Slovenia's agreement to sign on to the South Stream pipeline project has dashed hopes by the European Union to reduce dependency on Russian gas. 

As the Slovenian and Russian energy ministers signed an agreement for the massive South Stream gas pipeline Saturday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin looked on in satisfaction.

The approval of Slovenia, the fifth country to do so, brings Russia closer to locking its control over the European gas supply.

South Stream, which is estimated will cost 20 billion euros ($30 billion) to build and is expected to be completed by 2015, would run under the Black Sea to carry natural gas to western Europe.

The European Union has supported the construction of an alternative pipeline, known as Nabucco, in an effort to counter Russian monopolistic influence by importing gas from Caspian Sea nations like Azerbijan and Turkmenistan. That project has been stalled, however, by a lack of supply agreements.

In Kosovo, voters are going to the polls in the first election organized after the breakaway Serbian province declared independence in 2008. Observers say security is not a concern, but turnout could be.  

Voters in Kosovo are choosing mayors and deputies for 36 town councils for the first time since the Albanian-majority region unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia in February last year.

"It's incredibly important for our country because it's not an international organization which is doing this, but Kosovo itself," said Driton Tafallari, a member of an NGO coalition called Democracy in Action, which is monitoring the election and the run-up to it.

Some 74 political parties, coalitions citizens' groups and independent candidates are standing in the election which, according to observers, is running smoothly, despite fears that Serbia, which does not recognize Kosovo's independence, could try to derail the vote or keep ethnic Serbs in the north away from the polls.

"There are some problems in that area, but overall the elections are going very well," said Tafallari.

After choosing former Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel to lead the party, the SPD vowed to use its new role in the opposition to be a thorn in the side of Chancellor Angela Merkel's new center-right government. 

The gathering of some 500 delegates, coming about seven weeks after the Social Democratic Party (SPD) crashed out of power, is looking to overcome a crushing election setback and forge a united and coherent revival campaign that would battle Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Central in that campaign were promises to introduce a "wealth tax" while reducing the burden on middle-income earners.

The party's new leader, Sigmar Gabriel, said the outcome of the party congress in Dresden has been very positive.

"You have shown that those who thought we are finished were wrong," Gabriel told delegates. "We have embarked on a new beginning for social-democratic politics in Germany."

On Friday, the 50-year-old politician was elected to lead the Social Democrats at a time when morale among party members has hit rock bottom.

Controversy over Lord Ashcroft's donations to the Conservative party deepened last night after Labour MPs demanded an urgent meeting with Britain's elections watchdog.

Placing more pressure on the Tories, Labour MPs want to know why the Electoral Commission's official inquiry into an Ashcroft-controlled company, which has given £3m to the party, has dragged on for 10 months and threatens to run into the general election campaign.

If the commission rules that the company was not trading, the Tories could be asked to pay an equivalent amount to the Treasury. The explosive issue of Ashcroft threatens to engulf the commission, which has been criticised before for dragging its heels while investigating serious complaints.

John Mann, the MP for Bassetlaw, has written to Peter Wardle, chief executive of the commission, requesting an urgent meeting to find out why the inquiry has taken so long. He asked Wardle to investigate in January whether Bearwood Corporate Services, Ashcroft's company, is trading in Britain or is being used to funnel money to the Conservatives from overseas. By law, a British political party can only accept a donation from someone registered to vote in the UK or from a company "carrying on business" here.

[...]

The commission began making inquiries into Bearwood's donations in October 2008 after concerns were raised that the company may not be a genuine UK trading company. Bearwood gave the Tories £1,600,893 in 2008 alone, making it the party's biggest source of funds that year. The company is known to have one UK client, because in 2008-09 the firm received $300,000 (£181,000) in consultancy fees from BCB Holdings, another Ashcroft company based in Belize.

Opposition from four member states to a draft agreement between the EU and US allowing the use of banking data in anti-terrorist investigations is likely to delay a decision until after 1 December, drawing the European Parliament into the decision making process.

Citing data privacy concerns, Germany, Austria, France and Finland are opposing the text negotiated by the Swedish EU presidency and the European Commission allowing American authorities access to information from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) - the interbank transfer service.

WASHINGTON -- Leaders of a congressional commission investigating the causes of the recent financial crisis are threatening to publicly identify any company or government agency that stalls in voluntarily producing requested documents.

Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, told McClatchy in an interview that the panel would investigate the role that Wall Street firms played in causing the crisis to mushroom.

McClatchy reported earlier this month that Goldman Sachs, the nation's premier investment bank, sold more than $40 billion in securities backed by risky mortgages in 2006 and 2007 while secretly betting on a housing market downturn that would depress the value of those securities.

After purchasing those bonds from Goldman, pension funds, insurance companies and other institutions are facing bigger losses from the financial meltdown.

Angelides, a Democrat, and Republican Bill Thomas, the vice chairman, vowed that they wouldn't let the subjects of their inquiry "run out the clock on us."

I said in my post on November 12 Larry Ellison should ask himself whether it is even worthwhile for the new Oracle (ORCL)/Sun (JAVA) combination to do business in the information technology (IT) backwater that is the European Union (EU). Why go through the hassle of dealing with EU regulators when it appears the return on investment is so low? My suggestion is to just consummate the merger without EU approval and don't do business in the EU.

A bunch of Euroblatherers on seekingalpha.com commented that my idea was anti-Europe bashing. One even criticized the quality of my photograph, which I love because it is a snapshot taken by a friend in front of an old restaurant on Helsinki harbor. I love to go to places like that in Europe and look at the old cathedrals and decrepit palaces. It's just that the over-regulated EU is an increasingly bad place to sell enterprise software and IT. Look at the numbers.

A swedish kind of death:

As predicted the CEO of Vattenfall has been fired. Replacement to be announced tomorrow, intense rumors believes Øystein Løseth has been appointed.

Wall Street bankers make too much money -- on that the American public may be in near-unanimous agreement. But what about your own compensation? Can you justify it in this still-struggling economy?

One inevitable effect of this recession's massive job losses and plunge in consumer and business spending has been downward pressure on the wages and benefits of many of those who still are working. That pressure has been evident for the last 18 months or so, of course, as the unemployment rate has climbed relentlessly.

Now, with the economic downturn seemingly over as measured by the classic gauge of gross domestic product growth, the question is whether workers' piece of the economic pie will begin to grow again.

....

Yet the magnitude of job losses here and abroad in this devastating recession poses a huge risk to the future compensation of the still-employed: What if, for years to come, there are masses of qualified people willing to do what you do -- but for much less pay?

Balancing act

The government has to tread a difficult line in how this re-nationalised east coast line is to be run.

If it's too good, there will be strong calls for the rest of the rail network to be operated by the state.

If it's too poor, the government and the Department for Transport in particular will be heavily criticised for incompetence, though it's playing down any talk of further nationalisation.

One can only imagine the instructions issued to the Directly Operated Railways (DOR) management....

"In view of the excessively high customer ratings, staff are instructed not to clean the toilets North of Doncaster...."

Modern conservatives engage in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.Galbraith

Neda Agha Soltan, the young Iranian woman whose face became the international symbol of protest against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told her fiancé she was prepared to "take a bullet in the heart" in the fight against the president's regime.

The revelation comes as her boyfriend speaks out for the first time after being imprisoned following Neda's death last June, when she was shot by Iranian police at a demonstration in Tehran. Caspian Makan, a photographer, spent two months in prison for criticising the authorities after her death. In a moving interview, he told the Observer that far from being a bystander caught up in the demonstrations, she was committed to the overthrow of Ahmadinejad. As a result of her high-profile presence at the protests, he believes she was targeted by the regime loyalists who killed her.

Makan has fled Iran and given two in-depth interviews. His meeting with director Angus Macqueen, which is featured in today's Observer Review, will appear in a BBC film about Neda. In both interviews she emerges as a markedly different figure to the young woman depicted at the time of her death. Her fiancé describes her as politically active and assertive, convinced she was fighting for "democracy and freedom" for Iranians. Neda joined the first wave of protests. After the election results were announced, she headed to the Interior Ministry in central Tehran - a focal point for the emerging movement supporting Ahamdinejad's election rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi. Makan remembers telling her that the scenes she described to him would quickly lead to a violent response from the regime.

She said: "No, they will continue because the people are too many and the scale too widespread... Everyone is responsible for reaching democracy," Makan recalls her as saying. "If I get shot in the heart or arrested, it's not important because we are all responsible for our future."

Although he was nervous about Neda going to the demonstrations, Makan said she insisted on participating. The last time he spoke to her, they had an argument over whether she should continue attending, as the violence increased.

Splits within the Arab world's foremost Islamist opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, with its ties to Muslim communities in Germany and elsewhere, could be signs that the group is not interested in democracy. 

For much of its 80-year history, the Muslim Brotherhood's very name symbolized promotion of a violent, anti-western movement bent on strict imposition of Islamic law. Much of the first generation of the current violent Islamist movements trace their roots to the Brotherhood and were inspired by the organization's radical ideologues.

Yet, for the past 30 years, the Brotherhood's loosely aligned chapters in various Arab countries have participated in elections, shed secrecy for internal party democracy and justified the electoral path as their way forward. When asked in 1980 after the fall of the Shah of Iran, whether the Islamic revolution constituted a model for Egypt, then Muslim Brotherhood leader Omar el Telmesani told this reporter: "No, our Shah died in 1970," a reference to the late Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.

But rather than encouraging the Brotherhood's more recent democratic inclinations, Arab governments are cracking down in a move that threatens to widen the credibility gap between regimes and public opinion and could drive moderate Islamists toward the movement's radical jihad-preaching fringe.

In response to the Brotherhood's emergence from elections in 2005 as Egypt's main opposition group, the government of President Hosni Mubarak has constitutionally banned religion-based political parties, introduced legislation preventing Muslim Brothers from standing in elections as independent candidates and sought to cripple the movement by arresting hundreds of Brothers, among them some of the Brotherhood's most moderate leaders.

Barack Obama acknowledged today that time has run out to secure a binding climate deal at Copenhagen and began moving towards a two-stage process that would delay a legal pact until next year at the earliest.

During a hastily convened breakfast meeting in Singapore, the US president supported a Danish plan to salvage something from the moribund negotiations by aiming for a broad political agreement and postponing contentious decisions on emissions targets, financing and technology transfer.

While this falls short of hopes that Copenhagen would lock in place a new action plan for the world, it recognises the lack of progress in recent preparatory talks and the hold-ups of climate legislation in the US Senate. "There was a realistic assessment ... by the leaders that it was unrealistic to expect a full internationally legally binding agreement to be negotiated between now and when Copenhagen starts in 22 days," said Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for economic affairs.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the host and chairman of the climate talks, flew overnight to Singapore to pitch the deferral plan to 19 leaders, including Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao, at an unscheduled event during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. He insisted that the Copenhagen talks could still set political targets and outline commitments.

"Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries we must, in the coming weeks, focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible," he said. "The Copenhagen agreement should finally mandate continued legal negotiations and set a deadline for their conclusion."

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistan is sinking into a political and constitutional crisis that threatens to sideline its vital role in the battle against Islamist insurgents and U.S.-led efforts to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan.

The trigger for the crisis is the expiration of a legal amnesty for politicians at the end of this month, which will leave key officials, including the interior minister, open to prosecution and could even jeopardize the position of Asif Ali Zardari, the pro-Western Pakistani president.

The political opposition and the military appear to be using the crisis to force the unpopular Zardari to give up most of his powers or be ousted. Soon ministers of the government could find themselves hauled before the courts over long-standing criminal charges, ranging from murder to corruption, or they could rush to seek pre-arrest bail, legal experts said.

This "would make our democracy look like a thieves' bazaar," newspaper columnist Shafqat Mahmood wrote Friday in The News, a Pakistani daily.

The amnesty, known as the National Reconciliation Ordinance, was approved by a previous government under U.S. pressure in 2007. Unless it is ratified by parliament, which now seems unlikely, the amnesty expires Nov. 28, according to a ruling by the country's powerful chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry.

SINGAPORE--Declaring the world at "one of those rare inflection points in history," President Obama told the leaders of China and other Asian countries Sunday that they can no longer rely on debt-laden American shoppers to fuel their economies and that the United States must consume less and export more.

"The recession we're just now recovering from has clearly taught us the limits of depending on the American consumer to drive economic growth," Obama told a summit of Pacific Rim nations in Singapore, a vibrant Southeast Asian city-state that symbolizes Asia's economic transformation.

Obama's comments, made at the annual meeting here of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, hammered home what has become a leitmotif of his eight-day tour of Asia: the need for "sweeping change" in the way the world economy works.

Obama touched on a wide range of issues during a whirlwind day of meetings here. Significantly, he demanded the release of Burmese political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi in a meeting that included the Burmese prime minister, a general who is a close associate of the country's reclusive and hardline leader Than Shwe. It was the first encounter between a U.S. president and a member of Burma's military junta, which is under sanctions for human rights abuses.

Obama's willingness to sit in the same room with a Burmese leader reflects his administration's view that the United States must engage with regimes that it doesn't like, a sharp reversal of the Bush-era approach.

While President Obama's decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan is primarily a military one, it also has substantial budget implications that are adding pressure to limit the commitment, senior administration officials say.

The latest internal government estimates place the cost of adding 40,000 American troops and sharply expanding the Afghan security forces, as favored by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, at $40 billion to $54 billion a year, the officials said.

Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant.

So even if Mr. Obama opts for a lower troop commitment, Afghanistan's new costs could wash out the projected $26 billion expected to be saved in 2010 from withdrawing troops from Iraq. And the overall military budget could rise to as much as $734 billion, or 10 percent more than the peak of $667 billion under the Bush administration.

Such an escalation in military spending would be a politically volatile issue for Mr. Obama at a time when the government budget deficit is soaring, the economy is weak and he is trying to pass a costly health care plan.

WASHINGTON -- President Obama has sent the Senate far fewer judicial nominations than former President George W. Bush did in his first 10 months in office, deflating the hopes of liberals that the White House would move quickly to reshape the federal judiciary after eight years of Republican appointments.

Mr. Bush, who made it an early goal to push conservatives into the judicial pipeline and left a strong stamp on the courts, had already nominated 28 appellate and 36 district candidates at a comparable point in his tenure. By contrast, Mr. Obama has offered 12 nominations to appeals courts and 14 to district courts.

Theodore Shaw, a Columbia University law professor who until recently led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., said liberals feared that the White House was not taking advantage of its chance to fill vacancies while Democrats enjoy a razor-thin advantage in the Senate enabling them to cut off the threat of filibusters against nominees. There are nearly 100 vacancies on federal courts.

"It's not any secret that among the civil rights community and other folks there has been a growing concern about the pace of nominations and confirmations," Mr. Shaw said. "You have to move fairly quickly because things are going to shut down before you know it, given that next year is an election year and who knows what is going to happen in the midterm elections. No one wants a blown opportunity."

The departure of the White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, announced on Friday, raises another concern: a leadership vacuum may be forming at the highest ranks of the administration's judicial selection team. The administration also recently announced that Cassandra Butts, a deputy White House counsel who had played a leading role in judicial nominations, is leaving.

WASHINGTON -- In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident.
Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world's largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.

With the U.S. unemployment rate now having climbed into double digits and no dip in sight, here's one job opening that's, well, still open.

McDonald's is looking for an assistant manager willing to relocate to the one McDonald's burger joint on the communist island of Cuba. That McDonald's is, however, still able to serve freedom fries because it's located on the 45-square-mile U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

....

Besides ample sun and being surrounded by miles of barbed wire and numerous rapid-firing guns, the job at the fast-food franchise has a few perks. They include possible tax-free status for year-round residents and half your rent paid. No mention of salary in the Worker Wanted ad.

Stacy Kwinn and Gregory Perez and Kris Konopka and Justin Denney -- two American expat couples who are friends -- got together the other day for dim sum and swapped stories about the computer software business in China. These are among the thousands of Americans living and working here. Their experiences have given them insights into what U.S. policymakers should do about this economic juggernaut.

Their advice: Teach more American kids the Chinese language and higher-level math and science. Keep innovating. Take seriously China's ambition to invent, not just manufacture. Help China improve consumer safety and conserve energy. Understand how cultural differences translate in the marketplace.

Dan Kuzmanovic, a stamping and tooling specialist on a three-year assignment in China for Ford, was back in Shanghai after a two-week break in Michigan.

"My parents left Yugoslavia for America," Kuzmanovic said. "Now I've left America for China. . . Being in China is probably a good thing for any company if you're a global company but you can't do it at the expense of America. I think Ford's found that balance. At the government level, you need to have the same thought process."

Opponents of the Goldstone report might well be hoping that after its lopsided condemnation in the US House of Representatives and successful relegation back to the UN's Human Rights Commission, the report will become little more than an historical footnote in a decades-long conflict.

....

Why would the House go so far out of its way to stamp out even the consideration of war crimes accusations against Israel? And why would Barack Obama, the US president, have pressured Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, not to push the report in the UN when he had to know that such actions would cost Abbas most of his little remaining credibility among Palestinians?

There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, if Israel is guilty of committing systematic war crimes across Gaza and the West Bank, then the US, which supported, funded and armed Israel during the war, is an accessory to those crimes. Goldstone explains in no uncertain terms that Gaza was not an aberration in terms of Israel's treatment of Palestinians....Put simply, if there is blood on Israel's hands, than it is has dripped all over America's shirt.

There is also the larger context of the peace negotiations. If Israel can be guilty of humanitarian crimes at this level, then it puts the entire Israeli narrative about the occupation - that it is ultimately about preserving the country's security - into question. In fact, the report declares precisely this, in paragraph 1674, when it argues that the Gaza invasion "cannot be understood and assessed in isolation from developments prior and subsequent to it. The operation fits into a continuum of policies aimed at pursuing Israel's political objectives with regard to Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a whole". (Emphasis added.)

US Rep. Jan. Schakowsky (D-Illinois), is the first congressperson to visit Honduras since the June 28 coup that did not come in prefabricated support of the de facto regime. [...] Schakowsky's three day visit from November 10-12 included meetings with family members of victims that have died directly from violence from the coup, media outlets such as Channel 36 and Radio Globo that have been attacked for honestly reporting on the resistance movement, and also a visit to the Brazilian Embassy where ousted President Zelaya and approximately 40 others have taken refuge for the last 53 days. The Chicago Congresswoman commented on her opportunity to hear a recording of some of the sounds bombarded into the Embassy and see the blinding lights set up outside, in addition to the crane set up for the military to spy into the Embassy.

Also, Zelaya to Obama: Walk the Walk

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

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2009) -- Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, reports a new study in Science.

This mass loss is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland's fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface. Recent warm summers further accelerated the mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the mass of 1 cubic kilometre of water), in the period 2006-2008, which represents 0.75 mm of global sea level rise per year.

Professor Jonathan Bamber from the University of Bristol and an author on the paper said: "It is clear from these results that mass loss from Greenland has been accelerating since the late 1990s and the underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future. We have produced agreement between two totally independent estimates, giving us a lot of confidence in the numbers and our inferences about the processes".

The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to cause a global sea level rise of seven metres. Since 2000, the ice sheet has lost about 1500 Gt in total, representing on average a global sea level rise of about half a millimetre per year, or 5 mm since 2000.

TRANEBJERG, Denmark, Nov 15 (Tierramérica) - On the Danish island of Samsø, a model of energy self-sufficiency, even cow's milk helps reduce emissions of climate changing gases.

Samsø has an area of 114 square kilometres with just over 4,000 people, located in the Bay of Kattegat, in the North Sea, some 120 km west of Copenhagen.

ts reputation as a model of sustainability is due to the fact that it uses wind turbines and solar panels to generate all of the electricity consumed by local residents.

Since 1997, when Samsø won a national competition to become a prototype community in the use of renewable energy sources, the Samsingers, as locals are known, revolutionised all aspects of their daily lives in order to contribute to greater efficiency. The effort has such a broad scope that even milk production is part of the energy system.

...

The centrepiece of the system are 11 wind turbines, which generate an average of 28,000 megawatts annually. That's enough to meet the community's electricity demands, supply the island's entire public transportation system, and have a surplus of 10 percent to sell to other regions of Denmark.

The income from those sales is reinvested in the local renewable energy system.

It's not that the Samsingers have given up their cars and other usual modes of transport. For example, the three ferries that connect the island with the mainland consume 9,000 litres of petroleum per day. Even so, Samsø sells more clean energy to the continent than it purchases in fossil fuels.

MEXICO CITY, Mar 2 (Tierramérica) - With the blessing of development agencies, transnational corporations and environmentalists, the Mexican government is breaking ground for a big wind energy project. But peasant farmers and bird experts aren't too happy about it.

The government's aim is for wind-generated electricity - which now accounts for just 0.005 percent of the energy generated in Mexico - to reach six percent by 2030.

Achieving that goal involves setting up more than 3,000 turbines in Mexico's windiest zone, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the southern state of Oaxaca, as well as several other wind farms around the country with dozens of turbines each.

But erecting the windmills, tall towers with a 27-metre blade span, requires negotiating with landowners, most of whom are farmers. Some have complained that they were taken advantage of when the first wind farm was created in 1994.

Meanwhile, bird experts warn that many species are at risk of being killed by the giant blades, which could cause an environmental chain reaction across the continent, because various are migratory species.

"Everything is bent towards facilitating the wind farms, but there is not much interest in the birds, which in the long term could bring much broader problems," Raúl Ortiz-Pulido, spokesman for the Mexican office of the BirdLife International, told Tierramérica.

PARIS, Nov 15 (AFP) Nov 15, 2009
Researchers have pinpointed the source of what is probably the worst mass poisoning in history, according to a study published Sunday.

For nearly three decades scientists have struggled to figure out exactly how arsenic was getting into the drinking water of millions of people in rural Bangladesh.

The culprit, says the new study, are tens of thousands of man-made ponds excavated to provide soil for flood protection.

An estimated two million people in Bangladesh suffer from arsenic poisoning, and health experts suspect the toxic, metal-like element has caused -- and will continue to cause -- many deaths as well.

Symptoms include violent stomach pains and vomiting, diarrhoea, convulsions and cramps. A large dose can kill outright, while chronic ingestion of small doses has been linked to a large range of cancers.

It has long been known that the arsenic comes from water drawn from millions of low-tech "tube wells" scattered across the country.

Ironically the wells were dug -- often with the help of international aid agencies -- to protect villages from unclean and disease-ridden surface water.

Galloway Forest Park has been officially unveiled as the first Dark Sky Park in the UK.

The award, announced by the International Dark Sky Association, confirmed Galloway as one of the best places for stargazing in the world.

Lighting experts were brought in to ensure the skies above the forest park were pitch black at night.

The organisers of Galloway's bid said they hoped the award would boost tourism in south west Scotland.

The final decision on the award was taken at the International Dark Sky Association (IDA) AGM in Phoenix, Arizona, over the weekend.

The roof of a North Sacramento plastics factory will host the biggest West Coast installation of a new type of solar panel.

The technology, built by Fremont's Solyndra Inc., uses racks of solar cells roughly the size and shape of long fluorescent light tubes. The shape allows the panels to harvest sunlight from any angle, including what's reflected from the white rooftops common on large commercial buildings.

The technology promises to cut the cost of solar power.

In March, Solyndra gained a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy to greatly increase its Fremont-based manufacturing operations. According to news reports, the company has contracts for orders worth more than $2 billion.

The 208-kilowatt system atop Sacramento's Plastic Package Inc. will supply about one-third of the factory's annual electricity needs, according to company Chairman Jim Kaye.

Book publishers and authors in most countries outside the US won a significant concession late on Friday as Google and American book industry representatives agreed to make changes to their landmark digital books settlement.

The amendments, disclosed in a legal filing in New York close to midnight on Friday, were made after strong objections from the governments of Germany and France, as well as complaints from book industry representatives from a number of other countries, including China.

Other revisions disclosed on Friday reflected complaints from the US Department of Justice, which had warned that the original plan raised "significant legal concerns". Its fears included the risk that the deal would give Google an effective monopoly in the emerging digital books business.

The new plan was immediately criticised as a "sleight of hand" by the Open Book Alliance, a consortium of Google's opponents including Microsoft and Amazon.

"None of the proposed changes appear to address the fundamental flaws illuminated by the Department of Justice and other critics that impact public interest," said Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive, which is creating its own online digital archive.

If the revised deal wins court approval, it will make millions of out-of-print works that could previously only be found in a handful of university research libraries available online. While objecting to some aspects of the original plan, which was reached a year ago, the US justice department had applauded the settlement's aim, since it had "the potential to breathe life into millions of works that are now effectively off limits to the public".

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan -- The mullahs stared silently at the screen. They shifted in their chairs and fiddled with pencils. Koranic verses flashed above them, but the topic was something that made everybody a little uncomfortable.

"A baby should be breast-fed for at least 21 months," said the instructor. "Milk is safe inside the breast. Dust and germs can't get inside."

It was a seminar on birth control, a likely subject for a nation whose fertility rate of 6 children per woman is the highest in Asia. But the audience was unusual: 10 Islamic religious leaders from this city and its suburbs, wearing turbans and sipping tea.

The message was simple. Babies are good, but not too many; wait two years before having another to give your wife's body a chance to recover. Nothing in Islam expressly forbids birth control. But it does emphasize procreation, and mullahs, like leaders of other faiths, consider children to be blessings from God, and are usually the most determined opponents of having fewer of them.

[...]

The mullahs were reluctant participants. Truth be told, they were paid to show up. But surprisingly, they seemed to emerge from the session invigorated.

SAN DIEGO -- A long-running legal battle over whether to evict a colony of harbor seals that inexplicably took over a popular beach here like a gaggle of tourists overstaying their welcome appeared closer than ever to ending Friday when a judge ruled that they can stay put.

For more than a decade, the seals, dozens of them lounging and lollygagging on a La Jolla beach, have delighted tourists and animal lovers. But they have also irked swimmers and others who are concerned about the waste they produce contaminating the azure waters and their potential for drawing sharks.

People on both sides of the issue battled in state and federal court, winning at one point conflicting rulings, over whether the city should be forced to shoo them away because their chosen spot, a cove known as Children's Pool, was set aside in 1931 for young beachgoers under the terms of a trust that deeded the land to the city.

But a state law that takes effect on Jan. 1 gives the city broad discretion to maintain the beach as it sees fit, and the City Council has indicated that it favors keeping the seals. The state law was drafted at the urging of the city attorney's office.

Judge Timothy B. Taylor of Superior Court, overruling a previous order by a predecessor in the case to disperse the seals, ruled Friday that given the new law, there was no point in kicking the seals out now.

Swastika Christmas tree ornaments, "Germanic" cookies and made-up traditions: A new exhibition highlights how the Nazis tried to take Christ out of Christmas. But their attempts to hijack a festival that began with the birth of a Jewish child weren't entirely successful.

It all started innocently enough. Back in the mid-1970s, Rita Breuer began collecting old German Christmas ornaments after her husband expressed the desire for a good old-fashioned Christmas tree like his grandmother used to have. Breuer, who hails from the small town of Olpe, 60 kilometers from Cologne, scoured flea markets and raided friends' attics in the search for baubles and came to accumulate quite a collection which included not only tree ornaments, but also Advent calendars, cribs and Christmas cards.

But then something strange happened. Breuer, who was now being helped in her quest by her daughter Judith, came across more and more objects that didn't fit with the usual peaceful image of Christmas, such as World War I-era miniature soldiers, bombs and hand grenades designed to hang on the tree. The Breuers started to get interested in how Christmas had been abused for propaganda purposes over the years, most blatantly by the Nazis. Their hobby turned into a full-fledged amateur research project.

10  Photos Photo Gallery: How the Third Reich Celebrated Christmas

Now, more than 30 years after Rita Breuer first began collecting Christmas knickknacks, selected objects from the family collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Center in Cologne. The exhibition, which looks at the history of Christmas and propaganda from the 19th century until the present day, focuses on how the Nazis misused Christmas for their own foul purposes and tried to turn it into a "Germanic" winter solstice festival.

"Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis -- after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child," Judith Breuer, who helped prepare the exhibition and co-authored the accompanying book with her mother, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian."

Interestingly enough, my wife and I went along to see this exhibition yesterday. The scope is even broader than the Spiegel indicates, ranging from the imperial era to the 70s. Although - understandably, given the venue - the Nazi era makes up the greatest part.

Perhaps the most unexpected piece on exhibit is an actual CARE package that was found, unopened(!), in 1999. The 2 lb can of coffee alone would have been a windfall for postwar Germany.

There's no such thing as original sin - Elvis Costello

Valuation has always been an elastic concept in anything touching Bernard Madoff. But even the notorious Wall Street fraudster might have balked at the lofty prices paid for his personal belongings by souvenir hunters.

More than 500 people filled the ballroom of Manhattan's Sheraton hotel yesterday for an auction of 200 items of property seized by the US Marshals Service from Madoff and his wife, Ruth, following the exposure of the disgraced fund manager's $65bn Ponzi scheme.

For those willing to get out their cheque books, it was an opportunity to buy a slice of the couple's lavish lifestyle. Lots under the hammer included jewellery to artwork, silverware and china. And there were more prosaic offerings such as the family dog bowl, surf boards and personalised Post-It notes from Madoff's desk. The sale raised more than $1m (£600,000).

As bidders gathered in front of a stage shrouded in red velvet, it became clear that this was no ordinary auction. The first Madoff-related lot, a seaside-themed charm bracelet, had a guide price of $700 to $1,000 - but went for $3,000.

Anything connected to the jailed financier fetched many times more than the estimated value set by the auctioneers, Gaston & Sheehan. A pair of diamond earrings worn by Ruth Madoff fetched the biggest price of $70,000, more than quadrupling its estimated value.

Robert Enke's death has sparked a public outpouring of grief in Germany. Sunday's memorial service was held at Hanover's football stadium with some 40,000 fans, players and officials bidding farewell to the Germany goalkeeper who died earlier this week. 

 

The 32-year-old Hannover 96 player committed suicide on Tuesday by throwing himself in front of an oncoming train.

His widow, Teresa, went on national television a day later to say her husband had been suffering from depression for six years but that he had not wanted it to become known.

 

Football is not everything

 

The president of the German football association Theo Zwanziger said at the memorial service that the best way to remember the goalkeeper would be to recognize the fact that football should never be everything.

 

"I think that Enke would have called on the fans to show more humanity and more civil courage, they should stand up to oppose the taboos that still exist in our professional sport," Zwanziger said.

The ban was handed down by Fifa in Zurich following a three-hour meeting tonight and a 40-minute appearance from Maradona himself. The world governing body said that it had taken into consideration Maradona's apologies and "sincere regret" but the subsequent ban was still more severe than had been expected. Maradona will not be allowed to have any formal involvement in football until 15 January 2010 - less than six months before the start of the World Cup. He was also fined 25,000 Swiss francs (£15,000).

The punishment follows Maradona's remarks after Argentina reached the World Cup with a 1-0 win over Uruguay in their final qualifying match on 14 October. He told journalists they "take it up the arse", grabbed his crotch and insisted the world's media should "suck it and keep on sucking". Fifa punished him according to Article 57, which relates to "offensive gestures or language". He has been warned a repeat will lead to even stronger sanctions.

The Argentinian Football Association is expected to stand by the coach but no appeal is expected. Julio Grondona, the president of the AFA, is also vice-president of Fifa and was aware of the deliberations being made by football's governing body. In view of his coming in for severe criticism himself, it suits him for the media to focus more on the national team's coach than their president. Maradona is also a hugely lucrative draw, if not a particularly successful man, to have in charge.

She is the political wife who bucked tradition. When scandal struck her husband, the governor of South Carolina, she did not stand by his side. Instead, Jenny Sanford packed up her things and their four children and moved out of the governor's mansion for the family's home on Sullivan's Island.

On Thursday she issued a letter supporting another "principled, conservative, tough and smart" woman in the crowded Republican primary to succeed Mark Sanford. (You may recall that the governor, who once had presidential aspirations, went AWOL last summer, telling his staff he was hiking along the Appalachian Trail while he was actually in Argentina visiting his mistress.)

Jenny Sanford's pick for South Carolina's next governor, state Rep. Nikki Haley, was once a strong ally of Gov. Sanford, but in the wake of the scandal over his disappearance and his affair, she distanced herself, removing his photo from her campaign website.

This is one endorsement that could actually carry some weight. Jenny Sanford, a former Wall Street executive, was instrumental in managing her husband's campaigns, and has a network of supporters around the state.

Martin Sonneborn beleidigt Chinesen

La Chine dorme. Laisse la dormir. Quand la Chine s'éveillera, le monde tremblera.

Veteran actor Edward Woodward has died aged 79, his agent has confirmed.

The Croydon-born star had been suffering from various illnesses including pneumonia and died in hospital, said Janet Glass.

Woodward is most famous for his roles in the cult 1973 horror film The Wicker Man, alongside Christopher Lee, and US TV series The Equalizer.