Designated PM invited parties to negotiate. PSD, PNL and UDMR won't take part - Politics - HotNews.ro

"I invited all parliamentary parties to negotiate at 5 pm", the newly designated PM Liviu Negoita said today. He asserted that he wished to create a national union Government and that the negotiations will last for three days. On Monday, the list featuring the new Cabinet will be submitted to the Parliament.

PSD, PNL and UDMR announced that the parties will not take part at the negotiations announced by the designated PM.

(Precedents and context: Presidents vs. Parliaments: now playing in Romania), update.)


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

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.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has acknowledged the decision to let his son Jean seek a job managing France's top business district, the La Defense skyscraper park west of Paris, was "probably an error", a source at the French presidential palace said late on Monday.

A 23-year-old second-year law student, Jean Sarkozy had announced in October that he intended to pursue a bid to chair the EPAD agency managing La Defense, home to 2,500 corporate giants such as Total and Société Générale bank. After two weeks of controversy during which critics slammed Sarkozy junior as evidence France was becoming a "banana republic" run at his father's whim, the president's son dropped the job bid.

The Elysée source also alluded to a "likely cabinet reshuffling" to ostensibly take place after regional elections in March. Sports Minister Rama Yade was singled out in the statement as a minister who has had "difficulty adapting to any team."

(Translation: the puppet is dancing on its own? ...also see yesterday's discussion.)


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

As Belgium's prime minister assumes a frontrunner position in the race for the first EU president, his countrymen fear that Belgium wouldn't last long without him. 

In European Union diplomatic circles, the name Herman Van Rompuy has largely replaced that of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair when it comes to a first EU president.  

Since Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy indicated they would not support a bid by Blair, the newest leaders in the race for president of the EU are Van Rompuy, the current prime minister of Belgium, and Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende.

Sarkozy and Merkel called the 62-year-old Van Rompuy after a dinner in Paris on Oct. 28 "to tell him that they were thinking about him for the European president's job," the Brussels daily Le Soir reported Friday.

Unconfirmed sources indicate that the Belgian leader is interested in the position.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Iceland this week appointed its chief EU accession negotiator, but the country's application application is already hitting the buffers domestically and Brussels fears that the Arctic nation may "pull a Norway", meaning an application that the government is sincere about, but which the people strongly reject.

The country's finance minister, Steingrimur Sigusson and leader of the government's junior coalition partner, the Left Green Movement, said last Tuesday at a meeting of the Nordic Council in Stockholm that while Iceland had applied to join, the people did not want to become members of the EU, a statement that has not been met with great enthusiasm in Brussels.

On 1 November, the former Social Democratic foreign minister of the country, Jon Baldvin Hannibalsson, one of Iceland's biggest supporters of joining the EU, told a meeting at the University of Reykjavik that accession would probably be rejected in a referendum and criticised the current government as providing weak leadership.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The US will continue to treat EU members on a bilateral basis in its visa regime, but will review its passenger data policy towards Europeans, interior minister Janet Napolitano told MEPs on Friday (6 November).

Current US legislation does not allow the Obama administration to lift visa requirements for the five remaining EU countries which are still outside the so-called Visa Waiver programme, Ms Napolitano said in a meeting with EU lawmakers dealing with justice and home affairs.

Europeans traveling to the US will soon have to pay a ten-dollar tourist fee

Several MEPs had requested a rethink of the US visa policy towards European states, so that all EU citizens are treated equally. Citizens from Poland, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania are required to apply for a tourist visa if they want to travel to the US, while citizens from all other member states do not have to.

But Ms Napolitano warned the EU legislature to "be careful what it asks for," as there are numerous voices in Congress that want to scrap the visa waiver scheme altogether, citing security concerns.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Serbia plans to formally apply for EU membership by the end of this year and has pledged it will to apprehend war criminals as soon as possible, Belgrade's foreign minister Vuk Jeremic told European lawmakers on Thursday (5 November).

"The basic groundwork is there for Serbia to submit its official application for EU membership. We hope to do so by the end of this year," Mr Jeremic said in front of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee.

Serbian foreign minister Vuk Jeremic told MEPs that Ratko Mladic will be caught

The sticking point in EU-Serbian relations is the hand-over of war criminals such as former Bosnian Serb leader Ratko Mladic, who still remain at large. The former general is accused of having ordered the Srebrenica massacre, in which some 8,000 Bosniaks were killed. A government official said earlier this week that a majority of Serbs are still opposed to his extradition to the Hague.

Mr Jeremic reassured MEPs that his government was "searching every square millimetre of [its] national territory" for the fugitive. "If we knew where he was, he would not be at liberty, I can guarantee that," he said.

A slip of a pen by a British bureaucrat has thrown the sovereignty of Gibraltar into question by allowing Spain to lay claim to its shores in the name of conserving birds and bats.

The mistake was made by a civil servant who was applying for European Union protected habitat status for the coast.

The official made an error in a map reference on the document and consequently submitted an application for an area of coastal waters near Algeria.

Meanwhile, Spain, which has claimed Gibraltar as its own territory for more than 200 years, submitted, without informing London, a successful EU application to create an "Estrecho Oriental" conservation zone that includes the British territory.

The mistake, which was made in 2006 but only spotted recently, theoretically gives Spain responsibility for managing the Rock's coastline and waters as a special "Site of Community Interest" (SCI), a development that has dismayed Gibraltar's government.

DRESDEN -- When Frank Siebler moved from Dresden in the late 1990s to take a job in bustling, prosperous Munich, he thought he was leaving home for good.

In 1997, when Mr. Siebler was 25, the outlook for engineers in the former East Germany was so bleak that people like him were leaving in droves, creating a huge brain drain from East to West. But in a sign of just how much has changed over the past decade, Mr. Siebler, like a growing number of other Germans from the region, is back.

A start-up telecommunications company in Dresden called Signalion persuaded him -- without too much difficulty, he adds -- to resettle in the city where he grew up.

"The mind-set really changed for me," Mr. Siebler said. "At the beginning when I left I didn't think about returning."

AFP - Berlin authorities outlawed a rapidly-expanding neo-Nazi group on Thursday, with police staging dawn raids at the homes of its leading members, according to the city's interior minister Ehrhart Koerting.

The group, named "Frontbann 24" after a forerunner of Hitler's "storm troops", is "the fastest-growing neo-Nazi organisation in Berlin," according to Koerting.

A spokeswoman for Koerting said the group had between 40 and 60 members but was quickly attracting more. No arrests were made during the raids.

"The ban should be seen in the context of a decisive fight against far-right efforts in Germany and as an important step towards protecting our free and democratic constitutional order," Koerting said.

Poland has demanded that US troops be based on Polish soil in the wake of Russian war games which simulated a nuclear attack and invasion.

Radek Sikorski, Poland's foreign minister, said he was alarmed by recent military exercises conducted by the Russian army in Belarus, a country that borders Poland, and wanted the US military as a counterweight.

"We would like to see US troops stationed in Poland to serve as a shield against Russian aggression," he said.

"If you can still afford it, we need some strategic reassurance." Despite assurances given by US Vice President Joe Biden last month that Washington would stand by its Central-European ally there is growing unease in Poland that its interests have been sacrificed by an America eager to curry favour with Moscow.

Flush with cash and facing hard times at home, Spanish companies are again looking abroad.

The Great Recession has been easy on Enric Casi. In fact, the general manager of Mango, Spain's No. 2 fashion retailer, can barely keep up with business. The 53-year-old Barcelona native has inaugurated 225 stores since the crisis began and anticipates launching an additional 200 annually in coming years, mostly abroad...

Mango's story isn't a one-off. Spanish companies from windmill makers to banks to bicycle manufacturers have been flexing their financial muscle just as American and European rivals cut back. Last year, Madrid's Banco Santander, Europe's second-largest financial house, paid $1.9 billion for Sovereign Bancorp in the US and $16 billion for Brazil's Banco Real. Retail giant Inditex, owner of fashion brand Zara, in February penned a deal with India's Tata Group to open stores across the subcontinent. And Iberdrola Renovables, already America's No. 2 wind farm developer, has won $546 million in US federal grants -- more than half of Washington's stimulus spending for green-energy projects.

Germany, second only to China as the world's leading exporter of goods, has been particularly hard-hit by the collapse of global markets. But the mass unemployment some had feared has failed to materialize. Labor experts in many countries are wondering how Germany has done it.

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It was due in part to the workers in the program that Germany's new labor minister, Franz Josef Jung, was able to report an astonishing development last Thursday. In the midst of the country's deepest economic crisis, which has led to dramatic declines in order volume in key industries, unemployment was only half a percentage point higher in 2009 than it was in 2008. "The current figures are encouraging," Jung said. There are 3.2 million people registered as unemployed in Germany. At the beginning of the year, many had predicted up to 5 million would be unemployed by this fall.

GM's about-face has angered both Opel workers and European governments. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, union leader and Opel board member Armin Schild blasts GM for mismanagement and says that the US company is uninterested in saving the Opel brand.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Schild, General Motors has decided not to sell Opel after all, preferring to restructure the German automaker itself. What do Opel employees think of the plan?

Armin Schild: GM is going to continue pursuing company policies that have already led to the firm's decline over the last 20 years. Pressure on the employees and on the government, however, will become more intense.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What do you think GM will demand?

Schild: GM will ask for the same amount of support that the government already promised to Magna. In return, they will come up with a restructuring plan which, at first glance, looks a lot like the one Magna proposed. But closer study reveals that it does not actually contain what you would expect. The existence of the Opel brand has been put in danger. At the very least, it has been intentionally damaged.

With jobless numbers soaring, the US Senate voted to extend unemployment benefits and expand a tax credit for homebuyers. The measure goes to the House of Representatives, where it will likely be approved and sent to President Obama to sign into law.

AFP - The price of gold hit a record high above 1,100 dollars an ounce in trading here on Friday following a report that Sri Lanka had joined India in purchasing the precious metal in favour of the US currency.

The more money they create, the more the Bank of England's policy makers must wish they had better things to spend it on than government debt.

Of the extra £175bn the Bank has created through its QE policy since March, around £173bn has been used to buy UK gilts. That's no great surprise. But it is far from ideal.

Among the highlights: Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That's 44 percent of the body - compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall.

CRP says California Republican Rep. Darrell ("Screw U") Issa is the richest lawmaker on Capitol Hill, with a net worth estimated at about $251 million. Next in line: Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), worth about $244.7 million; Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), worth about $214.5 million; Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), worth about $209.7 million; and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), worth about $208.8 million.

All told, at least seven lawmakers have net worths greater than $100 million, according to the Center's 2008 figures.

"Many Americans probably have a sense that members of Congress aren't hurting, even if their government salary alone is in the six figures, much more than most Americans make," said CRP spokesman Dave Levinthal. "What we see through these figures is that many of them have riches well beyond that salary, supplemented with securities, stock holdings, property and other investments."

We urge readers to support the Too Big To Fail Petition: maybe one of these days kalamari will finally be served.

Sen. Bernie Sander's Petition:

Petition to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner

Too Big to Fail is Too Big to Exist

Financial institutions that are "too big to fail" played a major role in undermining the American economy and driving our country into a severe recession.

Financial institutions that are "too big to fail" put taxpayers on the hook for a $700 billion bailout and more than $2 trillion from the Federal Reserve in virtually zero interest loans.

Huge financial institutions have become so big that the four largest banks in America (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup) now issue one out of every two mortgages; two out of three credit cards; and hold $4 out of every $10 in bank deposits in the country.  

Just five banks in America (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) own a staggering 95% of the $290 trillion in derivatives held at commercial banks. Derivatives are risky side bets made by Wall Street gamblers that led to the $182 billion bailout of AIG, the $29 billion bailout that allowed JP Morgan Chase to acquire Bear Stearns, and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The concentration of ownership in the financial services industry has resulted in higher bank fees and interest rates that consumers are forced to pay for credit cards, mortgages and other financial products.

No single financial institution should be so large that its failure would cause catastrophic risk to millions of American jobs or to our nation's economic well-being.

.....

Defying the Obama administration, the House Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to remove from the USA Patriot Act a tool for tracking non-U.S. citizens in anti-terrorism investigations.

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The legislation would allow the Patriot Act's never-used "lone wolf" section to expire at the end of the year. The provision permits the government to spy on non-Americans even when they're not linked to a recognized terrorist group.

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The House bill's also would:

_Require the government, in requesting a roving wiretap, to demonstrate to a judge that the target is a single person. This would avoid a fishing expedition that could ensnare innocent people, supporters say.

_Require the government to produce more evidence to a court than currently needed, in order to obtain records from businesses, libraries and booksellers. An even higher standard would be needed for obtaining library and bookstore records.

_Set a December 2013 expiration for the roving wiretap and records seizure sections. Congress would have to revisit the legislation to keep those sections in force.

Hasan, a devout American-born Muslim, was shot several times in the aftermath of the rampage by a civilian police officer who was today being hailed as a hero.

Mr Cone said Sgt Kimberly Munley and her partner responded to reported gunfire within three minutes.

She then disabled the suspect despite being shot herself in the process.

"It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer," the military spokesman said.

Shortly before her arrival, Hasan - armed with two non-military issue pistols, including a semi-automatic - entered a section used to prepare soldiers for deployment overseas and started firing.

Within minutes, 12 soldiers and a civilian at the base were dead or dying in the worst mass shooting yet at a military base in the US.

Defending Britain's mission in Afghanistan against waning public support, Brown admitted the government in Kabul had become a "by-word for corruption" -- and also pressed for more Afghan troops to bare the brunt of frontline action.

He said he had spoken to the president, whose re-election was confirmed this week, several times in recent days and urged him to make progress on five key issues, from security to governance and economic development.

"If the government fails to meet these five tests, it will not only have failed its own people, it will have forfeited its right to international support," Brown said in a speech in London.

Puppet, dance!


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

The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.

The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.

The sophisticated technology, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than older models. It reduces the diameter of a warhead and makes it easier to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.

Reports say Saudi jets have pounded Shiite rebels camps in northern Yemen in retaliation for a rebel incursion across the border. Saudi ground troops are said to be gathering near the Yemeni border.

Jorge Reina, a negotiator for Zelaya, said the pact fell apart because congress failed to vote on whether to reinstate the deposed president before the deadline for forming the unity government.

The pact did not require Zelaya's return to the presidency. It left the decision up to congress. Zelaya interpreted that to mean that congress had to vote on the issue by Thursday.

Supporters of Micheletti disputed that, saying the pact required that members of the unity cabinet be in place by Thursday but that there was no deadline for congress to meet.

There are 50 murders a day in South Africa, the host country of the 2010 football World Cup. And Brazil, host of both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, also suffers from extreme violence. With a view to the high-profile events, the two countries are now attempting to crack down on rampant crime -- and are using ruthless tactics to do so.

AFP - South Africa has cancelled a deal to buy eight Airbus A400M military transport planes due to hefty cost overruns and delivery delays, the government spokesman said Thursday.

"The cost escalation would have placed an unaffordable burden on the taxpayer at a time when the national fiscus (Treasury) is under pressure due to the economic downturn," government spokesman Themba Maseko said in a statement.

summit of southern African leaders ended late Thursday with Tsvangirai agreeing to end his three-week boycott of the government that he formed in February with veteran President Robert Mugabe.

The summit gave the rival leaders 30 days to negotiate an end to their disputes, including a feud over key government appointments and the arrest and harassment of Tsvangirai loyalists.

South Africa was tasked with evaluating Zimbabwe's progress and reporting back to the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the 15-nation bloc that acts as guarantor to the power-sharing deal.

KILLEEN, Tex. -- The police officer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base here was on the way to have her car repaired when she responded to a police radio report of gunfire at a center where soldiers are processed before being sent overseas, the authorities said Friday.

As she pulled up to the center, the officer, Sgt. Kimberly Denise Munley, spotted the gunman, later identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base.

Sergeant Munley -- a woman with a fierce love of hunting, surfing and other outdoor sports -- bolted from her car, yanked her pistol out and shot at Major Hasan. He turned on her and began to fire. She ran toward him, continuing to fire, and both she and Major Hasan went down with several bullet wounds, Mr. Medley said.

Whether Sergeant Munley was solely responsible for taking down Major Hasan or whether he was also hit by gunfire from her partner is unclear, but she was the first to fire at him, the authorities said.

Sergeant Munley, 34, is an expert in firearms and a member of the SWAT team for the civilian police department on the base, officials said. Mr. Medley said she had received specific training in a tactic called active shooter protocol, which was intended for this kind of situation.

Some of the most violent earthquakes that have occurred unexpectedly in places with no recent record of tremors may be the aftershocks of previous earthquakes that took place decades or even centuries ago, scientists have discovered.

Recently both Russia and China have claimed to be able to use cloud seeding to increase rainfall and snowfall, or change the location of where it falls. In the past, snow-making experiments have been carried out in North American ski resorts in the past with little evidence of success. So how have the Russian and Chinese scientists achieved this feat and what evidence is there that it is in fact due to cloud seeding?

...

Professor Tom Choularton is Head of the School of Earth, Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences is supporting the Science: [So what? So everything] campaign, which aims to highlight the leading UK science research that will shape the future of Britain.

Water continued to erupt from the ground near the German state of Hesse's Ministry of Finance in Wiesbaden on Friday. Workers drilling for geothermal energy on Thursday accidently unleashed the powerful water spill.

The water stood under high pressure approximately 130 meters (427 feet) below ground when disturbed by the drilling. At times, up to 6,000 liters (1,585 gallons) of water per minute poured from the hole.

An "extinct" animal has been found alive and well in the Firth of Forth in Scotland. Oysters were thought to have died out in the area decades ago but specimens were found at a secret location.

Scientists have described the discovery as hugely significant and insisted it could lead to future commercial production. The Forth Oyster was previously thought to have died out due to over-fishing and water pollution in 1957.

AFP - Great Whites may be loners, but the ocean's most feared predators also hang out together between Mexico and Hawaii at a deep sea watering hole known as the "White Shark Cafe," a study reveals.

AFP - An Australian baby has become the first person to be cured of a rare and often fatal brain-poisoning condition thanks to an experimental treatment tested only on mice, according to doctors.

The child, known only as "Baby Z", was born with molybdenum cofactor deficiency, a genetic condition in which a build-up of toxic sulphite causes fits and brain damage, typically killing victims within a few months of birth.

Researchers have just linked prenatal exposure to bisphenol-A - a near-ubiquitous industrial chemical - with subtle, gender-specific alterations in behavior among two year olds. Girls whose mothers had encountered the most BPA early in pregnancy tended to become somewhat more aggressive than normal, boys became more anxious and withdrawn.

This is the first study to link human behavioral impacts with BPA, a common ingredient in hard polycarbonate plastics and the resins used in food-can linings. Emerging data from an unrelated research group points to another especially rich newfound source of BPA to which people unwittingly may be exposed: thermally printed cash-register receipts (see next blog).

At present, there's no way to know whether the apparent behavioral impact of BPA exposures early in development will persist or disappear, says Bruce Lanphear of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. But this epidemiologist, an author of the new study, says his worry is that if the kids don't grow out of these behaviors - and indeed, the changes are expressed widely across a population - they could greatly increase the number of teens at risk for delinquency, say, or for one day needing medical treatment of depression or anxiety.

Further prompting concern that the associations are real, his team points out, are rodent studies showing aggression and hyperactivity in pups prenatally exposed to BPA.

Lanphear and his colleagues at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center have been conducting a Health Outcomes and Measures of the Environment - or HOME - Study for several years. A primary focus has been the investigation of neurobehavioral risks posed by lead exposures early in a child's development. For the study, moms were recruited early in pregnancy and then followed through their babies' births. The children - now three to five years old - will continue to be followed into school age.

Mega-supermarkets and discount stores killed the corner store in small-town Germany. But now they're making an unexpected comeback by offering mixes of products and services tailored to the local population and, of course, the town gossip you can't get in a hypermarket.

Romanians are again, the main targets of the Statistical File edited by Caritas/Migrantes, presented at Rome last month. With almost 800000 citizens living in the Peninsula at December 31, 2008, our community occupies the first place followed by Albania and Morocco each with 400 000.

When Romania joined the EU, Romanians became European citizens, with the same status as Italians. However, they continue to be the object of various studies and research on immigration. The 2009 report offers a key lecture about immigration in Italy, Antonio Ricci, one of the writers of the report said.

The aim of the report is to increase awareness of Italian institutions so that they will improve the integration of those deciding to move to Italy, through a hospitality policy. Fini is the one to promote the right to vote of immigrants. Recently, he supported in the Parliament a change in the rules needed to obtain citizenship.

The report reads that there are about 800 000 Romanians in Italy but real life shows that there are more than 1 million.

A little earlier Jan Velinger discussed the situation with Viktor Mravčík of the National Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction:

"According to the information available Czechs, especially teens, have the highest level of marijuana use in Europe. An earlier study showed this was true among 16-year-olds and in the Czech Republic, until 2003 there was a remarkably sharp increase. Between then and 2007, though, the prevalence rate in marijuana use stabilised. By comparison, countries where abuse was also high saw a drop, leaving the Czech Republic at the forefront."

What are some of the factors, in your view, contributing to the high rate?

"There are many factors - or there is a package of factors - contributing to it. But if you look at countries with a recent decrease in drug use among the younger population, like France, which have seen a drop in cannabis use, or the UK, which were both formerly high up with the Czech Republic, both implemented programmes that have helped. They introduced a lot of programmes targeting the phenomenon: France, for instance, created dozens of clinics targeting hardcore cannabis users.

The world is looking to Berlin as the city celebrates 20 years since the fall of the Wall. But in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Lech Walesa, the man who led Solidarnosc, says that the collapse of communism started in the Polish shipyards -- and that East German "deserters" endangered his ultimate success.

The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers that Stiff Nights, a "dietary supplement" used to promote erections, contains an illegal drug and is potentially dangerous.

Following a complaint, the FDA investigated the product and found that it contains sulfoaildenafil, an analog of sildenafil -- the active ingredient in Viagra -- that has not been approved. Sulfoaildenafil may interact with prescription drugs called nitrates, including nitrogylcerin, producing dangerously low blood pressure.

The product is distributed on Internet sites and at retail stores by Impulsaria LLC of Grand Rapids, Mich. "Because this product is labeled as an 'all natural dietary supplement,' consumers may assume it is harmless and poses no health risk," said Deborah M. Autor, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Office of Compliance. "In fact, this product is illegally marketed and can cause serious complications."The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers that Stiff Nights, a "dietary supplement" used to promote erections, contains an illegal drug and is potentially dangerous.

Even before he got the job, Westerwelle, who is the leader of the Free Democrats, Chancellor Angela Merkel's junior coalition partner, managed to generate major headlines with a minor gaffe. At his first, post-election press conference, Westerwelle refused to answer a question posed by a BBC journalist in English remarking that when in Germany, one should speak German. To cap it off, he glibly invited the journalist to come and have a "fabulous tea" with him outside of any press conference, at which they could happily speak English together.

The linguistic kerfuffle launched a minor political scandal and dozens of magazine and newspaper columns around Europe. Befitting the German penchant for debate, it also spurred hundreds of online arguments about Westerwelle's reaction.

But it also raised the question as to whether Westerwelle could speak English at all. And it provided yet another opportunity to lampoon a politician who has become accustomed to being portrayed as the Dan Quayle of German politics.

For years, the world has mocked Germany for its love affair with David Hasselhoff. And, for years, Germans have been hoping that the world would forgive and forget. But now that MTV has invited "the Hoff" to perform in Berlin, just like he did 20 years ago when the Berlin Wall came down, their hopes have been dashed.

Aaaargh! Everyone run!!

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

With harsh words for his old rivals, fondness for his family, and an evasive approach when it comes to discussing Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president hits the front pages again with the publication of the first volume of his memoirs.

A Powys butcher has rewritten the rules of etiquette by accepting an honour from the queen with a ballpoint pen behind his ear.

William Lloyd Williams was collecting an MBE for services to the meat industry and checked with the palace if it was acceptable to wear the unusual accessory to the ceremony.