Medical officials say the past two weeks of bitter weather across Russia claimed at least 128 lives. About 900 others remain hospitalized. Siberia remains far below freezing but a thaw is forecast for the Moscow area.

Russian medical sources quoted by the news agency Interfax said Wednesday that hundreds of people had been treated for frostbite and hypothermia, including 14 children on Christmas Day. Many of those who died were homeless, they added.

Russian state television focused on southern Siberia's impoverished region of Tyva. A local power station failed, leaving 4,000 residents of the village Khovu Aksy facing minus 40 degrees Celsius (-40 degrees Fahrenheit).

Some fled to local schools which had emergency heating systems. Helicopters have been flying children and women to the regional center of Kyzyl, said Vesti-24 television.

Unseasonal cold

Russia's coldest weather does not usually arrive until January or February, but during December temperatures have been 12 degrees lower that the monthly norm. In Eastern Siberia minus 60 degrees Celsius was recorded.

A landslide warning has been issued by the Met Office, as continued heavy downpours sparked fears of unstable cliff faces.

Boxing Day walkers were urged to take extra care in "dangerous conditions" with flooding set to worsen across parts of England and Wales on Wednesday.

The Met Office, which issued the warning following advice from the British Geological Survey, said coastal areas in the south-west of England are in particular danger of collapsing cliff edges and rockfall, but stressed that all areas enduring heavy rain are at risk.

A spokesman for the Met Office said: "We have had such heavy and persistent rainfall over the last few days and weeks and that there is a danger of landslides and rockfall along the coast, even on coastal paths.

"We are advising Boxing Day walkers in the south-west of England to take particular care in these dangerous conditions, especially those not familiar with the area.

"Do not get too close to the cliff edge or walk under the cliff face along the beach and remember that coastal paths could be impacted too."

Many coastal paths have been closed over the last few weeks along the south-west and train services have been disrupted by small coastal landslides.

Far from suffering from an Olympic hangover, Britons are closing 2012 in a mood of fond nostalgia for the London Games, according to a Guardian/ICM poll. By an emphatic four-to-one margin, the public said the Games were worth the expense - and there are signs that the resulting feelgood factor has rallied spirits more widely in the year of a double-dip slump.

Even after being reminded of the £9bn price tag, 78% of voters said the Olympics "did a valuable job in cheering up a country in hard times", as compared with just 20% who look back on them as "a costly and dangerous distraction".

This new vote of confidence is even more marked than that which ICM found at the height of the Games. In an online survey taken immediately after so-called Super Saturday - on which Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis and Greg Rutherford all took track and field gold for Team GB - ICM asked an identical question, and found support for the games running at 55%, with 35% against. Instead of narrowing as the Games slipped into memory, that 20-point margin has widened to 58 points today. The Paralympics may have helped to cement this majority.

For all the pre-Games controversy about the public money involved, the strong retrospective support is reflected remarkably closely across the range of demographic groups and the political spectrum: 79% of men say the Games were "well worth the cost" as do 77% of women. In every age bracket, more than three-quarters of people take the same view, with the 80% of 65+ voters who gave the thumbs-up being the most emphatic of all.

Backing gay marriage has helped David Cameron, but not Nick Clegg, gain extra support from gay and lesbian voters, according to research by PinkNews.co.uk.

The proportion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered voters (LGBT) backing the Conservatives has shot up from 11% at the 2010 election to 30% now, a poll suggests. Two-thirds of respondents said the Conservatives' support for same-sex marriage had made them view the party more positively.

Yet Clegg's support for gay marriage does not appear to have stopped gay and lesbian voters abandoning the Lib Dems in droves. In 2010 the Lib Dems were easily the most popular choice for LGBT voters, 39% of whom voted Lib Dem. But now just 13% would vote Lib Dem.

Labour now attracts 38% of the LGBT vote, compared with 27% in 2010, but their 11 percentage point rise among the LGBT electorate is not as large as the Conservatives' 19 percentage point increase.

The figures come from a poll involving an 864-strong LGBT panel which has been weighted to make it demographically representative and whose members have been tracked since 2010.

As she nibbled on strawberry shortcake, Jessica LaShawn, a flight attendant from Chicago, tried not to get ahead of herself and imagine this first date turning into another and another, and maybe, at some point, a glimmering diamond ring and happily ever after.

She simply couldn't help it, though. After all, he was tall, from a religious family, raised by his grandparents just as she was, worked in finance and even had great teeth.

Her musings were suddenly interrupted when her date asked a decidedly unromantic question: "What's your credit score?"

"It was as if the music stopped," Ms. LaShawn, 31, said, recalling how the date this year went so wrong so quickly after she tried to answer his question honestly. "It was really awkward because he kept telling me that I was the perfect girl for him, but that a low credit score was his deal-breaker."

The credit score, once a little-known metric derived from a complex formula that incorporates outstanding debt and payment histories, has become an increasingly important number used to bestow credit, determine housing and even distinguish between job candidates.

he leader of Italy's centre-left, and the frontrunner to be the country's next prime minister, says he would be ready to cede more sovereign powers to Brussels over government spending - in exchange for greater freedom to boost key economic sectors.

Pier Luigi Bersani, whose Democratic party has a strong lead in opinion polls ahead of elections next February, says he is open to supporting an ambitious German plan for EU control over national budgets, while stressing that it is essential for Europe to take more aggressive steps to revive economic growth.

"The first thing that we should and can do is tighten budget constraints, but allow more gradual investments," Mr Bersani, 61, told the Financial Times during a day of meetings with top EU officials in Brussels last week.

"I am ready to discuss - if it will be my turn to run the country - how to strengthen the mechanism of fiscal discipline to monitor national budgets in exchange for new policies aimed at stimulating the economy," he added.

Russia's East Asia oil pipeline has officially gone into service. The pipeline is a reflection of the country's shift from European to Asian markets.

President Vladimir Putin commissioned the pipeline Tuesday with the completion of the 4,740 km-long (2,945 miles) East Siberia - Pacific Ocean (ESPO) section, which runs between the Siberian city of Skovorodino and the Pacific port of Kosmino, Russian media reported.

The new section will "considerably increase the infrastructure capacity of the regions in Russia's far east," said Putin in a televised address. He called the commissioning a "significant event."

Brazil's real rallied the most in the world among the U.S. dollar's counterparts as the central bank intervened to stem the currency's decline and contain inflation in Latin America's biggest economy.

The real advanced to a six-week high as the central bank sold $1.8 billion of currency swaps at two auctions and agreed to lend as much as $2 billion in foreign-exchange credit lines. Swap rates fell as speculation eased that policy makers will boost the target lending rate, known as the Selic, to cap consumer prices.

The real jumped 1.4 percent to 2.0513 per U.S. dollar at 1:43 p.m. in Sao Paulo, the strongest on a closing basis since Nov. 12. The currency pared its drop in 2012 to 9 percent, the biggest among 16 major currencies tracked by Bloomberg after the yen. The real fell on Nov. 30 to a three-year low of 2.1360. Swap rates on the contract due in January 2014 fell three basis points, or 0.03 percentage point, to 7.14 percent.

"The central bank aims to keep the real trading at around 2.05 in 2013," Joao Paulo Correa, manager of foreign-exchange trading at brokerage Correparti Corretora, said in a phone interview from Curitiba, Brazil. "The swap auctions clearly show that its goal is to avoid raising the Selic rate in 2013."

The record glut in aluminum will be no bar to rising prices because of delays in getting metal from warehouses, even as Barclays Plc advises investors to sell and Morgan Stanley says it has the worst outlook of any commodity.

Stockpiles will expand for at least the next four quarters, reaching a record 8.67 million metric tons by the end of 2013, or enough to make about 62 million cars, Barclays estimates. Production will exceed demand by the most since 2009 as output expands from China to Saudi Arabia, the bank says. Futures will rise as much as 16 percent to $2,400 a ton next year, the median of 29 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

The gains are forecast as the metal is not always available. Buyers are waiting about a year to get metal from warehouses in Detroit and the Dutch port of Vlissingen, which hold the most inventories. As much as 80 percent of stockpiles tracked by the London Metal Exchange are locked into financing deals and unavailable to consumers, Credit Suisse Group AG estimates. That means some customers are paying record premiums to get supply, according to Platts, a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos.

"You have what I would call an artificial tightness in the market and that's created by financing," said Jeremy Baker, who manages about $850 million of assets at the Vontobel Belvista Commodity Fund in Zurich. "If you look at it from a purely fundamental aspect it is probably one of the metals that is the least attractive, primarily due to excessive supply."

Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service are cutting corporate debt ratings at the fastest pace since 2009 as a global economic slowdown and record borrowing erode credit quality.

The ratio of ratings downgrades to upgrades worldwide climbed to 1.85 this year from 1.23 in 2011, according to S&P data. PSA Peugeot Citroen (UG), Europe's second-largest carmaker, was cut three times by Moody's since March to speculative grade. Fort Worth, Texas-based RadioShack Corp. (RSH) was lowered four steps this year by S&P to seven levels below investment grade. Defaults rose to 80 issuers from 52 in 2011, according to S&P.

Europe's second recession in four years and slowing global economic growth are helping to push a measure of corporate debt to earnings to a three-year high, Barclays Plc data show. Companies from the neediest to the most creditworthy sold unprecedented amounts of debt at record-low yields in 2012 as the Federal Reserve held interest rates at almost zero for a fourth year in an effort to boost the U.S. economy.

"We're going to have an elevated level of negative outlooks," Diane Vazza, head of S&P's global fixed-income research, said in a telephone interview. "The companies that we're seeing with downgrade pressure are speculative-grade companies."

"In the past 30 years, France has not been able to pass a balanced budget. State debt rose to an unacceptable 1.7 trillion euros ($2.2 trillion) in 2011. It is our duty to reverse this," Moscovici wrote in a column for the German business daily Handelsblatt.

France intends to lower its deficit to the European Union's ceiling of 3.0 percent of gross domestic product next year and start bringing down its debt from 2014, the minister said.

"This is an ambitious plan and we intend to implement it without striving for an old-fashioned budget policy of tax and expenditure increases," he said.

If Eurozone countries (except Germany) have a persistent current account deficit averaging close to 3% (and, on current trends, soon to exceed it), and at the same time the government deficit must remain below 3%, it becomes mathematically impossible for the Eurozone private sector (outside Germany) to net-save. This is unsustainable, because if the private sector is dissaving eventually it will become insolvent.

Take, for example, France:

If France were to bring its Government deficit below 3%, it would destroy the ability of the French private sector to net-save, assuming the current account deficit stays on trend (and it should: Germany's 6% current account surplus is as stable as if it were a successful policy target, and the Eurozone's neutral current account balance is consistent with the ECB pursuing a non-interventionistic foreign reserve policy).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/27/2012-the-year-in-graphs/

Peace and cheers!
Bob

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

World Economic League Table 2013 Highlights

· UK retakes its place in Top Ten from Brazil after losing it this time in 2011
· UK overtakes France in 2013 as 75% tax and euro woes pull France down
· India overtakes UK in 2017 to become largest Commonwealth economy
· Indonesia to enter Top Ten in 2022;

When you look at the pdf PR, you see that UK GDP is supposed to go from USD 2.44 tn to 4.06 tn from 2012 to 2022, while France would go from 2.61 tn to 3.18 tn.

Are they really expecting the UK economy to get from the size of France's to one third bigger in just 10 years?

But of course this get published and distributed, including the note that this is all because of Hollande's 75% tax rate...

Wind power

The head of Syria's military police has defected from the army and declared allegiance to the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Major General Abdelaziz Jassim al-Shalal was shown making a statement confirming his defection in a video broadcast on al-Arabiya TV late on Tuesday, saying he was joining "the people's revolution".

The defection came as a delegation of Syrian officials headed to Moscow on Wednesday to discuss proposals for ending the conflict following talks with the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi in Damascus this week.

Wearing his uniform with a red insignia on the shoulder, Shalal spoke from a desk in a room in an undisclosed location. Some rebel sources said he had fled to Turkey. It was not clear when Shalal changed sides.

"The army has destroyed cities and villages and has committed massacres against an unarmed population that took to the streets to demand freedom," he said. "Long live free Syria."

Shinzo Abe, Japan's newly elected prime minister, has announced his new cabinet that includes long-time allies to help him draft an extra budget to spur the nation's flagging economy.  

The powerful Lower House of parliament named the 58-year-old as the country's next leader on Wednesday after he led his conservative party to a landslide victory in the general elections earlier this month.

As Japan's seventh prime minister in less than seven years, Abe will replace outgoing prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda whose Democratic Party of Japan suffered a stinging defeat at the polls.

Abe previously served as prime minister from 2006 to 2007.

The losing party, which came to power in 2009, was seen as being punished for policy flip-flops and its clumsy handling of last year's nuclear disaster at Fukushima in the wake of the tsunami.

The LDP and its small ally, the New Komeito party, won a two-thirds majority in the 480-seat lower house in the December 16 election.

Tens of thousands of Sunni Muslims blocked Iraq's main trade route to neighbouring Syria and Jordan in a fourth day of demonstrations against Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The massive show of force on Wednesday marks an escalation in protests that erupted last week after troops detained the bodyguards of Sunni Finance Minister Rafia al-Issawi, threatening to plunge Iraq deeper into political turmoil.

"The people want to bring down the regime," chanted thousands of protesters in the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province.

It was the fourth major protest in less than a week in an area, which was once the heart of the deadly Sunni insurgency that erupted after the US -led invasion in 2003.

"This sit-in will remain open-ended until the demonstrators' demands are met, and until the injustice against ends," cleric Hamid al-Issawi told The Associated Press at the protest.

He accused Maliki of trying to create rifts among Sunni and Shia populations.

MONCLOVA, Mexico (AP) -- The white-haired bishop stepped before some 7,000 faithful gathered in a baseball stadium in this violence-plagued northern border state. He led the gathering through the rituals of his Mass, reciting prayers echoed back by the massive crowd. And then his voice rose.

Politicians are tied to organized crime, Bishop Raul Vera bellowed while inaugurating the church's Year of Faith. Lawmakers' attempts to curb money laundering are intentionally weak. New labor reforms are a way to enslave Mexican workers.

How, Vera asked, can Mexicans follow leaders "who are the ones who have let organized crime grow, who have let criminals do what they do unpunished, because there's no justice in this country!"

In a nation where some clergy have been cowed into silence by drug cartels and official power, Vera is clearly unafraid to speak. That makes him an important voice of dissent in a country where the Roman Catholic Church often works hand-in-hand with the powerful, and where cynicism about politics is widespread and corrosive.

Vera's realm is a wide swath of Coahuila, a state bordering Texas that's become a hideout for the brutal Zetas drug cartel. It's where the current governor's nephew was killed in October and the former governor, the victim's father, resigned last year as leader of the political party that just returned to power with newly inaugurated President Enrique Pena Nieto.

TARAPOTO, Peru--For tropical ecologist Gregory Asner, flying over the Peruvian Amazon from the town of Tarapoto is like traveling back in time. Modern houses, rice paddies and oil palm plantations give way to steep, forested mountains and then to green, unbroken forest that curves toward the horizon.

Suddenly the tree canopy below the twin-engine plane turns a mottled gray-brown, a sign of drought damage that he estimates may affect as many as half the trees.

In this remote corner of Peru's Ucayali region, Asner, a tropical ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University, is afraid he is seeing the future. In the last few years this patch of forest has been hit by two "once-in-a-century droughts"--one in 2005 and another in 2010. These dry spells may become more frequent as temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean rise and as humans burn thousands of square kilometers of forest for farming. Although it has seen warmer temperatures in the past, the western Amazon is under siege now from a combination of a warming climate and human population growth that it has never faced before, and scientists are scrambling to determine whether existing protected areas will be enough to buffer against the changes to come.

Behind the plane Asner glimpses smoke rising from fires set to clear land for farming. Migration from the Andean highlands has boosted Peru's Amazonian states to the top of the population growth chart, and the influx of people is taking a toll on the forest.

A researcher is about to test a technology that he says could be a breakthrough for curbing greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants, natural gas generators and other industrial facilities.

Canadian professor Guy Mercier's answer to curbing fossil fuel emissions is literally set in stone. With $300,000 in new grant money from Carbon Management Canada, a network of academic centers, he plans to run gas emitted from a Holcim cement plant through pulverized concrete and rock.

If everything goes to plan, the resulting chemical reaction will capture 80 percent of the carbon dioxide from the tested gas stream at a lower cost than other capture methods.

In theory, the cost of capturing CO2 could head to zero, since the resulting magnesium carbonate formed from chemical reactions between cement plant emissions and rock can be sold at a profit to the wastewater and steel-making industries, Mercier said.

"This can be applied anywhere there's a huge amount of CO2 emitted from smokestacks," said Mercier, an environmental technology professor at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, part of the University of Quebec. He is working with researchers from the University of Calgary and the University of Melbourne on the project.

EUREKA, Calif. -- State scientists, grappling with an explosion of marijuana growing on the North Coast, recently studied aerial imagery of a small tributary of the Eel River, spawning grounds for endangered coho salmon and other threatened fish.

In the remote, 37-square-mile patch of forest, they counted 281 outdoor pot farms and 286 greenhouses, containing an estimated 20,000 plants -- mostly fed by water diverted from creeks or a fork of the Eel. The scientists determined the farms were siphoning roughly 18 million gallons from the watershed every year, largely at the time when the salmon most need it.

"That is just one small watershed," said Scott Bauer, the state scientist in charge of the coho recovery on the North Coast for the Department of Fish and Game. "You extrapolate that for all the other tributaries, just of the Eel, and you get a lot of marijuana sucking up a lot of water.... This threatens species we are spending millions of dollars to recover."

The marijuana boom that came with the sudden rise of medical cannabis in California has wreaked havoc on the fragile habitats of the North Coast and other parts of California. With little or no oversight, farmers have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops flat for sprawling greenhouses, dispersed poisons and pesticides, drained streams and polluted watersheds.

Japan has rather complex terrain, and is experiencing a significant power shortage, especially after the government decided to phase out the use of nuclear power plants. The combination of these two factors prompted a group of designers working under the guidance of the Mr. Yoshihiro Suda with the Institute of Industrial Research, University of Tokyo, to develop a commuter train that would be moved by the force of gravity (and weight of passengers). The new development will be cost-effective and fast.

When developing a new miracle of transportation, the engineers decided to use the roller coaster principle. They thought that if they build such a "rolling" road, it can move train cars that will not need an engine because the weight of the cabin with passengers will make them move to the next station

The train will be lifted by an automatic lift every 10 meters. After that it can run 400 meters, using only the force of gravity. The speed of the descent should reach around 60 kilometers per hour. Of course, for the fans of extreme attractions this speed would seem snail-pace-like as the steepest roller coaster carts can reach the speed of 200 kilometers per hour.  

However, the engineers did not need such speed. When moving downhill at the speed of 200 kilometers per hour, it will not go that far because after exceeding the speed limit of 60 kilometers per hour the train rails friction increases in an avalanche-like fashion.

wassup with this? DoDo?

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

A Lions Mane Jellyfish, the largest jellyfish in the world! They have been swimming in arctic waters since before the dinosaurs (over 650 million years ago) and are among some of the oldest surviving species in the world.

Via Interesting Facts


It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

The world's longest, high-speed rail route has begun service. Trains will be able to complete China's 2,298 km (1,428 miles) line running between Beijing and Guangzhou in eight hours.

The first high-speed "bullet" train left the Chinese capital Beijing early Wednesday morning. During its trip to the southern city of Guangzhou, the train will travel at an average speed of 300 kilometers per hour (186 miles per hour).

China Central Television broadcast the first train's departure live from the Beijing West Railway Station.

State media said the bullet trains would cut the time of the journey, which normally takes 20 hours on standard rail, to just eight hours. There are 35 stops on the Beijing-Guangzhou line, including major cities such as Zhengzhou, Wuhan on the Yangtze River and Changsha.

China's high-speed rail network was established in 2007, and quickly became the world's longest with 8,358 km of track by the end of 2010. That number is expected to nearly double to 16,000 km in by 2020.

Facebook is vowing to defend Instagram, its photo-sharing-service, which is facing a civil lawsuit for changing its terms of service and breaching its contract with users. 

The social networking website defended the popular photo application, saying the complaint was "without merit".

A class-action lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco federal court last week, calling on the court to bar Instagram from changing its rules.

"Instagram is taking its customers property rights while insulating itself from all liability," said the law firm which also demanded the service to pay its legal fees.

"In short, Instagram declares that 'possession is nine tenths of the law and if you don't like it, you can't stop us,'" the law firm added.

Dec. 21, 2012 -- If the sinful excess of holiday eating sends your system into butter-slathered, brandy-soaked overload, you are not alone: People who are jet-lagged, people who work graveyard shifts and plain-old late-night snackers know just how you feel.

All these activities upset the body's "food clock," a collection of interacting genes and molecules known technically as the food-entrainable oscillator, which keeps the human body on a metabolic even keel. A new study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is helping to reveal how this clock works on a molecular level.

Published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the UCSF team has shown that a protein called PKCγ is critical in resetting the food clock if our eating habits change.

The study showed that normal laboratory mice given food only during their regular sleeping hours will adjust their food clock over time and begin to wake up from their slumber, and run around in anticipation of their new mealtime. But mice lacking the PKCγ gene are not able to respond to changes in their meal time -- instead sleeping right through it.

Two important sets of statistics were published this year which bring the picture up to date. Their findings on equality were unreported for the simple reason that they did not show what everyone expected them to show. In June, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) published an analysis of official data that found that, although all after-tax incomes fell in the first year of the Coalition (2010-11), higher incomes fell more than lower incomes, resulting in a more equal distribution.

Then in July, the first official estimates of the distribution of wealth were published for some time. The new figures, from the Wealth and Assets Survey carried out by the Office for National Statistics, covered the period from 2006 to 2010. In other words, roughly the period of the Gordon Brown government. The figures do not tell us about what is happening under the Coalition, but they were a missing part of the puzzle, because although there are a lot of statistics about incomes, there have been no reliable figures for the inequality of wealth in the UK for many years. What the survey showed was that the degree of inequality of wealth hardly changed from 2006 to 2010, becoming slightly more equal. Unless something dramatic has changed in the past two years, we would expect that trend to continue.

Some more in it than others

This is so at variance with the accepted story of food banks and greedy bankers that it makes no sense to most people. Not only are we all in it together, but the rich are bearing and will bear a greater share of the burden of taxes than the poor.

SCHAUMBURG, IL--In a turn of events that has stunned the worldwide medical community, local infant Nathan Jameson, born just six days ago, has become the youngest person ever to permanently and irrevocably lose all faith in humanity.

"This shatters all previous records," University of Chicago psychologist Douglas McAllister said Monday. "In all of documented medical history, there is no case of a newborn taking less than four months to develop the mental faculties required to grasp the full extent of this existential nightmare we call life on earth."

"Considering he already comprehends harsh realities that many people spend their entire fleeting, shallow existences attempting to deny, Baby Nathan is quite the little miracle!" he added.

Though he has not yet developed the capacity for speech, extensive cognitive testing has definitively shown that the shockingly perceptive 6-day-old fully understands and accepts that human beings cannot be trusted, that they remain far too ignorant for their opinions to be reliable, that a lack of self-awareness about their own destructive tendencies pervades the species as a whole, and that most are too ineffectual to successfully pursue even the shallow self-interested agendas that rule their lives.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman