...The proposal has already been condemned by the National Farmers Union as risking a doubling in the price of vegetables.

...A compromise hammered out between EU governments and MEPs means a reduced number of 22 toxic substances would be banned from use as crop chemicals.

But SNP MEP Alyn Smith said even the compromise was too much. Urging his colleagues to "reflect over the holiday period", he went on: "The proposals which will be presented in January go too far.

"Alternatives to many of the chemicals which the legislation proposes to ban have not been fully developed, and are mainly highly-targeted niche options. This often makes them expensive and impracticable, and we can ill afford to make farming more expensive at a time of rising input costs."

Russia has once again shut off its gas supply to Ukraine over a price dispute. This time Europe says it's ready with stockpiles, but the dispute is far from over: Russia swears to verify on Friday that Ukraine has not siphoned gas bound for Europe

The research by the Department for Communities and Local Government found that white working-class communities felt they had been "betrayed" and abandoned by the establishment, which no longer had their concerns at heart.

The Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, said that politicians had to start engaging with the disenchantment among poorer, white sections of society in order to combat growing "myths" over the treatment of immigrants.

Her department's report suggested, she said, that the resentment, unfairness and disempowerment perceived by the group together with the absence of an "open and honest discussion" about immigration had created fertile ground for the far-right to exploit.

Sarkozy said he had asked authorities to be "uncompromising" with vehicle arsonists and said those caught burning other people's cars should lose their own licences until the damage had been paid for.

"There is no reason why honest people should have to pay the consequences of the behaviour of delinquents," he said in an address to emergency service staff who worked over the evening of Dec. 31.

Car burnings are regular occurrences in France, where some 36,700 were recorded in the first 11 months of 2008, according to interior ministry figures.

But registering the New Year's Eve total has become something of a tradition since rows of blazing vehicles became one of the most potent images of the violent rioting that shook many of France's poor suburbs in 2005.

Authorities said 1,147 cars were burned on Dec. 31, up from 878 last year, with a regional breakdown showing the Seine-Saint-Denis region near Paris the most heavily affected.

(Oh, one would think he already 'won' against the racaille two years ago...)


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

AFP- A bomb exploded near the headquarters of the Basque television network in the city of Bilbao Wednesday, minutes after the area was evacuated following a warning call in the name of the separatist group ETA, police said.
   
There appeared to be no casualties in the blast, which took place at 11:05 am (1005 GMT), a police spokesman said.

AFP - Kosovo's president appealed for calm Saturday after seven firefighters were injured in one of two explosions that shook this ethnically divided northern city, police said.
   
NATO's KFOR peacekeeping force and the European Union's EULEX mission to Kosovo also reinforced their presence in the city's ethnic Albanian Bosnjacka Mahala neighbourhood where the second explosion took place, police spokesman Besim Hoti told AFP.
   
The first blast -- which occurred after 10:00 pm (2100 GMT) on Friday near a cafe in the northern half of Kosovska Mitrovica -- damaged several cars but caused no injuries, Hoti said.

About 200 members of the far-right National Democratic Party marched on Saturday, gathering in front of police headquarters in Passau and protesting what they called the "arbitrary" conduct of police and a "media smear campaign."

 

However, the right-wing participants were far outnumbered by counter demonstrators, who numbered around a thousand.

 

"We have to tap into the virtues of our able-bodied democracy," Mayor Juergen Dupper told the crowd, saying Passau was a city of tolerance which disdained right-wing violence.

 

Some 1,000 police officers were also on duty to prevent outbreaks of violence. Ten people were arrested.

Citizens of Passau carry placards reading "Brown filth? Passau is flushing"

Members of right-wing groups march past a banner reading "Extreme right-wingers not welcome"

(This is standard practice in West Germany, but I think still newsworthy as this is how it should be done.)


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

Police have dispersed crowds of demonstrators who gathered near the Israeli embassy in London, following a day of protests across the UK.

Up to 5,000 protesters were involved in a stand-off with police in Kensington while some burned Israeli flags and threw missiles at officers.

Scotland Yard said several people had been arrested.

Earlier, thousands of people marched through central London and other cities in protest at Israeli attacks on Gaza.

And aren't we supposed to feel fools for not being part of it? Sterling, thanks to the idiotic economic policies of Gordon Brown, is a basket case. [...] If only we'd signed up for the euro: then we'd be smug too.

Actually, I fear we wouldn't. [...] Exports from the eurozone are cripplingly expensive. France's aerospace business is tottering. Even its luxury marques like Chanel are having to lay people off. Before too long, there is going to be chaos in the eurozone, mark my words.

Oh yes, let's not forget:

The confrontation between rhetoric and reality cannot be long delayed. [...] The bending of those rules cannot long escape the currency markets. They have picked off sterling and the dollar - the time cannot be far off when the short sellers go after the euro.

[Europe.Is.Doomed™ Alert]  (Boy, do I feel better...)

Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.

The Bank's survey found that concern about the economic outlook and falling asset values had prompted banks to limit lending, risking a downward spiral of falling property prices, increased loan defaults and tighter credit. The rep-ort, which predicted further reining in of lending in the current quarter, came on top of gloomy data from the manufacturing and housing sectors.

Manufacturing shrank for the eighth straight month in December, according to the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply survey. Mortgage approvals in November were at their lowest since the Bank of England started collecting figures in 1999, while a Halifax survey showed a record annual fall in house prices of 16.2 per cent.

The batch of grim data sent the pound down against the dollar and the euro, which hovered just short of record highs above 98p reached earlier in the week.

(Could someone explain the above news? What's a gilt?)


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

US Treasury Department spokeswoman Brookly McLaughlin confirmed that the government had sent the $4 billion in funds to Chrysler yesterday.

General Motors Corp received $4 billion in emergency loans on Wednesday. Both Chrysler and GM have said they need the infusion of government cash to meet payouts to suppliers at a time when a plunge in auto sales has drained their cash holdings.

Officials have not spelled out why the loan to GM and a separate $6 billion funding for its affiliated finance firm GMAC were completed ahead of the Chrysler transaction.

At least 10 per cent, and possibly as much as 17 per cent, of its global workforce could be cut in what would be the first mass lay-offs in the company's 32-year history. Across the world, up to 15,000 jobs could be under threat.

The economic meltdown has led to losses among Germany's 20 richest families of about "30 percent on average" of their fortunes since 2007, said asset manager Joachim Paul Schaefer, according to a report published Saturday in the financial magazine WirtschaftsWoche.

 

"It is clear now that the present crisis has inflicted much deeper wounds on big family fortunes than the last four or five recessions combined," he said.

 

He compared today's threats to family fortunes that have grown over generations to those experienced during the bad old days of hyperinflation, during the 1920s or 1930s in Germany.

 

For example, the magazine said the value of the shares of the Quandt industrial dynasty, which owns one-half of the capital of automaker BMW, has decreased by 50 percent in one year.

 

According to the magazine, there are 122 German individuals or families worth at least one billion euros ($1.38 billion).

The economic downturn in the second half of 2008 did not have a major effect on employment, it said.

Germany's jobless rate hit a 16-year-low in November when 7.5 per cent of the workforce, or 3.15 million people, were without jobs.

The Federal Labor Agency is due to release unemployment figures for December next week.

...

The Purchasing Managers' Index is a measure of an economy's manufacturing activity. A score over 50 points indicates growth, while a score below 50 reflects contracting industrial output. December saw the euro zone's score fall below 34 point points -- the lowest level in the survey's 11-year history. 

On a national level, Germany was one of the hardest hit. Its score shrank to 32.7 in December -- down three points from November.

Chris Williamson, the chief economist at Markit, said Germany's disappointing score represents a 12 percent drop in industrial output.

The burden cannot fall exclusively on deficit nations. If trade is to work to everyone's advantage, the system must be broadly in balance, which means surplus nations must do more to stimulate demand. For China, that means crucially allowing its exchange rate to appreciate.

Firecrackers ripped through the skies of villages and towns in Sri Lanka last night as the majority Sinhalese population celebrated the government's claim that its forces had seized the rebel Tamil Tiger capital of Kilinochchi.

But joy at the apparent breakthrough by the army was tempered by reports of a suicide bomb attack on the headquarters of the Sri Lankan air force in Colombo. The attack serves as a reminder that the Tigers, who wish to establish an independent Tamil state in the north and east of the island, remain a deadly force able to strike across the country.

The small column of military vehicles crossed the boundary fence into the northern Gaza Strip under darkness, said the witness, a resident of Beit Lahiya.

An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the incursion and said the aim was to seize areas from where Hamas was launching rocket attacks on southern Israel.

...An Israeli air strike earlier on Saturday evening killed 11 Palestinian worshippers, including children, and wounded dozens as in a mosque in Beit Lahiya, Hamas officials and medics said.

Rescuers pulled people from the debris and the bodies of victims lay in pools of blood, witnesses said.

Israel has targeted mosques previously saying that Hamas had used them as command posts and fire bases.

The mosque raid brought the Palestinian death toll to at least 446, with about 2,050 wounded, in the worst sustained bloodshed in decades of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Four Israelis have also been killed in the cross-border rocket attacks by Hamas and other militant groups.

Some 6,428 Iraqis applied for asylum during the first 11 months of 2008, a rise of 64 percent from a year ago, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees said.

Nearly one-third of the 20,436 asylum seekers registered between January and November came from Iraq, said Michael Kleinhans, who heads the department responsible for processing asylum applications.

Kleinhans attributed the increase to moves by Germany to ease asylum requirements for members of certain religious minorities.

Hundreds of Ethiopian soldiers have started pulling out of the Somali capital Mogadishu amid fears the troops' departure will allow Islamic insurgents to take even more control of the lawless country.

Ethiopia has been propping up Somalia's weak government for two years, but vowed to leave by the end of 2008.

Officials declined to give an exact date because of fears of a power vacuum, saying only that the thousands of troops would be pulled out in stages.

Ghana's electoral commission says John Atta Mills of the opposition National Democratic Congress has won the country's presidential election. The 64-year-old lawyer is to succeed President John Kufuor, who is to step down on Wednesday after serving his maximum two terms in office. Election officials in Accra said the results of a run-off in which a final constituency voted on Friday showed Mills had won narrowly with 50.23 percent of the votes, against 49.77 percent for Nana Akufo-Addo of the ruling New Patriotic Party. Turnout in the run-off vote, which was held in most of the country last Sunday was 73 percent. The ruling NPP boycotted Friday's poll in a remote rural constituency after it failed in its bid to stop the vote over alleged election irregularities.

"On the basis of the official results given, it's my duty to declare Professor John Evans Atta-Mills president-elect of the Republic of Ghana,"  electoral commissioner Kwado Afari-Gyan told reporters.
   
"Victory for the opposition party is a victory for democracy," NDC member Sekou Nkrumah, the youngest son of Ghana's first president at independence Kwame Nkrumah, told AFP at the party's headquarters.

An emergency "Plan B" using the latest technology is needed to save the world from dangerous climate change, according to a poll of leading scientists carried out by The Independent. The collective international failure to curb the growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has meant that an alternative to merely curbing emissions may become necessary.

The number nine has a special significance for Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Nine is the number of planets in the Solar System, and Sykes is one of several leading astronomers who want to keep it that way.

Unfortunately, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which adjudicates on these matters, has ruled there are no longer nine planets in the Solar System, after a decision two years ago to downgrade Pluto to the lowly status of a "dwarf planet".

But in 2009, Dr Sykes and his like-minded colleagues hope to get the ruling overturned at the next general assembly of the IAU, to be held in Rio de Janeiro in August.

Onto the barricades! Says an Eight Planets partisan... as for motivations on the other side:

The row over Pluto's downgrading has been simmering since the astronomy organisation voted to relegate it in August 2006 in Prague. It was agreed at the last vote of that conference - after many scientists had left.

It was particularly galling for Alan Stern, principal investigator on a Nasa mission, New Horizons, which had launched a nuclear-powered probe to Pluto six months earlier.

Dr Stern and Nasa found that their £460m New Horizons spacecraft, due to arrive at Pluto in 2015, was no longer going to visit the Solar System's most distant planet, but just one of many chunks of rock in the Kuiper belt of asteroids beyond Neptune.

Marketing, marketing! The article fails to mention the Kuiper Belt dwarf planet whose discovery prompted the 2006 decision, being larger than Pluto: Eris.


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

Critics claimed Germany's new citizenship test was too difficult when it was introduced last year. Now they are saying it's too easy -- officials have revealed the test has a 99-percent pass rate.

The Government is threatening to regulate the food industry to stop firms promoting unhealthy eating habits among the nation's seven million schoolchildren, the Health minister, Ben Bradshaw, warned yesterday.

Dieter Althaus, the 50-year-old governor of the eastern German state of Thuringia, collided with a 41-year-old Slovakian woman while skiing at the Riesneralm ski area in south-eastern Austria on Thursday. Both were immediately flown to the hospital by helicopter. The Slovakian woman, who lived in the US, died on the way.

Althaus is one of Merkel's supporters, a pragmatist, even vs. the Left Party.


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

The French fashion designer, Ted Lapidus, the man who made the safari suit and jeans the height of elegance in the 1960s, has died aged 79.

M. Lapidus, born in Paris into a family of Russian émigré tailors, was best-known for creating a "unisex" style of clothes. His high-profile clients in the 1960s and 1970s included the actors Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon. He died of respiratory problems in hospital in Cannes on Monday.