EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The stand-off between Jose Manuel Barroso and a swathe of rebel MEPs will be back in the spotlight on Thursday (3 September) as the European Commission president publishes his policy plans for a hoped-for second term in office.

The move comes after a six-week pause, as Socialist and Liberal MEPs before the summer said they wanted certain guarantees before they would give him the green light and prevented a planned July vote on his nomination from taking place.

Mr Barroso, a former Portuguese PM, is waiting for approval from MEPs

The president is supported by the centre-rght European People's Party, which is the biggest group in the parliament, but he needs backing across other factions to secure a majority in the 736-strong house.

However, an alliance of left-wing, Liberal and Green MEPs has forced Mr Barroso to lay out his plans for the next five-year term in office in writing before they will finally agree that his nomination will be put to a vote later this month, with the prospect of a further delay until October still in the air.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Positive chemistry between Russia and Poland at a World War II remembrance event on Tuesday (1 September) could open a new chapter of realpolitik in bilateral ties, with implications for Poland's place in the EU.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Polish leader Donald Tusk on Tuesday morning spent 30 minutes chatting in a friendly manner in view of cameras on a pier in the Polish town of Sopot on the Baltic Sea coast.

Some 20 European leaders gathered in Poland on 1 September 2009, 70 years after Germany started World War II by shelling the Polish town of Westerplatte

The meeting - the first of its type in eight years - stood out next to ceremonies commemorating the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II in nearby Westerplatte, where around 20 European leaders gathered to pay respects.

Mr Putin in an open letter in Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza the same day held out the prospect of putting Russian-Polish relations on the same privileged footing as Russian-German ties.

The Czech Republic's constitutional court has suspended a presidential decree calling an early general election, which was to be held next month. The court is now planning further deliberations on a legal challenge. 

Originally, elections were scheduled to take place in mid-2010. But major political parties agreed to cut the parliament's four-year term after the centre-right government of former Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek collapsed in March.

By presidential decree, early elections were set for October 9-10.

An outgoing independent member of parliament, Milos Melcak, questions the legitimacy of the shortening of parliament's term and he has taken his complaint to the Czech Republic's constitutional court. The court on Tuesday announced that is had suspended the decree calling for the early elections in order to consider the complaint.  

President Vaclav Klaus said the ruling had led to a political and constitutional crisis which he would try to resolve as soon as possible.

Two homemade bombs exploded early on Wednesday morning outside the Athens stock exchange and in Thessaloniki. One woman was injured in the attacks, and police say they do not yet know the cause.

Reuters - A car bomb blew up outside the Athens stock exchange on Wednesday, slightly wounding one woman, damaging the building and setting eight vehicles ablaze, Greek police said.

The Athens bourse said it would open normally despite the attack, the latest of several against business and police targets since the December 2008 police shooting of a teenager sparked Greece's worst riots in decades.

The powerful blast came after an anonymous early morning warning call to a Greek newspaper. It blew out windows on several floors of the stock exchange and hurled debris hundreds of metres (yards) away from the building.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been drawn into a damaging row over the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, after it was revealed a junior minister said Brown "did not want" him to die in a British prison.

AFP - Prime Minister Gordon Brown was Wednesday drawn into a damaging row over the release of the Lockerbie bomber, after revelations a British minister told Libya the premier did not want him to die in prison.
   
Junior defence minister Bill Rammell confirmed late Tuesday he suggested to Libyan officials that the premier and Foreign Secretary David Miliband did not want bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi to die in a Scottish jail.
   
Rammell's comments to the Libyans were contained in notes of a meeting released earlier Tuesday by the Scottish government about Megrahi, the only person convicted of the 1988 bombing that killed 270 people.

The prospect of teacher job cuts has overshadowed the return to school in France this week. Unions say that government ministers are diverting public focus from the issue with H1N1 virus concerns, and are threatening a strike.

Teachers and students return to schools across France this week amidst complaints from teacher's unions about job cuts. Some 13,500 positions may be eliminated from the 850,000 countrywide.

 

Teacher's union leader Gérard Aschieri claims that there are now fewer teachers per pupil. "The school population is increasing," he said, pointing out that because of France's increasing birth rate, some 14,000 extra students would be added this year to the 6.6 million nationally. The national education ministry, however, disputes this analysis. Its new head, Luc Chatel, said that despite the cuts, the number of staff per pupil is staying the same this year.

The ministry's main message to parents this year has not been about these cuts, but rather the influenza A (H1N1) virus. Twelve-million families will receive a brochure instructing children to wash their hands frequently and use disposable handkerchiefs when they are coughing and sneezing. Aschieri responded by publicly asking Chatel not to use H1N1 as a "smoke screen", covering the issue of teacher job cuts.

An emerging rift between the Vatican and Silvio Berlusconi, the embattled Italian Prime Minister, has widened further after top church figures rallied to defend Dino Boffo, the Catholic editor whose private life was the subject of renewed attack by one of the premier's newspapers yesterday.

Il Giornale, the Berlusconi family-owned newspaper, yesterday continued with a campaign to expose Mr Boffo as a homosexual with a police record, despite growing evidence that the stories are souring an increasingly fraught relationship between the Italian leader and the Catholic church.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State and deputy to Pope Benedict XVI, telephoned Mr Boffo, editor of Avvenire, the newspaper of the Conference of Italian Bishops, the CEI, to offer his "solidarity".

Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, head of the CEI, described the attack on Mr Boffo as "disgusting". He later added that Pope Benedict XVI had phoned him yesterday to discuss "the present situation" and had offered the head of the Italian bishops his "thanks and appreciation".

SOPOT, Poland (Reuters) - Russia and Ukraine have resolved a long standing dispute over natural gas supplies, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said on Tuesday after meeting her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (R) and his Ukrainian counterpart Yulia Tymoshenko meet for talks in Gdansk September 1, 2009. Russia and Ukraine have resolved a long standing dispute over natural gas supplies. (REUTERS/RIA Novosti/Alexei Druzhinin/Pool)

Rows over gas supplies have dominated Russia's relations with Ukraine over recent years, leading last winter to the longest interruption to European Union supplies for decades.

"We have removed all of the gas problems," Tymoshenko said after talks in Sopot, a resort on the Baltic coast in northern Poland.

"We feel that all the crisis-like occurrences in this sphere have gone."

PARIS -- On the edges of a Salvation Army soup line in Paris, a soft-spoken Afghan boy told the story recently of how he ended up in Europe, alone.

The boy, who said he was 15 but looked younger, recounted how his family left Afghanistan after his mother lost her leg in an explosion in 2004. They spent three years in Iran, where he went to school for the first time, learning English and discovering the Internet. After his father suffered a back injury that made working difficult, the boy, who declined to give his name, headed west.

He spent two months working 11-hour days in a clothing sweatshop in Istanbul, he said. He was then smuggled into Greece, where he was forced to work on a potato and onion farm near Agros for nine months, finally escaping in the back of a truck. He reached Paris by train after nearly a year on the road.

Something over a year ago the police in Geneva dared to arrest Gaddafi's son, and since then he is going after Switzerland with a vengance. At the time he is also keep some Swiss tourist hostage in Lybia.

Libya wins Swiss apology for arrest of Gaddafi son | International | Reuters

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz apologized to the Libyan government on Thursday for the brief detention last year of a son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, clearing the way for a return to normal diplomatic ties.

"We are apologizing for what happened to Hannibal Gaddafi and the two sides agreed to form a committee to discuss the matter," Merz told reporters in Tripoli.

Libyan Prime Minister Al-Baghdadi Ali Al-Mahmoudi said the two countries had agreed on a "normalization" of their relationship, a decision that was confirmed by Merz.

The row began when Hannibal Gaddafi and his pregnant wife Aline were arrested in a Geneva luxury hotel in July 2008 on charges of mistreating two domestic employees. Armed police forced open their hotel suite after being alerted to repeated altercations.

The Swiss are angry that Merz appologized.

Would you vote for a fish? Just in time for Germany's federal election, an artist in Konstanz has started the Fish Party. The water-borne party members believe in transparency and liquidity. And they are slippery characters, hard to get a handle on, who blow a lot of air bubbles -- just like real politicians.

If you look into the crystal clear stream in the southwestern German city of Konstanz on Lake Constance, you can see fish. This in itself is not an unusual thing. But these fish don't seem to making any headway. And if you look more closely you can see that the fish in question are actually attached to iron poles. Turns out they are, in fact, sculptures. And over the railing of the bridge hangs a sign that indicates what these sculptures are doing here. It's an election campaign sign and the slogan says: "Swim against the current with us. The Fish."

At first you might think this is another German election joke, along the lines of comedian Horst Schlämmer's fake campaign. Or maybe a cunning ruse by the independent Pirate Party. But in fact artist Markus Brenner is the man behind this particular campaign. The 46-year-old Konstanz local explains his project enthusiastically -- it's an "art party," he muses. And although he manages the party, the candidates are fish, trout that wear swimming costumes emblazoned with either the German, Swiss or Swedish national colors.

The right-wing extremist National Democratic Party may be entitled to an additional 100,000 euros in government funds for its "Education Center for Homeland and National Identity." Its re-election to the Saxony state parliament on Sunday may entitle it to cash for a foundation, according to regional party funding rules.

Germany's far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) may receive an additional €100,000 per year in government funding because it was re-elected to the regional parliament of Saxony in a state election on Sunday.

The NPD, which the German domestic intelligence agency has described as a "racist, anti-Semitic, revisionist" party bent on removing democracy and forming a Fourth Reich, plans to use the cash to transform its "Education Center for Homeland and National Identity" into a foundation.

Saxony's party funding rules state that parties are entitled to state money to finance a foundation if they get re-elected into parliament. The NPD has met that condition, vaulting the 5 percent threshold to enter the assembly of the eastern state of Saxony twice in a row. On Sunday, it got 5.6 percent of the vote, down from 9.2 percent at the last election in 2004.

Greece's PM Costas Karamanlis has called a snap general election, although no date has yet been set.

"I am seeking a fresh political mandate," Mr Karamanlis said on TV.

There had been speculation that the conservative prime minister would go to the polls early given the wafer-thin majority he has in parliament.

The government has been hit by a number of financial scandals and recent destructive wildfires have also hit its popularity.

This was expected ever since the Socialist Party (PASOK) announced that it would boycott the election of the new President of the Republic (elected by parliament), despite the fact that the conservatives were prepared to propose the current President, former PASOK cadre and Foreign Minister in the Andreas Papandreou cabinets in the 80s and 90s, Karolos Papoulias. This would thus force the dissolution of parliament in March 2010. It was rather unlikely that Karamanlis would choose to prolong the pre-electoral period for 6 months. He's moving forward despite his party's plunging popularity, which might result in the right's worst electoral result since 1981, possibly ever - with a surging xenophobic/fascist/populist right party however that might conceivably reach double digits. despite the fact that the past few months the government has been enacting their "law and order" and-immigrant and anti-refugee agenda fervently.

The left is in disarray (syriza), until literally yesterday embroiled in the most masochistic and petty of internal squabbles, or in eternal stasis (the communists: KKE - possibly the only parliamentary party in Europe to publically reendorse Stalin this year). The Greens seem at this point to be around the 3% required to enter parliament. The socialists are fairly certain to win, but the extent of their parliamentary majority or whether they will be able to form a government on their own is quite unclear. With ~20% of undecided voters and a high percent of uncertain voters (possibly leading to a low election-day turnout) the only thing that is given at this point is that the conservatives will lose big. It seems (barely) possible that SYRIZA and the Greens might run a joint electoral ticket, but the discussions haven't been on an official level thus far.

The economy (which is the pretext Karamanlis called early elections on) is imploding and it seems that the till recently relatively low intensity effects from the crisis are picking up as there is a series of potentially huge crises looming: one such catastrophe waiting to happen are postdated checks (which is the way most of the small and medium businesses are working nowadays) which amount to 1.5 times the country's GDP (at 360 billion euros) and noone has any clues as to how many will default, although there is a figure of 10% that seems a reasonable estimate. That is one of the time bombs that whoever wins will have to deal with...

The workers are getting restless as outside the relative stability of the public sector there growing precarity, rising unemployment and diminishing familial resources. I would expect that this whole house of cards is collapsing soon and Karamanlis decision might be just a ploy to leave the socialists to wrestle with stuff like the batshitinsane OECD policy recommendations... Note that the full force of worker protests is expected to occur near the 1-year anniversary of last December's riots, a combination which promises weeks of violent chaos in downtown Athens and major cities.

I will try to keep you posted, but (full disclosure) I will be involved in SYRIZA's electoral effort so I expect to be pretty busy this coming month...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

EU support is swelling for Franco-German plans to limit bonuses paid to bankers in the aftermath of the financial crisis, but the UK continues to cast doubt on the scheme.

The finance ministers of EU presidency country Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg at a eurozone member states' meeting in Brussels on Wednesday (2 September) all backed the austerity measures.

Fortis bank: its CEO pocketed more than €6 million after the bank fell

Swedish minister Anders Borg gave the catchphrase of the day, saying that "bankers are acting like it's 1999 but it's actually 2009."

The EU anti-bonus group is gathering momentum ahead of a G20 summit in Pittsburgh, US, on 24 September, where French President Nicolas Sarkozy aims to shape a global bank regulation deal.

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück has been railing against tax havens such as Switzerland and Luxembourg with harsh rhetoric. But he has paid too little attention to completely legal loopholes -- such as having subsidiaries on Malta -- that allow German corporations and the ultra-rich to minimize their tax burdens.

The Swiss are essentially a placid people. But for the past few months, two words have been sufficient to transport them into a state of agitation: Peer Steinbrück.

They have referred to the German finance minister as "Peitschen Peer" ("Whip Peer"), ever since he threatened to call in the cavalry unless Switzerland, traditionally a tax haven, cooperated with other countries. Even Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, whose country Steinbrück also included in his verbal attack, feels deeply offended.

Only one person is pleased with these reactions: Steinbrück himself.

"It wasn't only friends that I made during the fight against tax havens," he says. However, he adds, it was important to "sail against the wind and stay on course in this effort." But now Steinbrück lacks more than popularity. Now he also needs money. Last week, Germany's Federal Statistical Office reported a national deficit of €17.3 billion ($24.8 billion) for the first half of 2009.

Germany's popular car-scrapping bonus program has reached the limits of its budget. The only hope for Germans still hoping to take advantage of the deal is to get on the waiting list. 

The final application for one of Germany's car scrapping bonuses cleared the Federal Office of Economics and Export Control on Wednesday. At the start of the day, there were just under 5,000 car bonus applications available, but before noon, the last had been snapped up by German consumers.

Germany's car-scrapping bonus entitled car owners to trade in cars older than nine years old for a 2,500 euro ($3,500) bonus towards a newer, fuel efficient vehicle. The German government had set aside five billion euros ($6.6 billion) for the project, which amounted to an allocation for about 2 million consumers.

The German government has announced there are no plans to extend or replace the cash-for-clunkers premium. However, the Federal Office of Economics and Export Control announced that a waiting list of 15,000 people will be maintained in case any current applicants who have been given the chance to receive the bonus don't actually claim the money.

EU plans for tight regulations on hedge funds and private equity firms will be "enormously damaging" to London's reputation as an international financial capital, Mayor Boris Johnson warned today.

He took the fight against the plans to Brussels, where he will hold talks later today with Europe's Single Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, whose brief includes regulating financial services.

The meeting follows warnings from some of Britain's biggest hedge fund companies that they will have to leave the country unless the draft directive of "Alternative Investment Fund Management" is drastically revised before becoming law.

The Mayor insisted today that the rules would not only hit London, but the rest of Europe too, by giving a huge competitive boost to financial centres beyond Europe, such as New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and Geneva.

Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.

"We were all surprised by the high prevalence rate," said Ruth Milkman, one of the study's authors and a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the City University of New York. The study, to be released on Wednesday, was financed by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes and Russell Sage Foundations.

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay.

The researchers said one of the most surprising findings was how successful low-wage employers were in pressuring workers not to file for workers' compensation. Only 8 percent of those who suffered serious injuries on the job filed for compensation to pay for medical care and missed days at work stemming from those injuries.

Keir Martin is a lecturer in social anthropology at Manchester University who has done field work in New Guinea.

Critics of untrammelled free markets have long attacked the assumption that markets are rational, driven by rational self-interested economic actors. But the question of economic rationality has returned with a vengeance in the wake of the current crisis. Both advocates and critics of the rational economic actor model are usually keen to stress that it is a rationality that measures economic value and does not take into account the social setting. Yet, field research clearly shows that the actions of individuals vary massively depending on social context.

Living in Papua New Guinea, one is struck by the resources expended on gigantic ceremonial gift exchanges. The "big men" running such systems did not call in debts to maximise the number of pigs or modern wealth items such as money or trucks in their possession. But academics continued to assume that the aim was to profit over the long term, with the discrepancy between this assumption and the big men's actual activities being explained as the result of "selective amnesia". It was only when the assumption of economic rationality was dropped that it was possible to understand the big men in their own terms. Their aim was to increase the number of those dependent upon them, and so, like a Mafia godfather, their aim was to create debts that would never be repaid. Like Mafiosi, their actions were neither the result of what one economist described as "an inferior mentality", or a lack of rationality. They were entirely rational within a context in which building up an army of followers was at times a more pressing demand than stockpiling wealth objects.

One response to the current crisis has been a rise in the popularity of behavioural economics, which examines the psychological and emotional factors behind transactions. These models drop the assumption of the rational actor yet implicitly keep the same model of economic rationality at their heart. We may diverge from the path of rationality for all sorts of psychological reasons but only because emotion, Keynes's famous "animal spirits", clouds our judgment.

Clearly the stress, fear and excitement that run through investors' nervous systems can have as strong an impact on their investment choices as they can on gamblers caught up in the enthusiasm of a race meeting. But it is also important to remember that rationality can often be a matter of perspective and context. From a theoretical perspective it may be irrational to sell an investment for less than its true value. But, if everyone else is selling, are you going to risk your job as a professional investor holding on to those securities?

The Papua New Guinea example clearly shows the relationship between economic activity and political power that both Marxist and Neo-Classical Economics have been keen to obscure. But, as to magic and rationality, is it rational or magical thinking to believe that your portfolio adviser will put your well being ahead of his own career survival?

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

The European Central Bank will leave interest rates at a record low and signal it's in no rush to withdraw emergency stimulus measures as the economy shows signs of recovering from its worst recession since World War II, economists said.

ECB officials meeting in Frankfurt today will keep the benchmark rate at 1 percent, according to all 58 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. The central bank, led by President Jean- Claude Trichet, won't raise rates before the third quarter of 2010, another survey shows.

The ECB is wary of nipping the nascent euro-region recovery in the bud by tightening policy too soon. While the bank is likely to raise its forecasts for economic growth today after Germany and France unexpectedly exited their recessions in the second quarter, rising unemployment and the expiry of government rescue packages may damp expansion next year.

Madoff, 71, told Inspector General H. David Kotz's office this year that after being questioned in May 2006 and giving his account number at Depository Trust Co., an independent clearing agency, "I thought it was the end game, over. Monday morning they'll call DTC and this will be over." When that never happened, Madoff was "astonished," according to a summary Kotz issued yesterday. The Ponzi scheme continued for 2 1/2 years.

"This was perhaps the most egregious failure in the enforcement investigation of Madoff," Kotz's report said. "They never verified Madoff's purported trading with any independent third parties." By checking with the clearing agency, the SEC would have "immediately realized that Madoff was not trading in anywhere near the volume that he was showing on the customer statements."

The Kotz report detailed repeated missed opportunities by the agency after being alerted to Madoff's Ponzi scheme activities at least six times dating back to 1992. The SEC assigned inexperienced lawyers to the investigation, supervisors denied requests of examiners to expand their review and staff withdrew a request for information from a third party on grounds a review of the data would be "too time-consuming," Kotz said.

More Americans than anticipated filed jobless-benefit claims last week, indicating companies remain focused on cutting expenses as the economy emerges from its worst recession since the 1930s.

Applications fell by 4,000 to 570,000 in the week ended Aug. 29, exceeding the 564,000 median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. The total number of people collecting unemployment insurance climbed.
...
The Labor Department revised the prior week's applications level up to 574,000 from a previous estimate of 570,000.

The jobless claims report showed the four-week moving average of initial applications, a less volatile measure, climbed to 571,250 last week, the highest level in more than a month, from 567,250.

Continuing claims jumped by 92,000 in the week ended Aug. 22 to 6.23 million. The unemployment rate among people eligible for benefits, which tends to track the jobless rate, rose to 4.7 percent in the week ended Aug. 22 from 4.6 percent the prior week.

There are more Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan today than there are uniformed U.S. military personnel, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service.  Not only that, the ratio of contractors to troops in Afghanistan is higher than in any prior military engagement in U.S. history.

"As of March 2009, there were 68,197 DOD contractors in Afghanistan, compared to 52,300 uniformed personnel. Contractors made up 57% of DOD's workforce in Afghanistan. This apparently represented the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by DOD in any conflict in the history of the United States," the CRS report (pdf) said.  A copy of the report was obtained by Secrecy News.

At a time when the deployment of U.S. forces in Afghanistan may be increased (or reduced), the CRS report casts a detailed and fairly nuanced spotlight on the role of defense contractors there.  The report notes, for example, that more than 75% of the DoD contractor personnel in Afghanistan are local nationals.  Only about 15% are U.S. citizens.

Terror suspect Ahmad Vahidi set to become Ahmadinejad's Defence Minister

A former Revolutionary Guard commander wanted by Interpol for masterminding the worst terrorist attack in Argentina looks set to become the new Iranian Defence Minister after parliament signalled that it would confirm the provocative choice.

General Ahmad Vahidi is alleged to have planned the bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 when he commanded the Quds force, a unit of the Revolutionary Guard responsible for foreign operations. He is one of five Iranians sought in the bombing in which 85 people died. Iran denies that it was involved.

Israel and Argentina reacted with outrage at his nomination -- which came as President Ahmadinejad tries to get his new Cabinet approved by MPs -- with Buenos Aires calling it "an affront to Argentine justice and to the victims of the brutal terrorist attack". President Obama called General Vahidi's inclusion in the Cabinet "disturbing".

SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE HOLBROOKE: During that process there are going to be many claims of irregularities; that happens in every democracy. We recently had a senatorial election in Minnesota which took seven months to determine the outcome, there were so many charges of irregularities. It certainly won't take that long in Afghanistan, but that happens in democracies, even when they are not in the middle of a war.

Desmond Tutu said that the Palestinians and the Arabs are paying "penance" for the Holocaust.

In an interview Thursday with Ha'aretz, Tutu, the South African archbishop who is visiting Israel this week as part of the group known as the Elders, said that the West was consumed with guilt because of the Holocaust, "as it should be."

He added, "But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians."

Israel is mistaken to think it can achieve security through force, he said.

A budget black hole means that civil servants are no longer getting all their pay and the government is considering imposing new taxes on islanders. First, though, it is trying to raise emergency funds from banks. To do so, the British overseas territory needs to gain permission from their ultimate masters at Westminster. And there lies the rub. Writing to the Cayman government's leader last week, Chris Bryant declined the request, and pointed out that the islands' entire business model was bust. That is a sound judgment: the US and other economies remain weak, hedge funds and the rest of the financial services industry are still getting over the worst market crisis in decades, and secretive tax havens such as the Caymans are under pressure from the OECD and the G20 group of rich countries to become more transparent. The same diagnosis surely applies to Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. As Mr Bryant says: "It would be unwise ... to expect that the Cayman Islands' prosperity can presume on an offshore tax haven status."

A US-based medical rights advocacy group on Monday blasted health experts for playing a "central role" in advising and implementing the CIA's abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued its six-page white paper after shocking details about the range of techniques used by interrogators, including the simulated drowning known as waterboarding, came to light one week ago with release of a 2004 CIA inspector general's report.

<...>

"Health professionals played a central role in developing, implementing and providing justification for torture," PHR said in its report.

"Health professionals in the (federal government) and psychologist contractors engaged in designing and monitoring harmful interrogation techniques. Such medical participation in torture is a clear violation of medical ethics."

The not-for-profit group also said the medical experts "were complicit in selecting and then rationalizing these abusive methods, whose safety and efficacy in eliciting accurate information have no valid basis in science."

Interrogators are alleged to have used a range of techniques on suspected Al Qaeda members, including physical threats, mock executions, choking to the point where detainees lost consciousness and even using a stiff brush to scrub a detainee's skin raw.

PHR warned that such spy agency techniques -- and monitoring by doctors to gauge their effectiveness -- "approaches unlawful experimentation" on human subjects.

See also IdiotSavant's No doubt from 2008 June:

Now, in the preface to a report by Physicians for Human Rights on the medical evidence for torture by the US government, he accuses his former superiors of war crimes:

In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.

Greenhouse gases in the European Union have fallen again for the fourth year in a row.

According to figures released on Monday by the European Environment Agency, the EU's own ecological bureau, emissions from the 15 EU member states that signed up to the Kyoto Protocol fell by 1.3 percent in 2008, compared with 2007.

Hot weather and the economic crisis are the main reasons for the emissions reduction

The drop takes emissions down 6.2 percent below 1990 levels - the baseline year. As parties to the protocol, the EU-15 are committed to reducing emissions by eight percent on the baseline level by 2012.

For the whole of the EU, emissions dropped 1.5 percent in 2008, bringing the level to 13.6 percent lower than in 1990.

"These provisional figures are a further confirmation that the EU is well on track to reach its Kyoto target, even if one should recognise that part of the reduction in emissions is due to the economic slowdown," said EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas upon the release of the data. "This trend needs to be further consolidated in the coming years."

The Great Barrier Reef faces "catastrophic damage" from climate change and chemical runoff, according to a major report carried out by the Australian government.

The reef, which stretches for 1,200 miles off the northeast coast of Australia, has "poor" prospects of survival as a result of over-development and a failure by the relevant authorities to protect it from illegal fishing and chemical run-off, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said its first report on the state of the reef's health.

The report warned that damage to mangroves, increasing algae on coral reefs, ocean acidification and coral bleaching were already evident.

"While populations of almost all marine species are intact and there are no records of extinctions, some ecologically important species, such as dugongs, marine turtles, seabirds, black teatfish and some sharks, have declined significantly," it said.

Energy companies operating three Eastern Oregon wind farms were awarded more than $140 million in federal grants Tuesday in a fast-track process that saw their applications submitted and approved in 30 days.

The cash grants, part of the Obama administration's economic recovery program, are intended to jumpstart renewable wind, solar, geothermal and biomass energy projects while providing jobs. The grants will offset the cost of building Horizon Wind Energy's Wheat Field wind farm in Arlington and Iberdrola Renewables's Pebble Springs and Hay Canyon wind farms in Arlington and Moro, respectively.

The Oregon projects were awarded more than 25 percent of the $502 million granted to a dozen projects nationwide. U.S. Treasury Department Sec. Tim Geithner said the grants were offered in lieu of investment and production tax credits.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 1, 2009) -- The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose first evolved in dairy farming communities in central Europe, not in more northern groups as was previously thought, finds a new study led by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

The genetic change that enabled early Europeans to drink milk without getting sick has been mapped to dairying farmers who lived around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe.

Previously, it was thought that natural selection favoured milk drinkers only in more northern regions because of their greater need for vitamin D in their diet. People living in most parts of the world make vitamin D when sunlight hits the skin, but in northern latitudes there isn't enough sunlight to do this for most of the year.

In the collaborative study, the team used a computer simulation model to explore the spread of lactase persistence, dairy farming, other food gathering practices and genes in Europe. The model integrated genetic and archaeological data using newly developed statistical approaches.

[...]

Evidence from other studies suggest dairying was present in south-eastern Europe soon after the arrival of farming, while milk proteins found in ceramic vessels provide evidence for dairying in (present-day) Romania and Hungary some 7,900-7,450 years ago. Traces of fats also point to dairying at the onset of farming in England some 6,100 years ago. But it is most likely that milk was first fermented to make yoghurt, butter and cheese, and not drunk fresh. The Romans used goat and sheep milk to produce cheese, and cattle as a draught animal. However, Germanic and Celtic people practiced cattle dairying and drank fresh milk in significant amounts. The current distribution of lactase persistence would seem to suggest an origin in Northwest Europe - especially Ireland and Scandanivia - since it is found at its highest frequency there today. However, the latest study suggests otherwise. Dairy farmers carrying this gene variant probably originated in central Europe and underwent more widespread and rapid population growth than non-dairying groups.

After spending $10 billion to $12 billion over the past 25 years studying a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, President Barack Obama is fulfilling a campaign promise to kill it as a site for the repository. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada also stands to benefit, as polls show he could be in a tough fight for re-election next year, and Nevada residents adamantly oppose a the waste site.

Local leaders and lawmakers from the sites where the waste is now stored, however, are increasingly concerned that the Energy Department will leave it in place, even though that might violate legally binding cleanup agreements.

There's no backup plan for dealing with the waste. A promised commission to study the issue has yet to be appointed.

"We don't want to become a long-term repository without even having a discussion," said Gary Petersen of the Tri-City Industrial Development Council, near Hanford, Wash. "All of this waste is supposed to be going to Yucca. Without Yucca, everyone in the weapons complex has a problem."

Jared Fuhriman, the mayor of Idaho Falls, the largest city near the Idaho National Laboratory, agreed.

"We are all concerned," Fuhriman said. "Where are we going to store the waste we have?"

The British oil giant, BP, announced on Wednesday the discovery of what it characterized as a "giant" oil field more than six miles under the Gulf of Mexico, but it may take years to assess how much crude can actually be recovered...

Because the oil is so deep underwater and difficult to extract, the price of oil will need to be above $70 a barrel to make drilling profitable, according to energy analysts.

Nevertheless, the discovery was another indication that the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico are probably the most promising area in the country to bolster domestic oil production.

BILLIONS of dollars spent building freeways across Melbourne since 1995 have failed to deliver the spectacular time savings promised to justify their construction, a study to be published today shows.

This is of course not news to anyone who has looked into freeway politics, but apparently it is news to the person behind the freeway push:

But Dr John Cox, one of the main authors of the cost-benefit analysis used to justify construction of CityLink in the late 1990s, said the study did not stack up.

''Imagine if CityLink was stopped - you would get a lot of travel time costs,'' he said.

The interesting thing is that when large roads have been closed for a significant period, the result is invariably a decrease in traffic (for example the I5 in Seattle).  I'm trying to decide whether to write a letter to the paper on this topic.  That the head of the roads department is not aware of induced demand and other such things is worrying (or is he merely rtying to justify a bad decision).

A Congolese accountant is to launch a lawsuit in France against Tintin for racism, accusing judges in the cartoon hero's native Belgium of trying to bury his case to protect a "national symbol".

Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, 41, is taking legal action claiming Hergé's controversial Tintin In The Congo is propaganda for colonialism and amounts to "racism and xenophobia".

"Tintin's little (black) helper is seen as stupid and without qualities. It makes people think that blacks have not evolved," he said.

Mr Mbutu Mondondo launched a case in Belgium two years ago for symbolic damages of one euro from Tintin's Belgian publishers Moulinsart, and demanded the book be withdrawn from the market.

But since then his lawyer, Claude Ndjakanyi, said there had been no response from Belgian justice. "Our request to access the dossier was judged premature even though the investigation has been running for two years," he said.

From 7 to 10 July 2009 140 excellent senior level students of law, international relations, business and economics, information and communication technologies from Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia gathered in Vienna to participate in the BCC International Case Study Competition.

The Balkan Case Challenge The Balkan Case Challenge (BCC) is a case student competition and recruitment event for excellent students from South-Eastern Europe and Austria. It aims at strengthening the links between higher education and economy with a special focus on student recruitment and the employability aspect. Every year around 140 students from twelve countries meet and compete in four disciplines: Business Case Competition, Law Moot Court, ICT (Information Communication Technologies) Case Competition and Model European Council.

Education - key to the future of the Balkans. The principle which lies at the core of BCC is that better education is crucial for the faster development of and the long-term convergence prospects for the SEE region. The higher education in the Balkans is characterized by badly outdated teaching materials and methods as well as academic programs which have little or no relevance to the demands of the emerging economies of the region. In the knowledge-based economies of the globalised world the inadequate quality of higher education is certain to inhibit labor productivity and economic growth. To address these issues the Balkan Case Challenge employs the case study method - a tool developed at Harvard University as a practice-oriented method of learning. Students are faced with real-life or fictitious case and have to produce solutions for a concrete problem in their respective field. Therefore, the introduction of the case study method allow the application of theoretical knowledge and bridge the gap between theory and practice.

... it's Jabber the Powerful, lead character "The 99," an Allah-inspired comic wildly popular in the Islamic world and set to make its TV debut.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The animated creations of Kuwaiti cartoonist Naif al-Mutawa wear dashing, body-hugging outfits, though nothing like the super-tight tights and flamboyant capes so prominent in franchises like "Watchmen" and "Batman." 

Yet Mutawa's creations "Noora the Light" and "Jabbar the Powerful" are so popular in the Islamic world that they are set to appear in their own TV series, joining "The Simpsons," "The Boondocks" and other cartoon titles that have made the jump from the printed page to the television screen.

His TV breakthrough moment comes six years after a cab-ride epiphany that gave birth to the idea, and three years after his -- indeed, the world's -- first Islamic-inspired superheroes emerged in print.

A Serbian program tries to find people who went missing during the break-up of Yugoslavia.

BELGRADE, Serbia -- A television and radio program hopes to reunite some of the thousands of former Yugoslavs who have have gone missing or lost touch with friends and family and, in the process, foster a sense of togetherness 18 years after the nation's bloody breakup.

"If we see them, we will let you know," is the most likely police response to a report of a missing person, said Sasa Lekovic, who heads the five-strong team of journalists behind "Potraga" ("The Search"), produced by Belgrade broadcaster B92. The show, on the other hand, has recruited its viewers -- averaging about 400,000 -- to contribute as "citizen journalists" by helping in searches.

"People who watch the program learn to become a community," said Lekovic, adding that only one email among thousands of messages received since the show first aired in November harped on old ethnic hatreds. Lekovic himself is a Croat who has moved to Belgrade to lead the project.

Thus the campaign groups that I represent, those few million people that have been following us for years, are a part of the millions and millions of people in the world that make up the biggest movement of people in the history of humanity. And it's happening softly and always labelled: the environmentalists, the "Prius" ones, the anti-political ones. They label us. But we have ideas and there are no leaders. There are no organisations. It is all coming from the grassroots. There are millions and millions of people. There are 300 - 400 - 500,000 organisations that all want the same thing: to change this system in the world and see if it's possible to recover another possible world. And it is possible! There's the world of less: make fewer materials, less work, less effort. It's the only solution.
"Probably the best source of energy is to be found in the term coined by E. Lovins: it's the negawatt.

Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T

Slim and sleek as it is, the iPhone is really the Hummer of cellphones.

It's a data guzzler. Owners use them like minicomputers, which they are, and use them a lot. Not only do iPhone owners download applications, stream music and videos and browse the Web at higher rates than the average smartphone user, but the average iPhone owner can also use 10 times the network capacity used by the average smartphone user.

"They don't even realize how much data they're using," said Gene Munster, a senior securities analyst with Piper Jaffray.

The result is dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds as AT&T's cellular network strains to meet the demand. Another result is outraged customers.

Cellphone owners using other carriers may gloat now, but the problems of AT&T and the iPhone portend their future. Other networks could be stressed as well as more sophisticated phones encouraging such intense use become popular, analysts say.

Two feuding mayors of neighbouring Paris suburbs took their spat to surreal lengths by each declaring the same street one-way, but in opposite directions.

On Monday, Patrick Balkany, the conservative mayor of Levallois-Perret, northwest of Paris, made the D909 one-way to cut the commuter traffic flowing through his district.

But Gilles Catoire, the Socialist mayor of neighbouring Clichy-la-Garenne, complained this increased congestion in his area.

So he declared his section of the road one-way, but in the opposite direction.

With the contradictory road-signs in place, the unsurprising result was commuter chaos, road rage and gridlock. Municipal and national police were called in to direct traffic away from the area.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's next prime minister might be nicknamed "the alien," but it's his wife who claims to have had a close encounter with another world.

"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.

"It was a very beautiful place and it was really green."

Yukio Hatoyama is due to be voted in as premier on September 16 following his party's crushing election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party Sunday.

I don't just use my illustrative skills to draw comic strips and film storyboards, you know...

Oh, no; sometimes I use them to actually fight crime!

Yesterday, I was forced to visit my local bank to pay off some of my ever-expanding credit card bill. I found myself studying this extremely charismatic fellow in the queue ahead of me ( sounds a bit "gay" for a married man like me, I know... but, hey, I'm an artist! We do these things.).