Polling has opened in the Netherlands in what looks set to be a tight race between the pro-European ruling VVD party and Labour party. They are tipped to dominate at the expense of eurosceptic extremist parties.

Voters in the Netherlands headed to the polls on Wednesday to elect a new government in an election set to be shaped by the eurozone debt crisis.

Last minute polls on Tuesday showed Prime Minister Mark Rutte's Liberals and the centre-left Labour Party of ex-Greenpeace activist Diederik Samsom were neck-and-neck. Both parties are expected to send 36 MPs each to the 150-seat lower house, while Rutte and Samson battle it out for the top job.

Radical anti-Brussels parties, meanwhile, are expected to suffer at the hands of the more stable pro-European mainstream parties. The hard-left Socialists and the far-right anti-immigration Freedom Party, led by controversial figure Geert Wilders, polled in third and fourth respectively.

Germany's top court has conditionally cleared the way for the eurozone's new bailout fund to be signed into law. The introduction of the European Stability Mechanism was delayed by thousands of legal challenges.

The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe rejected objections to the legality of Germany's contribution to the long-anticipated European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and separate budget pact in a landmark ruling on Wednesday. The ruling paves the way for German President Joachim Gauck to sign the legislation into law in a move tipped as a possible turning point in the eurozone debt crisis.

"The Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court has rejected the injunctions with the stipulation that a ratification of the ESM Treaty is only admissible if [certain conditions] can be guaranteed under international law," Chief Justice Andreas Vosskukle said.

The ESM will provide the eurozone with the flexibility to deploy 500 billion euros ($630 billion) in emergency funds to support its weakest members. As the strongest economy in Europe, Germany will be the main contributor.

But the court specified that any financial burdens for Germany arising from the ESM must be limited to its 190-billion-euro share, currently set out in the ESM treaty. The Bundestag (Germany's lower house of parliament) must be called upon to sanction any burdens that exceed this figure.

See also European Deathwatch Diary

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

The EU has taken fresh steps in its controversial journey towards closer economic and fiscal union. The plans, unveiled by European Commission President Jose Barroso, are likely to unnerve wary member states.

Europe inched closer to a banking union on Wednesday, after Barroso voiced plans for the European Central Bank (ECB) to police the region's financial lending firms.

During his annual "state of the union" address to the European Parliament, Barroso detailed his proposal, which ultimately aims to bolster economic and fiscal integration in Europe and safeguard the future of the single currency.

"The crisis has shown that while banks became transnational, rules and oversight remained national," Barroso said. "We need to move to common supervisory decisions, namely within the euro area."

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian prime minister, has called for three members of the punk band Pussy Riot to be freed, saying further time in prison would be "unproductive."

Medvedev's comments could signal the imminent release of the band members, whose case comes up for appeal on 1 October.

The women had already spent more than five months in jail when they were convicted in last month of "hooliganism driven by religious hatred" and sentenced to two years in prison.

As I have written in the past, the Germans knew better than most that by signing up to the EMU they would have to change the way they pursued their mercantilist ambitions.

Previously, the Bundesbank had manipulated the Deutsch mark parity to ensure the German export sector remained very competitive. That is one of the reasons they became an export powerhouse. It is the same strategy that the Chinese are now following and being criticised for by the Europeans and others.

Once the Germans lost control of the exchange rate by signing up to the EMU they had to manipulate other "cost" variables to remain competitive. So the Germans were aggressive in implementing their so-called "Hartz package of welfare reforms". A few years ago we did a detailed study of the so-called Hartz reforms in the German labour market. One publicly available Working Paper is available describing some of that research.

The German constitutional court yesterday delivered another of its Yes But verdicts; German president Joachim Gauck is now free to sign the ESM and the fiscal pact into law; the court set two conditions, which are mostly fulfilled already: sufficient degree of parliament control, and a capping  of Germany's maximal losses to €190bn; eurosceptics welcome the court's criticism of the ECB's bond purchases, and the announcement that it would fully deal with this issue in the main verdict; said bond purchases with the intent to fund governments away from the capital markets are unconstitutional; Heribert Prantl says the German constitutional court got lost in the complexity of the eurozone crisis and has given up its fight against European integration; Wolfgang Munchau writes that the court, and German constitutional law in general, have lost their awe inspiring relevance in the eurozone crisis; Reinhard Muller hopes the court will take a firm stance against the ECB; Joachim Jahn says the German government might end up dragging the ECB in front of the ECJ if the court declares ECB bond purchases unconstitutional; Mark Schieritz says the ECJ would side with the ECB, but the real damage is political; Mark Rutte wins a surprising clear victory in the Netherlands; his liberal VVD and the labour party PvdA together have enough seats for a small majority; tensions in the Greek coalition are increasing as the Democratic left bluntly rejects the troika's recommendations; Greece is facing another general strike this month; Michael Noonan plays down hopes of debt relief talks next month;Jose Manuel Barroso proposes a federation of nation states, and a new treaty;the Spanish press criticises Mariano Rajoy's evident duplicity on whether or not to seek a bailout; Martin Schulz criticises Rajoy's tactics; Luis de Guindos says Spain cannot maintain the welfare states unless the economic situation improves; Vittorio Grilli says the ECB and the German constitutional court had ensure that Italy is now save; Mario Monti reiterates again that he won't seek another mandate; Fiat, meanwhile, says the Italian auto market is dreadful.

Golden Dawn parliamentary spokesman Christos Pappas on Wednesday filed a civil suit against Citizen Protection Minister Nikos Dendias and the chief of the Greek Police, Lt Gen Nikos Papagiannopoulos, for slander, "perversion of institutions", and "suppressing legal public actions" with the Supreme Court prosecutor.

The party accuses Dendias of trying to politically exploit the actions of the party on September 7-8 against foreign vendors in street markets and proceeding to act in ways that were beyond the bounds of legality.

Among the charges it makes against the minister is that he is harbouring criminals - namely, the unlicensed street vendors targeted by the party.

Europa Nova, Action pour une Europe Politique: Missions et objectifs

EuropaNova a été fondée en 2003, à l'initiative de Guillaume Klossa, par de jeunes actifs européens souhaitant accélérer la marche vers une puissance publique européenne démocratique, économique et sociale, capable de résister aux crises et aux tentations de repli sur soi, engagée en faveur d'une mondialisation équilibrée respectueuse des individus, des cultures et soucieuse d'un développement durable de la planète

Aujourd'hui, son équipe est constituée de jeunes actifs entourés de conseillers plus expérimentés ayant une connaissance en profondeur des institutions européennes et des différentes « parties prenantes ».Malgré une dynamique chaotique, l'Europe demeure le seul laboratoire concret d'une future gouvernance mondiale favorisant plus d'équité, de justice et de responsabilité à l'égard des générations futures. EuropaNova veut contribuer à ce renforcement nécessaire de l'esprit européen, en mettant en oeuvre un plan d'action ambitieux dont l'objectif est double :

• peser sur les débats politiques au niveau national et européen,
  
• favoriser l'appropriation du projet européen par les citoyens.

EuropaNova entend stimuler le débat d'idées sur l'Europe en nourrissant le débat public par des propositions concrètes, informer et sensibiliser les citoyens sur la construction européenne et ses enjeux. Ses actions visent à mobiliser le public le plus large via des actions originales et innovantes pour promouvoir l'intérêt général européen.

Britain faces a fresh fight with Brussels over who has control over the City of London, as it confronts a key element of the plans for eurozone banking union that makes it easier for London to be overruled on contentious matters of supervision.

In a proposal that will cause alarm among eurosceptic MPs, the European Commission will on Wednesday unveil reforms that strengthen the European Banking Authority, which co-ordinates rulemaking between the EU's national supervisors.

The changes do address a key UK concern by ensuring that a European Central Bank caucus would not hold an unassailable majority on some EBA committees when it becomes the leading eurozone bank supervisor. But this is achieved by boosting EBA powers to resolve disputes that affect all EU member states - meaning the UK would find it even harder to muster the votes necessary to overturn any decision against it.

Futhermore, the commission did not address UK concerns that the ECB would outgun those outside the banking union when setting technical standards.

Moody's has threatened to downgrade America's prized triple A credit rating if Congress fails to reach a deficit reduction deal, raising the stakes in the fiscal debate that lies at the heart of the November election.

The rating agency said on Tuesday it is considering joining its rival Standard & Poor's, which stripped the US of its top rating last year, if a deal is not reached by the end of 2013. The threat is likely to feed into election campaign concerns over the state of the economy and lift Republican hopes of a boost for Barack Obama's challenger, Mitt Romney, by focusing attention on the size of the national debt.

It also adds pressure on lawmakers in Congress to lay the groundwork for critical negotiations on fiscal policy that will begin almost immediately after the election on November 6.

The gap between rich and poor Americans grew in 2011 as the poverty rate remained at almost a two-decade high.

The U.S. Census Bureau released figures today that showed household income fell, underscoring a sputtering economic recovery that's at the heart of the presidential campaign.

The proportion of people living in poverty was 15 percent in 2011, little changed from 15.1 percent in 2010, while median household income dropped 1.5 percent. The 46.2 million people living in poverty remained at the highest level in the 53 years since the Census Bureau has been collecting that statistic.

"The recession is going to have long-term effects on the poverty rate, which our projections suggest is going to hang high for many years to come," said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who studies poverty issues.

EADS, Europe's largest aerospace company, and BAE Systems, its largest defence company, are in talks about a potential tie-up, the British group has said.

The pair would create a dual-listed company structure, under which they would operate as one group, BAE said. But each would be remain separately listed on their existing exchanges.

A combined group would have a joint market capitalisation of some $48bn, based on Tuesday's closing prices, and would represent a formidable force in the defence and aerospace industries, serving customers from Washington to Riyadh.

If it is the case that fractional reserve banking creates credit too rapidly then it is a matter of degree not princip[le], as full reserve banking has the same problems, only it creates credit more slowly.

If the ancillary argument is made that the problem is what credit is spent on rather than credit per-se - for example speculation on assets rather than production - then again it is a problem of degree.  Opponents are saying that time runs too fast slow it down rather than saying the fractional system is flawed per-se.  Indeed this begs a question, can you use trigger mechanisms for slowing down the rate of credit creation (credit accelerator).

...

Such is the system as proposed in the Chicago Plan by Fisher and others as well as its modern variants such as Positive Money, the AMI etc.  This plan would have many benefits, the state could more easily generate liquidity at times of crisis,  and with state owned banks (not a feature in all proposals) there is no rent of money.  These potential advantages (and there are disadvantages and possibly better ways of achieving these advantages) however do not stem from any structural advantage of full reserve banking but from improvements to distribution and `inside' (state) money creation whatever the banking system.

WASHINGTON --The Obama administration suspects that the fiery attack in Libya that killed the American ambassador and three other diplomats may have been planned rather than a spontaneous mob getting out of control, American officials said Wednesday.

Officials in Washington studying the events of the past 24 hours have focused on the differences between the protests on the American embassy in Cairo and the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, the Libyan city where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and the other Americans were killed.

The protesters in Cairo appeared to be a genuinely spontaneous unarmed mob angered by an anti-Islam video produced in the United States. By contrast, it appeared the attackers in Benghazi were armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Intelligence reports are inconclusive at this point, officials said, but indications suggest the possibility that an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack.

President Obama strongly condemned the killings and ordered increased security at American diplomatic posts around the world. American defense officials said 50 Marines were en route to Libya to strengthen security at United States diplomatic facilities, and the State Department ordered all "nonemergency" personnel out of the country and warned Americans not to go there, suggesting that further attacks were possible.

Syrian rebels have killed at least 18 soldiers in the northwestern town of Saraqeb, in Idlib province, by setting off a car bomb outside a military position and then attacked it, according to a watchdog group.

Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the UK-based rights group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), said on Wednesday the details of the incident were still sketchy, and that he could not say whether the car bombing was a suicide attack.

"There were 70 to 100 soldiers there when the attack occurred" in Saraqeb, he said.

"Twenty soldiers escaped, and clashes are still going on."

Outside Aleppo, Syria's second city, fighting erupted at dawn in the Nayrab area, around 5km from the airport,which remained fully operational.

After days of diplomacy, Russia and China have agreed to support a US-backed resolution demanding that Iran stop activities that could be used to make nuclear arms.

Diplomats said on Wednesday the agreement sent a unified message to Iran, but also convinced Israel that diplomacy was a real alternative to military force in preventing a nuclear confrontation.

The resolution cannot be enforced by the 35-nation board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), even if approved by vote or consensus as expected on Thursday. But with Israel threatening war against Iran, the agreement is a significant progress after months of diplomatic deadlock.

Israel views a nuclear-armed Iran as a strategic threat, citing Iran's persistent calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, its development of missiles capable of striking Israel, and Iranian support for Arab armed groups.

actory fires in two major cities in Pakistan have killed more than 300 people and injured dozens more, including some who had to leap from windows to escape the flames, officials and survivors have said.

The most deadly blaze broke out on Tuesday night in a garment factory in the southern port city of Karachi, where at least 289 bodies have been recovered so far, according to Roshan Ali Sheikh, a senior government official.

At least 25 others were killed hours earlier in a shoe factory in the eastern city of Lahore.

Firefighters continued to battle the blaze in Karachi on Wednesday.

Most of the deaths were caused by suffocation as people caught in the basement were unable to escape when it filled with smoke, said the top firefighter in Karachi, Ehtisham-ud-Din. There were no fire exits, and the doors leading out of the basement were locked, he said.

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN--After asking why the United States was in Afghanistan in the first place, 18-year-old U.S. Army Pvt. Josh McCombs received a frank description of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, from Master Sgt. Todd Brinkman, 33, between raids on Taliban insurgents Tuesday. "Turns out, the little shaver was only 7 back then, and his folks didn't want him to see the horrible pictures on TV," the commanding officer later told reporters. "Then Pvt. McCombs asked: `If 9/11 happened more than 10 years ago, why are we here now?' And that's when I told him to stop asking questions and just follow orders." McCombs was last seen explaining 9/11 to his fellow young infantrymen, who all reportedly asked the same follow-up question McCombs did

"There's a broader lesson to be learned here: Gov. Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later and as president one of the things I've learned is you can't do that," Obama told CBS News Wednesday."

Wind turbines on land and offshore could readily provide more than four times the power that the world as a whole currently uses. Throw in kites or robot aircraft generating electricity from sky-high winds and the world could physically extract roughly 100 times more power than presently employed--and the climatic consequences remain minimal.

Two new computer-model analyses suggest there are few limits to the wind's potential. Although "there are physical limits to the amount of power that can be harvested from winds, these limits are well above total global energy demand," explains climate-modeler Kate Marvel of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who led the analysis published September 9 in Nature Climate Change. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Current global demand is roughly 18 terawatts. (A terawatt is one trillion watts.)

Given the desire to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electric generation, a growing number of wind farms are cropping up from the U.S. to China--more than 239 gigawatts worth of wind turbines have been installed globally. But the ultimate limits of wind power's potential contribution remained unclear. One complication, for example, is that any effort to harvest wind power ends up having an impact on the wind itself, reducing its speed--as well as influencing both local weather and global climate.

The official end of the Arctic Ocean melt season could come any time now, but the sea ice that covers the North Polar region has already smashed the previous record low for end-of-summer ice area set in 2007.

Back then, a combination of warm temperatures and ice-dispersing winds left just 1.61 million square miles of ice cover -- but that meltback was surpassed in late August this year, and by now, the ice extent has dropped by more than 35 percent below the 2007 record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Since March, according to one calculation, the amount of ice that has disappeared is equal to the areas of Alaska and Canada, combined.

This unprecedented melting (unprecedented since we've been able to monitor the ice with high accuracy using satellites, anyway, which first became possible in 1979) is extremely worrisome for several of reasons. For one, as Climate Central reported on August 27, sea ice is a powerful reflector that bounces a lot of sunlight back into space rather than letting it warm the Earth.

When that ice melts, it exposes the darker ground or water underneath, turning the region into an energy absorber rather than a reflector. Sea ice is especially vulnerable to melting, and over the past 30 years or so there's been a downward trend in sea ice coverage in summer. The result is a feedback loop that accelerates global warming, with melting ice leading to more warming of the water below leading to more melting.

Frogs and other amphibians are being wiped out at such a rapid rate across Asia that many are going extinct before scientists even have a chance to identify them as new species, biologists warned at an international conservation meeting in South Korea this week.

The scale of the destruction - caused by habitat loss, disease, pollution and other factors - is hard to quantify, but scientists fear the result will be disastrous. Amphibians have been suffering a wave of devastation all around the world, in part because of the spread of the fungal disease Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, known as BD or chytrid fungus, which has wiped out whole populations within the space of a few years.

But while conservation and monitoring efforts have so far focused on the Americas and Europe, little work has yet been done in the world's most populous continent, with the result that many amphibian species there are as yet uncatalogued and unstudied. For instance, according to one researcher, there are probably at least three to four times as many amphibian species in India alone as are currently catalogued.

"These creatures are disappearing before we even know they exist. We know this is happening - this has already been shown in cases such as Sri Lanka," said Bruce Waldman, associate professor at Seoul National University in Korea. "These are living jewels - but we don't know even how many we have, and we are not saving them."

In yet another sign of how quickly global warming is eating away at glaciers in the European Alps, the Austrian Alpine Club is reporting that the summit cross high on the 3,660-meter Grossvenediger in Austria came close to toppling off its podium this summer.

The permanent snow and ice that helped hold the monument in place for decades melted away in the summer heat, with several feet of ice vanishing just in the past few months. A mountain guide arriving at the summit last week discovered that the cross was close to falling over, with potential risks to summit visitors.

A mountain rescue crew and other workers temporarily re-anchored the cross to the remaining ice with steel cables, but later decided to take it down once again. It will be remounted on solid rock.

Austrian media is reporting that, up until very recently, it would have been impossible to use the bare rocks at the summit as an anchor point. The permanent snow and ice that has covered the mountain's peak for at least a century has just vanished within the past few weeks, according to Friedl Steiner, head of the local rescue group, who attributed the melting to climate change.

The U.S. Geological Survey has documented shrinking and vanishing ice fields in the Rocky Mountains with this extraordinary photo project.

The team from New England including Marco Lagi say that believe that a single factor will trigger riots around the world within the next 11 months - the price of food. Lagi and his team say that once food prices reach a certain point, social unrest will break out in several countries, especially in poorer parts of the world.

The team cite evidence from the United Nations and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, which plots the price of food against time and the date of riots around the world. They've even made a graph which shows that when the food prices rises above a certain threshold, riots occur.

There is a saying that states that "every society is only three meals away from revolution", and it is easy to believe. If food is unobtainable, the fear of starvation will drive people to extreme measures. However, Lagi and his team don't think that high food prices will solely lead to riots, but will be responsible for creating the conditions in which social unrest can flourish.

"These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest," said Lagi to Technology Review. What is worse is that food prices seem to be constantly going up due to traders speculating on the price of food, which has gotten worse in recent years by the deregulation of the commodities markets and the removal of trading limits for buyers and sellers. The second is the conversion of corn into ethanol, a practice directly encouraged by subsidies.

Of course, it is the western world, and specifically the US, that is responsible for such subsidies, so if global unrest is to be prevented, major changes are going to have to be made.

The marketing of a cream which claims to make women feel 'like a virgin again' has sparked a debate over the value of women in Indian society. Indian bloggers discuss the cream, virginity and society in general.

In India, where the three letter word 'sex' is still talked about in whispers, the Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company Ultratech has introduced its new product - a vaginal tightening cream called "18 Again." The makers claim the cream can rejuvenate the "virginity of a female."

The television commercial, which can also be viewed on YouTube, shows an Indian woman in her mid 30's dancing with her husband in front of her in-laws and singing 'I feel like a virgin' in Bollywood style, with the husband singing, "yes you do!" At end of the spot, the aged mother-in-law is seen happily logging on to the product's website - presumably to find out more information for herself.

A virgin bride is still very significant in Indian culture

In an interview with the BBC, Ultratech's owner, Rishi Bhatia, said 18 Again was a revolutionary product in India which would "empower women." He also explained that the cream would not actually be able to restore a woman's virginity, but that instead, it would make her feel like a virgin.

Contrary to what many students are taught, quantum uncertainty may not always be in the eye of the beholder. A new experiment shows that measuring a quantum system does not necessarily introduce uncertainty. The study overthrows a common classroom explanation of why the quantum world appears so fuzzy, but the fundamental limit to what is knowable at the smallest scales remains unchanged.

At the foundation of quantum mechanics is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Simply put, the principle states that there is a fundamental limit to what one can know about a quantum system. For example, the more precisely one knows a particle's position, the less one can know about its momentum, and vice versa. The limit is expressed as a simple equation that is straightforward to prove mathematically.

Heisenberg sometimes explained the uncertainty principle as a problem of making measurements. His most well-known thought experiment involved photographing an electron. To take the picture, a scientist might bounce a light particle off the electron's surface. That would reveal its position, but it would also impart energy to the electron, causing it to move. Learning about the electron's position would create uncertainty in its velocity; and the act of measurement would produce the uncertainty needed to satisfy the principle.

UK researchers say they have taken a huge step forward in treating deafness after stem cells were used to restore hearing in animals for the first time.

Hearing partially improved when nerves in the ear, which pass sounds into the brain, were rebuilt in gerbils - a UK study in the journal Nature reports.

Getting the same improvement in people would be a shift from being unable to hear traffic to hearing a conversation.

However, treating humans is still a distant prospect.

If you want to listen to the radio or have a chat with a friend your ear has to convert sound waves in the air into electrical signals which the brain will understand.

The hunt for the maker of the anti-Islamic video that inflamed mayhem in Egypt and Libya and triggered a diplomatic crisis has led to a Californian Coptic Christian convicted of financial crimes.

...

Nakoula, who pleaded no contest to federal bank fraud charges in 2010, told AP in a brief interview outside his home that he considered Islam a cancer and that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion.

He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video's purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula's address.

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