Brussels has hailed the decision by the Icelandic parliament to give the go ahead to talks on joining the EU, suggesting it is proof of the "vitality of the European project."

Iceland's legislature, the 63-seat Althingi, passed the proposal to start the EU accession process by a narrow majority of 33 votes to 28, with two abstentions, on Thursday

Supporters of the move argued EU membership would help the island, with a population of 320,000, emerge more quickly from the global financial and economic crisis which devastated the countries' banks last year.

Opponents of the EU said membership would harm the country's sovereignty as well as its fishing industry by introducing binding quotas, the two arguments that in the past dominated the EU debate in Iceland and prevented any attempts to join Europe.

Often dismissed as irrelevant, expensive and remote, the European Parliament is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

The 736-member forum was once considered just a democratic sticking plaster on the bureaucratic behemoth of the European Union but it has undeniably grown in importance since it was created as an assembly of appointees from member states in 1952.

A key turning point was the introduction of direct elections in 1979, although Margaret Thatcher could only rarely bring herself to use the word parliament and continued to refer to the body as an assembly.

Two important confrontations helped to establish parliamentary authority over the Brussels executive when MEPs helped to bring down the European Commission of Jacques Santer in 1999 over claims of sleaze and rejected Rocco Buttiglione, Silvio Berlusconi's selection for Justice Commissioner in 2004, because of his conservative Catholic views.

Franz Müntefering, 69, the chairman of Germany's center-left Social Democrats, talks to SPIEGEL about Germany's upcoming national elections on Sept. 27, government bailouts for industry and his relationship with a 29-year-old party colleague.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Müntefering, you are considered perhaps the greatest living campaign strategist in Germany. People say you have magical powers. Are you proud of your reputation?

Franz Müntefering: Campaigning has always been enjoyable for me, at least. Take (the German election years of) 1998, 2002, 2005 -- those were some pretty strong campaigns we put together. We'll be doing the same thing this year.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev came across as charming and assured at Thursday's Munich summit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He adroitly expressed his concern over the murder of human rights activist Natalya Estemirova -- and even got Merkel to smile.

For several minutes Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel slide a piece of paper back and forth across the table, scribbling enthusiastically. Then Medvedev lifts the paper up a little, so Merkel can read it better. The chancellor chuckles.

 Medvedev charmed Merkel at their meeting in Munich Thursday. The Russian president is satisfied. He has managed to get a smile out of the chancellor, who often looks slightly grumpy in public. And he has also managed, in his direct yet charming manner, to make Thursday's meeting between the two leaders in Munich a success.

After the murder of the Russian-Chechen human rights activist Natalya Estemirova on Wednesday, many participants in the Russian-German forum "Petersburg Dialogue," which was established in 2001 with the aim of promoting contact between civil society in the two countries, initially feared that the crime could poison the atmosphere between the two top politicians. "There is this eerie feeling that someone wanted this murder to coincide with the state visit," commented one member of the German delegation ahead of Medvedev's arrival.

Natalia Estemirova was scheduled to give an interview to a team from FRANCE 24 at 8am on the morning she was abducted. Witnesses have reportedly said they saw Estemirova being bundled into a car on her way to the meeting.

Natalia Estemirova had scheduled an interview with FRANCE 24 at 8am on the day of her abduction at the headquarters of the NGO Memorial in Grozny. She never made it to the interview. After a few hours of no response on her phone and no word, her colleagues at Memorial raised the alarm.

 

A staff member at Memorial said, "We've managed to find a witness who told us that Natalia left her home at around half past eight. A car approached and she was pushed inside."

VLORE, Albania -- It was only after her trafficker sealed her mouth with electrical tape, drugged her and threatened to kill her family that the childlike woman, now 27, says she realized that the man she had planned to marry had seduced her with a terrible lie.

Her journey at age 18 from an Albanian village to a London brothel, where she said she spent five years working as a prostitute, began with a gold engagement ring, the promise of a better life abroad and -- like many before her -- a speedboat trip to Italy under the cover of night.

So many women, men and children had been trafficked abroad to work as prostitutes, forced laborers or beggars that the Albanian government three years ago barred all Albanian citizens from using speedboats, the favored transportation used by traffickers to get people out of the country.

Same sex couples continue to benefit from more extensive civil rights almost everywhere Europe. But de jure gay marriages are only authorized in five countries. Cafebabel.com sets out to map "gay-friendly" Europe.

"For us, having the right to marry our same-sex partner is about equality with heterosexuals, about having the choice to marry when and if we want to. In my country, I don't have that choice. It's forbidden," explains Juris Lavrikovs, a Latvian who is head of communications for the international lesbian and gay association (ILGA) of Europe. The ILGA, whose mandate is to defend lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans- and intersex rights, will publish a report on the rights of homosexuals in Europe this month. Its conclusions are damning. Of 58 countries, only 5 allow gay and lesbian couples to marry: the Netherlands was the first in 2001, followed by Belgium (2003), Spain (2005), Norway (2008) and finally Sweden in April 2009.

The Swedish government is the first to include a clause in its legislation forbidding the refusal of religious marriage to homosexual couples. While individual pastors have the right to refuse, the lutheran church is required to find a willing pastor for each couple. In Belgium the right to marry is extended to non-citizens provided one person in the couple is a Belgian resident. These laws have frequently provoked fierce debate. In Spain the catholic church and representatives of the right-wing people's party (PP) came out strongly against the proposed law, organising demonstrations in the streets of Madrid.

On a sweltering summer's day, packed in with sweaty passengers indifferent to the merits of deodorant, does anyone on the London Underground really need reminding that "Hell is other people," as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote?

Apparently so, according to a quirky new campaign to show that commuting and contemplation on the Tube don't have to be mutually exclusive activities...

While some passengers have indeed welcomed the idea, others have reacted in classic British fashion, which is to say with a dollop of skepticism and an acid irony.

"Let's hold off on the philosophy," said Sally O'Sullivan, 40, a stylist from the fashionable Notting Hill neighborhood. "Given the reality of London transport, we need Valium, not quotations."

In some ways, the new project taps into an already rich tradition of Underground train drivers and station staffers who lace the standard announcement fare with their own acerbic observations and ad-libbed commentary.

Some of these remarks have been collected in a book of Tube trivia called "One Stop Short of Barking." ("Barking" is a place, but is also shorthand for the British phrase "barking mad.") Examples:

"This train is all stations to Upminster, with the exception of Cannon Street. [The train] does not stop there on Saturdays due to total lack of interest."

Proposed law would fine web sites denounced for defamation.

ROME -- This week in Rome, bloggers and activists wore gags to protest a proposed law that could impose heavy fines on bloggers who don't correct "offensive" comments within 48 hours.

About 200 bloggers gathered at sunset in the picturesque Piazza Navona July 15, while hundreds others joined the protest online by freezing blog posts for a day.

"A blogger is not a professional reporter," yelled 35 year-old Guido Scorza from atop a marble bench as he held a heavy megaphone. "A blogger doesn't have a legal office to defend him from lawsuits," he said.

The controversial Alfano proposal -- named after its author, Italy's Minister of Justice Angelino Alfano -- has already been approved by Parliament and awaits Senate approval.

If passed, the law would force bloggers to edit any post denounced to the government as defamatory. If the blogger refused, the denouncing citizen could sue for as much as $18,000.

German discounting pioneer Aldi is using the economic crisis to expand its presence in the US. The move could help mitigate the company's troubles on its home turf.  

It is something that hasn't happened to Aldi before: In the midst of a severe economic crisis Germany's discounting pioneer is faced with declining revenues in its home market.

According to data from research company GfK, Aldi's sales in Germany declined by about five percent in the first five months of this year while the German retail sector as a whole shrank by only 2.2 percent.

It's an entirely different story in the United States. There, Aldi is rapidly expanding its reach and expects to open 75 new stores this year. The discount retailer entered the US market back in 1976, but its no-frills concept only really started to take off in recent years.

Workers at a plant in south-western France who had threatened to blow up equipment made by their company, JLG, say they have now obtained satisfactory layoff terms. This is the third such case of threats in France in less than a week.

REUTERS - A group of French workers facing layoffs obtained extra money after threatening to blow up industrial equipment at their plant, labour union representatives said on Friday.

The staff at JLG, a company that makes platforms mounted on cranes for fixing equipment high off the ground, were the third in France to make similar threats this month after workers from telecoms manufacturer Nortel and car parts maker New Fabris.

Arids Roma is a gritty Catalan construction company in the northeast of Spain that paves highways and churns out dusty gray mountains of gravel from several sprawling factories.

It is also a beneficiary of €1.59 million in farm subsidies from the European Union, which last year doled out more than €50 billion, $71 billion, from the largest agricultural aid program in the world, one that provides financing to a wide variety of recipients beyond the farmers who plow the soil -- German gummy bear manufacturers, luxury cruise ship caterers and wealthy landowners ranging from Queen Elizabeth II of England to Prince Albert II of Monaco.

Arids spreads gravel instead of seeds, but it received a farm subsidy for contributing to rural development -- money well spent, according to the Catalan regional government, which requested the payment and then distributed it to the company.

"Paved roads connecting the villages aid the mobility of tractors," said Georgina Pol Borràs, a spokeswoman for the regional government of Catalonia.

Hank Paulson's testimony yesterday was informative, if only because it illustrated that he himself still understands little about the origins and nature of the global crisis over which he presided. Perhaps his book, out this fall, will redeem his reputation.

A fundamental principle in any emerging market crisis is that not all of the oligarchs can be saved. There is an adding up constraint - the state cannot access enough resources to bail out all the big players.

The people who control the state can decide who is out of business and who stays in, but this is never an overnight decision written on a single piece of paper. Instead, there is a process - and a struggle by competing oligarchs - to influence, persuade, or in some way push the "policymakers" towards the view:

   1. My private firm must be saved, for the good of the country.
   2. It must remain private, otherwise this will prevent an economic recovery.
   3. I should be allowed to acquire other assets, opportunities, or simply market share, as a way to speed recovery for the nation.

Who won this argument in the US and on what basis? And have the winners perhaps done a bit too well - thinking just about their own political futures?(continues)

After noting that the Fed did not see the crisis coming and that the Fed has actively contributed to the severity of the existing crisis Buiter notes:

The Fed has been actively contributing to the next crisis

Here indeed the Fed stands guilty as charged, although it is in good company.  The Fed, through its lender of last resort and market maker of last resort actions and through a wide range of quasi-fiscal support operations it has undertaken on behalf of  Wall Street and other segments of the US financial establishment (Fannie & Freddie, AIG), has made a major contribution to the creation of the biggest moral hazard machine ever seen in human history.

Probably the single most damaging  failure of the US Treasury, the US Congress and the US financial regulators was there inability/unwillingness to create a special resolution regime (SRR) with structured early intervention and prompt corrective action for all systemically important financial institutions (those too big, too complex, to interconnected, too international or too politically connected to fail in the ordinary Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 way).    An SRR is an `insolvency lite' insolvency regime for banks and ohter systemically important financial institutions.  If early interventions fail, a bank that is judged (by a duly appointed administrator of the SRR, e.g. in  the FDIC in the case of insured deposit taking banks) to be at risk of becoming conventionally insolvent is instead rushed into a high-speed regulatory insolvency regime, the SRR.  There its balance sheet is restructured (typically existing equity is wiped out or diluted and unsecured creditors are turned into new equity holders).  The Administrator or Conservator has near-absolute powers to dispose of assets and to restructure liabilities.  Existing management, board and shareholders are disenfranchised for the duration of the institutions sojourn in the SRR.  The purpose of an SRR is that it wipes out a failing systemically important institution in a legal sense (by abrogating the property rights of shareholders, unsecured debt holders, mangement and board of directors) without wiping it out in the Army Corps of Engineers sense.  The bank (or insurance company) as a functioning organisation remains largely intact, and can continue to service existing contracts and commitments (at the discretion of the Adminstrator or Conservator of the SRR) and, most importantly, can engage in new lending, investment and funding activities, possibly with government support, including guarantees, for these new activity flows.

When the crisis started, an SRR existed for federally insured deposit-taking banks (administered by the FDIC), although the authorities did not have the nerve to put the largest insolvent institutions (such as Citi Group and Bank of America in it).  That SRR also did not apply to banking groups. There was an SRR for Fannie and Freddie, which was used effectively.  There was no SRR for investment banks.  There was no SRR for insurance companies like AIG.

The non-existence of an SRR for any systemically important institution amounts to a major policy failure of the executive and legistative branches of government.  The deafening silence of the Fed and the other regulators on the subject is a serious indictment of their competence.  After Bear Stearns went belly-up and was pushed into the terminal embrace of JP Morgan, it should have been clear even to the US authorities that either investment banks needed an SRR or that there ought to be no investment banks.  Yet we had to wait for the failure of Lehman and the forced acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America before the last two remaining large independent Wall Street investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, were ejected from the investment bank category and became bank holding companies.  This was not required  to give them access to the Fed's discount window and other facilities.  If the Fed declares "unusual and exigent circumstances" to prevail, it can lend, against collateral of the Fed's choosing, to individuals, partnerships and corporations (including non-financial corporations) , should it wish to.  It did, however, make it possible for these former investment banks to be put into an SRR.

If institutions are too systemically important to fail conventionally and if no SRR is available, they will have to bailed out at public expense should an emergency arise.  The regulators knew that.  The Treasury knew that.  The Congress knew that.  The banks knew that and their unsecured creditors knew that.   They permitted it to happen nevertheless.

So this is the candidate put forward by the Obama Administration as the "Systemic Risk Regulator."  They would be better off recommending Tommy.  At least he played a mean pin ball.

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

... the story is really not meant for an audience interested in a discussion of financial markets, as evidenced by his rhetorical style (almost everyone is simply an "asshole"), and his ridiculous leaps in logic (e.g. Goldman lowering its IPO underwriting standards created the .com bubble... and that explains how Nortel had a peak valuation of over $300 billion, how?). <...>

Taibbi is really just repeating an annoying tendency of mainstream financial journalists and pundits, who claim that the problem with CDOs is that they were exotic and 'not vanilla'. In fact, we might as well rename them 'Complex CDOs', since that's how they are always referred. But that's wrong. The problem wasn't lack of regulation or their complexity -- the problem is that they represented a bet on housing and that bet went horribly awry. What about that is so complex and hard to understand? If valuing CDOs were so impossible, whey did the collapse of that market in late 2007 precede the broader collapse of more normal securities? <...>

securities fraud this isn't. As McArdle reminds Taibbi, there was this whole Eliot Spitzer-led inquisition on Wall Street to ensure that the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing -- so a company can sell a product and its traders can be short it, and that's okay. Again, it's the opposite of what's called securities fraud.

As an aside, it's also total crap when he says that the securities were dumped to "old people" as though they were being sold at the corner to grandma and grampa. These pension funds may manage money for old people, but they weren't being run by unsophisticates. They're run by just the opposite -- highly paid, sophisticated managers that knew exactly what they were buying.

He goes onto note that, like with the IPO boom, Goldman Sachs has faced lawsuits related to its dealings in this area, as if that's damning (he talks about this elsewhere in the story, too). But the mere fact that someone is sued by angry investors, or the fact that a bank pays a fine to a regulator doesn't mean anything, given the perfunctory lawsuits anytime someone loses gobs of money. ...

This Eric Martin post reminds me that a number of you have asked me what I thought of Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on Goldman Sachs.  What I think, sadly, is that Matt Taibbi is becoming the Sarah Palin of journalism.  He seems to deliberately eschew understanding his subjects, because only corrupt, pointy-headed financial journalists who have been co-opted by the system do that.  And Matt Taibbi is here to save you from those pointy headed elites. 

Taibbi is a gifted narrative journalist, whose verbal talents I greatly admire.  But financial meltdowns don't offer villains, for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system.  Confronted with this, Taibbi doesn't back away from the narrative form, or apply it to smaller questions where it is more appropriate, as William Cohan did in House of Cards.  Instead, he grabs whoever's nearest to hand and builds them up into a gigantic straw villian, which he proceeds to bash with a handful of recently acquired technical terms that he clearly doesn't quite understand.  It's not that everything he says is wrong, but the bits that are true aren't interesting, and the bits that are interesting aren't true.  The whole thing dissolves into the kind of conspiracy theory he so ably lampooned in The Great Derangement.  The result is something that's not even wrong.  It's just incoherent. ...

Since it invaded Iraq in 2003, the U.S. has detained thousands of juveniles---some of whom were tortured and sexually abused, according to published reports. Figures of the number of children behind bars vary. Some estimates put the number as high as 6,000.

While the criminal abuse of male prisoners at Abu Ghraib is well known, child and women prisoners held there have also been tortured and raped, according to Neil Mackay of Glasgow's "Sunday Herald." Abu Ghraib prison is located about 20 miles west of Baghdad.

Iraqi lawyer Sahar Yasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview there are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps and that 95 percent of the 10,000 women among them have been raped. Children, he said, "suffer from torture, rape, (and) starvation" and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of "random" arrests "not based on any legal text."

Former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod in a witness statement said, "(I saw) two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and (a US soldier) was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners."

Somali Social Affairs Minister Mohammad Ali Ibrahim told FRANCE 24 that two kidnapped French agents are now both being held by the al Shabaab militant group. He said their abduction was in retaliation for their pirate relatives imprisoned in France.

Two French security consultants being held hostage in Somalia are now both in the custody of the al Qaeda-inspired al Shabaab militant group and their kidnapping might be linked to France's detention of Somali pirates earlier this year, a senior Somali official told FRANCE 24 on Friday. 

At least nine people have been killed and scores of others injured in near simultaneous bomb blasts at two luxury hotels in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

The blasts tore through the Ritz-Carlton and the nearby JW Marriott hotels within minutes of each other on Friday morning, as many guests were having breakfast.

Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has called the bombings a terrorist act and vowed that the attackers would be hunted down and punished.

"Those who carried out this attack and those who planned it will be arrested and tried according to the law," he said in a televised address to the nation.

^{Sami al-Haj - freed in May 2008 after more than six years - to launch legal action against former US president}

By Gwladys Fouché, guardian.co.uk

An al-Jazeera journalist who was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay plans to launch a joint legal action with other detainees against former US president George Bush and other administration officials, for the illegal detention and torture he and others suffered at the hands of US authorities.

The case will be initiated by the Guantánamo Justice Centre, a new organisation open to former prisoners at the US base, which will set up its international headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, later this month.

"The purpose of our organisation is to open a case against the Bush administration," said co-founder Sami al-Haj, an al-Jazeera reporter from Sudan who was illegally detained by US authorities for over six years after being captured while he was working as a cameraman. He was freed in May 2008.

"We need to start our organisation first and then we will prepare a whole case. We don't want to do this case by case," said the 40-year-old journalist during a recent visit to Oslo.

For half a century, a dark tunnel of crumbling concrete encased more than three miles of a placid stream bisecting this bustling city.

The waterway had been a centerpiece of Seoul since a king of the Choson Dynasty selected the new capital 600 years ago, enticed by the graceful meandering of the stream and its 23 tributaries. But in the industrial era after the Korean War, the stream, by then a rank open sewer, was entombed by pavement and forgotten beneath a lacework of elevated expressways as the city's population swelled toward 10 million.

Today, after a $384 million recovery project, the stream, called Cheonggyecheon, is liberated from its dank sheath and burbles between reedy banks. Picnickers cool their bare feet in its filtered water, and carp swim in its tranquil pools.

The restoration of the Cheonggyecheon is part of an expanding environmental effort in cities around the world to "daylight" rivers and streams by peeling back pavement that was built to bolster commerce and serve automobile traffic decades ago...

Some political opponents have derided Seoul's remade stream as a costly folly, given that nearly all of the water flowing between its banks on a typical day is pumped there artificially from the Han River through seven miles of pipe.

Charles Robert Jenkins is running late. He hurries into work at the souvenir shop to a chorus of approving calls that has become the foreign-language soundtrack to his life.

"Jenkins-san!" shout two dozen tourists lined up to meet this diminutive man with jug-handle ears, a 69-year-old American who speaks only a few words of their native tongue...

In 1965, Jenkins was a U.S. Army sergeant assigned to the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula, a skinny 24-year-old who was terrified of being sent to what he considered a sure death in Vietnam.

One night, after guzzling 10 beers for courage, he abandoned his sense of duty and freedom as he knew it to stumble across the border into North Korea, a desperate midnight maneuver that led to four lost decades in communist captivity.

Jenkins quickly became the Pyongyang government's most prized Cold War pawn. He starred in propaganda movies and memorized the inflated political tracts of "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, enduring a life so dreary and deprived that "most days you wished you were dead."

Eventually, he married Hitomi Soga, a Japanese woman abducted in 1978 as a teenager by the North Koreans. They raised two daughters, eking out an existence on government-issued rice and the undersized vegetables they grew in their garden.

When students gathered in common rooms to watch television in the early 1970s, the seditious insisted on "Star Trek" reruns; the best and brightest would demand to switch to "Cronkite." Back then, "Cronkite" meant the news.

It's almost impossible to convey the place Walter Cronkite held in American life for the 19 years he spent as the anchor of "The CBS Evening News." It wasn't just that he narrated the spikes in modern history, from the Kennedy assassination to the civil rights movement to the election of Ronald Reagan.

People tuned in to his program even on routine days when his broadcast -- Senate subcommittee hearings, gas prices, détente talks with the Soviet Union -- was as dull as toast. Mr. Cronkite's air of authority, lightly worn and unquestioned, was unusual even then, but nobody comes close to it now.

It was Walter Cronkite who convinced me that TV news was worth regular watching back in the mid 60s.

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

The probe will look into a program to kill Al Qaeda leaders, and at Cheney's possible role in hiding the plot from Congress. It marks a new level of scrutiny of Bush-era counter-terror efforts.

Washington -- The House Intelligence Committee launched an investigation Friday into a secret CIA effort to assemble paramilitary teams to kill Al Qaeda leaders -- a probe that will focus in part on whether agency officials were instructed by former Vice President Dick Cheney to hide the program from Congress.

The program, launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was ended by new agency Director Leon E. Panetta last month, shortly after he learned about it and before it became operational.

The inquiry is aimed at determining whether officials violated laws that require the executive branch to keep Congress fully informed of "significant" intelligence activities. It opens a new front in the scrutiny of CIA counter-terrorism efforts under the Bush administration.

The two protected baby pandas were born at a zoo in Shanxi province on June 25 and were immediately rejected by their mother in front of a huge crowd of visitors, Xinhua news agency reported.

"No one knew she was pregnant. Her plump body and bushy hair disguised her protruding belly until the babies were born," a worker at the Taiyuan Zoo, Ha Guojiang, told Xinhua.

A German company has produced contact lenses for animals, including lions, giraffes, tigers and bears, who suffer from cataracts.

S & V Technologies, founded by Bavarian chemist and entrepreneur Christine Kreiner, have created the acrylic intraocular lenses which are custom made to fit each animal.

"Cataracts generally means blindness for animals, unlike for humans," said the head of the company's veterinary division, Ingeborg Fromberg.

It began in 2007 with a few traders in the small town of Modbury in Devon refusing to give out plastic bags. But yesterday their small green revolution reached a national milestone: British shoppers have nearly halved the number of single-use bags they get through.

Figures from Wrap, the government's waste and resources programme, show that whereas 870m single-use plastic bags were handed out in the UK in May 2006, the figure for May 2009 was down to 450m - a 48% reduction, and 4,740 tonnes to send to landfill against 8,890 tonnes in May 2006.

A tiny species of lizard is so light that it falls to the ground like a feather, scientists have discovered.

Outwardly, little of the animal's body seems adapted to flying, gliding or moving through the air in any way.

But a slow-motion camera has revealed that when the lizard jumps from a height, it can slow the rate of its descent and land gently on the ground.

The lizard's surprising aerial ability might help explain how some animals became true gliders.

Details of the little lizard's talents are published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

They can't be stockpiled, producers are shutting down, and cancer patients need them. Isotopes, used in the detection and evaluation of cancer, heart and brain disorders could soon be in short supply. Of three main reactors in the world, only one will continue to function at the end of this week.

 
The upcoming closure of a Dutch nuclear reactor for routine maintenance has sparked fear and concern in Canada, where there is already a shortage of isotopes following the shut down of a reactor in Ontario.

"It's a real disaster. It's a national disaster. It's an international disaster", said Dr. Jean-Luc Urbain head of the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine. The Chalk River, Ontario reactor supplied a third of the world's radioactive isotopes.

There were limited options available to the Canadian medical community following the shut down of the Ontario nuclear reactor; namely South Africa and the Netherlands. However, as The Netherlands prepares to shut down its reactor, medical experts in Canada grow increasingly worried.

"I don't know how we're going to go through the summer, to tell you the truth, particularly since the reactor in Holland is also going to shut down for more than a month" said Urbain.

Microsoft's Bill Gates has already accomplished plenty in his life -- but now he's involved in an ambitious new venture -- a plan to tame hurricanes. He and several other scientists and engineers have a patent-pending project that plans to release barge-like contraptions into brewing offshore hurricanes, which would pump cold water up from the bottom of the ocean, thus calming the rough weather that's caused by warm ocean temperatures.

Jumbo flying squid have invaded the shallow waters off San Diego, California, spooking scuba divers and beachgoers after washing up dead on the beaches.

The carnivorous cephalopods, which weigh up to 45kg (100lb), came up from the depths last week, with swarms of them roughing up unsuspecting divers. Some reported tentacles enveloping their masks and yanking at their cameras and gear.

Radar beams could protect bats from wind turbines
^{A stationary beam reduces bat activity near turbines by almost 40%, research shows}
By Jacob Aron, guardian.co.uk

Radar beams that irritate bats could be used to prevent the animals from being diced by the spinning blades of wind turbines, according to a study of how the animals react to radar signals. The researchers discovered that a stationary beam reduced bat activity near the turbines by almost 40%.

Bat and bird populations can be significantly effected by collisions with turbines. A six-week study at two wind farms in the US recorded more than 4,500 bat deaths and the Peñascal wind farm in southern Texas is currently using radar to prevent migrating birds from flying into it.

"This is a major problem in the States, especially during the bats' migratory period," said Paul Racey of the University of Aberdeen, which undertook the study. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs recently commissioned a three-year study to gather data on the effect wind farms are having on bats in the UK.

Racey, who co-authored the research, outlined three ways to deter bats using radar in a paper published today in the journal PLoS One.

In life, he was about as likely a Catholic hero as Pontius Pilate. Now, more than a century after his death, Oscar Wilde has been claimed by The Vatican as one of its own.

Wilde, who died in 1900 after finding God and converting to Roman Catholocism on his deathbed, has long been regarded by the Vatican as a dissolute homosexual who was sentenced and imprisoned for acts of gross indecency over his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas.

However in a review of a new study, The Portrait of Oscar Wilde by the Italian writer Paolo Gulisano, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said that Wilde was much more than "an aesthete and a lover of the ephemeral".

He had been "one of the personalities of the 19th century who most lucidly analysed the modern world in its disturbing as well as its positive aspects", the review said.

Unpronounceable phrases with arcane meanings, European debates are often marked by embarrassing moments when mumblers come a cropper on EU tongue twisters. But that is no reason not to try.

At parties, tongue twisters are simultaneously ice-breakers and an indicator of how much someone has drunk. It's not just in beach bars that people wonder: Which wristwatch is a Swiss wristwatch? Another popular British tongue-twister is Red lorry yellow lorry red lorry yellow lorry.

The Polish and French virelangue feature "Jerzy" and a hunter as their respective main characters: Idzie Jerzy i nie wierzy, że na wieży jest sto jeży i pięćdziesiąt jeżozwierzy (Jerzy goes and does not believe that there are 100 hedgehogs and 50 porcupines in the tower), and Un chasseur sachant chasser sais chasser sans son chien de chasse (a hunter who knows how to hunt can also hunt without his dog).

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for--thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has returned its first imagery of the Apollo moon landing sites. The pictures show the Apollo missions' lunar module descent stages sitting on the moon's surface, as long shadows from a low sun angle make the modules' locations evident.

Here's the picture of Apollo 11 site.

We'd all like to help the police to do their job well. They, in turn, would like to have a massive database with DNA profiles from everyone who has been arrested, but not convicted of a crime.

We worry that this is intrusive, but some of us are willing to make concessions, on our principles, and the invasion into our privacy, in the name of preventing crimes. To do this, we'd like to know the evidence on whether this database is helpful, to help us make an informed decision.

EDITOR'S NOTE | 8:41 p.m. The Times published an article explaining that the Orwell books were unauthorized editions that Amazon removed from its Kindle store. However, Amazon said it would not automatically remove purchased copies of Kindle books if a similar situation arose in the future.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for--thought they owned. A screen shot from Amazon.com The MobileReference edition of the novel, "Nineteen Eighty-four," by George Orwell that was deleted from Kindle e-book readers by Amazon.com.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is "rare," but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we've been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we've learned that they're not really like books, in that once we're finished reading them, we can't resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

FRANCE: After studying a range of options, Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo has confirmed the preferred route for the proposed LGV Provence - Alpes - Côte d'Azur to Nice. This will follow the existing coastal railway through Marseille and Toulon rather than taking a shorter direct route east from Aix-en-Provence.

The future 180 km high speed line will include around 60 km of tunnels to thread through a relatively densely-populated region. This will include a 10 km bore to take the route under the current Marseille Saint-Charles terminus. As well as Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Toulon and Nice, intermediate stations are envisaged between Les Arcs and Le Muy in the département of Var, and near Grasse.

This is some change from previous practice, when TGV lines were built almost without tunnels. However, it will (if it will) come at a price...

Railway Gazette: Coastal route for LGV-PACA

The total cost is estimated at between €11bn and €16bn, of which the state is expected to contribute €8bn, leaving the rest to be raised locally. A further €4bn would be required to extend the line to the Italian border at Ventimiglia.

...Construction would start before 2020, in line with government commitments under the Grenelle de l'environnement. This suggests that commercial services may not begin until 2023, which would be too late to support Nice's bid to host the Winter Olympics in 2018.

Would they have asked for some advice from ADIF in Spain, 2018 would be possible...

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

An Italian erotic novel has raised intriguing questions about Silvio Berlusconi's government and its penchant for plucking attractive women from obscurity and propelling them into politics.

The book has been written by Maria Gabriella Genisi, 44, who alleges she was offered a candidacy in the Italian prime minister's People of Liberty (PDL) party only to be dumped so that the seat could be given to a government minister's mistress.

The rejection inspired her to write the book, cryptically titled The Goldfish Doesn't Live Here Anymore, about a supermarket checkout girl who has a love affair with a fictional minister.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is "excited" but "nervous" about performing in person for the first time since becoming France's first lady at a celebrity-studded concert in New York to mark Nelson Mandela's 91st birthday.

Dave Stewart, the British singer-songwriter who will perform two duets with Miss Bruni on Saturday night and is a driving force behind the Mandela Day celebration, offered the insights on his friend after he spoke to her in Paris.

"Carla's excited and a bit nervous," said Stewart, who rose to fame with Annie Lennox as The Eurythmics.

BRUSSELS (Reuters Life!) - It is a little known fact that Belgium's finance minister wears blue and white striped boxer shorts and the Brussels underpants museum has a pair to prove it.

Belgian artist Jan Bucquoy said that the framed underwear represents a utopian longing for an equal society.

"If I had portrayed Hitler in his underpants there would not have been a war. I think in this way you can contribute to a better world," Bucquoy told Reuters on Friday.

"If you are scared of someone, just imagine them in their underpants. The hierarchy will fall and you will see that this is a guy like any other. We are all equal, all brothers."

Today is hot. The sunlight is bright white, the sky clear Finnish blue. There's a water war going on in the garden with the neighbour kids. "He who controls the water, controls the war". I have threatened the WMD of a bucket of ice-cold water if one drop comes in my direction.

Close friends coming over for grilling. Not "What do you know about 9/11". The Krapula Sisters are also on their way. (Look it up).

Looks like we are into another recording on the H2 later on. I have started documenting the patio discussions to prove that they are not at all as funny as Ricky Gervais' podcasts.

Thanks again Bremen Beatman for the link. BTW CH I think you like a movie called 'The Visitor' from 2008, now in DVD. Richard Jenkins is great in it, (They all are) and it's about finding the beat in life, done in a very gentle, understated way. I find it really amazing that director was able to make us, the audience, simultaneously care about 4 quite different characters. Even though you sense that they could never all be together for long and thus an unhappy ending was on the way.

You can't be me, I'm taken