Imagine drafting a controversial proposal. Among its key recommendations is a new job. With a mixture of persuasion and muscle the proposal is accepted. The job has an attractive title but it turns out there is little agreement over its precise role. So only after the signature pens have been put to paper do the real discussions begin as to how the job will be defined.

This is the curious case of the president of the European Council.

As European leaders expect the last country, the Czech Republic, to sign the Lisbon Treaty, attention turns to not just who will fill the post of president but what this person will actually do. The job spec, as laid out in the treaty, is spare on detail. The president of the council shall "chair it and drive forward its work". He/she "shall endeavour to facilitate cohesion and consensus within the EC".

President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic was transformed this weekend from a Eurosceptic hero - "the last man standing", whose opposition to the Lisbon Treaty might save Britain from its tentacles - to something verging on a traitor. He has caved in, say opponents of the treaty; perhaps even been "got at" by EU threats to marginalise his country. President Klaus is now expected to sign the document, completing its Europe-wide ratification. And that means that the Lisbon Treaty will be in force when a future Conservative government comes to power (if it does).

To put it simply: Mr Klaus's signature makes the prospect of a British referendum on Lisbon vanishingly small. David Cameron made his position plain as long ago as June 2008, when he told an audience in Harlow, Essex: "We may have to say, well look, we're not happy with this situation, here are some of the powers we'd like to have back. But we can't give you that referendum on the Lisbon Treaty because it's already been put in place across the rest of Europe."

As secret negotiations continue across Europe over the new Lisbon Treaty 'top jobs', the dominant European centre-right is waiting for the left to make its move and propose "credible candidates" for the position of High Representative for Foreign Affairs.

José Manuel Barroso famously said that there are 'good socialists and bad socialists', when, during his grilling in the European Parliament before securing a second term as Commission president, the Parliament's centre-left group insisted on obtaining the EU foreign affairs minister job envisaged under the draft Lisbon Treaty (EurActiv 10/09/09).

Barroso's statement alluded to the fact that the socialists failed to name any candidates for the position, and he insisted that candidates eventually proposed by the left would not be automatically given the job simply by virtue of being a socialist.

Consequently, the European left's strategy has been to push strongly for a centre-left politician to be given the new job of High Representative (HR) for Foreign Affairs, in part capitalising on the good record of Javier Solana, a Spanish socialist, as foreign policy chief.

Governments and national parliaments must cooperate with the European institutions in communicating EU policies to the public if citizens' trust in the European Union is to be improved, Siim Kallas, a vice-president of the European Commission, told EurActiv in an interview.

Asked what more can be done to boost citizens' confidence in the European project, the former Estonian prime minister said his "heretical view" is that "it goes via governments".

"If national governments exercise, in their country, cheap criticisms of the European Union, then no-one can overcome this," said Kallas, explaining that "it's impossible to establish direct links from Brussels to Estonia or France, circumventing national governments".

"For national parliaments it's the same. If national elites are exercising an anti-European attitude, then citizens will take this attitude. If national parliaments and governments are pro-European, then citizens are pro-European as well," he declared.

The EU on Sunday (18 October) used the book fair in Frankfurt to launch its online digital library of official documents issued in the last 50 years.

The EU's so-called digital bookshop puts more than 12 million scanned pages online, to be downloaded for free by anyone interested. The oldest document is a 1952 speech by Jean Monnet which inaugurated the High Authority of the Coal and Steel Community, later to become the EU.

"The digital library frees the memory of the European Union tied to paper since its beginning," EU commissioner for multilingualism Leonard Orban said.

The EU has said that it intends to soon start talks to replace its partnership agreement with Moldova, with the aim of creating a successor that would act as "a powerful tool to promote deeper co-operation and approximation between Moldova and the EU".

Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden, said on Friday during a visit to Moldova that the "the EU decision to start negotiations testifies to the progress made by Moldova in implementing reforms and its commitment to continuing on the reform path".

The announcement comes during a period of substantial change in Moldova, where the Communist government was removed from power in April in elections that were judged to be free and fair by international observers.

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has come under fire after a TV channel he owns secretly filmed a judge who ruled against him in a bribery case.

Mr Berlusconi's Canale 5 channel aired footage of the judge taking a walk, smoking and visiting a barber shop.

A lawyers' association reported the incident to Italy's privacy watchdog and declared a "state of protest".

Earlier this month, Judge Raimondo Mesiano found Mr Berlusconi "co-responsible" of bribing legal officers.

French police have arrested two suspected Eta members, including a senior political leader of the Basque separatist group, officials say.

Aitor Elizaran Aguilar is a joint political chief of the group, Spanish anti-terrorism experts say.

The designated PM starts consultations today for a new government - Top News - HotNews.ro

PSD leader Mircea Geoana announced on Sunday that the four parties - PSD, PNL, UDMR and the national minorities - do not support Croitoru. They will propose the named PM to hold a common meeting on Tuesday, at the Parliament's Palace, "out of politeness".

"It is much clearer that he is being used as a rabbit by Mr. Basescu and that he does not stand any chance to find Romania's Parliament support", Geoana opinionated on Croitoru.

PNL, PSD, UDMR and the national minorities announced that they will back the mayor of Sibiu - Klaus Johannis - for the premiership, but the proposal was rejected by President Traian Basescu. The chief of state announced that he designated Lucian Croitoru to form the new Government.   

Background. The one pulling all the strings in Romania is popular President Traian Băsescu, who is soon up for re-election. A week ago, he engineered a collapse of the governing grand coalition of his [right-wing] liberal democrats (PDL) and the (post-commie) Soc-Dems (PSD).

Băsescu had free hand in deciding the PM's fate, but went for accepting the no-confidence and choosing a new candidate for PM. The upcoming parliamentary vote on the candidate gives him multiple options to keep control of the government: the Romanian tradition of splitting off individual MPs from other parties, or calling new elections.

But PSD and the former main opposition parties (national-liberals [PNL] and Hungarian minority party [RMDSz-UDMR]) unexpectedly found a common line, and that rather quickly, and stick to it: that ethnic German mayor from a city in Transsylvania, whose person shall secure the votes of the smaller minority representatives too.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

About 450 in 24h.

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

PRAGUE, Oct. 19 (Xinhua) -- Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said that his country would continue to back the European Union (EU)'s Lisbon Treaty while seeking to safeguard national interests, according to news reaching here Monday from Bratislava.

During a TV program, Fico said his country would act under the principle of neither threatening the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty nor causing damage to the national interests of his country

   Fico said his country was faced with two options: either to veto in the European Council a Czech proposal of being exempted from a part of the Treaty or to insist that it also applies to Slovakia.

"Continue to back"? What's he smoking?

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

All attempts to save the DSB Bank, which was put under central bank supervision a week ago, have failed. On Monday morning the Amsterdam court made the bankruptcy final, after it had given the consumer bank three respites to find an alternative solution.

Dirk Scheringa, the founder and owner of DSB, on Friday announced an American investor was seriously interested in buying his company. He has previously tried to persuade a consortium of Dutch banks to take over his ravaged bank after it succumbed to negative publicity surrounding its mortgages and insurance policies.

NRC Handelsblad discovered Saturday that Lone Star Funds, an investment firm from Texas, had approached DSB. The private equity firm specialises in buying distressed companies and assets, such as toxic mortgage loans. But on Sunday the company pulled out of negotiations after studying DSB's books.

Federal investigators are gearing up to file charges against a wider array of insider-trading networks, some linked to the criminal case against billionaire hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam that shook Wall Street last week, people familiar with the matter said.

The pending crackdown, based on at least two years of investigation, targets securities professionals including hedge- fund managers, lawyers and other Wall Street players, the people said, declining to be identified because the cases aren't public. Some probes, like the one focused on Rajaratnam, rely on wiretaps. Others stem from a secret Securities and Exchange Commission data-mining project set up to pinpoint clusters of people who make similar well-timed stock investments.

Investigators have struggled to build cases against large institutional investors such as hedge-fund managers, who often deflect regulatory queries about suspiciously timed bets, arguing they're statistical flukes amid millions of trades. The case against Rajaratnam, built on recorded conversations within a web of alleged conspirators, offers a glimpse of how U.S. investigators are using more aggressive tactics to cut through the blizzard of trading and trace the flow of information.

On the surface, this looks like 2003 and 2004 when the previous housing, credit, commodity and equity bubbles started to inflate, helped by low nominal interest rates and a lack of inflation. There is one big difference, though. This bubble will burst sooner.
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In mid-September both measures concluded that the US stock market was overvalued by some 35 to 40 per cent. The markets have since gone up a lot more than the moving average of earnings. You can do the maths.
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We could be in for a period of extreme price instability, in both directions, as central banks lose control.

This is exactly what the economist Hyman Minsky predicted in his financial instability hypothesis.** He postulated that a world with a large financial sector and an excessive emphasis on the production of investment goods creates instability both in terms of output and prices.
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Our present situation can give rise to two scenarios - or some combination of the two. The first is that central banks start exiting at some point in 2010, triggering another fall in the prices of risky assets. In the UK, for example, any return to a normal monetary policy will almost inevitably imply another fall in the housing market, which is currently propped up by ultra-cheap mortgages.

Alternatively, central banks might prioritise financial stability over price stability and keep the monetary floodgates open for as long as possible. This, I believe, would cause the mother of all financial market crises - a bond market crash - to be followed by depression and deflation.

The euro has become a currency on steroids.  Its relentless nominal and real appreciation since the end of 2000 was briefly interrupted in the second half of 2008, but resumed with a vengeance during 2009.  The strength of the currency is hurting the exporting and import-competing sectors of the Euro Area.  Unemployment and excess capacity continue to rise.  The euro's excessive strength is also contributing to a significant and persistent undershooting of the rate of inflation the ECB deems to be consistent with price stability in the medium term: headline HICP inflation in December 2008 was 1.60 percent in December 2008, hit zero in May 2009 and has been negative since then.
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What accounts for the strength of this über-currency? The profession's inability to understand, let alone predict, things monetary is amplified when it comes to explaining or predicting the relative price of (at least) two currencies. Nevertheless, any disinterested observer would be hard-pushed to avoid the conclusion that the Eurozone is paying the price for the ECB's excessively tight monetary policy.

The ECB's monetary policy is excessively tight in relation to the ECB's self-imposed quantitative expression of its Treaty-based price stability mandate.  In the ECB's own words: "The primary objective of the ECB's monetary policy is to maintain price stability. The ECB aims at inflation rates of below, but close to, 2% over the medium term."

There is no doubt in my view that the ECB has an asymmetric interpretation of its price stability mandate. Excessive inflation is to be avoided at all cost.  However, excessive deflation can be tolerated and rationalized.

In a January 2009 interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw, Warren Buffett criticized leveraging "to the sky," and creating "phony instruments [RMBSs, CDOs, et al.] that fool other people so you stick money in your pocket." In 2002, he claimed over-the-counter derivatives are "financial weapons of mass destruction"1 and participants who account for them have "enormous incentives to cheat." 2

Warren Buffett, the blogosphere's "Oracle of Omaha," often chastises the financial community. If you cost him money, he's liable to write an expose. He posts annual shareholder letters on a low-tech website and seems to labor under the assumption that rational people eagerly read his blog. Congress and regulators are dismissive of Buffett's hyperbolic rhetoric; it is fit only for a banana republic.
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Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner10 ignored the historic ravings of the most successful living investor, and fueled some of the bombers piloted by Wall Street before finance's Pearl Harbor. After they used taxpayer money to save the system and enriched the culpable with no strings attached, Buffett said "it could have turned out a lot differently," and called each of them a four-letter word. The label was undeserved.  (The word was "hero."  ARG)

Four-letter words aside, Warren Buffett raised a good point. It could have--and should have--turned out a lot differently. But it's not too late. Buffett called the crisis an economic Pearl Harbor and said that "Wall Street owes the American people one at this point."8 During World War II, we imposed an excess profits tax. We should impose a 95% excess profits tax--or windfall profits tax--on certain financial institutions (including Goldman Sachs) enriching themselves with ongoing low-cost Fed funding and debt guarantees.We should impose a 95% excess profits tax--or windfall profits tax--on certain financial institutions (including Goldman Sachs) enriching themselves with ongoing low-cost Fed funding and debt guarantees. (My bold)

When the financial system almost imploded in the fall of 2008, one of the primary responses by the Federal Reserve was the issuance of an unprecedented amount of FX liquidity lines in the form of swaps to foreign Central Banks. The number went from practically zero to a peak of $582 billion on December 10, 2008. The number of swaps outstanding was almost directly inversely correlated with the value of the dollar (much more on that shortly). A graphic representation of this can be seen below:

The topic of skyrocketing liquidity swaps was in fact the headline feature of one of the numerous grillings of the Chairman by the inimitable Alan Grayson...(You have probably seen Grayson mocking and laughing at Bernanke in a public hearing.)

And while Bernanke was not very interested in getting caught up in providing actual explanations, the Bank of International Settlements just released a major paper titled "The US dollar shortage in global banking and the international policy response" which goes on to demonstrate just how it happened that Fed chief Ben Bernanke in essence bailed out the entire developed world, which was facing an unprecedented dollar shortage crisis due to the sudden implosion of FX swap lines and other mechanisms which until that point were critical in maintaining the dollar funding shortfall for virtually every foreign Central Bank.

The BIS provides the following big picture perspective:

   The funding difficulties which arose during the crisis are directly linked to the remarkable expansion in banks' global balance sheets over the past decade. Reflecting in part the rapid pace of financial innovation, banks' (particularly European banks') foreign positions have surged since 2000, even when scaled by measures of underlying economic activity. As banks' balance sheets grew, so did their appetite for foreign currency assets, notably US dollar-denominated claims on non-bank entities. These assets include retail and corporate lending, loans to hedge funds, and holdings of structured finance products based on US mortgages and other underlying assets. During the build-up, the low perceived risk (high ratings) of these instruments appeared to offer attractive return opportunities; during the crisis they became the main source of mark to market losses.

How exactly did this improper perception of funding risk manifest itself?

   The accumulation of US dollar assets saddled banks with significant funding requirements, which they scrambled to meet during the crisis, particularly in the weeks following the Lehman bankruptcy. To better understand these financing needs, we break down banks' assets and liabilities by currency to examine cross-currency funding, or the extent to which banks fund in one currency and invest in another. We find that, since 2000, the Japanese and the major European banking systems took on increasingly large net (assets minus liabilities) on-balance sheet positions in foreign currencies, particularly in US dollars. While the associated currency exposures were presumably hedged off-balance sheet, the build-up of net foreign currency positions exposed these banks to foreign currency funding risk, or the risk that their funding positions (FX swaps) could not be rolled over.

Once again, the specter of everyone (and in this case it really means everyone) doing the same trade: sound familiar? This is eerily similar to what happened to basis traders in late 2008 (nothing pretty) when the balance of the trade was so skewed to one side, that there was nobody willing or able to take the opposing side, leading to massive wipe outs for everyone who participated. It is also comparable to the situation prevalent in equity markets currently.

What is now unquestionable, and what will be made clear shortly, is that the dollar trade is precisely what the basis trade, or any other trade, would have ended up being for any and every Central Bank that had a funding mismatch in dollars after the Lehman bankruptcy (all of them), had the Federal Reserve not stepped in and become the lender of last resort to the entire world.

About 12.2% of Californians are out of work, according to the state's latest calculations, and some economists are predicting that the state won't start creating jobs until late 2010. So what can the state's 2 million unemployed do in the meantime to better qualify themselves to get one of those jobs? Higher education may not be the answer, according to a study released today.

About 2.7 million "middle-skill" jobs will be created in the state by 2016, according to the study by the Workforce Alliance, Skills2Compete and the California EDGE Campaign. Middle-skill jobs refer to those that require more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree. They include jobs in construction, healthcare, law enforcement and many other fields.

"Federal funds from the stimulus bill are expected to create new jobs and many of these will be middle-skill, especially in green jobs, construction, manufacturing and transportation," the report says. "Matching the skills of our workforce to meet this demand will help our economy recover more quickly and prepare us for better times ahead."

The report calculates that about half of all jobs in California fell into the middle-skill category in 2008, and predicts that about 43% of all job openings in the next seven years will be middle-skill. Low-skill jobs will account for a quarter of all job openings over the same time period, and high-skill jobs will make up 32% of openings.

The problem: A shortage of middle-skill workers could develop because the state has cut back on the training of those skills. State budget cuts have drastically reduced funding to community colleges and adult education centers, for example.

Unions at Spain's Opel plant Monday rejected a plan on its future by its Canadian auto parts manufacturer Magna International and called for a vote on strike action, a union member said.

Canadian auto parts manufacturer Magna International wants to cut around 1,300 of the 7,000 staff at the Opel factory in the northern town of Figueruelas and move some production to Germany.

"The last proposal from Magna has been rejected," said Julio Vela, a member of the works committee and of the UGT union.

A FEW years ago, I accepted a Golden Globe award by barking out an expletive.

One imagines President Obama did the same when he heard about his Nobel, and not out of excitement.

When Mr. Obama takes the stage at Oslo City Hall this December, he won't be the first sitting president to receive the peace prize, but he might be the most controversial. There's a sense in some quarters of these not-so-United States that Norway, Europe and the World haven't a clue about the real President Obama; instead, they fixate on a fantasy version of the president, a projection of what they hope and wish he is, and what they wish America to be.

Well, I happen to be European, and I can project with the best of them. So here's why I think the virtual Obama is the real Obama, and why I think the man might deserve the hype. It starts with a quotation from a speech he gave at the United Nations last month:

"We will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year's summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time."

Turkey has recently sought to secure a new role as Middle East mediator. But fallout from postponed military exercises has seen it move further from Israel and closer to Syria. Israelis are concerned, Syrians are celebrating and the Turks are guardedly diplomatic.

It was a good week for Syria's Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem. Last Tuesday, he was part of a group of Syrian and Turkish politicians that met at Oncupinar, a border crossing between Syria and Turkey, to mark the removal of entry visa requirements between the two countries.

It was a big step. As recently as the late 1990s, the two neighbors were on the verge of conflict due to Syrian support for Kurdish resistance fighters in Turkey. Parts of the Turkish-Syrian border are still mined. Times, though, have changed: These days, the two countries cooperate on joint military maneuvers and have created a High Level Strategic Cooperation Council.

The Taliban in Afghanistan are running a sophisticated financial network to pay for their insurgent operations, raising hundreds of millions of dollars from the illicit drug trade, kidnappings, extortion and foreign donations that American officials say they are struggling to cut off.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban have imposed an elaborate system to tax the cultivation, processing and shipment of opium, as well as other crops like wheat grown in the territory they control, American and Afghan officials say. In the Middle East, Taliban leaders have sent fund-raisers to Arab countries to keep the insurgency's coffers brimming with cash.

Estimates of the Taliban's annual revenue vary widely. Proceeds from the illicit drug trade alone range from $70 million to $400 million a year, according to Pentagon and United Nations officials. By diversifying their revenue stream beyond opium, the Taliban are frustrating American and NATO efforts to weaken the insurgency by cutting off its economic lifelines, the officials say.

The chairman of Barclays has warned that Britain's banks will be damaged if regulators are too rigorous in their implementation of a global crackdown on bonuses and capital requirements while other nations, such as the US, are lax.

"There is the real risk of regulatory arbitrage," Marcus Agius said in a video interview as part of the Financial Times's new series The Future of Finance.

"The same principles will apply in different ways in different capital markets with different outcomes. This is a global financial system. It is fungible. So I am very concerned there should be a level playing field."

When Sudanese-born billionaire Mo Ibrahim announced an annual $5 million prize to reward Africa's best leaders, he warned that there would be years when "we wouldn't award the prize." Just three years on, and despite considering "some credible candidates," the prize committee said on Monday that no prize would be awarded in 2009. In announcing the decision, committee member and former Botswana President Ketumile Masire said the panel "noted the progress made with governance in some African countries, while noticing with concern recent setbacks in other countries."

The non-award is, of course, a powerful indictment of Africa's still patchy governance and the continent's most recently retired leaders. The Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership considers democratically elected former heads of state or government who have left office in the last three years. The prize is worth $5 million over 10 years and $200,000 a year for life thereafter. By making the reward so big -- it is the largest annually awarded prize in the world -- Ibrahim has said he wanted to create something to encourage African leaders to do good while in power, in part because they might be rewarded in retirement.

The de facto regime of Roberto Micheletti Bain, and its friends, have spent slightly more than $590,307.69 in lobbying the United States goverment since June 28, 2009. That's a lot of persuasion.

$20,000 - The Honduran Association of Maquiladores hired The Cormac Group on 6/19 to lobby over US-Honduran relations. Partner John Slade and Mark Vogel worked on their behalf. On the registration form they indicate a payment of $8,000. They indicated on the termination report, filed 9/9, that they had been paid $20,000 to lobby the US House and Senate on US-Honduran relations.

Officials in central China plan to relocate 15,000 residents after more than 1,000 children tested positive for lead poisoning, state media say.

Zhao Suping, mayor of Jiyuan city in Henan province, said the relocation would cost 1bn yuan ($146m), the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The residents live in about 10 villages around China's biggest lead smelter in Jiyuan.

The conventional wisdom is that China is steaming through the global financial crisis by building on the momentum generated by its 30-year boom. Indeed, ever since it sailed through the last big global crisis--the Asian contagion 10 years ago--Beijing has been feted for uniquely steady helmsmanship in financial storms. So perhaps it's natural for forecasters to assume that the Chinese supertanker of state is not turning sharply now, particularly since it continues to grow rapidly even as other economies sink in the recession.

Yet this crisis is different--bigger and more damaging than any seen in generations--and it is exposing limits and forcing change in just about every key piece of the China model: the supremacy of the one-party state, the smart economic management, the export-driven growth, the emerging consumer class, the burgeoning private sector, the headlong focus on growth at any environmental cost, and the drive to build world-class companies. What follows is a look at why these common assumptions about China are increasingly inaccurate or just plain wrong.

Despite a wide-spread belief that former communist states are not keen on adopting green initiatives, some of the EU's member states in the east are forging ahead with renewable energy policies, according to a representative from energy giant General Electric.

Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic are particularly active in the field of renewable energy although Poland is lagging behind, says Rod Christie, General Electric president for central and eastern Europe, Russia and the CIS countries.

"There is more wind generation in Romania, who only started two years ago, than there is in Poland who started 4-5 years ago."

"Romania has implemented legislation, has a very good wind resource and we've seen what's now the largest onshore wind farm outside of the US being constructed there," he told this website.

The Western media reported last week on how the German company Urenco shipped nuclear material to Siberia, where the highly toxic waste was stored in containers in the open air. The company has stopped deliveries and will store the material with higher standards in Germany in the future.

The radiation warning sign was so small that few passers-by took note in the commuter rail station in Kapitolovo, Russia. Fifty-six steel canisters were sitting there on a summer day three years ago. Just a stone's throw away, people were waiting for trains to take them to downtown St. Petersburg.

One passenger was Dmitri Artamonov, the head of the Greenpeace chapter in St. Petersburg. A short time later, he returned to the train station with radiation detection equipment. At the time, he recalls, the radioactivity levels were already above the level that would have triggered an evacuation in Russia. "Besides, the train was unguarded," he says, "a gift for terrorists."

Dairy farmers in the European Union are to receive 280m euros (£255m) in aid, says the EU's farm commissioner.

The decision follows weeks of protests by thousands of farmers over the low price of milk, including the spraying of milk onto fields.

Most of the EU's member states - including France and Germany - had been pressing for aid after the global economic downturn reduced demand.

Dairy farmers say milk costs more to produce than they can sell it for.

China's plans to buy into oil fields in Africa may suffer a third setback in as many months if Exxon Mobil Corp. succeeds in snapping up drilling rights in Ghana, one of the continent's newest oil nations.

Closely held Kosmos Energy LLC said last week it agreed to sell its stake in Ghana's Jubilee oil field to Exxon Mobil, which may thwart ambitions in the same area by Cnooc Ltd., the listed arm of China National Offshore Oil Corp. While Ghanaian government officials say the Exxon deal, worth about $4 billion according to a person familiar with the transaction, has not been officially approved, Chinese explorers have hit hurdles since July on other oil deals in Angola and Libya.

At stake is China's ability to secure fuel for its economy, which expanded 7.9 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier. China's oil companies in Africa are diversifying from construction projects as a means to gain access to mineral resources, and turning to strategies that include Western deal structures and local banks. In the process, they are competing with some of the world's biggest oil companies in the U.S. and Europe also seeking resources in the region.

Gordon Brown today warned that the world is on the brink of a "catastrophic" future of killer heatwaves, floods and droughts unless governments speed up negotiations on climate change before vital talks in Copenhagen in December.

This applies to the US as much as anyone, he said, adding that "there is no plan B", and that agreement cannot be deferred beyond the UN-sponsored Copenhagen conference.

There are fears that Barack Obama does not have the political capital to reach a deal in Copenhagen and will instead use a visit to China next month to reach a bilateral deal that circumvents the UN.

Texas cares little for environmental niceties. Its governor, Rick Perry, bashes the Environmental Protection Agency at every opportunity, and recently branded the climate bill that passed the House of Representatives a "legislative monstrosity."

Yet the oil-and-gas state has nonetheless emerged as the nation's top producer of a commodity prized by environmentalists: wind power. Eager developers are covering its desolate western mesas with giant turbines. The world's largest wind farm began operations in Texas this month, and the state now has close to three times as much wind capacity as Iowa, the second-ranked state.

This achievement puts Mr. Perry's state in odd company. The race for clean-energy leadership is on -- and big red Texas is going head-to-head with the gung-ho greens of California. That state has thrown itself into solar power and now leads the nation by a huge margin; it has also aggressively pursued energy efficiency.

In the absence of sustained federal action to support clean energy and fight climate change, Texas and California are serving as important policy laboratories. Now, as the United States Senate considers the best ways to accelerate the use of renewable technologies -- with the full support of the Obama administration -- lawmakers might do well to look at those states.

BP Northstar Island

The march of offshore oil development into the Arctic has been given a boost by the federal Minerals Management Service, which approved Shell Offshore Inc.'s plan to drill exploratory wells in the Beaufort Sea off the coast of Alaska.

Conservationists have been fighting in the courts to delay further offshore oil development until  studies of the Arctic's fragile and interconnected ecosystem can be done. But the minerals agency said it will work with the company to make sure the development can be conducted "in a safe and environmentally responsible manner."

The company has agreed to take a mid-season break in its drilling program, scheduled to begin in July 2010, to accommodate the fall hunting season on bowhead whales undertaken by Native Alaskan villagers, who had feared that noisy drilling activities could injure or scare off the whales.

"We sincerely believe this exploration plan reflects concerns we have heard in the North Slope communities which have resulted in the programs being adjusted accordingly," Pete Slaiby, Shell Alaska's vice president, said in a statement.

The Beaufort Sea contains an estimated 8.22 billion barrels of oil and 27.65 million cubic feet of natural gas. Oil operations on the North Slope at Prudhoe Bay have already begun to move into the near-coastal waters, but Shell's drilling plan would take place in two leases located 16 and 23 miles offshore.

I designed the communications and low voltage systems for the personnel quarters in a BP facility to be built on an artificial island in the Beauford Sea back in '95, on contract with Parsons-Daniels.  I had hoped to do on site commissioning.  Wonder if this is it.  

Hey! It is money!  And I was only the engineer.  :-)

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

Pedego---- Comfy, low-slung, relatively low-priced 6-speed cruiser designed for hill-averse, non-athletic baby boomers. It has big balloon tires, a rear hub engine, a rack battery and a rear-hub engine controlled by a hand throttle that does not require pedaling. (Pedego Electric Bikes)

"Ride up steep hills without huffing and puffing!" "Hammer at 20 mph without breaking a sweat!" At the recent Interbike trade show in Las Vegas, an explosion of companies touted the Lance Armstrong-like powers of the electric bike -- a pedal-powered bike with an electric motor for extra speed when you need it. Although E-bikes haven't caught on in the United States as they have in Europe and Japan, makers say high gas prices, the obesity crisis, better lithium-ion rechargeable batteries and a wave of green consciousness make them right for the times.

This review includes two styles of electric bikes: "pedal-assist," in which the rider must keep pedaling to actuate the engine, and "throttle," in which the motor can work independently.

For sixty-six years, much of the historic Neues Museum, Berlin's equivalent to the Louvre, was a bombed-out ruin in the heart of the city. Today it will reopen for visitors with a bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti taking pride of place, after a €212m (£193m) restoration masterminded by leading British architect David Chipperfield.

The museum was officially reinaugurated yesterday by Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, who lives opposite the cultural complex in the city's revamped centre. The renaissance of the museum, which contains 9,000 exhibits and artefacts ranging from a 700,000-year-old Stone Age shaped flint to a piece of barbed wire taken from the Berlin Wall, marks the return of one of Germany's most important cultural landmarks to the reunited city.

UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function.

The study, the first of its kind to assess the impact of Internet searching on brain performance, is currently in press at the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry and will appear in an upcoming issue.

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Small noted that pursuing activities that keep the mind engaged may help preserve brain health and cognitive ability. Traditionally, these include games such as crossword puzzles, but with the advent of technology, scientists are beginning to assess the influence of computer use -- including the Internet.

On first listen, some things grab you for their off-kilter novelty. Like the story of a company that has hired a bunch of "musicologists," who sit at computers and listen to songs, one at a time, rating them element by element, separating out what sometimes comes to hundreds of data points for a three-minute tune. The company, an Internet radio service called Pandora, is convinced that by pouring this information through a computer into an algorithm, it can guide you, the listener, to music that you like. The premise is that your favorite songs can be stripped to parts and reverse-engineered.

Some elements that these musicologists (who, really, are musicians with day jobs) codify are technical, like beats per minute, or the presence of parallel octaves or block chords. Someone taking apart Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" documents the prevalence of harmony, chordal patterning, swung 16ths and the like. But their analysis goes beyond such objectively observable metrics. To what extent, on a scale of 1 to 5, does melody dominate the composition of "Hey Jude"? How "joyful" are the lyrics? How much does the music reflect a gospel influence? And how "busy" is Stan Getz's solo in his recording of "These Foolish Things"? How emotional? How "motion-inducing"? On the continuum of accessible to avant-garde, where does this particular Getz recording fall?

There are more questions for every voice, every instrument, every intrinsic element of the music. And there are always answers, specific numerical ones. It can take 20 minutes to amass the data for a single tune. This has been done for more than 700,000 songs, by 80,000 artists. "The Music Genome Project," as this undertaking is called, is the back end of Pandora.

Women in the developing world who are paid to bear other people's children test the emotional limits of the international service economy.

In his 2007 book, Supercapitalism, Robert B. Reich argues that while industrial and clerical jobs could be outsourced to cheaper labor pools abroad, service jobs would stay in America. But Reich didn't count on First World clients flying to the global South to find low-cost retirement care or reproductive services. The Akanksha clinic is just one point on an ever-widening two-lane global highway that connects poor nations in the Southern Hemisphere to rich nations in the Northern Hemisphere, and poorer countries of Eastern Europe to richer ones in the West. A Filipina nanny heads north to care for an American child. A Sri Lankan maid cleans a house in Singapore. A Ukrainian nurse's aide carries lunch trays in a Swedish hospital. Marx's iconic male, stationary industrial worker has been replaced by a new icon: the female, mobile service worker.

We have grown used to the idea of a migrant worker caring for our children and even to the idea of hopping an overseas flight for surgery. As global service work grows increasingly personal, surrogacy is the latest expression of this trend. Nowadays, a wealthy person can purchase it all -- the egg, the sperm, and time in the womb. "A childless couple gains a child. A poor woman earns money. What could be the problem?" asks Dr. Nayna Patel, Akanksha's founder and director.

But despite Patel's view of commercial surrogacy as a straightforward equation, it's far more complicated for both the surrogates and the genetic parents. Like nannies or nurses, surrogates perform "emotional labor" to suppress feelings that could interfere with doing their job. Parents must decide how close they are willing (or able) to get to the woman who will give birth to their child.

As science and global capitalism gallop forward, they kick up difficult questions about emotional attachment. What, if anything, is too sacred to sell?

Printing police handcuff keys using a 3D printer:
http://blackbag.nl/?p=940

A document apparently listing thousands of British National Party members has been posted on the internet.

They include former senior members of the military, doctors and academics, according to the spreadsheet posted on the WikiLeaks website.

The names, addresses, home and mobile telephone numbers of apparent party members are listed in the document.

It follows the leaking of a BNP membership list containing 10,000 names and addresses in November 2008.

A former party member was fined £200 by Nottingham magistrates in September after admitting publishing that document

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has found out that former cycling champion Jan Ullrich made 24 trips to Madrid to use the doping services of Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes.

Between February 2005 and May 2006, Ullrich made eight secret trips to Madrid. The flights were organized by Rudy Pevenage, an Ullrich confidante who used to be his adviser at Team T-Mobile, his former sponsor. Pevenage himself flew to Madrid 15 times for short stays between December 2003 and April 2006 to meet the Spanish doping network, according to the investigators.

BKA experts found evidence of the trips on a computer they confiscated in a raid on Pevenage's home. Technicians reconstructed data that had been deleted from the computer's hard drive, according to files held by the Bonn public prosecutor's office. Authorities had investigated Ullrich since July 2006 for alleged fraud and closed the case in March 2008 after Ullrich paid a €250,000 fine ($373,000).

In what observers are calling his finest moment yet inventor James Dyson has unveiled a radically redesigned Prime Minister which will operate with much less bluster and at a fraction of the cost of existing models. `What you get with what's available on the market now is not a smooth delivery, it just feels like you're being buffeted the whole time.'