(Reuters) - Ukrainians voted on Sunday in an election that President Viktor Yanukovich's pro-business ruling party seemed likely to win, but it may now face a re-energised opposition which has promised to fight growing authoritarianism and corruption.

With Yanukovich's main rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, in jail and with the West seeing the poll as a test of Ukraine's commitment to democracy, interest will focus on the judgment that international monitors will hand down on Monday.

The former Soviet republic of 46 million is more isolated internationally than it has been for years. Tymoshenko's continued imprisonment has put it at odds with the United States and the European Union, while Russia turns a deaf ear to Kiev's calls for cheaper gas.

At home, the government's popularity has been hit by tax and pensions policies and a failure to stamp out corruption, prompting it to shy away from painful reforms that could secure much-needed IMF lending to shore up its export-driven economy.

Tensions between David Cameron and Angela Merkel over the future of the European Union have spilled into the open with a German diplomat claiming Britain lacks "vision" and faces being left behind by other countries because all it can say is, "No, no, no".

Dr Rudolf Adam, deputy head of mission at the German embassy in London, told one of William Hague's ministerial aides that the Prime Minister's refusal to take a lead in Europe meant Britain would "just see the red lights of the train that has already left the station".

Disgraced police chief Sir Norman Bettison infuriated Merseyside councillors, it emerged this weekend, when he told them the episode in his career he would most like to forget was not the Hillsborough disaster, but falling over on his first day as a constable.

Sir Norman, who resigned last week as chief constable of West Yorkshire, told an interview panel in October 1998, when he was applying for the top post at Merseyside Police, that the incident he would most like to forget was "that fall on my first day in uniform".

The following month, during an "informal meeting" with all members of the police authority, he was challenged over why he had not used the opportunity to express regret for the Hillsborough disaster. He insisted instead: "Nothing about Hillsborough embarrasses me."

A Greek journalist has been arrested after publishing a list of about 2,000 Greeks who hold accounts with the HSBC bank in Switzerland.

Kostas Vaxevanis has been charged with breach of privacy.

Mr Vaxevanis says the list he published is the same one that was given by the then French finance minister Christine Lagarde to her Greek counterpart.

Some of those named, said to include many prominent Greeks, are suspected of using the accounts for tax evasion.

The list was originally leaked by an HSBC employee and then handed over by Ms Lagarde to Greek authorities two years ago, according the the AFP news agency.

Since then, successive Greek governments have been accused of trying to cover it up.

"Instead of arresting the tax evaders and the ministers who had the list in their hands, they're trying to arrest the truth and freedom of the press," Mr Vaxevanis said.

A woman suspected of being a military leader in the armed Basque separatist group Eta has been arrested in France, the Spanish interior ministry says.

Izaskun Lesaka and another Eta suspect were arrested by French police in the town of Macon, a statement said.

It described Ms Lesaka as one of the "three most important figures" in Eta, and said both suspects had been armed.

Eta announced a "definitive end" to its armed campaign in October 2011, but Spain has demanded that it disband.

In May the Spanish government rejected a request for talks from Eta, whose 45-year campaign for independence has claimed over 800 lives.

The group is considered a terrorist organisation by Spain, the EU and the US.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi endorsed a proposal by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble for a commissioner who has power over the budgets of nations in the euro region.

"I am fully in favor of it," Draghi said in an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel, according to a transcript published today by the Frankfurt based-ECB. "Governments would be wise to seriously consider it" as "in order to restore confidence in the euro area, countries need to transfer part of their sovereignty to the European level."

Some of you may be aware that police invaded the home of a campaigner for Disabled People Against Cuts, living in Cardiff, just before midnight yesterday (October 26).

Apparently she had been accused of "Criminal acts against the Department for Work and Pensions" - being that she has been highlighting the deaths of sick and disabled people following reassessment by Atos and the DWP for Employment and Support Allowance.

No charges were brought against the lady concerned and it is generally considered that this was an act of intimidation.

Jill Dando was murdered at her own doorstep on 26 April 1999, aged 37. Her murder is, at present time, unsolved. Operation Oxborough, the Met's investigation into her death, discovered significant evidence that her privacy had been invaded in the 5 months prior to her death. Who was responsible for that activity, and to what extent did the Met discover the customers for that information?

After his conviction of tax fraud, Silvio Berlusconi bounces back with a full-frontal attack against Angela Merkel and Mario Monti; while the Italian media are writing him off as a future political force, he is still considered as sufficiently destructive to cause instability; Il Sole writes that Berlusconi is finished, but this is no reason to rejoice as he gives way to even more extreme populists; the latest exit polls suggest that Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement has won the regional elections in Sicily; his party is now second place in national polls; Italian demonstrators staged a large "No Monti Day" anti-austerity rally in Rome; Greece's foreign lenders have refused to make any concessions on the labour market reforms; there is still no agreement in the Greek coalition government; the austerity package could still pass without the support of the Democratic Left, but this would be seen as a blow to the stability of the coalition; Wolfgang Schauble rejects an OSI for Greece; Ewald Nowottny says Greece should be given more time; also says that Spain does not need a programme right now; Spiegel Online says that Merkel also rejects OSI, but may accept a third Greek loan programme; Cerstin Gammelin says please stop the hypocrisy about OSI; a Greek editor is arrested for publishing a list of suspected tax evaders, which reads like a Who's Who of Greek commerce; Germany backs a promissory note deal for Ireland, but remains hard on legacy debt; a Banque de France research note finds that austerity does not work for debt reduction, only growth or inflation can do the trick; Spanish judge urge mortgage reform; there are reports of suicides and attempted suicides by people facing eviction; the IMF advocates the closure of non-viable Spanish banks; Spain's unemployment exceeds 25% for the first time; Spain's employment minister says public sector unemployed are "people too"; Wolfgang Munchau, meanwhile, says there is something he does not understand.

L'Isola al voto per rinnovare presidente e Assemblea regionale. La maggioranza degli elettori si astiene: ha votato il 47,4 per cento. Affluenza in netto calo rispetto alle tre tornate precedenti. Clamorosi risultati secondo le prime rilevazioni nel capoluogo: Cancelleri sarebbe oltre il 27 per cento. Ma il candidato Pd-Udc Crocetta: "In cinque province sono in testa io"

Lithuanians angry at spending cuts put leftwing opposition parties on the path to power in an election on Sunday that likely spelled the end for a conservative government praised abroad as a model of austerity.

The Social Democratic Party and the Labour Party, which have promised to raise the minimum wage and shift the tax burden to the better off, were headed for a parliamentary majority in combination with their likely partner, the Paksas Party, according to preliminary results from the second-round vote.

China's government spent more than planned in the first nine months of the year, and revenue gains moderated, leaving little room for public outlays to stoke the economy this quarter without an expansion of the budget.

Fiscal revenue rose 10.9 percent in January-to-September from a year earlier to 9.06 trillion yuan ($1.5 trillion), compared with a 29.5 percent gain in the same period in 2011, Ministry of Finance data showed this month. Spending in the January-September period rose 21.1 percent, higher than the targeted 14.1 percent rise for the full year, leaving a surplus of about half last year's level.

"The effects of China's fiscal policy were expansionary in the first nine months but will be neutral in the fourth quarter as spending won't be higher than a year earlier," said Ding Shuang, senior China economist with Citigroup Inc. in Hong Kong, who formerly worked at the People's Bank of China and International Monetary Fund. "Policy effects from previous months will ensure a modest recovery, but the rebound is restrained."

Policy makers across Asia have restrained their stimulus efforts compared with 2008-2009 as the global expansion slowed, either opting to preserve firepower should Europe's crisis worsen, or seeking to avoid asset-price bubbles. In China, outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao's government has fought to rein in housing costs in the run-up to the nation's once-in-a-decade leadership transition that starts next month.

The Bundesbank said the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will help it meet auditing requirements related to its gold reserves that were demanded by Germany's Audit Court.

"We have been in discussions with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York about the Bundesbank's holdings of gold," the Bundesbank said yesterday in a letter to the German parliament's budget committee. "The discussions have been fruitful and the Federal Reserve has expressed a commitment to work with the Bundesbank to explore ways to address the audit observations, consistent with its own security and control processes and logistical constraints."

The agreement is part of a compromise between the German central bank and the Audit Court, which has called on the Bundesbank to take stock of its gold holdings outside Germany, saying it has never verified their existence.

Oil in New York rebounded after better-than-forecast U.S. economic figures fueled speculation that energy demand in the world's largest crude user will increase.

Futures rose as much as 0.3 percent after earlier dropping as much as 1.2 percent. The U.S. economy expanded by 2 percent in the third quarter, 0.2 percent more than forecast, paced by a pickup in consumer spending, a rebound in government outlays and gains in residential construction, a government report today showed. Crude is still set for its largest weekly drop in a month amid increasing stockpiles.

"These are better figures than expected, and are conveniently good for Obama, and should see oil and stock prices pare losses," Michael Hewson, London-based market analyst at CMC Markets, said by e-mail today. "The main worry is that these figures will probably get revised down."

The Bank of England has warned that a full breakup of Britain's banks might ultimately be needed to prevent their problems wrecking the economy or burdening the taxpayer.

Andrew Haldane, Threadneedle Street's director for financial stability, expressed doubts that current proposals would be sufficient to tackle the "too big to fail" issue that has dogged the financial sector since the crisis of 2007-08.

In a speech to the Institute of Economic Affairs on Thursday night, Haldane said current initiatives were a step in the right direction but did not go far enough.

Ultimately, he said, banks might need to have their activities curtailed by tough capital requirements, limits on their size or a modern Glass-Steagall Act, the 1930s law that separated investment from retail banking in the US.

David Cameron has asked the ONS to look into how best to lift the lid off the traditional measures of economic output and gauge families' life satisfaction - what used to be known as the elusive "feelgood factor".

In last week's study, the latest in a series, the ONS found that net national income per head, which experts including Joseph Stiglitz have found to be a better indicator of families' living standards than raw GDP, had declined by more than 13% from its pre-crisis peak by the summer of this year - far sharper than the 4% drop in GDP.

(...)the Bank of England governor used his appearance [in Wales] to warn that the UK, along with much of the industrialised world, may be working through the after-effects of the crisis for years.

"After a period of lopsided expansion, with growing trade deficits and debt levels, and a collapse of their banking systems, advanced economies across the world are facing a huge adjustment. Such is the scale of the global adjustment required that the generation we hope to inspire may live under its shadow for a long time to come," he said. He talked about a "downward correction of expectations about future incomes and wealth" that will inevitably change consumer behaviour and slowly start to shift the shape of the economy.

It's hard to know how much the productive capacity of the economy has been damaged by those years of "lopsided" growth; but an army of export champions won't spring up overnight to replace jobs lost on boarded-up high streets, and Ford's announcement that it is laying off up to 1,400 workers as demand from the continent shrinks demonstrates the scale of the challenge.

"We have been beaten and wrestled to the ground by settlers on numerous occasions," said Khalid Daraghmeh, also known as Abu Jamal. "When they come, they don't spare us or the plants or animals." Abu Jamal said the settlers have thus far killed four of his dogs, uprooted 350 seedlings, and removed the irrigation system of pipes used to water the plants. On one occasion, settlers stripped naked and dipped themselves in another well used for drinking, he said.

The Daraghmeh home is surrounded by freshly-paved roads leading up to the Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Levona, one of three bordering their land. The village, located some 30km south of Nablus, lies adjacent to Route-60, the primary north-south road that runs through the West Bank.

'I'm not going anywhere'

"They asked to buy my land on several occasions," Abu Jamal said. "But this land is mine and I'm not going anywhere." Large rocks peppering his land stand as testament to the number of times they have been hurled by settlers, he said. 

Two months earlier, a group of some 30 settlers attacked them in their home, recalled Taghreed, Abu Jamal's wife. The settlers took the door off its hinges and beat her children 13-year-old Mo'men, and her youngest, Nour, only 10, she said. 

A suicide bomber has driven a vehicle packed with explosives into a Catholic church in northern Nigeria, killing at least eight people and wounding more than 100, triggering reprisal attacks that have killed at least two more, according to officials.

The attack happened in the Malali neighbourhood of Kaduna, a city on the dividing line between Nigeria's largely Christian south and mainly Muslim north, where religious rioting has killed hundreds in recent years.

The car tried to force its way past the gate at St Rita's Catholic church just before it exploded, witnesses at the church said.

The UN has called for "urgent action" to prevent the spread of intercommunal violence in Myanmar's Rakhine state, after recent clashes killed dozens of people and left thousands homeless.

The organisation said a team lead by Ashok Nigam, its Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordinator, had visited the state and seen "large scale destruction of houses".

The government estimates that more than 22,500 people have been displaced from their homes in the last week and more than 4,600 houses have been burnt.

Security forces have been deployed to areas where clashes between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Muslim Rohingya erupted on October 21.

Tensions have been running high in Rakhine state after Muslims were blamed for the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman in June, setting off deadly clashes that displaced tens of thousands of people.

Fix one problem, and along comes another. On the day China expelled disgraced politician Bo Xilai from its parliament, a New York Times investigation alleged that Premier Wen Jiabao's family controls financial assets worth $2.7 billion. The suggestion is explosive, particularly of a leader who has spoken out about inequality. But it is also mundane, and won't much change the calculus for investors in the People's Republic.

With only around three weeks until Wen makes way for a new premier, the risk that this becomes a social hot potato is slight. China's censorship machine works as efficiently as ever: visits to the New York Times website were swiftly blocked. Blog users discussed the story, but only in euphemism, referring to Wen by names like "Wo Jia Baobao" - "My baby". Though the details are juicy, the idea that China's elite are very rich is hardly surprising.

New York City's public transport system is to be suspended ahead of the arrival on Monday of Hurricane Sandy.

Governor Andrew Cuomo said the subway, bus and train services would shut down from 19:00 (23:00 GMT) on Sunday.

As many as 375,000 people have been ordered to evacuate low-lying areas, and schools will be shut.

Sandy's winds are set to intensify as it merges with a wintry storm from the western US. A number of states on the East Coast have declared an emergency.

Up to 60 million people could be affected by the storm, which is set to hit several states key to the 6 November presidential election.

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's big political gamble to join forces with ultra-nationalists before early elections in January threatened to backfire today as signs emerged that the new alignment could alienate moderate voters.

In a surprise announcement late on Thursday, the hawkish premier sketched out the details of a tie-up between his ruling Likud party and Yisrael Beitenu, led by the Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. Disunited centrists factions condemned the alliance as an "extremist leadership".

Mr Netanyahu hopes the alignment will give him a substantial majority in the next Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and the popular mandate he needs to formulate a strategy, possibly a military one, to defeat Tehran's nuclear ambitions. The decision to run alongside Mr Lieberman, a former nightclub bouncer who lives in a West Bank settlement, will raise eyebrows not only in Israel but also in the West, where he is largely shunned.

Do you happen to know the religion of the following people: [...]

Barack Obama:

[figures are from 2010 and 2012]

Protestant   26     28
[...]
Jewish           0     18
Muslim        17      10
[...]              
No religion    2     35
Don't know   41     2
[...]

Many Western journalists are based in Lebanon, few in Iraq. This explains why relatively small events in Lebanon get dramatic reporting and much larger increases of violence in Iraq, are largely overlooked or elicit little concern.

...

The threat of spillover in Lebanon is minor compared to Iraq because the sects in Lebanon all acknowledge that none can rule the country without the others. Even the most powerful, the Shiites, readily confess that they have no chance of turning Lebanon into an Islamic republic because Lebanon has a form of democracy and the majority is against it. Not only do all the sects buy into the notion of power-sharing, they also know that in Lebanon it is impossible for one group to dominate on the others. They learned these simple truths from decades of barbaric fighting.

...

The Sunni-led attempt to depose Assad's regime is sure to give a big boost to Al-Qaida in Iraq as arms and men flow across the border and find a refuge in Syria. Saudi, Turkish and Qatari support for Syria's Sunnis is also likely to turbo-charge passions in Iraq, as Sunnis feel empowered to push back against Iranian influence and the Shiite hold on power.

Plans to expand a petrochemical plant in eastern China have been shelved after days of protests.

On Friday, crowds opposed to the expansion attacked police in the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province.

Officials from Ningbo's city government announced on Sunday evening that work on the project would now not go ahead.

Environmental protests have become more common in China. They come ahead of a once-in-a-decade change of national leaders in Beijing.

Protesters gathered again in Ningbo on Sunday, marching on the offices of the district government. They are opposed to the expansion of the plant by a subsidiary of the China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation.

"There is very little public confidence in the government," protester Liu Li told the Associated Press.

"Who knows if they are saying this just to make us leave and then keep on doing the project," she added.

In a world dogged by conflicts and wars, the key to peace and reconciliation lies in food, say chefs, small-scale producers and Slow Food campaigners at the world's biggest food fair in Turin.

Among the thousands of stalls which line the fair with spices, fruits, wines and delicacies from 100 countries in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, springs a huge African food garden with pumpkins, berries, bananas and trees.

The plot represents the 25 countries involved in the "Thousand Gardens in Africa project," which aims to preserve traditional foods and unite communities in the continent where civil wars and conflict often aggravate food crises.

The sea bed in the Arctic deep sea is increasingly strewn with litter and plastic waste. As reported in the advance online publication of the scientific journal Marine Pollution Bulletin by Dr. Melanie Bergmann, biologist and deep-sea expert at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association.

The quantities of waste observed at the AWI deep-sea observatory HAUSGARTEN are even higher than those found in a deep-sea canyon near the Portuguese capital Lisbon.

For this study Dr. Melanie Bergmann examined some 2100 seafloor photographs taken near HAUSGARTEN, the deep-sea observatory of the Alfred Wegener Institute in the eastern Fram Strait. This is the sea route between Greenland and the Norwegian island Spitsbergen.

"The study was prompted by a gut feeling. When looking through our images I got the impression that plastic bags and other litter on the seafloor were seen more frequently in photos from 2011 than in those dating back to earlier years. For this reason I decided to go systematically through all photos from 2002, 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2011," Melanie Bergmann explains.

Currently about 8.9 percent of [Sri Lanka]'s 21 million people live below the poverty line.

Of these, according to Abha Joshi-Ghani, head of the World Bank's Urban Development and Local Government Unit, "the poor in urban areas are likely to be affected more by the changing climate patterns. They are the most vulnerable because they live in sensitive areas, on precarious land where no one else will settle."

The British-based charity Homeless International estimates that 12 percent of Sri Lanka's urban population of about three million can be found in slums.

Defence and Urban Development Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa was recently quoted as saying that shanty dwellers in the capital Colombo can be found "mostly on government lands".

"Many of them are on the reservations set aside around the lakes, canals, roadways, and railway tracks," he added.

The biggest threat to this population is the flash flood. Since 2007, the nation's capital - along with other parts of the western region - has already been submerged more than two dozen times.

If you missed the news about McDonald's recent sales slump that's probably because the company planned it that way. Using the oldest corporate trick in the book, McDonald's announced its disappointing news on a Friday afternoon, hoping it would get ignored as the weekend started. But the timing of the announcement only underscores how bad the news really was. For the first time since 2003, the company's global sales rose less than 2 percent, and its net income dropped almost 4 percent.

CEO Don Thompson blamed the economy for the fast food giant's lackluster performance, pointing to "the external environment including declining consumer sentiment, high commodity and labor costs and heightened competitive activity." Translation? Between the rising price of food (thank you, climate change), growing consumer awareness of McDonald's bad business practices, and competition from the likes of Taco Bell, McDonald's was having trouble maintaining its normally high rate of growth. Thompson said the company would respond by promoting its Dollar Menu and bringing back the shockingly unhealthy McRib in December, as a way to show the "value" of eating at McDonald's. But Thompson is either missing the point or playing dumb.

I've been thinking lately about monoculture. It's a term that's familiar to those interested in food and agriculture and typically refers to the reliance on vast plantings of a single crop, such as corn or soy.

But monoculture isn't just about what you plant. It's also about how you plant and what you use to keep your plants alive. And while we can all share the goal of turning Big Ag into Better Ag, as the Natural Resources Defense Council's Sasha Lyutse put it, many of the obstacles aren't purely economic or scientific, they're cultural.

Take the Marsden Farm Study that Mark Bittman has brought to national attention as a potential model for future farmers. In it, a team of U.S. Department of Agriculture and Iowa State University researchers embarked on a 10-year study that compared conventional "two-year" rotations of corn and soy (the dominant form of commodity growing) with three- and four-year rotations that mixed in other grains, alfalfa, and -- in the case of the four-year rotation -- livestock to provide manure fertilizer. As Bittman observed:

The results were stunning: The longer rotations produced better yields of both corn and soy, reduced the need for nitrogen fertilizer and herbicides by up to 88 percent, reduced the amounts of toxins in groundwater 200-fold and didn't reduce profits by a single cent.

Dana Nachman was a producer at NBC when she wrote a story on how to make your home less toxic. "It was something I never gave an ounce of thought to before," she says. In her research, she learned not only about the tens of thousands of chemicals lurking in everyday products, but that most of those chemicals have never been independently tested for their safety. Meanwhile, rates of tough-to-explain health problems like breast cancer, autism, and infertility -- many of which have been linked to toxic exposure -- are on the rise. A mother of young children, Nachman found this upsetting enough to turn it into the subject of her next documentary (her first two films tackled wrongful convictions and terrorism). The Human Experiment, narrated by Sean Penn and co-directed by Don Hardy, follows three families motivated by health problems to fight the powerful chemical industry lobby on behalf of everyone's safety.

The head of the organisation representing Europe's nuclear industry says "lessons have been learned" from the Fukushima accident in Japan last year.

Jean-Pol Poncelet told a Brussels conference that "safety has always been of paramount importance to the European nuclear industry".

Addressing a debate organised by Foratom, the Brussels-based representative body for the nuclear industry, he said, "It has always been - and will always be - a non-negotiable priority.

"It guides our work and defines our business," he said on Wednesday.

He added, "The risk and safety assessments process that was carried out at Europe's nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima accident, and which culminated in the recent publication of the commission's communication, were an important reminder."

EU environment ministers abandoned plans on Friday (26 October) to limit excess supply of Kyoto-era carbon credits on the world's markets after seven eastern European states backed Poland's opposition to the measure.

The Environment Council had been intended to forge a common EU position on Assigned Amount Unit carbon credits (AAUs) - disparagingly dubbed `hot air' credits - before the UN climate summit in Doha next month.

But "the fact that there hasn't been agreement within the EU block will only make expectations for the Doha conference on the carry-over of AAUs very low," said Jeff Swartz, the policy director for the International Emissions Trading Association.

"The EU will have a harder time getting other countries to support their position in Doha," he told EurActiv, "so the likelihood of an outcome for that agenda item would be less."

AAU credits were agreed for countries in the former Soviet bloc under the Kyoto Protocol's Joint Implementation scheme. But a collapse of heavy industry after the Soviet Union's implosion, reduced their value to less than a euro per tonne.

Russia and many eastern European nations want the credits to carry over into a second Kyoto commitment period after 2012, when the treaty expires. 

The European Commission fears this could compromise its Emissions Trading System (ETS), and prevent meaningful international agreement at the UNFCCC Doha Climate summit next month.

If not even the EU is committed to a viable carbon market, then it's a corpse. And with it, the subsidies for carbon-mitigation in the less-developed countries.

Taking away the carbon credits from countries opting out of Kyoto is simply common sense. If the EU can't even agree on that, I don't see who else will defend it in Doha.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Nobody thinks book publishing will disappear, especially given the ubiquity and ease of e-books. After all, even in a world of cheap self-publishing, somebody has to find and market books to the masses. Recognizing this business reality (and good for them) is Penguin, which recently purchased the self-publishing company Author Solutions for $116 million. But the long-term prognosis for books is still not super. A New Yorker writer was probably right to fret in 2007 that pleasure reading may "one day be the province of a special `reading class,' much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century." Indeed, the industry has fallen into a stagnant funk. A year ago, the Association of American Publishers claimed as positive news that 4.1 percent more books were sold in 2010 over 2008. 4.1 percent! That kind of growth kills.

According to the Harvard Business Review wizards, a company that possesses a terrific first-mover advantage, a technological edge, or a patent portfolio strong enough to protect it from the competition can build scale and dominate its sector. Penguin was that sort of revolutionary company when publisher Allen Lane founded it in the mid-1930s. Lane intuited correctly that there was a market for quality literature printed inexpensively in paperback form. But his success inspired so much instant competition that his first-mover advantage was fleeting, and he couldn't patent the paperback.

The Penguin-Random House merger would theoretically give the new company more leverage in the pricing fights with Amazon et. al. But as important as that struggle for control might be, it still leaves Penguin-Random House operating in a moribund and hidebound enterprise that looks and acts like something out of the 18th century.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 26 2012 (IPS) - A new study confirms what many Iraqi doctors have been saying for years - that there is a virtual epidemic of rare congenital birth defects in cities that suffered bombing and artillery and small arms fire in the U.S.-led attacks and occupations of the country.

The hardest hit appear to be Fallujah (2004), a city in central Iraq, and Basra in the south (December 1998, March and April 2003).

Records show that the total number of birth defects observed by medical staff at Al Basrah Maternity Hospital more than doubled between 2003 and 2009. In Fallujah, between 2007 and 2010, more than half the children born there had some form of birth defect, compared to less than two percent in 2000.

Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a lead author of the latest study published in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, entitled "Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Birth Defects in Iraqi Cities," reports that in the case study of 56 Fallujah families, metal analysis of hair samples indicated contamination with two well-known neurotoxic metals: lead and mercury.

WASHINGTON, Oct 26 2012 (IPS) - Lukpan Akhmedyarov, a 36-year-old reporter for an independent weekly in western Kazakhstan who was recently ambushed and nearly killed, was awarded the Peter Mackler Award for Ethical and Courageous Journalism this month - the first journalist from that country to receive international recognition in 10 years.

An examination of his articles and the lawsuits they triggered reveals an unusually detailed picture of why Kazakhstan, a nation blessed with ample natural resources and a president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who covets the Nobel Peace Prize, is 154th out of 179 countries in Reporters Without Borders' press freedom index.

Over several long interviews with IPS in Washington, Akhmedyarov described the stories written for the Uralskaya Nedelya (Uralsk Weekly) paper that had generated lawsuits. They reported on police corruption, rampant nepotism, rigged tenders, how 1990s racketeers are now senior government officials, and how disqualified referees keep on refereeing.

His story illustrates claims by human rights monitors that Kazakhstan, whose official line is that it is inching toward democracy at its own pace, has in fact been doing just the opposite since its economy stared booming a decade ago.

The Kazakhstan International Bureau of Human Rights recently reported that in the area of freedom of expression, of "particular concern" were increases in libel lawsuits against newspapers and journalists and physical attacks on journalists.

[The use of optical perspective] was not always universal. It is often assumed that non-western picture-making got perspective "wrong". But the non-westerners didn't get it wrong - it's just that they didn't use optics. Chinese scroll painters had a very sophisticated perspective, without the vanishing point that had reduced the viewer to a static mathematical point. (If we are alive, we move!)

...

Art historians have never really explained the appearance of shadows in European art. No art made outside of Europe used shadows. Chinese, Japanese, Persian and Indian - all highly sophisticated image-makers - ignored shadows. Yet they occur in a big way in European art, and in a very big way with the likes of Caravaggio. Whether they offer an accurate reflection is another matter. There is a story about one of the Jesuits who went to China and painted a portrait of the Empress. Her comment on it was: "I can assure you that the right side of my face is the same colour as the left side of my face."

...

The age of the mass media is also the age of mass murder. That is probably no accident. The terrors of the 20th century - Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Mao's China - needed control of the mass media.

It is this age that is ending. What I would call the old media - TV, film and newspapers - are dying. But so too is a lot we thought would always be with us: the culture of stars and celebrity. The age of the mass media made and perhaps needed stars. One thinks of Charlie Chaplin, the first world star of films, and then those stars created by Hollywood.

(San Francisco won six straight elimination games to reach the championships, then swept Detroit. Wow.)

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin