EU environment ministers met for a second day to discuss a common stance on tackling climate change, committing to a 30 percent reduction of carbon dioxide and financial support for developing nations. 

Sweden's Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren says the European Union will use all its influence to get the international community to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent during talks on a new climate deal at the end of the year.

The EU will hold a summit in October to set down its policy for global negotiations on a new pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Carlgren said at a press conference Saturday in the Swedish town of Are, where EU environment ministers were holding a summit.

Carlgren said the summit would be preceded a few days earlier by meetings of EU finance and environment ministers on October 20-21.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The regional and urban dimension will get more prominence in the EU lawmaking process, former commissioner and the new chairwoman of the European Parliament's regional committee told this website.

Up until June the EU commissioner for regional policy, Danuta Hubner was elected last week as chair of the regional development committee (REGI) in the European Parliament.

Former EU commissioner Danuta Hubner is now chairing the European Parliament's regional development committee.

"My intention is to make this committee more visible and more important in the Parliament. It should acquire the full right to give opinions on legislation adopted by other committees - for instance environment, transport or energy," the Polish MEP said.

Established as a separate parliamentary committee five years ago, REGI is responsible for all legislation concerning the EU's regional funding - since 2007 the biggest part of the bloc's budget - and its co-ordination with other policies, as well as for relations with interregional co-operation organisations, local and regional authorities.

The European project is stalling. In order to strike out from the crisis it now faces, it must decide on its future and put forward a major new project as ambitious as that of the single currency, according to a report by demosEuropa, published in Warsaw weekly Polityka.

This moment is special: Europe has lost momentum, gripped by a economic, institutional crisis, and also a crisis of faith. With a new institutional season beginning - a new parliament, soon a new Commission, Europe needs to overcome some apathy.

Polityka weekly and demosEuropa - Centre for European Strategy, a Warsaw-based think tank, launched a reflection group with the purpose of drawing up a new agenda for the European Union. Its comprehensive report, called Europe Can Do Better, was unveiled in Warsaw on 16 July, with the aim to present it in selected European capitals also. Its message is clear: To go forward the EU must launch a new, demanding integration project matching to single market and single currency ones of the eighties and nineties.

As votes cast by Iraqi Kurds Saturday are counted, Kurds in Turkey are mulling recent overtures made by Ankara. After 25 years of conflict between Turkey and Kurdish separatists, there are signs of a rapprochement.  

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced last week that his government was working on steps to solve the Kurdish conflict, which has claimed over 40,000 lives.

"Whether we call it the Kurdish, the southeast or eastern problem, whether we call it the Kurdish initiative, we have started work on this," Erdogan told a news conference before departing on a trip to Syria.

He did not say when the plan would be announced or what it might entail, but did say the interior ministry was already discussing the issue with other branches of government including the military and the national intelligence agency.

TBILISI, Georgia -- This weekend, after the brass band had gone home and workers had taken down the American flags fluttering all over town, this much was clear: President Mikheil Saakashvili had survived.

Pundits were writing his political obituary through much of the past year. Former loyalists defected from his administration to join the opposition, Western allies blamed him for starting the war with Russia last August, and Russian leaders publicly menaced him, calling him a "political corpse."

It was a worried man who greeted Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last Wednesday. Mr. Saakashvili went beyond friendly to pushy in his quest for support, telling his guest, mid-banquet, that "there is no free dinner in Georgia." At first -- as Mr. Saakashvili welcomed "my dear Joe" and Mr. Biden responded with a prim "Mr. President" -- it was not clear what the American response would be.

Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, has threatened to derail attempts to see the controversial Lisbon Treaty take effect before the end of the year.

Supported by 17 Czech senators, Mr Klaus, a critic of the treaty, plans to refer the document to his country's constitutional court at the start of August.

In seeking a ruling on whether the treaty complies with the Czech constitution, Mr Klaus would be able to delay signing the treaty into Czech law until the court had given its verdict.

A British grandmother has become a fugitive from the French judicial system, wanted for a conviction that she never knew she had.

Deborah Dark, 45, from Richmond, West London, was blissfully unaware of her status as a wanted woman when she went to visit her elderly father in Spain. Her plight became clear only as she tried to return home. At the airport she was arrested and incarcerated for a month, as French authorities sought to have her extradited to serve a six-year sentence.

Though a Spanish judge denied the request she was arrested again on her return to London. A European Arrest Warrant has been issued and authorities in every member state of the EU are obliged to detain her should she set foot in their country.

The alleged offence for which Mrs Dark is now being pursued is from 1988, when she was 24 and was driving home from a holiday in Marbella, Spain, with her eight-year-old daughter. At the French border, customs searched her car and found several kilograms of cannabis beneath the floor and in the sunroof.

Immigrants who want to become British citizens will win bonus points if they go to live and work in Scotland, where the population is ageing, Jim Murphy, the Scottish secretary, announced today.

A draft Home Office consultation paper, due shortly, on the government's new policy of "earned citizenship", singles out the fact of "having lived or worked in a part of the UK in need of increased population [such as Scotland]" as a point worthy of "favourable treatment".

The credit of living in Scotland will rank alongside skills in short supply, as well as special talents, in science or the arts, and a "proper attitude" towards the adopted country.

Writing in Scotland on Sunday, Murphy reminded fellow Scots that their average age was now 45 - "almost four years older" than his age - and that such a demographic profile put pressure on the welfare state and on future competitiveness.

Updated 12.43 Brussels time The EU has accepted Iceland's bid to join the bloc at a meeting of its foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday (27 July), signaling a speedy pace on accession.

The ministers asked the European Commission to analyse Iceland's legal preparedness to start membership negotiations. The move marks the first formal step in the enlargement process.

Reykjavik: ministers will accept the application less than one week after it was made

"The Commission is invited to submit to the Council its opinion on this application," they said in a statement.

The decision comes after Iceland officially submitted its EU application just last week.

If the commission completes the analysis before the end of the year, Iceland could start accession talks in 2010 and enter the EU as early as 2011 or 2012.

Germany called a French idea to slap "carbon tariffs" on products from countries that are not trying to cut greenhouse gases a form of "eco-imperialism" and a direct violation of WTO rules.

The issue of greenhouse tariffs has met bitter opposition from developing countries such as China and India, who count on the developed world to buy their exports as they build their economies in the face of the worst financial crisis in decades.

Matthias Machnig, Germany's State Secretary for the Environment, told a news briefing on Friday that a French push for Europe to impose carbon tariffs on imports from countries that flout rules on carbon emissions would send the wrong signal to the international community.

"There are two problems -- the WTO (World Trade Organization), and the signal would be that this is a new form of eco-imperialism," Machnig said.

Even if hedge funds don't depart, London's financial district, known as the City, may be left at a disadvantage, said Willem Buiter, a former Bank of England policy maker and now a professor at the London School of Economics.

"There hasn't been a systemic crisis of this nature in recent times, and it has shown the limits to the long-term viability of the City," Buiter said. "The age of light-touch regulation is clearly over. Although it remains to be seen what will happen on the regulatory side in the U.S., the U.K. is now at a disadvantage."

As its hedge-fund and private-equity industries worry about new rules, the U.S. is quietly lobbying Europe to change the terms of proposed financial regulation that could place strict new rules on any U.S. hedge- or private-equity fund doing business in the region, according to a senior Treasury official.

The move wades the U.S. into a fierce battle between the U.K. and other parts of Europe over how tough regulation should be. Some nations, led by Germany and France, are calling for wholesale regulation of financial services

The seven North Atlantic Treaty Organization governments behind the Airbus A400M military transport aircraft program pledged Friday to continue looking for negotiated solutions to the troubled program through the end of the year.

Defense ministers from the A400M core customer countries, meeting in Le Castellet, in southern France, renewed their support for the program and said they will continue to negotiate with Airbus Military, which is overseeing the program.

German shoppers are showing surprising strength in adversity with consumer confidence in the eurozone's largest economy hitting its highest level for more than a year, even as evidence mounts of a credit squeeze across continental Europe.

The Nuremberg-based GfK research group has forecast its "consumer climate" index will rise from 3.0 points in July to 3.5 points in August, the highest since June last year. Even as the country battles against the worst recession in post war history, the disappearance of inflation and the lack of a dramatic shake-out in the labour force were boosting Germans' propensity to spend, it said.

The unexpectedly steep increase will strengthen expectations of a significant rebound in Europe's largest economy in the second half of this year. Last week, the German Ifo business confidence index also rose strongly, hitting the highest level since October.

The European Union risks losing credibility and contributing to political instability in the Balkans unless it draws the region's states closer to their goal of EU membership, Carl Bildt, Sweden's foreign minister, said on Sunday.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Bildt, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, warned that nationalists in the region might gain strength at the expense of pro-European political forces in several former Yugoslavian states if the prospect of joining the EU were to fade.

Busses running to replace Berlin's temporarily cancelled commuter rail routes have been pulled off the road for mechanical defects, including the risk of fire, adding to commuter frustration.

A spokeswoman for S-Bahn operator Deutsche Bahn (DB) told the daily Berliner Morgenpost that 40 busses have been taken off their routes for mechanical repairs, adding that the problems are specific to each bus and not common to the fleet, as has been the case with the cracked wheels discovered on the commuter trains.

Britain's pensioners have the fourth highest level of poverty in Europe, according to figures published today by the European Commission.

The over 65's in Britain are, on average, worse off than their counterparts in Romania, Poland and France.

The research, which compared relative poverty in the 27 member states, showed nearly one in three UK over-65s were at risk of poverty - the same proportion as in Lithuania (30 per cent).

Only pensioners in Cyprus (51 per cent), Latvia (33 per cent), and Estonia (33 per cent) came out worse. The EU average was 19 per cent.

Hat tip naked capitalism

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

Fresh data on business sentiment in Germany have sparked hopes that Europe's biggest economy may be on the path to recovery, while the latest figures from the UK have disappointed market insiders.

The closely watched business climate index by the Munich-based Institute for Economic Research (Ifo) rose to 87.3 points in July on Friday (24 July), improving for the fourth consecutive time after reaching a seven-month high in June.

Germany is traditionally seen as the EU's economic motor

"Firms are not so unhappy with the current business situation as they were the previous month. Those surveyed are, again, less skeptical about the coming six months. It looks as though the economy is gaining traction," the institute said in press release.

The index - based on a survey of 7,000 German executives - comes following statistics earlier this month which suggested that industry output in the biggest economy of the 27-member EU grew at its fastest rate in 16 years in May.

European foreign ministers meeting in Brussels were expected to approve negotiations with the US on providing access to bank details in terrorism investigations. Iceland's EU aspirations and Iran are also on the agenda.  

Although howls of protests have been raised, European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday were expected to give the green light for further negotiations between the EU and the US on providing bank details to American authorities in terrorism investigations.

 

The European Commission and the United States consider providing access to banking data essential in uncovering the financing of terror networks. 

 

"These are very effective measures," said French terrorism expert Jean-Louis Bruguiere, whose study on terrorism financing has been studied by the EU. "I don't see any contradiction between legality and effectiveness."

Top leaders of the US and China are meeting in Washington to discuss key economic and political differences.

President Obama said the relationship between the US and China would shape the 21st century and said the two shared a "mutual interest".

China has sent Vice Premier Wang Qishan and State Councillor Dai Bingguo.

The meeting, called the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, is the first formal negotiation between the US and China since Mr Obama took office.

The growing debate over "flash" orders, amplified late last week when a prominent U.S. senator weighed in, could spell trouble for Direct Edge, the fast-growing stock trading venue that has the most to lose if they are banned.

Rival exchanges, some of whom also offer flashes, have been coy on whether they support the service and may quietly hope they are eliminated for good.

[...]

Direct Edge, which aims to become a formal exchange operator later in 2009, has more than tripled its market share in the last year, thanks in large part to its flash program, called the Enhanced Liquidity Provider, or ELP.

Although ELP accounts for only about 10 percent of Direct Edge's overall volume, it brings in the lion's share of revenues, allowing the consortium-owned company to aggressively battle Nasdaq OMX, NYSE Euronext, and BATS on pricing in the transparent market.

[...]

Direct Edge is owned by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co, hedge fund Citadel, Knight Capital Group, and the International Securities Exchange, a unit of Deutsche Boerse's Eurex exchange.

The wave of "option" adjustable- rate mortgages recasting to higher payments, projected by some economists to represent a looming source of foreclosures that will hurt housing markets over the next few years, will be smaller than "feared" because many borrowers will default before their bills change, Barclays Capital analysts said.
...
About 40 percent of borrowers with option ARMs are already delinquent, and "many" of the others will start missing payments before their obligations change, the Barclays mortgage- bond analysts wrote in a July 24 report. Recasts of securitized option ARMs will peak at about $6 billion a month in mid-2011 and include "volumes lower than feared" overall, they said.
...
The Barclays analysts, who wrote that about 88 percent of option ARMs packaged into securities in 2007 will eventually default, said that after a rally in prices they no longer suggest owning related bonds, "a trade we have been recommending for months."
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More than $750 billion of option ARMs were originated between 2004 and 2008 as borrowers used their low initial payments to afford higher-priced homes, according to newsletter Inside Mortgage Finance. Outstanding U.S. home loans totaled $10.5 trillion on March 31, according to Federal Reserve data.

Concentrated, in fact, among a mere handful of financial-services giants. About 80% of the derivative assets and liabilities carried on the balance sheets of 100 companies reviewed by Fitch were held by five banks: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. Those five banks also account for more than 96% of the companies' exposure to credit derivatives.

Hat tip naked capitalism

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

The US government is poised to take a 34 per cent stake in Citigroup, increasing both its exposure to and influence over, the troubled financial group following Sunday's completion of a long-awaited $58bn share offering.

The move is a milestone in a financial crisis that has forced the US authorities to come to the rescue of some of the largest institutions in the country. Citi has been a repeated recipient of government aid and is the only large surviving bank to have had to cede a shareholding to the government.

Lending continues to slow as bankers and borrowers refrain from taking risks, in a bearish sign for the economy.

The total amount of loans held by 15 large U.S. banks shrank by 2.8% in the second quarter, and more than half of the loan volume in April and May came from refinancing mortgages and renewing credit to businesses, not new loans, an analysis by The Wall Street Journal shows.

Losses from loans tied to strip malls, office buildings, housing complexes, and the like are hurtling toward record levels not seen since the infamous savings-and-loan crisis.

But at some banks, according to the latest round of earnings reports, the commercial real estate crisis has already arrived. Those companies' worsening conditions could well foreshadow the heavy losses at regional lenders in quarters to come -- and failures or takeovers

Chinese regulators on Monday ordered banks to ensure unprecedented volumes of new loans are channelled into the real economy and not diverted into equity or real estate markets where officials say fresh asset bubbles are forming.

The new policy requires banks to monitor how their loans are spent and comes amid warnings that banks ignored basic lending standards in the first half of this year as they rushed to extend Rmb7,370bn in new loans, more than twice the amount lent in the same period a year earlier.

After numerous posts on this blog discussing speculation of assorted forced buy ins, it seems that this phenomenon is quite factual and quite pervasive among the asset management community. As Zero Hedge has noted previously, forced buy-ins are a critical issue as it leaves shorts at the mercy of their securities lenders and repo desks (most of which are TARP recipients and thus beneficiaries of higher stock prices) which generically have the option of recalling lent out shares at a moment's notice, and thus creating artificial purchasing pressure: i.e. a forced short squeeze. According to Securities Industry News, in a recent survey by Callan Associates, over half of the respondents said they are undergoing a "controlled unwind" with their securities lending desks (aka State Street, BoNY, and Northern Trust).
From Securities Industry News

    Firms participating in securities lending programs are trying to reduce their risks and push for greater disclosure of what happens to cash given as collateral, according to a survey released this week by Callan Associates, a San Francisco-based investment consulting firm.

   About half of the respondents to the Callan survey said they are undergoing a process called "controlled unwind" to reduce the risks in their existing securities lending programs and minimize current and future losses. Properly executed, an unwind involves recalling securities out on loan without incurring any financial loss or restricting either the number of transactions or the types of securities lent.

    Almost all the respondents are using their current custodian or securities lending provider for the unwind and most believe it will take one to three years to complete, said Callan.

-Skip-

Unlike their European counterparts, U.S stock lenders have traditionally preferred cash collateral valued at about 102 percent of the lent securities. This is designed to reduce risk and provide an opportunity to reinvest the monies and increase the yield. However, some assets held in such pools such as mortgage-backed or asset-backed securities may become illiquid and hard to value or convert when cash is needed back.

Northern Trust and JP Morgan Chase are the targets of lawsuits from pension fund trustees for alleged wrongdoing resulting in large losses in from the cash collateral they reinvested for pension fund clients. As a result, many plans are also finding that it behooves them to ask more questions and pay closer attention to the fine print of their securities lending programs.

-Skip-

Bottom line - in a market where an unknown but significant amount of trading is based on widely permitted and pervasive advanced looks compliments of the exchanges, ECNs and the regulators, and the balance consists of artificial buying from rolling buyins, only the most insane, or foolhardy or both, believe they can trade with any hope of short or long-term success.

Tyler is the man!  Could this be the fertilizer for the green shoots?  A market wide short squeeze that happens to benefit TARP recipients?  At the same time it drives up stock prices as short sellers have to cover.  What a brilliant solution!

But----Oh, wait!  It is driving the big institutional investors out of the market?  How can that be good in the long run.  The big boys are figuring out that all of that money that was collateral for the loans of stocks, and that they placed with some of the big institutional players for investment, might not be available when the short sellers, (the guys who borrowed the stocks), want to return the stocks. Have I got this right?  There sure are a lot of ways to screw up in high finance, especially when markets start to go down.  Who knew?

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

I was a Russian student in the 1970s. I recall our teacher, himself a recent Russian emigrant, telling us that in the USSR every factory, school, ship, and military brigade had what was called a 'political officer'. This person was trained in the principles of Marxism-Leninism and a true believer therein. Whenever there was a problem, ranging from the broadest policy decision to the most personal matters, the political officer gave advice based on his interpretation of communism; he was a kind of priest.

It seems that our modern economists occupy somewhat the same role. They are mostly government or academic employees, and as such must advocate policies that line up with their employers' interest or with the academic mainstream.

Like the Soviet political officers, economists have a model of how the world works, a model which takes too little account of observed reality. Imbalances and contradictions are explained away until they crawl out of the swamp and terrorize the townfolk.

The damage these CDS instruments do has not yet been exhausted. The publicized stress tests to which the federal bank examiners recently subjected the 19 largest banks was not really a serious enterprise, because all these banks rely on swaps to protect them against their losses on the toxic legacies they accumulated under the gaze of these same examiners -- and nobody knows whether or not these hedges will pay out if they are needed. (They will only pay out in full with government monies, which is the dirty little secret that the Treasury and Fed are desperate to hide from the public. And when they fail, they will bring down the top four or five banks in the United States. - Jesse)
...
But what Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has proposed will not do the trick, because it leaves the actual trading of these instruments in the hands of inter-dealer brokers who do not publish the prices at which they arrange the deals (and may not offer the same prices to all bidders). And because it does not show the way to meeting the legitimate needs that spawned this illegitimate market, the Geithner proposals invite evasion of the rules. (Geither's solution was designed in large part by the banks themselves who do not wish the game to end just yet - Jesse)

Hat tip naked capitalism

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

America stands at a crossroads, and Goldman Sachs now owns both of them. In choosing which road to take, ordinary Americans must not be distracted by unproductive resentment toward the toll-takers. To that end we at Goldman Sachs would like to dispel several false and insidious rumors.

Rumor No. 1: "Goldman Sachs controls the U.S. government."

Every time we hear the phrase "the United States of Goldman Sachs" we shake our heads in wonder. Every ninth-grader knows that the U.S. government consists of three branches. Goldman owns just one of these outright; the second we simply rent, and the third we have no interest in at all. (Note there isn't a single former Goldman employee on the Supreme Court.)
...
For too long we have allowed others to emulate us. Now we are working productively with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the Congress to ensure that we alone are allowed to take the sort of risks that might destroy the financial system.

Calls for end to monopoly control of power generate strong results for Goran party

The surprisingly strong showing by a reformist party in Kurdistan elections is shaking the power structure in what has long been the most stable part of Iraq.

The "Goran" party - which translates as "change" - did particularly well in Sulaimaniyah, in eastern Kurdistan. This region has long been the stronghold of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani. The electoral setback to his party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), is reported to be so severe he is considering resignation, according to al-Sharqiya, a television news channel.

The outcome of the election is being closely monitored by the Baghdad government for signs the normally well-organised and united Kurdish bloc is beginning to split.

This would be important given growing hostility between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) which is threatening to lead to armed conflict between Arabs and Kurds over disputed territories, including Kirkuk and its oilfields.

The Taliban in Afghanistan has issued a book laying down a code of conduct for its fighters. 

Al Jazeera has obtained a copy of the book, which further indicates that Mullah Omar, the movement's leader, wants to centralise its operations.

The book, with 13 chapters and 67 articles, lays out what one of the most secretive organisations in the world today, can and cannot do.

It talks of limiting suicide attacks, avoiding civilian casualties and winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the local civilian population.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was facing a revolt by furious Iranian hardliners on Monday after he sacked a key conservative minister in an act of revenge.

The Iranian leader found himself at the centre of bitter infighting within the Iranian establishment when he dismissed his intelligence minister after his choice for vice-president was overruled by the country's Supreme Leader.

The backlash intensified when another minister offered his resignation in protest at Mr Ahmadinejad's move at the weekend.

Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview that Russia's economy is "withering," and suggested the trend will force the country to make accommodations to the West on a wide range of national-security issues, including loosening its grip on former Soviet republics and shrinking its vast nuclear arsenal.

Mr. Biden said he believes Russia's economic problems are part of a series of developments that have contributed to a significant rethinking by Moscow of its international self-interest. The geographical proximity of the emerging nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea is also likely to make Russia more cooperative with the U.S. in blocking their growth, he said.

But in the interview, at the end of a four-day trip to Ukraine and Georgia, Mr. Biden said domestic troubles are the most important factor driving Russia's new global outlook. "I think we vastly underestimate the hand that we hold," he said.

I fail to see what this crazy Joe Biden gaffe routine does for the Obama administration, at least in the case of Russia.

Dozens of people have been killed after Islamist militants staged three attacks in northern Nigeria, taking the total killed in two days of violence to 150.

A BBC reporter has counted 100 bodies, mostly of militants, near the police headquarters in Maiduguri, Borno State, where hundreds are fleeing their homes.

Witnesses told the BBC a gun battle raged for hours in Potiskum, Yobe State and a police station was set on fire.

Some of the militants follow a preacher who campaigns against Western schools.

Riding high in opinion polls ahead of next month's general election, Japan's opposition Democratic party on Monday launched a campaign manifesto promising dramatic administrative reform and generous social spending.

The DPJ, which appears likely to win a historic victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic party on August 30, said that in government it would pay parents a Y312,000 ($3,273) a year child allowance; revamp and increase pensions; scrap school fees and road tolls; cut taxes on small companies; and increase regional autonomy.

'It (the F-22 program) is important to our national security because we're not just fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,'' Texas' Republican Senator John Cornyn said in a TV interview. "We're fighting  we have graver threats and greater threats than that: From a rising India, with increased exercise of their military power; Russia; Iran, that's threatening to build a nuclear weapon; with North Korea, shooting intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of hitting American soil.''

Turns out the Senator had a 'slip of the tongue.'

''Senator Cornyn misspoke saying 'India' when he meant to say 'China.'

The US obsession with Venezuela is at the heart of its policy towards Zelaya. Philip Crowley, Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the US State Department, stated that the coup should serve as a "lesson" for the deposed president who had signed trade and petroleum accords with Venezuela: "We certainly think that if we were choosing a model government and a model leader for countries of the region to follow, that the current leadership in Venezuela would not be a particular model. If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode, that would be a good lesson."

does the usa want all venezuela's oil?

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

Genetically-modified crops are being grown in Britain for the first time in a year after controversial trials of the plants were "secretly" restarted.

Cultivation of a field of potatoes designed to be resistant to pests were abandoned over a year ago when environmental protesters ripped up the crop

But, without alerting the public as is usual when such trials begin, the project has been restarted, prompting environmental groups to warn that local farms and nearby residents could be put at risk.

A New Zealand swimmer got into difficulty when a friendly dolphin stopped her returning to shore.

The woman had been swimming with the dolphin, called Moko, at Mahia Beach on the North Island. But the playful dolphin did not want the fun to end.

People at a nearby cafe eventually heard her cries for help, and rowed out to her rescue.

She was found, exhausted and extremely cold, clinging to a buoy. She said the dolphin had meant no harm.

The woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, was wearing a wetsuit. But even that eventually failed to protect her from the winter cold.

Rescue boats and fire fighters evacuated about 70 holidaymakers trapped on a beach in Greece last night as wild fires tore across the Mediterranean and experts warned that rising winds may spread the flames further.

The rescue operation on the Ionian island of Zakynthos is the latest emergency evacuation forced by more than 320 fires in Greece alone. Firefighters are trying to control blazes in five countries along the northern Mediterranean rim after a week that left eight people dead.

Tens of thousands of hectares of countryside have been devastated in Italy, Spain, Croatia, France and Greece with initial estimates suggesting that the insurance bill will run into hundreds of millions of euros.

Three coastguard boats off the Greek island carried a group of people, mainly women and children, to safety on a bigger vessel, while dozens of fire fighters opened a path through the flames for the rest to return to their cars on the island. It is not known if any British tourists were among those stranded on the beach.

A Canadian astronaut aboard the International Space Station said on Sunday it looks like Earth's ice caps have melted a bit since he was last in orbit 12 years ago.

Bob Thirsk, who is two months into a planned six-month stay aboard the station, said he is mostly in awe when he looks out the window, particularly at the sliver of atmosphere wrapped around the planet.

"It's a very thin veil of atmosphere around the Earth that keeps us alive," Thirsk said during an in-flight news conference. "Most of the time when I look out the window I'm in awe. But there are some effects of the human destruction of the Earth as well."

"This is probably just a perception, but I just have the feeling that the glaciers are melting, the snow capping the mountains is less than it was 12 years ago when I saw it last time," Thrisk said. "That saddens me a little bit."

The latest glitch occurred Saturday when the station's U.S. air-scrubber shut down, prompting NASA to call in extra flight controllers to oversee the device manually. The machine strips deadly carbon dioxide, a by-product of respiration, from the station's air.

" Very good short film that asks -- and answers -- the big question on climate change: Who's going to pay the bill?" But he misses all the nuances of poking fun at eco-Germans.  See for yourselves (it's subtitled.)

Skennah Kowa

The cancellation of this year's Big Green Gathering (BGG) appears to have been an attempt to bankrupt the festival, according to its chair Brig Oubridge.  

Outbridge claims that, up until late last week, organisers were still in negotiation with the authorities and were given the impression that things were progressing, which meant that they continued to spend money on the event.

Event reported earlier today how the five-day Somerset festival, which was due to start this Wednesday (29 July), had been called off amid fears surrounding its safety.

Yet at an official meeting between police and BGG directors yesterday (26 July), Oubridge claims chief inspector of Avon and Somerset Police, Paul Richards, admitted the decision to shut down the event was "political" and was made more than a week ago.

But if capturing carbon is one thing, deploying a wide-scale CCS programme that is cost-effective and commercially viable is another. Both the challenges and possibilities of CCS are coming into greater focus as world leaders prepare to meet in Copenhagen in December to discuss a global climate-change treaty.

They are already apparent in the European Union, which has made CCS a central part of its effort to contain global warming. To succeed, companies and member states will have to bridge a multi-billion euro funding gap, work out technological kinks, draft new regulations to govern the transport and storage of carbon dioxide and win acceptance from a public worried about safety.

The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun's activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study.
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The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO2 and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

The G-8's $20bn initiative on smallholder agriculture, launched at the group's recent summit in L'Aquila, Italy, is a potentially historic breakthrough in the fight against hunger and extreme poverty. With serious management of the new funds, food production in Africa will soar.

Indeed, the new initiative, combined with others in health, education, and infrastructure, could be the greatest step so far toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed effort to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by half by 2015.

Hat tip Economist's View

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

Mason Ewing overcame more than just an inability to see.

MEAUX, France -- The obvious impediment to Cyril Elong's success as a clothing designer is that he cannot see. But the blind creator of streetwear label Mason Ewing has won fame for incorporating Braille into his designs.

The less obvious impediment to Elong's success is the physical abuse he suffered as a young immigrant to France.

Elong testified against his great-aunt and great-uncle at their 2004 trial. The punishment they meted out when he wet the bed, did poorly in school or engaged in common adolescent mischief, he said, included having his head thrust against the bathtub, and pepper rubbed into his eyes and on his genitals.

The abuse Elong suffered during the five years he lived with them and did their chores, he said, had permanent consequences: He has been legally blind since age 15, when he woke up from a three-week coma induced by an epileptic fit.

With every high-tech gadget we buy, we give up a little more privacy. Many devices today are in constant communication with their manufacturer. And it's not just consumers who are losing their rights -- the technology gives authoritarian states whole new ways of keeping tabs on individuals.

Don't look now, but no matter where you go, you're connected. We -- or most of us, at least -- have opened our front doors to large corporations, hardware manufacturers, software firms and search engines. We have allowed them to rifle through our jacket pockets and handbags. And now they can do as they wish with us, or do the bidding of the powers-that-be -- in the form of a totalitarian government, for example.

 Gadgets like the Blackberry are changing our lives. Don't believe it? Well, consider a recent incident involving the Internet bookseller Amazon and two works by -- ironically enough -- George Orwell. Amazon had been selling the titles, "1984" and "Animal Farm," to owners of its Kindle reader, the special e-book device the bookseller developed. However, it turned out that the publishers of the Orwell books didn't own the electronic rights to the works. And so, to the surprise of buyers, Amazon erased the two books -- which had been paid for and delivered -- from the electronic reader. Amazon's readers had unwittingly purchased pirate copies, it turned out.

Now if this had happened in a normal book store, the customer would never even have known. A bookseller who had mistakenly sold pirated copies of a book would never have snuck into customers' living rooms, pulled the offending books from their shelves and left cash to the value of the purchase price on the kitchen table as recompense. In real life there are practical and legal obstacles to this sort of behaviour. But in the electronic world, it was simple. Probably Amazon won't even have to worry about legal problems relating to the action.

A WELSHMAN born in the rugby, singing and mining stronghold of Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley should be recognised as the true "father of the internet".

That is the view of Trevor Harris, a lecturer in the Department of Film and Media at Lampeter University.

He has now had his paper Who is the Father of the Internet? The Case for Donald Davies published in the latest edition of the scientific journal Mass Communication Research.

A blue dye found in Gatorade and Rocket Pops could play a protective role in the cellular mayhem that follows spinal cord injury. In rats, the dye -- known as FD&C Blue No.1 -- appears to block a molecule that floods the injury site and kills nerve cells, a team reports in the July 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rats dosed with the dye after injury showed greater improvement in motor skills than rats not receiving the dye. And the food colorant's low toxicity suggests a new approach for treating spinal cord trauma in humans, injuries for which there are few therapies.

"It's not a cure," says neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y., who led the new study. "I don't think that anything can cure this, but for the patient it could be a big improvement."

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The research team is now exploring how effective the dye is when it is administered later, such as four hours after the injury. It looks like there is still a beneficial effect, Nedergaard says. While clinical use of brilliant blue is years off and would require studies in humans, it looks promising, Nedergaard says. "It could be you drink blue Gatorade on the way to the hospital."

ATP normally floods damaged areas of the nervous system, and while helpful in other tissues, here it binds to P2X7 receptors and sets off a cascade of events that results in massive cell death.  FC&D Blue No. 1 contains a chemical that binds to these receptors and reduces the damage.  Blue Gatorade may be for nerve injuries what aspirin is to heart attacks.

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

The 54-year-old French president may not be as bulletproof as he seems

The aura of youth and indestructible energy cultivated by President Nicolas Sarkozy was dealt a severe blow yesterday when he collapsed while jogging at Versailles.

One of the first people to rush to his aid was his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkzoy. She was seen by an eye-witness arriving on a motorbike from the presidential retreat nearby.

President Sarkozy, 54, was under cardiological and neurological surveillance last night at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris but the Elysée Palace insisted that he had been the victim of a relatively banal fainting fit - or "vasovagal episode" - and had not lost consciousness.

Patrizia D'Addario, the call girl who claims to have slept with Silvio Berlusconi, has claimed she was offered a seat in the European Parliament after their night together.

She also intimated that she was working on a "tell all" book about her encounters with the Italian prime minister.

In the latest allegation concerning the 72-year-old prime minister's liaisons with younger women, Miss D'Addario, 42, said that she had asked for help in winning planning permission for a building project, which she said was part of the "deal".

but...

Skennah Kowa

From The New York Times on Sunday:

Scientists Worry Machine May Outsmart Man

Of course, I suppose it all depends on which man you have in mind. After watching Senator Jim DeMint try to explain health care policy this Sunday on ABC, I'm pretty sure my toaster would give him a run for his money.
--Jonathan Cohn

Hat tip Paul Krugman

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

BBC NEWS | England | Wiltshire | Capsule of cheese 'lost in space'

Members of a West Country cheesemakers group hoping to make the first space flight by a piece of Cheddar say they have lost track of it.

At 0400 BST a weather balloon was launched 18.6 miles (30km) into the upper atmosphere, carrying a capsule containing a 300g wedge of Cheddar.

But the organisers' GPS tracking system has stopped working and now they need help to find the cheese once it lands.

They say it could land anywhere between Pewsey in Wiltshire and Hertfordshire.