The New Year has brought with it the lifting of restrictions for Bulgarian and Romanian workers in Greece, Spain and Denmark, but a number of EU states will be keeping barriers to their labour markets for three more years.

Greece on Wednesday (31 December) became the latest "old" EU member to lift restrictions for Bulgarian and Romanian workers, following Spain and Denmark which set the example earlier in December.

Thessaloniki - Greece and Spain are among the favourite destinations of Bulgarian workers

"The Greek government has reached this decision after assessing all parameters. With this move, illegal work will diminish. The reasons [to work illegally] will be very much reduced, as workers from Bulgaria and Romania now become just as competitive as the Greek ones, if not more," the secretary general of the Greek labour ministry was quoted as saying by Bulgarian news agency Bgnes.

The new Czech EU presidency and France will next week send two overlapping peace missions to the Middle East, amid sensitivities on Prague's capability to lead Europe.

Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek told national TV on Thursday (1 January) that an EU delegation will visit Egypt, Israel, Palestine's West Bank and Jordan early next week to try to broker a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war.

Sarkozy (l) and Topolanek discussed the overlap problem by telephone.

Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg will lead the team, comprising French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, EU top diplomat Javier Solana and external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

The EU and the US have voiced concern after Russia has cut gas supplies to Ukraine on 1 January due to a price dispute. But EU consumers are less likely to be hit by disruptions as in early 2006.

Russia's gas monopoly Gazprom cut off gas supplies to Ukraine early on Thursday after talks on the new gas price for 2009 failed shortly before New Year's Eve. Without a valid contract, Gazprom said, it had no legal basis to continue supplying Ukraine.

It takes 36 hours for the Russian gas to reach the EU borders through Ukraine and see if there are disruptions.

Ukraine rejected a price increase, saying that falling oil prices did not justify the move. Kiev also claimed it has paid its outstanding debt of €1 billion to RosUkrEnergo, the gas-trading intermediary, while Gazprom maintained it had not received the money and also expected €432 million fines for late payment.

Russian gas giant Gazprom says it can no longer depend on Ukraine as a transit route to the EU and is looking to develop alternatives.

In a BBC interview, the deputy chairman of Gazprom, Alexander Medvedev, said he hoped EU countries would back the move.

Gazprom cut off Ukraine's gas supply on Thursday in a row over payment.

The firm has since accused Ukraine of stealing gas, however Ukraine's state energy firm said Russia was not sending enough gas to ensure the EU supplies.

New Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy has received the backing of parliament in a vote of confidence.

Mr Van Rompuy was appointed on Wednesday and has assembled much the same cabinet that served under his predecessor Yves Leterme.

Mr Leterme's government collapsed after he resigned on 19 December amid a scandal over the rescue of Fortis bank.

The new government must deal with the fallout from that, as well as impending recession and a continuing ethnic rift.

Business will be told it has to help pay for the government's plan for a £20bn bullet train line from London to Manchester, under plans to be published this year.

Andrew Adonis, transport minister, wants the new 200mph line to be at the heart of a revamped rail system, putting the capital within 45 minutes of Birmingham and 75 minutes of Manchester. But Lord Adonis told the Financial Times that while there was "a very strong case" for the new line, it would have to be partly funded by business, which would benefit from improved transport links.

There's a campaign in Finland, repeated this year, nd supported by mass transit operators, mobile operators and communications officials, to make people more aware of the intrusion of mobile phone use in public space.

It doesn't bother me if people talk into their mobiles at normal conversation levels - but they don't!

The thing that really gets my goat is people answering mobiles in meetings.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Jan. 2 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. regulators working to untangle  Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme are probing other money managers suspected of using similar tactics, two people with knowledge of the inquiries said.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is pursuing at least one case in which investors may have been cheated out of as much as $1 billion, according to one person, who declined to name the manager and asked not to be identified because the probe isn't public.

Regulators may discover additional Ponzi arrangements as declining stock markets prompt investors to withdraw their cash and they question how their money is being managed. This week, the SEC said it halted what the agency described as a $23 million scam targeting Haitian-Americans, and said the Florida- based operators had tried as recently as last month to bring in more investors.

World stock markets have started the year on a positive note, gaining ground after shares saw record falls in 2008.

In London, the FTSE 100 index was up by 2.88% at close and in France and Germany the major indexes had risen by 4.09% and 3.39% respectively.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones was 1.60% ahead at midday in New York.

However, analysts said gains might not be sustainable, with many market participants still on holiday and low trading volumes.

US manufacturing activity contracted at its sharpest pace for nearly 30 years in December, a closely watched survey suggested on Friday, underscoring the downward momentum in the economy at the turn of the year.

The Institute for Supply Managers survey index declined in November from 36.2 to 32.4, much worse than expected, while new orders and production measures hit their lowest level since the survey began in 1948.

It coincided with manufacturing data that highlighted the sharp synchronised decline in economic activity around the world, with manufacturing suffering severe pain.

JPMorgan's global purchasing managers index on Friday showed manufacturing activity falling to its lowest level since the survey began 11 years ago.

A PMI survey compiled by broker CLSA showed China's manufacturing activity contracting for a fifth successive month while the South Korean government said exports slid 17.4 per cent in December after a revised fall of 19 per cent in November.

The revised version of a closely-followed eurozone survey showed manufacturing activity hitting a new low of 33.9 in December - the lowest since the PMI was created a decade ago.

France is to step up efforts to instil moral values in the global market economy by urging policymakers to consider fresh ways of combating financial short-termism.

Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, and Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, will jointly host a conference in Paris next week of political leaders and Nobel prize-winning economists to discuss ways of strengthening the ethical foundations of the capitalist system after the financial crisis.

"There is no system of wealth creation without a system of values and this value system has been badly shaken," said Eric Besson, the French minister for policy planning, who is organising the conference.

"People are prepared to accept others getting high pay and enjoying different lifestyles, but only if they have the feeling that the system is fair and that the law is the same for everybody."

Mr Besson criticised complex securitisation of debt, excessive financial leverage, short-selling and demands for unrealistic returns on investment, saying they pointed to a pervasive "failure to value the long term" across all sectors of the economy for the past 20 years. "Nobody wants to ban the stock market," he said, even though it had become a "casino".

"But how can we return to certain fundamental values where the stock exchange is the place businesses come to for the long-term capital they need?"

FT.com / US - Paulson says crisis sown by imbalance

Global economic imbalances helped to foster the credit crisis by pushing down global interest rates and driving investors towards riskier assets, outgoing US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told the Financial Times.

In a valedictory interview, Mr Paulson cast the crisis as partly the result of a collective failure to come to terms with the way the rise of emerging markets was reshaping the global financial system. These imbalances - arising from differences in the inclinations of different nations to save and invest - are reflected in large current account deficits and surpluses around the world.

The US Treasury Secretary said that in the years leading up to the crisis, super-abundant savings from fast-growing emerging nations such as China and oil exporters - at a time of low inflation and booming trade and capital flows - put downward pressure on yields and risk spreads everywhere.

This argument - already advanced by a number of economists and largely endorsed by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke - suggests that the roots of the crisis do not simply lie in failures within the financial system.

Western countries should close their markets to sales of Chinese trains because China's domestic market is closing to outside suppliers, says the head of one of the world's largest rolling stock builders.

In a Financial Times interview, Philippe Mellier, chief executive of Paris-based Alstom Transport, also claimed that Chinese companies were offering trains for export using technology derived from western suppliers. Such technology is usually supplied on condition it not be used outside China.

However, after a period when China signed contracts with several suppliers from other parts of the world to transfer technology to itself, it is gradually insisting new trains be entirely domestically designed and built.

Chinese manufacturers are also increasingly seeking orders in the European heartland of Alstom, Bombardier Transportation, the world number one, and Siemens, the number three. One has already won a small order to build trains for the UK market, while another was included in a shortlist of bidders for an order by the UK's Department for Transport on December 22.

Mr Mellier said: "We're starting to see Chinese companies answering tenders around the world with Chinese freight locomotives, some of them being based on transferred technology." A similar process was under way with tenders to supply metro cars, he added.

GAZA (Reuters) - The civilian death toll climbed in Israel's air offensive against the Gaza Strip on Friday and Palestinian Islamists vowed revenge for the killing of a senior Hamas leader and his family.

There was no sign of a ceasefire on the seventh day of the conflict, in which at least 425 Palestinians have been killed and 2,000 wounded, but a Palestinian official told Reuters that Egypt had begun exploratory talks with Hamas to halt the bloodshed.

The senior Palestinian official, who declined to be named and who has been close to previous talks between Egypt and Hamas, said the aim of the talks included promoting ideas that would culminate in a new truce.

Four Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza, which strike southern cities and towns at random and cause property damage and panic among the local population.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's defense minister said on Friday Pakistan was still failing to crack down on militants blamed for the Mumbai attacks, and that New Delhi had not deployed troops despite tension with its neighbor.

India has been mobilizing support across the world to press Pakistan to crack down on militant networks there which have been blamed for November attacks in Mumbai that left 179 people dead.

New Delhi says it has repeatedly provided Islamabad with evidence of use of Pakistani soil by militants, but Pakistani authorities have rejected those claims, saying the proof was not credible.

"I don't think (there is) any noticeable change in the attitude of Pakistan," Indian Defence Minister A.K. Antony told reporters in New Delhi.

KERBALA, Iraq (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed at least 23 people and wounded 72 on Friday at a feast for Sunni Arab electoral candidates and tribal leaders in a town near Baghdad.

The bombing took place a day after the U.S. military presence in Iraq came under an Iraqi government mandate, and weeks before provincial elections which could reshape the political landscape across the country.

BOSASSO, Somalia (Reuters) - French forces handed over eight pirates to Somali authorities Friday and a new get-tough approach by foreign navies thwarted more attacks in vital shipping lanes linking Europe to Asia.

Rampant piracy off Somalia's coast has alarmed nations around the world worried about threats to global trade and warships have rushed to curb the hijacks, typically carried out by a handful of well-armed bandits in small speedboats.

It was the audacious seizure of a Saudi oil tanker with two million barrels of crude hundreds of miles at sea in November that shocked shipping firms and calls for action mushroomed.

The Sri Lankan army today seized control of Kilinochchi, the low-lying northern town in which separatist Tamil Tiger rebels had put together the institutions of their long sought-after independent state.

The major symbolic victory for the government could also prove a decisive turning point in the country's 25-year civil war.

"This was an unparalleled victory," the president, Mahinda Rajapakse, said in a televised speech from his office.

"Kilinochchi was the capital of a state dreamt of by a terrorist organisation. It will no longer be available to them. We should pay the gratitude of the whole nation to those heroic soldiers who achieved that victory."

Soon after the announcement, a loud blast rocked the Sri Lankan air force headquarters, opposite a luxury hotel in the heart of the national capital, Colombo, as a suicide bomber blew himself up, killing three people and injuring 37.

Cuba has marked the 50th anniversary of the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, creating a communist state on the United States' doorstep.

President Raul Castro, who took over from Fidel last year, spoke from below the same balcony where his brother declared victory on 1 January 1959.

He predicted the revolution would survive another 50 years.

The festivities have been muted as Cuba struggles with big economic challenges and the aftermath of three hurricanes.

Reacting to the anniversary, a White House spokesman said the US continued to seek freedom for the Cuban people.

Ghanaian President John Kufuor has urged both candidates in the election to choose his successor to respect the result, as the last constituency voted.

Mr Kufuor appealed for calm and said any complaints of vote-rigging should be dealt with by the courts after the new president is sworn in on Wednesday.

The opposition leader, John Atta Mills, has a narrow lead over the governing party candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo.

Mr Akufo-Addo's lawyers are trying to stop a final result being announced.

A US think tank has warned that diplomacy would not stop Iran's nuclear program and that harsher sanctions against Tehran should be adopted, a move that could drive a wedge between the White House and Germany.

US President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to "do everything that is required" to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, including harsher sanctions and, if necessary, military action.

"The diplomatic path is not promising," Middle East expert James Phillips of the conservative US Heritage Foundation wrote, according to the DPA news agency. A carrot-and-stick policy towards Iran holds little hope, he added, because "for Iran, a nuclear weapon is the biggest carrot."

The Chinese government is moving to crush a group of prominent dissidents and intellectuals that has released a rallying call for democracy, human rights and rule of law.

The group of about 300 writers, peasant farmers, students, professors, journalists, economists, and political activists from across the country all signed a document, known as Charter 08, that provides a detailed and wide-ranging blueprint for peaceful political, legal and economic reform in China.

Since then, nearly 7,000 Chinese and foreign intellectuals inside and outside the country have signed Charter 08, which warns of "the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions" if Beijing does not quickly move to reform the one-party authoritarian state.

Chinese intellectuals and dissidents are calling the document the most significant of its kind for at least a decade and possibly since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Its name is a reference to Charter 77, the 1977 call for human rights issued by dissidents in former Czechoslovakia.

WASHINGTON -- Just a month after President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he must tell the Supreme Court where he stands on one of the most aggressive legal claims made by the Bush administration -- that the president may order the military to seize legal residents of the United States and hold them indefinitely without charging them with a crime.

The new administration's brief, which is due Feb. 20, has the potential to hearten or infuriate Mr. Obama's supporters, many of whom are looking to him for stark disavowals of the Bush administration's legal positions on the detention and interrogation of so-called enemy combatants held at Navy facilities on the American mainland or at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama made broad statements criticizing the Bush administration's assertions of executive power. But now he must address a specific case, that of Ali al-Marri, a Qatari student who was arrested in Peoria, Ill., in December 2001. The Bush administration says Mr. Marri is a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda, and it is holding him without charges at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. He is the only person currently held as an enemy combatant on the mainland, but the legal principles established in his case are likely to affect the roughly 250 prisoners at Guantánamo.

Many legal experts say that all of the new administration's options in Mr. Marri's case are perilous. Intelligence officials say he is exceptionally dangerous, making deportation problematic.

Trying him on criminal charges could be difficult, too, in part because some of the evidence against him may have been obtained through torture and would not be admissible.

LONDON (Reuters) - Coral growth since 1990 in Australia's Great Barrier Reef has fallen to its lowest rate for 400 years, in a troubling sign for the world's oceans, researchers said on Thursday.

This could threaten a variety of marine ecosystems that rely on the reef and signal similar problems for other similar organisms worldwide, Glen De'ath and colleagues at the Australian Institute of Marine Science said.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral expanse, and like similar reefs worldwide is threatened by climate change and pollution.

"These organisms are central to the formation and function of ecosystems and food webs, and precipitous changes in the biodiversity and productivity of the world's oceans may be imminent," the researchers wrote in the journal Science.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Preliminary water tests from rivers near a huge coal ash spill in Tennessee show elevated levels of pollutants such as mercury and lead, a environmental group said on Friday.

"We're concerned that the water poses a greater risk to residents in the area than has been revealed so far," said Matt Wasson, a program director at Appalachian Voices, a environmental group that coordinated the testing of the water with scientists from Appalachian State University.

An earthen dike collapsed on December 22 at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston coal-fired power plant, spilling coal ash across as much as 400 acres. The ash, left from decades of coal burning, had been stored in a sludge pond. The spill extended into a waterway, blocked a road, and ruined three homes, according to the TVA.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Two Chinese companies on Friday announced plans to build a solar power plant in northwestern China that could one day be the largest photovoltaic solar project in the world.

The news helped spur a rally in shares of solar power companies that was also underpinned by higher oil prices and a strong rise the broader market.

China Technology Development Group Corp and privately held Qinghai New Energy Group will begin building a 30 megawatt solar power station in China's Qaidam Basin this year with an initial investment of $150 million, they said in a joint statement.

The project, which will combine thin-film and traditional silicon-based technologies that turn the sun's rays into electricity, ultimately will produce 1 gigawatt of power, the companies said, without giving a timeframe.

The identity of David Tennant's replacement as Doctor Who will be revealed in a BBC1 show to be broadcast tomorrow - and simulcast live on the BBC's big outdoor screens in cities around the country.

It is understood that those hoping for the first female doctor will be disappointed. Doctor Who's new executive producers, Coupling creator Steven Moffat and BBC Wales head of drama Piers Wenger are said to have stuck with tradition and cast a man in the role.

However, Moffat and Wenger are thought to have steered away from the more obvious names that have been linked to the role.

Tennant's replacement will be unveiled in an edition of Doctor Who Confidential to be broadcast on BBC1 at 5.35pm on Saturday, 3 January, featuring an interview with the actor who is to be the 11th doctor in the long-running BBC1 sci fi drama, successfully revived by the corporation in 2005.

Current approaches to deal with climate change are ineffectual, one of the world's top climate scientists said today in a personal new year appeal to Barack Obama and his wife Michelle on the urgent need to tackle global warming.

With less than three weeks to go until Obama's inauguration, Prof James Hansen, head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, asked the recently appointed White House science adviser Prof John Holdren to pass the missive directly to the president-elect.

Obama spoke repeatedly during his campaign about the need to tackle climate change, and environmentalists fervently hope he will live up to his promises to pursue green policies.

The world's first clinical trial of human insulin produced in plants is starting in the UK. The aim is to provide a new source of insulin to meet the rapidly growing demand from diabetics.

SemBioSys, a Canadian biotechnology company, has developed a genetically modified variety of safflower that makes high concentrations of human insulin in its seeds. (Safflower is a thistle-like plant with large yellow flowers, which is a minor source of seed oils.)

Thirty healthy volunteers are taking part in the inaugural trial, which is being run in Manchester by Icon, a contract research company.

It is an important milestone for the nascent "biopharming" industry, which aims eventually to produce a range of clinically useful human molecules in genetically engineered plants. Although several such pharmaceuticals are in development, none has yet reached the market - and insulin could be the first, says Andrew Baum, SemBioSys chief executive.

What an affect on the world this man's writing has had.  One could argue that Lord of the Rings was a strong underpinning to all the 60's wrought.  At least for me.

It was exam time after my first year at university, my last.  i was certain that in the last few days before my French exam, i was brilliant enough to study hard and pass the exam, even though i hadn't been to one class, except the first, to see what girls were there.

Then someone handed me the first volume.  By the time i finished the second volume, non-stop, i was beginning to realize the French exam ws dissolving away.  I ran down to a drinking establishment to exchange the second volume for the last, when i noticed an absolutely stellar display of Northern Lights building.

I grabbed a friend, and we took guitars and harps to the cemetery, propped our backs against the headstones, and played spellbound to unfolding cosmic spectacle.  Perhaps there were tiny dried mushrooms involved.

I finished the third volume in time to go to my French exam, and tell the teacher quote, "I don't think i'm ready for this," and showed her what i'd been studying the past week.  Instead of failing me, she told me I had already dropped the course.  Merci, i said.

I am still one of those people who read a shitload of metaphor in the Trilogy.  But i remain amazed that a writer could create such a compelling and full other world.

Skennah Kowa