EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Some of the most powerful women in the EU are discussing how to bring gender equality to European politics, an arena that continues to be overwhelmingly dominated by men.

A who's who of women politicians in Brussels met on Wednesday (16 September) to see how they can better promote women in the EU capital, where women's names routinely fail to be mentioned for the top jobs.

There were seven women in Jose Manuel Barroso's first commission in 2004

The 15-strong gathering, including four EU commissioners, Sweden's Europe minister and seven parliament committee heads, wants women to become better networkers and better at promoting one another in politics.

"There is still a glass ceiling to reach the very top of European politics. It is still very much an old boy's network and men are very good at praising each other and promoting each other," Finnish Green MEP and head of the human-rights sub-committee, Haidi Hautala, told EUobserver.

"But as there are so few women, this does not really happen."

Lawyers for Silvio Berlusconi admitted yesterday that he could resign if a law giving him immunity from prosecution is struck down next month.

If the Constitutional Court, which begins its deliberations on October 6, overturns the law "there would be damage to the functions of an elected official, which could not be carried out", Glauco Nori, a state lawyer for the Prime Minister's office, said. The move could cause "irreparable damage" and lead to the Prime Minister's resignation.

The law, which Mr Berlusconi pushed through Parliament last year after coming to power for the third time, gives immunity to him, as Prime Minister, and three other holders of high office: the President -- a post to which he aspires -- and the Speakers of both houses of parliament.

The court is expected to reach a verdict within two or three days after it begins to consider the matter.

Germany's Bundesrat upper house of parliament has cleared the way for the country to ratify the European Union's Lisbon Treaty, which is designed to streamline decision-making in the 27-nation bloc.  

Germany's 16 federal states on Friday voted unanimously to adopt amendments to domestic law that make the EU reform treaty more compatible with German law. The Bundestag lower house of parliament had passed the laws earlier this month.

Both houses of the German parliament had already endorsed the 2007 Lisbon Treaty. But the process was halted by the constitutional court on June 30 following a legal challenge by a group of  federal deputies who demanded a law protecting national parliamentary powers and giving them more of a say in decision- making in Brussels to be passed.

The Lisbon Treaty is considered officially ratified by Germany once President Horst Köhler has signed the document.

Russia and Germany have welcomed a US decision not to build missile shield bases in Eastern Europe, but the move has caused bitterness in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in a TV address that the US pull-back will help in upcoming talks on nuclear disarmament: "The statement made in Washington today shows that quite good conditions are evolving for such work."

Russia's Dmitry Medvedev said the shift will help in nuclear disarmament talks

Russia's ambassador to Nato, Dmitry Rogozin, described it in more colourful terms.

"It's like having a decomposing corpse in your flat and then the mortician comes and takes it away," he said in UK daily The Guardian. "This means we're getting rid of one of those niggling problems which prevented us from doing the real work."

Nato and Russia should link their missile defence systems and work together to meet the security challenges of the 21st century such as a nuclear Iran, Nato's new secretary-general declared today in his first significant policy speech.

Both sides had unrealistic expectations of each other after the end of the Cold War, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said, calling for them to put behind them the suspicions of the past and carry out a joint review to serve as a basis for future cooperation to fight terrorism, piracy and nuclear proliferation.

Mr Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish Prime Minister who took over at Nato in the summer, chose to focus on Russia rather than make a traditional tour d'horizon in his inaugural address because he said that it was the relationship that had the most potential and the greatest burden of mistrust.

"Nato wants Russia to be a real stakeholder in European and international security," Mr Rasmussen told an invited audience in Brussels. "We need Russia as a partner in resolving the great issues of our time."

With just over a week to go before Germany's national election, a new poll reveals a much-needed boost for the Social Democrats. But the survey also shows that Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives look like they will be able to form a center-right coalition with their preferred partner, the business-friendly Free Democratic Party.

Germany's center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) does not have much to smile about these days after a plodding election campaign, but just over a week before Germans go to the polls, they have finally got a dose of good news. Following a lackluster few weeks, the SPD's candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier is gaining some support, shrinking Chancellor Angela Merkel's sizable lead.

A poll commissioned by the ARD television channel and released on Thursday evening showed Steinmeier bolstered by his better-than-expected performance in last Sunday's television debate with Merkel. His SPD party gained 3 points compared to a week earlier to reach 26 percent, while Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, continued to prevail with their support unchanged at 35 percent.

The EU's costly obsession with harmonising European trains is bad news for Britain's railways.

Britain has consistently been ahead of the game where EU railway legislation is concerned. We broke up a monolithic network, ran private trains and encouraged competition long before the EU told us to.

But even with the current convergence between Britain and Brussels on many railway matters, European legislation has caused far more problems for our railway network than would be expected, due to Brussels' obsession with breaking down national barriers. Having eliminated border crossings in the Schengen Area, the EU is determined to create a harmonised pan-European rail network similarly free from national boundaries.

The Slavic majority and Hungarian minority in Slovakia are embroiled in a bitter dispute over language that is spilling across the border. Nowhere in the European Union are relations worse between neighbors than those between Bratislava and Budapest.

The Hungarian high school in Komarno, Slovakia is the picture of bourgeois solidity. Its facade is 101 years old and typifies the colossal architectural style typical of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. The building is a haven of classical education and an elite training center for the children of the upper classes in the town of 40,000 inhabitants situated at the confluence of the Danube and Vah rivers.

To mark the start of the new school year, the pupils are wearing white shirts and a blue tie emblazoned with the school crest. And today they also intend to break the law.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - French President Nicolas Sarkozy has warned the Czech Republic that it will have to face "consequences" if it continues to delay final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty following a Yes vote in a referendum in Ireland next month.

Speaking after a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday (16 September), Mr Sarkozy was careful to praise Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer as a "man of great quality" before taking a clear sideswipe at the country's president, Vaclav Klaus, who has indicated he will postpone as long as possible putting his signature under the treaty - the final step of ratification.

Vaclav Klaus: No one is sure when he intends to sign the Lisbon Treaty

"I stated clearly that if the Irish say Yes, there is no question that we will accept to stay in a no man's land with a Europe that does not have the institutions to cope with the crisis."

"It will be necessary to draw the consequences - but those will be the subject of another meeting," said the president.

I question female friends and colleagues and sure enough they all have similar stories to tell. Perhaps it's simply that Paris is the pervert capital of the world?

What is it that makes Frenchmen feel that they have the right to proposition women half their age and/or flash at them? Is it something they're eating? Is someone slipping viagra into their foie gras? Is it something cultural? Or is Paris just "une ville excitante"?

More wonders from the Torygraph.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

^{With little to tell its rivals apart, the far left party is thriving and may transform the political landscape with its populist agenda}

By Kate Connolly, guardian.co.uk

Against a backdrop of multicoloured pre-fabricated housing blocks, a tanning salon and a travel agent offering last-minute deals to the Baltic coast, Frank Spieth handed out red balloons, pens and advice in equal measure...

But in little more than a week, when Germans vote for a new parliament, Spieth and his allies are hoping to make a national impact.

His anti-capitalist, pro-social justice Die Linke is striking a chord with an increasingly disenfranchised electorate, espousing causes - such as inequality, reunification issues and, crucially, the war in Afghanistan - that are finding a receptive audience in both east and west.

"Our voters are representative of millions of Germans who feel cut off from the political process and they could have a significant impact on Germany's political landscape," said 62-year-old Spieth, who left the Social Democratic party (SPD) in 2003 after 37 years in protest at its restructuring of the social welfare state.

While Die Linke's rivals have mercilessly attacked it for its radical wealth redistribution plans and its links to the defunct communist regime, its message is clearly getting through.

One in seven Germans want the Berlin Wall back because they were better off when the country was divided, according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday ahead of the 20th anniversary of its collapse on November 9, 1989.

The survey of 1,002 Germans by the Forsa institute published in Stern magazine said 15 percent of the country's 82 million long for the days when there were two Germanys. Some 16 percent pining for the Wall were westerners and 10 percent easterners.

The survey found that many westerners are bitter about higher taxes to pay for rebuilding the formerly communist east, where some 1.2 trillion euros ($1,762 billion) worth of state funds has been transferred in the last 20 years.

Eastern Germans are unhappy about income levels that are on average only 80 percent of western levels and that due to higher unemployment depopulation is decimating parts of the east, where the population has declined by about two million since 1990.

How 2 Swedish towns vied for nuclear waste

Civic competition is a deep and ancient force. Ever since towns were towns, they have found ways to assert their superiority over one another, through commerce, war and other, more sporting encounters. The thrill of outdoing a neighbour, the fear of losing to the rivals from along the shore, are apparently universal human urges and the world crackles with all kinds of local contests, from the town lantern competitions of the Philippines to America's "Best Tennis Town" and the tidy villages of Ireland.

A few of these competitions are born of a culture so specific they can be hard to understand. In the Thai town of Phuket, temples founded by Chinese immigrants compete to produce extraordinary displays of human self-harm and mutilation, known as mah song. In Sweden, meanwhile, two municipalities, Östhammar and Oskarshamn, have spent the past seven years competing for the right to host the world's first high-level nuclear waste storage facility.

Although it comes in many varieties, nuclear waste is short on what most people consider winning qualities. It is the downsides that catch our eye, and, of these, high-level nuclear waste has a peculiarly rich array. This kind of waste is normally "spent fuel", long rods of uranium that have been burnt in a nuclear reactor. No longer capable of supplying the steady chain reaction that a power station demands, the bundles of radioactive metal emerge at the end of their useful lives to become a terrifying hazard.

(...)

The people of Östhammar and Oskarshamn know all this - not that I heard anyone mention the necrotic jaw. Geologists and physicists have been convinced since the 1970s that high-level nuclear waste can be stored safely, as long as it is buried hundreds of metres underground in secure repositories. The problem has been convincing the rest of us. In the US, Germany, Switzerland and Japan, all attempts to designate geologically suitable sites or find communities willing to accept nuclear waste repositories have failed. Other countries, such as the UK, have given themselves long, mid-century deadlines for dealing with the question. Only Finland and France are at a similar stage as Sweden, with all three countries expecting to open repositories some time around 2025.

A very long article. Email me if you want it in full.

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

EU leaders have agreed on a joint strategy to curb excessive bankers' bonus payments ahead of next week's G20 summit in Pittsburgh, putting pressure on US President Barack Obama to support fundamental financial reforms.  

At a special summit in Brussels European leaders on Thursday agreed that bonuses must be cancelled in case of negative development in the bank's performance. The proposed reforms would link compensation to a bank or business' performance and install a waiting period before stock options could be exercised.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the meeting as a "success" and said that demands from Germany, France and Great Britain were fully implemented and adopted as a European position. The three countries had called for bonus payments to be paid in line with banks' profits and for "guaranteed bonuses" to be stopped.

Merkel demanded a "charter for a sustainable economy" and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a "new system of managing our global economy."

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European Union leaders have agreed that their message for the G20 meeting next week is that the global economic recovery is still too fragile to begin a roll-back of economic stimulus packages.

However, they believe that the turnaround does suggest that now is the time to begin drafting plans for a withdrawal of government support.

"The bonus bubble burst tonight," said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt (r)

"The G20 should reaffirm its determination to continue implementing coordinated policy measures in order to develop the basis for sustainable growth and to avoid a repetition of the present financial crisis. Efforts must be maintained until recovery is secured."

The presidents and prime ministers of the EU's 27 member states European Union met in Brussels on Thursday evening for an informal dinner to prepare a common position to take to next week's G20 meeting of the world's leading industrialised and developing countries.

Over 200,000 German industrial workers lost their jobs in the last year, the Federal Statistics Office announced on Thursday. This is the biggest employment slump in German industry in 12 years. 

The effects of the global economic crisis are becoming ever clearer in Germany, where the number of jobs in industry sank by 3.9 percent in July compared to the same month in 2008, according to a new report from Germany's statistics office. The new report shows that 5.03 million people are currently employed in German industry,  compared to over 5.2 million last July.

 

The number of actual man-hours sank by an even more alarming 10.4 percent, as more and more industrial workers have had their hours cut back. The gross income earned fell by eight percent to 16.6 billion euros ($24.5 billion).

 

Worst hit were the metal, rubber and plastic industries, but Germany's beleagured automobile industry also took significant workforce losses of close to five percent.

The burst of the Danish housing bubble will be costing an extra 25,000 jobless, a major national deficit and lower growth in coming years.

The housing bubble, that coupled with the government's rates freeze and repayment-free loans became inflated until 2007, has drastically worsened Denmark's economic crisis and its burst has weakened Denmark's ability to combat the crisis.

According to calculations carried out by Nordea for Politiken, some 25,000 more people will lose their jobs as a result of the bubble than if the Danish housing market had not been hit by one of the worst price bubbles in the world.

Growth would be a third higher in the next few years and the public finance deficit would be DKK 37 billion in 2011 instead of DKK 60 billion.

In response to demand stimulus over recent decades, with investors implicitly assuming that the future would be like the recent past, there has been a massive increase in supply potential in many industries. The upshot is that many of them are now too big and must be wound down. This applies to automobile production, banking services, construction, many parts of the transport and wholesale distribution industries, and often retail distribution as well. Similarly, many countries that relied heavily on exports as a growth strategy are now geared up to provide goods and services to heavily indebted countries that no longer have the will or the means to buy them.

In this supply side context, policies such as "cash for clunkers" and value added tax cuts in countries with very low household saving rates and massive trade deficits are clearly suboptimal. So too, in countries with large trade surpluses, is resistance to exchange rate appreciation along with a continuing reliance on export demand. Such policies are equivalent to trying to resuscitate a patient long since dead. Not only will time prove that such attempts are futile, but they also impede the desirable adjustment from declining industries to those that should be expanding. In effect, relying solely on macroeconomic stimulus may well head off a more violent downturn, but only at the expense of a more protracted recession.

^{Despite the economic downturn, many firms cannot fill empty positions ranging from plumbers to pastry chefs. The reason? A stigma on blue-collar jobs.}

In today's economic downturn, one might think that every new job posting would instantly draw a hoard of applicants. Not so in Italy. Of the 94,600 jobs small Italian firms have offered so far this year, about a third have gone unfilled, according to a recent report by Confartigianato, the association of Italy's family-owned businesses.

It appears that the shame of working a blue-collar job is so great that Italians would rather risk twiddling their thumbs than using them to tailor fine European clothing, whip up delicious cannoli, or tinker with sports cars. This cultural stigma, unmoved by the fact that some skilled laborers earn substantially more than white-collar workers, has become a real "curse" for the Italian economy, says Giacomo Vaciago, an economic policy professor at the Catholic University of Milan.

From :Global Pensions

UK/CANADA - Nomura has secured a six-year rent holiday after signing a 20 year lease in a new office development owned by Oxford Properties Group, a subsidiary of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (Omers).

The investment bank - which was advised by Drivers Jonas - said the move into Watermark Place, located on Angel Lane in the City Riverside district, will complement Nomura's current European headquarters in St. Pauls.  Nomura said that the deal is believed to be the largest ever non pre-let leasing transaction in the UK office market.

Drivers Jonas partner Mark Lethbridge said: "We've got what's probably a record breaking deal of almost six years. It's fantastic timing - this is a historic opportunity, to get this kind of quality of building on these kinds of terms, which is something you see once in a generation."

However, he conceded that the situation was worse for Omers - which is letting this property on a rent-free basis for six years. Yet he said: "On the other hand, to secure any tenant in today's market would require a substantial rent-free period to be granted, although probably not as long as six years."

He added: "We were able to squeeze that bit extra because it's Nomura, which has taken the whole building for 20 years. For Omers, they wanted to secure this deal rather than go through a two-year painful period of letting the building."

North America Overtaken by Europe as the World's Richest Region, as Equity-Heavy U.S. Investors Are Hit with Steep Losses, Says Report by The Boston Consulting Group

NEW YORK, September 15, 2009--The crisis is transforming the global map of the world's wealthiest people, with Europe nudging out North America as the richest region, according to a new report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The report, titled Delivering on the Client Promise: Global Wealth 2009, is being released today.

Global wealth fell from $104.7 trillion in 2007, measured in assets under management (AuM), to $92.4 trillion in 2008--a decline of 11.7 percent. It was the first decline since 2001

The Year of the Ox or the Year of Fat Tails?

In addition to the statistical outlier that the November 2008 and March 2009 lows were for the S&P 500 relative to its 200d MA, there appears yet another statistical oddity, one that is remaining far out on the distribution curve and doesn't seem to be interested in returning to normal. What I am referring to is the correlation between oil and the USD and the Euro. As the USD was selling off sharply last year it appeared as though oil was acting as an inflation hedge, or anti-USD hedge, as the decline in the USD was fueling commodity prices. You can see this dynamic when looking at crude oil prices which have been moving in lock step to the Euro, which makes up 57.6% of the USD Index.

Watch Barclays in the cellar by Gillian Tett

A couple of years ago, when structured investment vehicles were sowing devastation in the financial world, I frantically searched for a way to explain to non-financiers how these entities worked. The analogy I resorted to was a garage or cellar.

For just as a garage or cellar is usually attached to a house - but not truly inside a house - entities such as SIVs and conduits have traditionally had a semi-detached status with banks. That served the banks dangerously well in the years of the credit boom, since they used SIVs as a place to store irritating stuff which they did not want cluttering up their balance sheet - such as a household stuffing rubbish into a cellar, so that it does not mess up the smart front room.

These days, of course, the word "SIV" has become almost as taboo as the phrase "subprime securitisation". Yet, as I perused this week's announcement that Barclays plans to sell $12.3bn of credit assets to a "newly established fund" called Protium Finance - which will be independent but mostly financed by a loan from Barclays - it was hard to escape a twinge of déjà vu.

Oil on the brain

Game-changers locally, the finds do not alter things globally. They are much smaller than the supergiants of the last century, still producing at dwindling rates today (Ghawar, the world's largest field, was discovered in 1948). And while the industry is getting better at finding and producing oil - seismic surveys are more accurate and recovery rates higher - these are often incremental improvements rather than technological leaps.

The world is still heading for an oil crunch, not necessarily due to physical scarcity of oil but because low investment and long lead-times mean it cannot keep up with demand. Averting such a crunch - and its economic consequences - is more about efficiency and government-mandated conservation than a few new finds.

There is one bright spot. If the market works, sustained oil prices will encourage investment in alternatives, weaning us off the black stuff sooner and averting a still-worse crunch: climate change.

Former head of SAS reveals how he will implement new strategy in Afghanistan

The British commander tasked with helping to bring to an end eight years of war in Afghanistan by persuading the Taliban to lay down their arms believes many in the enemy ranks have "done nothing wrong".

The Islamist extremists now waging a ferocious insurgency against Nato forces are almost universally reviled for promoting a medieval style of fundamentalism and perpetrating brutal abuses of human rights, but Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb told The Independent that many in the Taliban's rank and file carry a sense of "anger and grievances which have not been addressed".

The former head of the SAS has been asked to turn the seemingly relentless tide of war in Afghanistan by overseeing the implementation of the new US-led strategy of promoting engagement with Taliban "moderates" and convincing them to switch sides. However, he warned that it would be wrong and counter-productive to impose "Western preconceptions" on the process of winning them over.

India's Gurkhas are preparing to unilaterally declare independence in a separate "Gorkhaland" state in the area around Darjeeling.

They claim they have been forced to take the step by decades of misrule which has siphoned away millions of pounds of government funds earmarked for them.

Despite the lucrative tea and tourism industries in the area, unemployment is high, electricity supply is sporadic and people are forced to travel for hours to the nearest proper hospital.

The annual assembly of the UN nuclear watchdog has passed a resolution urging all Middle East nations to renounce nuclear weapons under oath.

The non-binding ballot was passed by 100 votes to one, with Israel voting against.

Israel is one of only four countries worldwide, along with India, Pakistan and North Korea, outside the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Despite accusations of press censorship and anti-semitism, Egypt's minister of culture Farouk Hosni managed to win 22 votes out of 57 expressed in the first round of voting in UNESCO's election of a new director-general.

Reuters - Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, who said last year he would burn Israeli books, won a comfortable lead in the first round of voting in UNESCO's election of a new director-general on Thursday.

 

Hosni's bid for the United Nations culture agency's top post has stirred a political storm, with accusations of anti-Semitism and press censorship in Egypt.

 

With 22 votes out of 57 expressed, he did not carry the majority needed to win in the first round so voting will go to a second round on Friday. There was one abstention.

Middle-aged male smokers with high blood pressure and raised cholesterol levels face dying about 10 years before healthier counterparts, a study warns.

The UK study looked at more than 19,000 civil servants aged 40-69 and traced what happened to them 38 years later.

It concluded that men with these three risk factors could expect a 10-year shorter life from 50 years of age.

The British Heart Foundation said it was an important reminder for everyone over 40 to have a heart health check.

Frankfurt is holding its 63rd International Motor Show from 17 to 27 September. This year's high mass for fast cars gives top billing to clean machines. But, warns the German daily Handelsblatt, this sudden craze may well prove a flash in the pan.

We do not know when it started and where it first broke out. What is certain is that electro-fever has long since hit Central Europe. And the International Motor Show (IAA) in Frankfurt has got it bad: not a single make can do without an electric vehicle (EV) of its own. Volkswagen intends to start turning out a fully-electric compact car by 2013, Mitsubishi as early as the end of this year. And BMW is planning its own line of EVs.

It is astounding how fast industry, engineers and political decision-makers have reached a consensus. The Federal Government envisions a million EVs on Germany's roads within ten years, Siemens deems as many as 4.5 million within the realm of possibility. These figures are electrifying even conservative forecasters. But the forecasts do not hold water. The idea did not really gain any momentum of its own till sales started nosediving all over the world. Yesterday's whimsy has become today's big business brainwave.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The death rate from the pandemic H1N1 swine flu is likely lower than earlier estimates, an expert in infectious diseases said on Wednesday.

New estimates suggest that the death rate compares to a moderate year of seasonal influenza, said Dr Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University.

"It's mildest in kids. That's one of the really good pieces of news in this pandemic," Lipsitch told a meeting of flu experts being held by the U.S. Institute of Medicine.

"Barring any changes in the virus, I think we can say we are in a category 1 pandemic. This has not become clear until fairly recently."

Germany's coastline may soon be bristling with wind turbines. A new plan involves 2,500 turbines, 30,000 new jobs and enough power for over 8 million households. Still, some worry that environmental regulations, financing difficulties and even security issues might hurt the ambitious plan.

On Wednesday, Germany's cabinet approved plans to dedicate special zones off its northern coast to house up to 40 offshore windparks that could provide electricity to over eight million households.

The plan involves setting aside zones between 12 and 200 kilometers (seven and 124 miles) off its northern shores. Of the 40 wind farms, 30 would be in the North Sea and 10 in the Baltic Sea. Of these, 25 have already received approval -- 22 in the North Sea and three in the Baltic Sea.

The Danes like to think of themselves as green. Denmark is home to the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas. And today, the giant state-owned energy company, Dong Energy, opens the world's largest windfarm.

But the Danes have a dirty secret. For Dong Energy, while greening its image at home, is busy building coal-fired power stations elsewhere in Europe. First in Germany, and now in Scotland.

We in the rich world are used to the idea of our big companies dumping their dirty and anti-social industries on the poor countries. But now European companies are doing the same to us. Rather as if Scotland were a banana republic somewhere in the developing world, it is the recipient of Dong "outsourcing" the dirty end of its energy portfolio.

Happiness lost

Each year since 1972, the United States General Social Survey has asked men and women: "How happy are you, on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3 being very happy, and 1 being not too happy?" This survey includes a representative sample of men and women of all ages, education levels, income levels, and marital status--1,500 per year for a total of almost 50,000 individuals thus far--and so it gives us a most reliable picture of what's happened to men's and women's happiness over the last few decades.

As you can imagine, a survey this massive generates a multitude of findings, (see the full report by Wharton Professors Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers) but here are the two most important discoveries.

First, since 1972, women's overall level of happiness has dropped, both relative to where they were forty years ago, and relative to men. You find this drop in happiness in women regardless of whether they have kids, how many kids they have, how much money they make, how healthy they are, what job they hold, whether they are married, single or divorced, how old they are, or what race they are. (The one and only exception: African-American women are now slightly happier than they were back in 1972, although they remain less happy than African American men.)

Hamburg hopes its new half-a-billion-dollar concert venue, Elbphilharmonie, will help unite the city.

HAMBURG, Germany -- Into a skyline dominated by the cranes loading and unloading the thousands of tons of goods that pass through its port each day, Hamburg is erecting an ambitious concert complex topped by an undulating clear glass roof.

The projected cost of Elbphilharmonie has tripled in recent months to 323 million euros, roughly half a billion dollars, but project officials have staunchly defended the expense. The complex, they say, is more than an arts venue: It will give the city a fresh identity and help unite what is one of Germany's most socially divided populations.

"This is a segregated city with completely different worlds from more slum-like parts to more suburban settings," said Elbphilharmonie's artistic director, Christoph Lieben-Suetter. "This [building] is exactly what is needed here: a bit of grand craziness."

BERLIN (Reuters) - One in seven Germans want the Berlin Wall back because they were better off when the country was divided, according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday ahead of the 20th anniversary of its collapse on November 9, 1989.

The survey of 1,002 Germans by the Forsa institute published in Stern magazine said 15 percent of the country's 82 million long for the days when there were two Germanys. Some 16 percent pining for the Wall were westerners and 10 percent easterners.

Google Books and most European countries are still at odds over whether the Internet giant will be allowed to extend it's business model from the US to Europe - scanning books and selling them in digital form online.  

In the De Slegte shop in Brussels book-lovers find a full four storeys of second hand books. Among them are many rare copies, books that long have been out of print. The people browsing the endless shelves for a hidden gem mostly want the real thing - a physical book. For many, the hunt for the book is almost as important as the book itself. "I would kill to find the book I want," one of them jokes.

Just down the road from De Slegte bookshop, however, executives from Google have been setting out their vision for an entirely different world. A global empire of digitalized books that's set to revolutionize the way we read.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Wíll reading a book made from paper soon be a thing of the past?

"If I had my way in fifteen years from now, I should be able to go into a bookstore and buy any book ever published, any book ever printed," says Dan Clancy, Director of Google Books Engineering. "I should be able to buy it as a physical book or a digital book. Some people will physical books, some more digital books, others both."

Alyssa Monks paints these images, paying meticulous attention to detail. The 31-year-old said: "I have always wanted to paint for as long as I can remember. "I took classes at school and then went to college and University before ending up at the New York Academy of Art"

This research says that advertising has "seriously interfered with the quality, accuracy, and breadth of content and programming in the media." The proposed solution is to ensure that there is "vigorous competition in media markets," and to provide "public funding of informative media as a public good":

   

Regulating for an independent media: The problems of political and commercial bias, by Matthew Ellman and Fabrizio Germano, Vox EU: There is a crisis in media and journalism, and policymakers have to tackle both political and commercial influence in the media.

    Political bias has been thoroughly analysed in the economics literature, but commercial bias has received markedly less attention than it deserves. For decades, commercial interests delayed public awareness of tobacco health risks. The literature on tobacco and public health contains the most systematic evidence. Health risks went essentially unreported in the mainstream press for decades (Baker 1994;Bagdikian 2004).

    Reporting on climate change and its causes suffered similar delays. More recently, some critics are suggesting that business interests (especially of insurance and pharmaceutical companies) are impeding an informed and balanced media debate on healthcare reform in the US. Others claim that a truly independent media could have helped to avert or mitigate the current financial and housing crises.

-Skip-

    Some options include:

• creating national endowments for journalism and media to ensure long-term financial independence
  
• allocating funds to content-providers as a function of audience and/or via a range of voting mechanisms
  
• expansion of the public broadcasting model to provide space and visibility for these outside content-providers
  
• subsidising investigative reporting (at the local, national, and international levels) as well as professional training for journalists
  
• subsidising media infrastructure (see e.g., Obama and Gordon Brown's commitments to breach the digital divide)
  
• removing advertising from public TV stations, as imminent in France and Spain. This reduces commercial bias of their content and pressures their competitors to reduce bias; it also shifts ad revenues to private media, complementing plans to subsidise media consumption and media entry.

Susan Boyle's overnight fame looks likely to last long term after the singer received a standing ovation on an American TV show.

The Britain's Got Talent runner-up was mobbed by fans and photographers when she arrived in Los Angeles to appear on the final of the US version of the show that turned her into a global superstar.

The live audience of America's Got Talent, one of the country's highest-rating shows, rose to their feet as the previously unemployed 48-year-old Scot delivered a soaring version of the Rolling Stones classic Wild Horses.

Here's what Chris Byrne keeps telling herself: He was going away anyway. Her oldest child, 19-year-old Mike, was going to head off to school this fall, leaving Beaverton and home for Boston and the Berklee College of Music...

But instead of a dorm room, Mike was checked into an extended-stay hotel. Instead of Boston, he was settling in outside of Chicago, near a recording studio. Instead of college, Chris Byrne helped move her son into the Smashing Pumpkins, one of the pre-eminent bands of the 1990s alternative rock boom -- a band that has sold more than 15 million records.

From more than 1,000 submissions, 12 drummers auditioned. From those, the 42-year-old [Billy] Corgan chose Byrne, but he wanted to make sure it was cool with the teenager's parents. Chris Byrne thinks Corgan also wanted to know Mike had the support of his family, which also includes Elise, a junior at Beaverton High School and the "real super-achiever," according to Mom...

In June, he headed back to Los Angeles to work with the band.

It began to feel real in that way a dream does when you wake up and you wonder, "Did that really happen?" It had really happened.

He really had visited the Zildjian headquarters, where he had his pick of the finest drum equipment available -- the best cymbals imaginable. "Cymbals that are typically so far out of my price range it's ridiculous," he says. "It was a really, really good day to say the least."

Byrne joined Corgan on a short tour in August that earned solid reviews and -- what do you know? -- he really did have someone whose job it was to care for and carry his drum kit.

"We hire people to do it," he was told.

Byrne spent some time in Beaverton just before Labor Day. He slept in his own bed. He played with his old band. He got ready to head to Chicago to begin recording the new Smashing Pumpkins record. He caught the flu, and arrived later than scheduled.

When he was well enough to head to the airport, he looked at the ticket and realized it was first class.

Maybe, his mother suggested, it was because he had to re-book on late notice. No coach left, so he had to go in style. Turns out, no, that wasn't it. Byrne flies first class now. He called his parents when he landed to declare the flight attendants had served him warm cookies and milk.

"I'm such a rock star," he told his mom.