The head of Germany's football association has promised speedy and severe punishment for match-rigging in the German game as calls mount for tough sanctions.  

Germany's football association boss has promised swift and severe punishment for those involved in the latest betting scandal to rock European soccer.

 

DFB chief Theo Zwanziger said he wanted to "lose no time" in the fight against match-fixing.

Investigators have the results of 32 matches in Germany in their sights, including four in the second division, three in the third, 23 games in regional leagues and two under-19 games.

 

Zwanziger said that players and officials involved in corruption in the country would be brought to account as soon as evidence was submitted.

Labour's hopes of avoiding a general election rout at the hands of David Cameron's Tories will be boosted today as a new poll shows a sharp fall in the Conservatives' lead, raising the possibility of a hung parliament.

The Ipsos MORI survey for the Observer, which will cause alarm in Tory ranks and boost Labour's hope of performing a "great escape", puts the Conservatives on 37%, only six points ahead of Labour on 31%. The Liberal Democrats are on 17%.

It is the narrowest gap between the two main parties in any poll since last December and demonstrates that, rather than powering towards a landslide victory, Cameron's party is struggling to capture the number of floating voters it needs to win a decisive mandate.

The poll, which also shows economic optimism at its highest level since 1997, suggests that Labour may be benefiting from a return of a "feelgood" factor as the country heads out of recession.

About 46% of the public now believe the economy will perform better over the next year, compared with 23% who think it will deteriorate and 28% who say it will stay the same. If the voting intentions are replicated at the next election, probably in May or June, the Conservatives will hold the most seats but fall 35 short of an overall majority in the Commons.

It would be the first general election to have delivered a hung parliament since 1974. If Labour was to cut the Tory lead to five points or fewer, pollsters say it would be likely to have more seats than the Tories.

An urgent investigation into the safety of all 1,800 bridges in Cumbria is under way today after the heaviest rainfall since records began swept several people away and claimed the life of a policeman.

People in Cumbria were advised not to return to their homes, as forecasters predicted winds of up to 65mph and more downpours over the coming days that could hamper the recovery effort. There are more than 60 flood warnings in force across south-western and northern parts of England, Scotland and Wales. In South Wales a search is under way for a woman believed to have been swept into the river Usk in Brecon, and an expert canoeist, Chris Wheeler, 46, from Reading, died after being pulled from the river Dart at Newton Abbot in Devon.

In Workington, Cumbria, the closure of the Calva bridge cut off the northside of the town and outlying villages. The area's Labour MP John Cunningham, who called the floods "biblical in size", said that help was urgently needed for the Northside estate which has been cut off from the rest of Workington.

Households on the sprawl of semis above the river Derwent have started to run out of medication and food, with every bridge to their local shops and health centre either collapsed or closed.

The area is still linked to northern Cumbria but all its services come from the main part of Workington, where hundreds of properties have been evacuated and the emergency services continue to work at full stretch.

A potentially devastating bomb attack on a police headquarters in Belfast, Northern Ireland on Saturday night failed when a massive car bomb did not detonate fully. 

On Sunday, police said the 180-kilogram (400-pound) device would have caused "widespread destruction" had it functioned as planned.

It is thought that the attack was launched by dissident republicans intent on undermining the province's fragile peace process.

A car crashed through barriers and onto the grounds of the supervisory Northern Ireland Policing Board in Belfast's dockland area on Saturday evening. Two people were seen running away before the vehicle burst into flames, but failed to blow up.

The building, which was undamaged, is the headquarters of a cross-community panel that oversees police operations. As such, it is a symbol of efforts to bring the UK-loyalist Protestant and Irish nationalist Catholic communities together.

For Bosnia, the road to Brussels is paved with constitutional reform. But in the current talks between European, American and Bosnian leaders, Brussels has shown a dearth of discernment that could endanger the democratic process, worries Tageszeitung.

Back in 1995, the Dayton peace talks came up with a formula to end the 1992-95 War in Bosnia, but that was not enough to ensure the development of democracy and the rule of law in the fledgling nation, which was subsequently partitioned along ethnic nationalist lines. The Western leaders who drew up the accords failed to insist on a mechanism to adapt the constitution framed at Dayton to future developments on the ground in Bosnia.

Not only does the constitution legitimise the territorial division of Bosnia and Herzegovina into two so-called "entities", the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (informally known as the Bosniak-Croat Federation). It leaves ethnic nationalist groups too much room for blockades should they see their interests at risk. In other words, the existing constitution actually impedes the development of a culture of compromise, a vital prerequisite for the nation's further integration into the EU community.

Doubts over Carl Bildt's strategy

Not only that, it runs counter to the (human rights) principles enshrined in European constitutions. To be sure, the new constitutional initiative does raise the decisive question: can the country fall in with the EU community or not? However, the way the talks have been going so far gives grounds for reasonable doubts about Carl Bildt's strategy and the Brussels negotiators' foreign policy competence.

Life for Slovak journalists is not exactly a bed of roses. Nonetheless, in spite of a populist government out to gag them by hook or by crook, they still manage to break scandals galore.

In Slovakia, there is no need for heaps of experience under your belt to be a newspaper editor. Matúš Kostolný, editor-in-chief of Sme, the country's leading daily, is a mere 34, and Juraj Porubsky, head of the rival daily Pravda, is actually three years his junior. That is no coincidence: "Nobody wants this job," Porubsky says with a rueful smile. Putting out a newspaper in Slovakia is no picnic. For one thing, the press there - as elsewhere in the world - faces a dwindling readership. To make matters far worse, however, journalists have to grapple with government antagonism.

Ever since a coalition of socialists, populists and nationalists came to power in 2006, the press has been seeing hard times. Slovak prime minister Robert Fico (Socialist Party, SMER) makes no bones about his enmity for the papers. What he relishes most, according to Matúš Kostolný, is heaping abuse on journalists: Fico habitually calls them "idiots", but has also let slip the occasional "whore" or "snake". The printed press is in the dog house owing to the critical coverage of governmental goings-on in the three main papers (Sme and Pravda plus Hospodárske Noviny), which, tallies Gabriel Sipos of Slovak Press Watch, break three-fourths of the scandals in Slovakia.

Scandals served up by the plateful

And they needn't dig very far to find ample muck to rake in Bratislava. The motley crew of populists, nationalists and semi-crooks now at the helm, Sipos says, supply the press with plenty of grist for its mill. The Socialist Party's coalition partners are particularly good at keeping investigative journalists busy. The Slovak National Party led by Jan Slota, who take it out on Hungarians, Gypsies and homosexuals, and the People's Party of ex-PM Vladimír Mečiar, whose autocratic rule in the 1990s gave Slovakia a bad name, are not exactly famed for playing by the rules of democracy. And Fico's election promises to combat the spreading canker of corruption have yet to amount to much

Herman Van Rompuy, Europe's first president, is to join forces with the European Commission to push for sweeping new tax raising powers for Brussels.

Within days of taking office in January, the former Belgian prime minister will put his weight behind controversial proposals already floated by the commission's head, José Manuel Barroso, for a new "Euro tax".

He will add credence to Mr Barroso's plans, to be formally tabled in the New Year, by arguing for a Euro-version of a "Tobin Tax" - a levy on financial transactions already floated by Gordon Brown as a solution to the international banking crisis. It would result in a stream of income direct to Brussels coffers, funding budgets that critics say are already rife with waste and overspending.

The deep hostility of Britain's senior military commanders in Iraq towards their American allies has been revealed in classified Government documents leaked to the Daily Telegraph.

In the papers, the British chief of staff in Iraq, Colonel J.K.Tanner, described his US military counterparts as "a group of Martians" for whom "dialogue is alien," saying: "Despite our so-called `special relationship,' I reckon we were treated no differently to the Portuguese."

Col Tanner's boss, the top British commander in the country, Major General Andrew Stewart, told how he spent "a significant amount of my time" "evading" and "refusing" orders from his US superiors.

Silvio Berlusconi faces more damage to his reputation with claims that he was directly linked to Mafia bosses and new disclosures about his private life in the memoirs of an escort girl who says that she was attacked and threatened after sleeping with him.

The Italian Prime Minister, who has lost his immunity from prosecution on two counts of corruption, could face further charges after a convicted Mafia hitman told magistrates that he had been the political protector of a Cosa Nostra godfather in the 1990s.

Gaspare Spatuzza, who became a pentito (turncoat) last year, told magistrates that the godfather, Giuseppe Graviano, had told him in 1994 -- the year that Mr Berlusconi entered politics by founding Forza Italia -- that his "political protectors" were Mr Berlusconi and Marcello Dell'Utri, the Sicilian co-founder of Forza Italia. Mr Dell'Utri was sentenced for "Mafia association" in 2004 but remains a Senator unless definitively convicted.

Spatuzza is due to give evidence on December 4 at Mr Dell'Utri's appeal. Mr Dell'Utri dismissed the allegations as "melodrama, nonsense, which, fortunately, still make me laugh".

Romanians are going to the polls in a tight presidential election amid skepticism that it will resolve months of political crisis, stalled reforms and persuade international lenders to resume aid. 

Pre-election surveys showed centrist President Traian Basescu of the Democratic Liberal Party (PDL) leading slightly with 33 percent approval. He is seeking a second term. His main rival and former foreign minister, Mircea Geoana of the opposition ex-communist Social Democrats (PSD) follows with 30 percent. Crin Antonescu, who is the head of the nationalist Liberal Party (PNL) was polled at a 18 percent approval rating, just ahead of the vote. 

In total, 12 candidates are running in the election. If no one wins an absolute majority, a second presidential round is to be held on December 6. Analysts say the winner could play a key role in finding a new prime minister to overhaul Romania's debt-laden public finances and tackle corruption.

BUCHAREST, Romania -- Romanians voted for a new president Sunday, hoping to end a leadership crisis that threatens a euro1.5 billion ($2 billion) IMF loan their country desperately needs to ease a painful recession.

As they cast their ballots, President Traian Basescu, 58, and his main rival, former Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana, 51, described the election as one of the most important votes Romania has had since the 1989 fall of communism.

Yet reports of possible fraud soon emerged as far more people than normal were casting ballots at special voting centers that are set up for Romanians who need to vote outside their area of residence because they are traveling.

The Electoral Committee said more than 305,000 people were voting at such locations, and witnesses claimed some were being bused there after already having cast ballots elsewhere. For instance, Economy Minister Adriean Videanu called for a halt to "electoral tourism" in Moara Vlasie, near Bucharest, saying election authorities there were overwhelmed.

Romania's government collapsed last month amid squabbling between the two-party coalition, and the International Monetary Fund has delayed access to the bailout loan while the country struggles to set up a new government.

Nine banks operating in Romania are, again, pledging commitment to ensure their affiliates maintain adequate capital levels above 10%, the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday.

The banks' reaffirmation came at a European Bank Coordination Initiative Group meeting held in Brussels. The banks originally said, at meetings in March and May, they would "maintain their positions in Romania," according to an IMF statement.

"In a few cases, exposure temporarily fell below the agreed level," the IMF statement said.

These discussions involving adequate capital levels for the banks stem from stress tests conducted by the National Bank of Romania.

The involved banks are Erste Group Bank (EBKDY, EBS.VI), Raiffeisen International (RAIFY, RIBH.VI), Eurobank EFG, National Bank of Greece (NBG, ETE.AT), UniCredit Group (UNCFF, UCG.MI), Societe Generale (SCGLY, GLE.FR), Alpha Bank (ALBKY), Volksbank, and Piraeus Bank (TPEIR.AT). The firms told regulatory officials that the availability of "appropriate investment instruments" is essential.

Western organizations have made clear however that whoever wins Sunday's ballot will face the prospect that real long-term economic growth can only be achieved with tough measures. They include IMF-backed plans to sack up to 150,000 of Romania's 1.3 million public workers, freezing state wages  and cut pensions.

Bucharest. Voter turnout in the presidential elections in Romania was 49,97% by 7:00pm, Realitatja television channel announced, citing data of the Central Electoral Commission. About 47,21% is the voter turnout in cities and 53,77% in villages.
46,84% of citizens voted in the referendum which must determine whether the country should have less MPs and one-chamber parliament, instead of the incumbent two-chamber one.

Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Romanian President Traian Basescu won the most votes in his bid for re-election today, giving him the edge against the leader of the party of former communists in a run-off on Dec. 6, exit polling showed.

Basescu took 32.8 percent of the vote, putting him ahead of 11 other candidates. Mircea Geoana, head of the Social Democratic Party, who took second with 31.7 percent, will take part in the two-man second round, according to the INSOMAR polling institute. Liberal leader Crin Antonescu was third with 12.8 percent, the poll shows.

"Today was a victory we obtained in the first stage of the presidential race," Basescu said in a speech to supporters after the exit poll results were released. He said voter turnout was "a big motive for joy and satisfaction."

The winner will name a prime minister to replace Emil Boc, whose 10-month-old government collapsed in the wake of Cabinet infighting over budget cuts. A new Cabinet with a majority in Parliament will be needed to counter the worst effects of a recession and work to preserve a 20 billion-euro ($30 billion) international loan led by the International Monetary Fund.

PARIS-A week-long trial starting Monday in the alleged insider-trading case involving European Aerospace Defence & Space Co. could have deep repercussions at the parent company of plane maker Airbus as well as on the authority of France's stock-market watchdog Autorité des Marches Financiers.

The case began in June 2006, when EADS disclosed that its program to develop the A380 double-decker aircraft was plagued with delays and cost overruns, sending its shares down 26% in one day. The A380 woes led to upheaval at the Franco-German aerospace company, which was torn apart by nationalistic rivalries. A management shuffle ensued.

The EADS stock fall also led the AMF to look into whether some company shareholders and executives knew about the A380 problems ahead of the June announcement and particularly when they had sold shares or exercised stock options in November 2005 and March 2006.

Following a three-year investigation, the AMF's sanction committee, which has an administrative jurisdiction, is trying 17 individuals, and two EADS founding shareholders-French media group Lagardère SCA and German automaker Daimler AG-on charges of insider trading.

[...].

EADS, which faces charges of having been too slow in disclosing the A380 woes, has said it provided investors with timely and accurate information.

As millions of Americans struggle to hold on to their homes, Wall Street has found a way to make money from the mortgage mess.

Investment funds are buying billions of dollars' worth of home loans, discounted from the loans' original value. Then, in what might seem an act of charity, the funds are helping homeowners by reducing the size of the loans.

But as part of these deals, the mortgages are being refinanced through lenders that work with government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration. This enables the funds to pocket sizable profits by reselling new, government-insured loans to other federal agencies, which then bundle the mortgages into securities for sale to investors.

While homeowners save money, the arrangement shifts nearly all the risk for the loans to the federal government -- and, ultimately, taxpayers -- at a time when Americans are falling behind on their mortgage payments in record numbers.

For instance, a fund might offer to pay $40 million for a $100 million block of mortgages from a bank in distress. Then the fund could arrange to have some of those loans refinanced into mortgages backed by an agency like the F.H.A. and then sold to an agency like Ginnie Mae. The trick is to persuade the homeowners to refinance those mortgages, by offering to reduce the amounts the homeowners owe.

Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007.

The company's effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, New York-based Goldman Sachs said today in a statement. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits.

Goldman Sachs, which today reported its first quarterly loss since going public in 1999, lowered its rate with more tax credits as a percentage of earnings and because of "changes in geographic earnings mix," the company said.

The rate decline looks "a little extreme," said Robert Willens, president and chief executive officer of tax and accounting advisory firm Robert Willens LLC.

"I was definitely taken aback," Willens said. "Clearly they have taken steps to ensure that a lot of their income is earned in lower-tax jurisdictions."

In October the FDIC held a large auction of properties it had acquired as a result of failed banks in Georgia. I thought this was an interesting story and wrote about it before the auction took place. It was my intention to write about it again after the results of the auction were released. No such luck. The FDIC has decided to keep us in the dark on this one. The following is an email I got from JP King, the auction house who ran the Georgia auction:

"Unfortunately, FDIC has prohibited us from releasing any information regarding the auction. We've been trying to get them to let us release the results, but they have denied our requests. We aren't allowed to release any details."

I would have thought that the results of a pubic auction of properties owned by FDIC would have to be publicly disclosed. So why is the FDIC trying to cover this up?

The answer is that the REO problem for the D.C. lenders and the FDIC is reaching a crisis level. In spite of every effort to avoid foreclosures the fact is that the number of properties owned by the Feds is rising on a daily basis.

There are approximately 55 million mortgages outstanding today. At least 10% will/have gone into default before this is over. Of those half will result in foreclosure. These numbers create an estimate of the Federal share of REO at about 1.5 mm homes. Depending on unemployment and the economy going forward that number could be much higher. Before this is over the Feds could own up to 5% of all residential RE.

Banks are not lending despite the massive quantitative easing. They are fat with reserves, paying huge bonuses again, and obviously doing something with their money other than providing funds for the commercial activity of the nation.

Excess Reserves are an accounting function. The banks themselves do not reduce their reserves significantly through lending in the aggregate, but seek to minimize the opportunity cost of reserves. But it is symptomatic in the sense that the lack of reserves is most definitely NOT an issue with lending.

No one can deny with any credibility that if the Federal Reserve reduced their payment on reserves to zero, or even a negative, that lending activity would not increase. And yet they do not. Why?

Because the first priority of the Fed is the health of the banking system itself, and not the national economy and the availability of credit to non-banking institutions. They are seeking to drive commercial entities out of secure savings to risk investment again, but providing a safe harbor for the banks while they are doing it, while attempting to maintain the appearance of financial system solvency.

The critical, unspoken factor is that the US banking system is not yet healthy, is not sound, is not well capitalized despite the record expansion in the monetary base and its specific direction to the banks themselves. They have simply not taken the writedown necessary to make themselves financially sound, because they do not wish to take the hit to earnings, salaries, stock options and bonuses.

The inadequacy of the foundation of US monetary and financial policy has never before stood so starkly revealed.  The policy has no concern for any but the banks.  And the people are getting pissed.  Few of them have any money to invest anyway, are going to hang on to what they have and are not going to invest it in a rigged system run by thieves.

We have to have a Government and a financial system that serves more than just the interests of the big banks. It is not that the existing system is immoral, which it clearly is, but that it is massively dysfunctional as well. I fear that event risk has never been higher.

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

5. False Belief System: Earlier this year, the Dow had dropped over 5,000 points in 6 months. One of the collective fallacies our culture operates under is the delusion that the market is some kind of astute forecasting machine. It is not -- it represents the collective wisdom of 10 million panicked monkeys. That millions of slightly clever, pants wearing primates can combine their collective ignorance, their intellectual foibles, biases and false beliefs somehow into something resembling intelligence was one of the false beliefs of the era. Unfortunately, this is a condition the monkeys are prone towards (Witch burning, bloodletting, organized religion, etc.).

CAIRO -- For years, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri criticized Iran's supreme leader and argued that the country was not the Islamic democracy it claimed to be, but his words seemed to fall on deaf ears. Now many Iranians, including some former government leaders, are listening.

Ayatollah Montazeri has emerged as the spiritual leader of the opposition, an adversary the state has been unable to silence or jail because of his religious credentials and seminal role in the founding of the republic.

He is widely regarded as the most knowledgeable religious scholar in Iran and once expected to become the country's supreme leader until a falling-out with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 revolution and Iran's supreme leader until his death in 1989.

Now, as the Iranian government has cracked down to suppress the protests that erupted after the presidential election in June and devastated the reform movement, Ayatollah Montazeri uses religion to attack the government's legitimacy.

"We have many intellectuals who criticize this regime from the democratic point of view," said Mehdi Khalaji, a former seminary student in Qum and now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "He criticizes this regime purely from a religious point of view, and this is very hurtful. The regime wants to say, `If I am not democratic enough that doesn't matter, I am Islamic.'

"He says it is not an Islamic government."

ISTANBUL -- Few here doubt that the case began with something threatening: in June 2007, 27 hand grenades and fuses were found in the attic of a house in an Istanbul slum. Investigators claimed they were stashed there by an ultranationalist retired officer and they were later linked to an elaborate coup plot.

But the question many are asking, inside and outside Turkey, is whether the Islamic-inspired government is exaggerating the threat in order to wage a much larger battle against this moderate Muslim nation's secular establishment.

Since 2007, 300 people have been detained during the investigation of an underground group known as Ergenekon, including a writer of erotic novels, four-star generals and other military officers, professors, editors and underworld figures -- some of whom appear to have committed no offense greater than speaking in favor of Turkey as a secular state.

"Ergenekon has become a larger project in which the investigation is being used as a tool to sweep across civic society and cleanse Turkey of all secular opponents," said Aysel Celikel, a former justice minister and president of a charity that finances the secular education of underprivileged rural girls. "As such, the country's democracy, its rule of law and its freedom of expression are at stake."

In all, 194 people have been charged, accused of trying to overthrow the government as part of Ergenekon (pronounced ahr-GEN-eh-kahn), named after a mythic Turkish valley. Prosecutors contend that they planned to engage in civil unrest, assassinations and terrorism to create chaos and undermine the stability of Turkey as groundwork for a coup.

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli aircraft attacked two suspected weapons-making factories and a smuggling tunnel in the Gaza Strip early Sunday in what the military said was retaliation for Palestinian rocket fire into southern Israel.

The airstrikes, which wounded at least seven people -- including one seriously -- came despite an announcement by Gaza's Hamas rulers that the territory's military factions had all agreed to stop firing rockets. The Hamas announcement came late Saturday, after the rocket attack.

Hamas' interior minister, Fathi Hamad, said the proclaimed halt in rocket fire was designed to prevent Israeli retaliation and provide stability for Gaza, which continues to suffer from the aftermath of a massive Israeli military offensive in December and January.

The offensive killed some 1,400 Palestinians, according to U.N. and Palestinian estimates, and damaged or destroyed thousands of homes. Thirteen Israelis also were killed. Most of the damage in Gaza has not been repaired due to an Israeli blockade that has prevented construction materials from entering the territory.

Israel said it launched the offensive to crush Palestinian rocket squads, who had severely disrupted life in southern Israel for years. While Hamas has all but halted its own rocket fire, smaller militant groups have continued to launch attacks, though the number of attacks has decreased dramatically.

Iran has launched a series of air war simulations in an effort to show off its defense capabilities to potential attackers. Tehran recently rejected a deal by the UN Security Council to ship its enriched uranium abroad. 

Iranian armed forces are conducting five days of war games involving simulated attacks on the country's nuclear sites, state-owned Press TV and Al-Alam television channels reported.

The simulations are intended to show off Iran's defense capabilities amid increasing pressure from the West over its uranium enrichment program. Tehran has long denied accusations that it intends to use its program to produce nuclear weapons.

"Due to the threats against our nuclear facilities it is our duty to defend our nation's vital facilities and thus this maneuver covers Bushehr, Fars, Isfahan, Tehran and western provinces," said Brigadier General Ahmad Mighani, the head of army air defense, on Saturday.

"I anticipate that the plea will be not guilty," said defense attorney John Galligan.

Asked if he was considering an insanity plea for his client, who faces 13 counts of premeditated murder, Galligan said, "I'm fairly confident that that's going to have to at least be examined. And that's problematic. But we haven't reached that stage yet."

Galligan said he has also learned that his client, who will be tried in a military court, may face additional charges for the Nov. 5 shooting spree in Fort Hood, Texas. He said he was alerted to the new charges during a pre-trial confinement hearing before a military magistrate held in Hasan's San Antonio hospital room Saturday.

After the hearing at the Brooke Army Medical Center Saturday, Galligan said his client is paralyzed from the chest down and is a not a flight risk. The military magistrate ruled that Hasan will stay at Brooke Army Medical Center for now, but the military has the option of moving him to another medical facility or to jail.

According to Galligan, Hasan is paralyzed, is incontinent and "in severe pain."

"He is an individual in need of constant medical attention," Galligan said. "He has no sensation from his chest down."

Previously, Galligan had said Hasan was paralyzed from the waist down. Galligan questioned the speed with which the legal process is moving.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The Pakistani government has some advice the Obama administration may not want to hear as it contemplates sending additional U.S. troops to neighboring Afghanistan: Negotiate with Taliban leaders and restrain India.

Pakistan embraces U.S. efforts to stabilize the region and worries that a hasty U.S. withdrawal would create chaos, but Pakistani officials worry that thousands of additional American soldiers and Marines would send Taliban forces retreating into Pakistan, where they're not welcome.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani's office said Friday that he told visiting CIA Director Leon Panetta of "Pakistan's concerns relating to the possible surge of the U.S. and ISAF forces in Afghanistan which may entail negative implications for the situation in Baluchistan," the Pakistani province that borders Afghanistan to the south.

The Pakistanis' advice is almost diametrically opposed to the strategy outlined by Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan: Don't send additional forces to protect Afghan cities, but send them to outposts along the Pakistani border -- where McChrystal has withdrawn troops.

It's just one example of how Pakistan, a critical U.S. ally in the struggle against Islamist extremists and a major recipient of American military aid, continues to deal differently with the violence that threatens not only the U.S.-backed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, but also impoverished, nuclear-armed Pakistan

Nine days before the Honduran elections are scheduled to take place, Channel 36, Cholusat Sur, has been taken off the air once again. A parallel signal has been transmitting over the station. Initially airing pornography, now the same movie has been on repeat for the second day in a row. This new attack on the press comes the morning after Micheletti announced that he would be leaving the Presidency `provisionally' from November 25 until December 2 for the country "to concentrate on the electoral process and not on the political crisis."

WASHINGTON -- Anxious that Saturday's party-line Senate vote to open debate on a health care overhaul gives them little maneuvering room, Obama administration officials and their Congressional allies are stepping up overtures to select Senate Republicans in hopes of winning their ultimate support.

The two moderate Republican senators from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe, say Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, reached out to them after he unveiled the Senate measure, encouraging them to bring forward their ideas and concerns. Ms. Collins also received a personal visit from a high-level Obama emissary, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a former senator who worked closely with her on various issues as part of a bipartisan coalition.

After the party-line vote of 60 to 39 on Saturday night to move to a full health care debate, including votes on significant amendments, both sides are acutely aware of the wavering in their ranks and are trying to figure out how to play the numbers.

Republican leaders conceded that the Democratic victory, while not conclusive, improved the odds that a bill would pass. "Ordinarily, when you do start debate on a bill like this, it ends up passing," Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said on "Face the Nation" On CBS. "When these senators, for example, say, `Well, we'll vote to start the bill but that doesn't guarantee our vote at the end,' the pressure at the end of the process is enormous."

ScienceDaily (Nov. 20, 2009) -- Most countries throughout the world participate in the $40-million-per-year culinary trade of frog legs in some way, with 75 percent of frog legs consumed in France, Belgium and the United States. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution and colleagues have found that this trade is a potential carrier of pathogens deadly to amphibians. The team's findings are published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Ecology, on November 19.

Amphibians are rapidly declining worldwide. More than one-third of the nearly 6,000 amphibian species are threatened with extinction -- disease is one of the main causes. Among the known amphibian pathogens, the parasitic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, also known as amphibian chytrid (KI-trid), is a top concern. The fungus, which attacks keratin proteins in the skin of amphibians, including frogs, causes respiratory and neurological damage and eventually death.

"Amphibian chytrid is an unusual example of a disease that is a primary cause of extinction in amphibian species," said Brian Gratwicke, biologist at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and lead author of the team's paper. "In fact, amphibian chytrid has been listed as a likely threat in 94 cases out of the 159 extinct and potentially extinct amphibian species. There are several hypotheses about how amphibian chytrid has spread around the world, but the trade in amphibians for food, bait, pets and laboratory animals has been identified as the most likely mode of spread."

ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2009) -- A community in Papua New Guinea that suffered a major epidemic of a CJD-like fatal brain disease called kuru has developed strong genetic resistance to the disease, according to new research by Medical Research Council (MRC) scientists.

Kuru is a fatal prion disease, similar to CJD in humans and BSE in animals, and is geographically unique to an area in Papua New Guinea. In the mid 20th Century, an epidemic of kuru devastated a population in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The infection was passed on at mortuary feasts, where mainly women and children consumed their deceased relatives as a mark of respect and mourning. This practice was banned and ceased in the late 1950s.

Scientists from the MRC Prion Unit, a national centre of excellence in prion diseases, assessed over 3000 people from the affected and surrounding Eastern Highland populations, including 709 who had participated in cannibalistic mortuary feasts, 152 of whom subsequently died of kuru. They discovered a novel and unique variation in the prion protein gene called G127V in people from the Purosa valley region where kuru was most rife.

This gene mutation, which is found nowhere else in the world, seems to offer high or even complete protection against the development of kuru and has become frequent in this area through natural selection over recent history, in direct response to the epidemic. This is thought be perhaps the strongest example yet of recent natural selection in humans.

Lead author Professor John Collinge, Director of the MRC Prion Unit said: "It's absolutely fascinating to see Darwinian principles at work here. This community of people has developed their own biologically unique response to a truly terrible epidemic. The fact that this genetic evolution has happened in a matter of decades is remarkable. Kuru comes from the same disease family as CJD so the discovery of this powerful resistance factor opens up new areas for research taking us closer to understanding, treating and hopefully preventing a range of prion diseases."

Ocean acidification could cause fish to become "fatally attracted" to their predators, according to scientists.

A team studying the effects of acidification - caused by dissolved CO2 - on ocean reefs found that it leaves fish unable to "smell danger".

Young clownfish that were reared in the acidified water became attracted to rather than repelled by the chemical signals released by predatory fish.

The findings were published in the journal Ecology Letters.

It was drizzling lightly in late October when the midnight shift started at the Owls Head Water Pollution Control Plant, where much of Brooklyn's sewage is treated. William Grandner, superintendent of Owl's Head Water Pollution Control Plant in Brooklyn, kept an eye on multiple monitors that track the flow of sewage.

A few miles away, people were walking home without umbrellas from late dinners. But at Owls Head, a swimming pool's worth of sewage and wastewater was soon rushing in every second. Warning horns began to blare. A little after 1 a.m., with a harder rain falling, Owls Head reached its capacity and workers started shutting the intake gates. That caused a rising tide throughout Brooklyn's sewers, and untreated feces and industrial waste started spilling from emergency relief valves into the Upper New York Bay and Gowanus Canal.

"It happens anytime you get a hard rainfall," said Bob Connaughton, one the plant's engineers. "Sometimes all it takes is 20 minutes of rain, and you've got overflows across Brooklyn."

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation's sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

But despite those upgrades, today, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage is spilling into waterways. In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation's 25,000 sewage systems -- including those in major cities -- have reported violating the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In Los Angeles the sewer system charge from the Department of Water and Power is frequently the largest single item on a bill that includes water and power charges. That fee primarily funds continuing upgrades. Los Angeles has very little infrastructure older than one century and the storm sewer system is a separate system. The storm sewer system has grossly inadequate primary treatment capability and regularly discharges onto local beaches, causing closures due to coliform bacteria from animal feces, leaked motor oil, antifreeze and anything else that gets spilled onto the streets and sidewalks of the city, including lawn fertilizers and pesticides. Another reason for surfers to wear a wet suit.

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

LEXINGTON, Miss. -- It was a long day for John Hart, a farmer in the hills just east of the Mississippi Delta. An insurance company had decreed that, though Mr. Hart's crop of soybeans and rice was ruined, he would have to harvest it and haul it to a salvage company for pennies on the dollar. For that, Mr. Hart needed to borrow a truck that was 70 miles away. By the time he got back to his field, the sky was so dark that a shooting star whizzed across it like a thick smear of crayon.

But that was just a minor setback compared with what he and other Southern farmers have been though this year. In August, they thought they had a bumper crop -- the best they had seen in years. It was the kind of crop that could put you ahead, for once. Pay off that combine.

But just as the harvest began in September, it began to rain, and it kept raining through October, normally one of the driest months here. The soybeans shriveled and blackened with mold. The rice keeled over into the mud. The cotton hardened into tight little spitballs. The sweet potatoes rotted underground. When the combines could get into the fields, they scarred them with deep ruts that will make next year's planting more expensive.

Last year, with commodity prices running at record highs, farming across the nation seemed to be bucking the recession. This year, with the rest of the country in a slow recovery from a man-made disaster, nature forced a crash of its own in the South.

Letter abstract

Accurate quantification of Antarctic ice-sheet mass balance and its contribution to global sea-level rise remains challenging, because in situ measurements over both space and time are sparse. Satellite remote-sensing data of ice elevations and ice motion show significant ice loss in the range of -31 to -196 Gt yr-1 in West Antarctica in recent years1, 2, 3, 4, whereas East Antarctica seems to remain in balance or slightly gain mass1, 2, 4, with estimated rates of mass change in the range of -4 to 22 Gt yr-1. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment5 (GRACE) offers the opportunity of quantifying polar ice-sheet mass balance from a different perspective6, 7. Here we use an extended record of GRACE data spanning the period April 2002 to January 2009 to quantify the rates of Antarctic ice loss. In agreement with an independent earlier assessment4, we estimate a total loss of 190plusminus77 Gt yr-1, with 132plusminus26 Gt yr-1 coming from West Antarctica. However, in contrast with previous GRACE estimates, our data suggest that East Antarctica is losing mass, mostly in coastal regions, at a rate of -57plusminus52 Gt yr-1, apparently caused by increased ice loss since the year 2006.

Wary of offending viewers and the authorities, who might be skeptical about the effect of human beings on climate, and mindful of making references to hugely complex science during three-minute broadcasts, most presenters have studiously avoided using their prime-time slots to discuss global warming.

But that may be changing.

In September, the World Meteorological Organization, an agency of the United Nations, anointed television weather presenters as climate emissaries, highlighting the role they could play in communicating evidence and information about global warming directly to viewers. That overture to weather presenters is part of a broader drive by the United Nations to bring the discipline of predicting the weather, which is the state of the atmosphere at a particular time in a particular place, closer to the discipline of predicting climate, which is the average of weather over periods of months to thousands and millions of years.

The goal of the organization's proposal is to create a suite of climate services to help governments, farmers, businesses and citizens anticipate new kinds of conditions and adapt accordingly. The initiative also could expand the responsibilities of weather presenters, and groups already have sprung up to create a steady supply of content about climate change.

"Our goal is to change weathercasts into envirocasts," said Deborah Sliter, a senior vice president of the National Environmental Education Foundation, an American organization that has offered presenters ideas to mention on air, like the blooming of lilacs an average of four days earlier in the spring in the United States than during the 1950s.

If there is one thing on which many working mothers agree, it is that their partners do not pull their weight on the domestic front.

But research to be published this week reveals that men are being unfairly accused and working women are advancing the myth of the "useless man" so they can feel more feminine. "Working women who provide the majority of the household's income to the family continue to articulate themselves as the ones who 'see' household messes and needs as a way to retain claims to an element of a traditional feminine identity," said Dr Rebecca Meisenbach, whose research paper, The Female Breadwinner, will be published this week in the journal Sex Roles.

But Meisenbach said the trend of the female high achiever and the male slacker is a tall story that women tell each other to compensate for the fact that most career-orientated women feel an "overwhelming sense of guilt" over their role and less of a mother and a wife.

"These women are struggling with the intersections of their status as the breadwinner and other gendered societal expectations," she said. "By highlighting stories of how men have to be told or asked to do specific chores in the home, these female breadwinners are making sure they still fit gender boundaries of a wife as someone who manages the home and children.

"By directing the housework done by their husbands, they maintain a sense of control over the traditionally feminine sphere of the home," she added. "This path of expressing control of and responsibility for both home and paid work may be essential for working mothers to manage competing discourses of ideal worker and intensive mothering."

Fruit grower and distiller Hermann Becker closely examines the thermometer sitting atop his stainless steel still, and then carefully tastes the clear fluid trickling steadily out of the pipe at the bottom. It's pear schnapps, and after two years stored in Becker's cellar, the traditional German drink will be ready for sale.

"We also have apple, mirabelle plum, greengage plum, nut and apricot schnapps," Becker explained, pointing to the tasting bottles lined up on a shelf before turning his attention back to his steaming still. 

[...]

In 2003, the European Commission ruled that Germany's spirits monopoly, which subsidizes spirit distillers to the tune of 80 million euros a year, is in breach of European free market regulations and has to be phased out by the end of 2010.

"If this ends up coming into effect, the vast majority of micro-distilleries won't be able to keep producing," said Klaus Lindenmann, the CEO of the Baden Small-scale and Fruit Distillers Association.

[...]

The German government has until the end of 2009 to lodge an application for an exemption to the Commission's ruling, and in an unlikely alliance, environmentalists are strongly lobbying alongside distillers for the spirits subsidies to continue.

This is because many of the distillers cultivate a traditional type of fruit orchard that is not only among the most ecologically diverse habitats in Europe, it is also among the most endangered.

ON THE day a new computer virus hits the internet there is little that antivirus software can do to stop it until security firms get round to writing and distributing a patch that recognises and kills the virus. Now engineers Simon Wiseman and Richard Oak at the defence technology company Qinetiq's security lab in Malvern, Worcestershire, UK, have come up with an answer to the problem.

Their idea, which they are patenting, is to intercept every file that could possibly hide a virus and add a string of computer code to it that will disable any virus it contains. Their system chiefly targets emailed attachments and adds the extra code to them as they pass through a mailserver. A key feature of the scheme is that no knowledge of the virus itself is needed, so it can deal with new, unrecognised "zero day" viruses as well as older ones.

Many mailservers already block attachments that will run as executable programs - such as PC files with a .exe suffix - in case they are viruses. But virus writers have tricks up their sleeve to get round this. For example, they can disguise files as an innocent Microsoft Word (.doc) or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file, and then fool unsuspecting users into converting them into an "executable" program file that will run on their computer.

Qinetiq aims to prevent this by inserting a line of machine code - the raw code that microprocessor chips understand - into the header area of incoming files. This is the part of the file that holds the formatting data that defines such aspects as a document's layout and fonts.

If the file is simply opened by another program, the code is ignored. But if someone attempts to run it as a program in its own right, Qinetiq's code will run first - and stop the rest of the program in its tracks, either by exiting or by sending it into an infinite loop.

VATICAN CITY -- In 1512, Raphael finished his ruminative portrait of Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In 1999, the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan produced "The Ninth Hour," a wax sculpture of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite.

Somewhere along the way, the Vatican's relations with the art world had clearly gone astray.

And so in an effort to improve the Catholic Church's engagement with contemporary artists -- and perhaps put a gentler face on a contentious papacy -- the Vatican invited more than 250 artists, architects, musicians, directors, writers and composers for an audience on Saturday with Pope Benedict XVI.

Sitting before Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel, after a choir sang music by Palestrina, Benedict urged them to embark on "a quest for beauty." In what he called "a cordial, friendly and impassioned appeal," he told his guests to be "fully conscious of your great responsibility to communicate beauty, to communicate in and through beauty."

About half of the 500 invited artists did not attend, including Bono from the rock band U2. But the meeting still seemed a public relations success in light of the fierce controversies that have made this papacy less than loved by the downtown art scene, and made that art scene unbeloved by a pope who decries nihilism and relativism at every turn.

Amid the centuries-old castles of the ancient city of Ferrara is a doctor who has come upon an entirely new idea about how to treat multiple sclerosis, one that may profoundly change the lives of patients.

Dr. Paolo Zamboni, a former vascular surgeon and professor at the University of Ferrara in northern Italy, began asking questions about the debilitating condition a decade ago, when his wife Elena, now 51, was diagnosed with MS.

Watching his wife Elena struggle with the fatigue, muscle weakness and visual problems of MS led Zamboni to begin an intense personal search for the cause of her disease. He found that scientists who had studied the brains of MS patients had noticed higher levels of iron in their brain, not accounted for by age. The iron deposits had a unique pattern, often forming in the core of the brain, clustered around the veins that normally drain blood from the head. No one had ever fully explained this phenomenon, considering the excess iron a toxic byproduct of the MS itself.

Dr. Zamboni wondered if the iron came from blood improperly collecting in the brain. Using Doppler ultrasound, he began examining the necks of MS patients and made an extraordinary finding. Almost 100 per cent of the patients had a narrowing, twisting or outright blockage of the veins that are supposed to flush blood from the brain. He then checked these veins in healthy people, and found none of these malformations. Nor did he find these blockages in those with other neurological conditions.

Over the last several months, The St. Petersburg Times published a series of scathing articles on the Church of Scientology under the rubric "The Truth Rundown." In 1980, the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation of the church's inner workings.

Coverage of Scientology has long been an important story for The St. Petersburg Times, given that the church's spiritual headquarters is located in nearby Clearwater, Fla. So it came as a bit of a shock when, on Friday, the newspaper's management announced that it would sell one of its sibling publications to a California media company whose top management are Scientologists. Governing magazine, which is based in Washington and for 23 years has covered the workings of local and state governments across the country, will be sold to e.Republic, whose founder and other top executives are Scientologists. The sale is expected to close after Thanksgiving.

The evening before the announcement, Governing's staff gathered at the Willard InterContinental Washington hotel for its annual awards dinner, honoring its picks for the best government officials. On Friday, the staff learned of the magazine's sale, which had long been in the works. And at a staff gathering, the question of Scientology was raised, given the paper's aggressive coverage of the church.

"I'm aware that some of the top officials personally practice Scientology, but it never came up in the negotiations," said Andrew Corty, a vice president of the Times Publishing Company, the holding company that runs the St. Petersburg paper and Governing. "It certainly was a question asked at our staff meeting."

Dede Haskins's cellphone has been her constant companion for more than a decade. And she has always considered herself a careful driver -- even using a hands-free set so she could keep both hands on the wheel.

But after missing one too many exits because she was distracted by a phone call, Ms. Haskins decided it was time to get tough with herself. So she signed up for ZoomSafer, a free service that uses her phone's GPS sensors to determine whether she's at driving speeds, and then disables her cellphone until she stops the car.

"I really love my cellphone," said Ms. Haskins, the chief executive of a software company in Washington. "But I know I'm not driving safely if I'm using it while behind the wheel."

Of course, there is a simpler, no-cost solution to limiting phone use while driving: the off button. But going cold turkey is hard for many Americans who have become addicted to their gadgets. And so technology companies are trying to solve a problem caused by technology with more technology.

In this video clip from New York University's annual talent show four years ago, Stefani Germanotta -- aka Lady Gaga -- performs two songs she wrote herself. She came in third place. At the end of her performance, one of the judges says: "Norah Jones, look out!" Little did she know that Lady Gaga would not be making Norah Jones-ish music at all.

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

The black and white shots of María Dolores de Cospedal in a smart cocktail suit appeared, to some, to represent sobriety itself.

But the photos of one of Spain's leading conservative politicians, which appear in the December issue of Vanity Fair España, have reignited controversy surrounding female politicians who are tempted by the lure of the flashgun.

Ms Cospedal, who is Secretary General of the conservative opposition, the Popular Party (PP), is under fire for appearing in the magazine. Critics have accused her of undermining the seriousness of her position by promoting sexist stereotypes of women.

"There are more and more politicians who seemed to want their voice heard in fashion and society magazines and ... to become a model for a day," the Spanish daily La Razon said.