(Reuters) - The European Union could agree in the next few weeks a law to regulate hedge funds and private equity operators, blamed by some for financial excesses, an EU commissioner said on Saturday.

Michel Barnier, European Commissioner responsible for financial regulation, said the deal in recent days on a set of pan-European watchdogs showed a political willingness for further post-crisis reforms.

"We are in the last straight. The big work has been done by the European Parliament. There are two or three sensitive points including on the treatment of third countries and the passport for hedge operators," he said.

Thousands of people have been attending rallies in Paris and 130 other French towns to protest at the government's policy of deporting Roma people.

Police estimated the turnout in Paris at about 12,000, much fewer than anticipated, but organisers put the figure nearer to 50,000.

Opinion polls suggest at least 65% of French people back government policy.

European commissioner accused of 'outrageous anti-Semitism' by Jewish group.

Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, has issued a statement saying that he regrets any offence caused by comments he made about Jews that led to him being accused of anti-Semitism.

De Gucht told a Belgian radio station yesterday (2 September) that one should "not underestimate the power of the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill" in influencing US policy on Middle East peace talks.

The EU commissioner and former Belgian foreign minister was asked about his views on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as negotiations were re-launched in Washington, DC. He said it was "not easy" to have "a rational" debate with Jews on the peace process. "It is a very emotional issue," the commissioner said.

The European Jewish Congress (EJC) today demanded that De Gucht apologise for his comments. "Once again we hear outrageous anti-Semitism from a senior European official," Moshe Kantor, president of the EJC, said in a statement on the group's website.

AFP - Broken Belgium's bid to form a government collapsed on Friday putting fractious Dutch- and French-speaking parts back on a collision course.
  
Francophone Socialist leader Elio Di Rupo quit seven-party talks aimed at forming a new coalition and urged King Albert II to relieve him of responsibility for ending a political impasse going back many months.
  
The figurehead for Belgium's Flemish separatists, Bart De Wever, accused Di Rupo of presiding over a "missed opportunity," but Di Rupo later told a media conference that he had refused to accede to Flemish demands at what he termed "any cost."

It has been announced that Dutch head of state Queen Beatrix will hold fresh meetings early next week to discuss how coalition talks should proceed.

On Friday, attempts by the right-wing VVD and the Christian Democrats (CDA) to form a minority cabinet with the support of Geert Wilders' far-right Freedom Party (PVV) ended in failure.

On Monday morning Queen Beatrix will first receive her permanent advisers: Senate Speaker René van der Linden, Lower House Speaker Gerdi Verbeet and the Vice-President of the Council of State, Herman Tjeenk Willink.

On Monday evening the Queen will meet with the parliamentary party leaders of the VVD, Labour and the Christian Democrats.

On Tuesday morning she will have discussions with the parliamentary party leaders of the Socialist Party, the democrats of D66, the Green Left, the Christian Union, the conservative Calvinist SGP party and the Animal Rights Party.

The Alliance claimed the support of 50.5 percent of the electorate in the poll, with the Red-Greens on 44 percent.

"The figures are a Moderate dream come true," said Social Democrat party secretary Ibrahim Baylan to the Expressen daily.

The Social Democrats declined by 0.9 percentage points to 29.7 percent, their lowest figure on record. The Green Party, long the force giving buoyancy to the Red-Green coalition in the polls, dropped 0.4 points to 8.5 percent.

US political scientist Charles Kupchan's pronouncement of the death of the EU has caused quite a stir in Europe. The handling of the euro crisis shows, however, that, despite all the recent trials and tribulations, EU integration is still forging ahead, argues Il Sole 24 Ore. Carlo Bastasin

On 13 May, at the very peak of the Greek financial crisis, German chancellor Angela Merkel shed some surprising light on her vision for Europe. Merkel was presenting the Charlemagne Prize to Polish prime minister Donald Tusk in the city of Aachen, Germany. "The euro crisis," Merkel stressed, "is no ordinary crisis. It is the most important test for Europe since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. An existential test. If we fail, there is no telling what the consequences will be. If we succeed, Europe will emerge stronger than ever."

These wholly unexpected remarks caught the international press off guard. "To overcome the crisis," the chancellor went on, "we need to face up more squarely to the actual challenges, draw the necessary legal conclusions and dovetail our economic and financial policies more closely than ever. We should also take initiatives that go beyond the economic sphere, for example by giving some thought to the creation a European army. Finally, we have to defend our principles and our values: democracy, the protection of human rights and sustainable growth."

Michael Gove, the education secretary, will next week be forced to announce a dramatic scaling back of the Tories' landmark plans to create a new generation of schools run by parents and voluntary groups.

Labour tonight accused the education secretary of presiding over a "chaotic shambles" after it emerged that as few as 20 free schools are on track to open in September 2011. In June Gove hinted that 700 could be established.

Ed Balls, the shadow education secretary, said: "This is another embarrassment for the education secretary's flawed, unfair and unpopular school reforms. Michael Gove took over a successful department which has helped to deliver record improvements in school standards over more than a decade, but in just a few months he has managed to turn it into a chaotic shambles."

Gove said in June that he had been inundated with expressions of interest from establish a new tier of free schools. "More than 700 expressions of interest in opening new free schools have been received by the charitable group the New Schools Network," he told MPs.

Guardian - Basque separatists Eta announces ceasefire

The Basque separatist group Eta announced a ceasefire in a video released today, more than three years after it resumed violent actions.

In the video, excerpts from which were published by the BBC, Eta said it would not "carry out armed actions" in its continued campaign for complete independence of the Basque region, which borders France and Spain.

Eta said it had taken the decision several months ago "to put in motion a democratic process"

(Reuters) - Europe needs to agree common positions on international issues at the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said on Saturday.

"I call on Europe to have a unified position," he said, adding that that was his personal opinion and the bank had no official position on the issue.

Trichet's comments at a conference in Cernobbio, on the shore of Lake Como near Milan, follow a stand-off over Europe's strong presence on the IMF board, with the United States pressing for more power for emerging countries.

The world's richest clients often come with "impossible demands," push margins down and cause internal conflict with investment banking colleagues, said the vice chairman of Barclays Plc's wealth management unit.

People with at least $30 million to invest, known as ultra high net worth individuals, insist on paying less for services, Gerard Aquilina of Barclays Wealth, told a conference in Zurich. They also ask for credit to invest in property, which may not generate private banking fees, and demand help with getting children into schools or last-minute concert tickets, he said.

"Beware of the complexities of dealing with ultra high net worths," said Aquilina, who until 2006 was chief executive officer for the Americas at HSBC Holdings Plc. "Demanding and often unreasonable" requests may create "impossible demands on the organization," he said.

The ultra rich saw their wealth rise by almost 22 percent in 2009, faster than other millionaires' 19 percent returns, according to a June report by Capgemini SA and Merrill Lynch. The report attributed the higher gain to a "more effective reallocation of assets."

Record low levels of demand continue to haunt the U.S. housing market with July pending home sales re-confirming previous crash-level readings.

Three months of data after the end of free down-payments, the inventory of purchase contracts rose just 5.25%. The inventory is still is at a record low with the exception of the two previous months - each of which were record lows in themselves (Please see the chart above showing how radically far demand has fallen. The three worst months are the last three months.).

The index of unclosed contracts to buy a home increased from 75.5 to 79.4. In the previous two months demand had fallen a record 30% and then 2.8% more. The July 2010 reading released today is 19% lower than July 2009.  The forecast was for a one percent fall according to 37 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

Freddie Mac also announced today that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage has fallen to another record low -- 4.32%. Outstanding rates and a price fall of 30 percent since the peak of the bubble has failed to ignite demand in our current market. Existing home sales represent 90% of residential housing transactions. The low reading of today will carry through to actual closed sales for July and August.

Noting the disagreement over the utility of naked credit default swaps the authors set forth a framework for evaluation that accounts for the varying degrees of optimism and pessimism among investors regarding any specific loan and then analyze the effects of allowing naked credit default swaps on the behavior of the market.

(The authors) have attempted to develop a framework within which such questions can be addressed and to provide some preliminary answers. We argue that the existence of naked credit default swaps has significant effects on the terms of financing, the likelihood of default, and the size and composition of investment expenditures. And we identify three mechanisms through which these broader consequences of speculative side bets arise: collateral effects, rollover risk, and project choice.

The authors note the heterogeneity of belief about the risk of particular loans due to different information and to different interpretations of common information and state that their belief that this factor is a fundamental driver of speculation in the real world.

When credit default swaps are unavailable, the investors with the most optimistic beliefs about the future revenues of a borrower are natural lenders: they are the ones who will part with their funds on terms most favourable to the borrower. The interest rate then depends on the beliefs of the threshold investor, who in turn is determined by the size of the borrowing requirement. The larger the borrowing requirement, the more pessimistic this threshold investor will be (since the size of the group of lenders has to be larger in order for the borrowing requirement to be met). Those more optimistic than this investor will lend, while the rest find other uses for their cash.

Now consider the effects of allowing for naked credit default swaps. Those who are most pessimistic about the future prospects of the borrower will be inclined to buy naked protection, while those most optimistic will be willing to sell it. However, pessimists also need to worry about counterparty risk - if the optimists write too many contracts, they may be unable to meet their obligations in the event that a default does occur, an event that the pessimists consider to be likely. Hence the optimists have to support their positions with collateral, which they do by diverting funds that would have gone to borrowers in the absence of derivatives. The borrowing requirement must then be met by appealing to a different class of investors, who are neither so optimistic that they wish to sell protection, nor so pessimistic that they wish to buy it. The threshold investor is now clearly more pessimistic than in the absence of derivatives, and the terms of financing are accordingly shifted against the borrower. As a result, for any given borrowing requirement, the bond issue is larger and the price of bonds accordingly lower when investors are permitted to purchase naked credit default swaps.

This effect does not arise if credit default swaps can only be purchased by holders of the underlying security. In fact, it can be shown that allowing for only "covered" credit default swaps has much the same consequences as allowing optimists to buy debt on margin: it leads to higher bond prices, a smaller issue size for any given borrowing requirement, and a lower likelihood of eventual default. While optimists take a long position in the debt by selling such contracts, they facilitate the purchase of bonds by more pessimistic investors by absorbing much of the credit risk. In contrast with the case of naked credit default swaps, therefore, the terms of lending are shifted in favour of the borrower. The difference arises because pessimists can enter directional positions on default in one case but not the other.

The authors then discuss the problem of self fulfilling pessimism for cases of high credit risk in which the possibility of bear raids can make rolling over debt impossible.

A key question then is the following: how does the availability of naked credit default swaps affect the range of borrowing requirements for which pessimistic paths (with significant rollover risk) exist? And, conditional on the selection of such a path, how are the terms of borrowing affected by the presence of these credit derivatives?

For reasons that are already clear from the baseline model, we find that pessimistic paths involve more punitive terms for the borrower when naked credit default swaps are present than when they are not. Moreover, we find that there is a range of borrowing requirements for which a pessimistic path exists if and only if such contracts are allowed. That is, there exist conditions under which fears about the ability of the borrower to repay debt can be self-fulfilling only in the presence of credit derivatives. It is in this precise sense that the possibility of self-fulfilling bear raids can be said to arise when the use of such derivatives is unrestricted.

The finding that borrowers can more easily raise funds and obtain better terms when the use of credit derivatives is restricted does not necessarily imply that such restrictions are desirable from a policy perspective. A shift in terms against borrowers will generally reduce the number of projects that are funded, but some of these ought not to have been funded in the first place. Hence the efficiency effects of a ban are ambiguous. However, such a shift in terms against borrowers can also have a more subtle effect with respect to project choice: it can tilt managerial incentives towards the selection of riskier projects with lower expected returns. This happens because a larger debt obligation makes projects with greater upside potential more attractive to the firm, as more of the downside risk is absorbed by creditors.

Considering that both those who take the loan and those who arrange the loan are likely to have better information than those who provide the funds in addition to having ongoing business relationships with each other but not those who provide funds, (the marks), the potential for abuse should be obvious.

James Tobin (1984) once observed that the advantages of greater "liquidity and negotiability of financial instruments" come at the cost of facilitating speculation, and that greater market completeness under such conditions could reduce the functional efficiency of the financial system, namely its ability to facilitate "the mobilisation of saving for investments in physical and human capital... and the allocation of saving to their more socially productive uses." Based on our analysis, one could make the case that naked credit default swaps are a case in point.

This conclusion, however, is subject to the caveat that there exist conditions under which the presence of such contracts can prevent the funding of inefficient projects. Furthermore, an outright ban may be infeasible in practice due to the emergence of close substitutes through financial engineering. Even so, it is important to recognize that the proliferation of speculative side bets can have significant effects on economic fundamentals such as the terms of financing, the patterns of project selection, and the incidence of corporate and sovereign default. (Emphasis added.)

Thus, even though the CDS will "net out" if counter-party risk is not a factor, there are still other consequences to naked CDSs. Sociopathic, self interested corporate management both at the firm doing the borrowing and the firm arranging the issue can collude to skin those who provide the funds. And when things go south they can intone in unison: Who could have known!

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

The end of America's combat mission, after seven and a half costly years, has raised questions that will provide fodder for argument for a long time to come: Was it worth it? And who, if anyone, won?

It's too early to answer the first question, according to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a man of sober judgment. "It really requires a historian's perspective in terms of what happens here in the long run ... How it all weighs in the balance over time remains to be seen."

For a sizeable group of Middle East experts, the second question is easier to answer than the first. "So, who won the war in Iraq? Iran," says the headline over an analysis by scholar Mohammed Bazzi for the Council on Foreign relations, a New York-based think-tank. His argument: "The U.S. ousted Tehran's sworn enemy, Saddam Hussein, from power. Then Washington helped install a Shi'ite government for the first time in Iraq's modern history.

"As U.S. troops became mired in fighting an insurgency and containing a civil war, Iran extended its influence over all of Iraq's Shi'ite factions." As a consequence, U.S. influence has been waning, Iran's has been rising, and there are predictions that Iran will fill the vacuum created by the drawdown of U.S. troops to 50,000 who will "advise and assist" the Iraqis.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has formed a committee to seek peace talks with the Taliban, his office has said.

It follows the endorsement by tribal leaders in June of a plan to engage militants in a reconciliation process.

The Taliban, who were ousted from power in 2001, have been fighting to overthrow the US-backed government and expel foreign troops from Afghanistan.

The formation of the High Peace Council was "a significant step towards peace talks", Mr Karzai's office said.

MOSCOW, Sep 4, 2010 (IPS) - Efforts by the U.S. and Russian governments to move speedily towards the abolition of strategic nuclear weapons have hit stumbling blocks and continue to generate debates among experts about the practicality of achieving a nuclear- free world in the near future.

The main point, experts say, is that Russia and the U.S. have only taken weak steps to fulfil the objectives of the first strategic arms reduction treaty signed in 1991.

"Russia assigns significant military utility to its nuclear arsenal and so has less interest than the U.S. in promoting nuclear disarmament. For instance, it maintains several thousand tactical nuclear weapons in western Russia to counterbalance NATO's conventional military superiority," Ben Rhode, a research associate for non-proliferation and disarmament at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London told IPS in an e-mail interview.

"Many in the West have said such weapons will need to be included in future arms control talks, but I don't know how enthusiastic Russia would be about this. A world free of nuclear weapons would see the U.S.'s military superiority increased, and Russia would lose one of the very few ways in which it can justify its claims to be a great power."

REUTERS - A suicide bomber struck a rally in the Pakistani city of Quetta on Friday, killing at least 54 people in the second major attack this week and piling pressure on a U.S.-backed government overwhelmed by a flood crisis.
 
Pakistan's Taliban claimed responsibility for the blast and said it would launch attacks in the United States and Europe "very soon" -- repeating a threat to strike Western targets in response to drone attacks that have targeted its leadership.
 
In Washington, the White House condemned the Quetta attack on a Shi'ite rally and expressed solidarity with the Pakistani people, saying it was "even more reprehensible" because it came during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as Pakistan reels from disastrous flooding.

One fallacy about the US-sponsored Palestinian-Israeli direct talks scheduled for September 2 seems to escape attention: There is nothing 'direct' about the talks. The timing of the meeting undoubtedly favours the Israelis. The summit will be at a juncture when the Palestinian community is polarized, weak and besieged by waning Arab support and enthusiasm. The Israelis are going to Washington with a self-serving agenda and not simply turning up for a photo opportunity.

Even if involuntary participants, the 'peace-troika' - Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia - provide the required Arab cover in order to give the talks an added air of seriousness and weight, they don't provide the legitimacy the talks desperately require. The first two are the only signatories of peace treaties with Israel.  The third is a key US ally and whose blessing of the talks is needed to garner morale for the Arab parties.

The talks are being packaged in international diplomatic rhetoric as the beginning of a process for a congenial forum towards a 'taswiyah' (as the cliché phrase goes: final, durable and peaceful settlement fulfilling Israeli and Palestinian nationalist aspirations).
 
At the core of the somewhat inflated optimism about the talks is the `crafting' of a diplomatic solution within a 12 to 24 months time span.

LIMA, Peru - President Alan Garcia hailed an agreement with Switzerland's Xstrata Copper for a $4.2 billion copper project in southern Peru, calling it the "contract of the century." (...) Xstrata said in a press release that "ore will be mined at a rate of 51.1 million tons per annum from three open pit mines (initially Ferrobamba, then Chalcobamba and Sulfobamba pits) and processed in a 140,000-ton-per-day sulphide grinding/flotation concentrator."

ROME - Enel Green Power, the renewable energy unit of Enel Group, was awarded three wind-energy projects in Brazil via an auction, the Italian utility said in a statement Friday. The three wind farms - Cristal, Primavera and Sao Judas, each with installed capacity of 30 MW - will generate more than 390,000 megawatt-hours annually, or enough to meet the electricity demand of approximately 245,000 Brazilian homes, and avoid the emission of around 270,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, Enel Group said.

LA PAZ - Bolivian President Evo Morales' government plans to invest $450 million in a project to produce lithium carbonate and potassium chloride on a large scale, the head of the evaporitic resources office of the Comibol state mining corporation said.

Mexico: Prof. José Woldenberg in a recent conference on the democratic transition in Mexico noted that nobody has presented any evidence that Calderón's victory was artificially engineered: The IFE commited mistakes" - "I emphasize, mistakes, not fraud" - Woldenberg dixit.

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (GINA) -- As Guyana moves closer to realising its hydro-electric potential, developments in oil and gas exploration augur well for the future of the nation's energy sector. (...) according to the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC), there are four companies licenced to undertake exploratory work in Guyana; Exxon-Mobil, REPSOL/YPF, Century Guyana Limited and CGX Energy Incorporated (Inc) and outlined that there are large areas in the Atlantic Ocean and Takutu Basin, available for investment for oil exploration. Equipment is currently in the Rupununi to drill for the Takutu Gas Company, in 2011. REPSOL/YPF will also endeavour to commence the drilling of a well in the first quarter of 2011.

Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves is accusing two US businessmen of engaging in a smear campaign to destabilise his Government. (...) According to Gonsalves, the US citizens, Dave Copps, a dot.com millionaire, who owns Pure Discovery Corporation, and Blake Burris of Dynamo Labs are working with the NDP to make false claims about St Vincent and the Grenadines. He said Copps owns a house in Bequia, one of the St Vincent Grenadines, and worked previously for the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Gonsalves said they have mounted a campaign called "Save Democracy for just $5."

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 3, 2010 (IPS) - Sugarcane could replace the energy produced by three hydroelectric dams like the Belo Monte in the Amazon, claims the Brazilian sugarcane industry, which remains relegated to marginal participation in the national electricity matrix.

Brazil's sugarcane straw and pulp could generate 12,200 megawatts, while the Belo Monte dam, to be built on the northern Amazonian Xingú River, will generate just 4,571 megawatts on average, according to UNICA, the sugarcane industry association, in the southern state of São Paulo.

UNICA members concentrate about 60 percent of sugar and ethanol production in this country, a world leader in biofuels.

The Belo Monte dam will in fact have a maximum capacity of 11,233 megawatts, but can only guarantee 40 percent of that because its reservoir will not store great volumes of water, and the flow of the Xingú declines sharply during the dry season -- which lasts most of the year. These factors of fluctuation, which affect all hydroelectric dams in the Amazon, are particularly marked in this case.

One advantage of electricity generated from plant biomass like sugarcane is precisely its ability to complement hydro-energy, given that the cane harvest -- between April and November -- coincides with the period of least rain in which the dams have to reduce energy production.

Lima (AFP) Sept 1, 2010
The Amazon, the world's biggest river, is at its lowest level in over 40 years near its source in northeastern Peru, causing havoc in a region where it is used as the only form of travel, authorities said.

According to officials in Loreto province, the Amazon on Tuesday in the northeast city of Iquitos fell to 105.97 meters (347.67 feet) above sea level, 50 cm (1.6 feet) lower than it was in 2005, so far the lowest reference point in four decades.

Low levels have brought economic havoc in areas of Peru that depend on the Amazon for shipping, by denying boats a navigable river as well as usable ports and harbors.

At least six boats became stranded for lack of river flow over the last three weeks and several shipping companies have been forced to suspend service, said regional civil defense chief Roberto Falcon.

Copenhagen, Denmark (SPX) Sep 03, 2010
The fear that global temperature can change very quickly and cause dramatic climate changes that may have a disastrous impact on many countries and populations is great around the world. But what causes climate change and is it possible to predict future climate change? New research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen shows that it may be due to an accumulation of different chaotic influences and as a result would be difficult to predict. The results have just been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

For millions of years the Earth's climate has alternated between about 100,000 years of ice age and approximately 10-15,000 years of a warm climate like we have today. The climate change is controlled by the Earth's orbit in space, that is to say the Earth's tilt and distance from the sun. But there are also other climatic shifts in the Earth's history and what caused those?

Moscow (AFP) Sept 2, 2010
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Thursday that Russia would not lift a ban on grain exports before next year's harvest, extending the major world producer's embargo until at least mid-2011.

"I believe it's necessary to note that we will only be able to consider lifting the grain export ban after next year's harvest ... and we have clarity on the balances," Putin said.

"We cannot just keep lurching back and forth," he said at a government meeting in televised remarks.

Putin gave no specific timeframe and his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, only confirmed that the ban would not be lifted on December 31.

A company controlled by the billionaire Koch brothers, who have bankrolled numerous right-wing causes, has donated $1 million to the campaign to pass Proposition 23, the California ballot initiative that would suspend the state's global-warming law.

The contribution was made Thursday and came from Flint Hills Resources, a Kansas petrochemical company that is a subsidiary of Koch Industries. The Koch brothers were the subject of a recent profile in The New Yorker.

The Koch donation came a day after Tesoro, a Texas oil company that has been bankrolling the pro-Prop 23 campaign, put $1 million into the campaign coffers.

According to the No campaign, 97 percent of the $8.2 million raised by the Yes forces has been given by oil-related interests and 89 percent of that money has come from out of state. Three companies, Koch Industries, Tesoro, and Valero -- another Texas-based oil company -- have provided 80 percent of those funds.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2010) -- A chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.

The research, led by Emory anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

"We tend to associate drugs that cure diseases with modern medicine," Armelagos says. "But it's becoming increasingly clear that this prehistoric population was using empirical evidence to develop therapeutic agents. I have no doubt that they knew what they were doing."

Armelagos is a bioarcheologist and an expert on prehistoric and ancient diets. In 1980, he discovered what appeared to be traces of tetracycline in human bones from Nubia dated between A.D. 350 and 550, populations that left no written record. The ancient Nubian kingdom was located in present-day Sudan, south of ancient Egypt.

....

Nelson, a leading expert in tetracycline and other antibiotics, became interested in the project after hearing Armelagos speak at a conference. "I told him to send me some mummy bones, because I had the tools and the expertise to extract the tetracycline," Nelson says....The results stunned Nelson. "The bones of these ancient people were saturated with tetracycline, showing that they had been taking it for a long time," he says. "I'm convinced that they had the science of fermentation under control and were purposely producing the drug."

Is that a flashing "Z" in your pocket, or are you just glad to still have your cell phone?

The Z stands for Zomm, a little multipurpose gadget for your pocket, purse or keychain whose main function is to prevent you from walking off and leaving your phone somewhere. It does so by lighting up and sounding an alarm when it's more than 30 feet from the device to which you have electronically linked it.

A lot of technology products are irritating by accident. The Zomm -- and the Phone Halo, a similar-in-concept but less- versatile competitor -- intend to irritate, and by and large do a good job of it.

Before you head over to Trader Joe's to stock up on cheap snacks for your Labor Day weekend festivities, stop and consider shopping somewhere else. Labor Day was enacted not as a general holiday to rest in honor of laborers, but in response to the tragic deaths of striking workers. And good old cheap Joe -- which just agreed to stop selling eggs from Jack DeCoster's vile operations -- is one of the remaining holdouts in this decade's most high-profile, life-or-death farmworkers' rights campaign.  

Two weeks ago, my coworker Karen and I left the office a little early and walked across Manhattan to the Trader Joe's store in Chelsea, where a small group had gathered making signs and chatting. Among them were members of the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a grassroots group working to improve wages and working conditions for farmworkers. Over the course of about 45 minutes, dozens more people filled the sidewalk in front of the store, including labor activists from the Jewish Labor Committee, Just Harvest USA and the Farmworker Solidarity Alliance, as well as local youths and a handful of musicians from the Rude Mechanical Orchestra.

Trader Joe's, along with Publix, Kroger, and the Dutch-held Ahold grocery chain (which includes Giant, Stop & Shop, Martin's, and Peapod), are the most recent targets of CIW's Fair Food Campaign. Over the last nine years the Coalition, together with partner organizations like the Student/Farmworker Alliance, has managed, through well-organized consumer campaigns and sometimes boycotts, to convince some of the food industry's largest corporations (including Taco Bell/Yum Brands, McDonald's, Subway, Whole Foods, and Compass -- see Grist's Tom Philpott's coverage) to agree to the tenets of Fair Food: an extra penny a pound for tomatoes (nearly doubling the wages for pickers, who've not seen a raise since the mid-1970s), a labor Code of Conduct, greater transparency in the supply chain, and incentives for growers that respect human rights.

French impressionist giant Claude Monet at the Grand Palais is expected to be Paris's autumn arts hit. The season's big contemporary show is Mexican Gabriel Orozco at the Pompidou Centre, while the Quai de Branly museum offers the mysteriously titled Baba Bling.

Here is some of what art lovers can look forward to in Paris as 2010 draws to an end and 2011 begins.

The conclusions of a Danish report on female as opposed to male longevity, suggest that an andropausal reduction in the hormone testosterone in men in mid-life is the main reason why males become gradually weaker than females in later life.

According to researchers Tom Skyhøj Olsen and Klaus Kaae Andersen, the fact that women live longer than men has more to do with a developing male physical inferiority, than female superiority.

"Our findings dispute the effects of female sex hormones as the underlying cause of female survival superiority over men. Instead we propose that the progressive deficiency of male sex hormones (testosterone) beginning in men in middle age is the underlying cause of the gap in survival rates between men and women," the two say in a survey in Gender Medicine.

"Accordingly the female survival advantage is rooted in male inferiority rather than innate female superiority," the conclusions of the report say.

(Reuters) - Three people were arrested after protesters threw eggs and shoes at former British Prime Minister Tony Blair when he arrived to sign copies of his memoir at a bookshop in Dublin on Saturday, national broadcaster RTE said.

No injuries were reported and the missiles did not hit Blair.

Divers hired by the provincial government of the Åland Islands have found what is quite possibly the world's oldest beer in the shipwreck from which they have also salvaged some nearly priceless bottles of champagne.

The beer and the champagne are both estimated to be about 200 years old.