Tony Blair's chances of becoming the first EU "president" nose-dived yesterday when President Nicolas Sarkozy distanced himself from the former prime minister's undeclared campaign for the post.

Mr Sarkozy, who had been Mr Blair's most prominent backer, suggested that Britain's non-membership of the euro was a "problem" which could wreck his chances of becoming the new "strong symbol" of Europe.

Although Mr Blair remains the runaway favourite with British punters and bookmakers, a powerful tide has been running against him in recent days. The Benelux countries and Austria, and influential political figures in France, have all spoken out against Mr Blair, partly because of what they see as Britain's semi-detached attitude to the EU.

Asked in a newspaper interview yesterday whether Mr Blair would make a "good candidate", President Sarkozy gave a cautious and non-committal response. The French President told Le Figaro that the EU had still not decided whether it wanted a low-key managerial "president" or a "strong and charismatic" figure who could "symbolise" Europe. "Personally, I believe in a Europe which is strong politically and symbolised [by a strong president]," he said. "But the fact that Great Britain is not in the euro remains a problem."

MOSCOW, October 2 (RIA Novosti) - The wife of Moscow's mayor, the richest woman in Russia, is suing a former Russian deputy prime minister for defamation, her construction company said on Friday.

Yelena Baturina, the wife of Yury Luzhkov, is the president of the construction conglomerate Inteko. Her personal wealth was estimated by Forbes Magazine last year at $4.2 billion, but she is believed to have lost large sums in the financial crisis, which has severely hit the real estate market in Russia, and her current worth is estimated at some $900 million.

Baturina is suing former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov over the publication of a report that the company said made "a conscious attempt to show that Inteko's effective activity is possible only in Moscow," which Baturina said is "absurd."

The suit also seeks damages for defamation of honor and moral damage.

There is no information on the amount of damages Baturina is seeking.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the last European leader holding out on signing the Lisbon Treaty, has indicated he could be set to sign the EU reform treaty. He says it's too far gone to block, even if he wants to. 

The Czech Republic is the last of the 27 European Union countries to not ratify the EU's Lisbon Treaty and its euroskeptic President Vaclav Klaus has done everything he can to prevent the treaty from going through. Now he has told the Czech daily Lidovy Noviny the treaty can't be stopped.

"The train carrying the treaty is going so fast and it's so far that it can't be stopped or returned," he told the paper. "No matter how much some of us would want that."

Klaus has dragged his feet on signing the document, which is meant to streamline EU operations and give the bloc a long-term president, even though the Czech parliament has already voted in favor of it.

BUCHAREST, Oct 17 (IPS) - Hasun Albaadzh, an asylum-seeker from Syria, died Oct. 6 at the Busmantsi detention centre on the outskirts of Bulgarian capital Sofia. He had been held at Busmantsi for months - considerably more than the maximum legal period of detention - and had been denied proper medical care.

About 200 people are currently detained at the Busmantsi Detention Centre for Undocumented Immigrants in Sofia. Following the death of Hasun Albaadzh last week, the migrants at Busmantsi staged a protest against the illegal prolongation of their detention periods and the violation of their basic human rights.

According to the Sofia human rights group Civil 21 Initiative, Albaadzh "was never taken to a specialised hospital, in spite of his multiple complaints and chronic diseases, which were known to the administration of the centre but had been treated only with analgesics."

"Alongside protracted periods of detention, malnutrition and lack of psychological support, one of the most recurrent problems reported by detainees is extremely poor levels of medical care, lack of medicines and treatment," says Iliana Savova, director of the refugee and migrant programme at the human rights NGO Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, which has researched detention conditions of migrants in Bulgaria.

As Savova told IPS, Busmantsi does not have a permanent medical staff. Instead, doctors and nurses come there for a month on rotation; this practice makes the monitoring and treatment of medical conditions of detainees difficult.

"The law will come into force in the UK in October 2011, giving recruiters and their clients time to prepare and plan," said UK business minister Pat McFadden.

"We are also mindful of the need to avoid changing requirements on business until the economic recovery is more firmly established," he added.

Once enforced, the EU directive will give temporary workers - numbered at roughly 1.3 million in the UK - the same rights as full-time staff in many areas, such as equal pay after 12 weeks of work.

UK businesses had been lobbying the government for months to delay implementation of the rules, and welcomed the news following its announcement.

"The government is sending out a positive message to business," David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said in a statement.

Thousands of people from across Spain have gathered in the capital, Madrid, to protest against government plans to liberalise the country's abortion laws.

The changes would allow women aged 16 to terminate pregnancies without their parents' consent.

Organisers said they hoped more than one million people would attend the march and rally in the evening against the government's move to liberalise the country's 24-year-old abortion law.

About 600 buses and several aircraft were used to bring the supporters of 42 Spanish anti-abortion and Catholic associations to the capital for the protest, which is also backed by the conservative opposition Popular party and the Roman Catholic Church.

The protesters, expected to include Jose Maria Aznar, the former prime minister, were to march about 1.5km across central Madrid.

Silvio Berlusconi yesterday (fri) announced a sweeping reform of Italy's legal system, which he insists is waging a witch-hunt against him and his business interests.

The prime minister was infuriated last week when Italy's highest court overturned a controversial law which had given him immunity from prosecution while in office.

It came just days after another court ordered his holding company, Fininvest, to pay £682 million in damages to a business rival for bribing a judge in a battle over the takeover of a publishing company in the 1990s.

The US Government acknowledged for the first time yesterday that payment of protection money to the Taleban by Italian forces in Afghanistan was discussed by American officials and their Italian counterparts last year.

A senior US official confirmed, two days after The Times reported that Italian authorities had paid the bribes, that "the issue [of payments] was raised with the Italians".

The official would neither confirm nor deny that the representation to Silvio Berlusconi's Government was in the form of a démarche or diplomatic protest, but Nato officials have told The Times that such a complaint was made by the US in Rome last year.

The payment of Italian protection money was revealed after the deaths of ten French soldiers in August 2008 at the hands of a large Taleban force in Sarobi, east of Kabul. French forces had taken over the district from Italian troops, but were unaware of the secret Italian payments to local commanders to stop attacks on their forces, and misjudged threat levels.

Photos of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the presence of young topless women may soon reach Israel as part of a campaign promoting hotels and restaurants in the Tel Aviv area, Haaretz has learned.

According to Antonello Zappadu, an Italian photographer from Sardinia who took pictures of Berlusconi in the company of half-naked female guests at the billionaire politician's Villa Certosa on the island's Costa Smeralda, a "very large advertising firm" in Israel has asked to purchase the rights to the photographs.

[...]

Before I transferred the request [by the Israeli advertising firm] to the Colombian photo agency, I informed the Israelis of the diplomatic implications," Zappadu told Haaretz. "I have to admit that the thought of Berlusconi and Topolanek appearing nude on billboards in Tel Aviv brings a smile to my lips."

For generations, the cautionary tales of the grown-up world wrapped up in nursery rhymes have been a normal part of childhood. Children have somehow managed to cope with a world where mice are blind, blackbirds are baked in pies and old women live in shoes.

But the BBC has triggered amazement by changing the words of Humpty Dumpty on one of its children's programmes to give the accident-prone character a happy ending. A programme on the broadcaster's children's channel CBeebies featured a singalong feature in which, instead of being unable to "put Humpty together again", all the King's Horses "made Humpty happy again".

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Toys "R" Us is facing a U.S. antitrust probe over whether the toy retailer used its market clout to stifle discounting by retail competitors and force consumers to pay higher prices for baby products, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

The Federal Trade commission is looking into whether the retailer violated an 11-year-old FTC order to abstain from anti-competitive practices, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.

FRENCH auto giant Renault is willing to invest in troubled Russian carmaker AvtoVAZ, in which it has a stake, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said on 6 October. Renault confirmed yesterday that it was prepared to invest in the development of AvtoVAZ, including the provision of the most advanced technologies, RIA Novosti quoted Shuvalov as saying.
The amount of investment will be specified after a discussion of the plans and a corresponding evaluation, Shuvalov added. The main thing is that Renault has confirmed its strategic interest in the development of AvtoVAZ and believes that the acquisition of 25 per cent plus one share was a strategically correct and justified decision, he said. Shuvalov indicated that the government has already allocated 25 billion rubles ($830 million) to help AvtoVAZ repay its debts, and another 12 billion rubles ($400 million) would be provided.
A day earlier, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told a meeting including an executive from its 25% shareholder Renault that Russia will not allow AvtoVAZ to collapse. We understand that if we do nothing...the company will cease to exist. We will not allow this to happen, Putin told the meeting. I want all the shareholders to take an equal part in the joint work and each shareholder can be sure that the Russian government will do everything possible to guarantee the rights of all shareholders, he added.
Along with Renault, the other major shareholders in Avotvaz are Russian brokerage Troika Dialog and state firm Russian Technologies, which have around 25% each. Christian Esteve, head of Renault Europe, promised at the meeting that Renault would continue to support the carmaker. You can count on the support of Renault, because we feel socially responsible, he said.
Putin warned Renault two weeks ago that its stake in AvtoVAZ could be diluted unless the French company provided help for AvtoVAZ.

A Goldman Sachs executive has been named the first chief operating officer of the Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement division. The market watchdog agency said Friday that Adam Storch, vice president in Goldman Sachs' Business Intelligence Group, is assuming the new position of managing executive of the SEC division. The move came as the SEC has been revamping its enforcement efforts following the agency's failure to uncover Bernard Madoff's massive fraud scheme [?!] for nearly two decades despite numerous red flags. Storch, who will be responsible for project management and operations, will report to SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami....

Khuzami, a former federal prosecutor who came to the SEC in March from Wall Street investment firm Deutsche Bank, says he has undertaken the most extensive restructuring of the enforcement division in at least 30 years.

Possibly related news: Lack of scrutiny for Geithner aides

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

In another sign of how deep the global recession has become, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach on Friday reported their worst combined import statistics for September in nine years. September is often the busiest month at the nation's biggest port complex, making it one of the best barometers of the health of the economy and international trade.

The port of Los Angeles received 309,078 containers packed with imported goods in September, representing a decline of 16% from the same month last year and 27% from September 2006, L.A.'s best month ever for imports. Long Beach received 224,924 import containers in September, a drop of 19% from a year earlier and 32% from September 2007, the port's best September ever.
....
As dismal as those figures are for the two ports, which rank first and second in the U.S. in container volume and together rank fifth in the world, a greater worry goes beyond the immediate and substantial loss of local trade-related jobs: Some of the ports' most important tenants were so poorly positioned for the downturn that they might sink completely in a sea of billions of dollars of red ink, experts say.
....
Through the first half of 2009, each of the world's 17 biggest shipping lines were in the red, according to Paris-based AXS-Alphaliner, which maintains online databases for shipping industry professionals
....
Jan Tiedemann, a shipping analyst with AXS-Alphaliner, said the companies were dealing with less cargo, lower freight rates for the cargo that remains, contractual obligations for new ships they don't need and the inability to rid themselves of older vessels quickly enough by scrapping them to reduce overcapacity.

After a seven-month rally the stock market ought to have plenty of excuses to pull back, or to at least stop rising for a while. Yet the Dow Jones industrials were back above 10,000 on Wednesday for the first time in a year. Frustrated bears -- who believe that rebounding stock prices are way ahead of economic reality -- may be overlooking one basic reason why the market is holding up so well: Big money managers badly want this year to finish out a winner after the devastation of 2008. And a winner is what they've got working, if something doesn't come along to screw it up.

So with the economic and corporate-earnings data in recent months generally pointing to things getting slowly better instead of worse, many money managers have simply been reluctant to sell -- which is why the few market setbacks since June have failed to snowball beyond mid-single-digit percentage losses in major indexes.

The fear is that if you sell you'll be left behind. That's exactly what has happened to many or most investors who have let go of stocks in the last seven months, with share prices up 50% or more. Now, as trader Dave Rovelli at brokerage Canaccord Adams put it, "Whenever we get any significant selling, the bids pile in." That further reinforces the idea that it's too early to exit the market.
....
Most big investors, however, also see a reckoning in 2010. Many expect the economy to struggle to stay in recovery mode next year. There also is universal concern about the federal budget deficit, a potential new wave of home foreclosures, and the risk of inflation if the Federal Reserve doesn't begin to tighten monetary policy.

But if optimism extends only to the end of 2009, the logical question is: When do portfolio managers start taking some money off the table, anticipating a rougher ride for the market in 2010? They can't all just wait until New Year's Eve. Yet for now, many fund managers' retort to advice to lighten up on stocks is this: "You go first."

The counterfeit nature of our economy is troubling enough, given that financial power is concentrated in the hands of a few key players -- "300 white guys in Manhattan," as a former high-placed executive puts it. But over the course of the past year, that group of insiders has also proved itself brilliantly capable of enlisting the power of the state to help along the process of concentrating economic might -- making it less and less likely that the financial markets will ever be policed, since the state is increasingly the captive of these interests.

The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team -- at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for New York bankers. And on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to Wall Street to promote "serious financial reform," his plan proved to be so completely absent of balls that the share prices of the major banks soared at the news.

The nation's largest financial players are able to write the rules for own their businesses and brazenly steal billions under the noses of regulators, and nothing is done about it. A thing so fundamental to civilized society as the integrity of a stock, or a mortgage note, or even a U.S. Treasury bond, can no longer be protected, not even in a crisis, and a crime as vulgar and conspicuous as counterfeiting can take place on a systematic level for years without being stopped, even after it begins to affect the modern-day equivalents of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. What 10 years ago was a cheap stock-fraud scheme for second-rate grifters in Brooklyn has become a major profit center for Wall Street. Our burglar class now rules the national economy. And no one is trying to stop them.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle/print

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

AT the dawn of the progressive era early in the last century, muckrakers attacked the first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, for creating capitalism's most ruthless monster. "The Octopus" was their nickname for Standard Oil, the trust that controlled nearly 90 percent of American oil. But even in that primordial phase of the industrial era, Rockefeller was mindful of his public image and eager to counter it. "His great brainstorm," writes his biographer, Ron Chernow, "was undoubtedly his decision to dispense shiny souvenir dimes to adults and nickels to children as he moved about." Who could hate an octopus tossing glittering coins?

Pakistani officials say the military has launched its much anticipated ground offensive against the Taliban in the South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan. 

Pakistani ground troops moved out of their bases in and around South Waziristan Saturday, hours after top military and political leaders met in the capital, Islamabad.

Pakistan has experienced a wave of terror attacks, including suicide blasts targeting international and security organizations, coordinated attacks around the country's cultural center, Lahore, and an audacious assault on the army's headquarters near Islamabad.

Some 175 people have died in the past two weeks. The government has blamed the Pakistani Taliban, which is based in South Waziristan, for the violence.

Britain said last night that its intelligence-sharing relationship with the US could be seriously damaged after the High Court in London ruled that a CIA document relating to the alleged torture of a British citizen must be published.

In a landmark ruling that was greeted with deep disappointment by David Miliband, the UK foreign secrtetary, the High Court ruled the document relating to the interrogation of Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan in 2002 should be released in the public interest.

An officer in Britain's domestic security service, MI5, is currently being in-vestigated by British police over allegations that he tortured Mr Mohamed. The UK police already have access to the seven-paragraph document, which amounts to a briefing note drawn up by the CIA and handed to the MI5 officer before his interrogation began.

The issue before the High Court was whether the document should now be published. A large number of media organisations have argued that publication is in the public interest and the courts yesterday agreed, saying there was a "compelling" case for it.

Mr Miliband, however, has disagreed and will now appeal against the judgment.

KABUL (Reuters) - Several international political figures have phoned President Hamid Karzai, his office said on Saturday, in what appeared to be an intense diplomatic offensive to end a row over Afghanistan's disputed presidential election.

The phone calls, including from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, came just before the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission was due to announce the findings of its investigation into allegations of fraud in the August 20 ballot.

The allegations have left Afghanistan in a state of political uncertainty at a time when Washington is deciding whether to send more troops to fight a resurgent Taliban.

There were widespread suggestions in Kabul that enough votes would be eliminated from Karzai's tally to trigger a run-off round against former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah.

Observers said pressure was mounting on Karzai to either agree to face Abdullah in a second round or form a power-sharing government to put an end to the crisis.

France has urged its nationals to leave Guinea, amid growing criticism of the military junta.

There are believed to be some 2,500 French nationals, mainly aid workers businessmen and their families, in the mineral-rich former French colony.

Human rights groups say some 157 people died after troops opened fire on opposition protesters last month.

The African Union has told the military leader to step down by Saturday, amid calls for him to be charged.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AFP) -- The mayor of New Orleans flew to Cuba Friday on a mission to study the island's respected disaster preparedness methods in another sign of easing diplomatic relations.

The visit comes a day after President Barack Obama promised New Orleans that the government would never repeat the "failure of government" seen after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the jazz city in 2005.

Ray Nagin is the first US mayor to make a diplomatic visit to Cuba in 50 years, his office said.

An eye-opening new report from the Democratic-aligned research organization Democracy Corps suggests that conservative Republicans, the majority of the GOP base, harbor a well-developed, consistent, peculiar worldview about President Obama and his "hidden agenda" for the country. Armed with "facts" from conservative media, these individuals, fully 2/3 of the Republican Party at this point according to Democracy Corps estimates, believe that the President has been installed by powerful interests to enact socialist policies, violate the Constitution and destroy America. Independents and even GOP-leaning moderates exhibit none of these characteristics, making life difficult for GOP leaders who must choose between support inside the party and support in the country.

The report, which you can access here, is a testament to what was described by Richard Hofstadter in 1964 as the paranoid style in American politics:

   The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America, according to focus groups conducted by Democracy Corps. These base Republican voters dislike Barack Obama to be sure - which is not very surprising as base Democrats had few positive things to say about George Bush - but these voters identify themselves as part of a `mocked' minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a `secret agenda' to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. While these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have failed in its mission, they overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country's founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.

The focus groups didn't pick up an explicitly racial viewpoint from these individuals, though that potentially is part of the background (the same audiences did discuss Obama in the context of race during the Presidential campaign). However, it has moved on to a more tribal "hidden agenda" argument, which combines a persecution complex with a full embrace of misinformation from conservative media. They find media outlets like Fox News and right-wing talk radio "central to their identity," according to Democracy Corps staffers on a conference call. In one notorious focus group quote, a woman said that she judges commercial establishments like restaurants based on whether they have CNN or Fox News playing on the television sets. They believe intensely in the bias of the "liberal media" and believe that their exposure to preferred media outlets gives them a greater sense of knowledge about what's really happening in the country. Asked to name specific complaints about Obama, they frequently say "you'll never know (about him) because so much is hidden," citing the powerful interests pushing the President forward from obscurity. It's a perfectly circular argument - they can justify any baseless charge by claiming it's all secret and part of a giant conspiracy.

Jeeezz!  Enough to give Conspiracy Theory a bad name!  But before Democracy Corps gets too smug they might consider what the complaints of these base Republican would sound like had they the sense to include three little words into the "secret agenda" they believe Obama is advancing: "to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism for the rich!."

Of course there is the inconvenient history of their own greatest heroes in the Republican Party advancing the very same agenda, especially since the election of Ronald Reagan.  But the process has flowed onward in a suprisingly bi-partisan manner since Bill Clinton's second term.

Then there is the seeming, (to me, at least), misapprehension of the role of the Presidents in this process.  While there are likely to have been very many conspiracies, many of them likely criminal in nature, involved in the carrying forward of the process that has brought us to this point, these conspiracies mostly involved the beneficiaries of this process, the moneyed interests, especially Wall Street, who exerted their influence through lobbyists and campaign contributions.  Others with an ideological focus have, in fact, been convicted on charges that did or could have included conspiracy, notably Jack Abramoff. The presidents from Reagan to Obama have largely been swept along in this process.

Last, at least for what I will discuss, is the role that the Republican "base", along with most of the rest of the country, has played as enablers of this process.  By allowing the self-interested wealthy to finance elections we have ceded to them control of "our" political destiny.  We have little influence on the really important issues in our society.  As a consequence of our dereliction of our responsibilities to safeguard our privileges and properly exercise our duties as citizens, those who have assumed control of our government and society can treat us with the contempt we deserve--and they do.

But the attitudes of the Republican "base" offer an opportunity.  They crave validation.  With some corrections of focus and detail, and with a bit of re-direction progressives could offer that validation, forge an alliance and change the face of US politics.  Stage a populist take-over of the bases of both the Republican and Democratic Parties.  The corporatists of both parties could then unite into a party that represented >20%.  What is needed is a suitable leader.  (Hint.  Did anyone see Rep. Alan Greyson, D. Fl. on the Bill Mayer show Oct. 16?  He was channeling Hughey Long: "You need to put some jam on the bottom shelf, where the little man can reach it." @4'20")

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

The jousting between the White House and Fox News is drawing grave warnings from pundits to Obama's team that this is a losing issue for their man. They quote the old tag, "Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel."

Certainly the jabbing has been refreshingly vigorous. Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, explains Obama's refusal to appear on Fox News by saying, "Fox News often operates either as the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party. We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent."
....
Surely, it was a no-brainer for the White House. Fox's troupe of right wingers will trash Obama, whatever Dunn says. Why not please your own political base by showing a little backbone and giving Murdoch a slap on the snout? Besides, history suggests that if the White House keeps up the small arms fire and doesn't lose its cool, in the end it will carry the day, and edge Fox as a network operation  into the Glen Beck insane asylum, viewed with derision by even more millions of Americans.

In the case of the Obama administration there's the added bonus that after surrendering abjectly to every powerful interest group in America, they're at last showing an appetite for a scuffle.

DES MOINES, Iowa, October 16, 2009 (ENS) - The 2009 World Food Prize has been awarded to Dr. Gebisa Ejeta of Ethiopia, whose sorghum hybrids resistant to drought and the devastating Striga weed have increased the production and availability of sorghum, one of the world's five principal grains, and enhanced the food supply of hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr. Ejeta received the $250,000 World Food Prize on Thursday at the Iowa State Capitol. The prize is the centerpiece of a symposium at which food experts and decision-makers from around the world are discussing how adequate access to food and nutrition can contribute to the security of all people.

As the planet gets warmer and more crowded, poor farmers will need access to genetically engineered seeds if they are to raise enough food, said keynote speaker Bill Gates, the Microsoft Corp. chairman who is using his fortune to ease global poverty.

Gates said food production must be boosted globally without harming the soil and water, and he challenged environmentalists to drop their resistance to high-yield, high-tech agriculture. "They act as if there is no emergency, even though in the poorest, hungriest places on Earth, population is growing faster than productivity, and the climate is changing," Gates said.

Like a tractor driven by a drunk, the Obama administration keeps zigzagging on food/ag policy--sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo.

In the last couple of days, there's been a sharp turn toward the status quo. As I reported yesterday,  Obama plucked Islam "Isi" Siddiqui from the nation's most powerful agrichemical lobby group and made him our chief negotiator on ag issues in global trade talks. This is a major coup for Big Ag. Ramming open foreign markets for our cheap food commodities and pricey ag inputs is critical to the industry's future profits--and perilous for global food security and the environment.

And today, Obama's Big Ag side got the best of him again. He tapped Roger Beachy, long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, as chief of the USDA's newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). <...>

...The Danforth Plant Science Center, nestled in Monsanto's St. Louis home town, is essentially that company's NGO research and PR arm. According to its website, the center "was founded in 1998 through gifts from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the Monsanto Fund (a philanthropic foundation), and a tax credit from the State of Missouri."

CAPE TOWN, Oct 16 (IPS) - A group of small-scale South African farmers has lodged a complaint with the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) against the government, accusing the authorities of not sufficiently assisting small farmers to make a living and therefore undermining their human right to food security.

The complaint was handed over today, World Food Day (Oct 16), by the Food Sovereignty Campaign (FSC), a network of small-scale farming associations from the Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces in the south-western and north-western parts of the country. The SAHRC is a constitutional body with the mandate to monitor and promote human rights in South Africa.

"We have tried for the past years to grab the government's attention, but so far we have had no luck," FSC chairperson Davine Witbooi said.

"Last year, in our last attempt, we handed over a memorandum asking the government to improve small-scale farmers' access to land so that they are enabled to grow the food they cannot afford to buy -- simply because they are too poor to do so. The minister seemed to understand us and he said he acknowledged the urgency of the problem. But so far we have not heard anything back."

The farmers' pleas come four months after President Jacob Zuma in his first state of the nation address said that by "working together with our people in the rural areas, we will ensure a comprehensive rural development strategy linked to land and agrarian reform and food security.

"People in the rural areas have a right to be helped with farming so that they can grow vegetables and other things and raise livestock so that they can feed themselves."

Witbooi believes it is time for action. "That is why we decided to take the matter to the SAHRC. We are sick and tired of not being taken seriously, while in the meantime our human right of food security is being violated," she told IPS.

About 30 small-scale farmers had come to Cape Town to witness the handing over of the complaint, including Rosina Secondt from Pela, a rural settlement in Namaqualand in South Africa's Northern Cape province. "If you can't afford to buy food in the shops, growing your own is your only option for survival, otherwise you are lost," she explained.

Photographs by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

To the naked eye, there was nothing to be seen at a natural gas well in eastern Texas but beige pipes and tanks baking in the sun. But in the viewfinder of Terry Gosney's infrared camera, three black plumes of gas gushed through leaks that were otherwise invisible.

"Holy smoke, it's blowing like mad," said Mr. Gosney, an environmental field coordinator for EnCana, the Canadian gas producer that operates the year-old well near Franklin, Tex. "It does look nasty."

Within a few days the leaks had been sealed by workers.

Efforts like EnCana's save energy and money. Yet they are also a cheap, effective way of blunting climate change that could potentially be replicated thousands of times over, from Wyoming to Siberia, energy experts say. Natural gas consists almost entirely of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas that scientists say accounts for as much as a third of the human contribution to global warming.

A government report on climate issues aims at cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. The government's climate expert, MP Oras Tynkkynen (Green) says that this is to be achieved through eliminating energy wastage in housing, transport, and food production.
      Tynkkynen also said that people would be steered in the direction of life with low emissions through various incentives and obligations.

An 80 per cent reduction in emissions means that the country's total level of emissions would be about the same as what comes now from transport alone.

Buildings will have to use 60 per cent less energy than they no now, cars will emit between 10 and 20 per cent of the present levels of carbon dioxide, and that waste management would no longer involve the kinds of landfills that are used today.
      For ordinary citizens, this will mean more stringent building standards, more electric cars on the roads, and the use of biological fuels in those cars that still have internal combustion engines.
      The ultimate aim will be for buildings not to need any external heating energy, and for the transport of humans to be emission-free.

Watching his sons kick around a makeshift ball made from tightly bound plastic bags, Ugandan handyman Jackson Mawa marvels at the way business has improved since he bought a solar-powered mobile phone.

"I am self-employed. Sometimes people call me and they find my (cell) phone is off. I have been having that problem a lot due to battery charging. So when (Uganda Telecom) brought out the solar phones, since I got it, that very day, I have never had any problem with my phone," said Mawa, clutching the device.

It might not sound like much but for Mawa and millions of people in Africa and Asia, with no connection to electricity grids or unreliable and expensive power access, these little solar-powered gadgets are proving to be revolutionary.

Farmers can check market prices before deciding which crop seeds to sow, speak to buyers from their fields and get weather forecasts. And unlike with standard mobile phones, they don't have to worry about their phone battery losing power.

Solar cell phones could build on the economic advantages that mobile phones have already brought to far-flung regions of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, including price transparency and more accurate and timely information.

Google is using a camera-equipped tricycle to photograph off-road locations for its Street View service, and it's asking for nominations of places where the Street View trike should visit.

"Some of the country's most interesting and fun places aren't accessible with our Street View car," Google senior mechanical engineer Dan Ratner explained Friday on the Mountain View Internet company's official blog.

"My day job is working as a mechanical engineer on the Street View team, but I do a lot of mountain biking in my spare time," Ratner continued. "One day, while exploring some roads less traveled, I realized that I could combine these two pursuits and build a bicycle-based camera system for Street View."

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has once again become one of the coldest places in the Universe.

All eight sectors of the LHC have now been cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

The large magnets that bend particle beams around the LHC are kept at this frigid temperature using liquid helium.

The magnets are arranged end-to-end in a 27km-long circular tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border.

The cool-down is an important milestone ahead of the collider's scheduled re-start in the latter half of November.

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 "It's a bit like firing knitting needles from across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way"
James Gillies, director of communications, Cern

Not everyone who is legally obligated to take the integration course actually needs it. NRC Handelsblad spoke to three perfectly integrated immigrants who are shocked at having their Dutchness put to the test.

Larbi Edriouch, head of integration for the city of Utrecht, sees them all the time: people who have lived in the Netherlands for years and speak perfect Dutch. They often have good jobs, but no Dutch passports. As a result they are legally obligated to take the Dutch integration course.

It's a waste, says Edriouch. These people are often quite assertive and they sometimes complain strongly. "By doing so they are proving that they don't need an integration course. But it takes up much of our time."

Since January 1, 2007 all foreigners coming to or residing in the Netherlands have to take a Dutch integration course and exam. For newcomers there are exemptions for people holding passports from the European Union, the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Korea and Japan. For people already in the Netherlands only EU passport holders and people under 18 or over 65 are exempt. People who feel they don't need an integration course can take a national exemption exam for 81 euros, but many municipalities fail to provide that information. People can also ask the municipality directly for an exemption, but the criteria are very strict.

The dosage -- eight times the programmed amount -- appeared on technicians' screens during CT scans. Doctors also missed the problem. Experts say blind trust of medical machinery is a growing concern.

Every time a patient receives a CT scan, a mundane array of numbers appears on a computer screen before a technician. The numbers include the radiation dose. "It's in your face on the screen," said Dr. Donald Rucker, chief medical officer for Siemens, a manufacturer of CT scanners.

Beginning in February 2008, each time a patient at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center received a CT brain perfusion scan -- a state-of-the-art procedure used to diagnose strokes -- the dose displayed would have been eight times higher than normal. No standard medical imaging procedure would use so much radiation, which one expert said is on par with the levels used to blast tumors.

Somebody should have noticed. But nobody did -- everybody trusted the machines.

Late last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Cedars-Sinai revealed that 206 stroke patients who received scans at the prestigious Los Angeles hospital were overdosed with radiation. Now doctors and safety experts around the country face a troubling question: In an era of supposedly fail-safe medical technology, how did the problem go undetected for 18 months?

 Another moon mission suggests iron and mercury, not frozen water, were kicked up

When a spent rocket was deliberately crashed into a lunar crater October 9, it did kick up a plume, according to this image released October 16. The LCROSS craft took the image 15 seconds after its empty Centaur rocket plunged into a crater in a part of the moon suspected to host frozen water. The plume is six to eight kilometers high.NASA The Centaur rocket that was deliberately crashed into one of the moon's southern craters October 9 did in fact kick up a plume, even though the plume was not initially as large as hoped.

The relatively low velocity of the Centaur rocket generated a plume that was difficult to spot -- in fact impossible to see by many ground-based telescopes -- and smaller than had been predicted, suggests Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

Moments after the impact, as the rocket's mother spacecraft LCROSS got closer and closer to the crash site of its empty Centaur rocket, which had plunged into a crater called Cabeus, the raw images taken by LCROSS showed nothing but darkness. But enhanced composite images released October 16 do show a faint plume that was not apparent in the raw images.

The enhanced images show the heat flash from the impact, the plume and the creation of a new crater inside Cabeus before LCROSS plunged to its own death 4 minutes after the Centaur, said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS principal investigator and project scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.
....
In the meantime, far-ultraviolet spectra taken by another craft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as it flew over the impact site shows no obvious signs of water. Instead, the spectra show signs of what may be iron and mercury, says Gladstone, a mission scientist.

It appears that they're getting the hash marks in the sky for some more fighter jet football.

Skennah Kowa

"'As we learned with the Obama Action Figure a lot of the sales from the Michelle Obama Action Figure will be motivated by the mood of the country even though the First Lady is considered an apolitical figure. Major events like, hopefully, health care reform passing will focus a lot of positive attention on the Obamas and increase interest,' Feinberg said.

"'The First Lady is a role model who crosses party lines. So we're hopeful that the figure appeals to women and girls who admire her intelligence, grace and commitment to education and family.'"

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

The Commissioning Editor for Education at the UK's Channel 4 will publish an essay tomorrow that is guaranteed to cause controversy. Noting that people will never go back to paying for music, Alice Taylor vehemently opposes plans to disconnect Internet users on a simple accusation, labeling the entities calling for it as "dying behemoths".

For 50 years he has been defending his country from the Romans - and his people love him for it. John Lichfield salutes France's greatest literary export

The year is 50BC and Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely. One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders. The year is 2009AD France has been entirely conquered by baseball hats, Big Macs and Hollywood movies. Well, not entirely. One indomitable enclave of French culture still holds out, and even thrives.

The Asterix series of cartoon books, France's most lucrative literary export by far, will celebrate its 50th anniversary from next week with a series of exhibitions and special events and a new album of stories. Asterix spins the unlikely adventures of a village of ancient Gauls who refuse to bow to the power of Rome.

The hero is a short, cocky, clever, hyper-energetic leader, who claims to have a magic potion to defend the Gaulish way of life from external threat. Any accidental parallel with contemporary French politics ends there. Asterix the Gaul has no tall, glamorous wife of Roman origin; he has no wife at all. Instead, he has a wholly platonic friendship with a man-mountain called Obelix and a dog called Idéfix (or in the English language version, Dogmatix).

During an evening speech to honor the public service institute that Bush founded two decades ago, Obama called for cooperation between Republicans and Democrats. The former president, he said, proved that "the R or D next to your name is irrelevant" in challenging times.

"You might not always know it from watching the cable news shows or listening to folks on the radio," Obama said, but "I think we're standing in one of those moments."

Possibly related news: Tiergarten Park, Berlin, 2008

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Eighteen of the state's 20  top-paid school administrators worked on Long Island, according to a new study of 2007-08 data by a conservative Albany think tank that questions why many suburban superintendents earn more than New York's new education commissioner.

Big packages reported in Thursday's study included $399,917 for the chief operating officer of the regional Eastern Suffolk BOCES, and $428,777 and $339,305, respectively, for superintendents of the Syosset and Commack districts. Total annual compensation for a retiring Locust Valley superintendent topped $570,000, once he cashed in unused sick and vacation days, the study found.

"If people on the Island wonder why taxes are high, this is one of the reasons," said Lise Bang-Jensen, senior policy analyst at The Empire Center for New York State Policy, which conducted the study.

Possibly related klatsch: valley lockjaw


Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Via superfrenchie

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes