José Manuel Barroso was left fighting for his job as head of the European Commission last night after MEPs snubbed EU leaders and refused to endorse him for a second term.

The Portuguese conservative should have been a shoo-in after winning unanimous backing from the 27 member states but the heads of the Socialist, Liberal and Green MEPs blocked plans for a vote next week in Strasbourg to agree his re-appointment.

The impasse leaves Mr Barroso to sweat about his future over the summer and risks making him and the EU seem a lame duck on the eve of the G8 and in preparations for the Copenhagen climate change talks.

Mr Barroso's mandate ends on October 31 and his supporters are exasperated because they can see his re-appointment dragging on for months while MEPs attempt to extract maximum concessions from the member states and European Commission.

MP David Davis's dramatic parliamentary move exposes treatment of terror suspect

The true depth of British involvement in the torture of terrorism suspects overseas and the manner in which that complicity is concealed behind a cloak of courtroom secrecy was laid bare last night when David Davis MP detailed the way in which one counter-terrorism operation led directly to a man suffering brutal mistreatment.

In a dramatic intervention using the protection of parliamentary privilege, the former shadow home secretary revealed how MI5 and Greater Manchester police effectively sub-contracted the torture of Rangzieb Ahmed to a Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), whose routine use of torture has been widely documented.

This is the first time that the information has entered the public domain. Previously it has been suppressed through the process of secret court hearings and, had the Guardian or other media organisations reported it, they would have exposed themselves to the risk of prosecution for contempt of court.

For most people, computer problems are usually a virus that slows things down, or perhaps a document is lost when the computer crashes and we have to re-boot and re-write the document.  

There are, however, bigger and scarier threats out there in cyber space, be they from governments, or from rogue independent hackers. And the reality is that a lot of damage can be done by a lone individual working from one computer.

One of the most important think tanks in the world when it comes to assessing cyber threats, cyber warfare or cyber terrorism, is the Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (CCDOE) in Tallinn, Estonia.

EUOBSERVER/BRUSSELS - Nato on Tuesday (7 July) launched a public consultation process aimed at clarifying the alliance's role in fighting the new range of threats that have emerged in recent years.

The current strategic concept dating back to 1999 "clearly belongs to the last century," although the ground principle of collective defence still remains valid, outgoing Nato secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in his opening remarks.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen will be the new face of Nato from 1 August

Among his 400-strong audience was former US secretary general Madeleine Albright, the UN's anti-nuclear chief, Mohammed El Baradei, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, due to take over Mr Scheffer's post on 1 August.

Apart from globalised terrorism networks, other new threats emerged have emerged, such as cyber attacks, energy disruptions, pirates attacks on UN and commercial cargoes, as well as the race for resources and strategic influence in the Arctic.

The Dutch national security service (AIVD) is being taken to court after mass circulation newspaper De Telegraaf discovered that it was being bugged.

The paper, together with the Dutch National Journalists' Union and the Society of Editors-in-Chief, lodged a complaint against the Dutch state. They are demanding that telephone tapping and house raids of journalists stop immediately and that any material that has been confiscated be returned. The case will be heard on 16 July.

Last month the home of one of the newspaper's journalists, Jolande van der Graaf, was raided by police after a former security service employee was arrested for leaking information. At the time a tearful photograph of the journalist appeared in De Telegraaf. The newspaper says not only has Ms van der Graaf's telephone been tapped, but so too have the telephones of Editor-in-Chief Sjuul Paradijs and subeditor Joost de Haas.    
Threat to society
"Now that free reporting is at risk, national journalism is taking joint action,"  writes De Telegraaf on Wednesday. Chairman of the journalists' union, Huub Elzerman, says it is logical that the union supports De Telegraaf  as his organisation promotes international press freedom. "This is a gross violation of source protection, now that it appears journalists are being bugged. This means that a journalist cannot guarantee the protection [of anonymity] of a whistle-blower or citizen." In a statement on its website the organisation points out that journalists often rely on anonymous sources to bring wrongdoings to light. It says that the security service practices undermine the reliability and independence of journalists. "If a country accepts that the intelligence service and police investigate and bug journalists to cover up their own failures, it is a direct threat to a constitutional society."

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European competition commissioner Neelie Kroes turned to Shakespeare on Wednesday (8 July) to describe anti-competition practices being widely used by pharmaceutical companies throughout the European union.

"Overall it is indeed a conclusion that there is something rotten in the state," she said, paraphrasing comments made by the character Marcellus in Act I of the British playwright's famous work, Hamlet.

The commission report points to widespread collusion between European drug makers

Ms Kroes made the statement following the publication of a final inquiry report on Europe's pharmaceutical sector - a document that points to widespread collusion between drug companies producing original products and others producing generic copies.

According to the report, a considerable number of generic drug producers have accepted payments to delay the release of medicines that are on average 40 percent cheaper than the original product two years after its initial release.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Graham Watson, the liberal challenger for post of European Parliament president, is set to pull out of the race after the job was split between the two biggest groups in the assembly.

Rumours flew around the parliament on Tuesday evening (7 July) that he had already formally withdrawn his candidacy after the head of the centre-right EPP, Joseph Daul, told a meeting of his group that Mr Watson was no longer in the running.

The parliament will vote on its next president on 14 July

However, his cabinet and spokespeople immediately denied the rumour, and insisted Mr Watson still intends to take part in an organised debate later on Wednesday between himself and the other declared candidate for the job, the centre-right Pole Jerzy Buzek.

Mr Watson's attempt at getting the presidency - largely a ceremonial role - was scuppered by the traditional carve-up of power between the EPP and the Socialists, confirmed on Tuesday.

The Hague tribunal has rejected the argument by former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that he should not be prosecuted because of an immunity deal.

Mr Karadzic said the former US peace envoy Richard Holbrooke had promised him immunity from prosecution if he gave up politics.

Mr Holbrooke has repeatedly denied there was any such deal.

The UN court said even if there was, it did not have legal standing, and that Mr Karadzic's trial should go ahead.

Mr Karadzic, 64, faces 11 charges including genocide.

The Taoiseach has announced that the re-run of the Lisbon Treaty referendum will be held, as expected, on October 2nd.

Brian Cowen made the announcement in the Dail this morning.

The second referendum is being arranged following the decision by EU leaders to give Ireland legal guarantees on issues like abortion, military neutrality and taxation.

Italy is hosting the 35th G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, the city devastated by an earthquake in April. The global economic crisis, climate change, Iran and Africa will top the agenda. Click here for DW-WORLD's comprehensive coverage of events.

Italian summit host under fresh pressure to help world's poorest nations

Aid groups and other world leaders joined forces yesterday to put Silvio Berlusconi under pressure as he prepared to chair a summit of the world's richest nations in Italy.

The Italian Prime Minister was accused of planning a further cut in his country's overseas aid budget, just as Gordon Brown and other G8 leaders called on the group to honour their headline-grabbing promises to help the world's poorest nations at their landmark summit at Gleneagles four years ago.

At their three-day meeting, the G8 leaders are expected to approve a "name and shame" system so its members' progress on meeting their commitments on aid can be tracked. Although the G8 has no official figures, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that the rich nations' club will fall $23bn short of its pledge at Gleneagles to raise annual aid by $50bn by next year.

Leaders of the G8 leading industrial countries have agreed to try to limit global warming to just 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial levels by 2050.

The summit, in the earthquake-hit Italian city of L'Aquila, also agreed tough new carbon emissions cuts.

It says developed nations should cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, with the rest of the world making a 50% reduction by the same date.

Analysts say there is no indication of how the targets, or costs, will be met.

The summit agenda is also expected to include food security, North Korea and Iran.

Italian summit host under fresh pressure to help world's poorest nations

Aid groups and other world leaders joined forces yesterday to put Silvio Berlusconi under pressure as he prepared to chair a summit of the world's richest nations in Italy.

The Italian Prime Minister was accused of planning a further cut in his country's overseas aid budget, just as Gordon Brown and other G8 leaders called on the group to honour their headline-grabbing promises to help the world's poorest nations at their landmark summit at Gleneagles four years ago.

At their three-day meeting, the G8 leaders are expected to approve a "name and shame" system so its members' progress on meeting their commitments on aid can be tracked. Although the G8 has no official figures, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that the rich nations' club will fall $23bn short of its pledge at Gleneagles to raise annual aid by $50bn by next year.

The Italian premier said he hoped the summit would see the launch of an initiative to raise between 10 and 15 billion dollars to boost food security in poor countries and said a thaw in relations between Washington and Moscow following a trip by US President Barack Obama to Moscow augured well.
   
Britain and France want the summit to focus on bringing greater stability to the oil market, which has fluctuated wildly over the last 12 monts, with highs of 147 dollars and lows of just 32.
 
Around 15,000 police have been deployed to prevent a repeat of the violence which marred the last time Italy hosted a G8 summit in 2001, when a protester was shot dead in Genoa.

Evacuation plans are also in place in the event of any major aftershock, which would bring about an immediate cancellation of the gathering.

Banking executives will have their pay linked to long term profitability under new rules designed to prevent a repeat of last year's financial meltdown.

Alistair Darling will tell MPs today that salaries will be aligned to the earnings and overall financial health of institutions when he presents his long-awaited reforms to the system of banking regulation.

Typically, top bankers are paid a fixed basic salary topped up with bonuses linked to their bank's share-price performance. Such arrangements can encourage excessive risktaking and often do not reflect the quality of the bank's balance sheet.

The Chancellor will also announce that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) will cap how much a bank can lend during the good times to ensure that it is not overstretched when the economy deteriorates.

William White predicted the approaching financial crisis years before 2007's subprime meltdown. But central bankers preferred to listen to his great rival Alan Greenspan instead, with devastating consequences for the global economy.

William White had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life after shedding his pinstriped suit and entering retirement.

White, a Canadian, worked for various central banks for 39 years, most recently serving as chief economist for the central bank for all central bankers, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.

Then, after 15 years in the world's most secretive gentlemen's club, White decided it was time to step down. The 66-year-old approached retirement in his adopted country the way a true Swiss national would. He took his money to the local bank, bought a piece of property in the Bernese Highlands and began building a chalet. There, in the mountains between cow pastures and ski resorts, he and his wife planned to relax and enjoy their retirement, and to live a peaceful existence punctuated only by the occasional vacation trip. That was the plan in June 2008.

And now this.

EU finance ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday (7 July) agreed on the need for new measures to lessen the effects that leaner economic periods can have on the financial system.

"We are clearly indicating that we need a more robust financial system in Europe with increasing abilities to build buffers against financial instability," said Swedish finance minister Anders Borg whose country recently took over the helm of the EU presidency.

European banks may be required to hold greater capital buffers

New measures would see a change to banking and accounting rules, including an obligation on banks to store away more profits during boom times to pay off expected loses on loan portfolios in the future.

Ministers would also like to see banks build up greater capital buffers to protect against fluctuations in the value of financial assets, with the European commission now likely to come forward with more concrete proposals in October.

srael had won agreement from the United States for the continued construction of 2,500 housing units in settlements in the West Bank, despite U.S. calls for a freeze, according to the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said the United States and Israel have been trying to find common ground on the sensitive settlement issue, but he had no comment on the front-page report of a deal.

A U.S. embassy spokesman in Tel Aviv also had no immediate comment.

	Advertisement

The report followed a briefing by Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his talks in London on Monday with U.S. envoy George Mitchell on ending a rift with Washington over its demand for a settlement freeze.

Western officials said the United States was moving in the direction of making allowances so Israel could finish off at least some existing projects which are close to completion or bound by private contracts that cannot be broken.

German analysts are greeting an unexpected rise in manufacturing orders with delight, with some going so far as to say the worst is over. Still, plenty of realists are warning that cautious optimism remains the order of the day.

The German government's scrapping premium is partially credited with driving a gain in national manufacturing. There was a very pleasant surprise in store for the German economy with the release of national manufacturing statistics for May: Orders were 4.4 percent higher than in April. The figures, released by Germany's Economics Ministry on Tuesday, surprised analysts who had only predicted a gain of 0.5 percent. They also made May the third successive month in which orders rose. Additionally business confidence was up and there were also positive signals coming out of the steel industry and from medium-sized businesses. The German stockmarket reacted to the positive news and the DAX went up, although it gave up some of those gains later in the day.

And all of this was considered the first solid indicator of an ongoing change for the largest economy in the euro zone, where Europe's common currency is used. It led to optimism in some German quarters, with Commerzbank analyst Dr Ralph Solveen, going so far as to say, "the end of the world has been cancelled, businesses are beginning to re-stock."

European Union regulators have imposed a €1.1 billion ($1.54 billion) fine on German utility company E.ON and France's GDF Suez over a 1975 deal which saw the two divide gas markets up between them. 

The EU Commission, which serves as Europe's anti-trust watchdog, said the energy giants had reached an agreement not to compete in one another's gas markets around the time they cooperated to construct the MEGAL gas pipeline.

As a result, the Commission said in a statement on Wednesday, they would have to pay penalties of €553 million euros each.

European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who delivered the statement, said E.ON and GDF Suez had "maintained the market-sharing agreement after European gas markets were liberalized."

On Tuesday night, Google announced plans on its blog to launch Google Chrome OS, an operating system designed to directly challenge Microsoft's Windows. The software is projected to be available to the public in about a year.

"This is a direct attack on Microsoft's revenue base," Rob Enderle, a technology analyst in San Jose who consults for the Seattle software company, told the L.A. Times. "Microsoft's Windows operating system platform and its Internet Explorer browser are the keystone products the empire is built on."

But how will it work? Our tech blog reports:

Google Chrome OS, the operating system, is designed to work with the company's Chrome Web browser, launched nine months ago and downloaded by 30 million users. Google said the software will be optimized for small, lightweight laptop computers called netbooks, a fast-selling category of inexpensive machines that sell for as little as $250 and are used primarily to surf the Web and check e-mail.

Time to boost my shares in IKEA chair suppliers, I reckon.

Not exactly sure what to expect out of this.  I'd love to see the evil empire brought to its knees, and certainly if anybody can do it, it's Google.  But I dunno.  In any case, this could be fun.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

NEW YORK - Oil prices neared $60 per barrel yesterday as the government reported that the size of stockpiles of gasoline soared again. Retail gas prices have fallen every day for more than two weeks, and gasoline futures fell more than 9 cents a gallon yesterday. Energy markets are undergoing an extended sell-off, the longest in 10 months.

Benchmark crude for August delivery fell more than 4 percent, or $2.79, to settle at $60.14 a barrel in New York. Prices came within a penny of $60 at one point. In just over one week, oil prices have fallen more than 18 percent.

"The recession is far from over,'' said analyst Stephen Schork. "Perhaps the run-up in prices was a bit overstated.''  [Do you think?]

Crude prices by last week had more than doubled from lows reached in January, following record highs near $150 last summer. Cheap oil sparked a new round of investment, as did the weaker US dollar. Crude is priced in dollars, so it effectively becomes cheaper internationally when the dollar falls.

Yet dismal economic data continue to emerge and the fundamentals of supply and demand appeared to take control of the market last week.

Gasoline, heating oil, and natural gas futures are also tanking. Americans are driving billions fewer miles than in recent years; though refiners are slashing production, gasoline continues to pile up. Gasoline in storage grew by another 1.9 million barrels last week, the fifth straight week of growth.

I wonder if a pattern of price oscillations driven by futures market speculation and economic hype can provide a suitably stable average yearly price to enable continuing investment in the development of additional resources.  The average spot price for the last year, July 1-July 1, should be well over $60/bl.  With a similar pattern this next 12 months we could have an average spot price of $40/bl.  Is there anything worth developing at $40/bl?


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

Now compare this to yesterday's

Spain is aiming to change its economic model away from construction and towards the "sustainable economy".

Salgado pide a los bancos y cajas 10.000 millones para el fondo de economía sostenible · ELPAÍS.com		Salgado asks banks and S&Ls for €10bn for the sustainable economy fund - ElPaís.com
La vicepresidenta segunda del Gobierno y ministra de Economía, Elena Salgado, ha clausurado el IX Encuentro Financiero Internacional organizado por Caja Madrid y EL PAÍS, acto en el que ha pedido hoy a los bancos y cajas que aporten el 50% del futuro fondo para la economía sostenible que se pondrá en marcha en 2010 y que ascenderá a 20.000 millones de euros. Cuando llegue la recuperación, ha afirmado Salgado, el sector financiero español deberá "redirigir la asignación de recursos hacia sectores sostenibles, es imprescindible su participación en el fondo".		[Spain's] Second Deputy Prime Minister and minister for the Economy, Elena Salgado, has closed the 9th International Financial Meeting organised by [S&L] Caja Madrid and El País, an event in which she asked banks and S&Ls to contribute 50% of the future Sustainable Economy Fund which will kick off in 2010 and will reach €20bn. When the recovery arrives, Salgado claimed, the Spanish financial sector will have to "redirect the resource allocation towards sustainable sectors, its participation it the fund is a requirement".

From the author of Moneyball.  Apologies if it's already been posted, haven't had time to be here lately.

Toward the end of 2004, that changed dramatically--but just how dramatically A.I.G. F.P. was extremely slow to realize. In the run-up to the financial crisis there were several moments when an intelligent, disinterested observer might have realized that the system was behaving strangely. Maybe the most obvious of these was the effects of U.S. monetary policy on borrowing and lending. The combination of the dot-com bust and the 9/11 attacks had led Alan Greenspan to pump money into the system, and to lower interest rates. In June 2004 the Fed began to contract the money supply, and interest rates rose. In a normal economy, when interest rates rise, consumer borrowing falls--and in the normal end of the U.S. economy that happened: from June 2004 to June 2005 prime-mortgage lending fell by half. But in that same period subprime lending doubled--and then doubled again. In 2003 there had been a few tens of billions of dollars of subprime-mortgage loans. From June 2004 until June 2007, Wall Street underwrote $1.6 trillion of new subprime-mortgage loans and another $1.2 trillion of so-called Alt-A loans--loans which for some reason or another can be dicey, usually because the lender did not require the borrower to supply him with the information typically required before making a loan. The subprime sector of the financial economy clearly was responding to different signals than the others--and the result was booming demand for housing and a continued rise in house prices. Perhaps the biggest reason for this was that the Wall Street firms packaging the loans into bonds had found someone to insure against what turned out to be the rather high risk that they'd go bad: Joe Cassano.
.....

But in the case of the subprime-mortgage credit-default swaps, Cassano had agreed to several triggers, including A.I.G.'s losing its AAA credit rating, that would require the firm to post collateral. If the value of the underlying bonds fell, it would fork over cash, so that, for instance, Goldman Sachs would not need to be exposed for more than a day to A.I.G. Worse still, Goldman Sachs assigned the price to the underlying bonds--and thus could effectively demand as much collateral as it wanted. In the summer of 2007, the value of everything fell, but subprime fell fastest of all. The subsequent race by big Wall Street banks to obtain billions in collateral from A.I.G. was an upmarket version of a run on the bank. Goldman Sachs was the first to the door, with shockingly low prices for subprime-mortgage bonds--prices that Cassano wanted to dispute in court, but was prevented by A.I.G. from doing so when he was fired. A.I.G. couldn't afford to pay Goldman off in March 2008, but that was O.K. The U.S. Treasury, led by the former head of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, agreed to make good on A.I.G.'s gambling debts. One hundred cents on the dollar.

and so much more.

Skennah Kowa

As goes California," says the adage, "so goes the nation." All eyes are therefore on the Golden State as it attempts to solve its $26 billion budget deficit. The world's eighth largest economy is not going quietly into that pit of debt and devastation that has devoured Third World countries whole. The State's voters have drawn a line in the sand against further tax hikes, while Democratic leaders have drawn a line at further cuts in services or selloff of public assets. State legislators are deadlocked, caught between the rock of tax ceilings and the hard place of debt limits.

"Expect the best and accept nothing less," says another adage that typifies the attitude sometimes called "California dreaming." You create your own reality. Instead of trying to prop up an old model that has failed, you can dream up a new one. If anyone can come up with an original solution to the problem, Californians should be able to. But what? While waiting for developments, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has started paying the State's bills with IOUs ("I Owe You"s evidencing debt, technically called "registered warrants").

Hmm . . . Pay the bills with IOUs. Not a bad idea!

It is happening here and now whether the pundits like it or not.  We have gone from a -3% savings rate (roughly) to a +6.9% one.  This is a 10% swing and with the consumer being 70% of the economy that's an immediate hit of somewhere between 4.83% and 7% of GDP (depending on whether you "count" the negative as an additive force, and you probably should.)

The problem is that it doesn't stop there: The government calls this a "savings rate" but it isn't.  It counts debt repayments as "savings" among other distortions, meaning that trying to use the "savings rate" as an indicator of future capital formation is a lost cause.  In point of fact there is no capital formation going on - people are cutting back on their voluntary 401k and IRA contributions because they don't have any money to put in - they are furiously paying down debt as fast as they're able in an attempt to avoid foreclosure and bankruptcy.

That of course means that spending drops which in turn means that employers need fewer people to work.  Capacity utilization is in the toilet and average hours worked has fallen to never-before-recorded numbers in the history of the data being collected.  This in turn feeds more layoffs which begets more people without income to spend on discretionary purchases (and in some cases non-discretionary ones!)

There is no avoiding the necessary contraction in GDP to bring the system back into balance, and the longer we continue to allow our government and media to LIE about what has happened, who is responsible, and what has to happen before the economy can clear and recover the worse off we will be.

Two years ago I began beating the drum on the prescription for a solution.  It involved pulling the rug - intentionally - on housing price supports, and allowing them to collapse to sustainable numbers, all at once.

This would have resulted in a lot of people losing their homes.  But by now, they'd be starting to buy them back at half or less of their former prices - and at sustainable payments under a 30 year fixed mortgage.  They would have been able to save the 20% down payment too.

We would have seen myriad banks, including most of the big ones, go under.  So what?  The FDIC would have consumed the "bailout funds" in paying off depositors, which is bad, but the debt would be out of the system.  Instead we have gotten exactly nothing out of more than $2 trillion now borrowed and spent by government - the debt is still there, it is still toxic, and it is still preventing recovery.

This story is by no means finished.  The government has spent $2 trillion it does not have and has committed to nearly $6 trillion more in either guarantees or outright payments, and yet capacity utilization continues to drop, employees continue to be laid off, consumption continues to fall and frantic attempts to pay down debt and avoid default continue to rise.

In response the economy has continued to shrink and tax revenues have sunk through the floor, skyrocketing the deficit.  Treasury apparently detected a reluctance among foreigners to continue buying our used toilet paper and changed the rules on reporting of "indirect" sales - which then, even after the change to intentionally overstate foreign interest, have precipitously declined anyway.  It is fair to say that foreign interest in Treasuries is all-but-exhausted and barring a collapse in equity prices to recreate a "fear" environment for holding government bonds, there is going to be an increasing problem with funding the insane "prop up the game" money flood policy of The Fed and Treasury.

California is just the beginning of this unraveling; they are now issuing IOUs.

read the rest, it's brilliant.

If'Madness is the absence of work'(Foucault), then Sanity is the presence of play..

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.

Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's chief lawyer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would make based on their estimate of whether the prisoner posed a future threat.

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration argues that the legal basis for indefinite detention of aliens it considers dangerous is separate from war-crimes prosecutions. Officials say that the laws of war allow indefinite detention to prevent aliens from committing warlike acts in future, while prosecution by military commission aims to punish them for war crimes committed in the past.

Mr. Johnson said such prisoners held without trial would receive "some form of periodic review" that could lead to their release.

China's president is skipping the G8 summit in Italy and returning to Beijing as ethnic tensions which have already claimed at least 156 lives, flare again.

The official Xinhua news agency said Hu Jintao, who had been on a state visit to Italy ahead of the Group of Eight summit starting on Wednesday, cut short his trip "due to the situation" in Xinjiang.

His hurried return comes as tensions were rising again in Urumqi, the region's capital, on Wednesday.

Victor Gao, the director of the government-run China National Association of International Studies, called Hu's early return "very unusual".

On Ameland, off the coast of the Netherlands, a number of the islanders are using an innovative mix of hydrogen and natural gas in their homes. The goal is to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, an initiative that is part of a wider programme to make the community self-sufficient in energy and water by 2020.

Under normal circumstances, there is not very much to say about hydrogen. But on Ameland, one of the Wadden islands off the north coast of the Netherlands, hydrogen is an increasingly popular subject for conversation. Locals are actively participating in an experiment, which blends hydrogen, a gas that burns without producing CO2, with natural gas. The larger the quantity of hydrogen used, the lower the green house gas emissions. According to project manager, Albert van der Meer, a lot of scientific studies have been published about the blend, but tests in a real environment had yet to be conducted.

Van der Meer, who works for the Energy company Eneco, opens the door to one of the green hydrogen tanks. "Bear in mind that this hydrogen was produced in a sustainable way. Better still, the electricity required was generated by solar panels. Our installation has been running since late 2007, we are already using a 15% hydrogen blend, and we'll be able to increase that to a 20% blend with no trouble."

The test installation on the Island of Ameland includes cookers and boilers located in 14 dwellings across the road from the green hydrogens tanks. This small housing complex, which has been disconnected from the natural gas grid, is now linked to the tanks via a special pipe system.

In a modern-day incarnation of the Wright brothers' famous first flight, the world's first piloted hydrogen-fuel-cell aircraft was successfully tested in Hamburg today. The Antares DLR-H2, developed by the German Aerospace Center, took off and landed on its own power generated solely from hydrogen fuel cells.

Andreas Friedrich of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) spoke to Newsline from the airport runway in Hamburg.

"We have just had a successful maiden flight at the airport in Hamburg. Everything went smoothly, and we had quite good weather, no rain, not so much wind, so it was perfect flying conditions."

Saturday's technical fault at a nuclear plant in northern Germany has sparked a fresh debate about the safety of nuclear power. A media report says the government has for some time held the view that older plants don't match the safety standards of more modern ones.

The German government conceded several years ago that older nuclear power stations such as Krümmel near Hamburg and Biblis in southwestern Germany lag behind modern reactors in terms of safety standards, a Berlin newspaper reported on Wednesday.

 Shut for months -- the Krümmel nuclear power station. "The new boiling water reactors and pressurized water reactors of the third or fourth generation have fundamentally better safety characteristics," says a written government statement issued in response to a question submitted in parliament by the opposition Green Party, Berliner Zeitung newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Krümmel, which has been beset by technical problems and was shut down on Saturday after a short circuit in one of its two transformers, came online in 1984 and is an older generation boiling water reactor.

The FDA just announced the appointment of Michael Taylor as a Senior Advisor to the FDA Commissioner, Margaret Hamburg.

Taylor previously worked at the USDA from 1976-1981 as a staff lawyer. He left government to work at King & Spaulding, a law firm representing Monsanto.

He returned to government - this time to the FDA - for a stint as Deputy Commissioner for Policy from 1991-1994. According to Marion Nestle in Food Politics:

[At the FDA] he was part of the team that issued the agency's decidedly industry-friendly policy on food biotechnology and that approved the use of Monsanto's genetically engineered growth hormone in dairy cows. His questionable role in these decisions led to an investigation by the federal General Accounting Office, which eventually exonerated him of all conflict-of-interest charges.

In 1994, he moved over to the USDA's Food Safety & Inspection Service to serve as Administrator until 1996. Then it was back to King & Spaulding for a little bit, and - in 1998 - over to Monsanto, where he was a senior lobbyist (Vice President for Public Policy).

Most recently, beginning in 2000, he was a fellow for Resources for The Future, serving as Research Professor Of Health Policy at George Washington University. Until this week, that is. Resources for Our Future is quite corporate funded with members of its Board of Directors from BP, Chevron, and DuPont.

And now he's back at the FDA.

The Maryhill Museum of Art has defied convention since it opened, with its utopian origin, eclectic collection and even its location -- the green-lawned mansion an incongruous landmark on a desolate ridge above the Columbia River.

Now the nonprofit museum's individuality extends into the realm of renewable energy. It is the first in the country to use wind-produced electricity to generate income, leasing land to one of the biggest wind farms in the country.

At a time when museums around the country are struggling with a downturn in donations and declining attendance, Maryhill has guaranteed itself at least $100,000 yearly by leasing land for 15 turbines that are part of Cannon Power Group's Windy Point/Windy Flats project.

"It will keep the museum open and thriving," executive director Colleen Schafroth said. "It will lay a foundation stone for the museum to continue what it's doing now and to preserve that into the future."

The world's major industrial nations and emerging powers failed to agree Wednesday on significant cuts in heat-trapping gases by 2050, unraveling an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following the talks...

The breakdown on climate change underscored the difficulty in bridging divisions between the most developed countries like the United States and developing nations like China and India. In the end, people close to the talks said, the emerging powers refused to agree to the limits because they wanted industrial countries to commit to midterm goals in 2020 and to follow through on promises of financial and technological help in reducing emissions.

"They're saying, `We just don't trust you guys,' " said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in the United States. "It's the same gridlock we had last year when Bush was president."

British scientists have created human sperm using stem cells in a medical first that could revolutionise fertility treatment, they claim.

Researchers at the pioneering Northeast England Stem Cell Institute say they have made the breakthrough using stem cells from an embryo.

They claim that with some minor changes the sperm could theoretically fertilise an egg to create a child.

I start from the proposition that health care, up to a collectively decided minimum standard, should be available to everyone. That is, it should be universal and mandatory.  Obama's plan does not include the provision that everyone has to have health insurance up to a minimum standard.

If health care is to be universal, it should be de-coupled from employment completely.  The availability of health care should be a function of the condition of being alive, not of the condition of being employed.  Here too, Obama's health care plans, which retain tax advantages for employer-provided health insurance, fall down badly.

...

Note that nothing I have said sheds any light on the best way to provide medical care - on whether health services should be supplied privately, cooperatively, by the state, with or without regulation etc.  It only concerns who pays, and there the answer is clear: you and I as tax payers or you and I as mandated providers of subsidies in large assigned-risk pools.

Louis Susman, the next US ambassador to London, will not be "an ornament" at the Court of St James, according one of his leading supporters in the senate.

Senator Claire McAskill, senator from his home state of Missouri, was addressing criticism that for all his talk of changing the culture of Washington, Barack Obama has too closely followed the tradition of rewarding friends and big money donors with plum overseas posts.

Speaking on behalf of Mr Susman at his senate confirmation hearing, she described the former lawyer and Citigroup vice chairman as a "great man".

bold mine

This yacht was literally left high and dry after its skipper attempted to perform a daring overtaking manoeuvre in choppy seas during a gruelling race.

Instead of making up vital ground against 19 rival boats, the Jersey-registered Knight Star found itself perched precariously on a rock.

The boat's skipper, Arthur Manning, admitted that there had been an 'embarrassing misjudgement'.

The paperwork from the Information Commission revealed the names of 31 journalists working for the News of the World and the Sun, together with the precise details of government agencies, banks, phone companies and others who were conned into handing over confidential information on politicians, actors, sportsmen and women, musicians and television presenters, all of whom are named in the paperwork. This is an offence under the Data Protection Act unless it is justified by public interest. Senior editors are among the journalists who are implicated. This activity occurred before the mobile phone hacking, at a time when Andy Coulson was deputy, and the editor was Rebekah Wade, now due to become chief executive of News International. The extent of their personal knowledge, if any, is not clear: the News of the World has always insisted that it would not break the law and would use subterfuge only if essential in the public interest.

Faced with this evidence, News International changed their position, started offering huge cash payments to settle the case out of court, and finally paid out £700,000 in legal costs and damages on the condition that Taylor signed a gagging clause to prevent him speaking about the case. The payment is believed to have included more than £400,000 in damages, dwarfing the largest previous payment for breach of privacy in the UK, the £60,000 paid by the News of the World for filming Max Mosley naked with prostitutes. News Group then persuaded the court to seal the file on Taylor's case to prevent all public access, even though it contained prima facie evidence of criminal activity.

i read gormenghast camping on dartmoor. perfection.

built up through poe and hawthorne, (in notting hill bedsits).

'modernist', isn't it hilarious how you can use terms like 'modernist' and 'nouvelle vague' about periods deep in the past'?

If'Madness is the absence of work'(Foucault), then Sanity is the presence of play..