Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has declared a national day of mourning on 7 December after a fire at a nightclub killed at least 109 people.

He said the fire was a criminal act and those responsible must be punished.

Officials say fireworks inside the club caused Friday's blaze and that most victims died from smoke inhalation.

More than 140 people were reported injured at the Lame Horse club in Perm, some 1,400km (870 miles) east of the capital Moscow.

The Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, made a deal with the Sicilian Mafia in the early 1990s that put the country "in the hands" of the Mob, a court in Turin was told yesterday.

Gaspare Spatuzza, a jailed Mafia hitman turned witness, told a packed and heavily guarded bunker courtroom that his Cosa Nostra Godfather boss had cut a deal with Mr Berlusconi in 1993 that provided unspecified "benefits" to the Mafia in exchange for political support. The media tycoon entered politics a few months later and won his first term as Prime Minister in 1994.

No editor of Germany's right-wing, mass-circulation Bild newspaper could ever expect to be liked by the country's left-wing press. But what was mere mutual animosity has now erupted into an embarrassing and vitriolic row over the size - believe it or not - of the Bild editor's penis.

The dispute concerns a massively exaggerated phallus attached to an image of Bild editor and bane of the left, Kai Diekmann. His altogether striking endowment features prominently in a huge satirical mural on the outside wall of the office of Berlin's alternative left-wing Die Tageszeitung (Taz) newspaper.

The mural, by the artist Peter Lenk, was put up months ago. It was the latest weapon in the Taz campaign to mock Bild, whose offices are just opposite, as well as Mr Diekmann, its flamboyant, hair-gelled, red-baiting 45-year-old editor.

A group of bloggers have organised a protest in Rome to demand the resignation of scandal-ridden Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. They estimate a turnout of 350,000 participants for what they are calling "No Berlusconi Day."

The movement has its own web site, www.noberlusconiday.org, which was launched in October by a half-dozen bloggers. One of the organisers, Gianfranco Macia, wrote on the site that the movement was "the first initiative of its kind totally mobilised on the internet."

Lord Mandelson has warned that the British Government will scrutinise any foreign takeover of Cadbury and oppose any buyer that fails to "respect" the historic confectioner, the subject of a £10.1bn hostile bid from Kraft Foods of the US yesterday.

The Business Secretary said that while the Government would not oppose a takeover of Cadbury purely on the grounds that the buyer was foreign, it would fight any deal it thought smacked of short-term profiteering.

US Outlook: When the US last emerged from recession, after the dot.com bust, the Bush administration presided over what became known as the "jobless recovery". If they get it right, a new generation of leaders might just spark a jobs-led recovery.

This week's White House "jobs summit" was a photo opportunity, but there is already the hum of ideas in the air about how government can support job creation. This is in contrast to the early 2000s, when the government cut taxes, sat back and waited for the jobs to materialise.

With its vital political timing, next week's pre-election pre-Budget report could be an eventful affair. The Chancellor, Alistair Darling seems unlikely to announce a further special fiscal boost of any size, despite signs that the recovery is late but some economists have begun to talk up the chances of some minor voter-friendly wheezes, such as a temporary income-tax rebate.

Many expect that Mr Darling will also take the opportunity to announce - or pre-announce - the sort of eye-catching measures that will help sharpen the Labour Party's message in the run-up to a general election. Moves on inheritance tax, income tax, VAT and capital gains tax have all been canvassed as ways for ministers to raise money and to reinforce the Government's differences with the Conservative programme. But the fragile state of the economy at present may militate towards postponement, if they are admitted at all.

Mark Twain famously said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. (If it didn't, technical analysis wouldn't work at all.) It also makes comparing today's bull market to that of 1982 an ear-splitting and scary exercise. As the second nastiest recession since World War II -- and the last time we had 10.2% unemployment -- one might think comparing 1982 to 2009 would offer insights into share prices. Barry Ritholtz certainly thinks so. The CEO and director of research at FusionIQ put together such a comparison Thursday, setting the 1982 rally against today's, and it ain't pretty.

               Comparing the 1982 Bull Market with the 2009 Rally

Rally Comparison     1982              2009

P/E Multiple         8X                26X

Dividend Yields      6%                below 2%

Book Value           Discount          2X Premium

Monetary Policy      Reducing money    Increasing money

                     growth and        growth and

                     inflation rates   inflation rates

Fiscal Policy        To reduce non-    To increase 

                     non-defense       non-defense

                     spending          spending

Deficits             Peaking and       Surging +10%

                     relative to GDP   relative to GDP 

Trade Barriers       Were being torn   Are being

                     down              erected

Regulation           Deregulation      Re-regulation

                     in vogue          rising

US Dollar            Plaza Accord      Mercantilist

                     bull market       bear market

Household Credit     Balance sheets &  Balance sheets

                     participation     contracting

                     rates expanding  

Tax rates            Income, capital   Taxes Rising 

                     gains and         Now

                     dividend taxes

                     declining

....

Fiscal policy, deficits, global trade barriers, regulation, the U.S. dollar, household borrowing, taxes...the differences between then and now make 2009's market melt-up almost a Bizarro World version of the Reagan rally. The remarkable contrasts make it almost inconceivable that investors would pay more than three-times as much for stocks today as they did back then.

A big part of this phenomenon is attributable to the fact that this is a rally predicated on hopes and dreams, says Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor's. The market is betting on economic and corporate profit improvement six to nine months from now, he says. In other words, it's a faith-based rally, not a fundamental one. "In a rally like this investors act more like Billy Graham than Benjamin Graham," Stovall says.

....

Yes, China's already a much bigger deal on a fundamental and economic basis than Japan or the Asian Tiger's ever could have hoped to be, but we wonder if investors aren't overpricing the would-be effects of the Middle Kingdom, if that is indeed the case.

We're going to have to go with Maymin -- not to mention Gluskin Sheff's David Rosenberg, star bank analyst Meredith Whitney and Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini -- on this one. Like the fizzy lifting drink scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, we see bubbles, bubbles everywhere -- and fear they are propelling us right into the spinning blades of a fan.

The family of murdered British student Meredith Kercher have welcomed the convictions of her killers, saying they agree with the guilty verdicts.

Meredith's brother, Lyle Kercher, said they were "pleased with the decision" to convict Amanda Knox and her Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.

"Ultimately we are pleased with the decision, pleased that we've got a decision, but it's not a time for celebration," he told a press conference in Perugia, Italy.

His mother, Arline, said: "If the evidence has been presented, then yes, you have to agree with that verdict."

Knox, 22, and Sollecito, 25, killed Kercher in an attack that ended with Sollecito taunting Kercher with one knife while Knox plunged another into her throat, the trial heard.

Iran's vice-president said today his country needs 20 industrial-scale uranium enrichment facilities, a potentially dramatic expansion of its nuclear program in defiance of UN demands.

Ali Akbar Salehi, who also heads the nuclear program, told the official IRNA news agency that Iran needs the sites to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity through nuclear power plants over the next 20 years.

The statement comes at a time of heightened Western concerns over Iran's nuclear intentions. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Iran is considering whether to scale back cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency after it approved a resolution censuring Iran over its nuclear program.

Guinea's military leader Moussa "Dadis" Camara was last night being treated at an army hospital in Morocco after being shot following an argument with one of his aides. Soldiers were out in force on the streets of Conakry, the capital of the West African country, amid fears of a counter-coup to topple the army major who came to power one year ago.

Senior Pakistani army officers were targeted yesterday in a bloody militant suicide bomb attack that killed at least 40 people. In the most high-profile assault on the army since it launched a major ground offensive against Taliban militants in South Waziristan two months ago, suicide bombers and gunmen laid siege to a two-storey mosque in Rawalpindi's garrison quarter.

They opened indiscriminate fire on a group of worshippers and hurling grenades at the crowd before two bombers detonated their explosives. At least six military officers were among the dead, as well as three regular soldiers. Some 17 children were also killed.

An accidental explosion ripped through a store in northwestern Pakistan today, killing at least three people and trapping others in a separate building that caught fire, police said -- rattling nerves in a city repeatedly pounded with militant attacks.

Officials initially said the blast in a commercial district of Peshawar was caused by a car bomb, but investigators found no trace of explosives at the scene. Police Chief Liaquat Ali Khan said it was an accidental explosion that went off in a shop with paint stored inside. The exact cause was still unclear.

AFP - The Philippines on Saturday announced the imposition of martial law in a southern province to quell a rebellion by a powerful clan accused of being behind the massacre of 57 people.

President Gloria Arroyo placed Maguindanao province under military control late on Friday in an effort to contain heavily armed militias belonging to the provincial governor and other members of his Muslim clan, authorities said.

"There's a rebellion in the area," Justice Secretary Agnes Devanadera said. "It was practically an overthrow of government."

Arroyo's controversial move is the first time martial law has been declared in the Philippines since the reign of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who had the whole of the country under martial law from 1972 to 1981.

Authorities insisted martial law was necessary to rein in swarms of heavily armed gunmen loyal to the Ampatuan clan who had threatened violence if their leaders were taken into custody.

AFP - Bolivian President Evo Morales is preparing to turn an expected easy re-election victory in weekend polls into a legal club to crush his distant conservative rival.
  
Morales, 50, has accused Manfred Reyes Villa, a former governor and candidate in Sunday's election, of corruption and links to the murders of at least 12 pro-Morales supporters during 2007 unrest.
  
Early this week, Morales charged that Reyes Villa, 54, and his running mate were "thieves" who would be jailed under a new law he intends to introduce once the election was out of the way.
  
On Thursday, Morales's government also claimed Reyes Villa had bought an airline ticket to leave Bolivia the day after the election in violation of a travel ban pending his trial.

Two more Rwandan peacekeepers have been killed and one injured in Sudan's Darfur region - the second deadly attack on the contingent in two days.

The soldiers were distributing water at a camp for the displaced when at least one man approached them and opened fire, officials say.

On Friday, three Rwandan peacekeepers were killed and two injured after an attack on a convoy.

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand's ageing monarch addressed the nation on Saturday for the first time since hospitalisation more than two months ago, marking his 82nd birthday with a call for "calm" in the politically turbulent country.

The world's longest-reigning monarch, regarded as semi-divine by many of Thailand's 67 million people, has been hospitalised since September 19 and made a one-hour trip to Bangkok's Grand Palace for a ceremony attended by top royal officials and politicians.

NEW YORK -- His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn't stop criticizing Iran on Facebook.

Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran.

"When they arrested my father, I realized the email was no joke," said Koosha, who asked that his full name not be used.

Gordon Brown tonight led a chorus of condemnation against "flat-earth" climate change sceptics who have tried to derail the Copenhagen summit by casting doubt on the evidence for global warming.

Sceptics in the UK and the US have moved to capitalise on a series of hacked emails from climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia, claiming they show attempts to hide information that does not support the case for human activity causing rising temperatures.

Up to 20 million Bangladeshis may be forced to leave the country in the next 40 years because of climate change, one of the country's most senior politicians has said. Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, Bangladesh's finance minister, called on Britain and other wealthy countries to accept millions of displaced people.

In a clear signal to the US and Europe that developing countries are not prepared to accept a weak deal at next week's Copenhagen climate summit, Abdul Muhith said Bangladesh wanted hosts for managed migration as people began to abandon flooded and storm-damaged coastal areas.

Vegetarians, look away now.

Potatoes and tomatoes make good eating but they may also have a vicious side that makes them deadly killers on a par with venus fly traps and pitcher plants.

They have been identified as among a host of plants thought to have been overlooked by botanists and explorers searching the world's remotest regions for carnivorous species.

Researchers at Royal Botanical Gardens Kew now believe there are hundreds more plants that catch and eat insects and other small animals than they previously realised. Among them are species of petunia, ornamental tobacco plants, potatoes and tomatoes and shepherd's purse, a relative of cabbages.

LILLE, France (Reuters) Amid the hum of machinery and warm odor of putrefying autumn leaves, official Pierre Hirtzberger is explaining how three giant fermenters can convert household food waste, trimmings from parks and gardens and the slops from school and hospital canteens into enough methane gas to power about a third of the buses in the French city.

"The process is exactly the same as in the stomach of a cow," he said, gesturing toward three biodigesters which each hold 20,000 cubic meters of rotting liquefied waste "The objective is to fuel 100 of Lille's buses on this biogas, out of a total fleet of 350," Hirtzberger, head of the city's urban waste research and development, told Reuters.

From San Francisco to Malmo, Sweden, cities around the globe are preparing for a new imperative: to accommodate the mass of world population growth and thrive, without further accelerating the release of carbon dioxide that threatens their existence. With half the world's population already living in cities and the urban population projected to reach almost five billion by 2030, it is not just growth that puts them in the front line of climate change.

Even if populations escaping drought migrate to urban centers, the fact that 60 per cent of the world's 39 largest metropolises are located in coastal areas puts the cities themselves at risk in future centuries, from rising seas.

THERE is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know -- because I used to share that view.

But today I have more nuanced feelings.

<...>

I've discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world's strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability. ...

<...>

On each of these issues, American businesses are going to play as much or more of a role in our progress as the government. And this isn't a bad thing, as corporations know they have a lot to gain by establishing environmentally friendly business practices.

My friends in the business world keep telling me that Washington can help on two fronts: by investing in green research, offering tax incentives and passing cap-and-trade legislation; and by setting and enforcing tough standards to ensure that companies with cheap, dirty standards don't have a competitive advantage over those businesses protecting the environment. As for the rest of us, we should get over the misimpression that American business cares only about immediate profits, and we should reward companies that work to keep the planet healthy.

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse."

A conservation initiative seeks to preserve up to 1 million acres of tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills -- some of the last stands of tallgrass in the nation. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering buying voluntary conservation easements in 14 Kansas counties. Participating landowners would have control over day-to-day operations on their land, and be able to pass it on or sell it.

The easements would prevent landowners from developing the land for residential or commercial use. The plan, still being developed, also might govern how much or where wind-energy operations could be placed, said Amy Thornburg with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Denver.

"We want to end up with an intact tallgrass prairie. And although intact is a hard thing to describe, you know it when you see it," Thornburg said. "The tallgrass region includes ranching, fire, grazing and prairie chickens. They are all dependent on each other. If it wasn't for the ranching heritage of the area, we wouldn't have a prairie."

The sea of grass and wildflowers, which once stretched from Northern Texas through Manitoba, largely has been plowed up, paved over or built upon. Between 2 and 4 percent of the nation's prairie remains, and much of it is in the Flint Hills.

"The prairie is shrinking every day through invasion of trees, homes and roads," said Flint Hills rancher Bill Sproul. "I like to think of the easements as preservation of the horizon. The horizon is important to me because it is one of the few things that you can only view from afar."

I grew up in a lightly grazed prairie in Osage County, Oklahoma and remember wading through dew covered grass above my knees in June. It was populated with meadow larks, scissor-tailed fly catchers, cliff swallows, dove, cotton tail rabbits and terrapin that I remember. It seemed a vast, rolling sea of grass to me at age eight. The creek bottoms were covered with trees and held other wonders.

The father of a friend was the foreman for the Boots Adams Ranch many miles to the north east. Adams was the CEO of Phillips Petroleum and that ranch has become a tall grass preserve. It is good to see more of this ecosystem being preserved.

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

Berlin has been melded back together so well over the last two decades that there are now very few obvious visual clues to the division that once was: the shiny "golf ball" TV Tower, the East Side Gallery (the longest remaining stretch of the wall), and the odd scattering of blocky GDR buildings, which defined eastern development in the 1960s when the city was in dire need of reconstruction. Although many of these East German government buildings were knocked down after 1989, and many of those that still stand are ugly, cheap monstrosities, the most iconic remaining examples of this era-defining architecture are now winning the interest of a new generation, thanks in part to the current buzz around the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down. Many young Berliners now think of the GDR era with nostalgia; it's no longer something to forget.

At 10.20pm on Saturday 1 August 2009, a man walked along Nachmani Street, a residential road in central Tel Aviv. He went into the apartment block at number 28 and down a flight of steps to the basement flat, where a song by Blur was playing on the stereo amid the sound of laughter and conversation. There, the man shot 13 people, killing 26-year-old Nir Katz and 16-year-old Liz Trobishi, before returning up the steps and disappearing into the promenading crowds. His identity remains unknown.

Understanding what happened that night is not easy. It might be tempting to assume that such an attack - unprovoked, apparently indiscriminate - was political, somehow connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it was not, for the basement flat at 28 Nachmani Street is the headquarters of the Aguda (Hebrew for "association"), otherwise known as Israel's National Association of LGBT, representing the country's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender communities.

Italian tax police have seized a secret stash of masterpieces from the disgraced founder of a collapsed dairy company.

Police in Parma seized 19 works belonging to Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi from the basements and attics of three apartments.

Among the masterpieces are paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Cezanne, Modigliani, Manet and Degas. Authorities estimated the total value at more than 100 million euros (£90 million.)

Police showed some of the paintings to journalists near Parmalat's headquarters today.

South Africa is engaged in a race against time to avoid the spectre of empty stadiums next June, as international fans turn their backs on the richest World Cup in history.

Moves in the past few days by the local organisers and by football's governing body, FIFA, suggest the third round of ticket sales, launched on 5 December, will not prevent the World Cup from becoming a financial fiasco for South Africa.

While FIFA has already made a record 2.1 billion Euros from the sale of sponsorship and television rights, the problem lies in low international take-up of premium tickets and apparent apathy among South Africans.

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail--but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people.

... Recent analyses, in fact, suggest that many orchid-gene alleles, including those mentioned in this story, have emerged in humans only during the past 50,000 or so years. Each of these alleles, it seems, arose via chance mutation in one person or a few people, and began rapidly proliferating. Rhesus monkeys and human beings split from their common lineage about 25 million to 30 million years ago, so these polymorphisms must have mutated and spread on separate tracks in the two species. Yet in both species, these new alleles proved so valuable that they spread far and wide.

As the evolutionary anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have pointed out, in The 10,000 Year Explosion (2009), the past 50,000 years--the period in which orchid genes seem to have emerged and expanded--is also the period during which Homo sapiens started to get seriously human, and during which sparse populations in Africa expanded to cover the globe in great numbers. Though Cochran and Harpending don't explicitly incorporate the orchid-gene hypothesis into their argument, they make the case that human beings have come to dominate the planet because certain key mutations allowed human evolution to accelerate--a process that the orchid-dandelion hypothesis certainly helps explain. ...

There have been other weeks during which Tiger Woods' life has borne little resemblance from Sunday to Sunday. In the second week of April in 1997 when all the potential suddenly turned into the phenomenon of the youngest major-winner in golfing history; in the first week of May 2006, when the death of Earl Woods forced the son to become a man with no mentor to turn to, no guru to impress.

One man's house may be his castle but in the case of film-maker Roman Polanski yesterday, released at last from his prison cell just outside Zurich, it is his luxury prison.

Chalet is the correct term for the 19,000 square foot wooden home on the edge of the gold-plated ski town of Gstaad, high in the Bernese Alps, where Polanski was deposited by Swiss police yesterday after posting bail of $4.5 million and paying $2,000 for the electronic devices that will prevent him from leaving its confines.

Hollywood film star Nicolas Cage has been given an award for his humanitarian work by the United Nations in New York.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon presented the 45-year-old Oscar winner with the Global Citizen of the Year award for humanitarian endeavours.

Cage has also been appointed as a UN goodwill ambassador on drugs and crime.

The star said his role would be "to shine a spotlight on the need for global justice".

Well sorry, but things like this make me blub. There's hope.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Here's the second half

As an aside, "Prophecy," not going to try to spell it, in Dineh doesn't carry the same connotations the word has in English.  For one thing the Spirit World is not categorically separate.  Removing the Spirit World from the "Material World" would be like trying to remove the yeast from an already baked loaf of bread.  Can't do it.  So a prophecy isn't from some woo-woo Otherness.  The nearest I can get to it is: it's like the pages of an encyclopedia you haven't read.  The information is there but you have to have a copy of the encyclopedia, you have to be able to read it, you have to go looking for it, and finally you have to read and remember it.  After you've done all that then you can tell people what was in it.  That's what an Elder does.  Subtracting the - I would guess - unfamiliar thus strange narrative from the YouTube what we are being told is as practical and pragmatic as saying, "I prophetize if you place your hand on a table and hit it really hard with a hammer it's going to mess up your hand and hurt like hell.  So don't do that. If you are doing that already ... Stop.  You'll feel better."  98% of all Nation prophecies run along those lines.

(The other 2% is much, much, different.  But let's not go there.)

 

No one could have predicted