Kristalina Georgieva -- Bulgaria's nominee to be the new EU Commissioner for International Co-operation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Prevention -- is expected to be approved for the post following a flawless performance at her confirmation hearing before the European Parliament (EP) on Wednesday (February 3rd).

"For those in need around the world, this is the most important portfolio," she said in her opening remarks at the three-hour session. The 56-year-old scholar and economist pledged to become "the voice of the voiceless" within the European Commission (EC).

Georgieva has served as vice-president and corporate secretary of the World Bank Group since March 2008. She was nominated to EU commissioner post about three weeks ago, after Bulgaria's original candidate, Rumiana Jeleva, withdrew her candidacy amid allegations concerning personal integrity and competence. Jeleva was later cleared but decided to resign from all government posts

Wind and solar technology made up over half of Europe's new electricity generating capacity in 2009, as the number of new coal and nuclear facilities fell

More wind capacity was installed in Europe during 2009 than any other electricity-generating technology, according to statistics released today by the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA).

Wind accounted for 39 per cent of increased European energy capacity, ahead of gas (26 per cent) and solar (16 per cent). In contrast, the nuclear and coal power sectors decommissioned more megawatts of capacity than they installed in 2009, with a total of 1,393 MW of nuclear and 3,200 MW of coal decommissioned.

Wind investment

According to the EWEA report, €13 billion has been invested in wind farms across the EU in the last year, which are now capable of meeting 4.8 per cent of EU energy demands. 

An expert report is demanding urgent action to address chronic skills shortages in Europe's labour market, as unemployment in the euro zone hits 10%.

One in three Europeans of working age has few or no formal qualifications, making them 40% less likely to be employed than those with medium-level qualifications, according to figures compiled by an expert group.

Nearly a third of Europe's population aged 25-64 have no, or only low, formal qualifications and only one quarter have high-level qualifications, according to the 'New Skills for New Jobs' report.

The document, written by an independent panel established by the European Commission, was published yesterday (4 February)and is expected to feed into a new skills strategy due to be launched by the EU executive later this year.

Workers who are trained do not always have the right skills that employers are looking for, thus creating mismatches in the labour market.

Germany supports the creation of a European army in the long term so that the EU can be a "global player," Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

"The long-term goal is the establishment of a European army under full parliamentary control.

"The European Union must live up to its political role as a global player. It must be able to manage crises independently. It must be able to respond quickly, flexibly and to take a united stand," he said.

Share28 Bush, Cheney and the Great Escape

Friday 05 February 2010

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Photo: phxpma; Edited: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)

With each passing day, it becomes more and more astonishing to encompass the fact that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their henchmen from the prior administration have managed thus far to escape any accounting whatsoever for the massive battery of criminal activity committed during their time in office. More than a year has passed since these men had their hands on the levers of power, and evidence of their myriad crimes and frauds is laying all over the countryside, yet nothing has come of it.

The British government has been running a wide-ranging inquiry into the manner in which the UK and United States were led to war in Iraq by then-President Bush and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. An astonishing amount of damning evidence and information has been uncovered and publicly aired, including the following statements delivered by a senior member of Parliament (MP) on Tuesday:

A senior Welsh MP said last night he knew "for certain" Tony Blair and George Bush struck a deal to invade Iraq at their notorious Crawford Ranch meeting in 2002 - a year before war was declared. Elfyn Llwyd, Plaid Cymru's parliamentary leader, said he had seen a confidential memo to that effect, although he would not divulge its exact contents.

Jürgen Rüttgers, the powerful governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, currently holds the reins of German politics. He doesn't want anyone rocking the boat before crucial state elections in May and is hampering much-needed reforms. He could even pose a challenge to Chancellor Angela Merkel.

It isn't hard to get the prominent German politician Jürgen Rüttgers angry. In fact, all it takes is a single question, as a recent incident showed.

Rüttgers, who is the conservative governor of Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, had just schmoozed his way through his party's New Year's reception in the city of Gelsenkirchen. "Nice to see you," he said enthusiastically to his guests, speaking in the local dialect of German. Rüttgers was playing the role of the patriarchal state governor with gusto, showing that he was ready to listen to anyone, even for the head of the local community garden association.

Wilfried Martens, the chair of the largest European party, sheds light on the secretive appointment of `European president' Herman Van Rompuy.

Wilfried Martens (73) is a powerful man in Brussels. As the chair of the European People's Party, Europe's largest political party and the former prime minister of Belgium, he played an important behind-the-scenes role in the appointment of his compatriot Herman Van Rompuy to the newly created office of permanent president of the European Council.

The appointment process was a backroom affair. The rumour mill was awash with names of potential candidates, including that of the Dutch prime-minister Jan Peter Balkenende and Luxembourg's Jean-Claude Juncker. Now, days before Van Rompuy will host his first European summit, Martens sheds light on the events leading up to the appointment of the most important European politician.

The EU's new foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton has called on Brussels to combine its hard and soft power to assume greater international power and responsiblity.  

In her first major security policy speech since assuming office as the diplomatic director of the European Union, Ashton said the EU should combine its soft and hard power to take responsibility on the international stage.

"We must mobilize all our levers of influence - political, economic, plus civil and military crisis management tools - in support of a single political strategy."

Ashton made the comments at the Munich Security Conference, a a gathering of the world's top defense officials.

"The days when a common EU foreign policy was regarded as mere talk are numbered," she said at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

Ukrainians vote Sunday in a close and bitter presidential run-off between Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and pro-Russian opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich.

REUTERS - Ukrainian voters choose between Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich in a close presidential run-off on Sunday that could yet disappoint hopes of a swift return to stability.  Many commentators predict a narrow victory by opposition leader Yanukovich, but fiery Prime Minister Tymoshenko is threatening to summon protesters in a replay of the 2004 "Orange Revolution" if she deems the second-round election unfair.

Portuguese police have uncovered 1.5 tonnes of bomb-making materials in a house used by suspected members of the Basque separatist group ETA. Spanish officials said the discovery could be another major blow to the militant organisation.

AFP - Police in Portugal found nearly 1.5 tonnes of bomb-making materials in a house used by suspected militants from armed Basque separatist group ETA, Spain's interior ministry said Saturday.
  
Experts said the raid on the cache -- if confirmed to belong to ETA -- would deal a strategic blow to the armed group's suspected bid to set up a rear base across the Spanish border in Portugal.
  
A Spanish ministry statement said: "Portuguese security forces have seized nearly 1.5 tonnes of explosives in the house used by the terrorist group ETA in Portugal."
  

Dominique Strauss-Kahn (pictured) told French radio Thursday he would consider running for the French presidency "in certain circumstances". A CSA poll suggested that the director of the IMF would defeat President Sarkozy by a margin of 52% to 48%. AFP - IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Thursday left open the possibility of quitting his Washington-based job to run for the French presidency.
  
Polls show the former French finance minister is a more popular choice to become the left's candidate in the 2012 presidential race than the current Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry.
  
The managing director of the International Monetary Fund told French radio that he could "in certain circumstances" reconsider whether to stay in Washington.
  

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Major economies with inflexible currencies must consider strengthening them if the global economy is to be weaned off its dependence on U.S. spending and Asian savings, according to a report prepared for a meeting of finance chiefs from the Group of Seven.

"Countries with inflexible nominal exchange rates must permit greater flexibility in real exchange rates either through higher inflation or a nominal appreciation of their currency," the document, drawn up by Canada's Finance Ministry and obtained by Bloomberg News, said.

G-7 finance ministers and central bankers are meeting in Iqaluit, Canada, today as policy makers seek to avoid a widening of distortions such as the U.S. trade deficit and the Chinese current-account surplus, which economists blame for helping deepen the worst postwar worldwide recession.

"While global imbalances were not the primary cause of the financial crisis, there is little doubt that they were an important contributor to the recession we faced," the G-7 document said. "For global growth to be sustainable, it must be balanced."

The report doesn't mention which countries are viewed as having inflexible currencies. China has attracted criticism this year from foreign governments for limiting gains in the value of its yuan since July 2008 after it strengthened 21 percent against the dollar over the previous three years.

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Dexia SA, which received billions of euros in capital and funding guarantees from France, Belgium and Luxembourg, agreed to sell assets in Italy, Spain and Slovakia to gain European Union approval of the taxpayer-funded bailout.

Dexia will sell municipal-lending units in Italy and Spain, its Slovak consumer-banking network and its Turkish insurance unit, Chief Executive Officer Pierre Mariani and Chairman Jean- Luc Dehaene said at a press conference in Brussels yesterday.

"The European Commission asked us to make additional efforts," Mariani said. These steps should "contribute to solve the group's problems rather than aggravate them."

Dexia's agreement with the European Union aims to reduce the bank's dependency on short-term credit, which led it to seek a government rescue after credit markets seized up following Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s collapse in September 2008. Dexia joins Amsterdam-based ING Groep NV, Lloyds Banking Group Plc and KBC Groep NV in winning EU approval for government bailouts after agreeing to sell assets.

Furthermore, even accounting for accounting slippages, the Greek budget deficit for 2009-2010 is likely to be lower, possibly much lower, than those in the UK and US, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development projections. Nor is Greek public debt unusual, by current standards. It is about half that of Japan and lower than Italy's. So why Greece and why now? Here is my conspiracy theory.
...
The first step in my theory is the non-controversial conclusion that the only reason why the Greek government might default is market pressure.
...
Here comes the second step of my conspiracy theory.

Rumour has it that some large German and French banks have a significant exposure to Greek debt. Rumour also has it that the same banks have yet to recognise much of their losses on US subprime mortgages. Now things start hanging together. France and Germany can allow Greece to default, but not some big, systemically important European banks.
...

Unfortunately, anyone who truly believes that, anytime soon, we will be in a position to regain the level of competitivity enjoyed by most Italian manufacturers only ten years ago thanks to a favourable exchange rate is very sadly mistaken.
More specifically, we are facing a collapse in the industrial manufacturing sector that will take us back 20 years, meaning jobs that we will never be regained. Those who are thinking about copying the English model, which is based on the services and advanced tertiary sectors, has unfortunately entirely failed to grasp precisely what happened in England, a Country that, more than 20 years ago now, chose to follow the Thatcher route that entailed the selling-off of major State assets, or in other words privatising everything. Now, twenty years on, while England is still rueing those criminal political choices, these people that continuously talk about a recovery while in 2009 our GDP dropped by 6% and the forecasts for 2010 show an expected recovery of + 0.10% or 0.20%, in my opinion this is anything but a recovery and smacks of us being taken for a ride

LONDON (AP) -- The overall amount of money invested in soldiers, weapons and war has been largely unaffected by the global economic downturn, a think tank said in a report published Wednesday.

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies said the total amount of money spent on world defense budgets rose from $1.3 trillion to $1.55 trillion between 2006 and 2008, and likely continued to climb further in 2009.

TEHRAN, Feb 7 (Reuters) - Iran has established an energy fund backed by the Central Bank and other Iranian banks to help finance investments in the sector, Oil Minister Massoud Mirkazemi said on Sunday.

"The National Energy Fund, with the help of the resources of four local banks and the Central Bank, has been established to help finance major parts of the oil industry's activities," the official IRNA news agency quoted Mirkazemi as saying.

BANGKOK, Feb 3, 2010 (IPS) - A Thai national habit of openly speculating if this South-east Asian kingdom is on the verge of its next coup d'etat is in full flight.

Newspaper reports and commentaries are feeding this guessing game of the country's powerful military mounting the 19th putsch. It comes three and a half years after the army successfully staged the last one, on Sept. 19 2006, to oust the elected government of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

The 18th coup, in fact, began with a similar political script as the one currently unfolding. The press began speculating about a looming coup in early 2006, the military commanders denied it, till the tanks rumbled through Bangkok's streets.

`COUP DEBATE REFUSES TO DIE,' screamed the headline in Monday's edition of `The Nation', an English-language daily. The story that followed pointed to the inevitable. "To many observers, a military coup still looms on the horizon, and the question tilts towards when it would happen rather than if it would occur," wrote managing editor Thanong Khanthong.

The military, for its part, has helped fan the flames by a series of recent incidents. On the night of Jan. 25, 22 armoured personnel carriers (APCs) were spotted driving through the streets of Bangkok, resembling the scene that had played out on the night of Sept. 19, 2006.

This time, though, the APCs were on the streets for a more mundane mission: maintenance and repair work. Yet the apologies offered by the military brass for causing panic in politically jittery Thailand did little to slow down the rumour mill.

SILWAN, Occupied East Jerusalem, Feb 3, 2010 (IPS) - Backed by armed security men, the municipal inspectors race their jeeps through the narrow alleyways and up a hillside crowded with buildings.

Some of the homes are well-faced with stone; the naked concrete of others gives off something of a temporary air.

One block of flats stands out for its unusual seven-storey height in an area of the city where two or three storied buildings are the norm. And then there is the giant, blue-and-white Israeli national flag draped demonstratively over the front of the building, from the roof down to the ground.

This is the so-called `Beit Yehonatan', the House of Yehonatan, where religious Jews have put down a nationalist marker in the heart of this Palestinian neighbourhood, part of a major effort to change the face of Arab East Jerusalem that has been under Israeli occupation since 1967.

The inspectors' mission is to deliver demolition orders to owners of illegally-built homes, almost all of them Palestinians.

Beit Yehonatan is also exceptional in this respect. In July 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered that it too was built "illegally" by the settlers and should be evacuated and sealed off.

When, for the umpteenth time, the inspectors arrive at the settlers' building they find it shuttered. They are unable to gain access. It is not clear whether anybody is at home. Shrugging their shoulders the inspectors move on to deliver demolition orders on more accessible targets - Palestinian families.

Washington's continued efforts to build a missile defense shield in Europe have complicated nuclear arms reduction talks with Russia, Russia's deputy prime minister said on Saturday.

"It is impossible to talk seriously about the reduction of nuclear capabilities when a nuclear power is working to deploy protective systems against vehicles to deliver nuclear warheads possessed by other countries," Sergei Ivanov said at an international security conference in Munich.

Russia and the United States are in talks to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START 1), the cornerstone of post-Cold War arms control, which expired in December with a new deal.

Russia on Friday expressed concerns about Romania's decision to host missiles as part of a U.S. missile defense shield to protect European allies from possible Iranian attacks, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov demanded "clarifications."

The planned deployment in Romania comes after President Barack Obama scrapped plans for a radar and interceptor missiles in the Czech Republic and Poland, which Russia fiercely opposed as a national security threat and a blow on its nuclear deterrent. Moscow threatened retaliatory measures.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Saturday that Iran still had to prove to the rest of the world that it was willing to make meaningful concessions regarding its nuclear program.

"Our hand is still reaching out towards [Iran]," Westerwelle said on Saturday, February 6. "But so far it's reaching out into a void. And I've seen nothing since yesterday that makes me want to change that view."

These comments came 12 hours after Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki - a surprise visitor at this year's Munich Security Conference - said that he expected a deal between his country and Western powers "in the not very distant future."

Westerwelle called for combined efforts world-wide to reduce both conventional and nuclear weapons and stressed that the international community could not accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

The United States plans to unveil later this decade a new conventional "Prompt Global Strike" (C-PGS) system. It will enable the US to instantly carry out a massive conventional attack anywhere in the world in an hour or less.
...
"The US cannot take its current dominance for granted and needs to invest in the programs, platforms, and personnel that will ensure that dominance's persistence," wrote US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in a commentary accompanying the 2010 QDR entitled, "A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon For a New Age".

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 04, 2010
Speed is not a word typically associated with trees; they can take centuries to grow. However, a new study to be published the week of Feb. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change.

For more than 20 years forest ecologist Geoffrey Parker has tracked the growth of 55 stands of mixed hardwood forest plots in Maryland. The plots range in size, and some are as large as 2 acres. Parker's research is based at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, 26 miles east of the nation's capital.

Parker's tree censuses have revealed that the forest is packing on weight at a much faster rate than expected. He and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute postdoctoral fellow Sean McMahon discovered that, on average, the forest is growing an additional 2 tons per acre annually. That is the equivalent of a tree with a diameter of 2 feet sprouting up over a year.

New Delhi (AFP) Feb 5, 2010
Indian Premier Manmohan Singh on Friday lent his support to the beleaguered UN climate change panel, saying a glaring error in the body's key 2007 report did not change the science of global warming.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been under fire since revelations last month that its landmark Fourth Assessment Report mistakenly predicted that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 as a result of global warming.

The claim has been traced to the campaign group WWF, which in turn took the prediction from an article in New Scientist magazine in 1999.

Addressing a summit on sustainable development, Singh acknowledged that "some aspects of science reflected in the work of the IPCC have faced criticism.

"But this debate does not challenge the core projections of the IPCC upon the impact of greenhouse gas accumulations on temperature, rainfall and sea level rise," he said.

Where does our food come from?

These days, most people might think corn, the ubiquitous grain that provides the bulk of feed for our livestock; most of the sweetener for our soft drinks and snacks; and a large amount of our cooking fat.

But where does the corn--and other staple crops--come from? The answer to that question lies beneath our feet. Healthy soil is our food system's bottom line. Without it, food crops won't grow.

Farming, especially on today's industrial scale, is tough on soil, draining essential nutrients. The most critical nutrient is nitrogen, the building block of plants. A lot of energy and money have been spent figuring out how to replace it in the soil.

In the past 50 years, led by the United States, global agriculture has come to rely increasingly on a cheap, synthetic form of nitrogen produced in fertilizer factories that are powered by natural gas and other fossil fuels.

Before World War II, when the fertilizer industry was in its infancy, farmers used very little synthetic nitrogen. By 1964, U.S. farmers were applying about 4.3 million tons annually. In 2007, the last year for which the U.S. Department of Agriculture has figures, farmers dropped 5.7 million tons on the nation's corn crop alone. We now know that the undeniable benefits of synthetic nitrogen come with serious costs, both to the environment and to public health.

In this special Grist series, we'll be looking at where synthetic nitrogen comes from and what our reliance on it is doing to our health and to the health of our waterways and climate. We'll also be looking at ways in which synthetic nitrogen can be used more wisely--and, as much as possible, phased out.

Canada's Winter Olympics are ready to start after massive preparations, except for a desperate struggle to get hold of enough snow.

They have spent six years fretting about security, costs, protests and etiquette. But just five days before the opening of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, organisers are tackling a last-minute act of sabotage by the weather - a paucity of the white stuff.

The warmest January in history has left the slopes of Cypress Mountain, where the world's best snowboarders and mogul skiers will soon be going for gold, virtually free of snow.

MEXICO CITY, Feb 5, 2010 (IPS) - Street stalls in the centre of the Mexican capital openly display books and publications that are sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and Nazism, indicating that there is public demand for such items.

Along with the internet, the books - the most visible face of the neo-Nazi movement, which keeps to the shadows in Mexico - are its prime means of communication and dissemination.

The author of many of the publications is former Mexican journalist Salvador Borrego, who worked for the influential daily Excélsior during World War II. Borrego is Mexico's most prolific anti-Semitic writer and a leading Holocaust denier in the country.

"My works show the other side of the coin, the viewpoint of the defeated," Borrego said in an interview with IPS. "Both sides of the story must be presented, to let readers reach their own conclusions," added the writer, who has 44 volumes to his name, many of them neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic propaganda.

The National Socialist Party of Mexico (PNSM), which is not legally registered and is only active on the internet, bases its thinking on 14 principles referring to racial supremacy and its ethical and economic foundations, written in a pompous, disjointed, fanatic tone.

BUCHAREST, Feb 6, 2010 (IPS) - A textbook on human rights activism, being introduced in Romanian schools this year, steers away from preaching and uses interviews with global and local rights activists to suggest how young people may get involved.

The Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mexican attorney Digna Ochoa and Czech playwright Vaclav Havel are some of the people interviewed for the book `Speak Truth to Power' by Kerry Kennedy, the rights activist daughter of former U.S. senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy.

Many of the interviews are included in the Romanian version of a rights educational package that is being prepared for use in some high-schools in the country.

Alongside interviews with prominent global human rights defenders, the Romanian book contains discussions with local activists fighting such issues as domestic violence and the rights of the Roma.

HAVANA, Feb 5, 2010 (IPS) - A neighbour started calling Andrea del Sol "Perseverance," and the name stuck. Since 1998, she and a small group of women from Alamar, on the outskirts of the Cuban capital, have been throwing their combined energies behind a common purpose: "changing things."

They faced plenty of difficulties, such as finding a space where they could meet, creating a library and cleaning up the surroundings. But all these needs were easy to fill compared with the daily gender violence that is the norm in Cuba's foremost dormitory town.

"People from more than 57 municipalities around the country live in my area. Everyone has their own customs, roots and religion, and this is something to bear in mind when conflict situations arise," del Sol, who has lived in East Alamar for 20 years, told IPS.

"We live with naked physical aggression, and with secretive domestic violence. We have battered women, fathers who throw their sons or daughters out of the house, and parents who don't pay their children enough attention. And increasingly, we are experiencing violence on the streets," she said.

Row upon row of nearly identical prefabricated apartment blocks, corroded by salt from the sea air, stretch for kilometres. Only basic health and education services, some shops and a very few cultural, sports or recreation facilities break up the endless housing project with its unfinished look.

East Alamar, where del Sol lives, covers an area of nine square kilometres and is home to about 38,000 people. This figure does not include a large number of unregistered residents from the provinces, or other areas of Havana.

On Tuesday the Upper House finally backed a 2008 Lower House vote in favour of the ban. "Indecent acts" with animals are now punishable with an 18-month prison sentence, and pornography involving animals is explicitly outlawed.

While the Lower House voted unanimously in favour of the bill, in the Upper House there were some who spoke out against a law against bestiality - notably from the conservative VVD and Christian Democrat parties.

VVD senator Sybe Schaap described the legislation as "unworkable", and the Christian democrats described it as "symbolic politics".

Opponents of the ban were concerned that vets and farmers carrying out artificial insemination could fall foul of the law. The original term "sexual acts" with animals was therefore changed to "indecent acts".

Hub
The law was originally proposed by the Labour Party with the strong backing of the Animal Rights Party. It aims to put a stop to a flourishing trade in animal pornography based in the Netherlands. 

So people talk a lot about how insanely detailed this world is. But really, how detailed is it?

Says designer Yuri Bartoli:

Jim has always talked about a fractal layer of detail, where as you get closer to the world of Pandora, more and more levels of intricacy emerge to create a sense of reality. Just as in nature, there is always more structure than your eye can perceive. The color passes on the Banshee alone took me several weeks to complete, since including the necessary detail required multiple paintings 190 megapixels in size, as well as mapping them on the 3-D model to judge how these markings would look from the camera when wrapped around the creature.

Every weekend, Nicolas Norbert (20) and his friends from the Bondy suburb hit downtown Paris. One night, they will attend a one-off mega party, the next they visit one of its many nightclubs. "Everything is happening there," Norbert said.

Much to the amusement of his father, his current favourite is Le Gibus nightclub, near République. That is the exact same spot dad hung out 30 years ago. "Much remains the same in Paris," he offered.
The answer to the question if Paris is still bustling today depends on who you talk to. Eric Labbé, who organises dance parties and owns the popular music store, slash sound lab My Electro Kitchen, believes the party days in the French capital are over. "Paris is expensive and compact, the music scene is suffering from the economic problems and the dwindling tolerance of residents."

Deux hommes recouverts d'une burqa, selon les premiers éléments de l'enquête, munis d'au moins une arme de poing, ont braqué la Poste d'Athis-Mons (Essonne) samedi vers 10H30.

Croyant être face à deux femmes, un employé a ouvert le sas de la banque. Une fois à l'intérieur, les deux hommes ont relevé le voile et ont braqué les employés et les clients.

Comme le révèle Le Parisien, ils se sont fait remettre 4.500 euros, et, ajoute le quotidien, ont se sont enfuis à pied, vers le parking voisin.

Two men covered in a burqa, according to preliminary results of the investigation, have at least one handgun, have robbed the Post office in Athis-Mons (Essonne) Saturday around 10:30.

Believing be faced with two women, an employee opened the airlock of the bank. Once inside, the two men took up the veil and shine the employees and customers.

As revealed in Le Parisien, they did give 4,500 euros, and it said, had fled on foot toward the nearby parking.

A group of Belgian prisoners has started serving time across the border in the Netherlands. The Belgian government is renting 500 Dutch jail cells to reduce overcrowding in its own prison system. 

Thirty-five inmates from Wortel Prison in Belgium arrived at their new cells in the southern Dutch city of Tilburg on Friday. They are the first of at least 500 detainees expected to make the transfer.

This is all part of an agreement between Belgium and the Netherlands that allows Belgian prisoners to serve time in rented Dutch cells. Last October, the two governments signed an accord allowing for 500 cells at Tilburg Prison to be rented for a three-year period.

In January, Dutch lawmakers gave their final approval, and Belgium must now pay 30 million euros ($41 million) per year to use the cells. This equals about 164 euros per day for each prisoner. Meanwhile, Dutch inmates at Tilburg will be transferred to other prisons in the Netherlands.

I don't know how the word snork escaped my sensor for interesting neologisms. It is already quite old. A snork, apparently, is what you do when you suppress a laugh while drinking and force the liquid out through your nose. Etymology presumed as variation of 'snort' with a hint of surface diving.

Anyone else heard it used before in this sense?

And here's another curio: Diastema. It means a gap between two teeth. I came across it while reading about Terry-Thomas, an English actor who specialized in 'cad' roles. He appeared in the 1959 Boulting comedy 'I'm all right Jack', with Peter Sellers and Ian Carmichael (recently deceased). Quite a formative film for me - I was around 16 when I saw it. I can still vividly recall scenes from it, and am unable to see someone carry a tray of confections without recalling a certain sneeze in a sweet factory from the movie.

You can't be me, I'm taken