Tony Blair should be made head of a stronger European Union that would be able to compete with China and the United States on the world stage, the Foreign Secretary said yesterday.

David Miliband said that the new EU president needed to be someone who "stopped the traffic" in Washington and Beijing and was guaranteed the highest access to world leaders.

With EU leaders preparing to start talking about Mr Blair's prospects this week, his supporters have begun a sustained campaign to showcase the advantages he would bring to the role. The behind the scenes battle is becoming increasingly fraught, with some of the smaller EU countries combining in a "Stop Blair" effort. So far he is the only politician to be backed publicly for the role.

A draft review of the European Union's budget has shocked contributors such as France as spending priorities are shifted from farm policy to the EU's economic renewal, climate change and energy as well as foreign relations.

The European Commission's draft budget review, a copy of which was obtained by EurActiv, is raising eyebrows in EU circles.

The proposal seeks a "root and branch reform" of the 130 billion euro annual budget, which currently devotes 45% of spending to agricultural policies.

Widespread derision Monday greeted German Chancellor Angela Merkel's choice of a little-known local politician with a controversial past as the country's representative on the European Commission.

The reported reaction of Jose Manuel Barroso, the commission's president, summed up the disbelief in Berlin and Brussels at the appointment of Guenther Oettinger. Barroso rang up German colleagues to ask: "What is that all about?"

Apparently, the appointment also came as somewhat of a surprise to Oettinger himself, the 56-year-old head of the Baden-Wuerttemberg regional government in southwest Germany, but he nevertheless leapt at the unexpected chance.

"It was impossible to turn down such an offer ... I had to jump now or never," Oettinger said in an interview with the Hamburger Abendblatt daily.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has failed to appear at his trial on 11 charges including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Mr Karadzic denies the charges, which relate to the Bosnian war of the 1990s.

The judge adjourned the case for a day, and requested Mr Karadzic, who is representing himself, to appear.

A clutch of far-right political parties have cobbled together an alliance of convenience to represent their interests in the European Parliament, the leader of Hungary's extreme nationalist grouping, Jobbik, announced in Budapest over the weekend.

Far-right monitoring groups however say that the coalition is made up for the most part of ultra-right wing groupuscules that have no representation in Strasbourg, meaning they will not be able to draw on any public funding for staff or research.

Gabor Vona, the Jobbik party chairman, announced in Budapest on Saturday (24 October) the founding of the "Alliance of European Nationalist Movements," in a declaration of common goals drafted by the British National Party's (BNP) leader, Nick Griffin.

As France finally passes its harsh anti-piracy law and Britain readies its own bill to tackle illegal file-sharing, the European Parliament in a major U-turn has dropped its opposition to cutting internet access to scofflaw downloaders.

Representatives of the house have rowed back from insisting on the maintenance of an amendment to a package of telecoms laws that would have ruled out such manoeuvres.

On Thursday (22 October), representatives of the parliament and the member states announced that at the beginning of November, they will hold formal talks along with the European Commission to resolve differences between the sides over the telecoms package.

Guido Westerwelle is a blank slate in Washington. The new foreign minister's demands that US nuclear weapons be removed from Germany may be popular at home. But Berlin's Western allies could be asking themselves if Westerwelle has any new ideas for dealing with today's problems.

A foreign minister in Germany, particularly one who is a member of the Free Democrats (FDP), has to have his own foreign policy issue. Any issue.

A topic that can somehow overshadow a chancellor who has become accustomed to the world's international conferences. An issue that can wipe the noble smile off the face of rising political star Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg's face and take current Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier by surprise. An issue that provokes collective nods of approval. A theme that doesn't cost a lot but that is sure to make the headlines.

Many thought that Merkel's new governing coalition, which pairs her with the business-friendly Free Democrats, would be heavy on the reform and light on concern for Germany's socially needy. Instead, after three weeks of bickering, the new coalition has produced status quo -- just radically more expensive.

It was a campaign poster that neatly summed up the fears many Germans held prior to the country's September general elections. The Social Democrats plastered warnings in cities and towns across the country that a governing coalition pairing Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives with the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP) would result in a leadership characterized by cold, unfeeling economic liberalism. Both Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Guido Westerwelle's FDP, so went the message, wanted to slash social programs and shower benefits on the rich.

Indeed, it was Westerwelle, in particular, who had presented himself as a worthy target for the left side of Germany's political spectrum. During the campaign, he promised hefty tax cuts, a rethinking of the country's only-recently introduced health care reforms and a loosening of employment laws to make it easier for companies to jettison unwanted employees.

Pierluigi Bersani, an ex-industry minister, will lead the political opposition to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi after winning yesterday's Democratic Party primary.

Bersani won more than 50 percent of the vote, defeating Dario Franceschini, who has been interim leader of the party since former Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni resigned in February after the Democrats lost a regional election to Berlusconi's People of Liberty party. Franceschini and Ignazio Marino, a senator who was the third candidate, both conceded before the release of official results.

"The Democratic Party will be an alternative party more than just an opposition party, because alternative implies opposition but opposition doesn't always mean an alternative," Bersani said at a press conference in Rome.

Bersani, 58, will try to unite a party that has failed to close the gap with Berlusconi even as the premier's popularity has stumbled over a series of sex scandals and his handling of the worst recession in 60 years. In October, Berlusconi's approval rating slipped to 45 percent, the lowest since his election in April 2008. Still, People of Liberty led the Democrats by 7 percentage points in the IPR Marketing poll released on Oct. 15.

On 22 October, the Polish senate decided on more severe punishments for sex offenders, with only one abstention. Chemical castration already exists as an option for sex offenders in Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Sweden, and, more controversially, in the Czech Republic

There was astonishingly little comment in the Polish press after the senate's decision to pass a law - with only one abstention - radically tightening the punishments for sex offenders on Thursday. Yet the altered law can't be uncontroversial: it makes it obligatory to chemically treat paedophiles and allows for more severe punishments for serious sex offences. Future jail terms would be for three to fifteen years, instead of the previous two to twelve years. Poland would be the only country in Europe with compulsory medical treatment. Similar laws against child abuse otherwise only exist in some states in the USA.

AFP - Turkey's prime minister accused Western powers of treating Iran unfairly over its nuclear programme, in an interview Monday in which he referred to the Iranian president as a "friend".

Speaking to The Guardian newspaper, Recep Tayyip Erdogan downplayed Western concerns that Iran wants to build nuclear weapons as "gossip", and implied that the accusers were guilty of hypocrisy.

"There is a style of approach which is not very fair because those (who accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons) have very strong nuclear infrastructures and they don't deny that," he said.

"The permanent members of the UN Security Council all have nuclear arsenals and then there are countries which are not members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which also have nuclear weapons.

A French judge will decide this week whether to pursue corruption charges against former President Jacques Chirac, who is accused of misusing city funds while he was Paris mayor.

AFP - A French judge will this week decide whether to pursue corruption charges against former president Jacques Chirac, who is accused of misusing city funds when he was Paris mayor, a report said Sunday.
   
Judge Xaviere Simeoni will decide by Friday at the latest whether she wants to bring the case to court to decide if municipal funds were used to give "ghost jobs" to members of Chirac's RPR party, the Journal du Dimanche said.
   
The now 77-year-old Chirac was charged in November 2007 in the case along with five former city hall chiefs of staff and a dozen other people, becoming the first former French president to be put under judicial investigation.

David Mills, the estranged husband of the Labour minister Tessa Jowell, has lost his appeal against a conviction on bribery charges in Italy.

He was convicted of accepting £400,000 from the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 1997.

ING Groep NV plans to raise 7.5 billion euros ($11.3 billion) in a rights offering and sell its insurance units as the biggest Dutch financial services company seeks European Union approval for a taxpayer-funded bailout.

ING, which traces its roots to 1743, fell the most in seven months after saying it planned to sell shares to finance the repurchase of 5 billion euros of core tier 1 securities held by the government. It will shed the insurance units through initial public offerings and sales to other firms over the next four years, the Amsterdam-based company said today.

The measures are part of a restructuring plan filed with the European Commission, the EU executive, to garner approval for state aid, including a 10 billion-euro cash injection and guarantees on 21.6 billion euros of mortgage assets. ING has risen 30 percent this year in Amsterdam, beating an 13 percent advance in the 36-member Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Insurance Index.

"ING's settlement with the EU competition commission looks less favorable than we had hoped," Chris Hitchings, a London- based analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Ltd., said in a note to investors. Hitchings, who rates ING "market perform," said he had estimated a share sale of 5.5 billion euros.

The European Commission came forward with more legislation on financial regulation on Monday (26 October), as the EU continues its drive towards ensuring that last year's financial meltdown is not repeated.

The draft directive is designed to amend already existing sectoral European legislation, thereby making it compatible with last month's commission proposals to set up a European System of Financial Supervisors (ESFS).

If agreed by the member states and the European Parliament, the ESFS will consist of three authorities in the areas of banking, insurance and occupation pensions, and securities and markets.

BMW has become the first major company in Germany to change its compensation practices amid growing concern over excessive banker bonuses. The company cited a fairer work environment as its reason. Other firms are sure to take notice, given BMW's size and weight in the global business market.

BMW became the first major blue chip German company to link the bonuses of its top managers to those of its assembly line workers, amid growing global criticism of executive compensation. The move sends a strong message to other firms also examining their compensation practices, as the world's largest banks in particular have come under fire from politicians, shareholders and the public over excessive bonuses during one of the worst economic crises the world has seen.

BMW plans to tie executive bonuses to those of its blue-collar workers, in a bid to create a fairer and sustainable compensation environment within the company. Starting in 2010, the company will use a common formula to ascertain and award bonuses to its upper and lower level employees, based on the company's performance as measured by profit, sales and other factors. That means that upper level management could potentially lose more money than their lower level counterparts for bad performance, BMW said.

Oil has returned to the role it held before last year's price collapse--a sanctuary of choice for investors fleeing the dollar. At least for now, that is.

Over the past week, crude surged through the $80-a-barrel barrier for the first time since September 2008. (The benchmark price of a barrel of crude oil ended Friday, Oct. 23, at $80.50.) This follows a breathtaking, yearlong bout of volatility. Since the summer of last year, oil has rocketed to $147, plunged to $32, and just a week ago traded below $70.

Yet many analysts say oil-market fundamentals are so weak that prices won't rise much higher, and may in fact retreat. "This is a dollar-led rally and unsustainable," says Phil Flynn, an oil analyst with PFGBest Research, a futures brokerage.

Three graduates in European studies, language and literature and nursing voice their experiences in the Mediterranean. Part two in a job testimony series of young Europeans based at home

One more in a long series of comparisons between the Crash of 1929 and the GFC of 2008 in which our current GFC is proceeding further and faster than did the one in 1929. Guess I should be glad that the crisis is over.

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

Socialism

Many people call the Bush and Obama administration's approach to the economic crisis "socialism".  Are they right?

Roubini has...written:

We're essentially continuing a system where profits are privatized and...losses socialized.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the same thing:

After finishing The Black Swan, I realized there was a cancer. The cancer was a huge buildup of risk-taking based on the lack of understanding of reality. The second problem is the hidden risk with new financial products. And the third is the interdependence among financial institutions.

....

Today we still have the same amount of debt, but it belongs to governments. Normally debt would get destroyed and turn to air. Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. But the government is socializing all these losses by transforming them into liabilities for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What is the effect? The doctor has shown up and relieved the patient's symptoms - and transformed the tumour into a metastatic tumour. We still have the same disease. We still have too much debt, too many big banks, too much state sponsorship of risk-taking. And now we have six million more Americans who are unemployed - a lot more than that if you count hidden unemployment.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls it "socialism for the rich". So do many others.

Fascism?

Some, however, argue that the economy is more like fascism than socialism. For example, leading journalist Robert Scheer writes:

What is proposed is not the nationalization of private corporations but rather a corporate takeover of government. The marriage of highly concentrated corporate power with an authoritarian state that services the politico-economic elite at the expense of the people is more accurately referred to as "financial fascism" [than socialism]. After all, even Hitler never nationalized the Mercedes-Benz company but rather entered into a very profitable partnership with the current car company's corporate ancestor, which made out quite well until Hitler's bubble burst.

And Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social" (page 416).

....

Remember that one of the best definitions of fascism - the one used by Mussolini - is the "merger of state and corporate power".

On the auction block in Detroit: almost 9,000 homes and lots in various states of abandonment and decay from the tidy owner-occupied to the burned-out shell claimed by squatters.

Taken together, the properties seized by tax collectors for arrears and put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York's Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area almost the size of Boston, according to a Detroit Free Press estimate....

"Why am I competing against a bank?" [Lt. Ross Wallace] said later. "It would be common sense to have a separate process for people who want to move back to the city or it's going to stay empty."

Nearby, a Dutch-born local woman, Riet Schumack, 54, knitted patiently through the auction for a chance to bid on a lot in Brightmoor, one of the most blighted neighborhoods.

Schumack, who runs a community garden near her home that employs 14 neighborhood children, said she had been battling through a maze of bureaucracy for years to try to buy an abandoned lot nearby to expand and plant fruit trees.

She learned the lot had been taken back from its previous owner -- an absentee investor with more than 100 abandoned lots in Brightmoor -- only because of her constant calls to city and county officials, she said.

When officials told her she would have to wait for a fourth day to bid on the property, Schumack broke down into tears.

"Anybody with a job is not able to sit here for days. So you are left with the sharks," she said.

Royalties on Health Plans | WaPo | 27 Oct 2009

The group and its subsidiaries collected more than $650 million in royalties and other fees last year from the sale of insurance policies, credit cards and other products that carry the AARP name, accounting for the majority of its $1.14 billion in revenue, according to federal tax records. It does not directly sell insurance policies but lends its name to plans in exchange for a tax-exempt cut of the premiums.

The organization, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, also heavily markets the policies on its Web site, in mailings to its members and through ubiquitous advertising targeted at seniors.

The group's dual role as an insurance reformer and a broker has come under increasing scrutiny in recent weeks from congressional Republicans, who accuse it of having a conflict of interest in taking sides in the fierce debate over health insurance....

GOP lawmakers point to AARP's thriving business in marketing branded Medigap policies, which provide supplemental coverage for standard Medicare plans available to the elderly. Democratic proposals to slash reimbursements for another program, called Medicare Advantage, are widely expected to drive up demand for private Medigap policies like the ones offered by AARP, according to health-care experts, legislative aides and documents....

[T]he group relies more than ever on payments from auto, health and life insurers, according to financial statements. From 2007 to 2008, AARP royalties from insurance plans, credit cards and other branded products shot up 31 percent -- from less than $500 million to $652 million -- making such fees the primary source of revenue for the group last year, the records show. AARP's annual financial report shows that 63 percent of that, or about $400 million, came from the nation's largest health insurance carrier, UnitedHealth Group, which underwrites four major AARP Medigap policies. Other carriers with AARP-branded plans include Aetna Life Insurance, Genworth Life Insurance and Delta Dental.

AARP is also a major powerhouse in Washington, spending more than $37 million on lobbying since January 2008. The organization's close ties with insurers have long attracted criticism from politicians of both parties.

During the health-care debate of the early 1990s, then-Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) held hearings lambasting the group's business operations. Some Democrats criticized the group for supporting the Bush administration's expensive Medicare prescription-drug [Pt. D for "donut hole"] legislation in 2003.

Earlier this year, AARP and UnitedHealth said they were halting the sale of "limited benefit" health insurance policies after complaints from  Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) that the plans were marketed in a misleading way.

Possibly related news:

Townhall Transcript, New Hampshire, Aug 2009
Obama Electoral Votes
Dissassembled Insurance Chassis

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Iran said on Monday it could endorse a U.N. deal for it to send potential nuclear fuel abroad for processing, the first official indication that Tehran could respond positively to the outline agreement.

The remark by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was the most positive yet from a senior Iranian official and hinted at a shift in backroom debate between hardliners and moderates in the faction-ridden Iranian leadership on whether to accept the deal.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said it was urgent for world powers to make a lasting deal with Tehran to avert an Israeli strike over its disputed nuclear program.

South Korea will make a small grant of humanitarian aid to North Korea, ending its suspension of handouts after a series of conciliatory gestures from its destitute rival, an official said on Monday.

As well as reaching out to the South, the North has also sent a senior nuclear envoy to the United States for talks that could revive dormant discussions on ending Pyongyang's atomic ambitions in return for massive aid.

Officials said they had no intention at present to fully restore aid, once equal to about five percent of the North's annual economy. Analysts said the aid signals to Pyongyang that more could be coming its way if the North continues reaching out to its neighbour on the heavily armed peninsula.

Health and law enforcement officials around the nation are scrambling to figure out how to regulate medical marijuana now that the federal government has decided it will no longer prosecute legal users or providers.

For years, since the first medical marijuana laws were passed in the mid-1990s, many local and state governments could be confident, if not complacent, knowing that marijuana would be kept in check because it remained illegal under federal law, and that hard-nosed federal prosecutors were not about to forget it.

But with the Justice Department's announcement last week that it would not prosecute people who use marijuana for medical purposes in states where it is legal, local and state officials say they will now have to take on the job themselves.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland - The Big Mac, long a symbol of globalization, has become the latest victim of this tiny island nation's overexposure to the world financial crisis. Iceland's three McDonald's restaurants -- all in the capital Reykjavik -- will close next weekend, as the franchise owner gives in to falling profits caused by the collapse in the Icelandic krona.

"The economic situation has just made it too expensive for us," Magnus Ogmundsson, the managing director of Lyst Hr., McDonald's franchise holder in Iceland, told the Associated Press by telephone on Monday.

Lyst was bound by McDonald's requirement that it import all the goods required for its restaurants -- from packaging to meat and cheeses -- from Germany.

Costs had doubled over the past year because of the fall in the krona and high import tariffs on imported goods, Ogmundsson said, making it impossible for the company to raise prices further and remain competitive with competitors that use locally sourced produce.

La información que ha comenzado a circular apunta al abandono de un efectivo programa de conservación y mantenimiento de las facilidades. Se ha señalado que en el día de ayer se realizaban labores de  reparación en los desatendidos tanques para corregir una filtración de combustible.  Cuando la situación se hizo crítica, los directivos de la petrolera desalojaron a todo el personal conscientes de la grave situación que estaba ocurriendo y el peligro de la misma para el personal y la comunidad.

My translation - Information has begun circulating about the abandonment of an effective conservation and facility maintenance program.  It was pointed out that repair work was being carried out yesterday to correct a fuel leak on unattended tanks.  When the situation became critical, the company directives cleared out all who were cognizant of the severity of the situation and of the danger it posed for the personnel and the community.

Sounds eminently plausible to me.

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

Amnesty International is accusing Israel of pumping disproportionate amounts of drinking water from an aquifer it controls in the West Bank, depriving local Palestinians of their fair share.

The London-based human rights group also said in a report to be released Tuesday, that Israel has blocked infrastructure projects that would improve existing water supplies to Palestinians -- both in the West Bank and those living in the Gaza Strip.
...
Israelis use more than four times the amount of water per person on average than do Palestinians, whose consumption falls far below the minimum amount recommended by the World Health Organization, the report said.

The report especially focuses on the so-called Mountain Aquifer in the West Bank. It says that Israel uses more than 80 percent of water drawn from the aquifer and while the Jewish state has other water sources, the aquifer is the West Bank's sole supply of water.

As a result, the 450,000 Israelis who live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem use more water than the 2.3 million Palestinian residents, Amnesty said.

An activist in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Eda Haredit community was conditionally released from prison Monday, a day after his arrest for allegedly spraying an ultra-Orthodox woman with tear gas in the capital's Mea She'arim neighborhood.

Yoel Kraus was arrested after the woman filed a police complaint. The alleged attack occured about two weeks ago, during the Sukkot holiday, as the woman was walking on a "men only" sidewalk, and refused Kraus' demand that she move to the women's side.

The woman did not require medical attention.  According to an agreement reached with the police, Kraus is to spend five days under house arrest at a location outside of Jerusalem and will not be allowed to return to the city for two weeks. He will then be prohibited from participating in public protests or public events for 30 days.

If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed"  2009 H1N1 or "swine flu"  in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn't have H1N1 flu....

CBS News learned that the decision to stop counting H1N1 flu cases was made so hastily that states weren't given the opportunity to provide input. Instead, on July 24, the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists, CSTE, issued the following notice to state public health officials on behalf of the CDC:

"Attached are the Q&As that will be posted on the CDC website tomorrow explaining why CDC is no longer reporting case counts for novel H1N1. CDC would have liked to have run these by you for input but unfortunately there was not enough time before these needed to be posted (emphasis added)."

When CDC did not provide us with the material, we filed a Freedom of Information request with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). More than two months later, the request has not been fulfilled. We also asked CDC for state-by-state test results prior to halting of testing and tracking, but CDC was again, initially, unresponsive....

While we waited for CDC to provide the data, which it eventually did, we asked all 50 states for their statistics on state lab-confirmed H1N1 prior to the halt of individual testing and counting in July. The results reveal a pattern that surprised a number of health care professionals we consulted. The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, despite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico....

It's unknown what patients who tested negative for flu were actually afflicted with since the illness was not otherwise determined. Health experts say it's assumed the patients had some sort of cold or upper respiratory infection that is just not influenza.

With most cases diagnosed solely on symptoms and risk factors, the H1N1 flu epidemic may seem worse than it is. For example, on Sept. 22, this alarming headline came from Georgetown University in Washington D.C.: "H1N1 Flu Infects Over 250 Georgetown Students."

H1N1 flu can be deadly and an outbreak of 250 students would be an especially troubling cluster. However, the number of sick students came not from lab-confirmed tests but from "estimates" made by counting "students who went to the Student Health Center with flu symptoms, students who called the H1N1 hotline or the Health Center's doctor-on-call, and students who went to the hospital's emergency room."

Without lab testing, it's impossible to know how many of the students actually had H1N1 flu. But the statistical trend indicates it was likely much fewer than 250.....

Major institutional building will be necessary if a new climate treaty is to move from the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to sectoral crediting as planned by the EU, a European Commission official said last week (22 October).

A sectoral crediting mechanism to replace the CDM in competitive industrial sectors of advanced developing countries such as China and India could hit the wall due to lack of institutional capacity, a Brussels climate change conference warned.

Such a mechanism, generating credits once a sector has reached an agreed baseline for emission reductions, is fundamentally different from the CDM in that it deals with entire industrial sectors rather than individual installations, said Jürgen Lefevere, policy coordinator for international climate change negotiations at the Commission's environment directorate.

From 10:10 to the government's Act On CO2 campaign, it is now widely accepted that tackling climate change will require tackling behaviour change too. But until now, a key piece has been missing from the puzzle - psychology. The study of human behaviour has been conspicuous by its absence from the climate change debate.

The assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have provided the scientific evidence of human impact on the climate, and a glimpse of what the future may hold if we don't act fast. But while the consensus may be growing on the need for changes in behaviour, we're no closer to understanding how we're going to do it. Attempting an unprecedented shift in human behaviour without the input of psychologists is like setting sail for a faraway land without the aid of nautical maps.

Psychological research shows that most people in the UK don't feel personally threatened by climate change because it is vague, abstract and difficult to visualise. This means that doomsday scenarios and apocalyptic language are unlikely to work - although fear can motivate behaviour change, it only works when people feel personally vulnerable. Clearly, exaggerating the threat of climate change is not an option. So how can climate change be made more relevant to people's lives?

Climate summit loophole lets palm oil producers cull vital wilderness

A vital safeguard to protect the world's rainforests from being cut down has been dropped from a global deforestation treaty due to be signed at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December.

Under proposals due to be ratified at the summit, countries which cut down rainforests and convert them to plantations of trees such as oil palms would still be able to classify the result as forest and could receive millions of dollars meant for preserving them. An earlier version of the text ruled out such a conversion but has been deleted, and the EU delegation - headed by Britain - has blocked its reinsertion.

Environmentalists say plantations are in no way a substitute for the lost natural forest in terms of wildlife, water production or, crucially, as a store of the carbon dioxide which is emitted into the atmosphere when forests are destroyed and intensifies climate change.

WASHINGTON - Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It's not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

The case that the Earth might be cooling partly stems from recent weather. Last year was cooler than previous years. It's been a while since the super-hot years of 1998 and 2005. So is this a longer climate trend or just weather's normal ups and downs?

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

Yet the idea that things are cooling has been repeated in opinion columns, a BBC news story posted on the Drudge Report and in a new book by the authors of the best-seller "Freakonomics." Last week, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that only 57 percent of Americans now believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming, down from 77 percent in 2006.

People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

In an interview with The Times , Lord Stern of Brentford said: "Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources. A vegetarian diet is better."

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

During an average wet season, the city of Los Angeles sends 100 million gallons of storm water into the Pacific each day. Because it carries various effluents to the ocean, that water had, for many years, been handled as pollution. But a new California law seeks to expand the role of storm water management to incorporate strategies that will use it as a resource.

The Stormwater Resource Planning Act, SB 790, allows municipalities to tap funds from two of the state's existing bond funds for projects that reduce or reuse storm water, recharge the groundwater supply, create green spaces and enhance wildlife habitats. The measure takes effect Jan. 1.
....

SB 790 allows agencies to apply for and, if approved, draw on funds remaining from Proposition 50, the $3.44-billion water security bond passed by California voters in 2002, and Proposition 84, the $5.4-billion safe drinking water bond passed in 2006. Exactly how much money is left from those bonds is unclear.
....

According to Wing Tam, assistant division manager for the bureau's watershed protection division, the money will fund an expansion of the city's rainwater harvesting projects and green infrastructure, including large cisterns, stream restoration, biofiltration and downspout disconnections.

"It's important for us to capture storm water and use it as a resource," said Tam, who noted that the city's paradigm shift from viewing storm water as pollution to seeing it as a resource has been a gradual process evolving through 10 years of pilot projects. "Not only does that help us with water quality, but quality of life. A wetland park deals with water quality, but it also creates a park for people to use. It's multiuse. That's our future," Tam said.

A rocket designed to replace the aging space shuttle is set for its first test-flight, despite questions over the future of the programme.

If there are clear skies, the 100m-long Ares I-X will blast off from Nasa's Kennedy Space Center on 27 October.

The two-minute flight will allow Nasa to test technology crucial for the development of the manned Ares I craft.

A high-profile report has cast doubt on the future of the Ares rocket, which is intended to enter service in 2015.

The German  Finance Minister who has a hard line on tax havens is especially unpopular the Swiss, and he is not alone. His compatriots who have chosen to live in  Switzerland are often criticized for being too loud, too pushy, and too arrogant. A new "integration course" in Zürich is aiming to change all that.

The Germans are coming. They enter the room smiling a bit bashfully, and speaking softly. They don't fit the stereotype now. No one is talking too loudly. Perhaps they figure, our reputation is marred enough as it is. After all, they are foreigners and immigrants who want to be accepted as members of Swiss society. 

It's a little before 7pm in Zürich. Welcome to the "Integration Evening for Germans in Switzerland." Surprisingly, the first page in the batch of handouts lying on the table reads "Grüezi ('hello') Rubber-Necks. Why the Germans sometimes tick us off." Rubber-necks? The epithet refers to German medical interns who are always nodding vigorously when engaged in conversation with chief physicians. But in a more general context, it denotes the opportunistic manner of the Germans, at least in the eyes of the Swiss.

Christiana Baldauf greets the guests. We came to the conclusion that a course like this was needed, begins the head of the Zürich Office for Cross-Cultural Issues, because Switzerland isn't just another German state, as some immigrants seem to think, but a real foreign country. 

A growing number of people are taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy to help them cope with a variety of conditions including anorexia nervosa, cluster headaches and chronic anxiety attacks.

The emergence of a community that passes the drugs between users on the basis of friendship, support and need - with money rarely involved - comes amid a resurgence of research into the possible therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. This is leading to a growing optimism among those using the drugs that soon they may be able to obtain medicines based on psychedelics from their doctor, rather than risk jail for taking illicit drugs.

Among those in Britain already using the drugs and hoping for a change in the way they are viewed is Anna Jones (not her real name), a 35-year-old university lecturer, who takes LSD once or twice a year. She fears that without an occasional dose she will go back to the drinking problem she left behind 14 years ago with the help of the banned drug.

LSD, the drug synonymous with the 1960s counter-culture, changed her life, she says. "For me it was the catalyst to give up destructive behaviour - heavy drinking and smoking. As a student I used to drink two or three bottles of wine, two or three days a week, because I didn't have many friends and didn't feel comfortable in my own skin.

Modern Homo sapiens is still evolving. Despite the long-held view that natural selection has ceased to affect humans because almost everybody now lives long enough to have children, a new study of a contemporary Massachusetts population offers evidence of evolution still in action.

A team of scientists led by Yale University evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns suggests that if the natural selection of fitter traits is no longer driven by survival, perhaps it owes to differences in women's fertility. "Variations in reproductive success still exist among humans, and therefore some traits related to fertility continue to be shaped by natural selection," Stearns says. That is, women who have more children are more likely to pass on certain traits to their progeny. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)...

Douglas Ewbank, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who undertook the statistical analysis for the study, which was published Oct. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), says that because cultural factors tend to have a much more prominent impact than natural selection in the shaping of future generations, people tend to write off the effect of evolution. "Those changes we predict for 2409 could be wiped out by something as simple as a new school-lunch program. But whatever happens, it's likely that in 2409, Framingham women will be 2 cm shorter and 1 kg heavier than they would have been without natural selection. Evolution is a very slow process. We don't see it if we look at our grandparents, but it's there."

Other recent genetic research has backed up that notion. One study, published in PNAS in 2007 and led by John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that some 1,800 human gene variations had become widespread in recent generations because of their modern-day evolutionary benefits. Among those genetic changes, discovered by examining more than 3 million DNA variants in 269 individuals: mutations that allow people to digest milk or resist malaria and others that govern brain development. (Watch TIME's video "Darwin and Lincoln: Birthdays and Evolution.")

But not all evolutionary changes make inherent sense. Since the Industrial Revolution, modern humans have grown taller and stronger, so it's easy to assume that evolution is making humans fitter. But according to anthropologist Peter McAllister, author of Manthropology: the Science of Inadequate Modern Man, the contemporary male has evolved, at least physically, into "the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet." Thanks to genetic differences, an average Neanderthal woman, McAllister notes, could have whupped Arnold Schwarzenegger at his muscular peak in an arm-wrestling match. And prehistoric Australian Aborigines, who typically built up great strength in their joints and muscles through childhood and adolescence, could have easily beat Usain Bolt in a 100-m dash.

Possibly related um:

Modern Man Had Sex with Neanderthals
What You Think of Prince Andrew

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Brilliant CBS Investigation Gets BURIED by Media

I just published a major swine flu update on Saturday about how CBS News investigative journalists exposed how misleading statistics are being used to panic the public into complying with the huge H1N1 swine flu vaccination program.

Last week, CBS News published the results from a three-month long investigation into the swine flu. One would think this would have received MASSIVE media exposure since their findings are in direct conflict with what the government is publicly stating.

Of major interest, as you can see on the video on the Saturday article, CBC investigative journalists went to the CDC to seek their help in clarifying the situation and answering outstanding questions but CDC officials refused. They would not cooperate and CBS had to do their own investigation.

Even worse, after CBS compiled the data, the CDC refused to comment on it.

What's this all about???

It can only make you wonder if the CDC is really interested in authentically serving the public good, or if, perhaps, it has been heavily influenced by outside corporate interests.

This is not good. The only way that we can have an effective response to the reported H1N1 influenza outbreak is if the government is transparent with the data. We have simply not seen ANY evidence that government health agencies are willing to be transparent. In fact, all evidence points to the contrary.

The CBS investigative report included state-by-state test results that revealed some VERY different facts from what the US Centers for Disease Control has been telling the American public.
The CBS report found that H1N1 flu cases are NOT AT ALL as prevalent as feared. A CBS article even states:

"If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn't have H1N1 flu.

Reporting from Culiacan, Mexico -  With a gilded, 4-foot statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe tucked under his arm, Jose Espinoza clambers up the Italian-marble staircase, past the Jacuzzis and gigantic Corinthian columns, to a domed chapel inside the ornate mansion of a particularly successful Sinaloa "farmer." Espinoza installs the Virgin in her niche on an elaborate cedar altarpiece that he carved by hand, a la early Baroque. Around her dance rosy-cheeked, feather-winged angels that Espinoza has painted on the walls and ceilings, an enveloping palette of pale blue skies and cottony clouds. Jesus Christ and God the Father are there too.

The multimillion-dollar mansion is one of many in this strangely wealthy city that Espinoza has been hired to adorn in recent years. Given Sinaloa's well-earned reputation as the cradle of Mexican narcotics trafficking, it is little wonder who is footing the bills. "I don't probe," says Espinoza, 51, a broad-shouldered man with a helmet of silver hair, bushy black eyebrows and a hearty laugh.

....

The architectural excesses, in the fast-growing cemeteries and in the mansions that have popped up on the slopes of this hilly city, might not be surprising in Bel-Air or the Hamptons. But Sinaloa is -- judged by its official economy -- one of the poorest states in a poor country. Most of the real money in Sinaloa, of course, is in the vast illegal network that has been producing and shipping marijuana and heroin to the U.S., and taking in billions of dollars in profit, for generations.