BUCHAREST, May 16 (IPS) - A Roma ghetto in Ponticelli neighbourhood of Naples, Italy, was burnt down May 14 by locals angry over a reported attempt by a Roma young woman to kidnap a baby. The incident shows that, when it comes to living together with the 10 million Roma, Europeans today have no better answer than the "Gypsy hunts" of the Middle Ages.

The attempted kidnap in Naples is merely the last in a string of publicised crimes committed in Italy by Roma, usually from Romania. In the most notorious case, Romanian Nicolae Mailat raped and killed Italian teacher Giovanna Reggiani Oct. 30, 2007, on the outskirts of Rome.

Italian human rights organisation Opera Nomadi has calculated that of the 160,000 Roma living in Italy, roughly 60,000 come from Romania. Most of them inhabit improvised camps on the outskirts of towns or next to rivers. The Roma are a community that is believed to have migrated to Europe from India since the 14th century.

According to a survey commissioned this year by the Romanian Agency for Governmental Strategies, over 60 percent of Italians believe that criminality rates in their country have increased because of Romanians. Italians further said they considered Roma "the most difficult to tolerate."

Close to one million Romanians currently work in Italy. Romanians are said to be responsible for most of the illegalities committed by foreigners there. There is no clear indication that criminality rates for Roma from Romania are higher than for their non-Roma compatriots.

GENEVA, May 17 (IPS) - The fate of the world's oldest customs union, the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), is hanging in the balance as a result of the economic partnership agreements that most SACU countries have signed with the European Union (EU).

SACU governments are now trying to figure out how to prevent paralysis or even total collapse. But they are finding themselves divided. Some in the SACU want a retreat from the liberalisation agreements they have agreed to while others want to move ahead and deepen the integration with the EU, for fear of losing out on EU aid and market access.

Gordon Brown's attempted fightback has failed to win over voters ahead of this week's crucial Crewe and Nantwich by-election, according to a new poll.

Labour is 17 points adrift of the Conservatives, the ComRes survey for The Independent on Sunday shows......

Last night an ICM poll in the constituency for the News of the World gave the Tories an eight-point lead, putting them on 45 per cent to Labour's 37 per cent.

A national YouGov survey for The Sunday Times puts the Conservatives 20 points ahead on 45 per cent to 25 per cent.

that's a staggering result, Crewe is a real dyed in the wool "pink pussycat" seat, ie Labour would win even if they put up a pink cat; to lose this would be an incredible loss.

A couple of weeks ago the tories were just hoping to do really well, today on the andrew Marr show he was looking pretty smug about the Tories probably winning the seat. This would be huge, panic would set in across the Labour benches, remember these people are useless and have are unemployable outside of the political process. which means their careers are dependent upon not losing their seats.

so if this by-election is lost, there will be changes at the top. Brown will almost certainly go and I can't see Darling staying around, his credibility is non-existent. Even if either Milliband or Balls (both NuLab loyalists) become PM, I imagine there will be a reassertion of the socialist left, theirs has been the only credible critique of late. Even if I personally disagree with their solutions at least they get where the problem lies.

UK politics could get mighty interesting after Crewe

keep to the Fen Causeway

Chinese President Hu Jintao has voiced his gratitude for the international aid following Monday's massive earthquake.

"I express heartfelt thanks to the foreign governments and international friends," Mr Hu was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Offers of help in the relief effort from home and abroad have now surpassed $800m, Chinese officials say.

The number of confirmed deaths of the quake in the south-western Sichuan province has now risen to 28,881.

More than 10,600 people are believed to be still trapped, Xinhua said, citing regional officials.

The final death toll following the 7.9-magnitude quake is expected to reach at least 50,000 people, Chinese officials estimate.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - India's foreign minister travels to Pakistan this week for his first meeting with leaders of a new civilian government and to review a peace process that has been in the doldrums for more than a year.

Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee will meet his Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, on Wednesday, a day after their top civil servants hold talks.

The nuclear-armed rivals launched peace efforts in 2004 after nearly going to war a fourth time after Islamist militant attacks in India linked to a nearly 20-year revolt, which Pakistan sympathizes with, against Indian rule in the Kashmir region.

While ties have warmed, the two sides have made no significant progress on their main dispute over the divided, Muslim-majority Himalayan region they both claim.

A heavy clash on their Kashmir border this month underscored just how tenuous the improvement in relations is.

East African maritime officials say pirates have hijacked a Jordanian ship off the coast of Somalia.

The Victoria, sailing from India with 4,000 tonnes of sugar donated by Denmark on board, was seized early on Saturday as it neared Mogadishu.

It has a crew of 12 from Pakistan, India, Tanzania and Bangladesh.

The seas off Somalia have some of the highest rates of piracy in the world, with a dozen vessels attacked this year, and three in recent weeks.

Last month the United States and France proposed a UN resolution allowing countries to chase and arrest pirates in Somalia's territorial waters.

The annual meeting of the African Development Bank (AfDB) opened in Mozambique on Wednesday with the organisation's head warning that rising growth rates are having little impact on poverty levels.

In his opening speech, AfDB president Donald Kaberuka said the economic impact of surging food prices, power shortages and global warming would all be debated during the two-day gathering of African finance ministers and experts.

Kaberuka said that although the continent's overall economic performance was improving, more was needed to lift living standards for the average African.

"The strong growth rate for Africa, which is averaging nearly six percent, has not yet been enough to translate into a big fall in poverty levels," said Kaberuka.

U.S. officials say a $770 food aid package proposed by President George Bush contains language promoting the use of bio-engineered food.

Proponents say genetically modified crops can result in higher yields from plants that are hardier in harsh climates, the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday.

"We certainly think that it is established fact that a number of bio-engineered crops have shown themselves to increase yields through their drought resistance and pest resistance," Dan Price, a White House food aid expert, told the newspaper.

Opponents say genetically modified crops could cause medical problems and are being promoted to to help U.S. agribusiness. "I think it's pretty obvious at this point that genetically engineered crops -- they may do a number of things, but they don't increase yields, Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association told the newspaper.

Sat 17/05/08 - Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme called for the introduction of sustainable development criteria in the production of biofuels at the EU-Latin American summit in Lima, the capital of Peru.

60 European and Latin American leaders attended the two-yearly EU-Latin American summit. This was the fifth summit. With the exception of Ireland, all the EU member states were represented in Lima.

The two big themes of the summit were poverty and climate change. A major element affecting both issues is the role biofuels can or should play.

The European Union and Brazil, the world's top ethanol exporter, back biofuels, but many Latin American countries blame them for pushing up food prices and causing hunger in a region where a third of the population lives in poverty.
...
On behalf of the EU, Belgian PM Yves Leterme held the opening speech for the second session of the summit. He was nuanced on the debate that is gaining momentum regarding biofuel as a viable alternative fuel.

Like the European Commissioner for Sustainable Development Louis Michel (Belgian), PM Leterme spoke out in favour of a review of the EU goals, but made no further comment on this issue.

A world-wide swarm of Has-Beens is flying from place to place like bees, all for one and one for all. This week they alighted in Jerusalem, on the invitation of Has-Been No. 1: Shimon Peres, a politician who in all the 84 years of his life has never won an election, and who was finally handed, out of sheer compassion, the largely meaningless title of President of Israel.

The common denominator of this group is that their prestige at home is close to nil, while their standing abroad is sky-high. Their mutual adoration compensates them for the lack of respect in their own countries.

One of the senior members of this club is Tony Blair, who has been pushed from power in his own country but is not content to enjoy his pension and raise roses. As a consolation prize he has been granted the pleasure of playing around with our conflict. Every few weeks he convenes a press conference to present the good tidings of his phenomenal success in ameliorating the lot of the Palestinians, while the actual situation in the occupied territories goes from bad to worse. Our security establishment treats him like a bore who has to be thrown a crumb from time to time to keep him happy.

HUAMA, Cuzco, Peru, May 16 (IPS) - In South America's Andes mountain region, indigenous women have traditionally been responsible for selecting, conserving and managing seed potatoes from the countless native varieties of the crop, thus ensuring diversity and continued production while contributing to food security among their people.

The conservation of thousands of native varieties of the potato (Solanum tuberosum), each with its own unique taste, nutritional value and climate-resistant traits, has taken on greater importance than ever this year. One of the reasons behind the current global food crisis is that human survival is currently dependent on just a handful of plant species, experts warn.

DALLAS, Texas, May 16, 2008 (ENS) - Texas energy executive T. Boone Pickens has taken the first step towards building the world's largest windfarm in the Texas Panhandle. On Thursday Pickens announced that his company, Mesa Power, has ordered the first 667 wind turbines for the Pampa Wind Project.

When complete in 2014, the windfarm is expected to generate more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity to feed into the Texas grid, enough to power 1.3 million homes.

Pickens said he expects that first phase of the Pampa project will cost about $2 billion, and that the first electricity from the project will be on-line by early 2011.

NEW YORK, New York, May 14, 2008 (ENS) - It may have been cold and wet where you lived this winter, but on a global scale, the warming climate is changing life on Earth, finds a new analysis of decades of scientific information not previously assembled. The data show that physical and biological systems across the Earth are being affected by higher temperatures resulting from human activities.

"Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the warming world is causing impacts on physical and biological systems attributable at the global scale," said lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Columbia Center for Climate Systems Research.

Both research centers are affiliates of The Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York.

Rosenzweig and researchers from 10 other institutions around the world analyzed data from published papers on 829 physical systems and some 28,800 plant and animal systems, back to 1970.

The idea is no longer to create a simple glossary but to have these links point to full-blown summaries of ET positions, for instance on agriculture , free trade , energy , taxation , employment , etc.

Of course, when you first insert an ETpedia link, you may just write a simple glossary entry. It will actually help if you then follow your own link and add some content to (and possibly create) the ETpedia article so we know what topics are of interest by looking at the ETpedia recent changes.

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes

US Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy is resting and undergoing tests in a Boston hospital after experiencing what his office says was a "seizure".

Mr Kennedy, 76, is conscious and talking with his family after earlier being flown from Cape Cod to Massachusetts General Hospital.

His doctors have said that he did not suffer a stroke, as initially feared.