Icy conditions that have caused chaos on the roads and disrupted holiday travel plans could continue well into Christmas Day, the Met Office has warned, with millions of people facing Christmas away from their loved ones.

Fresh travel warnings have been issued predicting an 80% or greater probability of "widespread icy roads" in north-east and south-west England, Wales and most of Scotland, lasting until late on Christmas morning. There is also a moderate risk of heavy snow in Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland on Christmas Day.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday ordered a one fifth cut to the staff of the 1.4 million strong Interior Ministry after a series of scandals involving the police.

If implemented, the reform could affect at least 280,000 people and would amount to one of the most ambitious reforms of Russia's bloated bureaucracy since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.

In a presidential decree, Medvedev ordered a 20 percent cut to the Interior Ministry's staff -- which includes the police, interior ministry troops, investigators and civilian officials -- by Jan 1, 2012, the Kremlin said.

Eurostar, reeling from the worst week in its history, faced a new threat yesterday - a cut-price competitor on the railway route beneath the Channel.

The French environment company Veolia and the Italian state railways are close to agreeing to launch within two years a kind of "rail Ryanair" - a network of cheap, high-speed services between European cities, including London and Paris.

Russia will work on a new generation of atomic weapons to strengthen its nuclear deterrent, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday, just hours after Moscow test-fired one of its most feared missiles.

Medvedev said that Russia and the United States were close to a landmark deal on cutting arsenals of Cold War nuclear weapons, but that Moscow would still push ahead with the development of new strategic offensive weapons.

"Of course, we will develop new systems, including delivery systems, that is, missiles," Medvedev told the directors of Russia's three main state-controlled television channels.

AFP - President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday pledged to overhaul Russia's largely Soviet-inherited prison system following the sudden death in jail of a lawyer last month.
   
"Our system of the execution of punishment has not changed for decades," Medvedev said in a live end-of-year television interview.
   
"There is no order. We need to bring it about."
   
Earlier this month, he sacked around 20 top prison officials, including top prisons chiefs for Moscow and Saint Petersburg, in one of the largest shake-ups at the Federal Service for the Execution of Punishment, the successor to the Soviet-era Gulag prison system.
   
The mass firings came after the sudden death of high-profile lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in jail, where he had been held for over a year in pre-trial detention. His requests for medical treatment had been denied.

REUTERS - Eurostar trains will be running at near full capacity on Thursday after thousands of passengers were stranded by a series of breakdowns and stoppages caused by snow, the cross-Channel rail operator said on Wednesday.   "Eurostar travellers can reach their destinations for Christmas. Eurostar announces a near-normal service for tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 24," the company said in a statement from Paris.   Eurostar, owned by the French and Belgian state railway firms and by Britain, has faced a storm of criticism after 2,500 people were trapped on trains inside the Channel Tunnel for up to 16 hours on Saturday.   The company said electrical power systems on the trains had been affected by condensation caused by melted snow and has ordered an inquiry.

AFP - Georgia and Russia have agreed to re-open their land border to traffic, Georgia's foreign ministry said Thursday, in the first sign of a thaw in relations after their bitter war last year.
   
The two countries reached a deal under Swiss mediation to re-open the Upper Lars checkpoint, which was closed in 2006, Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Nino Kalandadze said.
   
It is the only land border crossing that does not go through Georgia's Russian-backed rebel regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were the focus of the 2008 conflict.
   
"The decision to re-open (the border) has been made," she told journalists, adding that Georgia expects the crossing to re-open by the beginning of March.
   
Kalandadze said the agreement would allow Georgian citizens and cargo to cross the border and that a formal protocol on re-opening the crossing would be finalised within two weeks.

In a Christmas address broadcast Thursday, German president Horst Koehler reflected on a number of major events that affected Germany in 2009.

One of the main topics of the adress was the global financial crisis. Koehler called for respectability and improved rules within the financial sector, warning bankers and other financial actors of the responsibilites they hold in society. 

Anti-terrorism squads in Turkey conducted raids in 11 cities, arresting 43 campaigners and members of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), said aides of the chief state prosecutor in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir.

Among those arrested in the early-morning operation were several prominent politicians, including at least seven local mayors, and two-human rights activists.

According to some accounts from Kurdish sources, the number arrested was between 60 and 80.

Tens of thousand of employees and contract workers of the European Union are set for a pay raise next year, but it may not be as much as they had hoped.

 

A planned 3.7 percent salary raise was chopped into a 1.85 percent increase in compromise negotiations, but the Commission is unhappy with the deal.

The vote in the Greek parliament in Athens in the early hours of Thursday fell along party lines with all 160 Socialist lawmakers agreeing to the austerity budget and 139 from four opposition parties opposing it. One parliamentarian was absent.

The budget, described by the Socialists as the "toughest" since democracy was restored in 1974, aims to rein in the country's spiralling debt and chaotic public finances.

Through spending cuts and salary and hiring restrictions in the public sector, the budget sets out to cut the deficit to 9.1 percent of gross domestic product from its current 12.7 percent. Greek debt has grown to about 300 billion euros ($430 billion) and fellow euro-zone countries and investors were alarmed as three international credit rating agencies successively downgraded that debt this month.

Italy's four main mafia organisations have put aside their deadly differences to form a new and dangerous "fifth mafia" in Rome, a report has warned.

The co-operation between the organised crime syndicates is a new and worrying development for the country's capital, researchers said.

The impoverished south of Italy has been the traditional power base for the country's four mafia groups - Sicily's Cosa Nostra, the Camorra from Campania, the 'Ndragheta of Calabria and the lesser known Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia.

A woman jumped the barriers in St. Peter's Basilica and knocked down Pope Benedict XVI as he walked down the main aisle to begin Christmas Eve Mass on Thursday.

The 82-year-old pope quickly got up and was unhurt, said a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini. Footage aired on Italy's RAI state TV showed a woman dressed in a red jumper vaulting over the wooden barriers and rushing the pope before being swarmed by bodyguards.

<...>

Benedettini said the woman who pushed the pope appeared to be mentally unstable... "(The pope) quickly got up and continued the procession." ...

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has vowed to defeat the organised crime in the country by 2013.

"The mafia is a pathological phenomenon that we want to defeat once and for all by the end of this term in office," Mr Berlusconi told Italy's national radio.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Shares of Apple Inc (AAPL.O) reached their all-time high on Thursday, as excitement builds over the expected release of its tablet computer.

Although Apple itself has never acknowledged the existence of such a device, anticipation is peaking as the company enters the new year.

On Wednesday, the Financial Times reported on its blog that the company has rented a stage at a venue in San Francisco and is expected to make a "major product announcement" on January 26.

The report, which cited people familiar with the plans, did not say whether Apple planned to introduce the tablet at the event. Apple has declined to comment.

LONDON (Reuters) - Retail bellwether John Lewis posted a 27 percent rise in department store sales so far this week, indicating festive spending was not severely dampened by heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures.

The year-on-year increase for the four days to December 23, which follows a rise of 15.5 percent in the week to December 19, will boost prospects that Christmas sales in the UK will surpass those of 2008 after an unexpected fall in November.

Shoppers will have spent £951,000 per minute on Christmas Eve on last-minute shopping, research suggests.

Sainsbury's Credit Cards say 19% of the nation's adults intended to do some of their seasonal shopping on Thursday, spending about £1.37bn.

More than 13m people were expected to do Christmas Eve shopping, spending the equivalent of £57m an hour.

Financial data firm Experian said consumers were making the most of this year's final few shopping days.

Major retailers have reported brisk business on high streets and online as people made last-minute purchases.

London, of all places, is leading the battle against exaggerated banker bonuses. And leaders from all over the world are discussing how they can put an end to the banking practices that caused the global economic crisis. They are also considering ways for banks to compensate for the damage they caused.

Josef Ackermann can't let it happen. The CEO of Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest, says what he thinks and refuses to back down from a fight -- or from a faux pax.

"In the '90s, the pendulum swung toward economic freedom," Ackermann said last Friday. But today it's swinging back into the other extreme, "toward interventionist policies." If the reforms go too far, he says, the price to be paid will be a drop in growth.

2.0

    At length corruption, like a general flood,
    Did deluge all, and avarice creeping on,
    Spread, like a low-born mist, and hid the sun.
    Statesmen and patriots plied alike the stocks,
    Peeress and butler shared alike the box;
    And judges jobbed, and bishops bit the town,
    And mighty dukes packed cards for half-a-crown:
    Britain was sunk in lucre's sordid charms.
    --Pope.

2.1

THE SOUTH-SEA COMPANY was originated by the celebrated Harley, Earl of Oxford, in the year 1711, with the view of restoring public credit, which had suffered by the dismissal of the Whig ministry, and of providing for the discharge of the army and navy debentures, and other parts of the floating debt, amounting to nearly ten millions sterling. A company of merchants, at that time without a name, took this debt upon themselves, and the government agreed to secure them, for a certain period, the interest of six per cent. To provide for this interest, amounting to 600,000l. per annum, the duties upon wines, vinegar, India goods, wrought silks, tobacco, whale-fins, and some other articles, were rendered permanent. The monopoly of the trade to the South Seas was granted, and the company, being incorporated by Act of Parliament, assumed the title by which it has ever since been known. The minister took great credit to himself for his share in this transaction, and the scheme was always called by his flatterers "the Earl of Oxford's masterpiece."
2.2

Even at this early period of its history, the most visionary ideas were formed by the company and the public of the immense riches of the western coast of South America. Every body had heard of the gold and silver mines of Peru and Mexico; every one believed them to be inexhaustible, and that it was only necessary to send the manufactures of England to the coast, to be repaid a hundredfold in gold and silver ingots by the natives. A report, industriously spread, that Spain was willing to concede four ports, on the coasts of Chili and Peru for the purposes of traffic, increased the general confidence, and for many years the South-Sea Company's stock was in high favour.
2.3

Philip V of Spain, however, never had any intention of admitting the English to a free trade in the ports of Spanish America. Negotiations were set on foot, but their only result was the assiento contract, or the privilege of supplying the colonies with negroes for thirty years, and of sending once a year a vessel, limited both as to tonnage and value of cargo, to trade with Mexico, Peru, or Chili. The latter permission was only granted upon the hard condition, that the King of Spain should enjoy one-fourth of the profits, and a tax of five per cent on the remainder. This was a great disappointment to the Earl of Oxford and his party, who were reminded much oftener than they found agreeable of the

    "Parturiunt montes, nascitur ridiculus mus."

But the public confidence in the South-Sea Company was not shaken. The Earl of Oxford declared that Spain would permit two ships, in addition to the annual ship, to carry out merchandise during the first year; and a list was published, in which all the ports and harbours of these coasts were pompously set forth as open to the trade of Great Britain. The first voyage of the annual ship was not made till the year 1717, and in the following year the trade was suppressed by the rupture with Spain.

Serial Acquirers
You do not need to be a banker to run a major bank these days; in fact very few CEOs of big banks are. Vikram Pandit ran a hedge fund before taking over at Citigroup for Chuck Prince, a former general counsel. He himself was anointed to the job by Sandy Weil, who spent his career buying financial companies with his sidekick Jamie Dimon, who now runs JPM Chase. It is possible that none of these men has ever made a bank loan in their life, and what they know about credit or other banking risks is what people reporting to them have told them.

Why don't you need personal experience as a banker to run a bank? What these men all have in common is that they are serial acquirers of other banks. In this respect, they are like Jack Welch or private equity investors. The skill they are purveying is their ability to buy other banks, fire people, and dress themselves up as visionaries and heroes willing to make tough decisions. They bring to the job a narcissistic personality, because they believe themselves to be, and want to be seen, as indispensable to the bank's future. In this age of CEO worship, they are expected to dominate their board of directors, be the ultimate public face of the bank, and reap outlandish personal rewards in the process.

It is to these men we owe the concept and the reality of "too big to fail." In their rush to buy other banks, and their desire to be the biggest on the block, they created behemoths that touch almost all areas of the economy. At some point in the last decade, but certainly after 1999 when it was now legal to combine an investment with a commercial bank, all of the big players did just that. This alone produced financial companies so large that their failure would impact millions of Americans, but the real cost of failure showed up in something called systemic risk.

This is the risk that the failure of one bank will drag down one or more other banks to default as well, creating a cascade or daisy chain of financial destruction. In the early 1990s, there were probably 75 major banks in the world that dealt regularly with each other, so the daisy chain wasn't as tightly wound. By 2000, thanks to the efforts of the serial acquirers running the banking industry, this number was reduced to 20 major banks. At this point it was too late. The collapse of a bank in Spain could easily drag down a bank in the U.S., Australia or elsewhere.

this is the clearest narrative i've read yet on the architecture of macrofinance.

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

Courtesy of the US Treasury, Americans were informed on Christmas Day that they had added a whopping big gift under their Christmas tree for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants that are now wards of the state. The gift is truly one that keeps on giving: it has no price tag because the Treasury defines it as an "unlimited" promise to cover any losses these two companies may experience.

How big could this gift be? Fannie and Freddie have issued or guaranteed over $6 trillion worth of mortgage securities. If the losses were this big next year, we would have to fork over about 40% of the wealth built up in the US in 2010 to keep Fannie and Freddie solvent. Fortunately, most of the mortgage securities guaranteed by these mortgage companies are the pre-2004, fixed rate varieties that are still performing as required. That is, assuming these homeowners still have a home value greater than the mortgage due. If not, they may be tempted in the next few years to walk away - to "strategically default" - to do a Morgan Stanley - and turn the losses back on to Fannie and Freddie.

It makes you think the Treasury is just a little bit worried about the behavior of the American homeowner. What if they started to behave like corporations do, and walk away from their mortgage debts without a moral care in the world? Right now, about 25% of all homes are underwater, with mortgage debt exceeding what the home is worth in the market. If these homeowners strategically defaulted, the Fannie/Freddie losses could easily exceed $2 trillion.

I looked to see under what authority you, the taxpayer, through your representatives in Congress, gave the US Treasury to issue unlimited guaranties of any sort.

The US Senate has passed a sweeping healthcare reform bill, bringing Barack Obama a step closer to enacting one of his signature campaign promises and to meeting a goal sought by US presidents for decades.

The early-morning vote in the first Christmas Eve session for decades came after months of intense negotiations by the president's allies in the Senate, who were forced to wrangle for every Democratic vote in the chamber to overcome Republican opposition.

Obama welcomed the outcome, saying it brought decent healthcare closer to all Americans. "We are now finally poised to deliver on the promise of real, meaningful health insurance reform," he said at the White House. "With today's vote, we are now incredibly close to making health insurance reform a reality in this country. Our challenge then is to finish the job."

The $871bn bill will be merged with similar legislation passed by the House of Representatives, with a final version expected to reach the president's desk by mid-February.

The Iranian authorities have clamped down on memorial services for a dissident cleric amid growing political unrest in the country.

Pro-reform demonstrators mourning the death of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri clashed with security forces earlier this week and were planning to hold more ceremonies on Sunday to honour the seventh day of his passing, one of Shia Islam's ritual mourning milestones.

The Archbishop of York spoke out today against anti-homosexual laws being debated in Uganda.

Dr John Sentamu, who was born in the country, branded the proposals as "victimising".

A private member's bill is going through Uganda's parliament which would see gay and lesbian people sentenced to a minimum of life in prison if convicted of having sex.

People who failed to report homosexual acts taking place would risk up to three years in prison while those convicted of having sex with a minor would receive the death penalty.

Sentamu said that Uganda's current laws meant the bill's provisions were, in effect, already in place.

Violence across Iraq left at least 26 people dead today, most of them Shia pilgrims attending mourning ceremonies, prompting fears of further sectarian attacks as Shia Islam's most solemn occasion looms.

The deaths came three days before the climax of Ashura, when hundreds of thousands of pilgrims converge on Kerbala to mourn the killing of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein, in a battle in 680AD that sealed the split between Shia and Sunni.

Yemeni forces backed by US intelligence have struck a series of suspected al-Qaida hideouts, including a meeting of senior leaders, killing at least 30 militants, the government said.

The air strikes on Christmas Eve were Yemen's second such assault on al-Qaida in a week, at a time when the US has dramatically increased aid to eliminate the expanding presence of the terror group.

Washington fears al-Qaida could turn fragmented, unstable Yemen into a new Afghanistan-like safe haven in a highly strategic location on the border with oil-rich US-ally Saudi Arabia.

MANILA (Reuters) - A ferry collided with a fishing boat off the Philippines on Thursday killing three people and leaving about two dozen missing, an official said.

Rescue boats picked up nearly 50 people from the ferry as it began to sink following the collision, coast guard spokesman Commander Armand Balilo said.

"Our search teams have found three bodies, but we continue to search for two dozen still missing," he told reporters.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military in Iraq will scrap a policy early next year that has led to the punishment of some soldiers serving in Iraq for becoming pregnant, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq said on Thursday.

General Ray Odierno said the new, Iraq-wide guidelines would take effect beginning January 1, lifting rules enacted by the U.S. commander in northern Iraq, who reports to Odierno, that laid out possible punishments for pregnancy among his soldiers.

The policy had been criticised by some women's advocates and on Tuesday four U.S. senators wrote to the secretary of the U.S. Army asking that it be rescinded.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The central United States is expected to see a white but slick and blustery Christmas as snow will be coupled with blinding winds in western areas and freezing rain in the east, a forecaster predicted Thursday.

"This is major winter storm continuing to gain intensity today and tomorrow, impacting a wide area," said Joel Burgio of DTN Meteorlogix.

The forecast called for snowfall of 12 inches (30 cm) or more through Saturday, with blizzards in several northern areas.

LONDON (Reuters) - China looks set to ignore an appeal by Prime Minister Gordon Brown not to execute a British man convicted of drug smuggling.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in London said on Thursday that Britain's concerns had been noted, but added Akmal Shaikh had been convicted and sentenced to death for a serious drug trafficking offence based on "solid evidence."

"All cases of drug trafficking are dealt with according to law, regardless of nationality," he added in a statement.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - A suicide car bomber killed eight Afghan civilians on Thursday when he detonated his explosives outside a guest house frequented by foreigners in southern Kandahar city, a police official said.

"Police spotted the suicide bomber and fired at him but he managed to detonate his explosives. As a result eight people were martyred," senior police officer Fazl Ahmad Sherzai told reporters in Kandahar.

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) - Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff was hospitalized late last week and treated for facial fractures, broken ribs and a collapsed lung, a Raleigh, North Carolina television station reported on its Web site on Thursday.

The injuries, the station reported, citing unidentified sources, were consistent with an assault.

Madoff, 71, was treated at Duke University hospital late last week, and was discharged earlier this week, the station reported.

A Human rights group has accused Unesco of gross hypocrisy for its collaboration with Equatorial Guinea's dictator of 30 years, Teodoro Obiang Nguema.

Global Witness called on the UN body to cancel a $300,000 prize, named after the African president which is due to be awarded for the first time next year in recognition of scientific research that leads to "improving the quality of human life".

Activists have accused the president of enriching himself, his family and his cronies with oil money while his people become more impoverished. Last month he was declared the winner of the award with 95 per cent of the votes in an election that opponents and international human rights groups denounced as a fraud.

AFP - People displaced by an erupting volcano braced for a "White Christmas" of a different kind on Thursday as Mount Mayon sprayed ash and politicians bearing gifts descended on crowded evacuation centres.

Rains ceased and the skies cleared on Christmas Eve for the first time in five days as tens of thousands forced to flee by the restive volcano weighed up whether they could return home to celebrate with the traditional midnight meal.

However authorities were warning them to stay put and not venture within eight kilometres (five miles) of the crater because of the hazards posed by scalding ash and red-hot lava flowing down its flanks.

"I advise the evacuees to stay at the evacuation centres for their own safety, rather than going home for Christmas," governor Joey Salceda said in a television broadcast to the people of Albay province.

AFP - Israel's hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked centrist opposition leader and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni on Thursday to join his government, his office said.
   
"The prime minister asked Mrs Livni to join a national unity government ... in the face of the national and international challenges facing Israel today," a statement said.
   
Livni's Kadima party, the largest in the 120-member parliament, has been rocked in recent days by reports that Netanyahu pressed several of its MPs to break away and join his coalition.

Ghana's president has refused to accept Christmas gifts from individuals and businesses in a move aimed at highlighting his attempts to stamp out corruption.

John Atta Mills will this year not accept Christmas hampers, the giving of which has become a common practice in Ghana, it was announced on Thursday.

"He has made it clear that it was not his disposition to accept Christmas hampers and other gifts," Mahama Ayariga, a presidential spokesman, said.

He said that Mills was concerned "that you never know what is in the mind of the giver of the gift, so it's always better not to accept them".

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has told car companies they must share their technology with local businesses or leave the country.

Mr Chavez gave the ultimatum to Toyota, Ford, General Motors and Fiat during a public address.

If the demand isn't met, he said: "I invite you to pack up your belongings and leave. I'll bring in the Russians, the Belorusians, the Chinese."

Venezuela has nationalised most of the oil, metal and coffee industries.

Mr Chavez attacked Toyota in particular, saying it was not producing enough four-wheel drive vehicles, which are used for public transport, and ordered an investigation.

Obama should have one goal only

Restore the safety net. This should have been his priority from day one. Instead he wasted over a trillion dollars on banks which should have been shut down. The bankers could have turned to the soup kitchens and used food stamps like everyone else if the administration had devoted government resources to helping people, not megabanks, pharmaceuticals, and health insurance companies.

Colonel Girdle's story tells of a small business collapse that is feeding on itself, dragging down gas stations, beauty salons, accountants, restaurants, clothing stores, lawyers, building contractors, even ministers and their churches. The comments to his article on The Smirking Chimp tell the same story again and again by different people.

I certainly don't read this story in the business press. On Wall Street, everything is good news. Jobs are about to be created according to Bondad (this month or next for sure), industrial production is up, the housing market has bottomed, prices are stable along with wages, exports are booming, the recession ended months ago. Big businesses are doing splendidly because they were able to cut costs savagely to survive, and they can rely on cheap overseas workers.

We seem to have parallel universes and realities underway in our economy. Wall Street and the government are confident boom times are just around the corner. It sure doesn't sound like it, though, reading about small businesses collapsing and so many individuals flirting with bankruptcy and desperation. Numerian

Courtesy of the US Treasury, Americans were informed on Christmas Day that they had added a whopping big gift under their Christmas tree for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants that are now wards of the state. The gift is truly one that keeps on giving: it has no price tag because the Treasury defines it as an "unlimited" promise to cover any losses these two companies may experience.

How big could this gift be? Fannie and Freddie have issued or guaranteed over $6 trillion worth of mortgage securities. If the losses were this big next year, we would have to fork over about 40% of the wealth built up in the US in 2010 to keep Fannie and Freddie solvent. Fortunately, most of the mortgage securities guaranteed by these mortgage companies are the pre-2004, fixed rate varieties that are still performing as required. That is, assuming these homeowners still have a home value greater than the mortgage due. If not, they may be tempted in the next few years to walk away - to "strategically default" - to do a Morgan Stanley - and turn the losses back on to Fannie and Freddie.

It makes you think the Treasury is just a little bit worried about the behavior of the American homeowner. What if they started to behave like corporations do, and walk away from their mortgage debts without a moral care in the world? Right now, about 25% of all homes are underwater, with mortgage debt exceeding what the home is worth in the market. If these homeowners strategically defaulted, the Fannie/Freddie losses could easily exceed $2 trillion.

I looked to see under what authority you, the taxpayer, through your representatives in Congress, gave the US Treasury to issue unlimited guaranties of any sort.

For the first time, chimpanzees have been seen using tools to chop up and reduce food into smaller bite-sized portions.

Chimps in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, Africa, use both stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils, to process Treculia fruits.

The apes are not simply cracking into the Treculia to get to otherwise unobtainable food, say researchers.

Instead, they are actively chopping up the food into more manageable portions.

Some people spend weeks looking for the right Christmas tree. In Copenhagen, Danish scientists are mapping the genome of the conifer for the first time. They hope to use the data to breed the perfect Christmas tree.

Danish researcher Pär Ingvarsson had his Christmas tree a long time before Christmas. As always, it is a nice spruce tree. At Christmastime, the plant geneticist simply takes his research home. Ingvarsson's goal is to map the genome of the humble Christmas tree.

A foundation has given Ingvarsson and his team €7 million to sequence the tree's genome. If they are successful, it will be the world's first decryption of a coniferous tree's genetic make-up. Up until now only one other tree has had its DNA sequenced: the balsam poplar.

The Three Wise Men were actually being cleverer than they thought - scientists have discovered that myrrh is good for your heart.

The ancient resin, used traditionally as a perfume or embalming fluid, may help lower cholesterol levels if taken as a food supplement.

Myrrh is a rust-coloured resin obtained from several species of Commiphora and Balsamodendron trees, native to the Middle East and Ethiopia.

Mohammed was a child soldier in Afghanistan. He saw his father shot dead, witnessed savage atrocities and was seen in a Taliban martyrdom video. Now this teenager has been given the chance of a normal life - and you, our readers, can help other boys robbed of their childhood

Tomorrow, it will be 20 years since Dan Voinea helped send Nicolae Ceausescu before a Christmas Day firing squad.

But the anniversary of the climax to Romania's revolution will not bring unalloyed joy to the prosecutor, or indeed to his compatriots, as they struggle to unearth the truth of what really happened in those extraordinary days, and to discover whether it was a vengeful people or a communist clique that really toppled the Romanian dictator.

Money can't buy you love, but among China's new super-rich, it can certainly help narrow the field in the quest for affection. China's booming economy has produced 130 dollar billionaires, but it seems at least 21 men in that elite number are lonely, and find it hard to meet members of the opposite sex.

Forced to focus on building wealth during the early part of their careers, many billionaires in China simply haven't had the time to follow the advice of their parents in who to marry.

Enter an enterprising dating organisation, Golden Bachelor, which has organised the Chinese capital's most expensive party ever - a match-making ball with tickets costing 100,000 yuan (£9,000) a head.

Did our Neolithic ancestors turn to agriculture so that they could be sure of a tipple? US Archaeologist Patrick McGovern thinks so. The expert on identifying traces of alcohol in prehistoric sites reckons the thirst for a brew was enough of an incentive to start growing crops.

It turns out the fall of man probably didn't begin with an apple. More likely, it was a handful of mushy figs that first led humankind astray.

Here is how the story likely began -- a prehistoric human picked up some dropped fruit from the ground and popped it unsuspectingly into his or her mouth. The first effect was nothing more than an agreeably bittersweet flavor spreading across the palate. But as alcohol entered the bloodstream, the brain started sending out a new message -- whatever that was, I want more of it!

Rope specialists like Mr. Touchette and Mr. Haughey have long filled a range of niche jobs, such as inspecting big dams, cleaning Mount Rushmore and repairing offshore oil platforms. But as wind farms have sprouted across the United States, rope companies have quickly expanded into a new line of work -- fixing turbines so they last longer in the elements.

It's a dream job for rock-climbing types.

<...>

Some 300 certified rope specialists like them -- called "rope access technicians" -- work on turbines in North America, and that number may triple in three years, according to Mr. Stomp. Already, he said, demand is so acute that his own rope company, WindSwain, has an eight-week waiting list.

One of the great illusions of late 20th century finance was that banks were profitable. On paper - investment, commercial and mortgage banks appeared extremely profitable. The percentage of total S&P 500 profits that was attributable to financial companies rose steadily from 1980 to 2000, and by 2007 reached 40%, depending on how you measured it. This meant that two out of every five dollars of profit generated by America's 500 largest companies came from the financial function. This, by the way, understated things, since it left out the quasi-banks like General Electric and GMAC.

The illusion comes from the fact that this paper profit was not the result of selling products that allowed businesses and consumers to be more productive and more profitable in their own right. What was really happening was that financial firms were extracting equity that had been built up over nearly a century by businesses and consumers. The financial business had become a predatory business, scavenging the land for pockets of wealth to convert into cash that would be funneled in part to the banks as fees.

It's not clear that even at the highest levels the bankers understood what they were doing, since businessmen in the heat of competitive battle do not have the time to muse over the broader social implications of what they do. This is a job for government policy wonks and business professors, most of whom spent their time enabling and cheerleading for the banks. Moreover, some of what the industry did helped their customers, such as automated bill paying, even though this was a smaller proportion of bank profits.

Since the large banks and financial companies in the U.S. have blown up - in part because the equity available for mining and extraction has dried up - we the taxpayers are being asked to save their hides. As taxpayers, we represent the last available, and largest pool of equity - the good faith and credit of the United States as represented by the government's taxing power. At this very moment, the financial oligarchs are at it again, looking for ways to convert stored-up wealth into cash for themselves. Don't you think you should know who they are and what game is going on here?

The amateur storm-chaser from Colorado who launched a flying saucer-shaped helium balloon from his back garden one breezy day in October and told police that his six-year-old son was inside received a 90-day prison sentence yesterday.

The stunt, concocted jointly by Richard and Mayumi Heene, was riveting while it lasted. Millions of people around the world watched live television footage of the silver contraption as it soared over the high plains before eventually coming to rest in a prairie field, with ambulances in hot and dusty pursuit.

It's a reworking of Conan Doyle's original stories that in many ways makes more sense than the treatments we know so well. Gone is the dim but nice Watson and the hypodermics. Gone also is genteel foggy Victoriana, to be replaced by a much grittier feeling of London.

They've also set themselves up for a sequel or two. Downey Jr is already fully attached to the Iron Man franchise, and now he'll be Sherlock for a long time to come. Quite a comeback for someone who totally had a cock up on the catering front 1996 - 2001.

Of course it's essentially shallow, but unlike Dan Brownish shallowness it makes no attempt to disguise itself as serious. Guy Ritchie just doubled his budgets. Let's see if that will be an improvement or not.

If producer Joel Silver and Susan Downey (former Silver exec and Downey's wife, also producer on RocknRolla)) stay in control, I imagine they might get a couple of good sequels out - they don't have a bad track record. I'd like to see what Ritchie could do with Bond, but he'll certainly stay with Holmes because, as a Hatfield boy, he has a lock on Londonness (relative to anyone you could name in Hollywood).

Only the Coen Brothers could re-refresh the franchise imo and that's not going to happen.

You can't be me, I'm taken