On the same day the EU officials lifted visa restrictions for three Balkan states, Serbia has announced its official application to join the European Union. 

Serbia's application to join the European Union now goes to Sweden, who currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

Belgrade had said it would apply for membership to the 27-nation bloc last month, but had since been debating the timing of the application.

Serb President Boris Tadic said EU officials have discussed his country's potential membership, and he expressed optimism for his country's bid.

"This is a great day for Serbia and its citizens," he said, adding that "no one can doubt the road that Serbia has taken: Serbia is going towards European integration."

Serbian, Montenegrin and Macedonian nationals can travel visa-free inside the EU's borderless Schengen zone from Saturday.  

A group of 50 Serbian nationals left Belgrade after midnight for their first visa-free visit to several European Union countries.

The visit, organized by the Serbian authorities and supported by the European Commission's Directorate General for Enlargement as well as by the embassies of France, Italy and Germany, symbolically marks the abolition of visas for Serbian citizens to travel to the EU.

"These are ordinary people who have done something extraordinary and have so far never seen Europe," Bozidar Djelic, Serbia's deputy prime minister in charge of European integrations, told a press conference prior to the trip.

Travel restrictions were lifted following a November 30 decision by the EU that nationals of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia would be able to travel without visa to all its member states, except Britain and Ireland.

The Netherlands is no longer alone in its permissive approach to drugs. Legislative changes in the Czech Republic look set to make it the country with the most liberal drug policy in Europe.

Probably against their will, the Czechs have found themselves at the forefront of the permissive lobby on drugs. The Czech Republic traditionally pursued a policy which classified possession of "anything more than small amounts of drugs" as a punishable offence, but this vague formulation generated a great deal of confusion.

To put an end to this grey area, the government and parliament set about describing in detail exactly how many grams of each category of drug may be tolerated by law. In doing so, they make a clear distinction between the possession and use of small amounts of drugs on the one hand, and trading in drugs on the other hand.

No legalisation
The fact that the government has painstakingly detailed permissible amounts of drugs has been interpreted by some as legalising drug use. But that is not the case.

The possession and use of smaller amounts of drugs, such as 1 gram of cocaine or 15 grams of marijuana, is no longer a punishable offence but has been downgraded to a misdemeanour which can at most result in a fine.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen issued the clearest rebuff yet of President Dmitry Medvedev's pet project for a new European security pact, saying it was not needed.

"I do not see a need for new treaties or legally binding documents because we do have a framework already," he told reporters Thursday.

As evidence, he listed the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, the Rome Declaration of 2002 that set up the NATO-Russia Council, and the Charter for European Security.

Rasmussen, who was making his first visit to the country since assuming NATO's top post over the summer, also said Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members of the ­alliance and that Georgia's territorial integrity needed to be fully respected.

Despite his remarks, which were unlikely to go down with the Kremlin, the outspoken former Danish prime minister was adamant that he would achieve the goal of his visit -- to ­rebuild ties with Moscow that hit a post-Cold War low after the war in Georgia in August 2008.

ROME (Reuters) - Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's approval rating has risen back above 50 percent after an attack against him sparked a wave of sympathy even among opposition voters, an opinion poll showed on Sunday.

Berlusconi, 73, was struck in the face a week ago by a man who broke his nose and teeth after a rally in Milan.

Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi addresses a news conference at the end of a two-day EU heads of state summit in Brussels June 19, 2009. (REUTERS/Thierry Roge/Files)

An opinion poll by ISPO published in Corriere della Sera newspaper said the aggression had boosted Berlusconi's popularity to 55.9 percent, compared to 48.6 percent in mid-November.

It is becoming dangerous to associate with economic and ideological power in Southern Europe, or what Europol calls the "Mediterranean triangle" of anarchist violence.

Greece's Revolutionary Struggle detonated a car bomb at the Athens Stock Exchange in September. Citigroup's branches have been targeted twice this year.

Hooded extremists attacked the rector of Athens University in his office this month, sending him to hospital with head injuries.

In Milan, the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) planted 2kg of dynamite last week at Bocconi University, the symbol of the free market in Italy.

The FAI left a note threatening a "bloodbath" for capitalists. Security forces have issued alerts for the Milan bourse, Unicredit, and Barclays. Italians have begun to ask whether their country is returning to the 1970s, the "years of lead" when the Red Brigades murdered ex-premier Aldo Moro.

The FAI is no friend of Europe either. It sent letter bombs earlier this decade to the heads of the Commission and the European Central Bank and to the European Parliament.

In Spain, Barcelona's anarchists have been conducting a low-level campaign against bank cash machines, supermarkets, and firms such as Manpower. Valencia and Galicia have seen a wave of attacks.

A Eurostar executive also gave a variation of that notorious British Rail excuse - the wrong type of snow - by blaming "fluffy" snowflakes for the chaos. "The amount of snow was higher than we experienced before, it was lighter than normal, fluffier, and the temperature inside the tunnel and the humidity was higher than normal," said Nick Mercer, Eurostar's commercial director.

An outbreak of bitter recrimination has erupted among politicians and delegates following the drawing up of the Copenhagen accord for tackling climate change.

The deal, finally hammered out early yesterday, had been expected to commit countries to deep cuts in carbon emissions. In the end, it fell short of this goal after China fought hard against strong US pressure to submit to a regime of international monitoring.

The Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, walked out of the conference at one point, and sent a lowly protocol officer to negotiate with Barack Obama. In the end, a draft agreement put forward by China - and backed by Brazil, India and African nations - commits the world to the broad ambition of preventing global temperatures from rising above 2C. Crucially, however, it does not force any nation to make specific cuts.

"For the Chinese, this was our sovereignty and our national interest," said Xie Zhenhua, head of China's delegation.

After two weeks of international deadlock and an all-night marathon negotiating session that produced a thin and toothless accord, the biggest climate talks in history devolved from "Hopenhagen" to "Nopenhagen".

The Copenhagen Accord - brokered at the last minute by Barack Obama, the US president, with China, India, Brazil and South Africa - did not receive universal support from the 193 countries participating in the climate summit.

The accord, which gutted a comprehensive agreement to pay poor countries to protect their forests, since the mass cutting of trees accounts for 20 per cent of global emissions, is not binding and does not have a set date for capping carbon emissions.

It provoked reactions from fury to despair.

Lumumba Stanislaus Dia-ping, Sudan's chief negotiator, compared it to the Holocaust, while Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, referenced the sulfur of hell and suggested that Obama was Satan.

Ian Fry of Tuvalu, the drowning island-nation that has become the poster country for the perils of rising sea levels, likened the accord to "being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future".

What a disaster. The climate summit in Copenhagen has failed because of the hardball politicking of the United States, China and several other countries -- and because people just can't seem to fathom how catastrophic climate change will be. They probably won't have long to wait before things become a bit clearer.

The global climate summit in Copenhagen has failed. There will be no concrete goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Industrialized countries extended no concrete offers of hope to developing countries. Newly industrializing countries, such as India and China, can continue to grow their economies without any checks and balances for the climate.

In the run-up to the conference, scientists, environmentalists and politicians alike called it one of the most important in history. But now it's just a missed opportunity. Likewise, it might just be one of the last of its kind in the battle against climate change.

It took governments from around the world 17 years to come together for this summit in Copenhagen -- 17 years of talking, seemingly endless negotiations, ideological debates, delays and maneuvering. It's been 17 years since the first climate-related meeting, held in Rio in 1992. It's been 17 years of searching for solutions to confront the threats resulting from climate change. And this is what we're left with. Many of the hopes that had been building up since 1992 have now been shattered.

The United Nations climate change conference ended in recrimination yesterday without reaching a clear deal on emissions targets.

After a stormy session in Copenhagen, in which a vociferous anti-American minority brought the talks close to collapse, most countries agreed simply to "take note" of a watered-down agreement brokered by President Barack Obama and supported by Britain.

This accord -- which had been drawn up in discussions with China and 30 or so other countries on Friday -- sets a target of limiting global warming to a maximum of 2C above pre-industrial times.

Above this temperature, scientists say, the world would start to experience dangerous changes, including floods, droughts and rising seas.

Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. President Barack Obama called a climate change agreement with China and about 25 other nations an "unprecedented" move to slow global warming. Environmental groups and at least five developing nations called it a failure.

The accord, which pushes off signing a treaty for at least a year, is "a first step," Obama said yesterday before leaving Copenhagen, where he spent 14 hours cobbling together the agreement in meetings with world leaders, and addressing 8,000 envoys from 193 nations.

Delegates from the countries failed to reach consensus on the accord today after discussing it through the night, agreeing instead to "take note" of the document, or recognize that it exists. The agreement seeks voluntary cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists blame for global warming without binding countries to take action.

"The meeting was a disaster," Lars-Erik Liljelund, the director general of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's office, said in an interview today. "The process needs to be changed because if we continue like this, we won't be any further a year from now."

The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that could challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation that put a man on the Moon can't summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantle of a religion.

Then a Chinese premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Barack Obama's speech that he refuses to meet - sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager's house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.

Late in the evening, the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs that they call a "deal", although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them signing it with great solemnity.

The International Organization for Migration warned on Friday the world must prepare for a mass increase in climate-linked migration as leaders battled to save a deal on global warming in Copenhagen.

"Climate change and environmental degradation are already triggering migration or displacement all over the planet," the IOM warned on the critical last day of the Denmark summit, which coincides with International Migrants Day.

Right now, "it is the world's poorest countries that are bearing the brunt" of the migration, said the Geneva-based body, calling for leaders to make "greater efforts, beyond Copenhagen," to tackle the complex issue.

Norway will provide the EU around NOK 3 billion (EUR 347 million) per year to reduce social and economic disparities and promote cooperation in Europe in the period 2009-2014, a 22 per cent increase over the previous period.(Photo: Foreign Minister Støre)

This is the result of an agreement signed between the EEA/EFTA countries and the EU on new financial contributions.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre commented: "The new EEA Financial Mechanism gives Norway a historic opportunity to strengthen cooperation with the new EU member states. Many of these countries are struggling with high unemployment and a difficult economic situation. It is very much in Norway's interest to promote economic and social development in these countries."

The scope of the mechanism is now closer to Norway's priorities, with focus on the environment, climate change, renewable energy and tripartite cooperation.  The EEA Grants will be available to the 12 most recent EU members plus Portugal, Greece and Spain, while the Norway Grants will be earmarked for the 12 newest members. The priority sectors will be environment and climate, health, research, education and culture, decent work and civil society, the judiciary and human resources.

British Gas wants you to Pay As You Save | Money | The Guardian

How would you like £10,000 to make your home more energy efficient? British Gas is looking for 100 households to take part in a new scheme called Pay As You Save. The trial will help the government decide how it delivers on its pledge to make the UK's homes more energy efficient.

Although the launch was rather lost, by coinciding with the first day of the Copenhagen talks, the pilot scheme will see householders given a loan to allow them to install either energy efficiency measures or micro-generation projects, such as photovoltaic solar panels.

The householder pays back the loan over as much as 25 years, through the money saved by reduced gas and electricity bills, or the income generated by the energy they produce. The consumer can therefore pay for the energy- and climate-saving measures without incurring extra monthly costs.

The government has pinned its hopes on this scheme as it struggles to upgrade the nation's housing stock and produce more electricity from renewable sources. This week the Conservative party said it would launch a similar scheme in partnership with Tesco and Marks & Spencer if it won the next election. It was apparently unaware of this trial.

I'll bet British Gas shareholders really, really want this scheme to be a success......

Modern conservatives engage in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.Galbraith

Google, which has an estimated 90% market share of UK internet searches, last year used a cross-border network of subsidiary companies to ensure it did not pay a penny in corporation tax on its £1.6bn advertising revenues in Britain.

The international corporate structure enables Google to avoid paying what could otherwise have been a corporation tax bill in the UK of as much as £450m.

Recently filed accounts for subsidiary company Google UK Limited show none of the search engine's advertising revenues from British customers were accounted for in the business, despite operations in London and Manchester incurring "administrative expenses" of £177m last year, including a wage bill of £70m.

Read more...

In Capital as Power Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler address one of the oldest
theoretical conundrums in the discipline of political economy--the theory of capital--
with a view to supplying a more satisfactory answer to the question "what is capital?"
While the work clearly fits into the tradition of radical political economy it is
not easy to place it in any one school, and this for very good reason: Nitzan and
Bichler are trying to create a new approach to political economy. The release of this
highly ambitious book is aptly timed, for as the global political-economic crisis
unfolds and existing theories and paradigms come into question, a space will be created
in which new theoretical alternatives might be welcomed.

One way of classifying approaches to political economy is through theories of
value. A theory of value is a metaphysical assumption about how prices are formed.
Both neoclassical and Marxist approaches have a theory of capital and price formation
that are derived from a utility and labour theory of value respectively. However,
Nitzan and Bichler claim that both theories of value fail. They cannot explain what
capital is, how and why it accumulates, what gets accumulated and, similarly, how
prices are formed and why they fluctuate over time. In place of neoclassical marginal
utility and Marxist abstract labour Nitzan and Bichler propose a power theory of value.

For the authors, "the secret to understanding capital accumulation ... lies not
in the narrow confines of production and consumption, but in the broader processes
and institutions of power," the implication being that capital is not an economic category
anchored in material reality, as both mainstream and radical theories maintain,
rather it is a "symbolic representation of power"!. "Power" in the sense they employ
it does not mean "economic power" or "political power" but "organized power at
large". Most political scientists will likely find this problematic. Academic department-
alization and liberal ideology have tended to divide the study of society into
separate, though overlapping systems. The "economic" system is different than the
"political" in that markets and business are institutionally separate from the state and
government. Each system operates according to its own logic, pursues different goals,
utilizes different means, has its own discourse, and so on. In order to follow their
argument, however, we must suspend this bit of conventional disciplinary wisdom.

Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Geneva, touted as a haven for London bankers facing heavier U.K. taxes, may lure fewer than predicted thanks to a housing shortage, crowded schools and a 44 percent income-tax rate.

Barclays Plc President Robert Diamond this month joined a chorus of financial leaders in arguing that the U.K.'s 50 percent tax on bonuses would drive bankers away from London. The Swiss Private Bankers Association said the "arbitrary" tax will boost the allure of Geneva, whose bankers oversee about 10 percent of the world's foreign-held private wealth.

"It's a joke, it's lobbying," said Tim Dawson, an analyst at Geneva-based brokerage Helvea AG. "People are dreaming if they think the London investment banking world is going to move. There is more office space in Canary Wharf than in the whole of Switzerland," he said, referring to London's second financial district.

US President Barack Obama has recently announced a major troop buildup in Afghanistan and other NATO members will likewise be supplying more troops. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen spoke with SPIEGEL about the 'warlike' conditions in Afghanistan, how long NATO will stay and whether Russia might come to the alliance's aid.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Secretary General, the NATO mission in Afghanistan has not been going well in the last few years. Now US President Barack Obama has announced a new strategy. He is deploying 30,000 additional troops and is calling on allies to make additional sacrifices. Does this signify a new beginning?

Rasmussen: No. We aren't starting at zero. I would call it a new approach, a supplement to our mission thus far. We are currently beefing up our efforts on all levels.

Nato has set up an expert group to contribute to its Strategic Concept, which will be updated next year. Jeroen van der Veer, the recently retired CEO of Shell, was the odd pick for vice chair. "Nato will still be here after we leave Afghanistan," he told NRC Handelsblad.

When he left oil giant Shell last summer, after five years as its CEO, Jeroen van der Veer knew as much about Nato as the average newspaper reader, he admits. So his nomination as the Dutch candidate for membership of an expert panel formed to help draft the new Nato's Strategic Concept, the fundamentals of the military alliance, came as a surprise, even to him. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary general of the Nato, had made it clear he wanted a diverse panel, rather than one comprised solely of diplomatic heavyweights, former ministers and professors. Dutch foreign ministry officials knew this and proposed a candidate with such an impressive track record in international business, Rasmussen made him the vice chairman of the committee, second to Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state.

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Iran's most senior dissident cleric, has died, official media has reported.

Montazeri, 87, was an architect of the 1979 Islamic revolution who fell out with the present leadership.

He had been held under house arrest for several years.

"Hossein Ali Montazeri passed away in his home last night," the official IRNA news agency said on Sunday.

Montazeri lived in the city of Qom, which lies south of Tehran, and was referred to as the spiritual leader of the opposition after the country's recent disputed election.

His funeral will be held on Monday and he will be buried in the shrine of Masoumeh, a revered Shia figure, in Qom, his office told AFP.

Foreign media are banned from covering the ceremony.

On my office wall hang photos of yours truly with Pakistan's last four leaders. Two -- Zia ul Haq and Benazir Bhutto -- were murdered. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was ousted in a military coup led by photo number four, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was deposed by Pakistan's military in a slow-motion coup.

Either I'm a jinx, or leading Pakistan is a job with poor career prospects.

Now, Washington is finally getting the democracy it has been calling for in Pakistan -- and it's the mother of all backfires.

I've not met Pakistan's current president, Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto. But I've written for decades about corruption charges that relentlessly follow him. Zardari, known as "Mr. 10%" from when he was in his wife's government, was in charge of approving government contracts.

In 2008, Washington sought to rescue Musharraf's foundering dictatorship by convincing the popular but exiled Benazir Bhutto to front as democratic window-dressing for continued military rule. Her price: Amnesty for a long list of corruption charges against her and her husband.

Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

By a vote of 60-40, the Senate agreed to end debate on a major package of health care amendments--and by doing so, signaled that the Democratic caucus is unified, and ready to pass a far-reaching reform bill straight down party lines.

The two naked men were stopped by police and received a warning for wearing no helmets on December 7 at Whangamata, a popular New Zealand beach resort on the Coromandel Peninsula, the New Zealand Herald reported Monday.

It was Code Orange. Americans first heard of it at a Sunday press conference in Washington, D.C. Weekend assignment editors sent their crews up Nebraska Avenue to the new Homeland Security offices, where DHS secretary Tom Ridge announced the terror alert. "There's continued discussion," he told reporters, "these are from credible sources--about near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experienced on September 11." The New York Times reported that intelligence sources warned "about some unspecified but spectacular attack."

[...]

Since 1996 the Al Jazeera news network had been operating in the nation of Qatar, a U.S. ally in the war on terror. Montgomery claimed he had found something sinister disguised in Al Jazeera's broadcast signal that had nothing to do with what was being said on the air: Hidden in the signal were secret bar codes that told terrorists the terms of their next mission, laying out the latitudes and longitudes of targets, sometimes even flight numbers and dates. And he was the only man who had the technology to decrypt this code.

[...]

The federal government was acting on the Al Jazeera claims without even understanding how Montgomery found his coordinates. "I said, `Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.' They wouldn't even do that," says the first officer. "And I was screaming, `You gave these people fucking money?'"

Portuguese scientists have found a depression on the Atlantic Ocean floor they think may be an impact crater.

The roughly circular, 6km-wide hollow has a broad central dome and has been dubbed the "Fried Egg" because of its distinctive shape.

It was detected to the south of the Azores Islands during a survey to map the continental shelf.

If the Fried Egg was made by a space impactor, the collision probably took place within the past 17 million years.

Snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures have killed at least 19 people across Europe as well as severely disrupting air, rail and road transport.

At least 15 people froze to death overnight in Poland as temperatures dipped way below freezing. In parts of Germany a figure of -33C was recorded.

Flights have been cancelled, train services have been severely affected and roads made impassable.

After 15 years of comparatively trouble-free operations, high-speed train company Eurostar is now facing huge challenges.

The company's bosses must get to the bottom of a cold weather malfunction of trains that appears baffling - even to rail experts.

And they must then win back the trust of the travelling public -a trust which will have been eroded by all the tales of travel misery that emerged this weekend after the train failures within the Channel Tunnel.

If it was a simple mechanical failure of a piece of equipment, then things would be relatively simple for Eurostar.

But what the company has said is that its problem with the trains this weekend has been to do with the changes between the sub-zero temperatures outside the tunnel and the 25C (77F) heat within the tunnel.

Yet Eurostar has been running since 1994. There have been numerous cold snaps in that time, with the trains running from London through Kent - one of the UK's snowiest counties.

Pope Benedict XVI is facing criticism after he put a controversial wartime predecessor one step closer to sainthood. Jewish groups say Pope Pius XII did not do enough to save Jewish lives during the Second World War. 

The Vatican is at the center of criticism over a move that places former pope Pius XII closer to becoming a saint.

Pope Benedict has approved a decree that recognizes the pontiff, who is accused of doing too little to help Europe's Jews during World War II, as having "heroic virtues." The posthumous honor gives the former pope the title "venerable" and places him two steps from full canonization.

Pius XI has been accused of turning a blind eye to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, in a controversy that has strained relations between the Vatican and Israel.

When a department within the Vatican submitted the decree to the Pope in 2007, it was decided that any decision should be postponed for a "period of reflection."

The newly formed university is a mobilisation of students, teachers and researchers who aim to liberate education from the over-arching confines of the `institution'. Participants Emile Gayoso and Quentin Lade on neo-liberalism, the Bologna process and giving classes on public transport

It's 2pm on Wednesday afternoon, and Paris's metro line 14 is filling up with commuters. Most of them are going to and from the landmark Bibliothèque Francois Mitterand - a bastion of France's educational system. Here on the train however, an education of a different kind is unfolding. Several men and women in sandwich boards bearing the logo `Université de Paris 14' are distributing leaflets to the passengers. Class, it would seem, is in session. `We meet at the BNF,' explains Emile Gayoso, 24, `and make the return journey to Gare Saint Lazare, encouraging discussion and distributing information. The listeners are usually more or less interested, rarely annoyed, and often totally on our side.' `Breaking through the inner circle of French education'

Fighting against successive reforms that have transformed the average European university from a social nucleus of learning into a money-hungry `excellence' machine, Paris 14 is a nomadic entity that celebrates the joy of learning and the exchange of knowledge. It was the brainchild of students and teachers at Université de Paris 7, but welcomes participation from all corners of society. Impromptu `Flash courses` (each specially adapted to the average metro commute at 15-20 minutes long) bring intellectual discussion back into the real world. `At Paris 14 anyone can follow to course,' says Gayoso, `from professionals in the area, to students or anyone else outside the university system who wants to use this public platform to share their ideas.' Subjects are diverse; ancient mythology, contemporary politics or the writings of Roland Barthes are equally likely to be put to the (albeit moving) floor. Despite the challenges of getting people to publicly engage with something decidedly unfamiliar, Gayoso looks with pride on the fact that he has helped open a new avenue of discussion amongst ordinary people. `We have demonstrated that the problems in the university system don't only concern those in the `inner circle' of French education,' he says, `but everyone in society.'

The world's oldest still living married couple have revealed the secret of 85 years of married bliss - the wife is always right.

Liu Fuben, 95, and his wife Shi Jihui, 100, spoke after registering their claim with the Guinness Book of Records.

Liu said: "We are still very much in love and always will be. As to the secret of a long marriage - avoid arguments like the plague and remember the golden rule - she's always right."

      Midwives in the Helsinki area have voiced their concerns over the situation of those women in labour who are unversed in languages.
      In recent years the number of expectant mothers speaking languages other than Finnish or Swedish as their mother-tongue has increased within the Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital District (HUS).
      Simultaneously there has been a rise in the number of those women in labour with whom no common language can be found despite the use of interpreters and the relatively large arsenal of languages possessed by the area's midwives themselves.
     
At maternity wards in the Greater Helsinki hospitals the women in labour already speak nearly 70 different languages as their mother-tongue.
      "Giving birth is a very sensitive matter, as is the taking care of a small baby, especially if the infant happens to suffer from an ailment of any kind", says head nurse Soile Kivijärvi from the Hyvinkää Hospital maternity ward.
      On Friday morning there was an invoice from an Arabic interpreter on Kivijärvi's desk waiting for an approval.

Commissioner Margot Wallström has announced that she is stopping writing her weblog that she started in 2004. She was the first Commissioner to use the online diary as a way of communicating with the public. Since then many others, including MEP's, Commissioners and others in the European Union political and policy scene have followed her. In her post announcing the end of her blog she said "I really enjoyed it but it was more time consuming than I had expected.  It sounds easy to sit down and write a piece per week but finding the time to do this when you have to do a lot of travelling and many many meetings to prepare for and attend is not as easy as it sounds." It is also not easy to write an interesting weblog either, but the Commissioner has managed to do that, by mixing the professional with the personal and lifting the curtain a little on what goes on behind the scenes. She says that "I have managed to write 265 blog posts since the beginning, covering everything from the EU to dancing, music, books, Chinese mining, jam and wars." As Nosemonkey, a journalist and fellow blogger said "Not sure if the experiment entirely worked, but the blog did make you seem like one of the more human Commissioners - and anything that can be done to break down the perception of the Commission existing as some remote, isolated elite can only be a good thing.I hope the new lot carry on the blogs - they're not always the most exciting reads, but their mere existence is a major step towards allowing the people to see inside the Brussels machine."
 
On the future of blogging on Europe, Wallström notes that "Undoubtedly overcoming the language barrier.  What I can see of the EU blogosphere is largely in English and French.  Finding out what is going on in German, Spanish, Italian, Polish and the other 17 official languages is for many people an insurmountable hurdle.  We all depend on others to translate for us and bring good stories, ideas and arguments to everyone's attention... I think that, like it or not, English is becoming the common language through which Europeans understand each other. This has nothing to do with British or American linguistic imperialism and everything to do with practicality."
 
Her approach has also been appreciated by people who don't agree with her. On her final post, Max Kaye writes, "While we (still) hold opposite opinions on virtually every subject under the sun, in the 4 or five years that I have been following your blog, I've noted that you have always engaged your adversaries with courtesy and a sense of fair play - even under conditions of harsh criticism and sometimes unfair provocation. I may disagree with you on political and social issues, but I do respect you - and especially thank you for engaging with individuals as well as with groups and the `masses'."
 

Even though the asteroid doesn't look like it's going to hit Earth, on April 13, 2029, it will come closer to Earth than any other near-Earth object that we know of. It will pass just 18,300 miles above the planet's surface.

It had already been a terrible year for the Italian prime minister. Castigated by the Roman Catholic Church for his dalliances with showgirls, sued for divorce, accused of sleeping with a prostitute and facing two corruption trials, the last 12 months of personal and political pitfalls were capped last weekend when he was struck in the face with a souvenir model of Milan's cathedral.

Yet even as many Italians felt unexpected sympathy for the terrible injuries suffered by their sometimes embarrassing leader, and wondered whether his famous verve would ever fully recover, a handful noticed a striking - and perhaps significant - parallel with a notorious predecessor.

Dutch police say teenage sailor Laura Dekker - who seeks to be the youngest person to sail solo around the world -has been missing since Friday.

Police say the 14-year-old's boat is moored at its berth and she appears to have left her father's home on her own.

GENEVA - Roman Polanski is finishing the edit of his latest movie "Ghost" from his house arrest in Switzerland, surrounded by family and bombarded by telephone calls of support, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy said in an interview Sunday. AC =
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Levy, a friend of the 76-year-old director, told the Lausanne-based weekly Le Matin Dimanche that he visited Polanski in his chalet in the luxury Swiss resort of Gstaad about 10 days ago and found him like "a rock," working and confident even though his family is worried about the U.S. extradition request hanging over him.

"It's in fact very impressive. He is in the process of finishing at a distance the editing of his next film, which I understand will be in the official selection at the next Berlin Festival," Levy said.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Black belted Russian leader Vladimir Putin has offered to join the national judo team after showing off his martial arts skills to members of the squad.

The 57-year-old prime minister made the proposal at a special coaching session on Saturday aired on state television, adding to his carefully-crafted macho image.

Putin, who many observers believe is still paramount leader despite standing down as president last year, entered the hall of St Petersburg's School of Sport Mastery dressed in a white judogi and black belt, to applause from the assembled squad.

After bowing, the former KGB spy went onto the mats, throwing squad members half his age and even tackling the chief trainer, Olympic Gold medallist Ezio Gamba.

Rock band Rage Against The Machine has won the most competitive battle in years for the Christmas number one.

The band's single, Killing In The Name, sold 500,000 downloads beating X Factor winner Joe McElderry's The Climb by 50,000 copies to clinch the top spot.

Their success followed a Facebook campaign designed to prevent another X Factor number one.

One retailer said it was a "truly remarkable outcome - possibly the greatest chart upset ever".

Speaking on the Radio 1 chart show, Zack de la Rocha from Rage said: "We are very, very ecstatic about being number one."

He added it was an "incredible organic grassroots campaign".

Police in the US are investigating a detective who appears to draw his gun during a mass snowball fight on the streets of Washington DC.

Video taken at the scene shows people pelting a man with snowballs after his car, a Hummer, gets stuck in the snow.

The man - not in uniform at the time - then appears to pull out a gun while an angry crowd gathers and chants: "Don't bring a gun to a snowball fight."

DC police refused to comment, telling the BBC an investigation was under way.