Chancellor Merkel has opened a meeting in Berlin to discuss the future role of nuclear power in Europe's largest economy amid a dispute over extending the lifespan of German nuclear plants beyond 2021. 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is hosting a summit in Berlin on the future of nuclear energy in Germany amid a long-running row about extending the lifespan of the country's nuclear power plants. 

Hundreds of anti-nuclear power demonstrators have been gathering outside the chancellory where Merkel is meeting with fellow coalition leaders Guido Westerwelle of the Free Democrats (FDP) and Horst Seehofer of Bavaria's Christian Social Union, along with other parliamentary leaders.

[...]

Sunday's meeting focuses on granting the country's nuclear power plants an extra 10 to 15 years of production time and to decide on a levy for the utility companies' expected additional profits.

Basque separatist group ETA has said it will not "carry out armed actions" in its campaign for independence, according to a video obtained by the BBC. The Spanish government, meanwhile, has rejected the announcement. 

Basque separatist group ETA has declared a ceasefire, the BBC reported Sunday, citing a video statement it had earlier obtained from a Basque newspaper.

The video said the group would no longer "carry out armed actions" in its campaign for independence in a decision it came to several months ago "to put in motion a democratic process if the Spanish government is willing."

Spain's governing Socialist Party dismissed the ceasefire announcement on Sunday as "clearly insufficient."

"Theoretically, there is room for a political party to the right of the (center-right) Christian Democrats," Gero Neugebauer, a professor of political science at Berlin's Free University, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But right-wing populists in Germany tend to be like mayflies. They swarm to the manure, eat their fill, and the next day they are gone."

The fleeting nature of right-wing populism in Germany is almost unique in continental Europe. Belgium has the Vlaams Belang party, the Netherlands has Geert Wilders and France's far right has periodically found significant success at the polls under Jean-Marie Le Pen. In Switzerland, voters supported a populist movement to ban the construction of minarets. Austria's right wing has a long history of political success under now deceased Freedom Party leader Jörg Haider and many eastern European countries, led by Hungary, have an active right wing.

Indeed, in much of Europe, Sarrazin's views, if not necessarily part of the political mainstream, would hardly elicit more than a shrug from most given the political platforms they enjoy.

Still, the almost unanimous opprobrium German political parties have heaped on Sarrazin is misleading. Recent studies suggest that the lack of a robust, right-wing populist party in Germany is more of a political anomaly than an indication of tolerance in the country. According to a study by the University of Bielefeld published last December, fully 46 percent of Germans agree that there are "too many Muslims" in the country. Only 16.6 percent of German respondents agreed with the statement "the Muslim culture fits well into Germany," a result that was the lowest among the eight countries that were surveyed, including the Netherlands, France and Hungary.

Dramatic video footage has emerged of a police sergeant dragging a women to a cell and hurling her inside, an incident which has led to his suspension.

Pamela Somerville, 57, was left with blood gushing from a head wound after Sergeant Mark Andrews pulled her by the wrist across the floor of Melksham police station in Wiltshire and threw her into the custody suite. A camera cell showed Somerville lying briefly unconscious after her head hit the floor and then staggering to her feet, dripping blood.

The officer, a former soldier, 37, was convicted of assault causing actual bodily harm at Oxford magistrates court in July, and is due to be sentenced on Tuesday. He faces a formal disciplinary hearing next month and is currently suspended on full pay.

Another officer at the police station reported the incident to a supervisor.

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine - Patti Smith

David Miliband, the Labour leadership frontrunner, must ditch his attachment to Blairite policies on privatisation and globalisation if he is to avoid splitting the party, the leader of Britain's biggest public sector union insists today.

Dave Prentis, the general secretary of Unison, said that Labour was at a watershed moment in its relations with the unions and accused the elder Miliband of having been part of a New Labour elite which caused untold "trauma" to public sector workers and sought to "beat up" unions. The comments, in an interview with the Observer before next week's trades union congress, are part of an attempt by the unions to reassert their influence, after years of being sidelined, as the Labour party prepares to choose a new leader.

They also suggest that after the new leader is announced on 25 September, Labour will be plunged into a heated argument at its party conference on its future direction. Prentis, whose union is backing the more left-leaning Ed Miliband in the election, said that Ed Miliband reflected the values of the 1.4 million public sector Unison members "far better than the other candidates".

French trade unions protested Saturday against a clampdown on immigrants, launching a week of action against tightening security and pension reforms on which President Nicolas Sarkozy has staked his political reputation.

Demonstrators opposed to new measures including repatriation of Roma to eastern Europe waved French flags and placards and chanted slogans including "let's stop repression" and "no to Sarkozy's inhumane policies". "It's rare that I demonstrate like this," said protestor Alexis Peskine, "but [Sarkozy] went too far.

A threatened Conservative rebellion on voting reform - which could have raised serious tensions within the coalition - looks to have been averted after intense pressure by the Tory whips.

David Cameron told whips to ensure the coalition did not suffer its first defeat in the Commons on Monday night, when Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister, presents a bill allowing a referendum next May on adopting the alternative vote to elect MPs.

The push appears to have worked, with prominent rebels telling the Financial Times they do not intend to oppose the bill at second reading when MPs return to Westminster for a two-week session after their summer break.

One said: "The whips have been hitting the phones pretty hard. They're desperate to make sure this isn't the government's first defeat."

Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov personally examined on Sunday the scene of the suicide bombing that killed three soldiers at a military firing range in Russia's North Caucasus republic of Dagestan.

The bomber drove a car full of explosives into the army camp near the Dagestani city of Buinaksk shortly after midnight on Sunday. The Defense Ministry said the three servicemen were killed and more than 30 injured. Five of the wounded are in serious condition.

Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Alexei Kuznetsov said Serdyukov received reports from the commander of the Southern Military District and the commander of the troops camped at the firing range.

The policy that Germany has gotten most right is the one that has kept its unemployment rate (currently 7.0 percent) at or below pre-recession levels despite a steeper decline in output (4.6 percent) for 2009 than the U.S. experienced. This is the policy of subsidizing employers to keep workers on the job at reduced hours, instead of laying them off. This has saved hundreds of thousands of jobs in Germany and could save millions in the United States, if only we had some political leadership with the courage to take these modest but obvious steps.

Ironically, however, the reforms that Spain is being pressured to adopt are in the opposite direction - the European authorities want Spain to make it easier for employers to get rid of workers.

Another flaw in the argument: Germany's record second quarter growth - 2.2 percent over the previous quarter, or 9 percent at an annual rate - was driven mostly by exports, which grew 8.2 percent over the previous quarter, or 37 percent annualized. As the South Centre has noted, for 2002-2007, exports accounted for 143 percent of Germany's growth - meaning that the German economy would have actually contracted over these years if not for export growth.

Since most of Germany's exports go to Eurozone countries, it is clear that not everyone in the Eurozone can follow Germany's example, even if they had the manufacturing competitiveness to do so.

Electricity at a bureaucratic pace

In solar photovoltaic energy, however, bureaucracy does slow progress. Here the government invests in the establishment of this innovative means of generating electricity. Applied on a grand scale, the Greek programme provides financing for 40% of these types of electricity generation projects at the rate of 40 euro cents (30p) for every kWh (kilowatt-hour).

Despite their efforts, sources at the environment ministry confirm that financing requests are piled up in the building's hallways due to the lack of technical training for a survey and study of the various cases that arise. `Occasionally, permits expire and it is necessary to start again,' affirms the officer-in-charge of this function. Kostas Tigas, representative of CRES (centre for renewable energy sources and saving), corroborates this assessment. With certain reservations, Tigas chastises the country's mismanagement in squandering the funds received from Europe and Greece's own government. In 2010, one billion euros were allocated for the stimulation of renewable energy use. `More than half remains only on paper,' he says, `which explains our technical deficiency when attempting to take advantage of the resources this country enjoys, like sun and wind.' Since political survival does not depend on development of green programmes, as it does in northern Europe, such waste is not yet punished electorally.

The eurozone debt crisis is about to enter a dangerous phase as governments prepare to step up borrowing in the capital markets to fund their faltering economies.

Eurozone governments will attempt to issue double the amount of debt this month compared with August, with some strategists warning that some of the weaker economies could fail to raise the amount of money they need.

Spain, Portugal and Ireland, the so-called peripheral eurozone economies, are considered most in danger of being shunned by investors as worries persist over the health of their banks and economies. Greece is no longer a concern as it has emergency loans to cover its funding for the next two years.

Padhraic Garvey, head of rates strategy for developed markets at ING Financial Markets, said: "We are heading into a critical period as the chances rise that a government may fail to raise the money it needs.

Across the Washington region and around the country, the expectations of buyers and sellers are out of whack, thwarting deals that could potentially lift the U.S. housing sector from its long funk. The nascent rebirth of the market earlier this year proved to be a mirage.

Despite record-low interest rates, many would-be buyers are retrenching, hamstrung by meager growth in their wages, gripped by fears over the possibility of losing their jobs or another recession. Sales of existing homes plunged in July to the lowest level in more than a decade, and sales of new homes were slower than at any time since the government started tracking the data in 1963. The results were far worse than some of the most pessimistic economists had expected and added to the doubts nagging at Wright and other prospective buyers, even in areas such as Washington that have been relatively insulated from the housing bust.

There are now so many homes for sale and so few selling that, at the current sales pace, it would take over a year to clear the existing inventory on the U.S. market. That is more than double the time required in a healthy market and up significantly just since June.

"That's a powerful cocktail working against the housing recovery," said Mike Larson, an analyst at Weiss Research. "There's going to be a long-lasting psychological hesitancy for ordinary buyers to believe again in the dream of building wealth through homeownership."

The contributions by unauthorized immigrants to Social Security -- essentially, to the retirement income of everyday Americans -- are much larger than previously known, raising questions about the efforts in many states and among Republicans in Congress to force these workers out.

The kicker:

Adding to the Social Security irony is that the restrictionists are mostly older or retired whites from longtime American families. The very people, in other words, who benefit most from the Social Security payments by unauthorized immigrants.

Surprised?

The decline in illegal immigration, plus tighter workplace enforcement, means that contributions from the unauthorized will decrease. But as Goss notes, they remain, because of larger families, a positive contributing factor to Social Security solvency.

Somebody ought to say thank you.

(Don't hold your breath, though)

Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.

In Washington, the Israelis and Palestinians are discussing peace, but in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, construction is proceeding at full speed. A legal ban is being ignored and the government is looking away. The thousands of new homes could hinder reconciliation.

Officially, at least, this is the hour of diplomacy. For the first time in two years, Israelis and Palestinians are meeting for direct peace talks. United States President Barack Obama has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Washington. Settlement construction is one of the most sensitive issues at the talks.

It's also an issue where the fronts are growing increasingly tense. "As far as we are concerned, we will continue building after we have buried our dead," Naftali Bennett, the general director of the settlers' association Yesha said hours before the start of peace talks. Just a short time after his announcement, the settlers began erecting several symbolic settlements in the West Bank. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Bennett had threatening words. "It is not good enough that the moratorium will end on Sept. 26," he said. "Ehud Barak needs to act to approve 3,000 new housing units -- 1,500 of them right now."

An Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery now faces being whipped for indecency, her son says.

Iranian authorities sentenced Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani to 99 lashes after the Times newspaper published a picture purportedly of her without a headscarf.

The Times later published a correction, saying the photograph was of a different Iranian woman.

After an international outcry, Iranian officials temporarily halted Ms Ashtiani's stoning sentence in July.

There are fears the death sentence could still be carried out by hanging.

Bahrain has accused 23 Shia Muslim activists of forming a "terror network" aimed at toppling the Gulf state's government, the official BNA news agency says.

The agency, citing the charge sheet on Saturday, said the suspects allegedly held secret meetings in Bahrain and abroad in order "to change the political regime through illegal means".

It identified 10 suspects, including eight opposition figures who have been detained since mid-August.

State media said those expected to be charged included leading figures from Al Wefaq society, the banned Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, and the London-based Bahrain Freedom Movement.

Abduljalil al-Singace, the chief suspect and leader of the Haq Movement for Liberty and Democracy, an opposition association, was charged with "running an illegitimate network," as well as "leading sabotage cells ... contacting foreign organisations and providing them with false and misleading information about the kingdom".

URUMQI, China -- The five-star hotels are full, bulldozers are making quick work of dreary slums and billboards for "French-style villas" call out to the nouveau riche. In the year since rioting between the Han and Uighur ethnic groups killed nearly 200 people in this city in far western China, life appears to be returning to normal.

"Don't worry, everything is peaceful now," said the perky bellhop at a hotel in the city's predominantly Han Chinese quarter.

But before turning away, he had second thoughts. "You'd better not go to the Uighur part of town at night," he said.

Beneath the gloss and mercantile buzz of Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, there is a palpable unease that neither tens of thousands of surveillance cameras nor the patrolling squads of black-shirted police officers can completely assuage.

After being called on a white lie he told during his Restoring Honor rally, Glenn Beck admitted Thursday that he stretched the truth because he "thought it would be a little easier."

Beck had claimed that he held George Washington's handwritten first Inaugural Address in his hands at the National Archives, but a spokeswoman at the institution said he did no such thing. Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and others called him out for the fabrication.

Thursday on his radio show, Beck copped to the lie. (RELATED: Lies By Prominent Americans.)

"I thought it would be a little easier in the speech," Beck said, than to go into the following elaborate explanation (via Mediaite):

GUATEMALA - At least 10 people died Saturday in Guatemala when they were buried under two different mudslides caused by the heavy rains that have drenched the country for the last two days and which have also devastated dozens of communities

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico - Some 5,000 people have been evacuated in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco because torrential rains have caused two rivers to overflow their banks, officials said Saturday. "The situation is very critical, a situation more critical than in 2007," state Gov. Andres Granier said. Three years ago, the state suffered heavy flooding that had more than 60 percent of its territory underwater and displaced close to 1 million people.

Atlantic Tropical Weather Discussion.

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

An Israeli newspaper managed to get the court to release the woman's sealed testimony. She turns out to have been abused by her father from childhood, and currently to be in a home for abused women. According to her testimony, she was really raped (in the normal sense of the word) and beaten by the defendant. However, because of some problems with her testimony, including the fact that she had worked as a prostitute, the idiots in the prosecutor's office thought that they would have a hard time convincing the court that she had been raped, and came up with an alternative strategy....

A state of emergency has been declared in Guatemala, where days of heavy rain have caused widespread flooding and landslides.

At least 20 people have been killed, including at least 10 who died when a bus was engulfed by a mudslide.

President Alvaro Colom said the rains had undone all the reconstruction work completed since Tropical Storm Agatha, which killed 165 people in May.

He has asked congress to approve emergency funds for rebuilding.

Days of heavy rains have saturated Guatemala's mountainous terrain, causing hillsides to collapse suddenly and without warning.

WASHINGTON -- Twenty years after northern spotted owls were protected under the Endangered Species Act, their numbers continue to decline, and scientists aren't certain whether the birds will survive even though logging was banned on much of the old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest where they live in order to save them.

The owl remains an iconic symbol in a region where once loggers in steel-spiked, high-topped caulk boots felled 200-year-old or even older trees and loaded them on trucks that compression-braked down twisty mountain roads to mills redolent with the smell of fresh sawdust and smoke from burning timber scraps.

Regionwide, the owl populations are dropping 2.9 percent a year. In Washington state, they're declining at 6 to 7 percent a year.

Deforestation Rate Continues to Plunge in Brazil by Antonio Regalado on 2 September 2010, 1:03 PM | Permanent Link | 0 Comments Email Print | More Previous Article Next Article

The Brazilian government says that a preliminary survey by a low-resolution satellite shows that deforestation in the Amazon declined by 47.5% over the past 12 months. The figure is the largest decline since measurements began in 1988 and, if confirmed by data from a second set of satellites due out later this year, would amount to nearly a 90% drop in lost forest area since a 2004 peak.

"I think the results are pretty strong for a big additional decrease in deforestation," says Greg Asner, a satellite expert with the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. "I am really pleased to see it. I do not doubt that the trend is real."

The Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), Brazil's remote-sensing agency, said fires burned 2296 sq km between August 2009 and August 2010. That compares with 4375 sq km for the preceding 12-month period. Clearing was concentrated in the agricultural states of Pará and Mato Grosso. Asner, who uses satellites to monitor tropical forests globally, says Brazil is the only tropical country where deforestation rates are decreasing consistently. Deforestation refers to land cleared by fires for pastures or farms. The satellites do not monitor another activity, illegal logging, that also can degrade forest regions.

Researchers have demonstrated tiny solar cells just billionths of a metre across that can repair themselves, extending their useful lifetime.

The cells make use of proteins from the machinery of plants, turning sunlight into electric charges that can do work.

The cells simply assemble themselves from a mixture of the proteins, minute tubes of carbon and other materials.

The self-repairing mechanism, reported in Nature Chemistry, could lead to much longer-lasting solar cells.

After months of heated discussions  about the future of Germany's nuclear power plants, the coalition government has agreed to extend their operating lives by up to 14 years.

Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen and Economics Minister Rainer Brüderle announced the compromise late on Sunday evening after a nearly 12-hour meeting at the Chancellery in Berlin.

The agreement, which still needs to be approved by the German parliament, the Bundestag, will make significant changes to a law pushed through by Merkel's predecessor, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, which mandated that Germany phase out nuclear power by 2021. It will form the cornerstone of a broader energy strategy that Merkel is set to reveal later this month and ends months of divisions in the coalition government over the issue of extending plant lives.

Under the new two-tier solution, the government plans to divide Germany's 17 nuclear plants into two groups, depending on their year of construction. The operating lives of older nuclear plants will be extended by eight years, while newer plants will receive an extension of 14 years. The new plan means that Germany will be using electricity generated from nuclear power for the next three decades.

Even in the thick of a historical tragedy, Tony Blair never seemed like a Shakespearean character.

He's too rabbity brisk, too doggedly modern. The most proficient spinner since Rumpelstiltskin lacks introspection. The self-described "manipulator" is still in denial about being manipulated.

[...]

There is no apology, but Blair sounds like a man with a guilty conscience.

The troubles for the porn studios began with a technology called BitTorrent, introduced in 2001, which made it easy for people to share data files over the Internet. This technology provided the world with unlimited free music, much to the dismay of the giant music publishers. But it was still somewhat clunky. If you wanted to watch a video, you had to download it, which took time and ate up space on your hard drive.

By 2005, the BitTorrent technology gave way to something more manageable and user-friendly: streaming video. This technology was used early and heavily by sites with names like PornHub, Xvideos, and YouPorn. Suddenly, anybody who wanted to watch a clip could do so almost instantly. You clicked on a video and it played in the browser: no more waiting, no more downloading.

This simple innovation has demolished the porn industry's traditional way of doing business. Porn tube sites are now among the most visited websites in the world. According to the online measurement company Alexa, PornHub holds a worldwide traffic rank of 54. Xvideos is at number 53, and ­YouPorn is at number 64. The threat comes from the sheer ease of uploading content--anyone's content--onto a site and then drawing users to view it. Most tubes describe themselves as aggregators of "user-generated content," but the material they publish is much broader--many video clips are created, paid for, and owned by porn studios.

A major new exhibition of works by Andy Warhol focuses on a four-year period pivotal to his development as an artist.

"This is a very focused exhibition, concentrating on the years from 1961 to 1964," explains Bernhard Burgi, director of Basel's Kunstmuseum.

"This period is fantastic - I think it is the heart of everything Andy Warhol did."

The key to the exhibition is the way it traces the pop artist's transition from a more traditional artistic approach to using subjects repeatedly, in the same canvas, and moving to a more mechanised production of his work.

Tho perhaps Ralph Cardigan has something other to say.

Assuming he's not dead yet.

Skennah Kowa