The EP elections, the five year democratic interruption to the Brussels game, are long in the past. Everyone is back from their summer holidays, ready for a bout of jousting and positioning in that depressing and opaque game: how to put together a team of 27 Commissioners.

The nomination of José Manuel Barroso as President of the Commission looks to be a dead cert. The Heads of State and Government have already nominated him but the EP is waiting to give their approval until the Irish have made up their mind on the Treaty of Lisbon.

The Socialists and the Greens in the EP say the Commission needs strong leadership yet they lack anyone that could provide it. This has not stopped Barroso getting a bit nervous however, and it seems he has hit upon the idea of putting in a high profile socialist as Vice President of the Commission. Barroso doesn't want a socialist like Margot Wallström who might actually stand for something; he instead wants Alfred Gusenbauer, ex Chancellor of Austria, a man who never acquitted himself at European level. He's best known in Brussels for once calling Barroso "Barolo".

At least 15 people have died after a sightseeing boat sank in Lake Ohrid in south-western Macedonia.

The Ilinden sank about 200m from the shore - reportedly within four minutes. About 40 passengers have been rescued.

The Bulgarian government says the dead were all its nationals. The captain of the boat said there was a "loud crack" before the boat sank, police say.

A convey of 350 farm tractors rumbled through Berlin on Saturday to launch a mass anti-nuclear rally, designed to influence Germany's general election in three weeks' time.

About 50,000 opponents of nuclear power took part in the protest, which kicked off with an 8-km (5-mile)-long convey of tractors that passed in front of Chancellor Angela Merkel's offices and through the government quarter to the city's historic Brandenburg Gate.

Determined to make nuclear power a focus of the election campaign, the protesters criticised Merkel and her conservative party, which wants to scrap a 2001 law to shut down Germany's 17 remaining nuclear power plants by the mid-2020s.

"We won't tolerate any backtracking on the nuclear exit," Fritz Pothmer, a northern German farmer, said to cheers at the largest anti-nuclear rally in years. "It's nuclear insanity. How could Merkel become such a tool of the nuclear lobby?"

The Social Democratic Party has released a new video of North Rhine-Westphalia's state premier Juergen Ruettgers insulting Romanian factory workers, after being forced to apologize for previous offensive comments.

Christian Democrat Ruettgers has again come under heavy criticism for his xenophobic remarks about the standards of Romanian industry. The remarks were made during a speech in the town of Muenster on August 28, which was filmed and posted on YouTube by the SPD on Saturday.

The speech is very similar to the one made two days earlier in Duisburg that forced Friday's apology. The new video appears to support the SPD's view that the remarks were not just spoken in the heat of a campaign speech, but form part of Ruettger's election strategy.

The SPD NRW might have added some tendentious music.

MPs want to know what deal was struck over the Lockerbie bomber at a meeting in a London club in 2003 - long before either the Scottish government or Gordon Brown was involved

Tony Blair will be thrust into the controversy over the release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi with questions in Parliament over a secret meeting the then Prime Minister orchestrated that brought Libya in from the cold.

MPs are set to demand the minutes of an extraordinary cloak-and-dagger summit in London between British, American and Libyan spies held three days before Mr Blair announced that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was surrendering his weapons of mass destruction programme.

At the time of the secret meeting in December 2003 at the private Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London - for decades the favourite haunt of spies - Libyan officials were pressing for negotiations on the status of Megrahi, who was nearly three years into his life sentence at a Scottish jail.

LONDON (Dow Jones)--U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling said Saturday that each country will need to vary its exit strategies from stimulus policies according to domestic conditions, but said it was the right time to start developing those policies.

At a press conference at the end of the meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 industrial and developing economies, Darling said this is the "time to start developing appropriate exit strategies, but these will vary according to countries."

At the meeting, the G20 said member countries needed to maintain stimulus policies until a durable recovery had begun. However, it said these policies must be consistent with long-term price stability and fiscal sustainability.

LONDON (Reuters) - The G20 made progress on Saturday in toughening up financial rules but vague compromises over bank capital and pay curbs indicate that fundamental issues remain unresolved.

The crash of Lehman Bros that brought the world's financial system to its knees last September was uppermost in minds at the April G20 meeting, which adopted pledges to make it harder for banks to mess up economies in future.

Translating pledges into concrete action is proving to be more painstaking as vested national interests emerge and economic recovery takes the heat out of pressures to reform.

Still, the mood music at Saturday's meeting contrasted with the tense summit five months ago when fear stalked the corridors of governments and banks were on tenterhooks as to their fate.

"Then, we were meeting after two quarters of (economic) freefall, unprecedented in world history. Today everyone was in a calmer mood," said Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin.

A senior G20 official said there "were no big emotional battles, no fists on the desks and no shouting."

After two days of meetings in London, the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers agreed the broad outlines of a tough new regulatory framework for financial institutions that stops short of setting caps on bankers' bonuses but leaves open the possibility that regulators will have a say on pay.

In broad terms, the group agreed three major points about banking regulation: banks must raise much more capital once the financial crisis has passed, complex financial institutions should develop "living wills" to plan for their unwinding should that ever become necessary and banks should be required to retain some portion of loans they repackage and sell as asset-backed securities.

The group also made an implicit plea for banks to limit payouts to shareholders, saying: "We call on banks to retain a greater proportion of current profits to build capital, where needed, to support lending."

The group also agreed that it is far too soon to begin unwinding the unprecedented amounts of fiscal, monetary and financial sector support which have been poured into the economies of member states, with US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner saying that unemployment remains "unacceptably high". The US unemployment rate reached 9.5 per cent last month according to figures released on Friday.

US families turn to food stamps as wages drop

The number of working Americans turning to free government food stamps has surged as their hours and wages erode, in a stark sign that the recession is inflicting pain on the employed as well as the newly jobless.

While the increase in take-up is often attributed to the sharp rise in unemployment - which on Friday hit 9.7 per cent - the Financial Times has learnt that some 40 per cent of the families now on food stamps have "earned income", up from 25 per cent two years ago.

The agriculture department, which runs the programme, attributes this rise to workers having their hours cut back.

"I'm sort of stunned, it seems like a dire warning . . . that even the jobs people are retaining in this recession aren't at the wage level and hours level that they need to provide for their families," said Heidi Shierholz, economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

The European Parliament seems set not to water down EU regulation on alternative investment funds as strongly requested by the industry. The recently-appointed rapporteur on the directive, French MEP Jean-Paul Gauzès, told EurActiv in an interview that he intends to regulate funds too, rather than just managers as foreseen in the draft text.

"There should be a regulation on managers as the directive foresees, but also we have to guarantee transparency and see what happens within the funds themselves," Gauzès, from the centre-right European People's Party, told EurActiv.

"I think we should go further," he said, adding that the funds themselves should be regulated as well as the managers. "We cannot forget the risks we have seen during the crisis. Hedge funds are not the origins of the crisis, but they present risks," he made clear.

MEPs: Jean-Paul Gauzès

A World Trade Organization panel has dismissed 70% of the claims submitted by the U.S. in its long-running dispute with the European Union over state financial aid for new aircraft development given to commercial aircraft builder Airbus (ABI.YY), a source familiar with the matter told Dow Jones Newswires Friday.

Still, the WTO did uphold some claims, concluding that Airbus had received illegal subsidies from European Union governments, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source.

In its interim report, the panel confirmed that repayable loans are a "permissible" way for governments to help fund aircraft development, a European source told Dow Jones Newswires. It also found that not all of the repayable loans given by European governments for the development of Airbus's flagship A380 superjumbo were illegal, the source added. [...]

Earlier Friday, a person familiar with the matter had told The Wall Street Journal that the WTO had concluded that Airbus had received illegal subsidies. The Journal had reported that the WTO in its interim ruling classified every launch aid package given for the A380 passenger jet as an illegal subsidy. EU launch-aid loans don't have to be repaid if the plane under development loses money.

See the discussion yesterday and note that the WTO ruling has been due for something like three years now. Here we go:

On 13 April 2006, the Chairman of the Panel informed the DSB that the Panel would not be able to complete its work within six months due to the substantive and procedural complexities involved in this dispute, including the process of developing information concerning serious prejudice under Annex V of the SCM Agreement, another request for consultations by the United States, the Panel's subsequent agreement, at the parties' request, to set aside the original timetable for the dispute until an unspecified date in the future, and another request for the establishment of a panel by the United States. The Panel expected to complete its work in 2007. On 14 December 2007, the Chairman of the Panel informed the DSB that due to the substantive and procedural complexities involved in this dispute, it now expected to complete its work in 2008.

Speculators went wild for shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in August. And thanks to that buying frenzy, the two government-controlled mortgage giants will avoid getting booted off the New York Stock Exchange. The companies separately said today that the NYSE had informed them that they were back in compliance with minimum share price requirements after their stocks rocketed last month.

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In February, however, the NYSE suspended its $1 minimum stock price requirement for all listed companies in an effort to give stocks time to recover from the fall and winter market meltdowns. The NYSE put the rule back into effect on Aug. 1, which gave Fannie and Freddie until mid-October to "cure" their penny-stock problems. With their shares now well above $1, the two companies won't have to worry about the October deadline.

Does the government have an interest in keeping the stocks on the NYSE? Probably. Even though the shares may ultimately be worthless (the Treasury already has 80% ownership of both firms), an NYSE listing provides more flexibility for the Obama administration as it works on a plan for the future structure of the companies.

It also would seem to be in the interest of the many remaining institutional investors in Fannie and Freddie for the stocks to stay on the NYSE. So maybe it wasn't just rank speculators driving the stocks higher last month.

By HIROKO TABUCHI, NYT

TOKYO -- Japan's opposition party won an overwhelming victory at the polls on Sunday pledging to increase social welfare, better protect workers and do away with American-style, pro-market reforms to lead the country out of its long slump.

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In a manuscript widely circulated in business and diplomatic circles, Mr. Hatoyama, the leader of the Democratic Party of Japan who stands to become prime minister when the party assumes power this month, railed against American-style capitalism as "void of morals or moderation" -- a blight Japan must cast aside at all costs.

"The recent economic crisis resulted from a way of thinking based on the idea that American-style free-market economics represents a universal and ideal economic order," Mr. Hatoyama wrote in a recent syndicated opinion article...first published in a Japanese monthly magazine and later carried by the online edition of The New York Times.

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"We're in the midst of an economic crisis, and there's a feeling that the crisis originated in the United States, and it was the fault of American policy makers and that the countries are paying the price of policy errors," said Steven Vogel, political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "There you have the makings of a very appealing political platform."

The Democrats are expected to form a coalition with the Socialists and the conservative People's New Party -- smaller parties that are decidedly against market reform -- which could reinforce this tendency toward government-led solutions to the economic crisis. The Democrats' platform centers on initiatives like cash allowances for child-rearing families and lower gasoline taxes. Such policies could bring about the start of recovery by lifting Japan's flagging consumer spending.

WASHINGTON -- The European Union is strongly criticizing a congressional proposal to charge a $10 fee to some visitors to the United States and suggesting it may carry a price for U.S. travelers.

If it passes, the EU says, some U.S. travelers to Europe could face retaliation.

The fee now under consideration in Congress would finance a new U.S. program to promote travel, a burden that the EU believes Americans should bear.

"Only in `Alice in Wonderland' could a penalty be seen as promoting the activity on which it is imposed," the European Commission's Ambassador to Washington, John Bruton, said in a statement Friday.

One of the bill's sponsors, Democratic  Rep. William Delahunt, said the EU was getting too worked up over what he called "a nominal fee."

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.

The bankers plan to buy "life settlements," life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash -- $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return -- though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

Either way, Wall Street would profit by pocketing sizable fees for creating the bonds, reselling them and subsequently trading them. But some who have studied life settlements warn that insurers might have to raise premiums in the short term if they end up having to pay out more death claims than they had anticipated.

The idea is still in the planning stages. But already "our phones have been ringing off the hook with inquiries," says Kathleen Tillwitz, a senior vice president at DBRS, which gives risk ratings to investments and is reviewing nine proposals for life-insurance securitizations from private investors and financial firms, including Credit Suisse.

"We're hoping to get a herd stampeding after the first offering," said one investment banker not authorized to speak to the news media. ...

As the Lehman anniversary approaches, defenders of the financial sector struggle into position - partly in response to your comments (also here).  They offer three main points:

   1. We need finance to make the economy work.
   2. Financial innovation delivers value, although it's not perfect (but what is?)
   3. Don't kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

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Private sector capture of the state is bad enough, wherever it happens in the world.  But when the capturers have an unparalleled ability and willingness to "tax" the rest of us, we should really be afraid.

The business model of big finance is not to consolidate their position and live on comfortable annuities.  It's to take as much as they can ("otherwise the competition will hire our best people") while stuffing the risk ("which ordinary people don't understand") onto the taxpayer.  The technical details of this arrangement are loosely refered to as "financial innovation".

Modern finance is more than quack medicine.  This is state capture, an old tradition for bankers - and in the modern American version their hands are in the deepest set of pockets ever.  Why would they ever let go?  (My bold)

 KABUL, Sept. 5 (Xinhua) -- The Afghanistan Independent Election Commission (IEC) on Saturday dismissed the allegation of biased in the electoral process and assured transparency in the prudential voting.

    "The Independent Election Commission as the authorized body in holding and monitoring election has always strived to hold a free and fair election in accordance with the law," a press release issued by the body said.

    It made these remarks amid filling complaints by some presidential candidates with the election complaints commission questioning the impartially of the election body.

    Karzai's main challenger Abdullah Abdullah who has lodged dozens of complaints, accusing state machinery of involvement in backing the sitting president on the voting day told reporters on Saturday that there was widespread fraud by government with the support of IEC.

The top Communist official in Urumqi in western China was dismissed on Saturday as a large deployment of the military police appeared to have brought a measure of peace to the city after two days of large street protests.

Li Zhi, the party secretary of Urumqi, lost his post, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday evening. He became the most senior person to be removed since ethnic tensions erupted there in rioting in July.

AFGHANISTAN SYNDROME: THERE ARE MORE AMERICANS FIGHTING IN AFGHANISTAN TODAY THAN THE SOVIETS DEPLOYED AT THEIR PEAK

America now has more military personnel in Afghanistan than the Red Army had at the peak of the Soviet invasion and occupation of that country. According to a Congressional Research Service report, as of March of this year, the U.S. had 52,000 uniformed personnel and another 68,000 contractors in Afghanistan -- a number that has likely grown given the blank check President Obama has written for what's now being called "Obama's War."

That makes 120,000 American military personnel fighting in Afghanistan, a figure higher than the Soviet peak troop figure of 115,000 during their catastrophic 9-year war. Just this week, General McChrystal, whom Obama appointed to command American forces in Afghanistan, is talking of sending tens of thousands more American troops. At the height of the Soviet occupation,Western intelligence experts estimated that the Soviets had 115,000 troops in Afghanistan -- but like America, the more troops and the longer the Soviets stayed, the more doomed their military mission became.

See also Magnifico's diary: Just 1,000 shy of breaking the Soviet Union's world record

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

We saw considerable interest in a call by Javier Solana, secretary general of the Council of the European Union, for the United Nations to endorse the two-state solution, which already has the firm commitment of the U.S. government and the other members of the "Quartet" (Russia and the United Nations). Solana proposes that the United Nations recognize the pre-1967 border between Israel and Palestine, and deal with the fate of Palestinian refugees and how Jerusalem would be shared. Palestine would become a full U.N. member and enjoy diplomatic relations with other nations, many of which would be eager to respond. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad described to us his unilateral plan for Palestine to become an independent state.

A more likely alternative to the present debacle is one state, which is obviously the goal of Israeli leaders who insist on colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A majority of the Palestinian leaders with whom we met are seriously considering acceptance of one state, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. By renouncing the dream of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their Jewish neighbors and then demand equal rights within a democracy. In this nonviolent civil rights struggle, their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.

For the past year, as the economic crisis convulsed much of the world, India wobbled but never tumbled over. And now that the world is starting to pull itself out of the mire, India seems poised to resume its rapid economic expansion. Government officials are projecting that growth will reach or surpass 6 percent this year and approach 8 percent next year, almost the pace that established India as an emerging global economic power second only to China.

But the cautious optimism about the broader economy has been tempered by a historic summertime drought that has underscored the stubborn fact that many people are largely untouched by the country's progress. India's new economy may be based on software, services and high technology, but hundreds of millions of Indians still look to the sky for their livelihoods; more than half the country's 1.1 billion people depend on agriculture for a living even though agriculture represents only about 17 percent of the total economy.

Long-term climate records from the Arctic provide strong new evidence that human-caused global warming can override Earth's natural heating and cooling cycles, U.S. researchers reported this week in the journal Science.

For more than 2,000 years, a natural wobble in Earth's axis has caused the Arctic region to move farther away from the sun during the region's summer, reducing the amount of solar radiation it receives. The Arctic is now 600,000 miles farther from the sun than it was in AD 1, and temperatures there should have fallen a little more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since then.

Instead, the region has warmed 2.2 degrees since 1900 alone, and the decade from 1998 to 2008 was the warmest in two millenniums, according to a team headed by climatologist Darrell S. Kaufman of Northern Arizona University.

by Staff Writers
Kathmandu, Nepal (UPI) Sep 1, 2009

More is being spent on corporate and financial bailouts around the world than on promoting sustainability and addressing climate change, experts said at the "Kathmandu to Copenhagen" climate change conference....Talks focused mostly on the Himalayas, particularly the glaciers that provide headwaters for nine of Asia's largest rivers, ultimately serving the needs of 1.3 billion people.

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Each decade, for the last 30 years, temperatures in the region of the Himalayas have increased by between 0.27 and 1.08 degrees Fahrenheit. According to scientists attending the conference, nearly 67 percent of the glaciers in the Himalayas have been retreating about 32 feet each year. As a result, some 68 of its lakes could burst at any time. Rising sea levels could disrupt economic activity for about 100 million people living in the coastal belt of South Asia.

"Water shortages will be the order of the day in the region if glaciers melt at the current pace," Purushottam Ghimire, joint secretary and chief of environment division in Nepal's Ministry of Environment, told Bloomberg. "Hydropower generation will start suffering in Nepal, India and then other countries."

1.3 billion people......when the rivers all run dry?

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

Star of Taiji dolphin-hunt film wants to win over Japan > Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

The film, which won this year's audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, juxtaposes stunning underwater shots of gliding dolphins with others from the hunt.

Its hero is O'Barry, still a weathered outdoorsman at 69, who, after training dolphins for the "Flipper," had a change of heart in 1970. He has devoted his recent years to helping return dolphins in captivity to the wild and to stopping the killing at Taiji.

Scenes in the film, some which were shot clandestinely, show fishermen banging on metal poles stuck in the water to create a wall of sound that scares the dolphins--which have supersensitive sonar--and sends them fleeing into a cove.

There, the fishermen sometimes pick a few to be sold for aquarium shows, for as much as $150,000. They kill the others, spearing the writhing animals repeatedly until the water turns red.

The meat from one dolphin fetches about 50,000 yen, and is sold at supermarkets across Japan, where dolphin and whale meat are considered delicacies.

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Already, the Australian town of Broome dropped its 28-year sister-city relationship with Taiji last month, partly because of the movie.

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He also hopes that reports of high mercury levels in dolphin meat, which the Japanese government acknowledges, will convince Japanese to stop eating dolphins.

But many in Taiji take the dolphin hunt for granted as part of everyday life.

They are defensive about "The Cove," seeing themselves as powerless victims of overseas pressure to end a simple and honest way of making a living. About 20 to 30 fishermen earn money from the hunt, although they also catch fish.

"It tastes so good," Mutsuyo Kaino, an 88-year-old housekeeper, said of dolphin meat, which is eaten raw as sashimi or stewed in a pot. "This is a fishing town. You shouldn't worry about a movie."

By ELIZABETH SVOBODA  NYT

As a child, Meghan Swann had suffered several bouts of strep throat, and when she was a teenager, she thought she felt another one coming on. The main symptom was familiar -- a dull sore-throat pain.

But this time something was different; there seemed to be a foreign object stuck in the back of her throat, something she couldn't quite swallow. "So I pushed on my tonsil, and something popped out," Ms. Swann said. The yellowish object was about the size of a piece of gravel and had the sulfurous odor of bad breath. "I thought it was a piece of food or something," she said.

From then on, Ms. Swann, now 25 and living in the St. Louis area, engaged in a secret ritual: popping the mushrooming bits of debris out of her tonsils with a cotton swab whenever they got big enough to cause discomfort.

One day, she mentioned her problem to her mother -- and was surprised at the knowing response. Those squishy little things were tonsil stones, her mother explained, and she sometimes got them too. This year, when Ms. Swann posted a blog entry about her stones, readers came out of the woodwork to tell her they also had the problem. "Wow," she remembers thinking, "there's a lot of people out there with this."