Voting in presidential elections began on Sunday across Croatia, with 12 candidates vying for the job of helping the former Yugoslav nation over the last hurdles to European Union membership.

The most recent polls indicate that even Social Democrat Ivo Josipovic, who has a clear edge over the other candidates, will not be able to secure the 50 percent of votes needed to for an outright victory. Josipovic will likely face either Milan Bandic, the mayor of Zagreb who was recently expelled from the Social Democrats, or Nadan Vidosevic, a businessman and former member of the ruling party, the conservative Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), in a January 10 runoff.

Law professor and composer Josipovic has an untarnished political career but is seen as lacking charisma. He has pledged to support Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor's recent drive to fight corruption in the country. However, while the Croatian president has a limited say in foreign policy, security and defense, the post is largely ceremonial with no power to veto legislation.

The issues dominating the elections are the country's widespread corruption and its recovery from the the global economic crisis.

Germany's commissioner for data protection says users of online social networks remain poorly protected by the privacy policies of most sites. He proposes an independent ratings agency to alert users to these risks. 

Germany's Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Peter Schaar has warned that many social networking sites still haven't totally gotten on board with protecting users' data. In an interview with German news agency dpa, Schaar specifically mentioned Facebook, the largest of such sites, and its recent changes to its privacy settings.

The default of the new setup puts everyone at the weakest privacy level, making their personal information and uploaded photos public. While users did have to accept the changes, Schaar still considers this to be user protection "unfriendly."

Seven people have been killed in a string of deadly avalanches in the Italian Alps.

The bodies of the victims, including four rescuers, were being recovered today. A German boy hit by one of the avalanches while snow-boarding off-piste is fighting for his life at a hospital in Bolzano.

The rescuers died in the Val Lasties area of the Dolomites, east of Bolzano. Members of a party of seven expert mountaineers, they had climbed to 2,000 metres in search of two Italian tourists who had ventured into the area on snow shoes and been struck by the first of the avalanches.

The group reached a mountain refuge on Saturday night and set off again in the dark when they were caught in an avalanche as they were descending the mountain. One of the survivors raised the alarm.

The bodies of the two tourists were located by a bigger expedition consisting of tracker dogs and 40 rescuers, including members of the fire brigade and the paramilitary Carabinieri.

In the mountains west of Bolzano, a third avalanche struck three young Germans after they left the ski runs near Malga Madriccio to take a well-trodden shortcut across the slopes above 3,000 metres.

The head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, says the 16 members of the eurozone must reduce their deficits by 2011.  

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet has urged the 16 members of the eurozone to slash their deficits by 2011. In an interview with the German newspaper Bild, he said budget deficits in countries using the euro "should be reduced in 2011 at the latest, in some countries already in 2010, to preserve faith in state finances."

Trichet also called on banks to ease a credit crunch by making loans readily available. "Banks must live up to their central role in providing credit to the economy," he said.

WASHINGTON -- After a miserable year mired in the worst downturn since the Great Depression, Americans can take comfort that 2010 is likely to get better. How much better depends on a wide range of factors, but few economists expect a robust rebound.

"The pain of this economic downturn is going to be felt for a longer time frame," warned Martin Regalia, the chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The good news for the U.S. economy, which is now thought to be out of recession, is that some important tail winds will give it a push.

These tail winds, at least for the first half of the year, include federal government stimulus money that's still entering the economy in large amounts. Businesses are replacing the inventory they've burned through, and strong productivity numbers indicate that companies are doing more with fewer workers, suggesting that companies that survived the recession are becoming more profitable.

These developments bode well for the hiring outlook. Over the last three months of 2009, the net number of workers that companies were shedding moderated. Many economists now think that businesses collectively could begin adding jobs, rather than eliminating them, as early as March.

That would just be a beginning, however, not the end of the matter, and the pace at which employers add jobs will reveal a lot about the vigor of the recovery.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint is doing his best to prevent Bernanke from gaining a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the country's central bank.

"We can't overlook the fact that he has presided over one of the biggest economic catastrophes that we've had as a country," DeMint said at a Dec. 17 meeting of the Senate Banking Committee.

DeMint and at least two other senators, Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning and Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, have placed holds on Bernanke's nomination.

DeMint and Sanders vow to block a Senate vote on Bernanke until it considers their bill to require a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

"Before Ben Bernanke became the Fed chairman in 2006, he headed the Council of Economic Advisers for President (George W.) Bush -- one of the most right-wing presidents in American history," Sanders, a self-described "democratic socialist" who's among the most liberal lawmakers, wrote in a Dec. 8 column. "He also sat on the Fed board of governors from 2002 to 2005."

"Perhaps more than anyone else, Bernanke was in a position to diagnose the impending impending economic disaster and take steps to stop it," Sanders wrote. "Tragically, not only did he fail to prevent the economic collapse that we have experienced, he did not even warn the American people that it was coming until it was too late."

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.

It sounded like a direct response to none other than Barack Obama. During a recent appearance on the CBS show "60 Minutes," Obama aired out his frustrations with bankers. The same banks "who benefitted from taxpayer assistance ... are fighting tooth and nail with their lobbyists up on Wall Street or up on Capitol Hill fighting against financial regulatory reform," Obama said. He added: "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of ... fat cat bankers on Wall Street."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel sees things much the same way. And she's miffed at bankers, too. Merkel recently said in public that some of these bankers were even "shooting (their) mouths off a bit."

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said on Sunday that Beijing would not give in to foreign demands for its currency to strengthen, taking an increasingly defiant tone amid mounting international pressure for China to shift its exchange rate policy.

In an interview published by the Xinhua news agency on Sunday afternoon, Mr Wen said some of the demands for China to appreciate its currency were an effort to contain the country's development.

"We will not yield to any pressure of any form forcing us to appreciate. As I have told my foreign friends, on one hand, you are asking for the renminbi to appreciate, and on the other hand, you are taking all kinds of protectionist measures," he said.

By keeping the Chinese renminbi stable against the US dollar, China was contributing to the recovery in the global economy, he said. "The purpose [of these calls for appreciation] is to hold back China's development," he added.

China has effectively pegged its currency to the US dollar since the middle of last year, which has meant that the renminbi has depreciated by about 9 per cent against the currencies of its main trading partners since early this year, even though the Chinese economy has rebounded more quickly than any other major economy. However, Chinese officials argue that its exchange rate against its trading partners is roughly in line with its level at the start of the global financial crisis in September last year, when the US dollar began to strengthen.

BERLIN, Dec 27 - German firms see restricted access to loans, which could spiral into a new credit crunch, as the main risk to the economy in 2010, the heads of the country's four main business associations said in a Reuters poll issued on Sunday.

The groups expect Germany to experience a slow recovery in 2010 after it exited its deepest post-war recession in the second quarter of this year, but warned that growth could be at risk if the government does not persuade banks to lend more liberally.

[....]

Credit conditions for German companies tightened in December to their most restrictive levels since July, the latest credit survey from the Ifo research institute showed, reviving concerns over a possible credit crunch in Europe's largest economy.

[...]

On top of the risk to credit supply, the economy also faces a dearth of skilled workers, said Hans Heinrich Driftmann, President of Germany's chamber of industry and commerce (DIHK).

"During the next upswing this will be strongly felt," he said, adding that he did not expect recovery to come quickly. The other associations also expect a tough year ahead, and most say the crisis will not be over in 2010.

Tokyo on Friday proposed a record Y92,300bn ($1,000bn, €700bn, £635bn) annual budget for the next fiscal year, which starts in April, as it tried to stimulate domestic demand by supporting households with measures including child support.

However, the government has to walk a fine line between campaign pledges to give more cash to consumers to boost growth and the reality of plunging tax revenues and bulging public debt.

The DPJ has had to pull back from some of its key manifesto promises, such as a plan to end a provisional petrol tax, as it struggles to control huge debt issuance and retain the trust of the bond market.

Under the proposed budget, new bond issuance will be kept at Y44,300bn, close to its pledge of Y44,000bn - a level already worrying bond markets as public debt nears 200 per cent of gross domestic product.

Another headache for the new government is the rise in social security spending because of the country's ageing population. The proposal states that 51 per cent of general expenditure will be related to social security spending.

After noting how Wall Street has bounced back, how essential to the US economy a healthy financial sector is thought to be and how far this is from the truth Reich puts his finger on the real problem:

The real locus of the problem was never the financial economy to begin with, and the bailout of Wall Street was a sideshow. The real problem was on Main Street, in the real economy. Before the crash, much of America had fallen deeply into unsustainable debt because it had no other way to maintain its standard of living. That's because for so many years almost all the gains of economic growth had been going to a relatively small number of people at the top.

President Obama and his economic team have been telling Americans we'll have to save more in future years, spend less and borrow less from the rest of the world, especially from China. This is necessary and inevitable, they say, in order to "rebalance" global financial flows. China has saved too much and consumed too little, while we have done the reverse.

In truth, most Americans did not spend too much in recent years, relative to the increasing size of the overall American economy. They spent too much only in relation to their declining portion of its gains. Had their portion kept up -- had the people at the top of corporate America, Wall Street banks and hedge funds not taken a disproportionate share -- most Americans would not have felt the necessity to borrow so much.

The year 2009 will be remembered as the year when Main Street got hit hard. Don't expect 2010 to be much better -- that is, if you live in the real economy. The administration is telling Americans that jobs will return next year, and we'll be in a recovery. I hope they're right. But I doubt it. Too many Americans have lost their jobs, incomes, homes and savings. That means most of us won't have the purchasing power to buy nearly all the goods and services the economy is capable of producing. And without enough demand, the economy can't get out of the doldrums.

As long as income and wealth keep concentrating at the top, and the great divide between America's have-mores and have-lesses continues to widen, the Great Recession won't end -- at least not in the real economy.

Although G.D.P. numbers still aren't perfect -- they are subject to periodic revisions, for example -- the basic problem has been largely solved. So why not issue shares in G.D.P. now?

Such securities might help assuage doubts that governments can sustain the deficit spending required to keep sagging economies stimulated and protected from the threat of a truly serious recession. In a recent pair of papers, my Canadian colleague Mark Kamstra at York University and I have proposed a solution. We'd like our countries to issue securities that we call "trills," short for trillionths.

Let me explain: Each trill would represent one-trillionth of the country's G.D.P. And each would pay in perpetuity, and in domestic currency, a quarterly dividend equal to a trillionth of the nation's quarterly nominal G.D.P. Read more...

What is scarier, the "asset" backing this bond proposal, the proposal writer's credentials, or the repressed memory precipitating the proposal publication?

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

2010 will be a year of major transformations, punctuated by the following key escalating divergence: i) on one hand, the ongoing contraction of the US consumer will accelerate, because even as the stock market ramps ever higher (and on ever decreasing trade volume a 2,000 level on the S&P while completely incredulous, is attainable, but will benefit only a select few insiders who continue selling their stock at ridiculous valuations), household wealth will at best stagnate (as a reminder, an increase in interest rates "withdraws" much more household net worth, due to implied house price reduction, than any comparable boost to the S&P can offset), ii) on the other hand, China, which is faced with the ticking timebomb of continuing the status quo and hoping that US consumers can keep growing the global economy, or alternatively, looking inward at its own consumer class, and shifting away from its historical export-led model. The one unavoidable side effect of this prominent departure would be a renminbi appreciation, and a logical drop in the US currency, once the US-China peg if lifted (a theme opposed recently by SocGen's Albert Edwards, who sees the inverse as likely occurring).  The main question for 2010 and beyond is whether this will be a gradual decline or a disorderly drop. And behind the scenes of all the bickering, jawboning and posturing, this is precisely what high level officials from both the US and China are currently negotiating. This will be one of the major themes that defines the next decade. Another phrase to describe this process is the gradual drift of US into a nation that is aware it is no longer the primary economic dynamo of global growth as China eagerly steps in to fill that spot.

Looking at the aftermath of the financial crisis, the two major consequences that will define US economic trends for an extended period of time, are the increasingly more frugal US consumer, whose savings rate is likely to increase gradually to the long-term low double digit average, and an ongoing outflow from equities into safer assets such as municipals, bonds and loans, as the maturing baby-boomers finds the volatility of the engineered equity market far too risky as they enter retirement age.

So with US consumption-led growth entering its twilight days, courtesy of assets that simply do not provide the kinds of returns that allowed for a savings-free lifestyle, what does this mean for Asia, and China in particular? Bank of America provides a good and succinct overview of the major historical themes that have defined Asian economics, and what the next decade will likely bring. (No link provided.)

The essence of the Asian development strategy is to build manufacturing capacity for global demand. High savings rates allowed the needed investment in plants and infrastructure to be financed domestically. This strategy was pioneered by Japan in the 1950s and 60s, copied by the Asian "Tigers" (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan) in the 70s and 80s, and by a host of other Asian countries in the 80s and 90s. What changed the game was China's adoption of the same strategy. Exports have increased nearly sixfold since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. This had a profound impact on the global economy - but it had an even more profound impact on the China's own economy and labor market. We estimate that 150 million Chinese workers joined the global labor force and began producing internationally traded goods. (As a contrast, the US labor force is 154 million people.)

The integration of China's vast workforce into the global economy is what tipped the balance. The transfer of jobs and production from the US, where personal and corporate savings rates were low, to China, where savings rates were high, gave rise to huge imbalances. Within a few years after WTO entry, China's current account surplus became the world's largest, mirrored by an even larger US deficit.

Currency appreciation would have reduced wages, profits, and the flow of savings, but China was unwilling to allow market forces to play out. Thus, thePBoC (China's central bank)  intervened in unprecedented amounts, and the vast flow of Chinese savings was channeled  abroad in the form of foreign exchange reserves - mostly short-duration government debt and bank deposits. Essentially, China was financing its own exports by purchasing short-term debt. The bulk of that found its way into US markets, keeping interest rates low and setting the stage for the housing bubble.

....

The financial crisis delivered a clear verdict, in our view, on the limits to the Asian growth model. It no longer makes sense to pursue double-digit growth by lending cheaply to the US consumer.

Yet change would require less reserve accumulation or - put another way - allowing the currency to appreciate against the US dollar, to which it is now effectively pegged. China needs to manage this "exit" carefully. Moving too fast risks a dollar crisis, with a disorderly drop in the US dollar and a spike in US bond yields. Moving too slow risks a boom-bust cycle in China, with capital inflows and strong monetary growth rates putting upward pressure on asset prices and inflation.

A BoA China FX Roadmap can be read at the Zero Hedge site or downloaded, if you are registered with Scribd.

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

To qualify for the first short-work program that started last November, a company had to show a 30% drop in revenue over a two-month period. The government paid workers all the wages they lost due to the reduction of their hours. More than 2,000 companies applied, and the state paid for more than 2.4 million hours of work at a cost of around [euro ]200 million. The subsidy, limited to a six-month period, was available until the end of April.

At the same time, the government set up a network of advisers to work with companies. The companies, from large corporations to family-owned businesses, get help deciding whether to use state-funded programs to avoid job cuts. When layoffs can't be avoided, the team helps workers find new jobs.

In late April, another program known as "part-time unemployment" kicked in, which didn't require companies to show a big revenue drop.

Under this [euro ]1 billion plan, employers can reduce workers' hours and salaries by as much as half, and the state makes up 70% of the lost wages.

In the Washington Post Book World today, I review Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big To Fail and two related books: Duff McDonald's biography of Jamie Dimon (Last Man Standing), and Peter Goodman's broader retrospective on the political origins and social impact of the crisis (Past Due).

If you think the crisis of 2008-09 was an aberration, or top Wall Street executives have learned their lessons, or our financial system is no longer dangerous, take a look at these books.  Each of them separately explains part of how the people running our biggest banks have done so well; taken together, these books describe a pattern of corporate and government behavior which - in the aftermath of the Great Bailout of 2009 - points to serious trouble ahead.

Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever. (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the millennium didn't begin until 2001. Do we really care?)
But from an economic point of view, I'd suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

Israeli troops yesterday shot dead six Palestinians in two separate incidents, as evidence emerged that an increasingly fragile ceasefire between armed groups loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement and Israel appeared to be in danger of breaking down.

The shootings, the most serious violence in months, came a day before today's first anniversary of the outbreak of Israel's war against Gaza in which almost 1,400 Palestinians died - and as allegations have emerged from Israeli human rights campaigners who opposed the war that they are facing concerted attempts to silence them.

Three of the Palestinians were killed in an airstrike just inside the Gaza border. According to Israeli officials they had been scouting the area for a possible infiltration operation, but according to Hamas officials and medics they had been searching for scrap metal to salvage.

More serious in its implications, however, was the shooting dead of three members of Fatah's armed wing - the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades - in a raid on the northern West Bank city of Nablus, apparently in retaliation for the shooting of an Israeli driving near the settlement at Shavei Shomron. Relatives who witnessed the Nablus shootings said soldiers fired at two of the men without warning. An Israeli army spokesman, Major Peter Lerner, said troops fired after the three men failed to respond to calls to surrender.

It also follows the discovery of an improvised explosive device on a busy road leading to the huge Israeli settlement at Modi'in with a letter from an al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades unit claiming responsibility. The two incidents have followed recent warnings from both Israelis and Palestinians that frustration among a younger generation of al-Aqsa members - which signed an amnesty deal with Israel in 2007 - over the lack of progress in the almost moribund peace process was in danger of boiling over.

WASHINGTON -- Federal authorities on Saturday charged a 23-year-old Nigerian man with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, and officials said the suspect told them he had obtained explosive chemicals and a syringe that were sewn into his underwear from a bomb expert in Yemen associated with Al Qaeda.

The authorities have not independently corroborated the Yemen connection claimed by the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was burned in his failed attempt to bring down the airliner and is in a hospital in Michigan. But a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said on Saturday that the suspect's account was "plausible," and that he saw "no reason to discount it."

Mr. Abdulmutallab's name was not unknown to American authorities. His father, a prominent Nigerian banker, recently told officials at the United States Embassy in Nigeria that he was concerned about his son's increasingly extremist religious views.

As a result of his father's warning, federal authorities in Washington opened an investigative file and Mr. Abdulmutallab's name ended up in the American intelligence community's central repository of information on known or suspected international terrorists.

The nephew of Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi is reportedly among  eight people killed in continuing clashes between police and protesters.

An aide to the leader said on Sunday that Seyyed Ali Mousavi died after being shot by the police, but the claim could not be independently verified as foreign news organisations are barred by the authorities from covering street unrest.

Iranian state television, however, confirmed  that several people were killed in clashes.

Opposition websites said at least four protesters had been killed in the capital Tehran while another four died in a violent crackdown on opposition protests in the northwestern city of Tabriz.

"During clashes between security forces and protesters ... at least four protesters were killed in Tabriz and many others wounded," the Jaras website said.

Up to three million Shia men and women have flocked to the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala to participate in the annual Ashoura commemorations, despite bomb blasts that left at least seven dead.

Tens of thousands security personnel had been deployed for the occasion and city officials on Sunday later claimed that the "day had been a success".

Ashoura pilgrims have been targeted in a number of attacks over the past week, killing more than 180 people.

On Sunday, at least five pilgrims were killed and 15 others wounded after a blast targeted a religious procession in the northeastern town of Tuz Khormato.

Blasts in the capital Baghdad killed two more pilgrims.

Sunday's commemorations marked the climax of Ashoura, the yearly mourning period in which Shia Muslims remember the seventh century death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein, in a battle against overwhelming odds in the central city of Karbala.

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan -- Secretive branches of the military's Special Operations forces have increased counterterrorism missions against some of the most lethal groups in Afghanistan and, because of their success, plan an even bigger expansion next year, according to American commanders.

The commandos, from the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's classified Seals units, have had success weakening the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the strongest Taliban warrior in eastern Afghanistan, the officers said. Mr. Haqqani's group has used its bases in neighboring Pakistan to carry out deadly strikes in and around Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Guided by intercepted cellphone communications, the American commandos have also killed some important Taliban operatives in Marja, the most fearsome Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province in the south, the officers said. Marine commanders say they believe that there are some 1,000 fighters holed up in the town.

Although President Obama and his top aides have not publicly discussed these highly classified missions as part of the administration's revamped strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the counterterrorism operations are expected to increase, along with the deployment of 30,000 more American forces in the next year.

The increased counterterrorism operations over the past three or four months reflect growth in every part of the Afghanistan campaign, including conventional forces securing the population, other troops training and partnering with Afghan security forces, and more civilians to complement and capitalize on security gains.

China streaked ahead of its western and Asian rivals at the weekend by unveiling the world's fastest long-distance passenger train service.

The Harmony express raced 1,100km in less than three hours on Saturday, travelling from Guangzhou, capital of southern Guangdong province, to the central city of Wuhan. The journey previously took at least 11 hours.

The improvement illustrates how China's huge investment in infrastructure is dramatically shrinking the country, yet the economics of the new service, which runs 56 times a day, remain unproven amid a build-it-and-they-will-come approach to transport.

"Expressways are not suited for China, which has large numbers of people but little space to spare. China should learn from Japan and Europe."

The Harmony express, which reached a top speed of 394km per hour in pre-launch trials, travelled at an average rate of 350km per hour on its debut. This compared with a maximum service speed of 300km per hour for Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains and France's TGV service. In America, Amtrak's Acela "Express" service takes 3½ hours to trundle between Boston and New York, a distance of only 300km.

See DoDo's diary China wants 380 km/h trains from September 2008.

La Chine dorme. Laisse la dormir. Quand la Chine s'éveillera, le monde tremblera.

By Chuck Liddy | McClatchy Newspapers

KABUL -- When snow covers the mountains north of Kabul and temperatures drop below freezing, many residents of Afghanistan's capital rely on their bukhari stoves to heat their homes. The stoves burn wood, sawdust, diesel fuel and kerosene. Each is made by hand.

Most of the stoves are made in a block in north Kabul, and as you approach it, a symphony of noise rises, beginning with a faint staccato that grows into a crescendo of every pitch -- the sound of men working with metal as each component of each stove is carefully made. Young boys rush about, ferrying parts through the 30 or so shops in the market. The men have decades of experience in the craft. Intricate designs are pressed into the sheet metal with rotary presses. Some men use tin snips to cut the razor-sharp metal. Others use hammers and metal chisels. Welds are made with manual soldering irons heated to a glowing red, dipped into the solder, then placed on the seams.

Some of the stoves will double as water heaters. They're fitted with water jackets and faucets. Others will do duty as cook stoves. Business was slow but steady on a crisp Sunday morning when the temperature hovered just above freezing. An old man listened to a young boy's spiel but was unconvinced by the boy's earnest offer to fill the water jacket and demonstrate its "quality" watertightness. The man wandered off to listen to another vendor sing the praises of his stove.

Farwad Rasooli, 30, pitched his stoves' usefulness. "If you take one of these stoves you will have very good business," he urged. "Take this one with sawdust and this one with a boiler around to make warm water, put a little wood in it, your house, your room will be very warm."

With their ornate metalwork and handmade detail, the stoves border on art, all for about 2,000 afghanis, about $40 U.S.

More Chinese rich people join the trend to pursue American permanent residency by making investments in the United States. But they may be victimized by financial traps set up by domestic immigration agencies and foreign investment organizations, local expert warned.

Qi Lixin, chairman of Beijing Entry & Exit Service Association, said the number of applicants for the US EB-5 visa through investment almost doubled in 2009, from around 500 last year to over 1000 this year. The main reasons for them to do so are to provide a better education environment for their children and to look for further business opportunities.

"Only people with personal assets of over 10 million yuan can afford investment immigration," Qi said.

The EB-5 visa for Immigrant Investors provides a method of obtaining a green card for foreign nationals who invest money in the United States. Applicants should invest at least $500,000 in certain investments or regional centers with high unemployment rates.

"There usually exists a hidden problem for EB-5 visa applicants. As far as I know, there are more than 70 US regional center programs attracting investors in China. They said they can return customer's money in five years' time," Qi said, "But if losses occur, which side can assure Chinese applicants to get their $500,000 back on time? The domestic agency, or foreign investment organization?"

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has published new draft rules for village elections, allowing villagers to fire officials who don't perform as promised.

When village elections were rolled out nationwide in 1998, to improve local officials' responsiveness to local concerns, some Chinese reformers hoped they would open the door to democracy in rural townships and urban districts.

However, elections have been frozen at the most basic level.

The new rules allow for one-fifth of villagers with voting rights, or one-third of village representatives, to impeach a village chief, according to the draft published on the legislature's website, www.npc.gov.cn.

He or she would be dismissed if a majority of those attending a meeting made up of at least half the village vote to do so.

By law, Chinese employers are required to contribute to a state-administered retirement pension plan for their employees, who will be eligible for the benefits after paying a monthly premium for an accumulated 15 years. This arrangement, which appears to offer recipients necessary protection, is not always well-received by both sides of the employment equation.

One reason is that it is difficult for highly mobile workers to get benefits because in most cases their retirement pension accounts are currently not allowed to be transferred from region to region. Many employees withdraw their deposits when they move to a different province, and they would sometimes rather have their employers pay this part of their income up front just to avoid bureaucratic hassles.

Today, The Beijing News reports that the State Council announced at yesterday's session that starting January 1st, 2010, retirement pension recipients will be allowed to transfer their accounts between provinces and prefecture-level cities after they find employment elsewhere. The time during which the employee paid his/her dues in different areas will be accumulated. The new policy makes it clear that the migrant workers from rural areas will also be eligible for the change. In addition, the minimum retirement pension of "enterprise employees" (to be distinguished from government employees) will be raised by approximately 10 percent, which will translate into an average 120 yuan monthly income gain for pensioners.

My bold.

La Chine dorme. Laisse la dormir. Quand la Chine s'éveillera, le monde tremblera.

MOGADISHU: A helicopter dropped a $4 million (R30m) ransom payment yesterday onto the deck of a Chinese coal ship hijacked by Somali pirates, a pirate source said.

The De Xin Hai was carrying 25 crew and about 76 000 tons of coal from South Africa to India when it was seized in an attack about 1 100km east of the Horn of Africa.

It was the first known seizure of a coal ship, and Indian coal traders warned at the time that this might encourage gangs to seize other coal ships. Experts say a higher risk of pirate attacks could disrupt an expected increase in the volume of South African coal heading to India.

The North African branch of al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of two Italians in Mauritania earlier this month.

Al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb said in an audio message broadcast on the Al-Arabiya television news channel that they had kidnapped the Italians on December 19 because of Italy's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Italian media has named the couple as Sergio Cicala, 65, and his wife Philomene Kabouree, 39, who is from Burkina Faso and has dual Italian and Burkina Faso citizenship.

At least 10 Afghan civilians, including eight school children, have been killed by Western forces in the country, President Hamid Karzai has said.

Mr Karzai said the deaths occurred during an air strike in Eastern Kunar province two days ago.

Kunar governor Sayed Fazlullah Wahedi told the Reuters news agency officials could not visit the area "because of the presence of the Taliban".

WASHINGTON -- A 562-foot smokestack that spewed a plume of arsenic, lead and other heavy metals over 1,000 square miles of Washington state's Puget Sound for nearly a century remains a fitting symbol of the largest environmental bankruptcy in U.S. history.

However, it also tells a cautionary tale of how a company that's intent on shedding its environmental liabilities could manipulate the nation's bankruptcy system.

In this instance, Grupo Mexico, S.A. de C.V., tried and failed, according to lawyers and regulators who are close to the case. It took a federal judge, however, to block what some bankruptcy lawyers call a "candy heist" that could have left taxpayers responsible for cleaning up 80 polluted sites in 19 states, a job that initially was estimated to cost $6.5 billion.

The smokestack in Ruston, Wash., once the world's biggest, has been demolished, as has the copper smelter that fed it. The smelter was owned by Asarco, a century-old mining, smelting and refining company based in Tucson, Ariz., that once was listed on the Fortune 500. Grupo Mexico bought Asarco in 1999.

In court documents, Grupo Mexico has denied that it maneuvered Asarco into bankruptcy in an attempt to evade its environmental responsibilities. Grupo Mexico refused to comment for this story.

"Grupo Mexico tried to use a bankruptcy court to avoid Asarco's cleanup responsibilities, and they almost got away with it," charged Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2009) -- Glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are enriching stream and near shore marine ecosystems from a surprising source -- ancient carbon contained in glacial runoff, researchers from four universities and the U.S. Forest Service report in the December 24, 2009, issue of the journal Nature.

In spring 2008, Eran Hood, associate professor of hydrology with the Environmental Science Program at the University of Alaska Southeast, set out to measure the nutrients that reach the gulf from five glaciated watersheds he can drive to from his Juneau office. "We don't currently have much information about how runoff from glaciers may be contributing to productivity in downstream marine ecosystems. This is a particularly critical question given the rate at which glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are thinning and receding" said Hood.

Hood then asked former graduate school colleague Durelle Scott, now an assistant professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, to help analyze the organic matter and nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus) loads being exported from the Juneau-area study watersheds. "Because there are few reports of nutrient yields from glacial watersheds, Eran and I decided to compare the result from a non-glacial watershed with those of a watershed partially covered by a glacier and a watershed fully covered by a glacier," said Scott.

Hood and Scott's initial findings, reported in the September 2008 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, presented something of a mystery. As might be expected, there is more organic matter from a forested watershed than from a fully or partially glacier-covered watershed. With soil development, organic matter is transported from the landscape during runoff events. However, there was still a considerable amount of organic carbon exported from the glaciated landscape.

cienceDaily (Dec. 25, 2009) -- The faint tug of the sun and moon on the San Andreas Fault stimulates tremors deep underground, suggesting that the rock 15 miles below is lubricated with highly pressurized water that allows the rock to slip with little effort, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, seismologists.

"Tremors seem to be extremely sensitive to minute stress changes," said Roland Bürgmann, UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science. "Seismic waves from the other side of the planet triggered tremors on the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of Washington state after the Sumatra earthquake last year, while the Denali earthquake in 2002 triggered tremors on a number of faults in California. Now we also see that tides -- the daily lunar and solar tides -- very strongly modulate tremors."

In a paper appearing in the Dec. 24 issue of the journal Nature, UC Berkeley graduate student Amanda M. Thomas, seismologist Robert Nadeau of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory and Bürgmann argue that this extreme sensitivity to stress -- and specifically to shearing stress along the fault -- means that the water deep underground is under extreme pressure.

"The big finding is that there is very high fluid pressure down there, that is, lithostatic pressure, which means pressure equivalent to the load of all rock above it, 15 to 30 kilometers (10 to 20 miles) of rock," Nadeau said. "Water under very high pressure essentially lubricates the rock, making the fault very weak."

Though tides raised in the Earth by the sun and moon are not known to trigger earthquakes directly, they can trigger swarms of deep tremors, which could increase the likelihood of quakes on the fault above the tremor zone, the researchers say. At other fault zones, such as at Cascadia, swarms of tremors in the ductile zone deep underground correlate with slip at depth as well as increased stress on the shallower "seismogenic zone," where earthquakes are generated. The situation on the San Andreas Fault is not so clear, however.

With another holiday shopping season upon us, here is a look back at some of the consumer items of the early 20th century that had some gift givers and receivers radiating more than just smiles

Lusaka -- When he ordered his colleagues at the Water and Sanitation Association of Zambia to save all their urine in a plastic bottle in the office toilet, they thought he was mad. But German sanitation specialist Christopher Kellner wanted to demonstrate why he calls urine "liquid gold".

"(Urine) contains the three most important plant nutrients which farmers buy as artificial fertiliser. These are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium - but it also contains all eight micronutrients plants need for growth," Kellner explains.

In Detroit, hundreds of backyard gardens and scores of community gardens have blossomed and helped feed students in at least 40 schools and hundreds of families.

It is the size and scope of Hantz Farms that makes the project unique. Although company officials declined to pinpoint how many acres they might use, they have been quoted as saying that they plan to farm up to 5,000 acres within the Motor City's limits in the coming years, raising organic lettuces, trees for biofuel and a variety of other things.

The project was launched two years ago by Michigan native and financier John Hantz, who has invested an initial $30 million of his own money toward purchasing equipment and land.

Read more...

Wayne County has been aggressively marketing easements and lo-no interest SMB loans to stimulate new venture in Detroit-metro.

Possibly related news:

Dec 2008 et seq

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

With a bend of the knees and an arch of the back, a Japanese engineer today set a world flight record for a paper plane, keeping his hand-folded construction in the air for 26.1 seconds.

Using a plane specially designed for "long haul" flights, Takuo Toda narrowly failed to match his lifetime best of 27.9 seconds, a Guinness world record set in Hiroshima earlier, but achieved with a plane that was held together with cellophane tape.

Today's flight, inside a Japan Airlines hangar near Haneda airport in Tokyo, was the longest by an unadulterated model. "I felt a lot of pressure," Toda told the Associated Press after his feat. "Everything is a factor ‑ the moisture in the air, the temperature, the crowd."

The record was all the more satisfying for having been achieved with a plane that stayed true to the traditions of origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding. He folded his 10cm aircraft by hand from a single sheet of paper and did not use scissors or glue.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 26, 2009) -- Going back for a second dessert after your holiday meal might not be the best strategy for living a long, cancer-free life say researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. That's because they've shown exactly how restricted calorie diets -- specifically in the form of restricted glucose -- help human cells live longer.

This discovery, published online in The FASEB Journal, could help lead to drugs and treatments that slow human aging and prevent cancer.

"Our hope is that the discovery that reduced calories extends the lifespan of normal human cells will lead to further discoveries of the causes for these effects in different cell types and facilitate the development of novel approaches to extend the lifespan of humans," said Trygve Tollefsbol, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Center for Aging and Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "We would also hope for these studies to lead to improved prevention of cancer as well as many other age-related diseases through controlling calorie intake of specific cell types."

To make this discovery, Tollefsbol and colleagues used normal human lung cells and precancerous human lung cells that were at the beginning stages of cancer formation. Both sets of cells were grown in the laboratory and received either normal or reduced levels of glucose (sugar). As the cells grew over a period of a few weeks, the researchers monitored their ability to divide, and kept track of how many cells survived over this period.

They found that the normal cells lived longer, and many of the precancerous cells died, when given less glucose. Gene activity was also measured under these same conditions. The reduced glucose caused normal cells to have a higher activity of the gene that dictates the level of telomerase, an enzyme that extends their lifespan and lower activity of a gene (p16) that slows their growth. Epigenetic effects (effects not due to gene mutations) were found to be a major cause in changing the activity of these genes as they reacted to decreased glucose levels

By Sid Perkins,  Science News

A SHOCKING BITE
Sinornithosaurus may have subdued its prey with venom that flowed into a victim through unique grooves in many of the dinosaur's teeth, a new study suggests. Triangular depressions on the creature's upper jaw (arrow) likely held venom-producing glands.National Academy of Sciences

Well-preserved fossils of a feathered dinosaur that lived about 124 million years ago -- along with certain aspects of its teeth and skull -- suggest that the turkey-sized creature was venomous.

Sinornithosaurus was unearthed in China and first described by scientists about 10 years ago, but the telling details of the creature's cranial anatomy are just now being reported, says David Burnham, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Most of the teeth in each side of the creature's upper jaw have grooves that run from the base of each tooth to the tip, a characteristic seen in some of today's venomous reptiles. A large triangular depression on the creature's upper jawbone -- a feature not previously reported in other dinosaurs or their relatives -- probably held venom-producing glands, Burnham and his colleagues report online December 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Venom flowing from those glands probably pooled in reservoirs at the base of each grooved tooth until the dino bit its prey, Burnham says.

A few of Sinornithosaurus' narrow teeth were quite a bit longer than the others. Modern creatures that have a similar variability in tooth length typically bite and hold their prey, Burnham says. So, he and his colleagues speculate, Sinornithosaurus probably used its venom to quickly stun struggling victims, which probably included small-to-medium-sized birds, by sending them into shock.

Naomi Wolf described all this in 1991, in her pathbreaking book The Beauty Myth. "The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us," she wrote. But Wolf was writing before plastic surgery was considered a prerequisite for ongoing employment, before Botox, before ubiquitous Brazilian waxes, before images of natural breasts started seeming like an odd retro novelty. Almost 20 years later, the period Wolf was writing in seems like a prelapsarian paradise of female self-acceptance.

Given the way women perceived as unattractive are treated, it's no wonder so many find the pressure intolerable and seek surgical relief. Laurie Essig, author of a forthcoming book on plastic surgery, recently reported that a third of plastic surgery patients make less than $30,000 a year; many pay for their surgeries with credit cards charging usurious interest rates. Blogging on True/Slant, Essig argues that it's unfair to tax these women further, especially since there's no objective way to figure out which operations are and are not necessary. "'Necessary' is an impossible word when it comes to cosmetic surgery because ultimately, almost none of it is necessary for pure physical survival, but we are social animals who increasingly depend on 'first impressions' to survive," she writes.

There's some truth to what she says, but stretching the term "necessary" to encompass cosmetic surgery means acquiescing to the last decade's most pernicious trends. The more time women are compelled to spend fighting their own bodies, the less they have to fight for anything else.

Look, the Sunday morning talk shows are broken. As works of journalism they don't work. And I don't know why this is so hard for the producers to figure out.

The people who host and supervise these shows, the journalists who appear on them, as well as the politicians who are interviewed each week, are quite aware that extreme polarization and hyper-partisan conflict have come to characterize official Washington, an observation repeated hundreds of times a month by elders in the Church of the Savvy.  Ron Brownstein wrote a whole book on it: The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America

Holiday tidings come from NASA's Voyager 2 this week, offering a view of deep space beyond our sun's solar system.

Now speeding through space at more than 34,000 miles-per-hour, the 1977 space probe resides more than 8.3. billion miles away from the sun. That is twice as far as Pluto. Two years ago, Voyager 2 passed into the region of space where the sun's solar wind peters out as it plows into the interstellar gases of our Milky Way galaxy. And now it's giving us some news from this region, called the "heliosheath," by astrophysicists.

"This is a magic mission," says space scientist Merav Opher of George Mason University. in Fairfax, Va.. "After all these years, Voyager 2 is still working and sending us first hand (on-site) data."

Voyager 2's vantage, revealed in the Dec. 24 Nature journal in a study led by Opher and colleagues, shows that beyond the solar system, the galaxy's magnetic field is unexpectedly strong, about twice as much as expected, and unexpectedly tilted. Our galaxy is essentially a twin-armed flat disk of stars 100,000 light years across rotating around a spherical ball of stars in its center (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles.).

In a move essential to Florida's efforts to develop an expanded commercial launch industry, the U.S. Senate passed legislation late Wednesday that would extend federal liability protection for commercial space launch providers against catastrophic events.

Every time a commercial company launches rocket with any payload, the potential third-party liability is enormous--a rocket could conceivably do billions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure and people.

Under the measure approved by the Senate, the U.S. government would continue for three more years to indemnify commercial launch operators against third-party claims for launch-related damages that exceed $500 million, up to a total of $1.5 billion.

Rising prices and better alternatives may mean curtains for netbooks.

The small portable computers were popular in 2009, but some industry watchers are convinced that their popularity is already waning.

"The days of the netbook are over," said Stuart Miles, founder and editor of technology blog Pocket Lint.

As prices edge upwards, net-using habits change and other gadgets take on their functions, netbooks will become far less popular, he thinks.

"Technology has advanced so much that it's outmanoeuvred itself," he said. "You wouldn't go for something so basic anymore."

The aim is to let citizens report problems to their governments more easily and accurately; and to put public information, which otherwise may be buried in file cabinets and Excel files, at the fingertips of taxpayers.

By some accounts, the trend is turning the government-voter relationship on its head and could usher in a new era of grassroots democracy.

my bold

You can't be me, I'm taken

HYDERABAD, India -- The 86-year-old governor of a southern Indian state resigned, a day after a television news channel broadcast a tape allegedly showing him in bed with three women.

Pressure mounted on Gov. Narain Dutt Tiwari to quit after the tape allegedly showing him in bed with three women was broadcast Friday, prompting the opposition and women's right groups to hold street protests in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh's state capital, demanding his resignation.

Tiwari's office denied the allegation, denouncing the tape as fabricated.

Tiwari, a veteran governing Congress party leader at the national level, sent his resignation letter to the Indian president on Saturday, citing health reasons, a state official said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

NEW YORK -- In Hollywood's biggest-ever box-office weekend, "Avatar" held the top spot while earning only slightly less during its second week of release.

According to studio estimates Sunday, James Cameron's 3-D epic earned $75 million for 20th Century Fox, only a 3 percent drop from its opening weekend total of $77.4 million.

"Sherlock Holmes" followed close behind with $65.4 million, including a record Christmas Day debut of $24.9 million. "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel" [I could not make this up. -ed.] took in $50.2 million.