The next few months will be decisive for the European Union's future economic health, with the bloc set to agree a new 10-year economic plan in a bid to leave the recent recession behind, and chart a fresh course towards steady growth and job creation.

Decade-high unemployment, an ageing EU population and soaring budget deficits form the backdrop for those involved in drafting the important roadmap.

Memory of the EU's current economic plan - the Lisbon Strategy, due to expire in 2010 - is also likely to influence EU leaders as they prepare to discuss its successor at a number of European summits over the next six months under the Spanish EU presidency.

Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has invited to his Madrid office tomorrow (5 January) a number of personalities who are considered as Europe's `wise men', with the view of regularly consulting them, the Spanish press writes.

Those invited for consultation include Jacques Delors, the long-serving Commission President (1985-1994) who is considered as one of the 'fathers of Europe'.

Felipe González, former Spanish Prime minister (1982-1996) and chairman of a reflection group on the future of Europe will also join, alongside former Spanish commissioner Pedro Solbes (1999-2004).

Belgrade submitted its application bid last month with the ambition to "beat all records for fastest EU accession" but diplomats warned there were no shortcuts to the bloc's membership.

Serbian President Boris Tadic, submitted his country's application, a five-page document, to Swedish Prime Minister Frederik Reinfeldt in Stockholm on 22 December.

Tadic, whose victory at the general elections last May was seen as crucial to the country's integration to Europe, said Belgrade's target date for accession was 2014.

Greece is set to tell the European Commission how it aims to control its public finances and get its beleaguered economy back on track in 2010.

Its debt problems represent a major test of the euro in its 12th year, as markets wait to see how the 16-nation eurozone reacts to Greece's problems.

Government debt ratings have been downgraded in Greece by all three major international rating agencies.

The failed attack on the Danish caricaturist Kurt Westergaard has increased anxiety in Europe about religious extremists. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Islam scholar Peter Heine discusses Islam's stance toward violence and the nature of the threat in Germany.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In the wake of Friday's failed attack on the Muhammad caricaturist Kurt Westergaard in Denmark, there is once again talk of a so-called "Islamist hit list." But does such a thing really exist?

Peter Heine: There certainly isn't any set hit list for the simple fact that there are too many Islamist organizations, networks and individual groups. And all of them have their own goals, whether political or military.

Three labour MPs are arguing they cannot be prosecuted over expenses claims because they are protected by parliamentary privilege.

The trio - Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine - are being represented by a legal firm that has acted as solicitor to the Labour Party since 1990.

Their lawyers are understood to maintain that the Bill of Rights of 1689 makes them immune to prosecution. Police have forwarded files relating to the expenses claims of six MPs and peers to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Mr Morley and Mr Chaytor both claimed thousands of pounds for "phantom" mortgages they had paid off. Mr Devine submitted invoices for electrical work worth £2,157 from a company with an allegedly false address and an invalid VAT number. Steel & Shamash, a London legal company, confirmed it had instructed two QCs to consider whether the MPs should be protected by parliamentary privilege.

"It is their opinion that there are substantial legal and constitutional arguments that this is, in fact, the case," a spokesman for Steel & Shamash told The Sunday Times. "Any possible future involvement of the prosecuting authorities in this instance raises serious constitutional issues that will affect not just our clients but the way parliament itself operates."

Serbia has filed charges of genocide against Croatia at the United Nations' International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging atrocities during the 1991-95 Yugoslav war.

Serbia's foreign ministry said Belgrade's legal team filed the lawsuit at the Netherlands-based court on Monday.

The lawsuit was a reaction to charges filed more than ten years ago by Croatia, which the ICJ in 2008 decided that it would hear.

In that suit, Zagreb has accused Serbian forces of killing thousands of Croats during the war as they pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing in the north of the country.

Serbia's state-run Tanjug news agency said that Belgrade had filed a "counter-complaint against the Republic of Croatia for genocide committed against Serbs during the 1991-1995 war".

It is famous for its budget offers and rock-bottom prices but when the Lidl supermarket chain received several batches of high-grade cocaine at its Spanish stores last weekend it decided that that was one product which would not be making it on to the shelves.

Instead the budget supermarket group called in the police to solve the mystery of how a dozen of its stores had each received hundreds of thousands of euros worth of neatly wrapped cocaine mixed in with their fresh bananas.

The drugs were discovered at the bottom of banana boxes that went to stores in Madrid, Plasencia and the town of Cáceres. The bananas, which had been imported by sea from Ecuador, arrived at the Mercamadrid wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Madrid last week. There they were snapped up by buyers from Lidl and the Alcampo supermarket group.

BERLIN (Reuters) - The German government said on Monday it knew nothing about a magazine report that the CIA had planned a secret operation to kill a German-Syrian in Hamburg linked to the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets.

World

The U.S. magazine Vanity Fair had reported that the CIA had in 2004 sent a team from the private security firm Blackwater, now Xe, to Hamburg to kill Mamoun Darkazanli, who was investigated for years by German authorities on suspicion of links to al Qaeda.

January's edition of the magazine cited a source familiar with the program as saying the mission had been kept secret from the German government.

The report has been widely picked up in the German media and could become a source of tension between Washington and Berlin. The CIA declined to comment.

Darkazanli has been accused by the United States of financing Osama bin Laden's network and has been blacklisted by the United Nations as being linked to al Qaeda.

Vanity Fair reported that the CIA had dispatched a hit squad of Blackwater employees to Hamburg in 2004.

After he suddenly decided to leave his post six months ago, Croatia's former Prime Minister and HDZ president, announces his return. His return seems as pompous as his departure and the only difference is that he now seems to be launching an attack against the current HDZ president, Jadranka Kosor.

...

Sanader further explains that party's leadership deficits are partly his responsibility, but only because he decided to make a full withdrawal from the party.

...

Asked to elaborate on why he left the post of Prime Minister, Sanader said that he was not ready to sell Croatia's territory and how his departure assisted in Kosor's agreement with Slovenian Prime Minister, Borut Pahor. However, he refused to make further comments on the agreement.

Javno.hr: Only three HDZ members support Sanader?

HDZ leadership is appalled with Sanader's press conference because nobody in the party knew what he was planning to do on the 10th anniversary of HDZ's first parliamentary loss and his behavior is seen as a sort of attempt of rebellion.

Unofficial sources say that Sanader may be expelled from HDZ because of party's statute which calls for expulsion of the members who harm the party's political interests or their reputation.

Jadranka Kosor called for a Monday meeting with coalition partners who already expressed a full support for her and announced withdrawal from the Government in case Sanader attempts to interfere with her work.

Anjem Choudary is brilliant, isn't he? No one else can currently touch him when it comes professional media trolling; he knows exactly what to say, what to do and who to talk to, and also when to do it. As strokes of genius go, nothing is more likely to wind up the nutters outside of his own clique than a half-baked supposed plan to march through Wootton Bassett, which may as well be our current Jerusalem, a holy place which cannot in any way be defiled, such is how it's been sanctified both by the press and politicians. As for his rather less amusing supposed plan for "sending letters" to the families of those bereaved through the current deployment to Afghanistan, urging them, according to that notoriously accurate source, the Sun, that they should embrace Islam "to save [themselves] from the hellfire", it seems more likely that this would only be through the "open letter" which appeared on the Islam4UK website, which is currently 403ing.

[William] Reville [an academic at University College Cork who has campaigned for the continued influence of the church in Irish society] says the Catholic hierarchy has not pushed for the law at all, and no senior churchmen have come out in recent days to defend it. Some observers have suggested the move is simply to bring the old law up to date with the increasingly multicultural, multifaith nature of Irish society.

Others, such as David Quinn, a former editor of The Irish Catholic newspaper, have their own theories.

"My own personal theory is that it actually had to do with the Danish cartoon controversy of about four years ago," he says. "That there was a fear that we might get a Danish cartoon-style controversy in Ireland -- that some newspaper might publish something that Muslims found highly offensive -- and it might have repercussions for Irish trade in the Muslim world."

There has been no sign so far that the Irish government is going to prosecute the group Atheist Ireland or anyone else.

Many say the best step forward is to hold a referendum about deleting the blasphemy clause from the 1937 Constitution, eliminating the need for a law to enforce it.

In a speech yesterday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke insisted that low interest rates were not the root cause of the most recent real estate bubble. The New York Times says he used his "strongest language yet" in defending the central bank's past decisions and emphasizing the importance of greater financial regulation moving forward. Bernanke said, "Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders' risk management would have been a more effective and surgical approach to constraining the housing bubble than a general increase in interest rates." The Wall Street Journal notes that Bernanke's views on how the Fed should handle bubbles have changed. Previously, the paper says, "Its bubble strategy was to mop up after a bubble burst with lower interest rates to prevent damage to the broader economy." Recently, though, "Bernanke said, `never say never,' when asked whether the Fed should instead use higher interest rates to pre-emptively prick future bubbles, and he later said he wouldn't rule it out."

Labour and the Conservatives were today locked in the first big squabble of this year's general election campaign as the Tories described claims by the chancellor, Alistair Darling, that they had a £34bn black hole in their spending plans as "a dodgy dossier full of lies".

In one of the morning's press conferences that laid out some of the battlegrounds of the long campaign - to culminate in an expected polling day on 6 May - Darling said the Conservatives were trying to fight the election "on a nod and a wink".

He issued a 148-page document laying out what he said were Tory weaknesses on spending, with £45bn in spending commitments backed up by only £11bn to pay for them.

The move by Pimco, which is based in Newport Beach, California, comes as the majority of strategists in the bond market predict prices for both US and UK government debt to fall this year.

Prices are expected to come under pressure as the two nations shoulder larger debt burdens in the wake of the financial crisis. Each market also enjoyed support last year from their central banks - the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve - which began buying government debt as a way of injecting more money into their floundering economies.

[Torygraph Alert]

To understand the meaning of no good deed goes unpunished, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner can look no further than Wall Street where the banks that received the biggest taxpayer bailouts are seeking to reap trading profits from securities rescued by the government.

Only months after it was started, the U.S. program designed to purge debts of no immediate discernable value from the balance sheets of troubled banks has helped transform the frozen debt into a money-maker as the bonds have rallied. Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., who received 22 percent of the $418.7 billion American taxpayers loaned to troubled financial institutions, boosted holdings on their trading books of home- loan bonds that lack government guarantees while investors were raising cash for the program, according to Federal Reserve data.

Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America along with Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., all based in New York, added a combined $3.36 billion of the debt, for which there were few buyers as recently as March, to their short-term trading assets during the third quarter, up 16 percent from the second quarter, the most-recent data show.

Reporting from Washington - For three decades, Texas congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul's extreme brand of libertarian economics consigned him to the far fringes even among conservatives. Not a few times, his views put him on the losing end of 434-1 votes on Capitol Hill.

No longer. With the economy still struggling and political divisions deepening, Paul's ideas not only are gaining a wider audience but also are helping to shape a potentially historic battle over economic policy -- a struggle that will affect everything including jobs, growth and the nation's place in the global economy.

Already, Paul's long-derided proposal to give Congress supervisory power over the traditionally independent Federal Reserve appears to be on its way to becoming law.

His warnings on deficits and inflation are now Republican mantras. And with this year's congressional election campaign looming, the Texas congressman's deep-seated distrust of activist government has helped fuel protests such as the tea-party movement, harden partisan divisions in Washington and stoke public fears about federal spending and the deficit.

"People are wondering what went wrong. And they're not happy with what the government is offering up," said James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, offering an explanation for why seemingly wonkish arguments over interest rate policy and the money supply are spilling over onto ordinary Americans.

AKA [Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's Crystal Ball of Doom™ Technology]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is nothing if not decisive in his views, and has a undisguised fondness for the bearish perspective. But he was correct on the 2008 inflation/commodities headfake, saying repeatedly that deflationary forces would prevail when that was decidedly a minority view. He is also a Euro-skeptic, and I'm less comfortable with that position....

If things work out badly (and I see the odds of that as reasonably high; China is looking more and more like late 1980s Japan), they will work out very badly, markets are highly connected and if the right dominoes fall, many others go down in fast sequence. So the idea that the amplitude on the downside is likely to be extreme is very plausible. But he has also made a timing as well as a depth call, and sees things unravelling pretty soon. That could prove to be correct, but one thing shorts know all too well is that obvious-seeming outcomes can take much longer to come to pass than they ever thought.

Some of his observations seem spot on, in particular, that the Fed will lose its nerve and abandon its efforts to withdraw from quantitative easing, despite noises now to the contrary, that the dollar will rally near-term, and the yen will break.

From the Telegraph:

   The contraction of M3 money in the US and Europe over the last six months will slowly puncture economic recovery as 2010 unfolds, with the time-honoured lag of a year or so. Ben Bernanke will be caught off guard, just as he was in mid-2008 when the Fed drove straight through a red warning light with talk of imminent rate rises - the final error that triggered the implosion of Lehman, AIG, and the Western banking system.

    As the great bear rally of 2009 runs into the greater Chinese Wall of excess global capacity, it will become clear that we are in the grip of a 21st Century Depression - more akin to Japan's Lost Decade than the 1840s or 1930s, but nothing like the normal cycles of the post-War era. ...The vast East-West imbalances that caused the credit crisis are no better a year later, and perhaps worse. Household debt as a share of GDP sits near record levels in two-fifths of the world economy. Our long purge has barely begun. That is the elephant in the global tent....

    Yields on AAA German, French, US, and Canadian bonds will slither back down for a while in a fresh deflation scare. Exit strategies will go back into the deep freeze. Far from ending QE, the Fed will step up bond purchases. Bernanke will get religion again and ram down 10-year Treasury yields, quietly targeting 2.5pc. The funds will try to play the liquidity game yet again, piling into crude, gold, and Russian equities, but this time returns will be meagre. They will learn to respect secular deflation.

    Weak sovereigns will buckle. The shocker will be Japan, our Weimar-in-waiting...The Bank of Japan will pull the emergency lever on QE. The country will flip from deflation to incipient hyperinflation. The yen will fall out of bed, outdoing China's yuan in the beggar-thy-neighbour race to the bottom. By then China too will be in a quandary. Wild credit growth can mask the weakness of its mercantilist export model for a while, but only at the price of an asset bubble. Beijing must hit the brakes this year, or store up serious trouble. It will make as big a hash of this as Western central banks did in 2007-2008.

....

    The dollar rally will gather pace. America's economy - though sick - will shine within the even sicker OECD club....Mervyn King's pre-emptive QE and timely devaluation will bear fruit this year, sparing us the worst. By mid to late 2010, we will have lanced the biggest boils of the global system. Only then, amid fear and investor revulsion, will we touch bottom. That will be the buying opportunity of our lives.

What I find particularly interesting is that he "sees" all of these events and their resolution without even mentioning all of the bad debt at the foundation of the crisis or HOW it is to be resolved. Debt for equity swap?

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

A.P. Moller-Maersk has hired former soldiers and an armed escort vessel from Tanzania to protect its fleet in the pirate-infested waters off the Horn of Africa, according to an article in Monday's Copenhagen Post.

Maersk hired the ship to protect the tanker Birgit Maersk through former special forces soldiers working for a Danish security firm called Guardian-Global Business Security...

Steffen Jacobsen, technical director at Maersk Tankers, said the company checked first to make sure the move was legal. "That's why we chose it as an alternative solution to a very critical situation."

Silicon Valley is beset by the biggest office property glut since the dot-com bust, leaving the U.S. technology hub with empty high-rises and office parks that make it impossible for landlords to sustain average rents.

More than 43 million square feet (4 million square meters) -- the equivalent of 15 Empire State Buildings -- stood vacant at the end of the third quarter, the most in almost five years, according to CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. San Jose, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto have 11 empty office buildings with about 3 million square feet of the best quality space.

"There is a bubble bursting in much the same way as the residential market burst," said Jon Haveman, principal at Beacon Economics, a consulting firm in San Rafael, California. "None of those towers will fill up anytime soon."

Not So Radical Reform - BusinessWeek

... rescuing the system is hardly the same thing as reforming it, and a diverse chorus of voices worries that, with the stock market's recovery and the last of the big banks poised to leave TARP, the moment for real change has been squandered. It's not only a concern in the U.S.: In Europe regulators and policymakers so far haven't enacted a single proposal that would overhaul the financial system. "Meaningful regulatory change is urgent now because this is the window of opportunity," warns Simon Johnson, a professor of entrepreneurship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former International Monetary Fund economist. "If that window closes, we're asking for trouble." Paul Volcker, chairman of President Barack Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently visited nine cities in five countries delivering speeches warning that bankers and regulators around the world "have not come anywhere close to responding with necessary vigor." Volcker wants lawmakers to bust up the big banks. Since the crisis began, the institutions deemed "too big to fail" have only gotten bigger; at the end of 2008 the world's 10 largest banks had 26% of the assets of the top 1,500 banks, up from 18% in 1999.

<...>

... the onslaught from the financial services industry continues. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has focused on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a possible component of the bill that Dodd is trying to craft. The lobbying group launched a television advertising campaign titled "No Sleep" to illustrate the sleepless nights of business owners overwhelmed by regulation, and created a Web site to stoke opposition. The campaign follows a grassroots effort in August to block the formation of the agency; back then bankers visited lawmakers in 36 states and wrote more than 75,000 letters to Congress, according to David Hirschmann, head of the Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, a Chamber-led initiative focused on financial regulation.

It's possible public anger could yet fuel a regulatory push. Banks will start giving bonuses to their employees in January; the bigger the payouts, the bigger the potential outrage. Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) on Dec. 16 proposed a bill that would reinstate the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from investment banking until its partial repeal in 1999. "Wall Street firms have recovered nicely and profits are soaring," McCain said in a press conference, while "Main Street is suffering terribly." The same day Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.) put forth similar legislation in the House. But even he thinks it's a long shot: "There's a lot of pressure coming from the big banks to prevent this kind of thing from happening."

A failure wouldn't surprise frustrated lawmakers disappointed by the turn in Washington. "My greatest fear for the last year has been an economic collapse," says Representative Brad Miller (D-N.C), who sits on Frank's House Financial Services Committee. "My second greatest fear was that the economy would stabilize and the financial industry would have the clout to defeat the fundamental reforms that our nation desperately needs. My greatest fear seems less likely...but my second greatest fear seems more likely every day."

Dark complement to Paul Krugman's last column.

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

Paul Volcker: The Lion Lets Loose - BusinessWeek

Isn't that exactly what they do on Wall Street? They basically say, if you've brought in $50 billion worth of business, then we're prepared to give you a huge income?
Sometimes they do it on the basis of stock and sometimes not. That isn't going to solve all the problems, I agree. But you take the trading guy who says: "I brought in $100 million worth of profits, therefore I want $25 million." Have they really taken into account that this trading guy is going on [the firm's] reputation, capital, and risk when he went out there and made the $100 million? If he's so good, let him go out and do it himself.

Wall Street has a history of creating financial instruments that will meet any new challenge. Any reason to believe that's going to stop?
No. They will continue to try to get around all these restrictions. You have to have a much stronger supervisory and regulatory apparatus to have any chance of keeping up with that.

You feel strongly that the financial system has gotten out of whack. Do you think the American political process is capable of fixing it?
The American political process is about as broken as the financial system. Therefore, one has to be a bit skeptical. Just to give you one little example, one unrelated to the financial crisis. Here we are on Dec. 29, almost a year after the Inauguration, and there is no Under Secretary of the Treasury. That should be an important position. How can we run a government in the middle of a financial crisis without doing the ordinary, garden-variety administrative work of filling the relevant agencies? The Treasury is an outstanding example of a broken system, but it's not the only one.

Is part of the problem that Congress is slow in the process of approving?
Slow is too fast a word to describe what's going on. The Administration is one quarter over, and it hasn't manned the ramparts of government yet.

So it's the Administration's problem? They haven't gotten their Executive Branch in place?
It's partly a reflection of the discord in government and extreme views on either side and fighting each other for every scrap of advantage.

In interviews in the past you said that's why we needed to change the political process; that's why you thought that candidate Obama was the best choice for President.
True. But has he been able to do that at this point? It doesn't look that way. I think that's unfortunate. I wish the Administration would pay more attention to what's needed to improve the ordinary functioning of government. We can't even fight a war with our own people any more. We've got to hire Blackwater. I think people have lost confidence in government, they've lost trust in government, and it shows. This isn't a question just of this Administration. It's been kind of a steady, downhill path.

Yes, but this Administration came in and said it would change. That was the mantra of the campaign. So what happened?
It shows you it's not that easy to change.

Feinberg, a 64-year-old lawyer with an often-booming voice and pronounced Boston accent, has said jokingly that he loves "jobs that seem so hard that they have a low bar for success." This one, for which he is not accepting a salary, fits the bill. In proposals from the TARP Seven and in confrontations that followed the August deadline, Feinberg would hear arguments that Main Street America would find incredible. Citigroup and Bank of America, for example, concluded that everyone in their executive suites was above average when compared with peers at other giant banks that didn't need a bailout. Or there was A.I.G.'s behind-closed-doors argument against Feinberg's directive to pay its top people in large part with A.I.G. stock. The company's reasoning? That the stock -- trading briskly at the time at around $40 on the New York Stock Exchange -- was actually worthless. Yet Feinberg would be pushed by staff at Treasury and officials of the Federal Reserve Bank to accept that argument and others in order to keep the captains of these broken companies from quitting.

Feinberg's other constituency -- the rest of America, as represented by members of Congress -- wasn't so eager to placate the executives. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and whose views on this flash-point issue reflected a broad sentiment, told me recently that his attitude was, and is: "Let 'em quit. Who needs them? How can we reward the same people who screwed up in the first place?" Indeed, if to many on Wall Street the spectacle of their best and brightest reduced to submitting payroll permission slips to government bureaucrats was a dangerous exercise in populist pandering, to almost everyone else it was an overdue reckoning.

When Feinberg announced his pay packages in late October, he found a way to give something to everyone. The public enjoyed a measure of revenge: Feinberg's ultimate rulings looked hard-nosed when compared with what the executives used to make. Yet the leaders of these failed companies still ended up winning big paydays -- an average of $6.5 million to each Bank of America executive and $6.2 million to those at Citigroup. Meantime, the Obama administration looked tough on fat-cat compensation, even as it quietly cajoled Feinberg to ease up on some of the restrictions he wanted to impose.

Ruhollah Solook (78) was dying before a donated kidney and complex radiotherapy saved his life. Recovering in an isolation room in Teheran's oldest hospital, he expressed his joy in a telephone interview. "They saved my life already. I hope they will be able to cure me entirely now."

But Solook's treatment has become a race against time, as has that of 850,000 other Iranians suffering from heart and kidney disease and various cancers. Somewhere after March 2010, the country will run out of technetium-99, a radioisotope crucial to the treatment of these diseases. Technetium-99 is currently produced locally in Iran.

"We recommend treatment with these products to hundreds of patients every month in our hospital alone," said Dr. Gholamreza Pourmand, Solook's physician. Technetium-99 is essential to radiotherapy, Pourmand said: "If we cannot help these people, some will die. It's as simple as that."

Yemeni forces on Monday killed at least two al Qaeda militants they said were behind a threat which forced the U.S. and European embassies to shut as concerns grew about the impoverished Arab country's stability.

The raid took place after the attempted bombing of a U.S.-bound plane on Christmas Day thrust Yemen into the foreground of the U.S.-led war against Islamist militants.

"Security authorities had been monitoring them for several days and struck today," a Yemeni security official told Reuters.

Germany continues to discuss what to do about its mission in Afghanistan. The US, meanwhile, has decided to send 2,500 soldiers to Kunduz, the region under German command in the northern part of the country. The move is sure to increase the pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.

The visits made by Stanley McChrystal as 2009 changed to 2010 were primarily of a symbolic nature. The US general, head of all NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, flew by helicopter to all corners of the country to thank his troops -- particularly in those areas where the situation is most precarious.

But this year, his trip didn't just lead him to those regions in the south and east which have long been instable. The four-star general spent an entire day in Kunduz, the German-controlled region in northern Afghanistan, once known for its relative stability but now descending ever further into violence. The visit made it clear once again that McChrystal is keeping close tabs on developments there.

Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.

But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through those 14 nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full range of intensified security that was imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, officials said.

The change represents an easing of the immediate response to the attempted bombing of a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit that had been in place the past week. But the restrictions remain tougher than the rules that were in effect before the Dec. 25 incident. And the action on Sunday further establishes a global security system that treats people differently based on what country they are from, evoking protests from civil rights groups.

Iraq will file lawsuits in US and Iraqi courts against Blackwater, a private security firm, after an American court threw out charges against five of its guards accused of killing 14 civilians in Baghdad.

Making the announcement, Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, in a statement on Monday said his government "rejects the ruling issued by the American court acquitting the company of the crime of killing a number of citizens".

Last week, a US federal judge threw out the murder charges against the guards, saying prosecutors violated the defendants' rights by using incriminating statements they had made under immunity during a US State Department probe.

The guards, who had been part of a convoy of armoured vehicles, had been charged with killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians and wounding 18 others in September 2007 at a busy Baghdad roundabout using guns and grenades.

The US secret service is investigating an apparent effigy of Barack Obama hung from a storefront in Georgia. Local television news showed what appeared to be a black doll at the end of a noose on the main road in Plains, home of Jimmy Carter, the former Democratic president, Georgia governor and Nobel peace prize winner.

Witnesses said the doll bore a sign with Obama's name. The effigy was quickly removed by the fire department after it was discovered on Saturday.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) -- Envelopes containing white powder have prompted at least seven anthrax scares across Alabama.

The FBI said Monday that five letters were sent to the offices of senators or congressmen. One was sent to U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner's office in Mobile, and another to his office in Foley. Letters were also sent to the offices of U.S. Rep. Bobby Bright of Montgomery, U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions and U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby.

Burma's military leader confirmed today that the country would hold its first elections in two decades this year but warned voters to make the "correct choices" when they go to the polls.

The long-awaited election would be Burma's first since 1990, when the main opposition party, led by the democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, won by a landslide. The junta ignored the result.

In an occasionally cryptic message to mark the anniversary of Burma's independence from Britain in 1948, General Than Shwe said his seven-stage road map was the sole process in the country's transition to democracy.

The punishing winter weather has brought transport chaos to China and South Korea and claimed at least 60 lives in northern and eastern India.

Reports suggest that the states of Punjab, Bihar, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have borne the brunt of the freezing temperatures in India. "We are looking into the deaths and in the meantime have asked local authorities to arrange bonfires in the evening for the homeless," said a government official in Bihar, who added that all schools had been closed.

A heavy blanket of fog in New Delhi forced airport authorities to cancel or delay dozens of flights from the capital and train services were also disrupted.

KAMPALA, Uganda -- Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about "curing" homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda's capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was "the gay agenda -- that whole hidden and dark agenda" -- and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how "the gay movement is an evil institution" whose goal is "to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity."

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.

A gunman in a black trench coat opened fire Monday morning in the lobby of the Federal Courthouse in downtown Las Vegas, killing a court security officer and wounding a deputy United States marshal before fleeing. He was then shot in the head and killed nearby.

"The suspect was in the lobby, but he never made it past the security checkpoint," said Barbara Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Las Vegas police.

The building is a huge structure that houses federal courts as well as other agencies, including the offices of Senators Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, and John Ensign, a Republican. Both Senators were in Nevada, their offices said, but not in the building.

The gunman entered the building shortly after it opened at 8 a.m. and began firing in the lobby. An Associated Press reporter within sight of the building counted 20 shots over several minutes, although it was not clear how many were fired by the gunman and how many by responding law enforcement officials.

Police and federal agents poured through the building looking for signs of any other suspects, but none were found.

The world is a tough neighborhood. Mr. Bush was not loved, but he was feared, which Machiavelli advises is a more durable position. Mr. Obama has sought only to be loved, but in the process has disappointed America's allies and encouraged our adversaries. The world has the measure of the man in the White House, and he doesn't measure up to the task at hand. Unless he shows a stronger hand, Mr. Obama will continue to increasingly follow global events rather than lead them.

It helps if you've read the book, rather than just the out of context quote.

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell. Frank Borman

Indians living in border areas neighbouring China are beginning to envy fast-paced development brought by Beijing to the point of regretting being Indian, a senior member of India's ruling Congress party has warned.

Mani Shankar Aiyar, a former senior diplomat and cabinet minister with responsibility for India's volatile northeast region, described the development that China was bringing to its southwest and Tibet as "simply spectacular".

He said impoverished local people in India's northeast were asking themselves: "What is the mistake we have made by being Indians [rather than Chinese]?" He also warned of the consequences of families divided by the colonial era border "beginning to hear stories about the kind of progress happening on the other [Chinese] side".

Even Americans who are lucky enough to have work in this economy are becoming more unhappy with their jobs, according to a new survey that found only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their work.

That was the lowest level ever recorded by the Conference Board research group in more than 22 years of studying the issue. In 2008, 49 percent of those surveyed reported satisfaction with their jobs.

The drop in workers' happiness can be partly blamed on the worst recession since the 1930s, which made it difficult for some people to find challenging and suitable jobs. But worker dissatisfaction has been on the rise for more than two decades...

Workers have grown steadily more unhappy for a variety of reasons:

    * Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.

    * Incomes have not kept up with inflation.

    * The soaring cost of health insurance has eaten into workers' take-home pay.

The governments of Iran and China have grown considerably closer in recent years as the two regional powerhouses find themselves with complementary economies and little love for Western-led attacks on their domestic and foreign policies.

But now it appears relations are warming from the bottom-up, which could pose a threat to both governments.

Chinese democracy activists have launched an online campaign known by its Twitter tag #CN4Iran, or "China for Iran," expressing solidarity with the Iranian opposition and condemning their own government's complicity in the crackdown.

When pictures surfaced of Chinese armored trucks being unloaded in Iran, the CN4Iran contributors were quick to translate and spread the message through Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites.

The movement's website is slickly designed and sports the opposition's signature green as a background; a banner at the top reads: "We are watching you, and we are supporting you! Go, our great Iranian friends! Go!"

See China Is Losing a War Over Internet

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

American voters have done their job: they've elected politicians who promised to satisfy their preferences. But politicians haven't delivered. Should we blame the voters? That's one approach, taken recently by Chris Hedges, Tony Judt, Jane Hamsher and quite a few others. A sudden spate of self-criticism from the left. Another approach is to blame our leaders -- you can't toss a pebble on the internet these days without finding some recently disillusioned soul. All such complaints, though, have to do with either power or authority.

Nowhere do we see intelligent discussion regarding whether the government of the United States is legitimate or, if not, to what degree it is not, how it got that way, and what should be done about it. Assuming that the system is broken we can play by our current rules over and over and over, but we're going to keep on getting the same results. Assuming the system is broken -- and I absolutely believe that it is -- it does no good to complain about voters or politicians. The real question is legitimacy or, more precisely, how to get it back.

There are, indeed, only two constructive paths available: the first is to point out, insistently, that the government of the United States is in many fundamental respects illegitimate and, incidentally, completely out of step with the modern world; the second is to debate what alternative system of rules, what governing covenant, could be appropriate for our society.

This will take time.

Given the scale of the disconnect, it's inevitable.

it'll take time, but how long?

"The question facing world leaders today is not what to do. It is whether to do it." James Galbraith

The Christian right reached the mountaintop with the presidency of George W. Bush, shrouding science and reason in the shadow of the cross and the flag. But even at the height of Bush's glory, in his 2004 campaign, a few isolated moderate Republicans warned that the Republican Party was in danger of collapse. Of course their jeremiads were ignored. That year, Christie Todd Whitman published a book titled It's My Party Too, decrying the takeover by what she called the "social fundamentalists." A member of a distinguished and wealthy eastern Republican family, with deep ties to the party, she had been governor of New Jersey and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Bush, only to quit when fundamentalist ideologues substituted right-wing doctrine for science in its studies. After the 2008 Republican debacle, Whitman pointed out that even though McCain was not considered a champion of the religious right, his percentage of so-called "values voters" increased by 3 percent over Bush's in 2004. McCain, the last Republican moderate on the national stage, had lost among "moderate voters" by 21 points to Obama.

As soon as Obama took office, the movement camped in the wilderness prepared to take political advantage of the worst economic troubles since the Great Depression by injecting a renewed sense of anti-government resentment. As most people agonized and even panicked over the sudden economic collapse, the Christian right's peddlers of crisis lifted their hands to the heavens. They had a whole new world of trauma to exploit, more desperate and embittered followers to manipulate, and maybe--just maybe--another chance at power.

Republican Gomorrah is an intimate portrayal of a political, social, and religious movement defined by an "escape from freedom." As Erich Fromm explained, those who join the ranks of an authoritarian cause to resolve inner turmoil and self-doubt are always its most fervent, rigidly ideological, and loyal members. They are often its most politically influential members as well. President Eisenhower described the "mental stress and burden" that animates such movements. His admonition to beware the danger posed to democracy by those who seek "freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions" should be as memorable in history as his caution about the "military-industrial complex" in his farewell address.

Climate change scepticism is likely to surge in 2010 and could exacerbate "hardship" for the planet's poorest people, one of the world's leading authorities on climate change has told the Guardian.

Writing on environmentguardian.co.uk today, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also dismisses suggestions that he is personally profiting from policies to tackle global warming.

Climate sceptics gained media attention in the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit after alleging that hacked emails between senior climate scientists showed that an important temperature record was flawed -- a charge rejected by governments and scientific bodies. In Australia, sceptics within the party led to the ousting of the leader of the opposition over new climate laws.

A spill of around 150,000 litres of diesel oil from a broken pipeline in northwestern China into a river has started reaching the Yellow River, but drinking water is safe for now, state media said on Monday.

The leak, from a pipeline owned by China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in Shaanxi province, was discovered on Wednesday.

The company turned off the tap when the accident happened, according to state media, but not before some of the diesel ended up in the Weihe River, a tributary of the Yellow River, a major water source for millions of people.

A combination of frigid weather, expectations of an improving economy and new tensions between Russia and Belarus catapulted crude oil prices above $81 a barrel on Monday.

But most energy analysts said it was too soon to predict that prices would go much higher or even remain at current levels.

Energy markets are beginning the year with a string of reports that could help push prices higher. Traders took reports of increased manufacturing activity and passenger car sales in December as signs that the economy was on the mend. Meanwhile, India reported a substantial increase in oil imports.

NASA's Kepler space telescope, designed to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, has discovered its first five new exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system.

Kepler's high sensitivity to both small and large planets enabled the discovery of the exoplanets, named Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b. The discoveries were announced Monday, Jan. 4, by the members of the Kepler science team during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington.

"These observations contribute to our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve from the gas and dust disks that give rise to both the stars and their planets," said William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Borucki is the mission's science principal investigator. "The discoveries also show that our science instrument is working well. Indications are that Kepler will meet all its science goals."

Of the 84,000 chemicals in commercial use in the United States -- from flame retardants in furniture to household cleaners -- nearly 20 percent are secret, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, their names and physical properties guarded from consumers and virtually all public officials under a little-known federal provision.

The policy was designed 33 years ago to protect trade secrets in a highly competitive industry. But critics -- including the Obama administration -- say the secrecy has grown out of control, making it impossible for regulators to control potential dangers or for consumers to know which toxic substances they might be exposed to.

At a time of increasing public demand for more information about chemical exposure, pressure is building on lawmakers to make it more difficult for manufacturers to cloak their products in secrecy. Congress is set to rewrite chemical regulations this year for the first time in a generation.

The nation's top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government's intelligence assets -- including spy satellites and other classified sensors -- to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests.

The collaboration restarts an effort the Bush administration shut down and has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends, and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the scientific analysis.

The trove of images is "really useful," said Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.

Scientists, Dr. Untersteiner said, "have no way to send out 500 people" across the top of the world to match the intelligence gains, adding that the new understandings might one day result in ice forecasts.

In seeking the historical designation, the Wampanoag tribes -- whose name translates to "people of the first light" -- said their view to the east across Nantucket Sound was integral to their identity and cultural traditions.

"Here is where we still arrive to greet the new day, watch for celestial observations in the night sky and follow the migration of the sun and stars in change with the season," wrote Bettina Washington, historic preservation officer for the Aquinnah Wampanoag, in a letter to federal officials.

"The sound is part of a larger, culturally significant landscape treasured by the Wampanoag tribes and inseparably associated with their history," wrote Janet Snyder Matthews, who was the keeper of the National Register of Historic Places until she left the park service in December.

The tribes also argued that the wind turbines, which would be 440 feet tall, could destroy long-submerged tribal artifacts from thousands of years ago, when the sound was dry land. Such artifacts could "yield further confirmation of our cultural histories," Ms. Washington wrote.

Canada's Industry Minister, Tony Clement, has given PetroChina the go-ahead for a 1.7 billion US dollars acquisition of two oil sand projects.

The deal gives the Chinese company 60% control of Athabasca Oil Sands Corporation's MacKay and Dover oil sands deposits in Alberta province. The two are projected to yield five million barrels of oil, according to the company...

Only in the past few years has the price of oil been high enough to make it worthwhile...

Canada's industry minister, Tony Clement, said: "I am satisfied that the investment is likely to be of net benefit to Canada."

He said the Chinese company made a commitment to contribute more than 250 million to cover its share of developing the oil sand projects over the next three years, as well as boosting employment and managing a regional office in the area for a period of five years. The deal was originally agreed two months ago.

German women's magazine Brigitte has declared it will no longer use professional models in its fashion shoots. But reaction to the first all-amateur issue has been mixed, with observers criticizing the magazine for not going far enough to fight anorexia.

At first glance the new issue of Germany's Brigitte looks just like a normal fashion magazine. Attractive, perfectly made-up young women show off stylish clothes from labels like French Connection, Escada and H&M, glancing flirtatiously over their shoulders, pouting their lips or staring pensively into the distance.

But something about the photos looks different. A prominent tummy here and noticeable wrinkles there reveal that these are not size-zero Amazons straight from the catwalk, but real women. As of the January issue, which hit the newsstands Saturday, Brigitte will use only amateur models in its fashion shoots.

Lady Gaga's single "Poker Face" and Susan Boyle's debut album "I Dreamed A Dream" were crowned Britain's biggest-selling records of 2009, the Official Charts Company said on Sunday.

New Yorker Lady Gaga's debut single, "Just Dance," was number three in the official singles chart of 2009, just behind Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling."

Boyle, the runner up of the "Britain's Got Talent" TV show, claimed top spot in the year's album chart after "I Dreamed a Dream" sold more than 1.5 million copies in six weeks.

One of the riskiest movies of all times is now officially one of the most successful at the box office.

When "Avatar" opened, its solid but far from stellar results left 20th Century Fox uncertain about whether the $430 million that it and two financing partners had invested to produce and market the 3-D film would pay off.

Less than three weeks later, there's no doubt. Director James Cameron's science-fiction epic on Sunday became only the fifth movie in history to gross more than $1 billion worldwide and, by far, was the fastest to do so.

"Iron Mike" was the anchor of the Pittsburgh Steelers, a gritty job in one of the grittiest teams in American football.

He played for the Steelers from 1974 to 1989, winning the Super Bowl - the annual championship of the National Football League (NFL) -- four times, three as captain. He was inducted into the pro football hall of fame, and came to be seen as an icon of the sport.

All of which makes his demise all the more poignant. Even before he retired in 1990, he began to suffer mental problems. He displayed symptoms of dementia, memory loss and depression. As his behaviour grew more erratic, he found it hard to hold down a job and by his death in 2002 aged 50, he was reported to be sleeping homeless in railway stations or in the back of his pickup truck.

Such an ignominious an end for so huge a personality marked a low point of American football. At the time of Webster's death, the condition from which he was suffering -- repetitive brain injury, later dubbed chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE -- was not even recognised, let alone understood.

But over the past eight years, partly as a result of Webster's death, pressure has mounted on the NFL, the professional sport's governing body, to confront what has been described as a ticking time-bomb that could be facing hundreds of thousands of players.

 duh, there crumples another inflated icon, manly men playing rugby should think while they still can...

the cranium was built for more enlightened diversion!

"The question facing world leaders today is not what to do. It is whether to do it." James Galbraith

A different approach to policing in Southland that included officers visiting criminals at home for a friendly chat had contributed to a 17 per cent drop in crime in the region, a police boss said.

Southland police area commander Inspector Barry Taylor said they had been working since July on increased urgency and accountability, with a big focus on reducing crime rather than just arresting criminals.

As a result, indicative crime figures - which were not official police statistics - showed overall crime in Southland was down 17 per cent for the first five months of the reporting year, compared with the same period the previous year, Mr Taylor said.

Burglaries were down 28 per cent, while provisional indicators showed other types of crime were also down, he said. "We have just had a bit of a look at how we are going about our business and we felt we could do it a bit smarter, and the initial indicators are we are on the right track."

The altered approach to policing included working to prevent crime rather than react once a crime had been committed, he said.

According to Blumenthal the U.S. polity now has tens of millions of low-information but politically active voters whose interests are narrowly focused on personal spiritual salvation, whose political conception of right and wrong have shrunk from Judt's moral concern about overall fairness and who controls the commons, to a near-exclusive preoccupation with superficial moral questions about abortion, gay marriage and whether the politician they vote for has been "saved." This habit is all the more socially dangerous insofar as these same people have built a hermetic parallel culture within the U.S. whose home schooling, megachurches, and charismatic preacher/father figures provide constant reinforcement of authoritarian tendencies.

Blumenthal says many things in his tour de force: that the fundamentalist religious phenomenon is fueled, particularly among its leaders, by a culture of personal crisis whereby bizarre and destructive behavior actually constitutes merit if it somehow leads to one being "saved;" by an authoritarian outlook that is at its base one of sado-masochistic impulses; by a disturbed relationship to authority; and by a variety of sexual obsessions. Did the reader know that James Dobson, the ayatollah of Focus on the Family, was a big fan of serial killer Ted Bundy, and profited monetarily from the relationship? That Tom DeLay, who called the House into a special session to prohibit Terri Schiavo's husband from disconnecting her from life support, had in fact pulled the plug on his own father? That the creationist or, to use the approved euphemism, "intelligent design" movement is an artifact funded by a millionaire fundamentalist once institutionalized for insanity?

Brains in middle age, which, with increased life spans, now stretches from the 40s to late 60s, also get more easily distracted. Start boiling water for pasta, go answer the doorbell and -- whoosh -- all thoughts of boiling water disappear. Indeed, aging brains, even in the middle years, fall into what's called the default mode, during which the mind wanders off and begin daydreaming.

Given all this, the question arises, can an old brain learn, and then remember what it learns? Put another way, is this a brain that should be in school?

As it happens, yes. While it's tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they've become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age.

Many longheld views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.

where the nuts are?

"The question facing world leaders today is not what to do. It is whether to do it." James Galbraith

As most men will vouch, a lady's G-spot is near-on impossible to find. Still, we live in hope... But according to researchers, we could be waiting a long time as a study suggests that the female errogneous zone may not actually exist.

A study of 1,800 British women, carried out at King's College London, has found no evidence of the female erogenous zone and believe it may be a figment of women's imaginations.

A new report today from The Wall Street Journal seems to confirm what we've been hearing for the last few weeks: that the highly anticipated Apple Tablet (potentially named iSlate) will be revealed at the end of this month (reportedly on January 27th) and will launch in March. What's new is that the WSJ believes it has found out the price.

... When I finally got to America myself, I found that not only were the natives friendly and hospitable, they were also incredibly polite. No one tells you this about Americans, but once you notice it, it becomes one of their defining characteristics, especially when they're abroad.

This is very strange, or at least it says something strange about the way that perception routinely conforms to the preconceptions it would appear to contradict. The archetypal American abroad is perceived as loud and crass even though actually existing American tourists are distinguished by the way they address bus drivers and bartenders as "sir" and are effusive in their thanks when any small service is rendered. We look on with some confusion at these encounters because, on the one hand, the Americans seem a bit country-bumpkinish, and, on the other, good manners are a form of sophistication.

<...>

Across the board, the grounds for all our feelings of superiority have been steadily whittled away. It turns out that the qualities that make us indubitably British -- that is, the ones that we don't share with or have not imported from America -- are no longer conducive to Greatness. They actually add up to a kind of ostrich stoicism that, though it can be traced back to our finest hour (the blitz, the Battle of Britain), manifests itself in a peculiar compromise: a highly stylized willingness to muddle on, to put up with poor quality and high prices (restaurants, trains), to proffer (and accept) apologies not as a prelude to but as a substitute for improvement. We may not enjoy the way things are, but we endure them in a way that seems either quaint or quasi-Soviet to American visitors. ...