforcements are unlikely to lead to the sort of rapid turnaround that the so-called troop surge produced in Iraq after 2007.

After more than seven years of war, Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure and forbidding terrain.

Intelligence reports underscore the seriousness of the threat. In some recent months, the violence in Afghanistan outpaced the fighting in Iraq. Almost half of the insurgent attacks have been directed against U.S. and other foreign forces. The other attacks have been focused on Afghan security forces and civilians.

"Afghanistan may be the 'good war,' but it is also the harder war," said David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer who recently left his job as senior adviser on counterinsurgency issues to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Robert Kagan - When Security Trumps Sovereignty - washingtonpost.com

In Pakistan's case, the continuing complicity of the military and intelligence services with terrorist groups pretty much shreds any claim to sovereign protection. The Bush administration has tried for years to work with both the military and the civilian government, providing billions of dollars in aid and advanced weaponry. But as my Carnegie Endowment colleague Ashley Tellis has noted, the strategy hasn't shown much success. After Mumbai, it has to be judged a failure. Until now, the military and intelligence services have remained more interested in wielding influence in Afghanistan through the Taliban and fighting India in Kashmir through terrorist groups than in cracking down. Perhaps they need a further incentive -- such as the prospect of seeing parts of their country placed in an international receivership.

Would the U.N. Security Council authorize such action? China has been Pakistan's ally and protector, and Russia might have its own reasons for opposing a resolution. Neither likes the idea of breaking down the walls of national sovereignty -- except, in Russia's case, in Georgia -- which is why they block foreign pressure on Sudan concerning Darfur, and on Iran and other rogue states. This would be yet another test of whether China and Russia, supposed allies in the war against terrorism, are really interested in fighting terrorism outside their own borders. But if such an action were under consideration at the United Nations, that might be enough to gain Pakistan's voluntary cooperation. Either way, it would be useful for the United States, Europe and other nations to begin establishing the principle that Pakistan and other states that harbor terrorists should not take their sovereignty for granted. In the 21st century, sovereign rights need to be earned.

WASHINGTON -- The White House on Tuesday approved a final rule that will make it easier for coal companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining operations into nearby streams and valleys.

The rule is one of the most contentious of all the regulations emerging from the White House in President Bush's last weeks in office.

James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, confirmed in an interview that the rule had been approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget. That clears the way for publication in the Federal Register, the last stage in the rule-making process.

Wearing yellow badges and traveling in groups of 10 or more, agency review teams for President-elect Barack Obama have swarmed into dozens of government offices, from the Pentagon to the National Council on Disability.

With pointed questions and clear ground rules, they are dissecting agency initiatives, poring over budgets and unearthing documents that may prove crucial as a new Democratic president assumes control. Their job is to minimize the natural tension between incoming and outgoing administrations, but their work also is creating anxiety among some Bush administration officials as the teams rigorously examine programs and policies.

Lisa Brown, who served as counsel to Vice President Al Gore and is helping manage the reviews, said typical questions include: "Which is the division that has really run amok? Or that has run out of money? If someone is confirmed, what's going to be on their desk from Day One? What are the main things that need to happen, vis-a-vis Obama's priorities?"

... China's roaring industrial economy has been abruptly quieted by the effects of the global financial crisis. Rural provinces that supplied much of China's factory manpower are watching the beginnings of a wave of reverse migration that has the potential to shake the stability of the world's most populous nation. <...>

As the government tries to calm tensions in the cities, it also fears that newly unemployed migrants returning home could upend the already-strained social system in the countryside. <...>

At a train station 30 miles from Mr. Fan's village, officials are keeping 24-hour tabs on arrivals to monitor how many of the surrounding area's two million migrants will return from industrial centers. Around 60,000 have already done so, they say -- and many more are expected, despite Beijing's efforts to persuade workers to stay in cities and train for potential new jobs. <...>

Many of the returning workers, like Mr. Fan, have too little income from the land to support their families. Beijing has been encouraging many to lease out their farms to more profitable cooperatives -- which don't share their increased earnings from the crops with the landholders -- at the same time it encouraged their moves into the cities, by loosening rules for doing both in the past few years. Those rules were formalized earlier this year. <...>

For workers accustomed to a decade of double-digit growth, China's sudden downturn has come as a shock to the system. Migrant workers -- estimated to make up a tenth of the country's population -- have powered China's economic success in the three decades since free-market reforms began. ...

There are no witnesses to what happened to Mikhail Beketov when he returned home on the night of Nov. 13, but the beating that left him in a coma for two weeks must have been brutal.

Beketov, the owner and editor of Khimkinskaya Pravda, a local newspaper, was found by a neighbor more than 24 hours later, lying in a pool of his own blood outside his home in Khimki, a town just northwest of Moscow, with fractured limbs and severe frostbite.

"This was a result of his professional activities, because he did not have a comfortable relationship with the mayor's office," said Vladimir Kursa, his half-brother.

On Saturday and Sunday, more than 1,000 people gathered in Khimki and Moscow to protest the attack on Beketov, most of them pointing the finger at the administration of Khimki mayor Vladimir Strelchenko.

Oleg Mitvol, until recently a senior figure at of the country's environmental watchdog, agreed.

"Beketov is already the third editor to end up in intensive care," he told the more than 100 protesters gathered outside Chistiye Prudy metro station.
...

A leading UN scientist says the international community must work together to tackle the threat of asteroids colliding with the Earth.

Professor Richard Crowther's comments come as a group of space experts called for a co-ordinated science-led response to the asteroid threat.

The Association of Space Explorers (ASE) says missions to intercept asteroids will need global approval.

The UN will meet in February to discuss the issue.

In the ASE report, the group of scientists and former astronauts point to the historical record to highlight the dangers of asteroids; an impact 65 million years ago may have wiped out the dinosaurs, and the Tunguska impact in 1908 produced a 2000 sq km fire in Siberia, big enough to engulf a city the size of New York.

the Marywood study does not involve the bedroom, but the playing field. It is being financed by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which is investigating whether the diamond-shaped blue pills create an unfair competitive advantage in dilating an athlete's blood vessels and unduly increasing oxygen-carrying capacity. If so, the agency could ban the drug.

Viagra, or sildenafil citrate, was devised to treat pulmonary hypertension, or high blood pressure in arteries of the lungs. The drug works by suppressing an enzyme that controls blood flow, allowing the vessels to relax and widen. The same mechanism facilitates blood flow into the penis of impotent men. In the case of athletes, increased cardiac output and more efficient transport of oxygenated fuel to the muscles can enhance endurance.

"Basically, it allows you to compete with a sea level, or near sea level, aerobic capacity at altitude," Kenneth Rundell, the director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Marywood, said of Viagra.

Some experts are more skeptical. Anthony Butch, the director of the Olympic drug-testing lab at UCLA, said it would be "extremely difficult, if not impossible" to prove that Viagra provides a competitive edge, given that the differences in performance would be slight and that athletes would probably take it in combination with other drugs.

A man used a candy cane lawn ornament to fend off a knife-wielding neighbor who had been attacking holiday guests at a Sacramento home, authorities said.

Police spokesman Sgt. Norm Leong said the man used the 2-foot-tall plastic ornament to subdue the attacker until officers arrived.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2008) -- Scientists studying a material that appeared to lose its ability to carry current with no resistance say new measurements reveal that the material is indeed a superconductor -- but only in two dimensions. Equally surprising, this new form of 2-D superconductivity emerges at a higher temperature than ordinary 3-D superconductivity in other compositions of the same material.

[...]

Tranquada and his colleagues have been studying a layered material made of lanthanum, barium, copper, and oxygen (LBCO) where the ratio of barium to copper atoms is exactly 1 to 8. At a range of compositions with lower and higher levels of barium, LBCO acts as a "high-temperature" superconductor, with a peak operating temperature of 32 K. But at the mysterious 1:8 ratio, the transition temperature at which superconductivity sets in drops way down toward absolute zero.

[...]

The scientists are particularly intrigued by this new form of 2-D superconductivity because it sets in at an even higher temperature (40 K) than that at which 3-D superconductivity occurs in other forms of LBCO.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2008) -- Diets and beauty products which claim to have anti-oxidant properties are unlikely to prevent aging, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust. Researchers at the Institute of Healthy aging at UCL (University College London) say this is because a key fifty year old theory about the causes of aging is wrong.

"Superoxide" free radicals - oxygen molecules that have an imbalance of electrons to protons - are generated in the body through natural processes such as metabolism. These free radicals can cause oxidation in the body, analogous to rust when iron is exposed to oxygen. Biological systems, such as the human body, are usually able to restrict or repair this damage.

In 1956, Denham Harman proposed the theory that aging is caused by an accumulation of molecular damage caused by "oxidative stress", the action of reactive forms of oxygen, such as superoxide, on cells. This theory has dominated the field of aging research for over fifty years. But now, a study published online today in the journal Genes & Development suggests that this theory is probably incorrect and that superoxide is not a major cause of aging.

... Scientists say the Arctic's seas could be essentially free of ice in the summertime by mid-century. <...>

Already, shipping already has increased within the Arctic Circle to serve the oil and gas industry.

<...>

Except for some cruise ships and icebreakers, the traffic in the Arctic now is regional -- mostly ships going in and out to provide transportation for the oil and gas industry, he said.

Oil companies have been looking at Alaska's arctic waters as a new frontier.

And in the past two years, the Bush administration has leased large parts of those waters -- the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

Shell was the main buyer of the Chukchi leases in February, spending $2.1 billion.

"Shell, like many other national and international oil companies, is actively assessing Arctic opportunities," said Shell spokeswoman Darci Sinclair. <...>

There's also competition. Russia has claimed a vast territory in the Arctic Ocean by declaring that the undersea Lomonosov Ridge is its continental shelf, setting up a dispute with the U.S., Canada and other Arctic nations. ...

Hanging around a spent fuel canister for some hours will give you the equivalent dose from that of a dental X-ray, and sleeping on the canister for three days and nights will give you the equvalent of your annual natural radiation dose. If you live on the canister for an entire year you will recieve about five times the US federal radiation limit for nuclear workers. So don't do it.

If you really want to sleep on the canister you will have to wait 300-500 years, after which it will be perfectly harmless.

But I will still accept your spent fuel canisters for storage. I will just put them on the bottom of a swimming pool or bury them in the backyard, as a meter of water or two metres of dirt should be perfectly adequate shielding. ;)

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.