EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Early Thursday morning the European Parliament and EU member states finally reached a deal over a long-delayed telecoms package when MEPs dropped their opposition to French-style internet `three-strikes' laws aimed at illegal internet downloaders.

In a major reversal of the parliament's position for much of the last year, MEPs in behind-closed-doors negotiations with the Council of Ministers, representing the member states, embraced new language in a compromise text that no longer requires that only judicial authorities be allowed to cut off internet access.

The deal is a major reversal of the parliament's position for much of the last year

Rather than requiring that a judge alone be the authority to order a severing of the internet connection, the compromise text reads that only a "prior fair and impartial procedure"is necessary, a phrasing that is sufficiently ambiguous that has allowed both sides to claim a win.

The Greens, who had led the battle against internet cut-off in the parliament, called the result a clear victory.

Rama Yade, the popular French cabinet minister, has been told to "shut your gob or resign" by colleagues after criticising Nicolas Sarkozy and government policy.

Cabinet ministers have branded Miss Yade, 32, a "spoiled child" and she now faces being ousted in a reshuffle.

The outspoken, Senegalese-born politician - once hailed by the president as France's Condoleezza Rice, the former black American secretary of state - has been frozen out of the cabinet for serial insubordination.

Miss Yade now faces going the same way as Rachida Dati, the other star symbol of Mr Sarkozy's politically and ethnically diverse "rainbow" cabinet.

A renegotiation of EU institutions to suit the Conservatives if they win power is "out of the question" and London risks isolation if it makes such demands, France's minister for Europe said today.

The Conservatives have given up on the idea of putting the European Union's Lisbon Treaty to a referendum, but pledged to seek the return of some powers from Brussels to London.

"It is out of the question to reopen negotiations on the treaty," said Pierre Lellouche, France's secretary of state for European Affairs, on the sidelines of a news conference by President Nicolas Sarkozy.

"That would require agreement from the 26 other EU members and I don't think for a single minute that will be possible. It was so hard and took so long (to agree on Lisbon) that these institutions are here to stay, probably for decades," he said.

The postal workers union dramatically called off a third round of postal strikes due to start tomorrow after reaching an "interim" peace deal with management at Royal Mail. The postal executive of the Communications Workers Union agreed unanimously to postpone further industrial action while further talks took place under the umbrella of the arbitration service Acas.

The Christmas post now looks secure and Lord Mandelson beat Royal Mail itself to putting out a statement welcoming the news and expressing confidence the negotiating "wrinkles" could soon be ironed out.

Investigators today said they had solved one of Russia's most notorious killings and had arrested two far-right activists for the murders of the human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the journalist Anastasia Baburova.

Markelov - a friend of the assassinated journalist Anna Politkovskaya - and Baburova were gunned down in January in central Moscow. They had been walking towards the metro when a hitman shot Markelov in the back of the head. Baburova may have tried to grab the assassin and was also shot, dying in hospital.

Today Russia's federal security service (FSB) named their killers as Eugenia Khasis, 24, and Nikita Tikhonov, 29. While Khasis appears to have no previous convictions, Tikhonov is a veteran neo-Nazi activist wanted in connection with the murder of an anti-fascist campaigner.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU military chiefs are nervous that their advice will not carry the same weight once the new Lisbon Treaty is in place and that the planned diplomatic service will not contain enough experienced military personnel.

Europe's chiefs of defence gathered in Brussels on Wednesday (4 November) to review all military operations under the EU flag and to witness the handover of power from outgoing EU military committee chair, Frenchman Henri Bentegeat, to Sweden's Hakan Syren.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Sweden and Finland have given approval for Russia to build a controversial gas pipeline through their waters in the Baltic Sea.

Swedish environment minister Andreas Carlgren on Thursday (5 November) explained that a 23-month-long assessment cleared the project of potential harm to seabed munition dumps, bird-breeding and shipping.

PM to take signed Lisbon treaty to Rome next Friday

Prime Minister Jan Fischer will take the signed Lisbon treaty to Rome next Friday, whereby the ratification process by the Czech Republic will be completed, a government spokesman told the ctk news agency on Thursday. Prime Minister Fischer is due to pay a two-day visit to the Vatican and will use the opportunity to take the treaty to Rome in person, the spokesman said. The Czech Republic is the last country to complete ratification of the Lisbon treaty which is due to take effect on December 1.

[My emphasis]

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

Germany is pinning its economic hopes on future-oriented industries such as solar panel manufacturing. But high-tech companies are facing shortages of essential metals as China, which dominates the world market in so-called rare earths, begins stockpiling the highly sought-after resources.

A massive gray mountain rises from the vast plains of Inner Mongolia. The artificial hill is the pride of the Chinese and the envy of the world -- at least the world of commodities traders.

Workers at the Bayan Obo mine refer to the mound as "Treasure Mountain." Up to 6,000 people work at Bayan Obo, China's largest mine, which is completely inaccessible to the outside world. The Chinese authorities are intent on ensuring that no outsiders should gain access to the craterlike landscape, and for those who do somehow manage the feat, it is akin to arriving on another planet.

The EU and India will focus on pushing their free trade pact during their 10th annual summit in New Delhi on Friday. But other significant issues are also on the agenda, though the two sides don't always see eye-to-eye. 

A major sticking point at the EU-India summit is the planned free trade agreement (FTA) between the two sides. Daniele Smadja, head of the European Commission's delegation to India, said on Wednesday that the talks needed a boost.

"The FTA negotiations are very complex," Smadja said. "We have to jump into the cold water of give and take." The time had come to exchange concessions, she said.

But Clemens Spiess, a lecturer at the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg, said he did not expect a final agreement to be reached.

"There are still a lot of hurdles," Spiess told Deutsche Welle. These include intellectual property rights disputes and tariff disagreements. He said he did not expect FTA talks to conclude successfully until 2010 or 2011.

The Bank of England will expand its programme of money creation by £25bn over the next three months to boost Britain's recession-hit economy, Threadneedle Street announced today as it left interest rates unchanged again.

Warning that UK banks are still failing to provide enough credit to businesses and households, the Bank said it would increase the size of quantitative easing (QE) to £200bn.

The Bank's nine-strong monetary policy committee also pegged bank rate at its record low level of 0.5%, where it has been since March. It said cheap borrowing and QE were needed to prevent inflation falling below its 2% target.

Outlook: So the horse trading begins again. Just a day after the Government pumped a truly obscene amount of taxpayer's cash into two zombie banks, the motor manufacturers are at it with General Motors wanting some financial candy of its own as the price for protecting thousands of British jobs. To be fair, there's good news to report here. The volte face made by GM on the sale of its European operations is infinitely preferable for Vauxhaull car workers in this country when compared to the alternative arrangement.

A Russian bankrolled deal to sell to Canadian car-parts maker Magna would have cost many more jobs in this country. So it's no wonder the unions are crowing and Mandy's got a big smile on his face and a cheque book in his back pocket. They're rather less happy in Germany, where other unions are threatening strike action thanks to the demise of a deal that they believed would be far more favourable to them.

That may be narrow-sighted. A GM Europe cut loose from its parent would have been a smallish player in a landscape dominated by giants. No MG Rover, for sure, and with much better management, but there were big question marks hanging over it.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The vast majority of experts advising the European Commission on greater financial regulation are drawn from the same institutions that helped cause the crisis, claims a new report published on Thursday (5 November).

The document, A captive Commission - the role of the financial industry in shaping EU regulation, accuses the EU executive of listening almost exclusively to the finance industry both before and after the onset of the financial crisis over a year ago.

Its authors, the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (Alter-EU), a coalition of some 160 civil society groups, say the commission continues to draw insufficiently from the considerable expertise to be found in academia and civil society groups.

"The commission only seems to be interested in listening to the advice of the finance industry, rather than acting in the interests of society," said Paul de Clerck, a member of ALTER-EU's steering committee.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nine more people have been arrested in the Galleon Group insider-trading scandal, bringing to 15 the number charged in the biggest hedge fund-related case in history.

The new arrests include Wall Street traders, lawyers and hedge fund managers, according to complaints filed in federal court in New York on Thursday,

The new charges come nearly three weeks after Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of hedge fund firm Galleon Group, and five others were arrested in the case. Rajaratnam is accused of masterminding the scheme.

One of the more useful information items in Goldman's periodic filings is granular disclosure on the firm's CDS holdings, and specifically segregated data by maturity bucket and by spread as pertains to "maximum payout and notional amount of written credit derivatives." In essence, due to the firm's monopoly in CDS inventory and, therefore, trading, this is the squid's beating heart: between buying and selling (hopefully offsetting positions) CDS in billions of dollars worth of notional daily, and being able to capitalize on wide spreads, courtesy of the extinction of such traditional competitors as Bear and Lehman, the firm will continue to make hundreds of millions in profits every day, month and quarter, due to its newly found monopolist exposure when it comes to trading CDS, both as principal and as agent.

....

A Goldman CDS flow trader will traditionally make markets, for example in company XYZ, where he will give the (5 year) market as 500/530 bps, meaning buyers will put on new CDS at a spread of 530, while sellers will offload and/or short positions at 500 bps. By running traditionally balanced books, Goldman's flow trader is able to extract a 30 bps spread on any block of matched buys and sells. On $1 billion of notional traded CDS (which is much less than the firm does daily), with a DV01 of about $400k, if Goldman can unwind its CDS book daily to natural buyers and sellers, it can make $12 million simply by taking advantage of the spread ($400k (DV01) x 30 bps). At an average CDS block trade size of $25 million, Goldman's hundreds of salespeople need to just call up 40 accounts to trade in size and make the firm a risk-free $12 million. In days of volatility, Goldman can easily trade over $10 billion in notional equivalent. Again assuming a 30 bps spread, which the 85 Broad firm has basically guaranteed itself for life, courtesy of monopolizing the CDS market with just itself, and JPMorgan providing any relevant CDS inventory, Goldman can easily make $120 million daily, merely from trading CDS on a risk free agency basis.

....

Sometimes there will be quirks: like when the firm has net notional exposure to a firm like AIG, which may or may not be able to fund tens of billions worth of margin calls, thereby skewering Goldman, which is forced to eat the loss. Of course, in those instances people like Tim Geithner step in and bail out the counterparty so that things at Goldman can continue running as smoothly as always, and the firm can go back to making hundreds of millions in virtually risk free trades daily (and that even excludes the perpetually Fed backstopped balance sheet: this aspect of its risk free business is merely a function of its near-monopolistic dominance of the CDS market: nothing more fancy).

Another time when things get problematic is when Goldman is running an unmatched book: in other words when it has sold more CDS than it has bought, a disbalance from a purely P&L point of view, or when it has sold less than it has bought, a risk from a counterparty perspective. The last is precisely what happened to Goldman as it transitioned from last year and headed into 2009. As the charts below demonstrate the company materially tightened its overall sold CDS exposure, in other words the gross maximum payout it may have been on the hook for at any given moment.

....

Yet on a notional basis, things are not quite as bleak, and it appears that Goldman has learned its lesson: while at Q4 2008 the firm had a net liability arising from the carrying value of its written CDS of almost half a trillion, or $460 billion to be precise(that would mean its net exposure if all counterparties failed, would leave the company scrambling to get first row seats before Bernanke's printing press and praying it could print $460 billion worth of worthless dollars in one day), that number has since collapsed to a liability of merely $82 billion. Yet even that number is staggering, and begs the questions of what will happen to Goldman if we have another Lehman event at some point when the Fed's printing presses finally blow a fuse, and, more importantly, just what is the exposure of the other major CDS trading power houses which have likely not been as prudent in managing their credit derivative exposure. Zero Hedge will next analyze disclosed CDS exposures at JPM, DB and some of the other left over CDS trading desks. Luckily, with Lehman and Bear no longer out there (providing a happy Goldman with limitless Fixed Income monopoly powers), our task will be much easier.

   Time to start loading up on those sovereign CDS. Today Michael Milken provided some insight into what the five key reasons for our current predicament are, which, courtesy of absolutely no real reform, double as even greater future risks for the global financial system. These include: i) that corporate credit is not the same as leverage,... ii) mortgages in real estate are never an investment-grade asset, iii) interest rates are volatile and unpredictable, iv) The US AAA rating is misleading and, and most important, v) sovereign debt is a big, if not the biggest, risk.

At some point Milken must have done some serious study of the history of actual credit risks and defaults.  Imagine that!  His comments on the US AAA ratings give a sample of his analysis. It reads as though it was based on spoken delivery and simply transcribed:

   Rating is misleading

    I guess none of the financial crisis would have happened without rating. There are now only four AAA-rated companies left in the America now: Microsoft, ADP, ExxonMobil and Johnson & Johnson.

    Yet, S&P alone, in the first eight years of this century, has rated 17,000 securities AAA. How do you lose a 100% on a triple A investment? Well, first, those weren't AAA companies. Second, you can borrow against it and create a security that is against the mortgage portfolio that is still rated as triple A. That is nothing new. If you read the rating history you will see that a double-A railroad has a 200% higher default rate than a B-rated industrials.

    Sometimes, companies were not getting downgraded after they actually defaulted. Even for GM, there was an uptick in its ratings in last May from B- to B.

    So if you are relying on rating, then I am not sure why, as a money manager, you should be paid a fee because there isn't too much value-added you are providing. Besides, people who provide ratings are just human beings. Maybe if they are the most talented in the world, you would have already hired them.

Good comment from one who should know.  Reminds me of a penetrating critique of Wall Street circa 1929:
"Those guys on Wall Street were running a RACKET!"--- Al Capone

Milken's comments are worth a read.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

The efforts to try to burnish the image of bankers have gone from being unconvincing to ridiculous. I am certain we will see Jon Stewart comment on the latest twist, of trying to claim that God wants banks (and therefore bankers) to make a lot of money.

Since Calvinism is the de facto religion of America, equating wealth with virtue would normally make perfect sense. But one of my colleagues, who is thinking about writing a book on Christianity and capitalism, points out that God as depicted in the Bible is not a very good steward of the planet. He regularly uses brimstone, floods, earthquakes, plagues, and whatnot. And there aren't offsetting scenes of acts of nature conservancy. So if man was created in God's image, and God seems to have a bit of an appetite for destruction, perhaps the God-invokers are barking up the wrong tree. They might instead consider passing themselves off as mere vessels of Divine will in helping make bad things happen, that the people are who are suffering, in good Calvinist logic, clearly must be sinners somehow, even if it is not obvious what they did wrong.

But the defenses we get instead are more than a bit twisted, at least as reported in Bloomberg:

   Barclays Plc Chief Executive Officer John Varley stood at the wooden lectern in St. Martin-in-the- Fields on London's Trafalgar Square last night and told the packed pews of the church that "profit is not satanic."

    The 53-year-old head of Britain's second-biggest bank said banks are the "backbone" of the economy. Rewarding high- performing bankers with more pay doesn't conflict with Christian values, he said. Varley was paid 1.08 million pounds ($1.77 million) and no bonus in 2008....

    "Is Christianity and banking compatible? Yes," he said in an interview after the speech in the 283-year-old church. "And is Christianity and fair reward compatible? Yes."

Yves here. Whoa! I will agree that banking is probably not Satanic, but not being on a first name basis with him, I could be wrong here. "Satanic" leads to images of ritual sacrifice of babies, and I don't think the banking industry is into that,. However, many readers were put off by the idea of securitizing life settlements. That occurs when the holder of a life insurance policy is bought out by a third party who continues paying the premiums, speculating that they will die on some sort of actuarially-determined timetable. Of course, if the investor is proven wrong, and the people whose lives he is now insuring live longer than expected, he makes less money and has reason to want them to die, and could resort to trying to speed up the inevitable.

....

Of course, you could also turn this argument on its head. If God really did want banks to make money, they have been really really bad at it! How many years of earnings were torched in the crisis? Certainly everything since 2003. And then the banks should properly be charged for all the losses their messes created in the real economy. So the people who ran those banks should not expect to be well treated on Judgement Day, no matter how you look at their divine mission.

Citigroup has been supplied with 1,200 units and Goldman with 200, says Jessica Scaperotti, press secretary for the Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. The agency has so far approved orders by 29 employers--including 16 that have yet to receive any vaccine--after they were cleared by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). Big employers that have received or are scheduled to receive vaccine so far include Time Warner (TWX), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Memorial Sloan-Kettering, New York Presbyterian Healthcare System, and New York University....

"We decided early on that we would look to health-care providers in the state as the best way to get the vaccine out as quickly as possible to those groups in high priority by the CDC," says Claire Pospisil, spokesperson for the New York State Health Dept. "Eventually there will be enough vaccine for everyone that wants one, but initially--because H1N1 is affecting [the aforementioned groups] at much higher risk than the general population--it makes sense to get them the vaccine first."

Health-care workers at those employers are bound by the CDC to distribute the vaccine only to populations deemed to be at high risk of developing serious complications from swine flu: pregnant women, children and young people aged 6 months to 24 years, people who live with or provide care for infants under 6 months (who cannot be vaccinated), people aged 24 to 64 with medical conditions that put them at higher risk for flu-related complications, and health-care workers and emergency medical personnel.

The founders of Skype have regained a significant stake in the internet company after settling a contentious legal dispute that had threatened to derail its $2bn sale.

The deal, which was announced today, will give Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis a 14% stake in the internet telephony service they originally sold to auction website eBay in 2005 for $2.6bn.

Confirmation that the duo had settled their court action - which focused on the ownership of a core technology used by Skype to deliver millions of voice and video calls over the internet - means the duo have now regained around $400m of shares in the company.

The United Nations says it will relocate around 600 non-Afghan workers, more than half of its foreign staff in the war-torn country, following an attack by Taliban militants in the capital last week in which five foreign UN workers were killed.

The United Nations will relocate about 600 of its roughly 1,100 international staff working in Afghanistan. The move comes after an attack on a UN guesthouse in Kabul last week left five foreign workers dead.

"The UN has already asked its employees to be more careful, to avoid travelling without a convoy in Kabul and in other parts of the country," said FRANCE 24's special correspondent in Kabul, Lucas Menget. "This is the logical next step."

The gunman who killed five British soldiers in an attack in Afghanistan's Helmand province was today back with Taliban fighters who greeted him with flowers, sources close to the Afghan security forces said.

The killer - identified only as a policeman called Gulbadin - was back under Taliban protection, the source said.

British and Afghan commanders were undertaking an urgent investigation into the circumstances of the attack.

The Ministry of Defence named the five soldiers who died in the attack as Warrant Officer Darren Chant, Sergeant Matthew Telford, Guardsman James Major, Acting Corporal Steven Boote and Corporal Nicholas Webster-Smith.

MAGDALENA, Argentina (Reuters) - Argentine cattle raiser Jose Trivino fears the end of a decade-long boom in feedlots that is changing the face of traditional ranching on the legendary Pampas plains.

As the nation's farmers turn over more land to lucrative soybeans, cattle that once roamed freely over vast expanses are increasingly being reared in feedlots and fattened on grains instead of grass.

The government, keen to keep prices low for steak-loving Argentines, has encouraged feedlot expansion with millions of dollars of subsidies. But producers like Trivino say a recent suspension of state payments risks putting them out of business.

On a leafy street in Almaty, a few hundred miles from Kazakhstan's border with China, the elegant mansion of China National Petroleum Corporation is kept under close guard. Behind its closed shutters, Chinese oilmen have plotted a strategy to win a huge portfolio of Kazakh energy assets to feed their country's need for oil.

China began discreetly buying Kazakh oilfields 10 years ago and now has more energy projects on the go in the central Asian nation than any other country. While the west's biggest oil groups agonise over the risks of undertaking expensive infrastructure developments in obscure locations, Beijing has boldly built a 3,000km pipeline to lock Kazakhstan's oilfields into its orbit.

WASHINGTON -- Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan have devised ways to cripple and even destroy the expensive armored vehicles that offer U.S. forces the best protection against roadside bombs by using increasingly large explosive charges and rocket-propelled grenades, according to U.S. soldiers and defense officials.

At least eight American troops have been killed this year in attacks on so-called Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, and 40 more have been wounded, said a senior U.S. military official who, like others interviewed on the issue, declined to be further identified because of the issue's sensitivity.

The insurgents' success in attacking the hulking machines, which can cost as much as $1 million each, underscores their ability to counter the advanced hardware that the U.S. military and its allies are deploying in their struggle to gain the upper hand in the war, which entered its ninth year last month.

El Gobierno español considera que la creación de un Gobierno de unidad en Honduras sin representantes del presidente derrocado Manuel Zelaya constituye "un incumplimiento flagrante del acuerdo" que suscribiron el presidente 'de facto', Roberto Micheletti, y el propio Zelaya la semana pasada para poner fin a la crisis política que vive el país centroamericano desde el golpe de Estado del 28 de junio.

For English speakers.

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

One of the nagging issues in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit are demands that the US and Europe provide massive aid so poorer countries can buy expensive emissions-free technologies. Activist David E. Martin claims many of the patents for today's low-carbon technologies -- including some used in wind power and hybrid cars -- are already in the public domain.

When the host of a party predicts a flop, it rarely inspires much confidence in a good bash. With just over a month to go before international climate talks start in Copenhagen the Danish government has done exactly that: Don't hold your breath, it said, it's unlikely there will be a binding global deal. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso had even stronger words earlier this week: "Of course we are not going to have a full-fledged binding treaty, Kyoto-type, by Copenhagen. There is not time for that."

Money is threatening the fight against climate change. Climate experts have priced emissions-cutting technologies needed by developing countries at €100 billion ($149 billion) a year starting in 2020, and they want to see about half of that investment burden shouldered by public funding from the United States, the European Union and Japan. The world's poorest countries warn that without a solid promise of funds, they will walk out of the Copenhagen summit. But €50 billion is more than the loose change European states, Washington and Tokyo are willing to dole out -- particularly after bailing out their banks. European leaders meeting in Brussels last week shirked concrete commitments, saying only they would contribute their "fair share" to upfront climate financing.

English farmers have been given a last chance to adopt greener practices that benefit wildlife and help to combat climate change or face deductions from their state hand-outs of cash.

The Government has set a tough new target which requires that the area of arable fields covered by environmental schemes should double within three years.

Every farmer has also been told that he or she should fund some environmental improvements on their land without any financial support from payments made under the Common Agriculture Policy.

In addition, Hilary Benn, the Rural Affairs Secretary, has made clear that he expects farmers to keep some land fallow to help to provide habitats for birds and small mammals such as voles and field mice.

A global deal to fight climate change will take at least six months and possibly another year to finalise, according to negotiators at the heart of the UN talks.

In a series of briefings, senior British and EU diplomats said they had abandoned any hope of reaching a legally binding treaty at the Copenhagen summit next month and had now started to plan only for a meeting of world leaders. This final acknowledgement follows weeks of growing pessimism and represents a significant downgrading of the summit's original goal.

The world's carbon trading markets growing complexity threatens another "sub-prime" style financial crisis that could again destabilise the global economy, campaigners warn today.

In a new report, Friends of the Earth says that to date "cap and trade" carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions but have been plagued by inefficiency and corruption that render them unfit for purpose.

As the world heads towards the Copenhagen climate summit, Britain and other developed countries want to see carbon trading expanded worldwide. The carbon market, mainly based in Europe, was worth $126bn in 2008 and is predicted to mushroom to $3.1tn by 2020 if a global carbon market takes off.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A controversial climate change bill cleared its first hurdle in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, allowing President Barack Obama to tout progress in the run-up to next month's global warming talks in Copenhagen.

Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ignored a Republican boycott and used their majority to approve the legislation that would require U.S. industry to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases 20 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels.

The rehabilitation of the beleaguered Large Hadron Collider was on hold tonight after the failure of one of its powerful cooling units caused by an errant chunk of baguette.

The N.C. Utilities Commission on Wednesday denied environmentalists' move to stop the expansion of Duke Energy's Cliffside coal-fired power plant west of Charlotte.

The N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network had asked the commission to revoke its approval of the 800-megawatt expansion that was granted in 2007.

With the ruling, the only remaining challenges to Cliffside are before a state administrative court. A federal lawsuit filed by environmental groups to stop or modify the expansion was dismissed earlier this year. Before the utilities commission, WARN claimed that completing the project was no longer in the public interest. The need for the expansion, it said, is based on Duke's potential sales of wholesale power, not the electricity demands of its Carolinas retail customers. (N.C. = North Carolina)

Thirteen may be unlucky for some, but not for the National Theatre of Wales's artistic director, John McGrath, who has just announced a baker's dozen of productions to mark NTW's inaugural year-long season. It's an eclectic list, ranging from the first production for more than 50 years of The Devil Inside Him, a "lost" John Osborne play set in a Cardiff boarding house, written just before Look Back in Anger - to a new show, Mundo Paralelo, from the brilliant Welsh-based No Fit State circus. The 13th show of the season, which will take place in Port Talbot in April 2011, is to be Passion, a contemporary version of the old community plays that used to be performed amid the steel town's smoking towers. Actor Michael Sheen, who grew up there, is creative director of the project and will also star in it.

Parents are to lose the right to withdraw their child from sex education classes when the youngster reaches 15, the Schools Secretary announced today.

The move means all teenagers will receive at least one year's worth of lessons covering sex, contraception and relationships before the age of consent.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European drug manufacturers and dealers are becoming highly innovative and sophisticated in marketing legal alternatives to illicit drugs, such as 'spice', an annual report on the state of drugs in Europe shows.

While regular cannabis consumption is on the decline, a new trend, of 'legal' plant-based products with psychoactive effect is emerging, the European monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction reports in its latest released data.

LONDON (Reuters) - The number of people needing hospital treatment for the H1N1 virus in England is "snowballing," although the rise in the overall number of estimated cases is slowing, health officials said on Thursday.

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said there are now 848 patients in hospital with swine flu, of whom 172 are receiving critical care. In September, the number of swine flu patients in hospital was below 300.

Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, said the reason for the jump in severe cases was unknown, although the virus is not thought to have mutated.

Ethan Nadelmann is feeling good. Really good.

As the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, Nadelmann has long advocated for the liberalization of U.S. drug laws -- specifically, making marijuana legal, regulated and taxed and ending criminal penalties on the possession and use of all other drugs.

For most of that time the Alliance has been relegated to the fringe of serious policy discussions, a space long occupied - or so the stereotype goes - by radical libertarians and readers of the marijuana enthusiast magazine High Times.

But things are changing. The last few months are "the first time I've ever felt that the wind is at my back and not in my face," Nadelmann said. "There's a tremendous amount of momentum across the board."

Consider the developments of the last year. In March, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb introduced a bill calling for a wholesale overhaul of the criminal justice system in the United States. Our system is cripplingly large, he argued, and marred by wrongful incarcerations, poor rehabilitative treatment and mental health care and a price tag of $44 billion a year on prisons alone.

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the dead gunman as Nidal Malik Hasan. The Army Times earlier this year reported that Hasan, a doctor in the Medical Corps, had been promoted to major. Army officials refused Thursday to identify anyone involved in the shootings.

According to records, Hasan had lived in Maryland and Virginia. He was assigned to Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood at the time of the attack. CNN reported that Hasan was a mental health specialist and had previously practiced at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, the commanding general of Fort Hood, said one gunman was shot at the processing center and that two others suspected of involvement were apprehended later.

hmmm

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Questions over competition in the media industry have been raised by Rupert Murdoch's admission that News Corporation is talking to other organisations about its plans to introduce web charging.

Murdoch this week admitted that it is proving harder than expected to introduce charges for readers browsing his newspaper websites and that News Corp may miss a target of next June for the introduction of so-called "pay walls" at papers including the Sun, the Times, the New York Post and the Australian.

The initiative, which has divided the industry, is an attempt to recalibrate the business model for struggling print media businesses.

Thanks, Fran, for the link on such an interesting painter. I didn't know of him, and having looked through the slide show am ready to pack up and go visit Romania. Very nice work.