French President François Hollande potentially won the hearts of millions of future voters on Tuesday when he announced plans to abolish homework and reduce the number of pupils forced to repeat school years.

The comprehensive reforms will also increase the number of teachers across the country, boost aid to disadvantaged areas and target absenteeism. The school week would return to four and a half days rather than four - a change introduced under the former administration as a cost-cutting measure.

"Education is priority," Hollande said at Paris's Sorbonne University on Wednesday. "An education programme is, by definition, a societal programme. Work should be done at school, rather than at home," in order to foster educational equality for those students who do not have support at home., he added.

The European Students' Union says that the EU Erasmus student programme needs a €90 million injection to make payments to students for the second semester of 2012-13. In a statement issued Wednesday, the ESU said that the confusion would lead to a big drop in Erasmus applications.

BRUSSELS - The EU parliament's plenary chamber in Brussels is to stay closed for "at least" six months due to a crack in the roof.

The parliament said in a statement on Tuesday (9 October) that one of the curved, horizontal beams which supports the 750-seat chamber's cavernous ceiling, had a "weak spot" when it was put in.

The spot became "fragile" with "ageing," causing an "important crack." The fissure increased weight on two other beams "which made them crack too."

It noted that repair work is "expected to take at least six months.

BRUSSELS - The European Parliament is ready to hang tough with governments in upcoming talks on the seven year EU budget framework from 2014-2020, demanding "significant increases" in funding for research and development, small businesses and infrastructure projects.

The study, carried out by Dexia Credit Local and presented in September this year, shows that after two years of pumping money into regions, central governments are now tightening their belts.

In 2011, the amount of grants and subsidies to federated states, regions, provinces, and municipalities fell by 4.9 percent, according to the study, following a 0.6 percent drop in 2010.

...

As a result, subnational governments, too, are cutting down on spending.

Controversy in Olso

So yet another controversial decision from the Norwegian Nobel peace prize panel.

The secretary of the Oslo-based Nobel Committee has announced the EU has been awarded the Nobel prize. He cited the EU's role in bringing France and Germany closer together, and by helping strengthen democracy in southern as well as central and eastern Europe.

With the EU embroiled in the eurozone crisis and a deep debate over the future of Europe little surprise that one of the first questions in the room was what exactly the EU has done to promote peace in the last year....

Europeans react with dismay at IMF chief economist's ruminations about the fiscal multiplier;  Schauble says debate not helpful; privately, the Europeans are fuming even louder in Tokyo, angry that they have to be confronted with this debate at this time; Jacob Funk Kierkegaard says multiplier debate a sign of the IMF's intellectual independence, but will have no policy impact; Christine Lagarde favours a two-year extension to the Greek programme, but meets with stiff opposition from Schauble; Germans says an extension costs €30bn, and there is no way that the Bundestag would approve a third Greek programme; back in Athens, the troika and the Greek government edged further towards a deal; the Greek government is exploring a number of possibilities to fund a two-year extension; the Greek budget deficit is better than the target this year, but unemployment is now at 25.1%; the EU said to consider delaying Basel bank rules for up to a year; Spain's foreign minister blames Catalonia for the downgrade; Fitch says an orderly resolution of NovaCaixaGalicia is now the most likely outcome; the Spanish banking sector now constitutes 60% of all property transactions; Spanish households have lost 18% of their aggregate net assets in one year; Croatia is now being subjected to the eurozone governance rules, as the country faces demonstrations against austerity; German economic institutes believe that current policy will invariably lead to a rise in inflation; the Italian constitutional court strikes down an important austerity measure; Paolo Manasse says it is wrong to combine income tax cuts with a VAT increase; Claus Hulverscheidt says Merkel's crisis management is better than widely claimed, but she is making a mistake by not coming clean on the cost of the euro rescue; Le Monde, meanwhile, criticises Merkel's provincial attitude over her refusal to accept the EADS/BAE merger.

EU awarded Nobel Peace Prize - Telegraph

The European Union has won the Nobel Peace Prize, despite a year marked by riots on streets of many capitals and the looming prospect of an acrimonious break up amid an economic crisis caused by the euro.

The government of Portugal has approved what ministers called the most austere budget in decades. Lisbon has set its sights on quickly reducing its debt load after being bailed out last year by the EU and the IMF.

Portugal is on course to implement a draconian 2013 austerity budget. Following a 20-hour marathon session, the cabinet on Thursday approved massive spending cuts next year and a string of corrections to this year's budget.

Details of the measures in the pipeline are yet to be made public, but the package looked certain to include hikes in income tax and other taxes to replace a stalled rise in workers' social contributions which had been wiped off the table after widespread protests across the country.

Hungary's prime minister has said his country's in no rush to join the euro during a visit to Berlin. Chancellor Merkel said she understood why the moment might seem wrong, while holding her tongue on other matters.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in Berlin on Thursday that Hungary was not considering joining the single European currency in the short term.

"Hungary will enter into the euro area once this prospect really offers benefits and once we are ready," Orban said in a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel. "We in no way reject the euro, but we don't want to join up as novices."

A fresh poll has shown that more Germans want Greece to stay in the eurozone than want it to leave. The results of the survey by a public broadcaster indicate a change in sentiment despite Athens' ongoing dilemma.

For the first time in more than a year, the number of Germans wanting Greece to remain in the eurozone exceeds those who'd rather the country said good-bye to the single currency, a regular poll by public broadcaster ZDF showed on Thursday.

The results of the survey came just two days after German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a symbolic and highly controversial visit to Athens.

Germany's leading economic institutes have warned against a dent in growth in the country next year. They have attributed their revised expectations to the eurozone debt crisis and sluggish demand in other regions.

A group of leading German economic institutes on Thursday revised their expectations for economic growth in Germany in the current year as well as in 2013, saying they expected less growth than they had originally anticipated.

Presenting their annual Autumn Outlook, the experts said they now reckoned with 0.8 percent growth in Germany in 2012, down from 0.9 percent in their spring forecast. But while there was only a slight revision for this year, the institutes halved their estimates for 2013, saying domestic growth would only amount to 1.0 percent instead of the 2.0 percent predicted half a year ago.

AFP - Coca-Cola's second biggest bottler worldwide said on Thursday it was moving its headquarters from Greece to Switzerland and looking to establish a listing on the London stock exchange.

With the move, the company joins other businesses based in Greece that have chosen other shores after five years of recession and amid fears that Athens could leave the eurozone.

The fact of the matter is that the IMF has played bad cop to the global economy for generations now, enforcing austerity, conditionality and accountability wherever it goes. And, for the most part, it's the emerging world that's suffered most.

Recanting on some of these closely held beliefs, especially now that the bitter medicine is predominantly being applied to the developed world, is awkward to say the least. Some might even say it's as close to an admission of past wrongs as you will ever get.

This is from the blog. Can an FT subscriber tell us what the official FT story is?

The question is, what will the political elite do with this knowledge? Also, to what degree will the IMF have to stage a "we're sorry" campaign?

Hah!
and Hah!


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sapere aude

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said a Syrian passenger plane intercepted by Turkey's air force was carrying Russian-made munitions. Erdogan said the cargo seized was destined for the Syrian military.

Prime Minister Erdogan told reporters in Ankara on Thursday that Turkey was still examining the equipment and that "the necessary will follow."

Syria's government had said that the Syrian Air Airbus A320 was not carrying any illicit cargo.

Lebanon's Hezbollah leader has claimed responsibilty for a drone that was shot down over Israel last week. He said the Iranian-made craft was shot down near Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor.

In a televised speech on Thursday Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the drone had flown over sensitive sites in Israel. "Possession of such an aerial capacity is a first in the history of any resistance movement in Lebanon and the region," he said.

"It's not the first time (that a drone was sent) and it will not be the last. We can reach all the zones" of Israel, said Nasrallah, referring to a less sophisticated drone sent by Hezbollah during its 2006 war against Israel.

Yemeni security officials say a gunman has killed the Yemeni chief of security working for the US Embassy in the capital city Sanaa. The attack comes amid a US-backed offensive against al Qaeda's branch in the country.

A gunman on a motorcycle opened fire on Qassem Aqlan, who was on his way to work early on Thursday. The unidentified gunmen then fled the scene. Aqlan had been working for the US Embassy in the Yemeni capital for nearly 20 years, according to Yemeni security officials.

The attack comes as Yemen's US-backed government is waging an offensive against al Qaeda, taking back territory and cities in the south that the terrorist group seized last year.

Forty years ago, the Federal Republic of Germany established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. Nowadays, the disparate partners rely on each other more than ever before.

On the one hand, there's the relatively small industrial nation in the heart of Europe which - after overcoming Hitler's fascism and the German Democratic Republic - is proud of its democracy and rule of law. On the other hand, there's the single-party state with a population of over one billion people and a huge territory resembling a continent. These two counties, Germany and China, could not be more different. And yet relations between them have developed in a way people never would have imagined 40 years ago.

As the "cradle of the Arab Spring," Tunisia enjoys a symbolic status across the region, with the ideological debates gripping this tiny North African nation widely viewed as a harbinger of more salubrious or ominous things to come.

So, when a secret video of a tête-à-tête between the leader of Tunisia's ruling Islamist party and radical Salafists surfaced on the Internet earlier this week, it sparked a storm across the region.

President François Hollande said on Thursday that he would not commit French combat troops to future military operations against Islamic militants in northern Mali, but would help with logistical support and training, a day before he embarked on his first official tour of Africa.

"We can't intervene in the place of Africans, but we can offer logistical help, we can train, but France will not intervene" Hollande told FRANCE 24 in an exclusive interview on Thursday.

He said that it was up to the Malian government, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the African Union to organise and man a military response to Mali's Islamist rebels.

Armed Tuareg groups and Islamist militants allied to al Qaeda overran Mali's north in April 2012, proclaiming the region's independence and imposing sharia law.

Four students from the University of Port Harcourt, in southern Nigeria, were burned alive Friday by locals who accused them of being thieves. A horrific video of the scene has since surfaced online, angering their classmates, some of whom reportedly decided to get revenge by setting fire to the part of town where the young men were killed.   According to the Nigerian press, the four killed students were second-year undergraduates whom local residents in the Aluu neighbourhood of Port Harcourt accused of stealing a laptop computer and a Blackberry phone. A friend of the victims, meanwhile, told the BBC that they had gone to Aluu to try to collect money they were owed, and were mistaken for thieves.

The more troubling sign for Mr. Romney, however, is that although he's made gains, he does not seem to have taken the lead in very many state polls. That trend, if anything, has become more entrenched. Of the half-dozen or so polls of battleground states published on Wednesday, none showed Mr. Romney ahead; the best result he managed was a 48-48 tie in a Rasmussen Reports poll of New Hampshire.

...

How to reconcile this against the fact that Mr. Romney is about tied -- or perhaps even has a small lead -- in the average of national polls right now?

From a forecasting standpoint, this is the question that the whole election may turn upon. There are basically four ways to explain the difference.

1. This is a statistical quirk that will work its way out of the system.
   
2. Mr. Obama has some pronounced advantage in the Electoral College relative to his position in the popular vote.
   
3. The state polls systematically overestimate Mr. Obama and underestimate Mr. Romney.
   
4. The national polls systematically overestimate Mr. Romney and underestimate Mr. Obama.

An Argentine naval vessel crewed by more than 200 sailors has been seized in Ghana as part of an attempt by the US hedge fund Elliott Capital Management to collect on bonds on which Buenos Aires defaulted in 2001.
[...]
Elliott is among a minority of "holdouts" who didn't accept the roughly 30 cents in the dollar Argentina offered in two rounds of debt restructuring since 2005.

Is this what's in store for the GIIPSI if they don't behave and stick with austerity? Haven't heard anything similar about Iceland - maybe their navy sticks closer to home.


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Ad astra per aspera

In a landmark legal case, Nigerian farmers are suing the oil giant Shell in a Dutch court, asking judges to order the company to clean up environmental damage it is claimed was caused by leaking pipes.

The case breaks new legal ground because this is the first time that a Dutch company is being sued for alleged environmental mismanagement caused by an overseas subsidiary.   

Villagers say a leak in June 2005 fouled fish ponds, farmland and forests in Oruma in the Niger Delta. They claim it took Shell 12 days to seal the leaking pipe and blame the spill on corrosion on a pressurized underground pipe. Shell claims it was caused by sabotage.

An investigation by the Environmental Justice Foundation has found that nine out of 10 trawlers caught fishing illegally in Sierra Leone send their catch to Europe. The government is working to fight the problem.

A two-year investigation by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) has found evidence of illegally caught fish entering the European market. The British-based environmental and human rights charity says nine out of 10 trawlers caught fishing illegally in Sierra Leone are actually accredited to export their catch to Europe.

AFP - EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has written to German car giant Volkswagen maintaining that proposed EU limits on auto carbon emissions were actually relaxed before they were finalised.

According to a letter seen by AFP Thursday, Oettinger said the proposals "reflected not insignificant changes compared with the initial plan."

A sea scuffle between French and British fisherman has forced marine officials from both countries to hold urgent negotiations. The conflict began on Monday when some 40 French trawlers `confronted' around five British scallop dredgers off the coast of Normandy, allegedly throwing rocks and flares and sailing near them at high speed.

"We were like sitting ducks," British skipper of the Vertrouwen, Kevin Loughran, told the Guardian newspaper. "Someone could have been killed."

"I don't have a whole lot of choice," said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. "We've decided as a society that it's too expensive to modify the kid's environment. So we have to modify the kid."

Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money -- not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance.

It is not yet clear whether Dr. Anderson is representative of a widening trend. But some experts note that as wealthy students abuse stimulants to raise already-good grades in colleges and high schools, the medications are being used on low-income elementary school children with faltering grades and parents eager to see them succeed.

"We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions for these children and their families," said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, a child mental-health services researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children. "We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications."

This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for literature has been announced. Chinese author Mo Yan is the 111th winner of the prestigious accolade.

The Swedish Nobel Prize Committee awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature to Chinese author Mo Yan on Thursday.

The last Chinese-language author to win a Nobel prize was Gao Xingjian in 2000.

Mo's use of imaginative prose and dark humor to write about modern China has earned him worldwide praise.

New Zealand-born musician Hayden Chisholm toured Germany to learn about its rich folk music tradition - and why the Germans have a problem with it. His back-to-the-roots journey was captured in a new documentary.

The EU's Digital Agenda chief warns time is running out for the Web's standards body, W3C, to develop a tool good enough to help users protect their data against commercial interests.

It's not easy for companies to make money online - the number of people willing to pay for an online subscription remains relatively low.

Many internet companies, including newspapers, still tend to rely on people's clicks on ads to make their money.

The more targeted the ad, the more advertisers are willing to pay. And in order to target an ad, they use tracking tools, such as cookies.

A Russian court has confirmed jail sentences against two members of the punk band Pussy Riot. A third had her sentence suspended. Observers say the trial confirms the downward spiral of Russian human rights.

One of the members of the punk band Pussy Riot has been unexpectedly released on appeal, after a Moscow court converted a two-year jail term against Yekaterina Samutsevich into a suspended sentence on Wednesday (10.10.2012).

The judges said Samutsevich had been thrown out of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior before she was able to take part in the activities over which she was charged. The court confirmed the two-year sentences imposed on the other two members of the band, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina.

AFP - Twinkling stars are not the only diamonds in the sky. Scientists Thursday reported the existence of a "diamond planet" twice the size of Earth, and eight times its mass, zooming around a nearby star.

In fact, this is not the first diamond planet ever discovered, but it is the first found orbiting a sun-like star and whose chemical makeup has been specified.

The discovery means that distant rocky planets can no longer be assumed to have chemical constituents, interiors, atmospheres, or biologies similar to those of Earth, said lead researcher Nikku Madhusudhan, a Yale postdoctoral researcher in physics and astronomy.

The robotic arm of the International Space Station grabs hold of the SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo craft. The unmanned Falcon rocket contained about 1,000 pounds of food, clothes and gear, including ice cream. The mission was the first under a $1.6bn contract with Nasa that calls for a dozen resupply flights by SpaceX

Norway is to double carbon tax on its North Sea oil industry and set up a £1bn fund to help combat the damaging impacts of climate change in the developing world.

In one of the most radical climate programmes yet by an oil-producing nation, the Norwegian government has proposed increasing its carbon tax on offshore oil companies by £21 to £45 (Nkr410) per tonne of CO2 and a £5.50 (Nkr50) per tonne CO2 tax on its fishing industry.

New rumours are swirling about the French first lady's private life, and she is preparing a counterattack.

Valérie Trierweiler, the partner of French President François Hollande, will sue the authors of a new book about her, her lawyers have said.

AFP - Cocktails of olive oil and testosterone, blood stored in secret cupboards and a shadowy courier known as 'Motoman' have delivered the fatal blows to the doping-shattered reputation of Lance Armstrong.

In the 202 pages of damning evidence compiled by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) which it claims proved the existence of the biggest doping conspiracy in sports history, the use of EPO, testosterone, cortisone and transfusions were common occurences which powered the American to seven Tour de France titles.

The computer hacker collective Anonymous has distanced itself from WikiLeaks, claiming the whistleblowers' site has become too focused on the personal tribulations of its founder, Julian Assange.

A statement posted on the Anonymous Twitter account, AnonymousIRC, described WikiLeaks as "the one man Julian Assange show" after the website began asking users to pay for access to millions of leaked documents.

"The idea behind WikiLeaks was to provide the public with information that would otherwise be kept secret by industries and governments. Information we strongly believe the public has a right to know," said the statement on behalf of Anonymous.

"But this has been pushed more and more into the background, instead we only hear about Julian Assange, like he had dinner last night with Lady Gaga. That's great for him but not much of our interest. We are more interested in transparent governments and bringing out documents and information they want to hide from the public."