Bavaria's ruling CSU party is heading for heavy losses in Sunday's state elections that will likely end the party's decades-long rule without a coalition partner in the state, according to early projections.

Projections showed the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), polling around 43 percent of the vote in its worst showing in half a century. The CSU has held an absolute majority in Bavaria since 1962 and won 60.7 percent of the vote in the last state election in 2004.

 

The Social Democrats (SPD), which governs in a grand coalition with the CDU in Berlin, polled around 19 percent, roughly the same as in the last state election in 2003.

 

Among the smaller parties, the conservative Free Voters entered the state parliament in Munich for the first time with 10 percent and the liberal Free Democrats (FPD) were back after an absence of 14 years with 8.5 percent.

Austria's Social Democrats are likely to emerge as the biggest party after early elections despite significant gains by parties on the far-right, according to early projections. Forming a government won't be easy.

According to the first projections published by Austrian news agency APA after polling stations closed at 5 p.m. local time on Sunday, the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPOe) got 28.6 percent of the vote and will remain the largest party in parliament.

 

The conservative Austrian People's Party (OeVP) will get 25.2 percent -- the worst result in the party's history.

 

Two far-right parties, however, were the big winners in the election. The the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) is expected to get 18.2 percent, with the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZOe) expected to win 11.8 percent.

Parliamentary elections in Belarus were passing off peacefully Sunday. But the opposition has expressed fears that the polls would be fixed by the Belarusian leadership.

By midday, one-third of the country's 7 million eligible voters had cast their ballots, Elections Supervisor Lidiya Yermoshina was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying from the capital Minsk.

 

Former presidential candidate Alexander Kozulin said he doubted that any opposition candidates would make it into the parliament.

 

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Alexander Kozulin

"A few supposed opposition politicians will be successful, which will be sold to the European community as a great achievement, but they will only be candidates who suit the powers that be," Kozulin said as he cast his vote.

LONDON: British banks are proposing that the government help bail them out of losses from the credit crunch so they can resume lending, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions, but Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested Friday that he would not go along.

Brown, who was in Washington for a meeting with President George W. Bush, told the British Broadcasting Corp. television that the best way of dealing with the British aspect of the global financial crisis was to increase liquidity.

"The American plan is designed for a large number of banks and institutions across America," Brown told the BBC. "We have a smaller banking system."

The four people with knowledge of the discussions declined to be identified because the negotiations are confidential. They said industry executives had held talks during the week about different options, including the establishment of a bank, run by the government, that would take over low-value assets including mortgage-backed securities that declined in value with the collapse of the U.S. subprime home-loan market.

TBILISI, Georgia: During the recent war between Georgia and Russia, Russian soldiers broke into a tower housing Georgia's largest Internet provider and blew up its transmission equipment with hand grenades, shutting down television, phone and digital access for two million people across the country.

More than a month later, the company, Caucasus Online, is still struggling with the war's economic fallout. Having restored Internet access to his clients at what he says was a cost of $50 million, the company's managing director, Mamia Sanadiradze, said he now risked defaulting on plans to build a giant telecommunications network stretching from Georgia to Western Europe.

The project was supposed to be completed by October, but has been set back because American engineers hired to install an underwater cable are said to be too worried about the security risk to return to Georgia and go back into the field. Sanadiradze estimates he will lose $1 million for every month the project is delayed.

"The Russians are still stationed on Georgian territory and at any time they can paralyze our communications network or blow up the railway and nobody can stop them," he said. "As long as the Russians are here, it will be impossible to restore business confidence in Georgia that we spent years trying to build up."

The former Tory leader tells us why the party could loosen Britain's ties with Brussels

A NEW Conservative government could still hold a referendum on Europe, even if the Lisbon treaty had already been fully ratified, should the party win power.

William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, is considering a special national ballot to help to give him the authority to renegotiate Britain's relationship with Europe.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Sunday Times, Hague said: "The integration of Europe will have gone too far. We won't let matters rest."

A referendum would be popular with the Tories' Eurosceptic MPs and grassroots activists who believe that the European Union reform treaty undermines Britain's national sovereignty. But it would be resisted by some of David Cameron's strategists, who would fear that a prolonged debate on the minutiae of EU procedures would be a turn-off to voters.

FIRST it was the sheer ingratitude of the Irish, then it was the failure of the Dublin government to mount a successful yes campaign. Now Brussels has found a new explanation as to why Ireland voted down the European Union treaty in June - a CIA and Pentagon-backed plot, devised by American neoconservatives to weaken the EU.

The European parliament wants an inquiry into whether Declan Ganley, the multi-millionaire chairman of the Libertas group that campaigned against the treaty, could be in the pockets of US defence and intelligence services.

The calls have been led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the firebrand 1968 student leader turned Green MEP, who pointed to Irish press reports that "revealed there possibly exists a link between the financiers of the no campaign in Ireland and the Pentagon as well as the CIA.

"If proved true, this would clearly show there are forces in the US willing to pay people to destabilise a strong and autonomous Europe", he said.

SHALI, Russia -- The men who set fire to Valentina Basargina's house arrived in the stillness of 3 a.m. There were three of them. Each wore a camouflage uniform and carried a rifle. One held a can of gasoline. They wore masks.

They led Ms. Basargina and her son outside and splashed gasoline in their two rooms, she and her relatives said. One man produced a T-shirt, knotted onto a stick. It was damp with gas.

"This is for the one who is gone," he said in thickly accented Russian. Ms. Basargina's nephew had recently disappeared; the police had said he joined the small but smoldering insurgency fighting for Chechnya's independence from Russia.

The man lit the torch and tossed it inside. The air whooshed. Flames shot through the house.

The attack, late last month, was part of what Chechens described as an intensified government effort to stamp out the remnants of a war that has continued, at varying levels of ferocity, for nearly 15 years.

In a campaign to punish families with sons suspected of supporting the insurgency, at least a dozen homes have been set ablaze since midsummer, residents and a local human rights organization said.

Saudis are sponsoring a peace dialogue involving a former senior member of the hardline group

The Taliban have been engaged in secret talks about ending the conflict in Afghanistan in a wide-ranging 'peace process' sponsored by Saudi Arabia and supported by Britain, The Observer can reveal.

The unprecedented negotiations involve a senior former member of the hardline Islamist movement travelling between Kabul, the bases of the Taliban senior leadership in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and European capitals. Britain has provided logistic and diplomatic support for the talks - despite official statements that negotiations can be held only with Taliban who are ready to renounce, or have renounced, violence.

Sources in Afghanistan confirmed the controversial talks, though they said that in recent weeks they had 'lost momentum'. According to Afghan government officials in Kabul, the intensity of the fighting this summer has been one factor. Another is the inconsistency of the Taliban's demands.

Barack Obama and John McCain reluctantly backed the $700 billion rescue plan today, as they were forced into a political balancing act between supporting a deal they both realise is critical to the US economy but deeply unpopular with voters.

The presidential candidates, fresh from their first televised debate on Friday night, appeared on the Sunday talk shows to try and claim some credit for the taxpayer protections inserted into the deal, but also to send a populist message that if elected they will end the days of Wall Street greed.

"My inclination would be to vote for it understanding I am not happy about it," Mr Obama told CBS's Face The Nation. The reaction in the US heartland, just 39 days before the election, was largely hostile to what is seen as a taxpayer-funded Wall Street bailout.

Earlier, in a statement, the Democrat conceded that "failure to deal with the current crisis would have devastating consequences for our economy." He called the breakthrough on Capitol Hill "the culmination of a sorry period in our history," because of the "reckless greed of Wall Street". He called for long-term protections for American taxpayers.

US secret forces are intensifying their cross-border raids into Pakistani tribal areas because of fears of a high-profile al-Qaeda attack during the American election campaign, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

The Pentagon has ordered that raids on suspected terrorist targets within Pakistan be stepped up to pressurise al-Qaeda leaders and distract them from preparing attacks on American targets elsewhere.

"The aim is to disrupt their scope for planning and keep their leaders on the move so that it is more difficult for them to co-ordinate complicated plots," a senior US intelligence official told The Sunday Telegraph.

The operations launched from neighbouring Afghanistan have led to sharply increased tensions with Pakistan's armed forces since President George W.Bush recently authorised assaults involving "boots on the ground" without prior approval by Pakistan's government, a supposed US ally.

International efforts are under way to stop Pakistan from defaulting on its debts after its foreign reserves dropped to just $3bn.

With about $1bn a month needed to provide its people with basic requirements there are fears that Pakistan could run out of money before the end of the year.

Saquib Sherani, the economic adviser to Yusuf Reza Gilani, Pakistan's prime minister, said on Sunday that the country urgently needed about $7bn to bridge the expected financing gap for the year.

"Its large and we need it quite fast ... the reserves are down to covering one month of imports," he told Al Jazeera.

The US has deployed an anti-missile radar in Israel that is mainly to warn of incoming Iranian ballistic missiles, Israeli state radio reports.

The radar with a range of more than 2,000km is sited in the south of the country, the radio station said on Sunday.

It is operated by a permanent 120-strong US army staff.

The Associated Press news agency quoted officials as saying that the new radar was flown into Israel last week along with some 120 American crew members and has been set up at the Nevatim air base in the Negev desert.

The system can pick up a ballistic missile shortly after launch. That will cut the response time of Israel's Arrow system, designed to intercept incoming missiles.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the radar's arrival has not been officially made public. It was first reported in Defence News.

Sen. John McCain retracted Sarah Palin's stance on Pakistan Sunday morning, after the Alaska governor appeared to back Sen. Barack Obama's support for unilateral strikes inside Pakistan against terrorists

"She would not...she understands and has stated repeatedly that we're not going to do anything except in America's national security interest," McCain told ABC's George Stephanopoulos of Palin. "In all due respect, people going around and... sticking a microphone while conversations are being held, and then all of a sudden that's--that's a person's position... This is a free country, but I don't think most Americans think that that's a definitve policy statement made by Governor Palin."

Wachovia approached potential buyers including Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Spain's Banco Santander yesterday after a 27 per cent plunge in its shares deepened fears over the future of the sixth-largest bank in the US.

The move came after JPMorgan Chase's takeover of most of Washington Mutual, the collapsed lender that became the US's biggest bank failure on Thursday, and did little to soothe investor worries over future casualties of the financial crisis.

People close to the situation said that after seeing its shares slumping throughout the day, Wachovia executives, led by its chief executive Robert Steel, contacted Citi, Wells and Santander - three of the defeated bidders for WaMu. Canada's Toronto Dominion was also interested in WaMu and may take a look at Wachovia, they added. The banks declined to comment.

Links to pdf docs at Calculated Risk. I think the house.gov server blew up though. They are dead, as in "document has no data," "server cannot be found," to my machine.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

... fresh accounts told to The New York Times by three foreign tourists who happened to be in the area challenge central parts of the official Chinese version of the events of Aug. 4 in Kashgar, a former Silk Road post in the western desert. One tourist took 27 photographs. <...>

One or two men dressed in green uniforms took out machetes and began hacking away at one or two other men dressed in the same type of uniforms on the ground.

"A lot of confusion came when two gentlemen, it looked like they were military officers -- they were wearing military uniforms, too -- and it looked like they were hitting other military people on the ground with machetes," the friend said.

"That instantly confused us," he said. "All three of us were wondering: `Why are they hitting other military people?' " <...>

The machete attack lasted a minute or two, the tourists said. One uniformed man then handed his machete to another uniformed man who had a machete, the friend said. One of the photographs shows a man walking around clutching two machetes in one hand. Another photograph shows a uniformed man carrying a rifle with a bayonet, a rare weapon in China.

Other officers were trying to disperse civilian onlookers, the tourists said.

Audio slide show of tourists' pictures

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

The upcoming downside for the Obama-Biden campaign is that its supporters became so flustered over Palin's surprisingly explosive popularity coming out of the GOP convention. They have so successfully mocked, derided and lowered expectations for Palin in Thursday night's VP debate that if she doesn't drool or speak in tongues, many millions still open to persuasion will be impressed.

Al Gore's campaign made the exact same mistake going into the 2000 debates. So all Texas Gov. George W. Bush had to do was not lose.

In that sense Democrats may have played right into a PR cul-de-sac. Biden, for instance, described Palin as merely better-looking than him. A far better communications strategy would have been to insincerely portray Palin with superlatives as a superwoman, make it harder, not easy, for her to impress. Too late now.

Citigroup to buy Wachovia banking operations

5:34 AM PDT, September 29, 2008  LA Times

NEW YORK -- The government says Citigroup will acquire the banking operations of Wachovia in a deal facilitated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The FDIC says Wachovia didn't fail, and that all depositors are protected and there will be no cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund.

The sale of Wachovia Corp. comes just days after the government's seizure of Seattle-based Washington Mutual Inc. -- the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

Wachovia has been among the banks hardest hit by the ongoing crisis in the mortgage market. Its current problems stem largely from its acquisition of mortgage lender Golden West Financial Corp. in 2006 for roughly $25 billion at the height of the nation's housing boom. With that purchase, Wachovia inherited a deteriorating $122 billion portfolio of Pick-A-Payment loans, Golden West's specialty, which let borrowers skip some payments.

Obama's brain trust
By Janet Raloff,  Science News
Web edition : Friday, September 26th, 2008

As I noted last week, advisers to the presidential candidates have been fairly mum about which scientists, medical leaders and engineers have signed on to advise and/or support Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama.

It's something Albert H. Teich also noted when I contacted this director of Science & Policy Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science several weeks back. Observed Teich in August, "You don't have any really identifiable science people associated with McCain's campaign, whereas there are quite a few people on the Obama side." Indeed, he said, "You could say that there is a brain trust of scientists" linked to the Democratic candidate.

Yesterday, Obama's campaign released "an open letter   to the American people" signed by 61 Nobel laureates. All received their award for achievements in physics (22), chemistry (14) or medicine (25). (My bold)

In their letter, they argue that during the past eight years, "vital parts of our country's scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. The government's scientific advisory process has been distorted by political considerations."

Russian, South Korean leaders agree on gas, rail links
[ 17:33 ] The presidents of Russia and South Korea agreed on Monday to work on a range of joint projects, including a pipeline to pump Russian gas via North Korea, and the linking of the Russian and Korean rail networks.

World  29/09/2008 15:56
Russia, India to develop new BrahMos cruise missile
Russia and India will jointly develop a new BrahMos-2 hypersonic cruise missile, the head of the BrahMos company said on Monday.
 

http://en.rian.ru/
Looks like they are not isolated...

ROME: It may have taken God a week to create the world, but it will take nearly as long to read the Bible from beginning to end in what is being described as the longest live television broadcast in Italian history.

On Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI will read the opening verses of the Book of Genesis. The nonstop Bible recital will end 139 hours later when Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, tackles the final verses from the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation.

In between, about 1,250 readers from many walks of life and religious faiths will take turns until every word in the 73 books that make up the Roman Catholic Bible has been uttered (mostly in Italian but also with some ancient Greek and Hebrew). The first and the last hour of the Bible-a-thon will be broadcast live on the main channel of RAI, the state broadcaster; the rest will be shown on RAI's satellite education channel.

"Please don't call it a marathon - it's more of a nonstop relay," said Giuseppe De Carli, the chief of the RAI division that covers the Vatican and the organizer of the event, which will be held during six days at the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome. "It's not a race, after all, but a reflection on God's way."

PARIS: On ZDF Dokukanal, a public television channel in Germany, the evening entertainment last Tuesday began with "Illusion of Freedom: How Neurology Is Turning Our Worldview Upside Down." That was followed by a documentary on child poverty.

The channel is no ratings-grabber. So ZDF, one of two main publicly financed television companies in Germany, wants to revamp Dokukanal, a digital channel that was started eight years ago. It intends to replace documentaries and other factual fare with "family entertainment," including soap operas, to attract a broader audience.

"This is the only way for us, in a digital world, to fulfill our communications mission and reach younger people again with our public service content," said Markus Schächter, director general of ZDF, in a statement on the broadcaster's plans.

Commercial rivals of ZDF are crying foul, saying they already provide plenty of options for viewers seeking lighter entertainment. Last Tuesday one of them, RTL, offered reruns of the U.S. drama "CSI: Miami."

A Frenchman inspired by the film ET has set off on an attempt to become the first person to cross the English Channel in a pedal-powered airship.

Stephane Rousson, 39, from Nice, took off from the coast of Hythe in Kent just before 8am and hopes to reach Wissant about five hours' later while suspended from the miniature Zeppelin.

He is being shadowed by two boats during the 28-mile journey across one of the world's busiest shipping lanes in case he and his contraption plunge into the sea.

A spokeswoman for him, who is on board one of the boats, said: "To have set off is a victory in itself. He had to wait for just the right weather conditions but they came at the right time.

"It's all going right. He is hovering about ten metres from the water and is making a really good go of it."

MI6 is using the social networking site Facebook to recruit the next generation of spies. The Secret Intelligence Service, which has traditionally scoured the country's elite universities for recruits, launched a series of online adverts this month as part of its attempts to attract people from a variety of backgrounds.

"A number of public channels are used to promote job opportunities in the organisation and Facebook is a recent example of this," said a Foreign Office spokeswoman. MI6 runs agents in foreign countries and says it wants its officers to "reflect the society" they serve.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2008) -- Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring.  Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes.  Adults do the same, but more efficiently.

he switch in learning strategy has been demonstrated in behavioural research, which shows that eight-year-olds respond disproportionately inaccurately to negative feedback. But the switch can also be seen in the brain, as developmental psychologist Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab discovered using fMRI research.  The difference can be observed particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for cognitive control. These areas are located in the cerebral cortex.

Opposite case

In children of eight and nine, these areas of the brain react strongly to positive feedback and scarcely respond at all to negative feedback.  But in children of 12 and 13, and also in adults, the opposite is the case.  Their 'control centres' in the brain are more strongly activated by negative feedback and much less by positive feedback.

An old news:
http://nightwatch.afcea.org/NightWatch_20080925.htm

Georgia-Abkhazia:  A car bomb exploded this morning near the Abkhazian Interior Ministry and secret service office buildings in Sukhumi, the Abkhazian capital, Interfax reported. The buildings were damaged but no casualties were reported. Abkhaz secret service chief Yury Ashuba was quoted as blaming the attack on Georgia's secret services.

Book reveals explosive break-up of President Nicolas Sarkozy's marriage to Cecilia

They have been divorced for almost a year and both have remarried but President Nicolas Sarkozy's stormy parting from Cécilia, his second wife, has returned to haunt him as new details emerged last week of the marital breakdown.

Seldom has a French politician dragged so much colourful personal baggage into the presidential palace. A book that seemed to revel in highlighting that baggage has undermined Sarkozy's latest effort to draw the line under the past and present a more dignified image.

According to Hubert Coudurier, the author of a book about Sarkozy's rise to the presidency, Cécilia filed a complaint about her husband at a police station after a particularly violent row with him in the run-up to last year's election.

"Sarkozy can be very nice," Coudurier explained last week, "but there is also another, more impulsive side. He can get carried away."

The "rainbow tribe" of Marlon Brando's multitude of acknowledged children, ex-wives and lovers are growing impatient for their inheritance.

Penniless relatives are eager to share a fortune after the screen actor died in July 2004. They are hoping to benefit from the transformation of his dilapidated Polynesian atoll near Tahiti into a world-class hotel.

The Brando eco-lodge was due to open this summer with 30 villas in the heart of a South Pacific nature reserve, but last week the agency representing the development said: "Nothing is going on and we don't know when it will."

Brando, who bought the Tetiaroa atoll in 1965, three years after filming Mutiny on the Bounty in Polynesia, talked about leaving it as an unspoilt refuge for his children. However, financial realities have intruded.

How the drunk cattle-challenged cowboy made it up to the big house.

You can't be me, I'm taken