EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Europe risks again being sidelined, as in the final hours of the UN climate talks in December, unless the bloc speaks with one voice at future talks, the incoming climate commissioner warned on Friday (15 January).

"There are very important lessons from Copenhagen. In the last hours, China, India, Russia, Japan each spoke with one voice, while Europe spoke with many different voices," Denmark's Connie Hedegaard, the presumptive new 'climate action' chief, told MEPs during her job hearing in the European Parliament.

...She also backed the EU's promise to upgrade its 20 percent carbon reduction target to 30 percent. "I very much hope that by Mexico of course we could go to 30 percent," she said, referring to the next UN climate conference at the end of 2010.

By the end of the grilling, she had very clearly won over the chamber, with deputies joking with her about whether she would be taking a bicycle to work from now on.

"I go as often as I can by bike in Copenhagen ...but there are just not that many bike lanes in Belgium. I have to study the security situation, but my husband gave me a bike helmet for Christmas," Ms Hedegaard said.

Dacian Ciolos was subject to EC hearings today, Friday, in the European Parliament, after being designated Agriculture Commissioner. During hearings, he supported the need to continue the direct payments' system, but on reformed criteria. He supports the second Common Agricultural Policy (PAC) pillar, because the agriculture is closely connected with the rural environment and believes that here are the solutions to develop agriculture in the new member states ant solutions to fund small farms. The hearing concluded in the applause of the participants.

The Bulgarian government is set to announce on Friday (15 January) that Ms Jeleva did not break Bulgarian law in failing to declare her stake in Global Consult, a privatisation firm, when she became an MEP in 2007, the New Europe newspaper reports

A document signed by Bulgarian deputy justice minister, Lyudmila Petrova, and published by the paper on Thursday states that the Prevention and Exposure of Conflict of Interests Act only came into force on 1 January 2009, meaning that Ms Jeleva was under no obligation to disclose the information when she was elected.

The EU parliament's legal services are currently studying other papers in the case ahead of the plenary session in Strasbourg next week. MEPs have also asked the EU commission to reveal if its internal audit of Ms Jeleva revealed any irregularities.

...Senior members of the Socialist group in the EU parliament have already begun to switch their focus from Ms Jeleva's financial declaration to the question of merit.

"Apart from the financial story, she had the weakest presentation, way below the necessary standards," Austrian centre-left MEP Hannes Swoboda said in the Wiener Zeitung newspaper on Friday.

"I fear that a second hearing will be worse than the first," the leader of the Socialist group, German MEP Martin Schulz, said on Thursday. "Her performance showed beyond doubt that she is incompetent."

Parliamentarians from across the political spectrum said they were disappointed by the Liberal Dutch politician's vague answers, apparent unwillingness to back pro-consumer lines on a number of issues and considerable knowledge gaps in key areas of the policy.

UK Conservative MEP Malcolm Harbour criticised Ms Kroes for not showing enough ambition to tackle abuses in the telecoms market. "I thought you would be more challenging, given your reputation," he said, with others citing wishy-washy responses to questions on digital copyright law.

...The industry committee's political co-ordinators met after the three-hour grilling, with Austrian centre-right MEP Paul Rübig subsequently saying the panel had agreed to a second, closed-door meeting in Strasbourg next week to clarify her position on the key issues.

Britain should give up trying to punch above its weight internationally and stop routinely deploying troops to world trouble spots, the chairman of the parliamentary committee that oversees the intelligence services said yesterday.

Kim Howells told The Independent that the succession of British deaths in Afghanistan proved the time had come to abandon the pretence that the UK could be at "the very, very sharp end" of United Nations military operations.

Mr Howells, a former Foreign Office minister, called for a fundamental rethink of the nation's place on the world stage.

A BNP member who spent a decade building up a cache of weapons in a bedroom hideaway was jailed for 11 years today.

Bus driver Terrance Gavan manufactured highly dangerous firearms and explosives at the home where he lived with his mother in Batley, West Yorkshire.

Police discovered 54 improvised explosive devices including nail bombs and a booby-trapped cigarette packet at the address, as well as 12 firearms.

The German government's integration commissioner, Maria Boehmer proposed the initiative this week, saying it would ensure that the public service sector better mirrored the country's population.

"In Germany, one in five residents has an immigrant background. It is, therefore, important that immigrants are appropriately represented in the public sector," Boehmer said in Berlin on Thursday.

But Germans politicians - both from Boehmer's own conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU) as well as from the center-left opposition - have opposed the measure.

"A quota is not compatible with our constitutional and legal culture," Olaf Scholz, deputy head of the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) parliamentary group told daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.

"The goal of having more immigrants in public service jobs is a good one - but a quota is inappropriate," he added.

Pope Benedict XVI's planned visit to Rome's main synagogue on Sunday has sharply divided Italian Jews, with some angered by his moves to push World War II Pope Pius XII toward sainthood.

Some Jews and historians have accused Pius of not doing enough to stop the Holocaust.

The Casalese were brought to international attention thanks to Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah. Saviano was condemned to death by the Casalese and since lives under escort.

While the sentence has a strong symbolic sense, the Casalese continue to be the major criminal force at large in the Neapolitan area with strong roots throughout Italy and abroad. Two of the bosses condemned are still at large.

"We will attain our goals by any means possible," finance minister George Papaconstantinou told a news conference on Thursday (14 January), with the measures set to be presented to the European Commission on Friday.

Under the plan, the newly elected socialist government aims to cut the deficit to 8.7 percent of GDP this year, 5.6 percent next year and below 3 percent by 2012.

Barack Obama channelled popular anger against Wall Street bonuses yesterday as he announced a $117bn (£72bn) tax on the finance industry.

The levy will hit about 50 institutions and be spread out over at least the next 10 years, with bigger and riskier institutions forced to pay the most, something that the President said would help to change behaviour and prevent a repeat of the credit crisis.

"My commitment is to recover every single dime the American people are owed," Mr Obama declared. "And my determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people."

Ratcheting up the rhetoric against Wall Street, the President said that executives opposed to the tax were using "twisted logic" and he demanded that banks dip into their bonus pools for employees to pay the levy instead of "sticking it" to shareholders and customers.

ITALY: Alstom's AGV demonstrator high speed trainset will begin a test programme in Italy on January 14, validating the Italian signalling and safety equipment required by launch customer NTV.

The prototype AGV trainset is expected to cover more than 60 000 km by July, running initially on the Roma - Firenze conventional line, then on part of the Roma - Napoli high speed line and finally on the Roma - Firenze direttissima.

...Alstom Transport expects to complete the first of the 25 production trainsets for NTV this autumn. Certification will be obtained by mid-2011, with entry into service that year.

NTV will be the first "truly" private high-speed operator making use of the EU's new open access rules.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

   "The Hobbs Act defines extortion as the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right. 18 U.S.C. S 1951."

Interesting story in which Citi and J.P. Morgan among second lien holders are demanding cash payments "off the books" from homeowners in order to allow a short sale to proceed in lieu of a foreclosure, a total loss and a black mark on their credit record.

Was my characterization of the big Wall Street banks as 'sociopathic' a bit harsh as a reader asked?

No, more likely understated. Remember, this is not some small local lender facing a loss and trying to get something out of it for their trouble. These are the TARP-sucking, discount window-feeding, bonus paying, fraudulent flim-flam 29.9% interest-charging pigmen who are demanding a pound of flesh from the down and out and the dispossessed as a consequence of their own reckless lending practices.

Change you can believe in.

Without any doubt, the real person of the year is none other than the Italian public debt. It has grown more than the economy, inflation or the people's salaries. In October it climbed to more than 1,800 billion Euro and then took a break in November, settling at around 1.783 billion just before the Christmas holidays. It is ready to take off again and surprise everyone in 2010. No one knows what heights it could achieve. Those who have dared to make forecasts have always been beaten by the reality. 2009 will close with a public debt that is forecast to be about 140 billion higher than that at the end of 2008, which ended with a public debt of 1,664 billion. Every Italian is personally liable for 30,000 Euro, a debt accrued on his/her behalf by the Government. Therefore, a family of four has a cumulative liability of 120,000 Euro. Each of us would have to take out a twenty-year loan to repay this debt. In 2009, Tremorti indebted us to the tune of almost one billion Euro more every two days. On what has he spent this monumental amount of money? What we want to know is where has all that money gone? No one knows for certain. As at the end of November, the Treasury's account balance between income and expenditure stood at less than 74 billion. Expenditure increased by 44.8 billion compared to the same period in 2008. Tax income dropped by 3.4% in a single year while expenditure rose by 11.1%. A crazy economic policy that no family man in his right mind would dream of applying to his family budget. Our public debt is amongst the highest in the world and has to be addressed, but no politician is willing to talk about it. So our debt is growing and our GDP is falling? No problem, our debt becomes part of our GDP. Italy is one of the biggest producers of debt and exports it everywhere. Tremorti placed a not insignificant amount of it on his last trip to China. Any party that holds another party's debt can control the debtor and, if the debt is large enough, he becomes the debtor's master. It works the same way when one is talking about Countries, but who is the holder of our debt? Who is our master and is thus able to influence, for example, our foreign policy or economic policy? The final debtor, namely the man in the street, has no answer to this question. The fact is that we simply don't know. Prior to the coming of the Euro, monetary inflation was the tool used to balance the Country's books. Purchasing power would decrease and we all became poorer. Now that this tactic is no longer possible, the debt increases to the point of default. That's because not even a debt as sound as that of Italy can continue to increase indefinitely. However, today our debt is the world's latest "Made in Italy" product, if you think about it, it's absolutely fantastic, productivity along the lines of the olden-day Brianza. Italy is producing half a billion Euro a day of export quality public debt. The public debt is the Country's top industry and can only grow! Heading for catastrophe with optimism.

It is not only David Cameron's glossy, tie-less election poster that has been airbrushed. The ugly spots and oily patches in the Tory leader's policies have also been successfully pixellated out of the public mind - by a Prime Minister with the communications skills of a malfunctioning speak-your-weight machine, by a Labour Party engaged in self-strangulation, and by a malfunctioning media pitched at the intellectual level of the Mr Men books. So nobody sees Cameron's policies; nobody knows. Most of us will only discover them after he has won, when we will wonder why nobody told us this was coming.

For example, a perfect laboratory experiment in Cameronomics has been taking place just next door, in Ireland - but who knows about it? One of the remaining real differences between Labour and the Conservatives is over how governments should behave in a recession. At first glance, David Cameron's proposal sounds like common sense. When times are bad, you - as an individual, or a family - figure out how to cut your spending and pay down your debts. No more fancy nights out. Holiday at home. Put the stuff you don't want on eBay.

Cameron says government should do the same: it should slash its debts, even if that means dramatically slashing spending. This was the view of economics that prevailed until the Great Depression - and it has only just made a comeback.

FRANCE 24 correspondent Melissa Bell, reporting from Port-au-Prince on Friday morning (0700 GMT+1), says the relief that is pouring into the country has so far done little to alleviate the Haitians' suffering. "It is very hard to see any tangible results," she says.

In the meantime, concerns are mounting that desperation is turning to anger in the streets.

"There are fears that this could degenerate into something far uglier than the aftermath of an earthquake," Bell says, adding that there have been reports of looting at what few shops remain standing in the capital.

Security concerns are already complicating relief efforts. The UN's World Food Programme said on Friday that its stockpiles had been pillaged in the Haitian capital. "Our warehouses in Port-au-Prince have been looted," said spokeswoman Emilia Casell. " We will have to restock."

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told reporters he had raised specific human rights cases in his meeting with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. But he declined to say which dissidents he had mentioned, saying that wouldn't help their cause.

(But of course, mentioning it does help Guido's cause...)

The wife of Liu Xiaobo, a dissident sentenced last month to 11 years in prison for "incitement to subvert state power," had asked Westerwelle to bring up her husband's case in his high-level meetings. "It would be very important," she told the German press agency, dpa.

The German foreign minister is in China as part of a four-day trip to Asia - his first since becoming foreign minister - and is set to meet with opposition groups on Saturday.

AFP - Japan's defence minister on Friday ordered the end of a naval refuelling mission in the Indian Ocean that has supported the US-led war in Afghanistan since 2001, his ministry said.

"The defence minister issued an order at 11:00 am (0200 GMT) today to the fleet commander to end refuelling activity in the Indian Ocean at 12:00 pm on January 15 and to send the troops home," the ministry said in a statement.

The move fulfils a pledge by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's centre-left government, which took office in September vowing a less subservient relationship with security partner the United States.

A roadside explosion narrowly missed two cars carrying Israeli diplomats at the border crossing between Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Thursday. No casualties were reported.

Prince william will face protesters, including MPs, when he opens the Supreme Court building in Wellington on Monday.

Labour MP Clare Curran and Green MP Keith Locke will stand with republican advocates when a banner is unfurled saying: "It's Time For A Republic."

Dear UK: we don't want your useless inbreds either.

Wrestling with a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, Arizona decided Friday to close nearly all of its state parks, including the famed Tombstone Courthouse and Yuma Territorial Prison.

The State Parks Board unanimously voted to close 13 parks by June 3. Eight others had already been closed, and the decision would leave nine open -- but only if the board can raise $3 million this year.

The action represents the largest closure of state parks in the nation, although several other states are considering similar moves.

"It's a dark day for the Arizona state parks system," said Renee Bahl, the system's executive director. "We have 65,000 acres around the state and the majority of them are closing."

The Arizona parks receive about 2.3 million visitors per year who bring about $266 million into the state, Bahl said.

Born in Heidleberg, Lackner, 57, is a geophysicist and director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at the renowned Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York. He's also the man behind an ambitious new solution for the climate change problem. The scientist wants to build millions of CO2 catchers, machines the size of shipping containers fitted with chemical filters to pull greenhouse gases out of the air the same way trees do. The devices may be bulkier and less attractive than real trees, but they are thousands of times more efficient.

In 2009, the EU banned the import of seal products. The legislation was one of the most non-partisan bills to pass through the European Parliament. Believing the issue to be massively popular amongst EU citizens ahead of elections to the chamber in June, some 550 deputies voted in favour of the ban, with just 49 opposed.

The groups will aim to prove that the seal hunt is, contrary to the European legislation's justification, humane. The suit will also maintain that the hunt is environmentally sustainable and that seals are not endangered.

Calling the EU ban the product of a "shrill campaign" by animal rights "extremists", Mary Simon, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, said: "Inuit have been hunting seals and sustaining themselves for food, clothing, and trade for many generations."

Wild chimpanzees have been observed carrying out a "fire dance" in front of grassland wildfires as part of a suite of unusual behaviours that could indicate an ability of man's closet living relative to understand and even control fire.

Instead of fleeing the wildfires in panic, the chimps were seen to monitor them carefully, showing no signs of the fear that other animals normally exhibit. Their leader - the alpha male - was even observed performing a ritualistic display while facing the flames.

A storm of protest has forced scientists in Austria to abandon experiments on pigs buried in snow. Animal rights activists say the tests on live animals are unacceptable. The researchers counter that it is vital to help save human lives in the aftermath of an avalanche.

The tests were supposed to last two weeks, but an avalanche of criticism has forced scientists to stop after just three days. Protests by animal rights activists have brought a controversial experiment involving pigs in the Austrian Alps to a halt. On Tuesday, scientists had commenced burying the animals in the snow and monitoring their deaths in an attempt to determine what factors make it possible for humans to survive avalanches.

...Germany's new coalition government of the center-right Christian Democrats and the business-friendly Free Democrats wants to continue with research into the suitability of Gorleben as a national permanent repository for radioactive waste.

But that isn't likely to happen any time soon, because the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party will not hand over the salt dome to the conservatives without a fight. This month, they plan to petition for the establishment of an investigative committee to look at the Gorleben project. The issue of radioactive waste is set to become a major bone of contention between the government and the opposition.

As the petition states, the purpose of the investigative committee will be to uncover errors and omissions made over a period of three decades "as completely as possible," as well as to investigate "undue exertion of political influence" and "conflicts of interest within the federal government" due to its close ties to industry. Was political manipulation involved in the selection of Gorleben as a site? "The suspicions are very clear," says Sylvia Kotting-Uhl, the Green Party's nuclear policy spokeswoman, who initiated the investigative committee together with other members of her party.

...Previously unknown documents and interviews with contemporary witnesses already reveal that instead of geology and nuclear physics, partisan politics and power struggles shaped the search for permanent repositories from the start, which is why a feasible solution hasn't been found to this day. But the industry's spent fuel rods will have to be disposed of somewhere. Germany's mountain of radioactive waste, which is growing from one year to the next, cannot be kept in ordinary warehouses forever.

(For detail on the last paragraph, see Nuclear dump (of final storage and German elections).)

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

"It's the end of the epidemic," Thierry Blanchon, one of the doctors of the Sentinelles flu monitoring network, told AFP.

The number of cases of the fever reported to doctors has "fallen below the epidemic level for the past two weeks," he said. "The virus is certainly still spreading, but at a very weak pace."

He added that vaccinations should continue in order to prevent a resurgence of the A(H1N1) flu virus, which health authorities say has killed 240 people in mainland France.

A solar eclipse that reduced the sun to a blazing ring surrounding a sombre disk plunged millions of people in Africa and Asia into semi-darkness on Friday.

The spectacle, visible in a roughly 185-mile band running 8,060 miles across the globe, set a record for the longest annular eclipse that will remain unbeaten for more than a thousand years.

An annular eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly in front of the sun but does not completely obscure it, thus leaving a ring - an annulus - of sunlight flaring around the lunar disk.

Solar Eclipse 2010 (PHOTOS)

The longest annular solar eclipse of the millennium occurred in Africa and Asia today, and we've collected some of the best pictures documenting the big event. Take a look, and vote for your favorite!

RALEIGH The sea level on the N.C. coast is likely to rise by 1.2 feet to as much as 4.6 feet this century, a panel of scientists told a state forum today.

The broad range reflects the uncertainty in how much the seas will rise, the panel reported. Globally, the rise has accelerated since the 1990s and that trend is expected to continue.

The estimates will be used by coastal managers for planning purposes, but they could widely affect residents too. By including sea level rise in land-management plans on the coast, for instance, areas that are likely to flood in future decades could be declared unsuited for high-density development.

The N.C. Department of Transportation is already considering the likely rise of the sea in coming decades as it designs coastal bridges and highways, officials said.

Addressing sea-level rise "is going to cost. It's pay now or pay later," said David Knight, an assistant secretary of the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources. "It's hard to think 80 to 100 years down the road, which is why it's important to incorporate it into long-term planning and let science lead on this."

Twenty years ago thousands of protestors stormed the offices of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, looking for secret files on their lives. Deutsche Welle spoke with the commissioner now in charge of the archive.

A Frenchman is building a resort for well-heeled tourists among the ruins of a former communist gulag in Romania. Hundreds of prisoners died in this forgotten area along the Danube River. Now it is being turned into a haven for nature lovers.

There isn't much snow on the ground and there is no ice in the river yet. Nevertheless, the nights are frosty in Periprava, a remote and seemingly forgotten Romanian village in the Danube Delta.

Periprava lies in a forgotten corner of the country, right up against the old border with the Soviet Union. Every other day, a ferry crosses the river from the Ukrainian side, passing the rusty skeletons of ships, the onion-shaped domes of Orthodox churches and abandoned observation posts. Periprava, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the spot where the northern branch of the Danube empties into the Black Sea, is the last stop on the ferry route.

Popular interest in history is peaking like perhaps never before in the 21st century. Films such as Spartan gore-fest 300 have proven big hits at the box office in recent years, and many more ancient world movies - including Centurion, Clash of the Titans and Valhalla Rising - are set to arrive in 2010.

TV historians such as Simon Schama and David Starkey are household names. Dan Brown's Lost Symbol dominated the fiction chart in the past year and all of the novels shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2009 were set against historical backdrops, with the winner - Hilary Mantel's Tudor England-based Wolf Hall - proving the most popular Booker prize winner of all time.

The past most definitely sells. Yet, for some reason, interest in history as a subject of study is dwindling among young learners - in England pupils taking history at GCSE level has dropped as low as one in three. Some voices argue that we need to do a better job of firing youngsters' imaginations when it comes to teaching history, by using learning tools that excite as well as enlighten - in other words making better use of edutainment, as it's known.

Can historical fiction - in the form of novels, plays, films or even video games - pass as education when it comes to teaching history? Or are the old fashioned ways still the best? We asked a number of commentators, and their responses were consistent: with caveats, there's undoubtedly a place for entertainment in modern learning, as a means of channelling youngsters into the streams of traditional education.

The BBC has been warned to stop chasing young viewers and mass audiences by wasting money on sports rights, such as for Formula One coverage, and formulaic game shows, such as BBC One's Hole in the Wall, that could be provided by commercial channels.

A report by Policy Exchange, the centre-right progressive think-tank regarded as influential within David Cameron's Conservative strategy team, calls for the BBC to be made to spend 5 per cent of its licence fee income on making distinctive programmes for other broadcasters. It says that the BBC should not be trying to outbid commercial broadcasters to hire popular entertainment presenters and should end its obsession with attracting viewers under the age of 35.

(In case people forgot what the Tories are about.)

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Silvio Berlusconi was absent in court at the resumption of his corruption trial on Friday with his lawyers asking for earlier hearings to be invalidated. The Italian Prime Minister is accused of trying to buy the silence of his former tax lawyer.

Of course personal pique is not the only reason the rich assholes who control all the money for New York Democrats might throw their support behind a failed Tennessee politician with no name recognition who is also to the right of an incumbent who is already perceived as too conservative. See, Ford lives in their bubble of privilege, and "works" for Merrill Lynch, and so he agrees with them that everyone should probably start being much nicer to bankers. He also, like them, operates under the mistaken belief that anyone has been mean to bankers. The simple fact that someone running under the slogan "let's be much, much meaner to bankers" would win in a historic landslide has not occurred them them--or if it has, perhaps it frightened them into Harold's waiting arms.

Read more...

Every now and then you have to salute a genius. Both the Daily Mail and the Metro report new research analysing the positions of Britain's ancient sites, and the results are startling: primitive man had his own form of "sat nav". Researcher Tom Brooks analysed 1,500 prehistoric monuments, and found them all to be on a grid of isosceles triangles, each pointing to the next site, allowing our ancestors to travel between settlements with pinpoint accuracy. The papers even carried an example of his map work, which I have reproduced here.

Wonderful.

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