More than 20,000 people have taken part in a protest against the Turkish prime minister in Germany. They were undeterred by the fact that Recep Tayyip Erdogan canceled his appearance to collect an award for tolerance.

Police said around 22,000 people participated in a protest march against Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the western German city of Bochum.

Alevi Muslims made up the majority of the demonstrators as they protested against oppression of minorities in Turkey, according to police. The Alevi, who believe in a distinct form of Shi'ite Islam, primarily live in Turkey.

"We do not feel like we are represented by Erdogan," the secretary general of the Alevi community in Germany, Ali Dogan told news agency DPA. He is a full-fledged anti-democrat who should not receive any prize for humanity and straightforwardness."

Hundreds of Kurds and Armenians also protested.

Could German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble take over as head of the Eurogroup in June 2012? It's a key position in the struggle to solve the debt crisis, but no-one admits that the candidacy race has even started.

"You heard Mr. Juncker's announcement at the last European summit that he isn't planning to continue," said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, after the Financial Times Deutschland reported that Chancellor Angela Merkel intends to see him appointed him as the head of the Eurogroup of Europe's finance ministers.

But Schäuble refuse to be drawn on his potential job. "I have no further information regarding the issue. We have other issues at the moment," he said. "Speculation about personnel matters might be interesting for the media, but there are other issues facing us.

The government has lied and sold the public a pup over the idea that patients will be able to challenge doctors and hospitals over treatments, according to Labour's health team.

In "unusually unparliamentary language" Lady Thornton, Labour's health spokeswoman in the Lords, said the bill was a triumph for Tory ministers who had seen Liberal Democrats "capitulate" over the vexed issue of privatising the NHS.

The Labour peer, who has followed the reforms since they were published in July 2010, says that although the bill has been amended more than 300 times, its pro-market measures remain largely intact and the health service will be end up as "a terrible bureaucratic, expensive and fragmented NHS".

In an interview with the Guardian, Thornton said: "This is an ideologically driven bill and the Lib Dems capitulated. Ministers lied to get it through. I know it's unusually unparliamentary language but I am really horrified. They have sold us a pup."

Germany has elected a new president. Joachim Gauck, a former pastor and East German rights campaigner, drew backing from across the political spectrum.

The Federal Assembly, which is made up of the 620 members of the Bundestag and 620 delegates representing Germany's 16 states, chose Gauck over Beate Klarsfeld, an anti-Nazi activist nominated by the small Left party, and far-right candidate Olaf Rose.

Gauck received 991 votes, Klarsfeld got 126 and Rose received three out of 1,228 valid votes, while 108 delegates abstained.

Gauck accepted the result, saying, "What a beautiful Sunday."

He used his first speech as president to recall the first time he was able to vote in a free election: 22 years ago in communist East Germany, at the age of 50. Months later, East and West Germany became one country.

Italy's Prime Minister Mario Monti will forge ahead with efforts to revise labor laws this week, amid fresh warnings that the three-year-old European debt crisis is far from over.

Monti will lead talks with unions and employers in a final round of negotiations beginning March 20. Decision makers meanwhile warned against complacency after delivery of the final element of Greece's 130 billion-euro ($171 billion) bailout package and the completion of the world's largest sovereign-debt restructuring last week.

"Optimism should not give us a sense of comfort or lull us into a false sense of security," International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said today in a speech at the China Development Forum in Beijing. "We cannot go back to business as usual," she said, urging vigilance on oil prices, debt levels, and the risk of slowing growth in emerging markets.

An easing of the crisis offered breathing room for Monti to seek an Italian labor-market overhaul and for euro-area ministers aiming to bolster euro bailout funding before a meeting at the end of the month. Still, urgency was underscored by an IMF warning that the Greek bailout held "exceptional risks" that could prompt a "disorderly" exit from the monetary union unless additional help is prepared.

GPs to stand against top Lib Dems and Tories in 2015 general election as more than 240 medics launch national campaign in letter to The Independent on Sunday

An unprecedented coalition of nearly 250 doctors launches a campaign today to unseat Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs at the next election in revenge for their backing of the controversial Health and Social Care Bill.

On the eve of the embattled legislation's final hurdle in Parliament, scores of GPs, consultants and other NHS doctors have signed a letter to The Independent on Sunday condemning the Bill as an "embarrassment to democracy" and pledging to stand as candidates against MPs who backed it.

Nick Clegg and other senior Lib Dems will be specifically targeted on polling day in 2015, as well as those in marginal seats, for betraying the wishes of activists at last week's spring conference who called for a last-minute rethink of the reforms.

There is growing resistance to the increase in the size of the ESM on the grounds that the market pressures no longer makes this necessary; favourite position is to let the ESM get the full €500bn, without subtracting existing EFSF commitments; Olli Rehn is pushing for a €750bn capacity, but this position is losing support; Francois Hollande is coming under increasing pressure from Nicolas Sarkozy and the Communist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon; Socialists are now saying the outcome will be closer than they had originally believed; Les Echos notes that the European left is only half-hearted in its support for Hollande's call to renegotiate the fiscal pact; Angela Merkel is furious about Sarkozy's decision to dump her from his electoral campaign; she may now pull out of the only joint appearance left - a debate about Europe; Merkel's push for Wolfgang Schäuble as the eurogroup chairman receives an unenthusiastic response; Germany elects a new president; an Italian poll suggests a hypothetical Monti party would have 24% support, ahead of the other two main parties; Evangelos Venizelos is elected party chairman of Pasok, and is about to resign as finance minister; a whole string of splinter parties has sprung up in Greece - most with no chance of entering parliament, but together large enough to deprive the pro-reform parties of a majority; a new poll puts combined New Democracy and Pasok vote at 36% - close to the point where a Grand Coalition would have no majority; Greek banks may not need all aid, says central bank chief; Greek CDS auction is to be held today; Athanasios Orphanides may not be reappointed as Cyp[r]us' central bank governor; an Irish academic claims that Ireland would still be able to plug the IMF if it votes No; Paul Krugman says the fall in industrial production in Europe is of a similar scale as it was during the Great Depression; Wolfgang Münchau, meanwhile, argues that the worst of the eurozone crisis still lies ahead.

In the long run, the failure to treat the population like adults could cause trouble. But in the short run, the strategy has paid off. The Socialist Party lost nearly 40 percent of its votes in the general election, not least because it had done a poor job in government. It is now expected to lose control of Andalusia, its last main bastion, according to an opinion poll by Metroscopia.

Mr. Rajoy has already used the absence of any serious opposition -- even a general strike called for March 29 does not pose much threat -- to push through one batch of measures. The most important addressed the labor market. He has made it less costly for companies to dismiss people and largely dismantled the nationwide system of collective bargaining. The net effect will be that wages, which rose rapidly during the early years of the single currency, will fall, helping to restore Spain's competitiveness.

...

This will not matter if the economy, which the government expects to shrink 1.7 percent this year, stabilizes next year. But what if G.D.P. keeps falling, unemployment (now 23 percent) continues rising and the deficit remains stubbornly high? Spain would face renewed bond market jitters and further pressure from its euro partners to cut its deficit. Mr. Rajoy would then have to sell another dose of austerity to voters who would not believe him. Having been treated like children, they might even throw a tantrum.

Hugo Dixon is the founder and editor of Reuters Breakingviews.

François Hollande, the opposition Socialist challenger for the French presidency, has said the mandate of the European Central Bank should be changed to give it a role in stimulating economic growth.

In a speech in which he also detailed his demands for a renegotiation of the new European fiscal discipline treaty to include growth measures, Mr Hollande added that the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone's €500bn rescue fund due to come into force in July, should be allowed access to ECB funds to boost its firepower. 

"How is it to be understood that banks can have unlimited access to the ECB but the mechanism for acting against financial speculation in Europe cannot," he said in an address to a conference of European left-of-centre leaders in Paris on Saturday.

Mr Hollande, aiming to oust President Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential election which takes place over two rounds on April 22 and May 6, has drawn the ire of Mr Sarkozy and angered German chancellor Angela Merkel with his attacks on the fiscal treaty the two leaders championed over months of painful negotiations.

Attorney Lynn Szymoniak had spent a career investigating insurance fraud when a bank moved to foreclose on her Florida home in 2008. Almost four years later, the fraud she said she uncovered by combing through mortgage documents earned her $18 million.

Szymoniak, 63, is among six whistle-blowers who will pocket $46.5 million as part of a $25 billion national foreclosure settlement that state and federal officials reached in February with five banks, including Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), according to the U.S. Justice Department.

"When they did this to her, they picked the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place," Richard Harpootlian, Szymoniak's attorney in two whistle-blower cases, said in an interview. "They stuck their hand into the beehive."

Szymoniak's examination, in which she relied on her experience as an insurance-fraud investigator, led to her claims against banks for submitting fraudulent documents to the federal government asserting that they owned loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration, she said.

STOCKHOLM (AP) -- Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661. Now it's come farther than most on the path toward getting rid of them.

"I can't see why we should be printing bank notes at all anymore," says Bjoern Ulvaeus, former member of 1970's pop group ABBA, and a vocal proponent for a world without cash.

The contours of such a society are starting to take shape in this high-tech nation, frustrating those who prefer coins and bills over digital money.

In most Swedish cities, public buses don't accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices -- which make money on electronic transactions -- have stopped handling cash altogether.

At least three people have been killed and 25 wounded by a car bomb in Syria's second biggest city of Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said, a day after two blasts rocked the capital Damascus.

Residents told the UK-based rights group that they saw bodies in the streets after Sunday's blast close to a state security office.

State news channel Syria TV said the "terrorist" explosion had been between two residential buildings in the al-Suleimaniya district, behind a post office.

Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from neighbouring Lebanon, said it is not the first time Aleppo was hit during the now year-long uprising against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

Thousands of people in the Sudanese border region of South Kordofan have fled their homes to the nearby mountains, fearing attacks by Sudanese forces that have left entire villages devastated.

Al Jazeera's Peter Greste gained access to the remote region and documented evidence of villages and crops destroyed and spoke to people who said they had abandoned their homes out of fear that they would be killed if they stayed.

Sudan's army has been accused of deliberately targeting civilians in South Kordofan during a months-long military campaign that has included air raids and allegations of soldiers razing villagers.

The government in Khartoum blames separatist fighters of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM) for the violence, and says the group is aligned with South Sudan, which achieved independence last year.

Libya has requested the handover of Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence chief after his capture in Mauritania.

Abdullah Senussi was detained on Saturday as he arrived on an Air Morocco flight from Casablanca. He was carrying a forged Malian passport and is now under police interrogation in Mauritania, a Libyan government spokesperson confirmed.

"Clearly we are going to make a formal request to hand him over because he needs to stand trial in Libya, because he committed all these crimes against the Libyan people," Mustafa Abushagur, Libya's deputy prime minister, said on Saturday.

Al Jazeera's Nicole Johnston, reporting from Tripoli, said Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) had made an official request to Mauritania to have him deported back to Libya, but had not received a response.

Al Jazeera's Mohammed Fadel, reporting from the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott after Senussi's arrest, said: "In a short, brief statement, the authorities did not give any more information on Senussi.

WASHINGTON -- Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the soldier accused of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan last week, was deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan over a decade, a record of combat that at the very least suggests high levels of stress. He was particularly upset about being sent to Afghanistan, his wife wrote last year on her blog, and the family had hoped to be stationed in Germany, Italy or Hawaii instead. Enlarge This Image William Yardley/The New York Times

The backyard of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales's home in Lake Tapps, Wash. He is a father of two.

But Army officials said over the weekend that Sergeant Bales's combat tours were hardly unusual in a force that has had an unprecedented pace of repeat deployments in two grinding ground wars, among the longest in the nation's history.

"Lots of soldiers have four deployments, and they're not accused of things like this," said Col. Thomas W. Collins, an Army spokesman.

Over the next weeks, a debate is likely to turn on whether Sergeant Bales's four combat tours helped deliver him to the village in Panjwai district of Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan where he is accused of going door to door and methodically shooting or stabbing Afghan civilians, mostly children and women. The argument could well play out in a court-martial, should his case go to trial.

The report on the November pepper-spraying of students and protesters at UC Davis likely will be ordered released today, although a potential court appeal may delay public release until at least April 2.

In a tentative ruling issued late Thursday, an Alameda Superior Court judge indicated he was not swayed by arguments from an attorney for the campus police involved in the incident that releasing the report with officers' names is illegal under state law.

Instead, Judge Evelio Grillo said in his 16-page tentative ruling that the report does not contain any confidential information regarding campus officers and that it does not recommend disciplinary action against any of the officials involved in the Nov. 18 incident.

"The report is a compilation of public information that would have been available to an investigative journalist or member of the public who took the time and expended the effort to make a Public Records Act request, review videos posted on YouTube and elsewhere, and locate and interview witnesses," the judge wrote.

Israel's intelligence services agree with American intelligence assessments that there is not enough proof to determine whether Iran is building a nuclear bomb, according to a report published Sunday in the New York Times.

The newspaper said that senior American officials believe there is little disagreement between the Mossad and U.S. intelligence agencies over Iran's nuclear program, despite the fact that Israeli political leaders have been pushing for quick action to block Iran from becoming what they describe as an existential threat.

The report further quoted one former senior American intelligence official who states that the Mossad "does not disagree with the U.S. on the weapons program," adding that there is "not a lot of dispute between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence communities on the facts."

The Maoists have accused their two Italian abductees of denigrating the tribal population and demanded an immediate ban on the entry of tourists and foreign visitors in the tribal belts of Odisha.

The guerrilla group abducted two Italians- Bosusco Paolo, 55, a tour operator who has been living in Puri intermittently for almost 15 years and Claudio Colangelo, 60 who had gone to Daringibadi hill station a week ago, along with two local guides in the tribal dominated Kandhamal-Ganjam region in Odisha.

Though the red brigade set March 18 as the deadline for the government to comply with its demands, the negotiations, reportedly, are still on.

1.Tribals are not commodities for tourists and tribal areas not meant for tourism. This should be clearly announced by the state government and those violating this should be arrested and punished.

2.Halt operation green hunt. Except the existing police stations, withdraw all police camps immediately. Create conducive atmosphere for talks relating to people's problems.

3.Withdraw ban on Communist Party of India (Maoist) and other people's organizations.

4.Arrest and hold trials of the SP and police officials on charge of murder and rape for murdering Lalit Dehuri, Junesh Badarlat, Pradip Majhi in false encounter and gang raping Arati Majhi. Release Arati Majhi unconditionally.

5.Release all including Ashutosh, Kamalakanta Sethi, Sujata, Kishore Jena, Pratap and Majulata who were arrested in connection with Nayagarh armoury loot case.

6.Stop arresting people released by courts in again by imposing fresh cases. In this context, release all including Subhashri Das, Lalit who have been detained even after their release by courts.

7.Release all innocent prisoners including Shatrughan Biswal, Uttam, Shekarh, Sudarshan Mandal, Ramesh Nayak, Lata, Bijal and Ratna lodged in Rayagada, Gajapati, Kandhamal, Ganjam, Nayagarh, Sambalpur, Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar.

8.Do not scrap the ST status of tribals including Kotia, Konda Dora, Acha Kui, Gauda Kui, Kumbhara Kui, Sahara, Odia Kanda and Khaira. Grant ST status to those tribals not yet recognised as ST.

9.Provide drinking water to Odisha's all villages, irrigation to all land, free medical facility in all gram panchayats. Provide free education to students till high school level.

10.Stop police crackdown on all anti-land acquisition movements including those in Posco-Kalinga Nagar-Vedanta areas. Release anti-land acquistion movement leaders like Abhay Sahu and Narayan Reddy.

11.Release leaders of mass democratic movements like Gananath Patra and withdraw all cases against people participating in Mandrabaku, Nedingpadar, Gudari and Narayanpatna land movements.

12.Initiate enqiry by independent agencies into forced surrender of Maoists and unlawful detaintion of surrendered Maoists by police.

13.Fulfil all demands agreed upon for release of (the then) Malkangir collector from captivity in February last year.

Quito, Ecuador-- The most biologically diverse habitat in the western hemisphere, the Yasuní rainforest in Ecuador, is under threat. The diversity of species in the Yasuní Park is unmatched by any other park in the world. One hectare contains more species of trees than all of North America, but hidden beneath this Garden of Eden lies temptation: oil worth billions.

Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa is bargaining the fate of the Yasuní Park against the willingness of the industrialized world to pay 3.6 billion dollars in return for a promise not to extract oil from the ecological preserve. The conservation proposal is praised internationally as a creative way to protect the Amazon rainforest and the indigenous people living there, but the fate of the Yasuní Initiative is in doubt. There is uncertainty whether the funding can be raised as governments grapple with the international economic crisis, and skeptics question whether the bargain could work.

The Yasuní Park contains more species of trees in one hectare than in all of North America. Ecuador lost 4 million hectares of forest in the last 20 years--30 % of its total forest area. Courtesy UASB (Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar)

"They are going to drill. They are going to drill," an authority on the Yasuní project told me in confidence. "Perhaps ten years from now, perhaps 5 years from now. The next president will need that money."

Oil is Ecuador's top export, providing one third of its revenue, but despite the black gold pooled beneath its steamy jungles, Ecuador is a poor country. With little industry, Ecuador's 58.9 billion GDP is among the smallest in Latin America. (By comparison, the GDP of the USA is 14,600 billion.) Exporting raw materials, primarily petroleum, bananas, and shrimp, has enriched foreign corporations, but the wealth has not trickled down to the people. 50 % of Ecuadorian citizens live below the poverty level. One third of the children in Ecuador are malnourished and 60 % in the indigenous populations according to Health Minister, Carina Vance. Between 1999 and 2000 one million Ecuadorians fled their homeland to escape the misery and financial collapse that left the country's currency worthless. The US dollar is now the accepted currency.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2012) -- Early snowmelt caused by climate change in the Colorado Rocky Mountains snowballs into two chains of events: a decrease in the number of flowers, which, in turn, decreases available nectar. The result is decline in a population of the Mormon Fritillary butterfly, Speyeria mormonia.

Using long-term data on date of snowmelt, butterfly population sizes and flower numbers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Carol Boggs, a biologist at Stanford University, and colleagues uncovered multiple effects of early snowmelt on the growth rate of an insect population.

"Predicting effects of climate change on organisms' population sizes will be difficult in some cases due to lack of knowledge of the species' biology," said Boggs, lead author of a paper reporting the results online in this week's journal Ecology Letters.

Taking into account the butterfly's life cycle and the factors determining egg production was important to the research.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2012) -- The northeastern U.S. should prepare for a surge in Lyme disease this spring. And we can blame fluctuations in acorns and mouse populations, not the mild winter. So reports Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY.

What do acorns have to do with illness? Acorn crops vary from year-to-year, with boom-and-bust cycles influencing the winter survival and breeding success of white-footed mice. These small mammals pack a one-two punch: they are preferred hosts for black-legged ticks and they are very effective at transmitting Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

"We had a boom in acorns, followed by a boom in mice. And now, on the heels of one of the smallest acorn crops we've ever seen, the mouse population is crashing," Ostfeld explains. Adding, "This spring, there will be a lot of Borrelia burgdorferi-infected black-legged ticks in our forests looking for a blood meal. And instead of finding a white-footed mouse, they are going to find other mammals -- like us."

For more than two decades, Ostfeld, Cary Institute forest ecologist Dr. Charles D. Canham, and their research team have been investigating connections among acorn abundance, white-footed mice, black-legged ticks, and Lyme disease. In 2010, acorn crops were the heaviest recorded at their Millbrook-based research site. And in 2011, mouse populations followed suit, peaking in the summer months. The scarcity of acorns in the fall of 2011 set up a perfect storm for human Lyme disease risk.

Advances in delivering and storing electricity are crucial to the future of electric cars and otherwise reducing reliance on energy produced from burning fossil fuels. Yet a powerful means of running electronics that can charge and discharge quickly while also storing large amounts of energy has long eluded scientists.

This predicament could be changing, thanks to new research. A team from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Egypt's Cairo University describe in the March 16 issue of Science a new laser-based technique for making flexible, durable and highly conductive electrochemical capacitors--also known as ultracapacitors or supercapacitors--out of graphene. Electrochemical capacitors handle frequent charge/discharge cycles well but have been unable to store lots of energy. (Lithium-ion and other conventional batteries can store large amounts of energy but have short life cycles and are filled with hazardous chemicals known to catch fire under certain conditions.)

Electrochemical capacitors made using graphene--a one-atom-thick sliver of graphite--began showing potential to boost storage capacity a few years ago. Individual graphene sheets create a larger surface area than when they are stacked together as a piece of graphite. This larger surface area increases energy storage capacity. Yet the strong electrostatic attraction between graphene sheets makes graphene a difficult material to work with because it tends to cause them to stack back together into their original graphite form.

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child's academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual's brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn't so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins -- one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.

CRAZY HORSE, S.D. -- It was to be the largest sculpture in the world: a granite portrait of a Sioux leader on horseback whittled out of a mountain in the Black Hills here. In scale and complexity, the carving would dwarf the imposing collection of presidential profiles on nearby Mount Rushmore.

As he started the Crazy Horse monument in 1947, short on money, manpower and the credulity of just about anyone who heard his plans, Korczak Ziolkowski, a sculptor from Connecticut, promised the tribal leaders who had recruited him and the local residents who scorned him that he was dedicating his life to the effort.

But he underestimated the scale of the undertaking. His promise, it turned out, was a multigenerational commitment.

The sprawling country clan Mr. Ziolkowski reared at the base of the mountain has spent the 30 years since his death honoring his final plea to continue the effort, to which he supposedly added, "But go slowly, so you do it right."

Windswept from cloud to cloud until they flutter to Earth, snowflakes assume a seemingly endless variety of shapes. Some have the perfect symmetry of a six-pointed star, some are hexagons adorned with hollow columns, whereas others resemble needles, prisms or the branches of a Christmas tree.

Scientists as far back as Johannes Kepler have pondered the mystery of snowflakes: Their formation requires subtle physics that to this day is not well understood. Even a small change in temperature or humidity can radically alter the shape and size of a snowflake, making it notoriously difficult to model these ice crystals on a computer. But after a flurry of attempts by several scientists, a team of mathematicians has for the first time succeeded in simulating a panoply of snowflake shapes using basic conservation laws, such as preserving the number of water molecules in the air.

Harald Garcke of the University of Regensburg in Germany and his colleagues, John Barrett and Robert Nürnberg of Imperial College London, described their findings in an article posted at the physics preprint server, arXiv.org, on February 15. In that sense, Garcke and his collaborators "have done the whole megillah," says physicist and snowflake maven Ken Libbrecht of the California Institute of Technology. "They have solved a problem that other people have tried and failed to do."

ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2012) -- A fundamental shift in the Indian monsoon has occurred over the last few millennia, from a steady humid monsoon that favored lush vegetation to extended periods of drought, reports a new study led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The study has implications for our understanding of the monsoon's response to climate change.

The Indian peninsula sustains over a billion people, yet it lies at the same latitude as the Sahara Desert. Without a monsoon, most of India would be dry and uninhabitable. The ability to predict the timing and amount of the next year's monsoon is vital, yet even our knowledge of the monsoon's past variability remains incomplete.

One key to this understanding lies in the core monsoon zone (CMZ) - a region in the central part of India that is a very sensitive indicator of the monsoon throughout the India peninsula.

"If you know what's happening there, you know more or less what's happening in the rest of India," said Camilo Ponton, a student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and lead author of the study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters entitled "Holocene Aridification of India". "Our biggest problem has been a lack of evidence from this region to extend the short, existing records."

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

Via Rich Yeselson, Alec MacGillis has a fantastic piece in the New Republic (unfortunately paywalled) about how hedge fund managers' love for Obama has turned into blind, spitting hatred. His main argument is that it's all about feeling disrespected

...

This seems completely right to me. When you make a billion dollars a year, you can buy anything you want -- which means that goods and services yield almost no marginal utility. What you crave, then, is what money can't buy: respect.

...

And now Obama says what anyone paying attention would: that these big-money people were, to some extent, making their money in socially destructive ways -- and they go insane, precisely because in their hearts they know that he's right.

Marmite production has been suspended since the closure of the Christchurch plant that produces the yeast extract spread in November last year after a tower was found to have been damaged by the earthquake.

New Zealand has its own Marmite recipe and the much-loved flavour is different from the British version, which therefore would not do as a substitute.

The plant, the sole source of the spread for Australia and New Zealand, was not expected to reopen until July, said Pierre van Heerden, general manager for manufacturer Sanitarium.

(see photo) Perhaps one must be antipodeanish to spread so thickly - no wonder they run out. Perhaps Eurogreen can enlighten us - but I feel the 'artist' who submitted the illustration (which could be 'shopped) does not like Marmite. The True Experience can only be achieved by working a small heaped teaspoon dollop of the black stuff into the melting butter to marble it. A proper balance of taste between toasted bread, butter and yeast extract is paramount.

The thick impasto illustrated here is called a wedgie-mite - it causes clenching of the buttocks.

You can't be me, I'm taken