Two weeks after the German election, the new coalition government is struggling with the consequences of the economic crisis. Both the Christian Democrats and the FDP want to lower taxes to please the electorate, but the country's massive budget deficit means that cost-cutting and tax hikes are more realistic.

When politicians are forced to abandon big plans, they tend to come up with all kinds of excuses to explain their change of heart, talking about everything from unfavorable circumstances to modified forecasts. The leadership of Germany's pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) is turning to a no less tried-and-true approach: assigning the blame to others.

Last Thursday, the leaders of the future coalition government of the FDP and Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) met for a second round of coalition negotiations at the offices of the Berlin representation of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The two teams consisted of Merkel and 17 other senior members of the CDU and the CSU, on the one hand, and the FDP's nine-member negotiating team, led by party Chairman Guido Westerwelle, on the other.

Young people in Spain suffer the highest unemployment rate in the EU. And the financial downturn has only served to widen the gaps between the have and the have-nots in an increasingly two-tier labor market. 

Nothing divides Spain quite like the labor market. And the effects of the current economic crisis vary according to age, geographic location and sector.

Young people are one group that is disproportionately affected by soaring unemployment, which stands at double the eurozone average. The national rate is 18.5 percent, but among Spaniards aged between 15 and 24 years old, this figure climbs as high as 37 percent, according to Eurostat.

Job losses are concentrated in construction and the service industry - the same sectors that once drove the country's exponential growth. Figures from Spain's Youth Employment Observatory show the majority of workers laid off were recruited on temporary contracts , which account for a quarter of the nation's jobs, and half the jobs held by people under the age of 30.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus wants guarantees in the EU's Lisbon reform Treaty to protect his country from post-war property claims. This emerged from a meeting with the President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, aimed at encouraging the eurosceptic Klaus to sign.

He would be the last head of state to seal the treaty's ratification after Poland's president signs it into law on Saturday. In Prague, Klaus sought an exemption from the Charter of Fundamental rights, as Poland and the UK negotiated for themselves.

London's opt-out means the European Courts cannot force changes to laws on labour in Britain. Warsaw's exemption proscribes individual rights such as for homosexual wedlock.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - German Chancellor Angela Merkel has added her voice to a small but growing number of people who are increasingly alarmed about internet search giant Google's scheme to digitise millions of books from the globe's leading libraries.

No curmudgeonly luddite, the leader of the European Union's largest economy made the comments via her weekly podcast on Saturday (10 October) ahead of this week's opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

"The German government has a clear position: copyrights have to be protected on the internet," she said, warning of the "considerable dangers" to copyright from the digital world.

However, she did not say she was opposed to any book digitalisation project tout court. The problem was the way the US search engine firm was going about it.

Two people have been injured in a bomb explosion at an army barracks in Milan in northern Italy.

One of those injured was the attacker who threw the device, according to the Italian news agency, Ansa.

The man was reported to be foreign, possibly from North Africa, though his nationality was not clear. He was said to be "in a serious condition".

The other casualty was a soldier lightly hurt by glass shards after the blast, Ansa said.

Special report: Extent of FSA fears and reason for taxpayers' bank bailout revealed

City watchdogs were monitoring cash withdrawals from Royal Bank of Scotland every hour during the height of the banking crisis, the Guardian can reveal.

The Financial Services Authority demanded 60-minute updates on cash flooding out of the bank's branches and hole-in-the-wall machines in the days before Britain's historic bank bailout, which took place a year ago.

The regulators stepped up their surveillance after realising that confidence was draining from the banking system following the collapse of Lehman Brothers a month earlier, and that customers were concerned about the safety of their deposits.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - If you are a lobbyist in Brussels and you want to win over a public official to your client's point of view on a new law, whatever you do, do not invite the politician to a fancy evening reception.

It just won't work.

Such is the counter-intuitive and startling conclusion of a survey of European political elites on what sort of lobbying works and what does not.

Decision makers do not find evening receptions useful

Just two percent of decision-makers in the European institutions think that going to an after-work gathering with smoked-salmon triangles and tepid chardonnay is in any way useful in providing information on laws they are working on, says the report.

In what will come as a goodly shock to the European capital's powerful croissant, rubber chicken and light-nibbles industry, breakfast, lunch and dinner briefings are also all considered something of a waste of time in comparison to plain old one-on-one meetings and written reports, according to the Guide to effective lobbying, published on Monday (12 October) by Burson-Marsteller, one of the largest lobbying, public relations and crisis management firms in the world.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown will repay £12,415 after an independent audit of all MPs' expenses claims since 2004.

Downing Street confirmed he would repay the money, largely for cleaning and gardening, even though the claims had been within the rules at the time.

It said auditor Sir Thomas Legg had "deemed" that any annual claims above £2,000 for cleaning and £1,000 for gardening should be repaid.

Some MPs are annoyed that new limits are being applied retrospectively.

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented - for the first time in memory - from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Fifteen million European buildings should have eco-friendly renovations over the next decade, with builders and architects re-educated to do the job, a draft EU report says.

The European Union should also make mandatory its voluntary goal of cutting energy use, creating about 2 million new jobs, says a draft of the EU's "energy efficiency action plan" obtained by Reuters.

....

"The Commission will launch a European Building Initiative, supported by the European Investment Bank ... that will aim at stimulating the major renovation of 15 million buildings by 2020," said the report.

"A mandatory low energy building course for the building workforce, particularly for architects, should therefore be introduced."

While Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party claims sweeping victory in regional elections, opposition leaders say the vote was rigged. 

According to official results reported Monday, United Russia captured a wide margin in elections which are being widely viewed as a test of Russia's democracy.

Leonid Ivlev, a member of the Central Elections Commission, told reporters that the ruling party had garnered almost 80 percent of seats up for grabs in the 75 regional and local elections held up and down the country on Sunday.

Ivlev said Putin's party picked up 107 of the 135 regional seats and 189 of the 235 seats available in municipal legislatures.

They also emerged victorious in the eagerly-watched race for Moscow's city legislature. With 99 percent of votes in, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported a 66 percent win for United Russia.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has promised to encourage multiparty democracy since his election last year. Sunday's regional elections will put this pledge to the test, with opposition claiming little improvement. 

Elections for regional, district and mayoral offices are being held on Sunday in 76 of the country's 83 administrative regions, with 30 million voters expected to visit the polls. One of the most criticized races is that for Moscow's city council and mayor, who control a municipal budget of $40 billion (27 billion Euros). Of the six parties registered, all but one are pro-Kremlin.

Pro-Western parties said that all of their candidates were barred from running for 17 directly elected seats on the council after city officials declared the signatures on their registrations invalid.

The leader of the sole party allowed to enter the race for 18 party seats said they had been blocked from advertising on television or in newspapers and even in posters on the street.

The pro-Kremlin party dominated an election for Moscow city council and other local votes across Russia, results released Monday showed.

With 99 percent of the Moscow vote counted, United Russia won 66 percent and the Communist Party 13 percent. No other party cleared the 7 percent threshold to win seats on the city council.

United Russia is a power base for Vladimir Putin, now the prime minister and party head, who has not ruled out a return to the presidency in 2012. President Dmitry Medvedev congratulated party leaders on their "convincing" victory, which he said showed "the authority the party has acquired from our people in recent years."

Oct. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire George Soros, looking to address the "political problem" of climate change, said he will invest $1 billion in clean-energy technology and create an organization to advise policy makers on environmental issues.

Soros, the founder of hedge fund Soros Fund Management LLC, announced the investment in Copenhagen yesterday at a meeting on climate change sponsored by Project Syndicate. The group is an international association made up of 430 newspapers from 150 countries.

"I want to apply rather stringent criteria to the investments," said Soros in an e-mailed message. "They should be profitable but should also actually make a contribution to solving the problem."

Soros, whose own wealth accounts for much of the approximately $24 billion his New York-based money-management firm oversees, didn't provide any details in his speech on the type or scope of investments he might make.

Soros, 79, also will establish the Climate Policy Initiative, a San Francisco-based organization to which he will donate $10 million a year for 10 years.

Two of the euro zone's largest economies - France and Italy - have announced surprise surges in industrial output during August.

Combined with a solid German figure earlier this week, that has bolstered expectations the region will come out of recession during the third-quarter.

Italy reported a seven percent monthly rise and revised its July result upwards.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Nobel prize winner in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, says the financial crisis is forcing the EU to re-examine its cornerstone policy area - the single market.

"The crisis has brought home a couple of fundamental questions for the single market concept of Europe that have not really been adequately discussed," said the star economist at a conference on banking regulation in Brussels on Monday (12 October).

Joseph Stiglitz warned the financial crisis was testing the EU's single market

Referring to the banking collapses in Ireland and Iceland late last year, Mr Stiglitz said financial regulation in one country clearly presented problems for depositors in other countries. "And we need to get a grasp on that," he said.

But the former World Bank economist, turned critic of its sister organisation the International Monetary Fund, questioned whether Europe was now dealing with such economies correctly.

American economists Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson have won the 2009 Nobel Prize for economics for their work on economic governance. Ostrom is the first woman to win the economics prize.

AFP - Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson of the United States won the 2009 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for their work on the organisation of cooperation in economic governance, the Nobel jury said.
   
Ostrom is the first woman to win the Economics Prize, which has been awarded since 1969.
   
"The research of Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson demonstrates that economic analysis can shed light on most forms of social organisation," the jury said.
   
Ostrom won half the 10-million-kronor (1.42-million-dollar, 980,000-euro) prize "for her analysis of economic governance" especially relating to the management of common property or property under common control.

The Business Secretary Lord Mandelson today defended a multi-billion pound sale of public assets as "a much better thing to do than savagely cutting public expenditure".

The Prime Minister will today give details of an initial round of disposals that could raise £3 billion over the next two years - including the Tote, the Dartford crossing, the Channel Tunnel rail link, and the Student Loan book.

Speaking on GMTV, Mr Brown said: "The important thing is we will maintain frontline public services, we will have an economy that is growing with jobs to maintain frontline public services. Now that is the big division between us and the opposition.

"We are doing everything to make sure we maintain our health, our schools, our policing services. That is not the case with our opponents."

Lord Mandelson suggested that airports could be also among the local council-owned assets which could be sold offs.

In a BusinessWeek interview, Siemens CEO Peter Löscher discusses the company's lawsuit threats against former executives embroiled in a major bribery scandal, difficult market environments and the path out of the economic crisis.

In late September, Siemens issued an ultimatum to former board members, including ex-CEOs Klaus Kleinfeld and Heinrich von Pierer: Reimburse the company for some of the money it has expended to settle a massive corporate bribery scandal or face legal action. According to the Financial Times, Siemens wants Kleinfeld, now chief executive of Alcoa, to pay more than $2.9 million; it is seeking about three times that from von Pierer. Siemens claims that its former chieftains failed to stop widespread bribery, first revealed in 2006. The scandal has become a long-running embarrassment for a company which The Guardian called "a symbol of German engineering excellence and corporate probity." In 2007, current Siemens CEO Peter Löscher, a former top executive at Merck, was brought in to clean up the mess that has cost the company billions in fines and legal fees. I talked with him about what is perhaps the final chapter of the saga and about how he sees the global recovery shaping up from his vantage point atop a major multinational.

Maria Bartiromo: Siemens has threatened legal action against former executives if they don't reimburse the company for some costs related to the bribery scandal. What exactly are you looking to accomplish?

Peter Löscher: This case is currently being (negotiated) between the supervisory board of Siemens and the former executive board members. Clearly the company has indicated that it wants to settle under certain conditions. Now it's up to the two parties to find out if they're willing to settle.

If you are happy with the banking system, and don't think it needs to be reformed, then you probably work for one of the banks headquartered in New York.
...
The Fed banks in Philadelphia and Kansas City and Dallas and elsewhere disagree with what the New York Fed and Fed's Open Market Committee are doing. See this and this.

So the battle isn't between bankers versus outsiders. It is between the giant New York money-centered banks and the rest of the country.
...
Goldman Using Taxpayer Dollars to Buy Stock in China?

As everyone knows, Goldman became a "bank holding company" in September, to be able to access funds from the Fed at essentially zero percent interest.

But in a new interview with Bill Moyers, Simon Johnson noted that in August of 2009, Goldman switched again - to a "financial holding company".

What's the difference?

Johnson says that being a financial holding company means that Goldman can borrow money from the Fed at essentially no cost, and then invest it in any thing it wants. For example, Johnson says that Goldman has bought a large share of the stock of a Chinese automaker. Johnson says that if the investment succeeds, Goldman will reap the profits; but if it fails, the taxpayers are on the hook.
...
As PhD economist Steve Keen pointed out recently, 2 Nobel-prize winning economists have shown that the assumption that reserves are created from excess deposits is not true:

    The model of money creation that Obama's economic advisers have sold him was shown to be empirically false over three decades ago.
...

As Mish has previously noted:

    Conventional wisdom regarding the money multiplier is wrong. Australian economist Steve Keen notes that in a debt based society, expansion of credit comes first and reserves come later.
...
Monetary reformers argue that the government should take the power of money creation back from the private banks and the Federal Reserve system.
...
The bottom line is that monetary reformers argue that letting banks create credit and money and then charge high interest rates creates massive levels of debt for states and taxpayers. They argue that the power to create money should be reclaimed by the government and taken away from the private banks.
...
America's banking system needs to be fundamentally reformed.

Central banks flush with record reserves are increasingly snubbing dollars in favor of euros and yen, further pressuring the greenback after its biggest two- quarter rout in almost two decades.

Policy makers boosted foreign currency holdings by $413 billion last quarter, the most since at least 2003, to $7.3 trillion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Nations reporting currency breakdowns put 63 percent of the new cash into euros and yen in April, May and June, the latest Barclays Capital data show. That's the highest percentage in any quarter with more than an $80 billion increase.

World leaders are acting on threats to dump the dollar while the Obama administration shows a willingness to tolerate a weaker currency in an effort to boost exports and the economy as long as it doesn't drive away the nation's creditors. The diversification signals that the currency won't rebound anytime soon after losing 10.3 percent on a trade-weighted basis the past six months, the biggest drop since 1991.

The most (popularly) insensitive quote of the year award goes to the FSA's liquidity manager, David Morgan.

In a Friday speech on the FSA's new liquidity rules for banks, which will see them buying more government bonds, he said:

Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- British banks may pass on more than 2 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) in fees to customers to make up for the costs of implementing tougher liquidity rules, a U.K. regulatory official said.

Banks can charge retail and corporate customers higher rates and fees to maintain profit margins after implementing the rules, David Morgan, liquidity policy manager at the Financial Services Authority, said in London today. The cost to financial firms of using more expensive funding, such as government bonds, may reach 2.2 billion pounds a year under the proposals, according to FSA data.

"This is not a cost to your shareholders in the long term, this is a cost to your customers," Morgan said in a speech. "You will pass these costs on to your customers."

Thanks, FSA!

Putting the idea in even starker perspective on Monday -- albeit with different numbers -- were UBS banking analysts Alastair Ryan and John-Paul Crutchley.

They reckon the costs to bank customers of the new rules are equivalent to a 2p increase in the basic rate of UK tax:

DUBLIN -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to buck up a pair of stalwart American allies on Sunday, assuring the British that they still had a special relationship with the United States, and telling the Irish that she would help them keep Northern Ireland's peace process on track.

Northern Ireland, while mostly tranquil, has flared up in recent months, with a few violent episodes, including the shooting of two British soldiers, and a dispute within the Northern Irish coalition government over the transfer of the police and justice functions from London to Belfast.

"Clearly there are questions and some apprehensions," Mrs. Clinton said before meeting with Prime Minister Brian Cowen of Ireland at his residence here. "But I believe that due to the concerted effort of the British government, the Irish government, the support of friends like us in the United States, that the parties understand that this is a step they must take together."

In Takaba town in north east Kenya, a crowd of people gather around a camel. The so-called ship of the desert has been weakened by drought and can barely move. When this happens, it takes an entire village to put it back on its feet.

Despite their best efforts the villagers are unable to lift the camel. After two hours of huffing and puffing, they have no choice but to leave the camel to die in the sun.  They too have been weakened by the dry spell.
 
Habiba Ibrahim, the owner of camel, watched the animal with tears in her eyes: "There is nothing I can do. There is no grass to give it due to the drought. This is one of my two remaining camels. The rest have all died."

The relentless drought across East Africa is worsening because of global climate change and the continued destruction of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other critical ecosystems, the United Nation's Environment Programme (UNEP) is warning.
 
The Kenyan government says nearly four million people are now close to starvation after the rains have failed for three straight years.

Senior British army commanders in Iraq refused to investigate hundreds of cases of abuse against Iraqi civilians that led to serious injury or even death, a former member of the Royal Military Police has claimed.

The former Red Cap investigator alleged that some of the worst cases had been covered up and that the interests of the military had taken precedence over the interests of justice.

It has been claimed previously that top commanders in Iraq ruled out calling in the RMP in cases where it was judged that deaths or injuries involving Iraqi civilians could not be directly attributed to British military action.

However, the new allegations, made by a former member of the RMP in an interview with Donal MacIntyre on BBC Radio 5 Live last night, could reignite the question of the treatment of detainees and the conduct of soldiers during the campaign against Shia militia extremists in southern Iraq between 2003 and 2007.

The US has cancelled its biggest air-defence exercise with Israel after Turkey refused to allow Israeli aircraft to participate in the war games, due to begin out of Turkish air bases today.

Israeli officials said that Turkey's stance over the 11-day manoeuvres, codenamed Operation Anatolian Eagle, was the result of lingering anger at Israel's devastating onslaught on the Gaza Strip last winter.

Secular Turkey is Israel's main military ally in the Muslim world, and has long enjoyed military co-operation with the Jewish state. Israeli bombers are believed to have passed through Turkish airspace when they attacked a suspected nuclear facility under construction in Syria in 2007.

The cancellation of the large aerial war games caused anger in Israel, coming only two weeks after Iran held its own military exercises in which it launched missiles capable of hitting Israel. Last week an official from Iran's Revolutionary Guard threatened that Tehran would "blow up the heart of Israel" if a US or Israeli strike was made on the country's controversial nuclear facilities.

US troops boarded a German-owned freighter in early October and found eight containers full of ammunition, allegedly headed to Syria from Iran. The shipment is in violation of a UN weapons embargo and has become a source of chagrin in Berlin.

An "embarrassing affair," is how one German diplomat described it. The official could also have added: potentially damaging to trans-Atlantic relations.

In an operation reported on by SPIEGEL over the weekend, US soldiers entered the freighter Hansa India in the Gulf of Suez at the beginning of October and discovered seven containers full of 7.62 millimeter ammunition suitable for Kalashnikov rifles. An eighth container was full of cartridges suitable for the manufacture of additional rounds. The incident is particularly awkward for Berlin as the Hansa India is registered to the Hamburg-based shipping company Leonhardt & Blumberg.

Investigators suspect that the arms were part of an Iranian shipment bound for either the Syrian army or for Hezbollah, the militant Islamist group. US officials have pointed out that the delivery is in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747, which prohibits arms shipments either into or out of Iran.

Truth is war's first casualty. The Afghan war's biggest untruth is, "we've got to fight terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them at home."

Many North Americans still buy this lie because they believe the 9/11 attacks came directly from the Afghanistan-based al-Qaida and Taliban movements.

False. The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany and Spain, and conducted mainly by U.S.-based Saudis to punish America for supporting Israel.

Taliban, a militant religious, anti-Communist movement of Pashtun tribesmen, was totally surprised by 9/11. Taliban received U.S. aid until May, 2001. The CIA was planning to use Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida to stir up Muslim Uighurs against Chinese rule, and Taliban against Russia's Central Asian allies.

My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility. We 'experts' have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we 'perfect' the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common--often wrong--wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.

In December this year, Copenhagen will host the top UN climate meeting, at which a new international agreement needs to be reached. This past Friday, the Danish press reported that the driving force behind "Copenhagen," climate minister Connie Hedegaard's "right-hand man," has left his post as Denmark's chief negotiator, effective immediately.

Friday's Danish headlines suggested he left in protest and in rage over internal disagreements, and that Becker is the victim of a power struggle between the prime minister's office and the climate ministry.

The Dutch government has decided to build a new nuclear reactor for medical purposes. Two separate provinces are in the race to build a reactor to replace the one in the coastal town of Petten. The provinces of Zeeland and North Holland have both set aside a budget of 40 million euros for the development costs, licences and research. The government still has to decide on the location of the new reactor.

The reactor in Petten produces isotopes which are used for treating cancer, cardiac problems and bone disease. It is 50 years old and has been having trouble with its cooling water system for a number of years. Repairs to the system have had to be postponed to guarantee a steady supply of isotopes as the Canadian Chalk Rivers reactor had to be shut down for repair after a leak. Now the Dutch reactor is due to close for repairs in March next year.

Petten supplies 30 percent of the world's isotopes and the Canadian reactor produces about half of the world's medical isotopes. The Canadian reactor is due to start up again early next year.

There are millions of photo competitions. But very few of them deal with objects that are normally invisible to the naked eye. SPIEGEL ONLINE brings you the winners of this year's microscopic photo competition.

It isn't uncommon for scientists to spend countless hours staring into a microscope. Only rarely, however, do they take pictures of what they see. And even then the images tend to be gray and amorphous, depicting malignant tissue or the activity of a particular protein inside a cell.

For the uninitiated, such images are impenetrable. Yet the micro-world can also be a beautiful place, full of splendour that normally remains hidden to the naked eye. Capturing that beauty is the aspiration of micro-photographers, those who magnify the miniature and take pictures of the tiny. The images that result are often full of unfamiliar shapes and forms -- and surprisingly colorful. Only rarely is it possible to identify the subject being photographed.

Link here

Belgium doesn't suffer from the sensitive calculations of Berlin's rulers.  They've already decided yesterday not to phase out nukes, overturning the 2003 law.  the utilities will only have to "forfeit" some €230M over five years.  Why we can't stop global climate change with all this brainpower burnin' is beyond me.

The  other link

Skennah Kowa

This is a live video as we've learned, so if it becomes dark, it will be because it's night.

Skennah Kowa

MEXICO CITY - Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

Or is it?

Definitely not, the Mayan Indian elder insists. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff."

It can only get worse for him. Next month Hollywood's "2012" opens in cinemas, featuring earthquakes, meteor showers and a tsunami dumping an aircraft carrier on the White House.

At Cornell University, Ann Martin, who runs the "Curious? Ask an Astronomer" Web site, says people are scared.

"It's too bad that we're getting e-mails from fourth-graders who are saying that they're too young to die," Martin said. "We had a mother of two young children who was afraid she wouldn't live to see them grow up."

Chile Pixtun, a Guatemalan, says the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold--services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate--in ways we can only begin to imagine.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet--logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don't need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public "status" on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.

Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.

At the end of "Manhattan," the celebrated movie romance from 1979, a teenager played by Mariel Hemingway delivers some good news to the 42-year-old television writer, portrayed by Woody Allen, with whom she has had a long-running sexual affair.

"Guess what, I turned 18 the other day," said Ms. Hemingway, in what was framed as a poignant encounter. "I'm legal, but I'm still a kid."

That was then.

Roman Polanski's arrest on Sept. 26 to face a decades-old charge of having sex with a 13-year-old girl stirred global furor over both Mr. Polanski's original misdeed and the way the authorities have handled it -- along with some sharp reminders that, when it comes to adult sex with the under age, things have changed.

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented - for the first time in memory - from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

France has the best quality of life out of Europe's biggest countries, while Britain has the worst despite having the highest incomes, a study says.

British workers can expect to spend three years longer at work and die two years younger than their French counterparts, while they pay above the European average for fuel, food, alcohol and cigarettes, the study by uSwitch.com released on Monday said.

The consumer website used existing research from different sources to compare 17 lifestyle factors in France, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy, Sweden, Ireland and Britain.

Full report (such as it is) is here [PDF].

Apple has admitted that its latest operating system harbours a bug that can accidentally delete data belonging to the computer's owner.

The glitch occurs when some users who upgraded to the Snow Leopard - which was released at the end of August - log into a "guest" account on their machines. When they log back in under their own name, all of the files in their home directory - such as documents, music and videos - have been deleted.

Reports of the problem first surfaced more than a month ago, but it was only on Monday that Apple finally responded by recognising that there was a problem for some customers.

Debbie Christie's son Zachary, a first-grader at Downes Elementary School in Newark, Del., was suspended for carrying a camping utensil that contained a spoon, fork, bottle opener and knife to school.

"I wasn't really trying to get in trouble," 6-year-old Zachary said. "I was just trying to eat lunch with it."

"I got a call from the principal, telling me to come down, that Zach had carried a dangerous weapon into school and was going to be suspended," Christie told "Good Morning America" today.

Sometimes you just have to laugh at how absurd right-wingers are. Tory blogger Iain Dale goes off on one of his hysterical rants again today, fuming about the Greenpeace supporters who put up a big sign across Westminster.

One of the honors of my life was being invited to drum on the AIM drum on the way out to Alcatraz.  and you can bet the Native community around San Francisco will be getting up early to greet the sun on The Rock for unThanksgiving Day as well.

Skennah Kowa