Deliveries of Russian gas to Europe remain suspended after negotiations on Friday aimed at agreeing on a mechanism to monitor gas flow through Ukraine failed to bring any result. Russian state-run energy firm Gasprom, which has pledged to resume deliveries to Europe once the deal is signed, has said Ukraine disrupted Friday's talks. Kyiv, meanwhile, is saying that Ukraine is prepared to sign a deal on a monitoring mechanism as soon as possible.

Millions of Europeans are left shivering in some of the coldest temperatures of the winter so far, as Russia, which supplies one-quarter of all gas consumed in European Union countries, continues to halt deliveries of its gas.

(Voice of America)

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

The war in Afghanistan is a war of a new kind, being waged simultaneously on the security and development fronts. The battle for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people will determine the success or failure of the mission. But in our haste to win the support of Afghans, we forget that this is a battle that must be fought at home too. National opinion polls point to shrinking support for the mission. We are plainly losing the battle for European hearts and minds on Afghanistan. The consequences of this failure are dire. European troops and civilian experts on the front lines do not enjoy the moral support they deserve. At the same time the capacity of governments to strengthen or even renew their commitment to Afghanistan is now seriously limited.

Each European country significantly involved in Afghanistan should, as a matter of urgency, set up an independent public review of its future commitment. These review commissions would evaluate the different options and propose a pragmatic way forward that reflects each country's national interest. They should also generate a substantial public discussion on why Afghanistan matters for Europeans.

Zimbabwe's cholera epidemic has claimed at least 1,778 lives since August last year with the number of diagnosed cases rising to 35,931, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

On Tuesday the organisation reported 1,732 dead and 34,306 suspected cases of the water-borne disease.

United Nations aid agencies have been warning for weeks that the number of cases could top 60,000, with the impending rainy season likely to facilitate the spread of the disease.

All 10 of the country's provinces have been hit, according to UN statistics, which remain incomplete because of a lack of local medical personnel and communications problems.

About 600,000 migrant workers left south China's industrial heartland last year as the economic crisis caused exports to shrink and forced factories to close, a senior official said Thursday.

The number of migrants departing Guangdong province, one of the world's top makers of toys and electronic appliances, accelerated through 2008 as the global situation worsened, said provincial deputy governor Huang Longyun.

"This year the situation is more serious than at any other time since the start of the decade, indeed since the Asian financial crisis," he told a briefing in Beijing, referring to regional turmoil that broke out in 1997.

By the middle of last year, when the economic crisis was still in its embryonic stage, only 143,100 workers had left Guangdong, but the number reached half a million at the end of October and has now hit 600,000, he said.

A senior Israeli military commander involved in Operation Cast Lead said on Saturday that Hamas militants are suffering from exhaustion and are deserting battle.

The commander told reporters that Amir Mansi, the commander of Hamas's rocket-launching program in the Gaza City area who was killed by the IDF on Saturday, fired mortars himself after junior Hamas operatives refused to go outside, fearing an Israeli strike.

The IDF official estimated that more than 300 Hamas operatives have been killed since Israel launched its ground offensive in Gaza one week ago.

This is the highest estimate provided thus far, and the IDF said that Hamas has purposely refrained from releasing casualty figures among its military wing.

The commander added that the army is working to tighten its grip on the northern section of the Gaza Strip.

The IDF earlier on Saturday killed Mansi, an expert with regard to long-range Grad rockets.

New Delhi(PTI): India on Saturday virtually ruled out any Israel type action against Pakistan in the wake of Mumbai terror attacks, saying the situation is not comparable.

External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, however, maintained that "future course" will decide how India will deal with Pakistan if the latter does not comply with its demands about ending terrorism.

"I do not agree to that. Because this is totally wrong. The situation is not at all comparable," he said when asked whether Israeli type offensive against Hamas in Gaza Strip could be an option for the Government against Pakistan.

"I have not gone and occupied any (of) Pakistan's land which Israel has done (in Palestine). So, how the situation can be comparable," Mukherjee asked during an interview to CNN-IBN.

Well of course. All the talk about "doing a Gaza" on Pakistan is quite misguided, and this has nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

According to a recent Census Bureau report, whites could become a minority of the U.S. population as early as 2042. In the January/February issue of the Atlantic, contributor Hua Hsu explores the implications of this development from both a demographic and cultural perspective.

Also see:

Intolerant Chic (October 2008)
The new "white people" are bigoted, but not the way you think--or they'll admit. A review of Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like. By Benjamin Schwarz

To some extent, Hsu argues, an important shift has already taken place. "Where the culture is concerned," he writes, "[white America] is already all but finished." While some are celebrating this new, more multiethnic America, others, he notes, have reacted with anxiety--sometimes with blunt xenophobia (like Pat Buchanan, who characterizes America's white-minority future as "Third World America"), and sometimes with ironic self-deprecation (like Christian Lander, whose blog and book, both titled "Stuff White People Like," have found popular success).

Such concerns about perceived or real challenges to white hegemony are nothing new. Hua Hsu opens his essay with a look at some of the fears about racial encroachment that once prevailed among a certain cadre of scholarly white men in the 1920s:

Their sense of dread hovered somewhere above the concerns of everyday life. It was linked less to any immediate danger to their class's political and cultural power than to a perceived fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness. From the hysteria over Eastern European immigration to the vibrant cultural miscegenation of the Harlem Renaissance, it is easy to see how this imagined worldwide white kinship might have seemed imperiled in the 1920s.

Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary who advised Citigroup Inc. as it lost $20 billion in the subprime mortgage crisis, resigned his position as senior counselor and won't stand for re-election to the board.

Rubin's departure comes as Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are in talks to merge their brokerage units, said a person familiar with the matter. Rubin, 70, intends to "deepen his involvement in outside activities and organizations to which he has been strongly committed," the New York-based bank said in a statement on Jan. 9.

Rubin, who served at the Treasury's helm from 1995 to 1999 under President Bill Clinton, was criticized by investors for collecting more than $150 million in pay in a decade while failing to steer Citigroup away from subprime securities. The investments led to four straight quarterly losses and prompted the bank to turn to the government for a rescue package.

"His reputation has very much been damaged by what has happened at Citi," Bert Ely, chief executive officer of Ely & Co., a bank consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia, said in a Bloomberg TV interview. "Fair or not, Citi's problems do reflect negatively on him."

A German research ship laden with 20 tonnes of iron sulphate has whipped up a storm of protest as it sails towards the Antarctic, where it intends to dump its cargo into the ocean.

Scientists on thePolarstern, which set sail from Cape Town in South Africa on 7 January, plan an ocean fertilization experiment that some argue will violate international law.

But the scientists say that it will yield the very data necessary to assess the impact of the controversial geo-engineering technique, which aims to trap carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by encouraging the growth of algae.

The team, comprising about 50 scientists from Germany, India, Italy, Spain, Chile, France and Britain, is heading for a small patch of the Scotia Sea between Argentina and the Antarctic Peninsula. The researchers hope that the iron will induce an algal bloom in this usually nutrient-poor region, and plan to observe the growth and decay of the organisms in unprecedented detail during the following eight weeks.

Officials at the Advertising Standards Authority are now considering whether to tackle the question that has taxed the minds of the world's greatest thinkers for centuries.

It has recorded 48 complaints since Tuesday when buses first hit the streets emblazoned with the message: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." At least 40 more people were understood to have made objections by last night.

Most of those who have contacted the ASA consider the adverts offensive and say they break guidelines on taste and decency.

However Stephen Green, the Christian campaigner who led the protests against the BBC's broadcast of Jerry Springer - The Opera, is claiming they should be taken down because the statement in the adverts cannot be substantiated.

He said: "If you're going to put out what appears to be a factual statement then you have to be able to back it up. They've got to substantiate this proposition that in all probability, God doesn't exist."

The ASA is now considering whether to investigate his complaint, which could lead to it reaching a deep ontological conclusion about a supreme being.

A lobster believed to be some 140 years old is to be freed from the confines of a tank at a New York restaurant.

George the giant lobster, weighing 9kg (20lb), will be returned to the ocean, from where he was caught two weeks ago.

The crustacean was bought for $100 (£66) by the City Crab and Seafood and quickly adopted as its mascot, posing for pictures with restaurant patrons.

But animal rights group Peta sought the lobster's release, and will now put it back into the waters off Maine.

It will enter the ocean in the waters around Kennebunkport, where lobster trapping is banned.

The only surefire way to stop criminals stealing data from secondhand computers is to destroy the hard drive, a study by Which? Computing magazine has warned.

Even though people think they have wiped data from machines before they sell them on auction sites or put them onto rubbish tips, the files remain on the hard drives - and can contain vital information such as bank details and other personal data sufficient for identity theft. They can be recovered using specialist software that is widely available.

The magazine recovered 22,000 "deleted" files from eight computers which it bought from the auction site eBay - demonstrating that normal deletion is insufficient to remove the data.

Criminals source used computers in order to find such useful data, the magazine warned. "PCs contain more valuable personal information than ever as people increasingly shop online, use social networking sites and take digital photos," said Sarah Kidner, editor of Which? Computing. "Such information could bring identity thieves a hefty payday."

It is the last frontier in the spin wars between Labour and the Tories, and so far David Cameron has had it largely to himself.

Now Labour is fighting back in the battle of the blogs, with a new website to be launched this week aimed at sparking an online debate among what it calls "Labour-minded" people over thinking inside the movement. It forms part of Labour plans to "take the fight to the web", with ministers fielding questions in online forums, such as the price comparison website moneysupermarket.com and "virals" - internet spoofs designed to be emailed between friends - increasingly sitting alongside conventional party political broadcasts.

LabourList.org was controversial even before it was born, with established Labour bloggers complaining at being left out, and Tory bloggers warning that it would be so heavily censored as to be little more than party propoganda.

Its contributors range former Brown spindoctors Charlie Whelan and Spencer Livermore, to Ben Wegg Prosser, a former aide to Peter Mandelson, and the former cabinet minister Alan Milburn.

Its new editor, Derek Draper, another former Mandelson aide, insists it will be fully independent of the party, pointing to voices like Ken Livingstone and his former chief of staff, Simon Fletcher, who are both signed up as contributors.

Within days of one another, two of the nation's top newspapers -- The Boston Globe and The New York Times -- published stories on youth violence. Titled, respectively, "Girl Power" (seriously Boston Globe?) and "A Rise in Efforts to Stop Abuse in Youth Dating," both reported that the rise in dating violence against young women and violence among young men rages on.

The really bad news? Law enforcement, educators, and even parents are holding girls responsible for stopping it while entirely overlooking systemic and cultural influences that breed violent behavior. The Boston TenPoint Coalition, a Christian group focusing on "troubled youth," along with Boston School Police, is packing teenage girls into public-school auditoriums and sending them a bold and dangerous message: you must prevent your boyfriends from becoming violent.

In addition to being heterosexist, this non-solution conjures up antiquated gender tropes. It paints young men as hormone-crazed meatheads who can't be expected to manage their own emotions or be responsible for their own Cro-Magnon behavior, and young women as moralistic enforcers with no sex drive and nothing better to do than regulate the boys' seemingly untamable instincts. (Interestingly, it's the same sexist framing that the abstinence-only movement has employed for decades without success.)

If you want to eat like a president, order the corned beef," advises Marsha Goldstein as 20 of us tramp off the tour bus and join an early lunchtime queue that is already out of the door of Manny's, near the corner of Roosevelt and Jefferson in central Chicago.

We are about a mile west of Hutchinson Field, where Barack Obama held his celebratory rally after winning the US presidential election. Whereas that November night was unseasonably balmy, this is a more conventional Illinois December day, with icy winds forcing us to shuffle around in oversized coats, scarves and hats.

The president-elect is the reason we are here. Manny's, a traditional Jewish-style deli long beloved by Chicagoans, has drawn international attention in recent weeks as one of Obama's favoured lunch spots. He popped in a few weeks after the election. Desperate for news, hordes of journalists swarmed outside. The media solemnly reported that the president-elect entered the lunch institution at 12.24pm, chatted with customers and staff, purchased two portions of cherry pie and three corned beef sandwiches, insisted on paying the $48.34 bill himself, and exited at 12.45pm.

The level of detail indicates the febrile atmosphere surrounding Obama. As the base for his transition team, America's third largest city had the world's attention as Obama held daily press briefings in the city.

McKenzie: I've heard where you're going to have folks come in to [your policy institute] from other countries that you all have dealt with. Do you envision something that you're going to have fellows and scholars ...

George Bush: Absolutely. There will be fellows and scholars. Let me tell what this isn't. This is not going to be "George Bush is a wonderful person" center or the "center for Republican Party campaign tactics."

It's going to be a place of debate, thought, writing, lecturing. There will be fellows. As an example of the type of fellow that I would like to have there, we've befriended Václav Havel. He was in Washington, and we invited him for dinner. And I said, "What are you doing here." He said, "I'm writing my book." And he was living in Georgetown in a rented house and was going up to the Library of Congress to write. They'd given him space to write his book.

And it dawned on me, why not have somebody like Václav Havel as a fellow - to give him a place to think and write? And all you do in return is lecture.

I could write about the wide effect psychedelic consciousness expansion had on society.  I could write that he'd been working just as carefully as always with the substance, but something changed just after the first controlled nuclear reaction in Chicago in 1942, and LSD became more psychoactive.  A few (not afew) months later, Hofmann had his first accidental trip, and the first calculated trip a few days later.

Much of the history of how LSD affected modern society is either hidden, for obvious reasons, or little reported or understood.  This really deserves a great, detailed, perhaps ongoing diary.  I sure won't get to it for a while, though I have a wealth of subjects to write about.

But I do not want to let this anniversary pass without mention, because a great and sweet and visionary man had been born on this day.  You can begin searching here, or perhaps Here, or even here at MAPS.

I will only say that i am indebted to this man for providing me a tool of consciousness expansion without which i wouldn't have been able to see and understand as well.

Skennah Kowa

• Beetroot
  
• Cabbage
  
• Swiss Chard
  
• Cinnamon
  
• Pomegranate juice
  
• Dried plums
  
• Pumpkin seeds
  
• Sardines
  
• Turmeric
  
• Frozen blueberries
  
• Canned pumpkin

I'm also a big fan of Black Salt.

You can't be me, I'm taken