A UN committee has urged France to avoid collective deportations of Roma (Gypsies) to Romania.

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also said it was concerned about "discriminatory" political speeches in France.

The French government said it was "scrupulously respecting European law" and helping deported Roma reintegrate.

France has recently sent hundreds of Roma back to Romania and Bulgaria and dismantled more than 100 illegal camps.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that 300 such camps are to be removed. The latest round of deportations took place on Thursday. 'Residency limits'

The UN committee issued a series of recommendations urging France to "avoid" collective deportations and "strive for lasting solutions".

PARIS, Aug 28, 2010 (IPS) - The European Union (EU) is failing to fulfil its environmental commitments in practically all areas, from protecting biodiversity to improving air quality in the cities, according to official studies released this month.

This worrisome trend is confirmed by the European Commission, the bloc's governing body, in its latest Environment Policy Review released on Aug. 2.

In the document the EC says although many official environmental protection programmes have been launched and progress is evident in some areas, "further efforts are needed, in particular (to tackle) the loss of biodiversity."

The study states that only 17 percent of protected habitats and species have a good conservation status. And goes on to add: "Grasslands, wetlands and coastal habitats are the most vulnerable, mainly due to factors such as the decline in traditional patterns of agriculture, pressure by tourist development, and climate change."

In addition, the review warns, "The protection of soil biodiversity continues to present a challenge. The overexploitation of marine fisheries remains a threat to marine ecosystems, with some 45 percent of assessed European stocks falling outside safe biological limits."

Just 42% of Europeans say they trust the European Union, according to a new opinion poll, down six percentage points in just six months.

 The survey also found that fewer than half of Europe's citizens see their country's membership of the EU as a positive thing, but the European Commission is clinging to the positive elements of the report, particularly on economic governance.

Officials are presenting the new Eurobarometer as an endorsement of greater budget oversight from Brussels, pointing to the 75% of Europeans who said stronger coordination between member states will help weather the economic storm.

The research was done in May at the peak of negotiations on the €720 billion eurozone rescue fund (EurActiv 10/05/10). Ironically, it reveals that Slovaks (89%) are the most positively disposed towards an EU solution to the crisis - despite Slovakia's parliament recently pulling out of the EU-IMF bailout fund for Greece.

Clashes have erupted in the northern British city of Bradford, during the staging of a rally by the far-right English Defence League and a counter-rally by the anti-Fascist Unite Against Fascism.

Supporters of the English Defence League (EDL) threw bottles, stones and cans at Unite Against Fascism protesters in the multi-ethnic city of Yorkshire on Saturday.

Fears of scenes of race riots seen in the city nine years ago had been raised by the proposed rallies. 

The government had banned all marches in the city on Saturday for fear of tensions spilling over. The 2001 riots began after a far-right march was held.

The two groups therefore held static protests in different areas of the city.

(Reuters) - The so-called bond market vigilantes who in the past drove up U.S. bond yields and forced the government into more conservative budget policies are holding fire this time around.

For now these influential - and at times feared -- investors seem to have concluded the U.S. economy is still too weak and deflation too much of a danger to tackle the budget deficit right away.

Prominent economist Ed Yardeni coined the term "bond vigilantes" in 1984 to describe why major investors were demanding higher yields to compensate for perceived risks of rising inflation as a result of large deficits.

But in recent interviews, some major bond fund managers say huge deficits are less of a worry in the short term than maintaining spending to keep the world's largest economy from falling back into recession.

(Reuters) - Beaten-up investors go into September, historically a weak month for stocks, facing key reports on jobs, manufacturing and services. If those disappoint, the S&P 500 could breach technical support levels, pushing stocks yet lower.

The S&P 500 index has fallen nearly 13 percent since April as investors fret about the chance of a double-dip recession. But the index has found solid support around the 1,040 level, with a sustained move below that proving tough.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke boosted stocks on Friday by signaling the Fed is ready to act if the economy worsens. But more weakness in upcoming indicators like non-farm payrolls and Institute for Supply Management surveys would intensify fears the economy is sliding back into recession.

"There is this continual trend toward numbers falling short of expectations," said Nick Kalivas, equity analyst at MF Global in Chicago. "My guess is you'll see some selling come in again next week on these numbers."

(Reuters) - Tax and budget policies need the same regularity and independence as monetary policy if countries around the world are to cope with looming stresses from pension programs, world central bankers were told at a Federal Reserve conference on Saturday.

"Modern monetary research and practical policy-making are united in aiming to make monetary policy scientific," said Indiana University Economics Professor Eric Leeper in a paper. "No analogous transformation has occurred with macro fiscal policy."

Leeper presented his paper at an annual conference held by the U.S. Federal Reserve in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

His view will have resonance for policy-makers who in many countries have already cut interest rates to historically low levels and launched extensive asset purchase programs to stimulate growth. With prospects for new fiscal stimulus programs politically unpopular, central bankers are considering additional measures to ease financial conditions to support flagging recoveries in many countries represented at the conference.

Zhang Xin is betting hundreds of millions of dollars that the warnings of a housing crash are wrong. The former sweatshop worker has a track record of being right.

From her leafy, 11th-floor rooftop terrace at the headquarters of Soho China Ltd., billionaire Zhang Xin scans the relentlessly expanding Beijing skyline she helped create. Zhang's avant-garde buildings -- some sleek as chopsticks, others stepped like rice terraces -- became part of the hottest real estate market on Earth in 2010.

Zhang says she's well aware of the chorus of investors and economists who predict that China's property boom is about to go bust, taking the global economy down with it. The doomsday scenarios don't intimidate Zhang, a onetime penniless sweatshop worker who ascended to Wall Street by defying the odds. She hopes to prove skeptics wrong again this year by betting hundreds of millions of dollars on new buildings in Beijing and Shanghai, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September issue.

"I don't see any bubbles," says Zhang, dressed in a white V-neck zippered top, black slacks and red heels. "The next few months will be a fantastic time to buy."

(Reuters) - China is lobbying neighbors to sign up to a road map for renewed nuclear disarmament talks with North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong-il is visiting China amid conciliatory words and threats of "holy war."

The details of Beijing's plan for restarting stalled six-party nuclear talks came from a South Korean diplomatic source, who spoke on Saturday after discussion in Seoul with Wu Dawei, China's top envoy in the talks.

But the source, as well as a Japanese official speaking in Beijing, stressed that big obstacles remained, even if the secretive Kim's trip to China yields another vow of North Korea's willingness to sit down and discuss a dormant deal to scrap its nuclear weapons in return for aid.

(Reuters) - Foreign and Afghan troops killed 24 insurgents as they fought off pre-dawn attacks on two bases in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday, officials said, with the Taliban saying suicide bombers the fighters.

The attacks targeted the U.S. military's Forward Operating Base Chapman and nearby Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province near the eastern border with Pakistan, where U.S. and other foreign forces have been stepping up operations against a resurgent Taliban.

Seven Central Intelligence Agency officers were killed by a suicide bomber inside Chapman last December, the second-most deadly attack in CIA history.

Despite the presence of almost 150,000 foreign troops, violence across Afghanistan is at its worst since the Taliban were ousted by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001.

Asuncion, Paraguay (UPI) Aug 26, 2010
Paraguay is celebrating record economic growth on the back of its soy exports but remains exposed to domestic and international pressures to consolidate a more secure future.

An ever bigger uncertainty is political, not economic -- President Fernando Lugo's fight against cancer. Lugo, 59, a former Roman Catholic bishop who won election two years ago, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma this month.

Earlier the president was ambushed by multiple paternity claims by women he met during priesthood. But the scandals oddly enhanced his standing among Paraguayans respectful of virility in their leader. Lugo begged forgiveness and was back on the road until cancer struck.

News of the land-locked nation's soybean bonanza from the Central Bank brought cheer to the country, only to be tempered by Lugo's future and memory of Paraguay's relapse in the 2009 economic downturn, which was made worse by a prolonged drought.

Tens of thousands have gathered in Washington DC for a rally organised by Glenn Beck, a talk show host, at the site and on the anniversary of the iconic 1963 civil rights demonstration.

Civil rights leaders have protested the event, scheduling a march not far from Beck's gathering.

Beck, a commentator on Fox News and daily radio, has called Saturday's event a faith-based show of thanks and support for US military families, honoring "heroes, our heritage and our future."

Beck said the date of the rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the same location where Martin Luther King made his 'I have a dream' speech 47 years ago, is only coincidental.

He called it one of "divine providence".

Mexico: The United States, then, in addition to being responsible for much of the drug consumption that fuels Mexico's "drug war," and of putting in place very few obstacles to selling the assault rifles and guns used to kill Mexican police, civilians, and drug rivals, for fear out of financial panic blocks a full indictment of the criminal wrongdoings of big banks such as Wachovia, meekly asking them pay merely a small fine and to promise not to do it again...

Puerto Rico, SAN JUAN - Teachers on Thursday staged a 24-hour strike and paralyzed Puerto Rican public education to protest what they say is a general deterioration of the school system. The strike is a protest against the aim of privatizing employee pensions, a shortage of teachers and the degradation of physical plant, the president of the FMPR union, Rafael Feliciano, told Efe on Thursday.

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (GINA) -- As the government of Guyana continues to make interventions to ensure that the rice industry remains productive, a new agreement has been secured with its neighbouring counterpart Venezuela.  The US$38 million agreement is the largest ever signed by the governments of Guyana and Venezuela, secured during President Bharrat Jagdeo's recent visit to the neighbouring country in July. It was initially inked by Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud and Venezuela's Minister of Food Production.

SANTIAGO, Aug 28, 2010 (IPS) - Controversial plans to build the Barrancones thermoelectric plant near a protected area in the northern Chilean region of Coquimbo were cancelled Friday, but not before reviving the debate on other projects for polluting coal-fired power stations.

"Now Barrancones is being talked about as if it were the only project of its kind," Lorenzo Núñez, head of the Mother Earth Defence Committee (CODEMAT) in Tarapacá region, over 1,700 kilometres north of Santiago, told IPS.

For years CODEMAT has opposed the construction of two coal-fired thermoelectric plants close to the Chanavayita fishing cove, 54 kilometres south of Iquique, the capital of Tarapacá.

They are the Pacífico plant, a project of the Chilean company Río Seco, and the Patache project belonging to Compañía Eléctrica Tarapacá, which is controlled by Endesa, a Spanish energy giant.

CODEMAT, made up of groups of local residents and social organisations, organised a National Meeting of Social Movements Against Coal-Burning Thermoelectric Plants, running Thursday to Saturday Aug. 26-28 in Iquique.

As the proposed Cape Wind offshore wind farm in Massachusetts fends off some last ditch legal challenges to become the first offshore wind farm in the U.S., New Jersey yesterday passed a law that would ultimately make it the leading provider of offshore wind energy in the country.

The Offshore Wind Economic Development Act directs the state's Board of Public Utilities (BPU) to establish an offshore renewable energy certificate program that calls for a percentage of electricity sold in the state to be from offshore wind energy. The act would support the development of at least 1,100 megawatts of offshore wind energy capacity.

The bill was signed into law yesterday by Gov. Chris Christie yesterday at a former BP port facility that will be transformed into a regional hub for the offshore wind industry.

Distributing new varieties of drought tolerant maize to African farmers could save more than $1.5 billion dollars, boost yields by up to a quarter and lift some of the world's poorest out of poverty, a study found.

The study published on Thursday by the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), with input from other food research institutes, focused on 13 African countries in which it has been handing out drought tolerant maize to farmers over the past four years.

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It described maize as "the most important cereal crop in Africa," a lifeline to 300 million vulnerable people.

The Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa plan aims to hasten the adoption of maize varieties that withstand dry weather.

CAPE TOWN, Aug 27, 2010 (IPS) - Civil society organisations have reacted with outrage to claims that the international campaign against genetically modified (GM) crops is partly responsible for food shortages and food insecurity in Africa.

"Food insecurity in developing regions such as Africa is partially a result of the anti-GM campaign," David King, director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University in Britain, said during the 15th World Congress of Food Science and Technology held between Aug 22-26 in Cape Town, South Africa.

King added that, "many African countries have the idea that food that is not good enough for Europeans, is not good enough for Africans.

"In Europe, people might have a choice between conventional and genetically modified products. In Africa, this is not the case. Here, any food that is available is great."

South African organisations that oppose the genetic modification of food, such as the South African Freeze Alliance on Genetic Engineering (SAFeAGE), have condemned King's statements.

"Africa's food insecurity has nothing to do with the anti-GM campaign," said Fahrie Hassan, media spokesperson at SAFeAGE.

Reading about the recall of 550 million possibly salmonella-tainted U.S. eggs, laid and packed in just a handful of massive Iowa factories made me think about the egg aisle of a Sainsbury's supermarket I visited in England, near Brighton, two years ago.

I was so struck by the store signage, which read not only "Organic" and "Free Range" -- familiar terms -- but also "Barn" and "Caged," that I took several pictures with my iPhone. ...

...

In line with its more protective attitude toward consumers, Europe requires any genetically modified food ingredients to be identified as such. Egg operations over a certain size are required to vaccinate their flocks for salmonella unless they can demonstrate that they have strict preventive measures in place or that there hasn't been an incidence of salmonella on the property in the previous year. As a result, salmonella infections in England have dropped a stunning 96 percent since 1997.

And the European Food Safety Authority has strongly discouraged the use of antimicrobials for controlling salmonella because of the risk of creating antibiotic-resistant strains of the bacteria. Governments in Europe have much more power to enforce food safety testing and to shut down infected farms.

Whereas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has only recently acknowledged that the routine non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animals -- which promotes growth -- might be causing antibiotic-resistant bugs.

Here in America we even don't have mandatory recalls. We let the industry conduct its own testing for pathogens, and when it is nice enough to tell the FDA it's found some, we let the company recall months-old tainted products on its own schedule.

A study commissioned by the German government has recommended an extension of up to 20 years to the life nuclear power plants, according to reports. The government faces resistance if it presses ahead. 

Experts from Germany's Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne (EWI) were asked to give their advice to the government on a range of scenarios about extending the operational lifetimes of plants by 4, 12, 20 and 28 years.

 

The study recommended that nuclear power plants should be kept open for between 12 and 20 years more than currently planned, the German news magazine Focus reported Saturday.

 

A number of studies, many of which have come to different conclusions, have been recently issued by think-tanks and environmental organizations.

 

RAMALLAH, Aug 28, 2010 (IPS) - As Hamas cracks down on the rights of Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip, their sisters in the occupied West Bank are slowly gaining ground. But a bureaucracy, that is sometimes supported by foreign aid, is crippling these advances.

The Hamas authorities in Gaza have been making international headlines as they slowly restrict the rights of women. The restrictions have included banning women from smoking argilah (also known as hookah or water-pipe) in public places and riding pillion on motorbikes. Schoolgirls and women lawyers are now forced to cover their hair, and mannequins displaying female underwear have been banned from Gaza's shop windows.

In the West Bank, five of the Palestinian Authority's (PA) 24 cabinet ministers are women. Women head two West Bank municipalities. A woman has been appointed commander of one of the Palestinian police stations, and a woman also runs the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

The Governor of Ramallah (Palestine's de facto capital) Dr Leila Ghanem has several government bodies falling under her jurisdiction. Earlier, she had been a high-ranking official in the Palestinian Security Services.

Nissan FM Radio station has a staff of 20, most of them women, and hosts a Café au Lait programme which broadcasts six hours a day. The radio station focuses its programme content on the rights and interests of Palestinian women.

"Palestinian women constitute half our society and they are beginning to be recognised as full partners to their male counterparts," Rabiah Diab, the PA minister of women's affairs told IPS.

And in the most significant development in March this year, PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad approved new legislation, which would equate "honour killings" of Palestinian women with murder.

Every year, throughout the occupied Palestinian territories, dozens of women are killed by their male relatives for allegedly having an affair or bringing "dishonour" of a sexual nature to the family

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 27, 2010 (IPS) - Experts from 13 Latin American countries called for a shift in counter-drug policies from a punitive to a public health-based approach for users, in order to reduce drug-related violence, on the argument that the current "war on drugs" has been lost in the region.

The Aug. 26-27 Second Latin American Conference on Drug Policy was organised in Rio de Janeiro by Intercambios Civil Association for the Study of and Assistance for Drug-Related Problems, of Argentina, and Psicotropicus of Brazil, two non-governmental organisations that advocate a new approach to global anti-drug policy.

The conference, which brought together public officials, academics and activists from around the region to debate drug policy, discussed questions like the decriminalisation of the possession and personal use of drugs.

"Criminalisation drives drug users away from health services, out of fear of discrimination or being turned in to the police," Psicotropicus director Luiz Paulo Guanabara said at the opening of the conference.

Rejection of a punitive approach to drug use was a common theme in the speeches of the majority of the participants at the conference, which was supported by the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) and attended by the representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Regional Office for Brazil and the Southern Cone, Bo Mathiesen.

The human genome contains just over three billion paired nucleotides and about 25,000 genes.

The ambitious plan to map all of them was undertaken by two different enterprises. One was funded by the U.S. government and private philanthropy; the other was commercial, largely supported by drug companies buying access to future patents and data.

Problems ensued, according to Lewis Hyde, author of "Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He notes that during the 1990s, J. Craig Venter's Celera Genomics Corp. said it would make its data freely available to the scientific community. In fact, there were always restrictions.

Hyde points out that property rights tend to expand over time. Congress passed a copyright extension law in 1998 to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. And a recent electronic- book version of Lewis Carroll's 1895 "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" forbade copying, printing, lending or giving it to someone else, plus warned against reading the tale aloud.

Temperatures of minus 1.8 degrees C should really be enough to freeze any fish: the freezing point of fish blood is about minus 0.9 degrees C. How Antarctic fish are able to keep moving at these temperatures has interested researchers for a long time. As long as 50 years ago, special frost protection proteins were found in the blood of these fish.

These so-called anti-freeze proteins work better than any household antifreeze. How they work, however, was still unclear. The Bochum researchers used a special technique, terahertz spectroscopy, to unravel the underlying mechanism.

With the aid of terahertz radiation, the collective motion of water molecules and proteins can be recorded. Thus, the working group has already been able to show that water molecules, which usually perform a permanent dance in liquid water, and constantly enter new bonds, dance a more ordered dance in the presence of proteins - "the disco dance becomes a minuet" says Prof. Havenith.

A planned exhibition by Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami at Louis XIV's Versailles Palace has stirred up a storm of opposition. Two petitions have gathered over 3,000 signatures each but organisers dismiss them as right-wing reactionaries.

The organisers of one petition, "Versailles mon amour", refuse to make the names of its 3,500 signatories public because, they claim, "not liking modern art may be disapproved of by future employers".

The internet petition, which declares "No to the provocation of modern `art' which respects nothing", was launched by Versailles resident Anne Brassié who hosts a literary broadcast on right-wing radio station Radio Courtoisie.

Brassié takes particular exception to two of Murakami's works, My lonesome cowboy, which she describes as "the little man with a pointed penis whose sperm forms a lasso" and Hiropon, which she says portrays "a little woman with big breasts whose milk forms a skipping rope".

Jyllands-Postens culture editor is to release a new book including a page containing a reprint of controversial caricatures.

A leading U.S. terrorism expert has warned of renewed tensions between the Muslim world and Denmark in connection with plans by Jyllands-Postens Culture Editor Flemming Rose to release a book in which caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed are reprinted.

In his `The tyranny of silence' Rose studies the 12 controversial caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, which were first published in Jyllands-Posten in 2005.

Since then, they have repeatedly been re-printed in media across the world and caused anti-Danish demonstrations, boycotts of Danish goods in Muslim countries, the burning of Danish flags and torching of Danish embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

"If I were him, I would seriously consider the consequences of reprinting the drawings," says U.S. terrorism expert Evan Kohlman, who has worked for the FBI and the U.S. administration on terrorism issues.

Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita & Edward O. Wilson.

Eusociality, in which some individuals reduce their own lifetime reproductive potential to raise the offspring of others, underlies the most advanced forms of social organization and the ecologically dominant role of social insects and humans. For the past four decades kin selection theory, based on the concept of inclusive fitness, has been the major theoretical attempt to explain the evolution of eusociality. Here we show the limitations of this approach. We argue that standard natural selection theory in the context of precise models of population structure represents a simpler and superior approach, allows the evaluation of multiple competing hypotheses, and provides an exact framework for interpreting empirical observations.

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You can't be me, I'm taken

Celebrity photographer Francois-Marie Banier has been cut out of the will of L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, her lawyer said Saturday. Bettencourt's gifts to Banier led to a long-running legal spat with her daughter which developed into a political scandal.
 

The change was made in mid-July, Lawyer Georges Kiejman said, and no-one else had been added to the will in his place.

Bettencourt, who is France's richest woman, had understood that "enough was enough", said Kiejman. Banier  has received gifts worth nearly a billion euros from the 87-year-old over the years, sparking accusations from her daughter that he has taken advantage of her.

A couple out picking mushrooms in the woods in western Sweden made a macabre find on Thursday evening after spotting the head of a live kitten peering out from the ground behind a tree stump.
The pair immediately began digging and quickly found three distressed and exhausted kittens buried in a woodland area near Hindås, 34 kilometres east of Gothenburg, local newspaper Borås Tidning reports.

Shocked by the find, the couple contacted Tina Karlsson, who runs a local shelter for abandoned cats. Karlsson said one of the four week old kittens -- two females and one male -- had somehow managed to clamber out of the shallow grave and get its head above ground.

"If I got hold of whoever did this I don't know what I'd do," she told Borås Tidning