Gordon Brown stands accused today of misleading the public over his much-vaunted plans to help young people through the recession. Leaked documents show the government is planning drastic cuts for its flagship plan to train a new generation of apprentices.

Confidential papers obtained by The Observer show that, while Brown and his ministers have suggested they are raising investment in training, skills and apprenticeships, behind the scenes they are preparing some £350m of cuts for 2010-11 that will slash the number of training places on offer by hundreds of thousands.

Last night business groups, unions and opposition parties accused the government of duping young people - and businesses that train them in return for state help with funding - into believing it is investing more during the downturn, when the reverse is the case.

The cuts represent part of the £5bn in immediate spending reductions across all departments promised by Alistair Darling at his April budget, which the Treasury insisted would not compromise front-line services. The leaked documents show, however, that these cuts will severely limit help for young people seeking training and qualifications - and will raise fears that other core services such as schools and hospitals will also suffer

Two Tory frontbenchers in the European Parliament have announced their resignation from EU positions after Conservative leader David Cameron announced he would drop plans to hold a referendum on the EU's Lisbon Treaty should he come to power next year. B

Daniel Hannan, a prominent Conservative MEP, resigned on Wednesday as Conservative spokesman on constitutional affairs, hours after Cameron's EU speech. 

In a blog post , Hannan suggested he had felt betrayed by Cameron's U-turn. "It's not chiefly about Europe - it's about democracy. Out of 646 MPs in Westminster, 638 were elected on the promise of a referendum," Hannan wrote.

Hannan was soon joined by Roger Helmer MEP, who resigned as Tory employment spokesman in Brussels. "Like all Conservative MPs and MEPs, I was elected on an explicit Manifesto Commitment to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty," Helmer wrote on his website. "Yesterday, David Cameron ejected that commitment and repudiated that policy."

Germany's defense minister has called for clarification of Germany's status in Afghanistan, after a contoversial airstrike ordered by a German commander raised the question of whether the country is at war. 

German defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, told the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung that legal security must be established for all German Bundeswehr soldiers - in particular those taking part in complicated missions like Germany's participation in the NATO ISAF mission in Afghanistan.

"We can't have our soldiers hampered by legal doubts, especially when they are forced to make decisions under extreme time pressure," Guttenberg said.

Guttenberg's comments came after he voiced his support of a controversial airstrike ordered by a German commander in Afghanistan in September.

Guttenberg backed the decision of Colonel Georg Klein to launch an air attack on two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by Taliban militants near a German military base in northern Afghanistan.

taly is hailing the capture of an influential mafia boss who was on the list of the country's 30 most wanted men.

Italian police arrested Luigi Esposito on Saturday in a luxury villa in Posillipo, a northern city of Naples.

Esposito, on the run since 2003, was using a wig and false name when captured.

Police declined to comment on Sunday.

He is believed to be one of the heads of the Nuvoletta clan of the Camorra, which operates in the Naples region.

In 2006, he was sentenced to nine years in prison for drug-trafficking and for criminal association with the mafia.

The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain's Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself.

Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide?

On the surface, the court was considering a straightforward challenge to the admissions policy of a Jewish high school in London. But the case, in which arguments concluded Oct. 30, has potential repercussions for thousands of other parochial schools across Britain. And in addressing issues at the heart of Jewish identity, it has exposed bitter divisions in Britain's community of 300,000 or so Jews, pitting members of various Jewish denominations against one another.

"This is potentially the biggest case in the British Jewish community's modern history," said Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle newspaper here. "It speaks directly to the right of the state to intervene in how a religion operates."

The case began when a 12-year-old boy, an observant Jew whose father is Jewish and whose mother is a Jewish convert, applied to the school, JFS.

<...>

It is unclear what effect the ruling, if it is upheld, will have on other religious schools. Some Catholic schools, accustomed to using baptism as a baseline admissions criterion, are worried that they will have to adopt similar practice tests.

The case has stirred up long-simmering resentments among the leaders of different Jewish denominations, who, for starters, disagree vehemently on the definition of Jewishness. They also disagree on the issue of whether an Orthodox leader is entitled to speak for the entire community. ...

Thousands of curious Berliners in the center of the German capital have been sizing up over 1,000 giant dominos set to topple on Monday to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

The 2.5-meter high (8 ft. 2 in.) colorful plastic foam dominos have been lined up along a 1.5 kilometer (one mile) stretch of terrain once occupied by the Berlin Wall in the area around the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag parliament building.

The dominos will be tipped over in a ceremony on Monday to symbolically mark the toppling of the wall and the beginning of the end of communist East Germany on November 9, 1989.

The dominos have been decorated by various artists as well as Berlin school children to reflect upon what reunification represents to the people of East and West Germany.

The dominos are a powerful, symbolic message

Many of the dominos carry messages, like "We are one people". One labeled "bleeding heart" shows a sword cutting through the city of Berlin, starting a crimson flow of blood speckled with crosses.

In a press conference on Nov. 9, 1989 GDR central committee spokesman Guenter Schabowski unintentionally announced that citizens could travel to West Germany immediately. It was the beginning of the end for East Germany. 

Guenter Schabowski's press conference on November 9, 1989 was a fairly dull affair for most of its duration, according to those present. But a question by an Italian journalist right at the end turned it into one of European history's most memorable events.

Schabowski was asked just before 7 p.m. about when a new law permitting GDR citizens more freedom of travel would go into effect. Schabowski famously told the journalist: "As far as I know, that goes into effect now, immediately."

Since television viewers in both East and West Germany were following the live press conference, his comments electrified East Germans and eventually led to a redrawing of the European map.

Immediately following the remark, GDR citizens rushed to the border separating East and West Berlin, wanting to visit the western part of the city. The GDR border guards were unaware of the press conference, and, taken aback by the crowds gathering in front of them, made repeated calls to their superiors asking for guidance. They successfully prevented citizens from crossing the border for three hours.

But later in the evening, the guards relented and opened the borders. People were able to cross freely from East to West for the first time since the wall's erection on August 21, 1961.

Willy Brandt was uncomfortable with the idea, Günter Grass -- who in those days spoke from the summit of Mount Morality -- considered it an abomination, and Gerhard Schröder, maneuvering for political position as a Social Democratic underling, eventually voted against it.

François Mitterrand resisted as long as he could, and Margaret Thatcher, in her fierce opposition, held out even further.

From the day after the Berlin Wall fell, and for the next month or two, the prospect of reunifying Germany met with extensive rejection, while the Cold War's leaders nurtured the notion that it could be negotiated and stalled into a still distant future.

(That first free afternoon, meanwhile, as Angela Merkel later told reporters, she and her sister headed straight from East Berlin to visit the Big Rock Candy Mountain of free-world consumerism, the West Berlin department store KaDeWe.)

In recent weeks polls have been released on the differences, and as often as not the similarities, between the former East and the former West in matters of love and real estate, table manners and car ownership. In ways both typically serious and atypically jocular, Germans seem to be groping for an understanding of what happened and what, along the way, they have become.

Beneath the trivial differences lies a country more unified than anyone expected. That is not to say that there are not still some hard feelings, and particularly among those from the East, known officially as the German Democratic Republic. Despite great strides and an estimated $2 trillion in assistance since 1989, many there have not quite caught up to the West materially and saw their everyday way of life disappear along with the wall.

"The things from the G.D.R. are no longer around, and have to be hauled out of museum cabinets, whereas in the West they don't have to remember because those things are still there," said Jana Hensel, a writer who grew up in the eastern city of Leipzig, when asked about the quiz show. "For East Germans it is still painful to have to remember the things they have lost," she said.

But the fading divisions between the sides are most apparent among those with no memories of the wall or the G.D.R., the generation born after 1989.

"For people from our generation, it's just a part of German history," said Sebastian Melchior, 19, a student at the Alexander von Humboldt High School here in the district of Köpenick in the former East. "For us this division doesn't really exist anymore."

"My parents ask if people are Wessis or Ossis," he said, using the colloquial and slightly derogatory terms for the two groups, "but I just can't identify with that at all."

(Reuters) - The 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9 will coincide with other significant 20th-century anniversaries for Germany, some far darker:

Nov 9, 1918 - As defeat approached in World War One, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and Social Democrat Philip Scheidemann declared Germany's first republic from a window of the Berlin Reichstag parliament building. Known as the Weimar Republic, it collapsed in 1933 when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party exploited its weaknesses to seize power.

November 9, 1923 - Launched in a Munich Beer Hall the night before, Hitler's first attempt to seize power -- the Beer Hall Putsch -- quickly fizzled and the Nazi leader was imprisoned.

November 9, 1925 - The Nazi Schutzstaffel -- the SS -- was founded. The elite armed wing of the party, it spearheaded the genocide of Jewish people throughout Europe.

November 9, 1938 - Nazi thugs went on the rampage against Jews and Jewish property. At least 91 Jews were killed, 26,000 rounded up to be sent to concentration camps and thousands of synagogues, shops and other Jewish buildings were damaged. The broken glass that littered the streets of Berlin and other cities next morning gave the pogrom a name -- "Kristallnacht" (Crystal Night).

The fall of the Berlin Wall was a time of celebration, but also one of fear and uncertainty in the old East Germany.

 

A country, and an ideology, collapsed. Factories closed, jobs disappeared and old values were turned upside down. 

 

All of East German society felt the impact of those dramatic events, but perhaps none were as vulnerable as the country's foreign contract workers, or Vertragsarbeiter.  

 

Over the years, tens of thousands of people had travelled to East Germany from fellow Socialist countries in the developing world; places like Angola, Cuba, Mozambique and Vietnam. 

 

They learnt technical skills and worked in factories.

To some extent, the scheme was driven by a sense of solidarity between friendly, ideologically-linked states. 

 

But East Germany also used the migrant workers to overcome chronic labour shortages, and by sometimes keeping a portion of their wages, to pay-off debts owed to it by countries like Mozambique.

"If you just take the simple example of telling some people from Western Europe where you are from, they are a bit taken aback," said Yaroslav Hrytsak, professor of East European modern history at the Ivan Franko University in Lviv, Ukraine. "This part of Europe still seems so far away, so remote, for many West Europeans.

"It is not only the languages, which the West Europeans regard as strange, difficult and impossible to pronounce," said Professor Hrytsak, 49. "There are mental, imaginary borders," he said. "It is as if we are still regarded as backward, poor, not quite Europe."

<...>

"These countries have been not very well behaved and rather reckless of the danger of aligning themselves too rapidly with the American position," Mr. Chirac said. "It is not really responsible behavior. It is not well brought-up behavior."

<...>

"Everything is different" between East and West, even today, [a deputy editor of the main daily newspaper in Poland, Gazeta Wyborcza, Helena Luczywo, 63] said. "The economic conditions. The living conditions. But the basic difference is the national collective memory."

This, she said, was the main issue: "It is so important. There is no common memory." The freedom to remember, publicly, has been a release but also a burden for the countries of Eastern Europe.

<...>

All of this explains why, as yet, there is no unified European narrative. "National memory is divided along national lines," Mr. Hrytsak said. "It is very hard to overcome these kinds of borders. We need a space to overcome them."

Today, this space is being created by the younger generation from Eastern Europe -- people who never experienced the wall. ...

http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2009/11/08/sur-facebook-sarkozy-raconte-ses-coups-de-pioches -dans-le-mur-de-berlin_1264369_823448.html

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Preferential loans directed towards infrastructure and social programmes where announced by Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, at the opening of a two-day China-Africa summit.

Chinese help for African nations is designed to promote its interests in the export of raw materials and expansion of local markets. The Chinese package would encourage Chinese financial institutions to lend to smaller African firms, expand market access for African products and culitivate good will with local government by helping states cope with climate change.

Some of the financing would go to cancelling debts the most heavily indebted countries owe to China.

The loans - double those pledged at the last summit in 2006 - were promised as China and the West vie to expand their influence in Africa by portraying their interests as mutally beneficial. Chinese commentators regularly deride Western involvement in Africa as paternalistic exercises in aid hand-outs.

"Africa's development is an essential part of achieving global development, and as the sincere and dependable friend of Africa, China deeply feels the difficulties and challenges faced by Africa," Mr Wen said.

When the Berlin Wall opened two decades ago, freedom quickly swept through Germany's largest city. Prosperity, by contrast, was much slower to arrive. After the euphoria of reunification wore off, Berliners endured a recession that lasted almost without pause from 1996 to 2004. Even as imposing new government buildings rose along the stately Unter den Linden, the city of 3.4 million was in an economic funk.

Now, as Berlin celebrates the 20th anniversary of Nov. 9, 1989--the day East German apparatchiks threw open border crossings--its status as Germany's hippest and most affordable big city is finally translating into growth. Berlin has become a magnet for Internet and media startups as well as established corporations eager to tap the city's well-educated young people. Drugmaker Pfizer (PFE) moved its German headquarters to the capital from Karlsruhe last year. The top creative people of ad agency BBDO Germany will soon be in Berlin instead of Düsseldorf. And Finnish handset maker Nokia (NOK) has based its mobile mapping operations in Berlin since it bought local software startup gate5 in 2006. "You can recruit people from all over Europe to come to Berlin," says Michael Halbherr, the former chief of gate5 and now a Nokia vice-president.

HERE, in a corner of Switzerland where Italian is spoken and roughly one-third of the world's gold is refined into bars and ingots, business is booming. Every day, bangles, bracelets and necklaces arrive in plastic bags -- from souks in the Middle East, from pawn shops in Asia and from corner jewelers in Europe and North America.

"It could be your grandmother's gold or the gift of an ex-boyfriend," said Erhard Oberli, the chief executive of Argor-Heraeus, a major refiner here that processes roughly 400 tons of gold a year. "Gold doesn't disappear."

Amid a global frenzy fed by multibillion-dollar hedge funds, wealthy speculators and governments all rushing to stock up on the precious yellow metal, the price of gold briefly surpassed $1,100 an ounce on Friday, a record high.

Long considered the ultimate refuge for nervous investors, gold has climbed as the dollar has steadily weakened, budget deficits have expanded in the United States and Europe, and central banks have continued to pump trillions of dollars into weak economies, creating fears of another asset bubble that will ultimately pop.

"It's not that gold has changed, but gold buyers have changed," said Suki Cooper, a precious-metals strategist for Barclays Capital. "It's a structural shift we're seeing on the investing side, from Asian central banks right down to individual investors buying ingots and coins."

Amid the ongoing financial regulation overhaul, the banking industry is hoping to pull off a quiet power grab that has eluded its grasp since the Great Depression, by stripping the independence of the board that sets financial accounting standards.

The move could effectively let banks set their own accounting standards in rough economic times.

Astonishingly, at a time when the public is crying out for greater regulation to limit excessive risk-taking by financial institutions, the banks are trying to get Congress to agree that the next time there's a big downturn, they should have the ability to alter their accounting standards -- essentially, fudge the numbers -- so that the public and investors won't be able to tell how insolvent they really are. By ignoring their declining asset values, they can avoid the standard requirement of raising more capital.

The mechanism is contained in an amendment set to be introduced in mid-November by Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) that would move final authority over the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) from the Securities and Exchange Commission to a new body, a so-called "oversight" board, that would include the officials charged with managing systemic risks to the financial markets.

Billionaire Warren Buffett's investment firm has reported that profits almost tripled in the third quarter.

Berkshire Hathaway said its net profit was $3.2bn (£1.9bn) in the three months to September, compared to $1.1bn in the same period last year.

But most of that was due to an unrealised $1.1bn gain on some derivatives its insurance unit holds.

Mr Buffett last week said he was taking control of a US railroad in his biggest deal to date.

Berkshire agreed to buy the stock that it does not already own in Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF), the biggest US haulier of products such as corn and coal, for about $26bn in cash and stock.

Iraq's parliament has approved a long-delayed law governing national elections scheduled to be held next January, officials have said.

Members of parliament passed the law with 141 votes in favour in the 275-seat parliament after overcoming disagreements over the disputed city of Kirkuk.

Sunday's vote came after delays the previous night due to concerns from the Sunni Muslim bloc within parliament.

The parliamentary election is seen as a crucial test for the country as it attempts to emerge from the sectarian carnage and civil strife that has followed the US-led invasion in 2003.

Mr. Buffett is...betting against the more technology intensive, labor intensive, and industrial based part of (the US) economy.  If that were to do well, the dollar would strengthen and resources would be pulled out of the commodity sector - the more "modern" part of our production is not now commodity-intensive. The G20 will stand pat, waiting for the recovery and hoping for the best; "peer review" will turn out to be meaningless.  But this raises three dangers.

   1. China will overheat, with capital inflows fuelling a giant credit boom.  Books with titles like "China as Number One" and "The China That Can Say No" will appear.  The boom-bust cycle will resemble that of Japan in the 1980s - you don't need a current account deficit in order to experience a costly asset price bubble.  Other emerging markets may follow a similar pattern (think India, Brazil, Russia.)

   2. US and European banks will be drawn into lending to China and other emerging markets, directly or indirectly.  In a sense this would be a re-run of the build-up of debt in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1970s, leading to the debt crisis of 1982 (remember Poland, Chile, Mexico).  Banks with implicit government guarantees will lead the way.

   3. We hollow out the middle of the global economy - with a few people doing ever better and most people struggling to raise their living standards.  Increasing commodity prices hit hard at poorer people everywhere (recall the effects of the relatively mild run-up in food and energy prices in the first half of 2008).  Global volatility of this nature helps big business but at the cost of undermining the middle class.

By betting on commodities, Mr. Buffett is essentially taking an "oligarch-proof" stance.  Powerful groups may rise to greater power around the world, fighting for control of raw materials and driving up their prices further.  As long as there is growth somewhere in emerging markets, on some basis, Mr. Buffett will do fine. As for the G20, they are already a long way behind the curve.

Executive Summary

1. According to BLS, payrolls fell at a 188,000 a month rate over the last three months. But their own household survey says employment fell at a 589,000 a month rate.

2. Why the discrepancy?

3. Chris Manning of the BLS told us last month that payrolls were overestimated in the twelve months ending March by 824,000. The source of this error was the birth/death model. BLS used "plug" numbers for the number of births and deaths. These "plug" numbers were wrong. They led to estimated positive contributions to employment that were too high. Most of the error (675,000 out of a total 824,000 jobs) occurred in the first quarter of this year. The birth/death model was adding significantly to payrolls when all other payrolls were falling. In reality the contribution from net births and deaths was in fact negative.

4. Manning told us that the faulty birth/death model was still being used for the months after March of this year. The implication was that the faulty birth/death model would continue to overstate payrolls and understate the payroll job losses in the months since March.

5. And, in fact, the BLS is doing just that. For the last three months they are assuming net birth/deaths have added 18,000 jobs a week. Last year over the same period they assumed it added 17,000 a week, the year before 18,000 a week, and the year before smack in the middle of the economic boom 18,000 a week.

6. It is obvious what BLS is doing. They are simply plugging in an extrapolated figure with zero adjustment for the most severe labor market contraction in three generations. And, worse yet, they know the birth/death number they are using is pure baloney.

7. NUTS!

8. Therefore, reality probably lies somewhere between the payroll survey monthly rate of job loss of 188,000 and the noisy household survey rate of job loss of almost 589,000. A best guess would be that jobs continue to be lost at a rate of 300,000 a month or more.

The earlier discussion of CDS, Einhorn, and the US UST-CDS basis trade, sparked a flurry of queries on the topic of "really big numbers." Therefore, even as ZH staff awaits the most recent data out of the BIS, we present for your numeric (in)comprehension pleasure lots and lots of zeroes. The chart below summarizes the biggest relevant numbers currently out there, appearing as pixels occasionally on every single computer in the financial world. And what does it say? That the total notional value of all OTC derivative contracts as of the most recent count (sucks to be on the recount committee), was $592,000,000,000,000.00 at the end of 2008. Fear not: this number is actually a reduction from the most recent previous read of $683,700,000,000,000.00 in June of 2008. Well wait, that thing we said about fear not, ignore that: because the net notional, or the market value of all OTC contracts, i.e. what someone (cough taxpayer cough) would be on the hook for when the Fed's plans go astray, increased by 66.5% over the same period, to $33,900,000,000,000.00. Like we said, big numbers - and this is just OTC. The real number includes regulated exchanges, and to estimate that, double the numbers above. In totality, the "sidebets" on everything from interest rates, to F/X to corporate default risk, amount to about $1.3-$1.4 quadrillion (that's 15 zeroes before the decimal comma) in terms of uncollateralized liquidity (think inflation buffer): take all those zeroes away and the value of the dollar would go down by 1E10-15: you listening yet American middle class? And the actual exposure, or "money at risk" is roughly $60 trillion: a number which is about the same as the world GDP if one were to remove all the various stimulus programs. Take away Goldman, JP Morgan, and all the other wannabe BSD's, and this is what you end up with: the heart and soul of the Too Big To Fail monster itself. And there is no way on earth to stop that mangled, mutated heartbeat without destroying the very fabric of both our capital markets and societal system. Please give the Federal Reserve a golf clap for this truly amazing accomplishment.

Afghanistan hit back at pressure from Western powers for it to crackdown on corruption on Saturday and accused the United Nations envoy to Kabul of seeking to interfere in the formation of the next government.

Washington, Europe and the United Nations have increasingly been putting public pressure on Hamid Karzai, the newly re-elected president, to tackle widespread graft since he emerged as the winner of the country's disputed elections on Monday.

In a sharply worded response, Afghanistan's foreign ministry accused Kai Eide, the UN envoy, of breaching international norms after he called a news conference this week to urge Mr Karzai to appoint reform-minded ministers.

"Over the last few days some political and diplomatic circles and propaganda agencies of certain foreign countries have intervened in Afghanistan's internal affairs by issuing instructions concerning the composition of Afghan government organs and political policy," it said. "Such instructions have violated respect for Afghanistan's national sovereignty."

The statement also appeared to be directed at Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, who gave a speech on Friday describing Afghanistan as a "byword for corruption" and warning Mr Karzai he risked losing international support. "Cronies and warlords should have no place in the future of a democratic Afghanistan," Mr Brown said.

The Dalai Lama has angered the Chinese government with a visit to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery town in the remote northeast Indian region of Arunachal Pradesh.

The Tibetan spiritual leader said his visit on Sunday was only a lecture tour, but China, which claims the region as its own, has described the event as a provocation aimed at harming China-India ties.

"It is quite usual for China to step up campaigning against me wherever I go," the Dalai Lama said after opening a museum at the Tawang monastery.

"It is totally baseless on the part of the Chinese communist government to say that I am encouraging a separatist movement.

"My visit to Tawang is non-political and aimed at promoting universal brotherhood and nothing else."

Saudi Arabia has regained control of an area of territory seized by Yemeni rebels in an incursion last week, a senior defence official in the kingdom has said.

Saudi Arabia began air raids and artillery bombardments against the Houthi group after its fighters crossed from northern Yemen and reportedly took control of the area called Jebel al-Dukhan.

"The situation is calm ... especially in Jebel al-Dukhan, of which full control has been regained," Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, the assistant minister for defence and aviation, said on Saturday, according to the Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

However, there were reports that air raids along the border were continuing on Sunday.

Theodore Karasik, an analyst at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, said that it was likely that the apparent success of the Saudi action was only a "temporary reprieve".

"The Saudis have been able to push back the rebels but they are going to continue to have problems with the rebels if the Yemeni army is indeed using the southern part of Saudi Arabia for operations and for supply lines," he told Al Jazeera from Dubai.

General George Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said on Sunday that he was concerned that speculation about the religious beliefs of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian and wounding 30 0thers in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, could "cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers."

"I've asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that," General Casey said in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union. "It would be a shame -- as great a tragedy as this was -- it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well."

General Casey used almost the same language in an appearance on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," an indication of the Army's effort to ward off bias against the more than 3,000 Muslims in its ranks.

"A diverse Army gives us strength," General Casey, who visited Fort Hood Friday, said on "This Week."

Investigators have tentatively concluded that Major Hasan, a 39-year-old psychiatrist, acted alone and was not part of a terrorist plot. But Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told "Fox News Sunday" that he would begin a congressional investigation to determine whether the shootings can be termed a terrorist attack.

WASHINGTON -- Advisers to President Obama are preparing three options for escalating the war effort in Afghanistan, all of them calling for more American troops, as he moves closer to a decision on the way forward in the eight-year-old war, officials said Saturday.

The options include Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's request for roughly another 40,000 troops; a middle scenario sending about 30,000 more troops; and a lower alternative involving 20,000 to 25,000 reinforcements, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Officials hope to present the options to Mr. Obama this week before he leaves on a trip to Asia.

While some civilian and military officials believe Mr. Obama is seeking a middle ground in the debate over Afghanistan, aides denied he has made any decision or is leaning toward any of the options. Still, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appears to be supportive of the middle option, some officials said, and his view is thought to be pivotal because of Mr. Obama's respect for him and his status as a holdover from a Republican administration.

Concerns are growing in Israel's government over the possibility of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence within the 1967 borders, a move which could potentially be recognized by the United Nations Security Council.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently asked the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama to veto any such proposal, after reports reached Jerusalem of support for such a declaration from major European Union countries, and apparently also certain U.S. officials.

The reports indicated that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has reached a secret understanding with the Obama administration over U.S. recognition of an independent Palestinian state. Such recognition would likely transform any Israeli presence across the Green Line, even in Jerusalem, into an illegal incursion to which the Palestinians would be entitled to engage in measures of self-defense.

At least 60 people are reported missing after three days of rain. Meteorologists say the downpour is unrelated to Hurricane Ida, now swirling off Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.

Reporting from Mexico City and San Salvador - Torrential rains in El Salvador triggered flooding and mudslides that left at least 91 people dead across the Central American nation, officials said today.

At least 60 people were reported missing, and authorities warned that the toll could rise as rescuers reached hard-hit zones that remained cut off by floodwaters and landslides. About 7,000 people were evacuated and scores were plucked from flood zones by helicopter, Interior Minister Humberto Centeno said.

The impoverished nation of 7 million was pelted by three days of rain attributed to "a disturbed weather area" off the Pacific coast of El Salvador, according to the Miami-based National Hurricane Center. Meteorologist Dennis Feltgen said the heavy rains were unrelated to Hurricane Ida, which earlier sideswiped the region as a tropical storm over the western Caribbean.

Salvadoran authorities reported flooding in the capital, San Salvador, and rural areas to the east. Some of the worst damage was reported in the eastern province of San Vicente, a farming region where authorities said many residents remained cut off from communication.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 6, 2009) -- Despite their fearsome fangs, male sabertoothed cats may have been less aggressive than many of their feline cousins, says a new study of male-female size differences in extinct big cats.

Commonly called the sabertoothed tiger, Smilodon fatalis was a large predatory cat that roamed North and South America about 1.6 million to 10,000 years ago, when there was also a prehistoric cat called the American lion. A study appearing in the November 5 issue of the Journal of Zoology examined size differences between sexes of these fearsome felines using subtle clues from bones and teeth.

The researchers report that while male American lions were considerably larger than females, male and female sabertoothed cats were indistinguishable in size. The findings suggest that sabertooths may have been less aggressive than their fellow felines, researchers say.

ICA, Peru -- A small grove of huarango, the storied Peruvian tree that can live over a millennium, rests like a mirage amid the sand dunes on this city's edge. The tree has provided the inhabitants of this desert with food and timber since before the Nazca civilization etched geoglyphs into the empty plain south of here about 2,000 years ago.

The huarango, a giant relative of the mesquite tree of the American Southwest, survived the rise and fall of Pre-Hispanic civilizations, and plunder by Spanish conquistadors, whose chroniclers were astounded by the abundance of huarango forests and the strange Andean camelids, like guanacos and llamas, that flourished there.

Today, though, Peruvians pose what might be a final challenge to the fragile ecosystem supported by the huarango near the southwestern coast of Peru. Villagers are cutting down the remnants of these once vast forests. They covet the tree as a source of charcoal and firewood.

WASHINGTON -- Off the coast of Washington state, mysterious algae mixed with sea foam have killed more than 8,000 seabirds, puzzling scientists. A thousand miles off California, researchers have discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling vortex roughly twice the size of Texas filled with tiny bits of plastic and other debris.

Every summer a dead zone of oxygen-depleted water the size of Massachusetts forms in the Gulf of Mexico; others have been found off Oregon and in the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie and the Baltic and Black seas. Some studies indicate that North Pole seawater could turn caustic in 10 years, and that the Southern Ocean already may be saturated with carbon dioxide.

A recent bird kill off the coast of Washington state came without warning, said Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There will be more surprises than that," she said.

[...]

• Every eight months, 11 million gallons of oil run off the nation's roads and driveways into waters that eventually reach the sea, the Pew Oceans Commission said in 2003. That's the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez-size oil spill.
• Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the oceans have absorbed 525 billion tons of carbon dioxide. They're now absorbing about 22 million tons of carbon dioxide a day. As that happens, the oceans become more acidic, threatening the marine food chain. The acidity could eat away the shells of such animals as the petropod, a nearly microscopic snail with a calcium carbonate covering that's eaten by krill, salmon and whales.
• More than 60 percent of the nation's coastal rivers and bays are moderately to severely degraded by nutrient runoff from products such as fertilizer, creating algae blooms that affect the kelp beds and grasses that are nurseries for many species of fish.

The formation of the Alps through the collision of the two continents Africa and Europe began about approximately 55 million years ago. This led to the upthrusting of the highest European mountains, which probably already achieved its greatest height some millions of years ago. At present, however, the Swiss Alps are no longer growing as a result of this tectonic process.

Swiss geodesists, who have already been measuring the Alps with highest accuracy for decades, have observed, however, that the Alp summits, as compared to low land, rise up to one millimetre per year. Over millions of years a considerable height would have to result. But why then are the Alps not as high as the Himalayas? Researchers from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences were able to calculate that mountains eroded concurrently at almost exactly the same speed.

And a solid ARGH from me on the succeeding paragraph:

How does it come about now that the Alps erode at the same speed that they rise? "Here pure upthrusting forces are at work. It is similar to an iceberg in the sea. If the top melts, the iceberg surfaces out of the water by almost the same share," explains von Blanckenburg. Thus this paradoxical situation with the Alps that through wind, water, glaciers and rock fall, they are being constantly finely eroded from the top but on the other hand, regenerated from the Earth's mantle. This phenomenon, even if already postulated theoretically has now been proven for a complete mountain range for the first time.

"Pure upthrusting"? "Regenerated"???

Sigh...

Signature Of Antimatter Detected In Lightning / Science News

Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms -- and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.

During two recent lightning storms, Fermi recorded gamma-ray emissions of a particular energy that could have been produced only by the decay of energetic positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. The observations are the first of their kind for lightning storms. Michael Briggs of the University of Alabama in Huntsville announced the puzzling findings November 5 at the 2009 Fermi Symposium.

It's a surprise to have found the signature of positrons during a lightning storm, Briggs said.

Antimatter!!

Vaccine shortages point to a shift in public opinion toward the hazards of the swine flu in Germany. Some people are facing waiting periods of weeks before vaccination will be available. 

Only two weeks after beginning a national vaccination campaign against H1N1, the intial skepticism over the vaccine has apparently vanished in Germany. The rise in cases and deaths within Europe is thought to be the reason for an apparent swing in public opinion about the dangers posed by swine flu.

In September a study found that 62 percent of Germans polled would not get vaccinated.

Now, due to high demand and supply shortages there are waiting lists to receive the swine flu vaccine. In some parts of Germany, those wating for vaccinations are facing a delay of several weeks.

n recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate -- or confound -- gender identity and sexual orientation. Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans.

Last week, a cross-dressing Houston senior was sent home because his wig violated the school's dress code rule that a boy's hair may not be "longer than the bottom of a regular shirt collar." In October, officials at a high school in Cobb County, Ga., sent home a boy who favored wigs, makeup and skinny jeans. In August, a Mississippi student's senior portrait was barred from her yearbook because she had posed in a tuxedo.

Other schools are more accepting of unconventional gender expression. In September, a freshman girl at Rincon High School in Tucson who identifies as male was nominated for homecoming prince. Last May, a gay male student at a Los Angeles high school was crowned prom queen.

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

"This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with," said Diane Ehrensaft, an Oakland psychologist who writes about gender. "A lot of youths say they won't be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field." Adults, she added, "become the gender police through dress codes."

After well over a century of prim coverups, literal and metaphorical, of the sexual content of the greatest nudes in art, experts have been waking up to the erotic, even pornographic, potential. "I think it's essential that we understand them as objects in the context of men wanting to look at naked women," says Amelia Jones, a pioneer of feminist art history who teaches at the University of Manchester in England. Over the past decade or two, most of her colleagues have abandoned the genteel distinction Sir Kenneth Clark insisted on, in a famous lecture series in Washington in 1953, between the chaste "nude," cleansed by an artwork's aesthetic and philosophical ambitions, and pictures of the pruriently "naked," meant to get a rise out of viewers.

The new view: Flesh is flesh is flesh. Any culture that thinks "sex" when it sees naked bodies will still think "sex" when it sees pictures of them.

As usual, Marcel Duchamp had hammered all this out before others, as we can see in an important show now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It digs deep into the making of his "Etant Donnés," the wildly explicit peep show Duchamp left to the museum when he died in 1968. Duchamp's last work did for pornography what his urinal "Fountain" had done for men's-room plumbing back in 1917: It made clear that there's nothing so out of bounds in our culture that it doesn't have artistic repercussions.

But before considering Duchamp and his final word on lusty aesthetics, we need to go back to beginnings and take a more licentious look at Titian and Canova and their times.

New York -- This holiday season's biggest entertainment blockbuster likely will be a sequel to a popular franchise, with jarring depictions of war and an intricate story of good versus evil. It could easily rake in more than last year's record $155 million opening weekend for "The Dark Knight."

But this blockbuster is not a movie.

It is "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2," a video game that Activision Blizzard Inc. is releasing Tuesday. Fans worldwide are expected to spend at least half a billion dollars on the game in the first week.

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That would at least match last year's "Grand Theft Auto IV," which was the most successful video game release in history and might have been the top entertainment launch ever.

LABOUR is driving through laws that will give the Church of Scientology tax breaks on its British missions.

While thousands of businesses face higher tax bills from April and homeowners brace themselves for rises in council tax, the wealthy church will be exempt.

The change is being forced by a Bill from Equality Minister Harriet Harman, which, for the first time, puts Scientology on the same footing as the Church of England and Roman Catholicism.

Under British law, places of worship are exempt from business rates while homes of religious leaders receive council tax discounts. To qualify as a place of religious worship a building has to be used for worshipping a God or deity, not a philosophy.

Liberal Democrat Science spokesperson Evan Harris has written to the Home Secretary Alan Johnson, charging him with a "litany of errors" in his handling of the sacking of Professor Nutt, and demanding an apology for misleading the House of Commons.

Mr Harris said: "Neither Professor Nutt nor I have had a sniff of retraction or apology from the Home Secretary. I will now be raising this in the House tomorrow."

"The FBI says killer truckers are abducting prostitutes and other women at truck stops, raping them and leaving their bodies along the nation's highways."

Below is a "Time Video" news report, which states there are 500 known victims.

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It's a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies -- to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That's a lot of estrogen.

More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it -- though not conclusively -- to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.

Now it turns out it's in our food.

Consumer Reports magazine tested an array of brand-name canned foods for a report in its December issue and found BPA in almost all of them. The magazine says that relatively high levels turned up, for example, in Progresso vegetable soup, Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup, and Del Monte Blue Lake cut green beans.

<...>

The Food and Drug Administration, which in the past has relied largely on industry studies -- and has generally been asleep at the wheel -- is studying the issue again. Bills are also pending in Congress to ban BPA from food and beverage containers. ...

Ulf Leonhardt is riding high these days, with a new award from the Royal Society of Great Britain to further develop his ideas on how to make things in plain sight disappear.

Metamaterial cloakA metamaterial cloak (outer ring) steers light.

....

Leonhardt's role in the cloaking field's rise to respectability did not get off to an encouraging start. The details of his initial frustration and eventual triumph illustrate the swiftness with which the field entered the mainstream -- even surprising some experts. "I began my work at a time when invisibility was not fashionable at all," he says. That was about a decade ago. After years of quiet work with a few colleagues, he wrote a paper titled "Optical conformal mapping." The abstract's first words come right to the point: "An invisibility device should guide light around an object as if nothing were there."

In 2005 he sent the paper to Nature, which rejected it, and to Nature Physics. Editors at Nature Physics, Leonhardt recalls, took just two days to reject the paper as well. So, he says, he sent it to Science. There, it lasted two weeks before the heave-ho. In early 2006 he tried again, this time with Physical Review Letters, or PRL. Another no-go. One reviewer said the mathematics, while classical (the calculations refer to Maxwell's and Newton's equations of light and to other mathematical constructs credited to such titans as Fermat, Lagrange, Euler, Descartes, Euclid, Kepler, Einstein and Feynman), did not offer enough new physics. Ouch.

But it was another PRL reviewer's rebuke that opened Leonhardt's eyes wide. It said he was not alone. The assessment, routinely shared with Leonhardt, indicated that the reviewer had been to two meetings in the previous months "in which John Pendry discussed his group's efforts on the same issue, calling it a cloaking device or their Hogwarts project in reference to the cloak of invisibility associated with the Harry Potter series." Pendry and his colleagues, the assessment added, "supposedly have filed a patent related to this work." Hence, the anonymous reviewer declared, the work was not new and did not merit publication in PRL.

It came as a surprise to Leonhardt that he had been in unwitting competition with Pendry, one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain. Pendry is not merely professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London -- he is Sir John. The queen knighted him in 2004 for his services to science. Much of his reputation is based upon achievements in optical theory and in metamaterials that refract light in a fashion -- even backward -- not found in natural substances. Leonhardt was pleased to have a rival of such eminence but furious over his paper's treatment. Because Pendry's team had not published its work, Leonhardt argued in a letter to PRL, the journal should publish promptly -- not reject --his own paper. Further, Leonhardt averred that a pending patent provides no ethical reason to reject independent work by an outsider.

Then, abruptly, his fortunes took a 180-degree turn. Science, he recalls, wanted to publish his paper after all. The journal had just received a paper from Pendry's team, which includes his close collaborator David Smith, an electrical and computer engineer at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Titled "Controlling electromagnetic fields," the work was strikingly similar in its overall message to what Leonhardt had already offered. In late May 2006 the two papers came out (SN: 7/15/06, p. 42). They were sensations. Dozens of groups around the world set to work to build devices that, however crudely, tested the elegant new mathematical prescriptions.

Racing at speeds of up to 350 mph, the Soviet-made military jet made several low-altitude passes at the Santa Monica Pier, seemingly keying on the popular Ferris wheel as frightened onlookers scattered, some screaming. Emergency calls poured in to police as the aircraft flew about 50 feet off the ground, then spiraled skyward in a series of tight rolls, smoke trailing from its tail as if it were an aerobatic plane. The lifeguard in Tower 26 said the jet passed so close that she felt a wall of heat.

For a few minutes on that November day a year ago, it seemed the pier was under attack. Instead, officials learned, the startling aerial display was a stunt arranged by a local pilot, convicted felon and production company executive to promote an unfinished movie about a maverick squadron of Americans and Russians on a secret mission to Iran.

The pilot, David G. Riggs, lost his license and faces a misdemeanor criminal case in Santa Monica. A court hearing to set his trial date has been scheduled for Monday. Riggs declined to comment. His attorney said he did nothing wrong. But Riggs' escapade has focused attention on a little-known aspect of aviation: the use of high-performance military jets by civilian pilots and the hazards they can pose to people in the air and on the ground.

The incident has prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to take a harder look at hundreds of experimental exhibition aircraft in its Western Pacific region: California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii. There are about 5,600 planes with that designation in the United States, including aircraft like Riggs' 1973 Aero Vodochody L-39 Albatros, one of the most popular Soviet bloc trainers during the Cold War.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Police say a U.S. tourist who was pretending to be surfing on the hood of a friend's moving car was killed when he fell and broke his neck in a popular Puerto Rican beach town.

Police spokeswoman Yolanda Hernandez says 29-year-old Long Beach, New York, resident Jorge Geysel fell off his friend's Isuzu Trooper as he was "car surfing" along a road in the west coast community of Rincon early Saturday.

LONDON -- The reigning Miss England has relinquished her crown after being accused of a fight in a bar.

Pageant organizers say Rachel Christie has also withdrawn from next month's Miss World competition in South Africa.

They said in a statement that the 21-year-old heptathlete will now focus on clearing her name and training for the 2012 Olympics.

British newspapers reported that Christie got into a dustup with another beauty queen - Miss Manchester Sara Beverley Jones - in a nightclub earlier this week.

Sweden has decided to expand a programme which gives unsuccessful asylum seekers money to voluntarily return to their homelands, at the same time as the number of refugee applications continues to drop.

Migration authorities estimate that around 18,000 repatriation cases will be carried out in 2009. About 42 percent of cases are expected to end in voluntary return, with Iraqis making up the bulk of those willing to return on their own.

The cost of the current repatriation assistance programme is calculated to be between 40 and 50 million kronor ($5.7 to 7.2 million).

Call it $6.45 million or around $358,000 per.

I'll offer to NOT go to Sweden and NOT claim refugee status for a mere $50,000.  I note that is a $308,000 savings!  I'll even throw in a two-for-one deal.  Both the SO and I won't to Sweden for only $75,000 -- another saving of $333,000.  Together this saves the Swedish government a whopping $641,000!

Where else will the Swedish government get a deal like that?

(The ATinNM Refugee Services wishes to note this is a limited time offer.  So ... ACT TODAY!)


In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. -- Nietzsche