EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso has said Europe needs to reinvent itself with a "transformational agenda" or the 27-nation club risks sliding "towards irrelevance."

Mr Barroso made the comments Thursday (3 September) in a 41-page policy document laying out plans for the EU's near future and designed to woo members of the European Parliament into backing him for a second five-year term in office.

The parliament is conscious of its weightier role in the EU's institutional set-up

Much of the paper focuses on the current economic crisis, with the commission having been strongly criticised in the past for acting too late and too timidly.

In the document, Mr Barroso pledges to push for greater economic policy co-ordination and increase commission surveillance of public finances as well as push for stricter financial regulation and bring banks back to good health.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A group of the EU's major foreign policy players is waiting to find out what happens to the Lisbon treaty before deciding if it should keep or scrap an old "musketeer" defence pact.

The security pact is found in Article V of the Modified Brussels Treaty, created in 1954 at the height of the Cold War.

Illustration from an 1894 edition of Dumas' book <i>The Three Musketeers</i>

"If any of the high contracting parties should be the object of an armed attack in Europe, the other high contracting parties will ... afford the party so attacked all the military and other aid and assistance in their power," it states.

The contracting parties are EU and Nato member states France, Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Greece.

The pact is similar to Nato's Article V, which is sometimes called the musketeer clause as it echoes the "all for one, one for all" motto of the protagonists in Alexandre Dumas' novel The Three Musketeers.

Greek and Turkish Cypriots have hit another snag in efforts to reunite the divided Mediterranean island after the Greek side cancelled talks over what it says was the unfair treatment of Orthodox pilgrims. 

The talks, which are aimed at reaching a deal within the next six months for a reunification of Cyprus, were to be held Thursday between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders. The meeting was seen as an important step in a previously agreed roadmap to reunification.

The latest dispute is over a convoy of over 550 Orthodox Christians from the Greek south of the island. The group was on its way to services in the town of Morphou in the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

The pilgrims were stopped by Turkish border guards who, according to a senior aid to Greek Cypriot President Demetris Christofias, were overzealous when checking the list of names of those seeking to cross.

A group of cyclists from around Europe are embarking on a tour of the Irish countryside to demonstrate for a higher voter turnout ahead of the 2 October Lisbon referendum. Organiser Grace Cox enthuses about the `yes' movement that's gathering speed - and even Ryanair are getting on board

`It's different this time,' Grace from Ireland for Europe tells me breathlessly over the phone. She's organising a 700 kilometre bicycle ride across Ireland, from the Irish Sea to the Atlantic and back again. The aim is to try and bring out the vote for the second referendum on the Lisbon treaty, which takes place on 2 October.

As part of the `yes' camp, those at Ireland for Europe are feeling positive. They've co-organised the event with EuroCycleTour, a Brussels group that has been trying to `stir up interest' in European participation since 2008. Momentum for the referendum is building. `There's such a buzz in the office,' Grace tells me. `The walls are cluttered with calendars and upcoming events.' She tells me it's the involvement of young people like her that's making all the difference. `Look at me - I'm a student, and I'm involved. My colleague here is a student too. It's such a big change from last year (53.4% of Irish voters rejected the first referendum in June 2008 - ed).'

An Italian Catholic editor who has been the subject of a sustained media attack by supporters of Silvio Berlusconi for criticising the Prime Minister's "immoral" lifestyle stepped down today.

Dino Boffo, editor of Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI), said his name had been besmirched "for days and days in a war of words which has wrecked my family and stunned Italians".

He said the "defamatory" attacks by Vittorio Feltri, the editor of Il Giornale, the newspaper owned by the Berlusconi family, had "violated my life" and amounted to "a desire to desecrate which I could not have imagined existed".

Mr Feltri, who is leading an aggressive "counteroffensive" to "unmask" critics of scandals in Mr Berlusconi's private life, had unearthed a 2004 incident in which Mr Boffo paid a fine for alleged telephone harassment of the wife of an unnamed man whom Il Giornale claimed had been his gay lover, adding that he was a homosexual "known to the police for this kind of activity".

Silvio Berlusconi is accustomed to allegations about his predilections being excitedly received abroad. France's Nouvel Observateur recently published a story titled "Sex, Power and Lies" and the Spanish newspaper El Pais showed photographs of naked guests at the Italian Prime Minister's retreat in Sardinia. (He announced his intention to sue both for libel.)

Back home, though, the priapic 72-year-old's influence over the media is such that the slew of claims over his private life usually receives a muted reception - perhaps because they come as little surprise.

So when Italy's state television channel refused to show a film trailer which blamed Berlusconi for creating a frivolous media culture filled with "half-naked women" and chauvinistic images (he owns three commercial Italian TV channels), the movie's director interpreted it as straight censorship.

As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown continued to deny striking any deals with Libya in exchange for Scotland's release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber, the Scottish government lost a parliamentary vote on a motion to support the decision.

AFP - Britain denied Wednesday any "double-dealing" with oil-rich Libya over the release of the Lockerbie bomber but admitted it had not wanted the former Libyan agent to die in a Scottish prison.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown insisted the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi was entirely a matter for the Scottish government, which freed him on compassionate grounds last month because he is dying of cancer.

"There was no conspiracy, no cover-up, no double-dealing, no deal on oil, no attempt to influence Scottish ministers, no private assurances by me to Colonel Kadhafi," he said.

A Libyan minister backed Brown late Wednesday, saying there was "nothing to hide" and no deals were done over efforts to secure the release of Megrahi.

The government is looking into whether the Netherlands, like Great Britain, should allow some kind of Sharia law. The idea terrifies Dutch politicians because Islamic law means inequality between men and women. Everyone in the Dutch political world is also well aware that Freedom Party leader and anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders is bound to make enormous electoral mileage from it.
 
Stoning. Chopping off hands. Whippings and beatings. When people hear the word `Sharia', these are the images that spring to mind, but Islamic justice can also be used in family law, and in divorce and inheritance cases. These areas of Sharia law could be applied in certain Dutch mosques.

Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin is looking into the details of the system. In a letter to MPs, he says it is the government's duty "to ensure that no parallel society evolves where people take the law into their own hands or have an independent system of justice.

Close down mosques
An overwhelming parliamentary majority is fiercely opposed to any form of Sharia. MPs say mosques where imams dispense Sharia rulings should be closed down. Socialist Party MP Sadet Karabulut argues that "Islamic law is contrary to our own laws and regulations". "Islam often places women in an inferior position. They can, for example, be forced to have sex with their husbands. Men are allowed to be polygamous and that is against Dutch law," she explains.

Maurits Berger, Leiden University's professor of Islam in the Western world, is also against Sharia, but only where it runs contrary to Dutch law: "No stoning, child marriage or chopping off of hands."

Free choice

George Osborne sided with Germany and France today in the dispute over the spiralling cost of the global economic bailout orchestrated by Gordon Brown.

The Shadow Chancellor accused Mr Brown of being in "complete denial" over the mounting bill of the financial rescue packages, and agreed with Britain's neighbours that it was time to look for an exit strategy.

Britain has been irritated by calls from Germany and France to start reducing the amount of support as their economies have shown signs of an upturn.

Britain's own economy has not been doing so well, and today a respected international economic body warned that Britain would lag behind the rest of the world in coming out of recession.

This prediction, and the dissonant voices in the EU, come at an awkward time for Mr Brown, who has been striving to present a united front with Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy before EU finance ministers meet in London tomorrow to prepare for the G20 summit in Pittsburgh in three weeks' time.

German doctors and hospitals are making negative headlines over rumors of widespread corruption. Leading medical sources say hospitals frequently pay doctors premiums for sending patients their way. 

The allegations, which both the association of German hospitals (DKG) and the central organization of medical self-administration (BAEK) say hold some truth, have sent waves of outrage rippling through Germany.

Health Minister Ulla Schmidt has called for a quick investigation into the claims. In an interview with the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper, she said the practice of hospitals paying doctors for particularly lucrative admissions was harmful to patients.

Schmidt stressed that it was now up to medical associations to find out just how deep-seated such corruption is.

Deputy Health Minister Klaus Theo Schroeder told public broadcaster ARD that where there was "real evidence," charges would be brought. But he said he did not see any need to change the laws currently in place to protect against corruption in the medical industry.

On 23 August 2009, Berlusconi-the-African went to the studios of Nessma TV, in Tunisia, to take part in a programme called "Ness Nessma". Nessma TV is a commercial TV channel, that has a range covering countries in the Mediterranean Maghreb. Mediaset owns 25% of it. Wild Bathrobe has promised "with a total opening of his heart" to all North Africans listening: "the possibility of work, of a home, of a school for the children, the possibility of wellbeing that means both health and the opening up of all our hospitals to their needs". He can't help it. After the villas to the earthquake victims in Abruzzo, work, home, school, wellbeing and hospitals to the people of the Maghreb ...

Male Presenter: "From the attraction that Italy has for the people of the Maghreb, we can go on to the topic of immigration, above all clandestine immigration that unfortunately causes thousands of deaths!"
Berlusconi: "The worst things are the criminal organisations and there are so many of them. Today Ben Ali told me about 300 organisations discovered by the Police in your country. They are people who take advantage of the hopes of the others, of people who are destitute and who want to give themselves and their loved ones a better future. And so they put their trust in people who have unsound boats and they set off on the sea and this leads to tragedy at every instant. That has to be opposed.
What's necessary is to increase the possibility for the people who want to try for a new opportunity in life and for work, and it's necessary to increase the possibility of entering legally into Italy and into the other European countries. This is what I want to happen, not just in Italy, but in the whole of Europe. And then it's necessary to say that the Italians have been a people who have left Italy and who emigrated to other countries, especially to the Americas. And so this obliges us to look for those who want to come to Italy with a completely open heart. And to give those who come to Italy the possibility of a job, a home, a school for their children, and the possibility to be well that means health as well and the opening of all our hospitals to their needs and this is the policy of my government."
Female Presenter : "You are incredible, Mr President. I cannot but applaud."

thus spake zara

"If you want to change the world, change the metaphor." Joseph Campbell .

In the 2008 elections the PSOE and the PP both increased their seat counts by the same amount with respect to 2004. This left the PSOE only 7 seats away from an absolute majority in parliament, which made their minority government more solid than in the 2004-8 term. However, the PSOE still negotiated with CiU [moderate-right Catalan nationalists] in preference to the left parties.

But now Zapatero's crisis policies are grating CiU the wrong way and Zapatero needs the left parties to pass next year's budget.

That the nationalist/centralist axis is losing strength means that the PP could now potentially work together with CiU and the Basque Nationalists of PNV, were it not for the fact that the PP lobbying to get the Constitutional Court to overturn the new Catalan Autonomy Statute (which would really annoy CiU) and has helped the PSE unseat the PNV from the Basque regional government.

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

Residents of the German town of Monheim recently elected a 27-year-old PhD student as their next mayor. Daniel Zimmermann, a founder of the tiny Peto party, said he was as surprised as anyone by his win. 

There might not have been much media hype in the weeks leading up to Sunday's mayoral vote in Monheim, a city of 43,000 residents just north of Cologne. But the election results sent journalists from around Germany scrambling for exclusive interviews with Monheim's new mayor.

It's not every day that a 27-year-old Cologne University student picks up a solid 30.4 percent of the vote. Even more remarkable is the fact that Zimmerman's political party, Peto, only has 250 members.

When it comes to their election campaigns, Angela Merkel and her challenger Frank-Walter Steinmeier agree on one thing: It's the bankers who are the bad guys. Each of them claims to have the solution to the crisis. But their hubristic stump speeches reveal more about the candidates' over-inflated egos than concrete issues.

The Hungarian border guard who famously opened the Iron Curtain in the summer of 1989 clearly also has the secret to fighting the current financial crisis. Why else should Angela Merkel speak in such great detail about him in her election campaign speeches, right at the start of each appearance?

The German chancellor does a wonderful job of recounting this captivating tale. There the guard stands at the border between Hungary and Austria. Suddenly, a group of East Germans runs up to him. He phones his superior, but since he can't get him on the line, he decides right on the spot to open up the border.

The CDU's Dieter Althaus, who came under fire for causing the death of a woman during a ski accident earlier this year, has stepped down as governor of the eastern German state of Thuringia. His move came amidst mounting pressure from his own party and the opposition to resign following disappointing state election results.

Thuringia Governor Dieter Althaus, who is a close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel in the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), stepped down on Thursday four days after the CDU suffered a disappointing result in key state elections.

"I am stepping down as governor of Thuringia and chair of the Thuringia branch of the CDU with immediate effect," he announced at a press conference on Thursday. He did not give any further explanation of his decision.

In deciding to step down, the 51-year-old politician is reacting to demands from his own party and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) not to stand in the way of a CDU-SPD coalition in Thuringia's state assembly. In Sunday's election in the eastern German state, the CDU's share of the vote slumped by 11.8 points to 31.2 percent. The party has lost its absolute majority in the state for the first time in 10 years and now requires a coalition partner if it is to stay in power. Its only realistic option is to join forces with the SPD.

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis has called for a national election ahead of schedule, as Greece struggles with the economic crisis. 

The move caught observers by surprise, as his scandal-plagued conservative New Democracy government clearly trails the main opposition socialist PASOK party in opinion polls.

"I am seeking a fresh political mandate," Karamanlis said in a televised speech to the nation.

"The consequences of the economic crisis are visible; we have two difficult, crucial years ahead of us," he added.

Karamanlis gave no date but a senior government source said it would be held on October 4th.

A flat tax on fuel consumption is at the centre of France's first political debate after the government's return from summer recess. Prime Minister François Fillon is defending the fiscal measure, which promises to be a divisive issue.

A tax on fuel consumption is at the centre of France's first political debate after the government's return from summer recess. Although all French parties say they support fiscal measures to curb carbon dioxide emissions and lower consumption of non-renewable energy sources, the issue is a divisive one, even within parties.

Prime Minister François Fillon has defended the tax in an interview to the weekly Figaro Magazine, to be published on Saturday. Echoing President Nicolas Sarkozy's wish to implement an overarching levy to reduce France's total fuel consumption, Fillon hoped to defuse opposition to the tax among industrial groups and members of his own UMP centre-right party.

"We have decided to apply this tax progressively, starting with the market price of carbon, or 14 euros" per tonne, Fillon told Le Figaro. He also reassured constituents that the tax would not go into effect until 2010.

PARIS -- After five years of bitter and costly litigation between the United States and Europe, the World Trade Organization is expected to deliver a report Friday intended to set limits on government support for civil aircraft makers like Boeing and Airbus. But it is coming, economists and industry analysts say, too late to make much difference.

The W.T.O.'s preliminary report, analysts say, is expected to support at least part of the complaint filed in 2005 by the United States on behalf of Boeing, alleging that the European Union and its member governments funneled tens of billions of euros in illegal subsidies to the European aircraft maker Airbus over the past 40 years.

The most serious charge in the U.S. case, legal experts say, involves "launch aid," the low-cost loans extended by European governments to help finance the development of new planes.

Gov. John Baldacci on Tuesday declared a statewide civil emergency because of the H1N1 influenza virus, paving the way for mass immunization of Maine schoolchildren and other residents.

The emergency designation protects schools and health care providers against liability claims related to their participation in school-based vaccine clinics this fall for both the seasonal flu and the H1N1 flu. "Maine has been proactive in its response to this new flu," Baldacci said in announcing the proclamation. "But as the school year begins, we must continue our vigilance, which will require a responsible and aggressive vaccination and public education campaign. It's our goal that every person in the state has access to vaccines for the seasonal and H1N1 flu." ...

Schools are no more liable for injuries associated with the vaccine clinics than they would be for injuries incurred at a basketball game or other community event, [director, Maine CDC Control and PreventionDr. Dora Anne] Mills said. And while vaccine manufacturers are generally not liable for ill effects of the vaccines they produce, Mills said, the federal government does have a compensation fund for vaccine-related illnesses or injuries....

The virus is linked to one death in Maine....

Unlike the seasonal flu, H1N1 thus far has proved to be more dangerous to young people, including children, teens, pregnant women and young adults.

A breakdown in communications at the highest level between the US and the UK led to the shock collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in September last year, a Guardian/Observer investigation has revealed.

The downfall of Lehman, which triggered the biggest banking crisis since the Great Depression, came after a rescue bid by the high street bank Barclays failed to materialise.

In London, the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority all believed that the US government would step in with a financial guarantee for the troubled Wall Street bank. The tripartite authorities insist that they always made it clear to the Americans that a possible bid from Barclays could go ahead only if sweetened by US money.

But in Washington, the former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson has blamed Lehman's demise on Alistair Darling's failure to let Washington know of his misgivings until it was too late. Paulson has told journalists that during a transatlantic phone call the chancellor said he was not prepared to import the American "cancer" into Britain - something Darling strongly denies.

With finance ministers and central bank governors from the G20 countries meeting in London on Saturday, the first-hand accounts of those handling last year's events underline a rift between London and Washington over who was to blame for the demise of Lehman, which triggered a month of mayhem on the financial markets.

Oops.

There's no such thing as original sin - Elvis Costello

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? - NYTimes.com

Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field's problems. More important was the profession's blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable -- indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed's best efforts.

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn't sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession's failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Chief executive officers at 20 banks that got U.S. aid received compensation 37 percent higher than the average for leaders at Standard & Poor's 500 companies and may be poised for gains as stock values rise, a study showed.

Lenders including Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. paid CEOs an average of $13.8 million last year, topping the $10.1 million for S&P 500 leaders, according a report released today by the Institute for Policy Studies. Average CEO pay was 430 times larger than for typical workers, and at nine of 20 banks the value of stock options soared $90 million in a year, the Washington-based group said, citing proxy statements.

There have been three big banking booms in modern U.S. history. The first began in the late nineteenth century, during the Second Industrial Revolution, when bankers like J. P. Morgan funded the creation of industrial giants like U.S. Steel and International Harvester. The second wave came in the twenties, as electrification transformed manufacturing, and the modern consumer economy took hold. The third wave accompanied the information-technology revolution. Each wave, Philippon shows, was propelled by the need to fund new businesses, and each left finance significantly bigger than before. In all these cases, it wasn't so much that the bankers had changed; the world had.

The same can't be said, though, of the boom of the past decade. The housing bubble was unique, and uniquely awful. Each of the previous waves had come in response to a profound shift in the real economy. With the housing bubble, by contrast, there was no meaningful development in the real economy that could explain why homes were suddenly so much more attractive or valuable. The only thing that had changed, really, was that banks were flinging cheap money at would-be homeowners, essentially conjuring up profits out of nowhere. And while previous booms (at least, those of the twenties and the nineties) did end in tears, along the way they made the economy more productive and more innovative in a lasting way. That's not true of the past decade. Banking grew bigger and more profitable. But all we got in exchange was acres of empty houses in Phoenix.

There's no doubt that the financial sector needs to be smaller; Philippon suggests that, given the demands of businesses for capital, a normal financial sector would be about the size it was in 1996. Besides just shrinking the industry, though, we have the harder task of making credit bubbles like the one we just lived through less likely. That will require limiting the ability of banks to rely on vast amounts of leverage, which clearly increases risk without adding social value. Many financial innovations also seem to be overrated; it's not clear that they actually help finance do its core job of channelling capital to businesses. The most important change, though, may be something harder to legislate: Wall Street needs to recognize that its proper role is, as it has been in the past, to follow the real economy, rather than trying to drive it. During the housing bubble, the financial sector essentially tried to create reality. Now's the time for it to respond to reality instead

Lord Turner, the head of the UK's Financial Services Authority, is my new hero. He is willing to tell banks to do things that are in the public's best interest but are singularly unpleasant and costly to the financiers. The fact that what is good for the banksters is increasingly at odds with what is desirable for the rest of us simply highlights how predatory the industry has become, and how the incumbents are pathologically unable to see that (I may be being charitable in taking their wounded-sounding protests at face value)

Last week, he stirred up a hornet's nest by suggesting the unthinkable, namely, that the financial services industry needs to shrink. In reality, quite a few people have made that observation, but anyone in authority who dares say such a thing out loud must be beaten back.

-Skip-

The reason for the howls of protest, however, is more immediate: financial firms often have complex structures either to minimize taxes or circumvent regulations. So they would not only face the cost of restructuring, but higher ongoing expenses. How horrid. Those banks have an absolute right to their profits, or at least that's what they expect us to believe.

Even if Turner is catching a lot of flack, he is at least willing to stare down the industry. The financial services sector is even more important to England than to the US, but they also have been longer at the empire and banking game than we have, and as a result, at least some recognize the importance of having sound institutional structures. We have completely lost the plot in the US. While Timothy Geithner is giving lip service to having banks draw up resolution plans, every measure the Treasury has proposed had either been bank-friendly from the get-go, mere posturing, or half hearted and easily beaten back. The Turner discussion of the need to simplify legal structures reveals what a serious version of wind-down plan would need to include, and it is a virtual certainty nothing of the sort will be required in the US.

Investors who believe that major credit-rating firms should be held responsible for their disastrously optimistic ratings of subprime-mortgage bonds have won at least an interim victory. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in New York ruled late Wednesday that Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's can't invoke the 1st Amendment to hide from subprime-related legal challenges.

The decision triggered heavy selling of shares of Moody's parent Moody's Corp. and S&P parent McGraw-Hill Cos. on Thursday. Moody's slid $1.84, or 7%, to $24.26. McGraw-Hill's shares tumbled $3.30, or 10.2%, to $29.01.

From Bloomberg News:

   Scheindlin rejected the firms' arguments that investors can't sue over deceptive ratings of private-placement notes because those opinions are protected by free-speech rights.

    The decision forces S&P, Moody's and Morgan Stanley, which was also sued, to respond to fraud charges in a class-action by investors claiming the raters hid the risks of securities linked to subprime mortgages.

    Defaults on the debt ignited a credit crisis that has led to more than $1.6 trillion in writedowns and losses since the start of 2007.

    "The fate of the major rating companies may be determined by the courts rather than Congress or regulators," said Jerome Fons, a New York-based consultant and former Moody's managing director for credit policy who left the firm in August 2007. "There are so many suits outstanding, if they lost a major case all bets are off. The floodgates will be open."

Some investors on Thursday were fearing the worst: Trading volume in Moody's and McGraw-Hill soared as the shares plunged.

"It's the first major ruling upholding fraud allegations against an arranger and the rating agencies on the instruments that are at the heart of the financial crisis," Patrick Daniels, a lawyer at Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman Robbins LLP, the San Diego-based securities litigation firm that represented investors in the case, told Bloomberg.

Iranian MPs have approved the first woman minister in the 30-year history of the Islamic republic.

She was one of 18 nominations for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new cabinet to be approved. Two other women were among three rejected nominees.

The president's choice for defence minister, Ahmad Vahidi, who is wanted by Argentina over a deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre, won strong backing.

The vote follows months of wrangling after disputed elections in June.

Correspondents say Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, the female health minister-designate, is a hard-line conservative who has in the past proposed introducing segregated health care in Iran, with women treating women and men treating men.

USAID probes the possibility that contractors give a cut to the Taliban.

KABUL -- The United States Agency for International Development has opened an investigation into allegations that its funds for road and bridge construction in Afghanistan are ending up in the hands of the Taliban, through a protection racket for contractors.

And House Foreign Affairs Committee member, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) vowed to hold hearings on the issue in the fall, saying: "The idea that American taxpayer dollars are ending up with the Taliban is a case for grave concern."

U.S. officials confirmed that the preliminary investigation and the proposed hearings were sparked by a GlobalPost special report on the funding of the Taliban last month that uncovered a process that has been an open secret in Afghanistan for years among those in international aid organizations. 

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- As many as a dozen men armed with automatic weapons stormed into a drug rehab center in this violent border city Wednesday night, lined up the recovering drug addicts and alcoholics against a wall and opened fire at point-blank range, killing 17 people.

The attack, within sight of the United States border, set a revolting new low in the unremitting wave of vicious crimes Mexico has suffered since President Felipe Calderon launched a frontal assault on the nation's drug cartels in December 2006. Rehab clinics have been a special target, with cartels hunting for rivals hiding or recruiting in them.

[...]

The upsurge of violence in Juarez, where rival cartels have been battling amongst themselves for the lucrative smuggling route to the United States, seems to be an open challenge to Mr. Calderon's government, which has sent 10,000 troops and federal police to patrol the streets and take back the city from the criminals.

Despite the reinforcements, Juarez experienced the most violent month in its history in August, according to local media, with at least 326 homicides. That represented almost half the death toll in all of Mexico. And Juarez, which was Mexico's most violent city in 2008, with 1,600 homicides, is on pace to exceed that figure this year.

In the last two years, gunmen suspected of being tied to drug cartels have now barged into Juarez rehab clinics on four separate occasions and started shooting. With the latest incident, the death toll from clinic attacks now hovers around 32.

President Barack Obama's plan to address the nation's students during the school day Tuesday has polarized parents over whether it's OK for their kids to listen to the speech.

On one side are parents who say the webcast speech to K-12 students is "political recruiting" and "spreading the liberal agenda."

On the other are those who say listening to presidential speeches is an important part of American culture and the education process.

The White House officially announced the speech Wednesday morning, and the U.S. Department of Education followed up with a letter to school principals and a lesson plan for discussing the talk. The White House said the speech will address the importance of studying and staying in school.

"Infant mortality." This sounds clinical and antiseptic - who feels moved when they hear it? - when what we are in fact talking about is dead babies. Here's an example. In Malawi in southeast Africa, the country's soil became badly depleted by overuse, so the democratic government there adopted a sensible policy of subsidising fertiliser. The nation's hungry farmers were given sacks of it at a third of its real cost - and the country bloomed. Then the World Bank damned this as a "market distortion" and said that if Malawi wanted to keep receiving loans it had to stop them at once. So the subsidies stopped, and the country's crops failed. A famine began - and "infant mortality rose".

That's the dull phrase. What we mean is - lots of babies died, totally needlessly. Three years ago, the Malawian government finally told the World Bank to stick its loans, and subsidized fertiliser again. Now nobody there is starving, and the country is the single biggest exporter of corn to the World Food Programme in southern Africa. When on some rare occasion this is mentioned in the news, they might say in passing, "Infant mortality fell." The phrase that tells the truth is: hundreds of thousands of babies stopped dying.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America.

Fishermen know that their livelihoods will be at stake if they don't adopt more sustainable fishing methods. And nonprofits are now certifying -- and thereby rewarding -- companies that follow stringent eco-guideless. Still, many fishermen are frustrated that "going green" often means more work and less money.

The fishing trawler FMS Susanne is not a very pleasant place for fish -- or humans. With a crew of only six, the captain and his seamen rarely get a chance to sleep, and their quarters are only slightly larger than the bunk beds they hold. Every four or five hours, the alarm clock goes off, and they lift the net.

Saithe, a relative of cod, is brought on board from the stern in nets bulging like balloons. The fish flop onto the deck and whiz down a hatch directly into the processing equipment made up of a slaughtering machine, a conveyor belt and slides. Fresh from the catch, the fish are gutted, sorted according to size and placed on ice. The Susanne can store a good 100 tons in one outing, and it can bring in that amount within just a few days.

The ship is 40 meters (130 feet) long and has one of the largest catch capacities in the North Sea, with an official annual quota of 2,300 tons of saithe. More importantly, it has proven that it can fish in a way that both conserves fish stocks and is environmentally friendly.

A German company is marketing a mobile toilet for women that fits into their handbags and can be used whenever they are caught short.

Aware that the fairer sex battle with long queues at conveniences and are loathe to relieve themselves at roadsides like men, the makers of the "Ladybag" believe they are on to a winner.

The disposable portable lavatory consists of a plastic bag fitted with absorbent polymers that turn urine into a gel.

The size of a chocolate bar when folded, it has a wide opening and can be used squatting, sitting or standing.

The gel can absorb a pint of urine, but in an emergency the bag itself can hold 2.2 pints.

The prime minister of Bangladesh has ordered male government employees to stop wearing suits, jackets and ties to save electricity.

Sheikh Hasina told officials that doing so would minimise their use of air-conditioners.

Bangladesh suffers from daily power cuts as power plants are unable to meet the country's demand.

A senior official told the BBC the government would soon encourage businesses to follow its example.

Hundreds of sand lizards are being released at sites across England and Wales in an attempt to bring back the UK's rarest lizard to areas where it has disappeared, conservationists said today.

The reintroductions at five sites in Surrey, Dorset and mid Wales are part of efforts to "turn back the clock on amphibian and reptile declines" in Britain, Amphibian and Reptile Conservation said...

The sand lizard was once a common sight on heathland across parts of England and Wales, but widespread destruction of its heath and sand dune habitats led to extinctions at many sites.

^{The Arctic has warmed as a result of climate change, despite the Earth being farther from the sun during summer months}

By Ian Sample, guardian.co.uk

Warming as a result of increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has overwhelmed a millennia-long cycle of natural cooling in the Arctic, raising temperatures in the region to their highest for at least 2,000 years, according to a report.

The Arctic began to cool several thousand years ago as changes in the planet's orbit increased the distance between the sun and the Earth and reduced the amount of sunlight reaching high northern latitudes during the summer.

But despite the Earth being farther from the sun during the northern hemisphere's summer solstice, the Arctic summer is now 1.2C warmer than it was in 1900.

Writing in the US journal Science, an international team of researchers describe how thousands of years of natural cooling in the Arctic were followed by a rise in temperatures from 1900 which accelerated briskly after 1950.

The warming of the Arctic is more alarming in view of the natural cooling cycle, which by itself would have seen temperatures 1.4C cooler than they are today, scientists said.

Thomas Brausse used to trade stocks for a living in Frankfurt. Now, after being laid off as a result of the financial crisis, he sells French fries and sausages from a lunch truck -- and is delighted with his new career.

For Thomas Brausse, 44, the world of work is very different now from how it was before the financial crisis struck. Brausse, who has a shaved head and broad shoulders, used to be a high-powered banker in Germany's financial center Frankfurt. Now he runs a snack bar not far from his old office.

Sometimes one of his former colleagues walks past without saying hello. Brausse used to chat with him a lot, he says. But the man's coldness doesn't bother him. "I don't let stuff like that get to me," he says. And most of the bankers he knows from the old days enjoy coming to see him -- to fill their bellies.

Tunes inspired by tamarin calls seem to alter the primates' emotions

MOVING MELODY  Cotton-top tamarins (one shown) seem to respond with emotion to professionally composed cello music based on their calls. Bryce Richter/University of Wisconsin-Madison

Listen to the monkey sounds / music at the bottom of the article.

When people play their funky music for cotton-top tamarins, the monkeys hardly get their groove on. But playing monkey music does the trick. Cello music that mimics tamarin calls seems to bring forth the same sort of emotions in the monkeys that the original calls would have elicited, researchers report online September 1 in Biology Letters.

People from many different cultures respond similarly to certain musical characteristics, such as inflection and pitch, says coauthor Charles Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "But we shouldn't expect other species to process it in the same way." He and coauthor David Teie of the University of Maryland School of Music in College Park wanted to know whether monkeys' emotional states could be manipulated by music the way people's emotions are.

Teie, a composer and cellist, used traits from calls that tamarins made in response to both stressful and calming situations to create a series of original compositions designed especially for monkeys, using cello and voice.

After listening to a 30-second clip inspired by contented vocalizations, the tamarins acted calmer and more social than usual, grooming each other more and eating more. Threatening music, full of ch-ch-ch noises and short staccato notes on the cello, made for anxious monkeys. In this case, the tamarins moved around from perch to perch and urinated more frequently than usual.

"I think it's a very creative approach," says cognitive biologist Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna in Austria. "It's unusual to have a composer and scientist interact like this."

Two actresses from the Franco-Italian cinema aristocracy - Carla Bruni's sister and Catherine Deneuve's daughter - are duelling head to head, and hankie to hankie, in rival "weepie" movies released in France this week.

The two films, competing to become the French, post-summer, romantic blockbuster, star Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Deneuve, and Valeria Bruni-Tadeschi, the older sister of the French first lady.

Both films opened at 200 cinemas across France this week. Both are 105 minutes long. Both are classic tales of tangled, or doomed, love, with a modern, feminist twist. Both of the lead actresses are of Franco-Italian origin. Both have received rave reviews. And both women have been tipped to win nominations for a César, or French Oscar, next February.

The guy standing on the runway is an officer from the French Foreign Legion.
He used to tease the french pilots about their skills and about who has the "biggest one".
So one day he bet - in front of all of his men - that a pilot could not fly low enough to remove his green beret.
Unfortunately someone as dumb as him accepted the bet, and here is the result.
He put the beret so damn low on his head that the only way to make it fly away would have been to take the head wit it.
Which was nearly the case.
For information, don't believe the pilot is an ace. He can absolutely not calculate the exact height above ground, and was just lucky enough not to kill his fellow soldier.

And there was no way for an officer of the Foreign Legion to make a single move, not with all of his men looking at him.

http://www.vimeo.com/6396353

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.