"We hope that they will be on the road to EU membership sooner instead of later. Obviously, we don't have a vote in the EU, but we have made it clear to a number of our counterparts how valuable we think it will be when Croatia is a member," US secretary of state, Hilary Clinton, said after meeting Croatian foreign minister, Gordan Jandrokovic, in Washington on Thursday (10 December).

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stepped up their media charm offensive on Friday morning (11 December), as part of ongoing efforts to bury their recent differences.

Announcing their intentions to work together is securing an ambitious EU agreement on `fast-start' climate funding (2010-2012) for developing countries and EU emission cuts, the two leaders went out of their way to show all was well between London and Paris.

"It is a very strong relationship and one that is working today as we examine climate change," said Mr Brown in a joint press conference with the French leader.

The day before France announced it would follow the UK's lead and implement a one-off 50 percent windfall tax for French bankers receiving bonuses of over €27,000.

IT SEEMED like a safe bet. Mircea Geoana, the centre-left challenger in Romania's presidential election, had the money, media and political backing that he needed to win. Sleek and Western-educated, he portrayed himself as the safe consensus candidate against Traian Basescu, the lively but exasperating former sea-captain (and once mayor of Bucharest) who has been the country's president since 2004.

For a few hours on December 6th it even appeared to have paid off. Exit polls gave Mr Geoana a narrow victory. He did win inside the country by 14,738 votes. But Romanians abroad cast 146,876 votes and Mr Basescu took 78% of them. The campaign was exceptionally dirty: observers think that both sides cheated. Mr Basescu's victory against largely hostile news coverage was impressive. Mr Geoana wants a rerun, but his support is dwindling. His Liberal allies now hope to form a government with Mr Basescu's centre-right Democrats.

AFP - Turkey's top court on Friday banned the country's main Kurdish group, on charges of links to separatist rebels.

The 11 judges of the Constitutional Court decided unanimously that the Democratic Society Party (DTP) had become a "focal point of activities against the indivisible unity of the state, the country and the nation", court president Hasim Kilic told a news conference here.

He said DTP chairman Ahmet Turk and fellow lawmaker Aysel Tugluk had been stripped of parliamentary immunity and banned from politics for five years along with 35 other party members.

Although there are five candidates in the running for leadership, the race is really between incumbent President Sergei Bagapsh and former prime minister, Raul Khajimba.

The two are no strangers. Following the disputed outcome of the 2004 elections, they entered into an uneasy power-sharing arrangement, which was called off earlier this year when Khajimba resigned on the grounds of political incompatibility.

Some observers said the move was motivated by Khajimba's need to distance himself from the policies of the current administration ahead of the upcoming elections. But the two were never happy bedfellows.

The opposition leader, who is campaigning on a platform of nationalism, has repeatedly accused Bagapsh of being too "Georgia-friendly," while the incumbent president, hoping to ride back into power on a health and education ticket, has accused his rival of making promises he won't be able to keep.

AFP - Thieves opened the grave of former Cypriot president Tassos Papadopoulos and stole his corpse during the night, state television reported on Friday, interrupting its normal programming.

The current leader of Papadopoulos's centre-right DIKO party, Marios Garoyan, condemned what he called a "heinous and terrible crime."

Andros Kyprianou, head of the communist AKEL party that leads the Mediterranean island's government, expressed outrage at the crime, which came the day before a memorial service to mark the first anniversary of Papadopoulos's death.

It would have been "right to remove" Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein even without evidence that he had weapons of mass destruction, Tony Blair has said.

The former prime minister said it was the "notion of him as a threat to the region" which had tilted him in favour of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Without WMD claims it would have been necessary to "use and deploy different arguments," he told the BBC.

Mr Blair is expected to face the Iraq war inquiry early next year.

The defense lawyers think that the Hague Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz is "behind yesterday's police action the goal of which was to find the so-called artillery logs", and therefore are asking the trial chamber to "take concrete legal measures against him".

...

Croatian police yesterday morning searched the apartments of several persons from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina as a part of the search for the artillery logs.

They included the apartments of retired general and former Hague indictee Rahim Ademi, Gotovina's associates and member of his defense team Željko Kučić and Marin Ivanović, and former chief of General Petar Stipetić's cabinet, Miroslav Vidović.

...

Brammertz's report about Croatia's cooperation with the Hague Tribunal depends on these logs, because some members of the EU do not wish to allow Croatia to start the judiciary and fundamental rights chapter negotiations, unless the logs have been given to the prosecution.

The European Union is urging the International Monetary Fund to pursue a global tax on financial transactions, known as a Tobin tax. Speaking after a two-day summit of EU leaders in Brussels, Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said: "The conclusion ... is to propose a global financial transaction levy. It wouldn't be fair that some impose very heavy burdens and others don't. I think it makes sense that a sector that created such a problem for our economies, our taxpayers ... also makes a contribution to the overall economy."

The proposal comes at a time when the International Monetary Fund is trying to develop ways to limit risk in the financial sector. "The European Council emphasizes the importance of renewing the economic and social contract between financial institutions and the society they serve," the EU wrote in the summit's closing statement.

Ever since the financial crisis plunged the world into an economic downturn, the European Union has been keen to find a way to avoid a repeat. But it is unlikely that the Tobin tax, named after American economist James Tobin, will gain much traction. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposed such a tax at November's G-20 summit of developed and emerging nations, arguing that the proceeds could be used to fund future financial bailouts. But the proposal faced immediate opposition from both US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Part of a list of 3,000 alleged French tax evaders being used by the French authorities to put pressure on Switzerland was stolen from HSBC Private Bank by a former employee, a French newspaper has reported.

Le Parisien reported on Wednesday that an employee working in the IT department at the Geneva branch of HSBC Private Bank stole the information in 2008 before fleeing to France.

The era in which all Britons aspire to own their own home may be coming to an end, according to the Housing minister, John Healey. In a controversial speech, he suggested that Britain may be moving towards a European model, with renting on a roughly equal footing with buying. He said home ownership had fallen from 71 per cent of households in 2003 to 68 per cent today, noting that this trend began in 2005, well before the recession. "I'm not sure that's such a bad thing," he said.

(I repeat my view: Britain is part of Europe, even if usually in denial.)

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

AFP - Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou on Friday ruled out going cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund as a way out of his country's 300-billion-euro debt morass.

The bealeaguered premier said it was "out of the question to resort to the IMF" after earlier stating in Brussels at a European Union summit that Greece was "not about to default on its debts."

Greece's sovereign debt was downgraded this week by the international ratings agency Fitch, prompting fears of dangerous divergence in the 16 countries which use the euro.

Analysts had interpreted eurozone and EU political reaction as a precursor to the sort of bail-out assistance offered last year to Hungary, Latvia and Romania, especially with mounting deficit worries also extending to Ireland and Spain.

AFP - Iraq reached agreement with energy giants Shell and Petronas Friday for a massive southern oil field, part of a two-day auction that seeks to dramatically boost the country's crude output.

The successful bid from the Anglo-Dutch and Malaysian consortium kicked off the bid round, which aims to catapult Iraq towards the top of the list of the world's oil producers and bring in much-needed revenues to rebuild the country.

"The price that the consortium offered is a little bit less than the price offered by the oil ministry," Shahristani said.

"It gets 100 points, so we can announce that Shell wins the bidding for Majnoon."

The two companies requested fees of 1.39 dollars per barrel of oil extracted from the field, and projected that they would produce 1.8 million barrels per day.

The project will be split 60 percent for Shell and 40 percent for Petronas.

The good news is that the Airbus military transport plane A400M can fly. The plane took off for its maiden flight on Friday in Seville, Spain. But the project is now €5 billion over budget and EADS would like European governments to help cover the shortfall.

ITALY: Celebrations were held in Milano on December 5 to mark the completion of the final sections of the north-south high speed rail corridor, which opens for revenue service with the timetable change on December 13.

Completion of the Novara - Milano, Bologna - Firenze and Napoli - Salerno links brings the total length of Italy's Alta Velocità network to more than 1 000 route-km, stretching from Torino to Salerno. Describing the occasion as `an Italian miracle', FS Group Chief Executive Mauro Moretti said the high speed line would act as a `vertical spine' for the country, linking most of the major cities and serving around 65% of the country's population.

(Shameless self-promotion: I'll post a 2009 high-speed review on Sunday.)

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

EUOBSERVER / INTERVIEW - Even in a season of surprising EU appointments, the person who has been nominated as Hungary's next commissioner is something of an outlier. An economics professor and member of the board of directors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, but also an author of 11 books in English and Hungarian and the editor-in-chief of Hungary's main left-wing academic journal, Laszlo Andor is more the donnish intellectual than the seasoned political operative.

...Mr Andor is an ardent Keynesian, a school of economics which advocates government intervention in the economy, or "post-Keynesian" (the term he prefers) and a strong critic of those he calls the "Market Maoists" or "market fundamentalists" of eastern Europe since 1989.

He was an opponent of the Iraq war and regularly rubs shoulders with the "galacticos" of the left-liberal universe. His quarterly journal, Eszmelet (Consciousness) - essentially a Hungarian Le Monde Diplomatique - publishes texts by the likes of Ignacio Ramonet, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek and Arundhati Roy. He believes the Maastricht criteria are misguided, that Europe suffers from a democratic deficit and blames the financial crisis on the "anglo-American" economic model.

WASHINGTON -- The House on Friday approved a Democratic plan to significantly tighten federal regulation of Wall Street and the financial sector, advancing a far-reaching Congressional response to the financial crisis still reverberating through the economy.

After three days of floor debate, the House voted 223 to 202 to approve the measure, which did not get a single Republican vote. It creates a new agency to oversee consumer lending, establishes new rules for transactions that contributed to the meltdown, and seeks to reduce the threat that one or two huge companies on the verge of collapse could bring down the economy.

"As we have seen over the past year, our financial system is broken and we can no longer afford to maintain the status quo," said Representative Ed Perlmutter, a Colorado Democrat and member of the Financial Services Committee, which spent months assembling the measure. The Senate has made less headway in drafting a companion bill.

The vote is the most significant legislative act to confront the financial crisis that exploded last year since the vast and costly bailout that was rammed through Congress at the peak of the emergency. It was an effort to address comprehensively what many of the bill's supporters have called the underlying causes of the collapse -- reckless risk-taking unrestrained by regulation.

The bill's principal provisions establish a process for dismantling large, failing financial institutions; set up a council to identify and regulate firms that are so big, interconnected or risky that they need heightened supervision to keep them from bringing down the whole financial system; create a new consumer financial-protection agency to squelch unfair and abusive practices; and for the first time, regulate over-the-counter derivatives markets. The bill also contains provisions on executive pay, investor protection, credit ratings, hedge funds and insurance.

Congressman Kucinich has announced that even after his proposed amendment to HR 4173 to tax TARP recipients was shot down, he "will be introducing legislation based on the amendment that [he] offered, that will pave the way for a more fair and just tax treatment of absurd bonuses in the financial industry."

It will be useful to see if the vote goes once again along party lines, in which case the banana republic nature of America will truly shine, as republicans and democrats finally confirm they have terminally flip-flopped on all issues pertaining to Wall Street, even as Main Street anger over banker compensation continues rising. If this proposal gets voted on, Democrats, who will likely once again vote it down, stand to reap the full fury of over 300 million Americans, who will realize that the Democratic party now holds banker remuneration and bonus concerns closer to its heart than those of small and medium-sized businesses (let along Joe Sixpack). And in that case, watch out come mid-term election time. Now if only Bernanke's reappointment can be stalled for another year, there just may be a little hope for capitalism yet.

From Kucinich' website:

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today released the following statement in response to news reports that Goldman Sachs has decided to alter its bonus payments:    

"Today, Goldman Sachs bowed to public pressure and promised to suspend bonus payments to its top executives.  It's important to understand this in perspective. Goldman did this only in the face of deafening public criticism over bonus payments to bankers.

    "Once the uproar subsides, executives throughout the financial services industry will return to the same practice of showering themselves with outrageous compensation packages and bonuses.

    "We need to reform fundamentally our tax code so that we don't have to rely on extraordinary public outcry to curb such excessive behavior.

    "I offered a commonsense amendment to HR 4173, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, that would have taxed the bonuses of executives at TARP recipients, as well as the profits reported by these institutions. My amendment simply acknowledged that without the extraordinary actions of the federal government, many of these institutions would have collapsed a long time ago, and it would have held to account those individuals that made the decisions and that led to the crisis.

    "Unfortunately my amendment was not accepted by the Rules Committee.  Soon I will be introducing legislation based on the amendment that I offered, that will pave the way for a more fair and just tax treatment of absurd bonuses in the financial industry.

    "Leaders in Great Britain and France have recently announced proposals to tax the bonuses of financial executives--if the United States remains silent on the issue, we will in effect be leading the world in a `race to the bottom' of international efforts to regulate the financial services industry.

AFP - Assailants vandalised a West Bank mosque on Friday, torching its library and spraying hate messages in Hebrew in an attack blamed on hardline Jews angered by plans to curb settlement building.

Clashes erupted as villagers hurled stones at Israeli troops sent to investigate the overnight incident at the mosque in the northern West Bank's Yasuf village. The security forces responded with teargas.

One of the slogans sprayed on a wall read: "Get ready to pay the price." Another read: "We will burn you all."

Village councillors and Palestinian security officials blamed Israelis from a nearby settlement for the attack.

The area is home to some of the most hardline settlers who advocate a "price tag" policy under which they target Palestinians in retaliation for any Israeli government measure they see as threatening Jewish settlements.

Kai Eide, the UN envoy to Afghanistan, has announced his resignation after two years in the post. Was Afghanistan's flawed election the main stumbling block?

France has its Helios satellites, Germany its SAR-Lupe radar aircraft and Italy its Cosmo SkyMed. The problem is that each does not know what the others are doing - or snooping on. Now a new system, called MUSIS, aims to change that.

It's been called the great golden gizmo of French military spy satellites and, once it's launched, the Helios 2B promises to upgrade European intelligence gathering, providing high-resolution images of often remote, dangerous terrain and assisting in military risk assessments.

On Wednesday, the Helios 2B - a 4,200-kilogram, golden hued satellite - was scheduled to blast off on a European Ariane rocket from a launch site in French Guiana. The launch was, however, indefinitely postponed due to technical problems with the Ariane launcher, according to French defence ministry officials.

AFP - India announced on Thursday that it planned to create the country's 29th state, after a hunger strike by a regional leader and escalating protests from supporters.

Home Minister P. Chidambaram said the government would begin work to found the separate state of Telangana, which will be carved out of Andhra Pradesh in the southeast.

"The process of forming the state of Telangana will be initiated," Chidambaram told reporters.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European Union leaders have agreed to offer around €7.2 billion to help developing countries deal with the effects of climate change over the next three years.

After a hard push by the Swedish presidency of the EU at a summit of the bloc's premiers and presidents in Brussels on Friday to get every single member state on board with a contribution to the pool of money, by mid-morning, each capital had signed up with a figure, even if from some of the poorer countries the amount was only symbolic.

The "central estimate" of their forecast is that the global average surface temperature for 2010 will be 0.58 degrees C above the long-term average for 1961-1990 (which is 14 degrees C), compared to the average for 1998, which was 0.52 degrees above.

If a new hottest year is indeed recorded, it will undermine the argument of climate change sceptics that the actual warming of the atmosphere ceased in 1998. Earlier this week the head of the World Meteorological Organisation, Michel Jarraud, insisted the world was "still in a warming trend". The new record is likely to be broken, the Met Office said, because of a combination of global warming and El Nino, the periodic, natural warming of the waters of the eastern tropical Pacific, which is currently pushing up world temperatures.

AFP - A bankrupt Arizona copper mining firm has paid 1.79 billion dollars for environmental cleanup and restoration in the largest such payout in US history, US federal agencies said Thursday.

The funds, obtained through Asarco's bankruptcy reorganization, will be used to pay for past and future costs to clean up hazardous mining waste at more than 80 sites in 19 states.

Researchers have solved what may be the oldest mystery in planetary science, the two-tone surface of Saturn's moon Iapetus.

The odd feature -- the moon's trailing side is about 10 times brighter than its leading side -- has been a mystery since it was first observed by Giovanni Cassini in 1671. In two papers published online by Science, researchers have unraveled the mystery, using images and data from instruments aboard the spacecraft named for Cassini.

The studies confirm an earlier idea that dust, most likely from another of Saturn's moons, falls on the leading side of Iapetus as it orbits the planet. "It's just like a motorcyclist, who only gets the flies on the leading side of the helmet rather than the trailing side," said Tillmann Denk of the Free University of Berlin, an author (with John R. Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute) of one of the papers and lead author of the other.

But the pattern of the surface features -- the dark area extends to the trailing side at the equator, for example -- is not fully explained by the deposition dust. Rather, the researchers say, the reason has a lot to do with the moon's rotation on its axis, which takes 80 earth days.

Such a slow rotation ("mid-day" lasts for a couple of weeks) allows the distant sun to warm the dark dust-covered areas enough that water ice becomes vapor. The vapor migrates elsewhere, freezing to ice again when it reaches colder areas. The areas where the ice was lost become darker, and those that gained ice become brighter.

The company in charge of a California project to extract vast amounts of renewable energy from deep, hot bedrock has removed its drill rig and informed federal officials that the government project will be abandoned.

The project by the company, AltaRock Energy, was the Obama administration's first major test of geothermal energy as a significant alternative to fossil fuels and the project was being financed with federal Department of Energy money at a site about 100 miles north of San Francisco called the Geysers. But on Friday, the Energy Department said that AltaRock had given notice this week that "it will not be continuing work at the Geysers" as part of the agency's geothermal development program.

The project's apparent collapse comes a day after Swiss government officials permanently shut down a similar project in Basel, because of the damaging earthquakes it produced in 2006 and 2007. Taken together, the two setbacks could change the direction of the Obama administration's geothermal program, which had raised hopes that the earth's bedrock could be quickly tapped as a clean and almost limitless energy source.

The Energy Department referred other questions about the project's shutdown to AltaRock, a startup company based in Seattle. Reached by telephone, the company's chief operations officer, James T. Turner, confirmed that the rig had been removed but said he had not been informed of the notice that the company had given the government. Two other senior company officials did not respond to requests for comment, and it was unclear whether AltaRock might try to restart the project with private money.

Why are we asking this now?

This week three women mounted a legal challenge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, arguing that the Irish Republic's strict abortion laws violated their rights. Specifically they claim that they had to go abroad for abortions and in doing so their health was put at risk. They say this amounted to inhumane treatment. Two of the women are Irish while the third is a Lithuanian living in Ireland. One was an unemployed long-term alcoholic who lived beneath the poverty line and was trying to regain custody of her four children when she became pregnant. Another was at risk of an extra-uterine pregnancy while the third was recovering from cancer and feared a relapse. The women are said to have borrowed money from friends and a money-lender to travel abroad for their abortions.

Ultra-orthodox rabbis in Israel are trying to crack down on growing use of the internet among their followers, saying that it is filled with "abomination" and is leading believers astray.

But despite their efforts, the number of ultra-orthodox Israelis online is growing rapidly, while ultra-orthodox websites are proliferating.

In 2010 the German government is planning to pick up the fight against infected home computers. In the first half of next year it plans to set up an advisory centre which will help users purge their computers of viruses and bots. The idea, jointly developed by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the Association of the German Internet Industry (eco), is based on the premise that internet service providers (ISPs) have long had the technical capability to identify infected computers by analysing network traffic. The project was officially announced by BSI and eco at today's fourth national IT summit in Stuttgart.

According to the plan, ISPs will contact customers whose PCs are infected with a bot, possibly by post or by telephone. The plan also contemplates having infected computers automatically connect to a special web page each time they connect to the internet. Before the plans are implemented, however, a decision needs to be made on what sanctions customers who decline to cooperate with their ISP can be subjected to. According to an eco project manager, quoted by the dpa, "Anyone surfing without proper anti-virus software is endangering other web users, in the same way that a car driver driving with faulty brakes is endangering other road users."

AFP - France will hand back to Egypt five stolen relics on Monday when President Hosni Mubarak visits Paris, ending a row over the wall fragments sold to the Louvre.

...The five small relics were chipped off the wall painting of an ancient Egyptian tomb dating back to the 18th dynasty, centuries before Christ, and are currently in storage at the Louvre museum.

Cairo's antiquities department, which controls access to all of Egypt's archeological sites, had in October broken off relations with the Louvre in protest and said ties would be restored once the relics were restored.

AFP - Scientists in France have isolated a new giant virus that lurks inside amoeba and whose gene pool includes genetic material from other species.

The virus "is a completely new viral form," said Didier Raoult, head of infectious and emerging tropical disease research at Aix-Marseille 2 University in France.

The dinosaur, called Tawa hallae, lived about 230 million years ago and was found in a quarry in northern New Mexico. It possess anatomical features that link it with other dinosaurs living much further south in what is now South America. Researchers said that Tawa supports the idea that the dinosaur lineage evolved in the southern part of the supercontinent Pangea. Successive waves of migration from that region resulted in a diverse variety of dinosaurs spreading to other parts of the giant continent, which later split into several separate continents.

Sterling Nesbitt of the American Museum of Natural History said that the discovery of Tawa, along with other two-legged, meat-eating therapod dinosaurs in the same quarry, suggests that dinosaurs did not evolve in the part of Pangea that became North America but that they had migrated there from the south. "We would expect that all of the therapod dinosaurs found in the quarry were related to each other. But they are not. Tawa and two other carnivorous dinosaurs from North America each have their closest relatives in South America," Dr Nesbitt said.

Boom boom! (I'm here, come to me!)
Krak krak! (Watch out, a leopard!)
Hok hok hok! (Hey, crowned eagle!)

Very good -- you have already mastered half the basic vocabulary of the Campbell's monkey, a fellow primate that lives in the forests of the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast. The adult males have six types of call, each with a specific meaning, but they can string two or more calls together into a message with a different meaning.

Having spent months recording the monkeys' calls in response to both natural and artificial stimuli, a group led by Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland argues that the Campbell's monkeys have a primitive form of syntax.

....

"Krak" is a call that warns of leopards in the vicinity. The monkeys gave it in response to real leopards and to model leopards or leopard growls broadcast by the researchers. The monkeys can vary the call by adding the suffix "-oo": "krak-oo" seems to be a general word for predator, but one given in a special context -- when monkeys hear but do not see a predator, or when they hear the alarm calls of another species known as the Diana monkey.

The "boom-boom" call invites other monkeys to come toward the male making the sound. Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. "Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" is the monkey's version of "Timber!" -- it warns of falling trees.

There is yet another variation on this theme, Dr. Zuberbühler's team reports. Into the "Timber!" call, the Campbell's monkeys insert a series of up to seven "hok-oo" calls. The combined call indicates the presence of other monkey groups and is heard most often when the monkeys are on the edge of their home range.

While dying, Editor & Publisher taught journalism how to live

I followed the E&P regularly since it had excellent, informed, sceptical and well written articles about the print world.

It's a sad day, but in a strange way the death of Editor & Publisher gives me hope for the future of journalism. Because they showed us a blueprint, that size or technology is overrated, that a half-dozen people can make a difference just by asking the right questions and by not backing down. And if Greg Mitchell and the others could accomplish this at a small, shrinking trade publication, then I know that it can happen again and will happen again, somewhere else and in some other format -- that no-holds-barred journalism is possible even on these weird little newfangled tablets or whatever.

There's an interview with the editor Greg Mitchell (formerly of Crawdaddy, a 70's music paper) that lays out his and E&P's journalistic philosophy.

You can't be me, I'm taken

British tourists coming to France for the ski season have been warned by their own government to be careful when drinking at high altitudes. The UK Foreign Office (FCO) campaign comes after more than 30 Britons died in Alpine ski resorts last year. Many died because they underestimated the risk of drinking at a high altitude, according to British diplomats.   A study published by the FCO estimated a third of skiers and snowboarders under 25 had experienced problems abroad linked to a mix of altitude, adrenaline and alcohol.

Two French policemen were suspended from duty on Tuesday after they were filmed apparently robbing a mobile phone shop in Paris.

The policemen, who belong to the police intelligence services responsible for illegal immigration control, then asked staff to lower the shop's blinds while they went behind the counter and apparently helped themselves to mobile phone top-up cards.

Witnesses said they also took other items from the shop.

When the officers left the premises, staff caught up with them, got hold of one of them and called the police, who turned up and took everyone, including the staff and alleged robber-officers, to a police station.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

For most international football managers, a 6-2 thrashing at the hands of Germany in a major final would not be considered a career-enhancing result. But for Hope Powell, the coach of the England's women side, it has led to speculation that she could be about to achieve a sporting first: becoming the first female "gaffer" in the men's game.

The England manager, who unlike her male counterparts for the last 43 years was able to lead the national side to a tournament final this summer at the European Championships, was linked to a vacancy at League Two club Grimsby earlier this year after being seen leaving a restaurant with the Mariners' chairman.

Powell, 43, who has been in charge of the national women's team for the last 11 years, dismissed the claims she was about to become the first woman to manage a professional men's side as "lies". But rumours persist that her impressive coaching credentials - underlined by the fact that she is the first woman to hold Uefa's highest managerial qualification - are attracting interest from the professional game.

AFP - China's Ding Junhui edged closer to the UK Championship final after building a 5-3 lead over world number two Stephen Maguire in the semi-finals on Friday.

World number 14 Ding won three successive frames after the mid-session interval to move 5-2 ahead before Maguire claimed the final frame of the session to remain in touch.

The best-of-17 clash continues later on Friday, with the winner set to face either Ronnie O'Sullivan or John Higgins in Sunday's final.

US golfer Tiger Woods is taking indefinite leave from professional golf to try to work on "healing" his family.

In a statement on his website, he said he was aware of the disappointment "my infidelity" had caused his family.

He said he wanted to "try to repair the damage done" and asked for privacy so his family "could heal".

In the UK, lawyers for the world number one golfer obtained an injunction preventing certain information purportedly about him being published.

Psychologists found that when a player lines up to take the spot kick, the more the pressure, the more likely their eyes will be distracted by the keeper.

As the path of the shot tends to follow the eye line, this means that they are more likely to shoot into the centre of the goal, making the goal easier to defend.

Useful advice in many fields.

You can't be me, I'm taken

An ITN film crew covering a story about a photographer who was stopped while taking innocent photos in central London were themselves quizzed while filming.

London Tonight reporter Marcus Powell was stopped by police in the City who told him that filming was not allowed.

The incident, yesterday morning, occurred while the crew were attempting to film a piece about Grant Smith who was searched by police after taking pictures for a project on churches 24 hours earlier.