BRUSSELS - EU officials went into damage control mode on Wednesday (26 September) after the finance ministers of Germany, Finland and the Netherlands said the old debt of troubled banks should not be put on the eurozone bailout fund's books.

Earlier in the day, the value of Spanish bonds fell, as investors wondered yet again whether the country's bad banks will be saved by the richer eurozone countries using the so-called European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a €500 billion fund due to be inaugurated on 8 October.

Back in June, during an all-night session among EU leaders, Spain and Italy were told the ESM would be able to recapitalise banks directly once a single supervisor for eurozone banks is in place.

It was also agreed that Spain's €100 billion bailout for its banking sector would be put on the ESM books once the supervisor is in place, so Madrid can get its balance sheet back on track.

But on Tuesday (26 September), Finland, Germany and the Netherlands - the acknowledged hawks of the eurozone - issued a joint statement suggesting old debt of troubled banks should not be taken up by the joint fund.

EXCLUSIVE: In an escalation of rhetoric, civil rights groups accused the Georgian authorities of preparing massive fraud in order to win the 1 October parliamentary election. In response, a Georgian diplomat told EurActiv that the government had evidence of links between some opposition politicians and organised crime figures in plotting a coup d'état.

Civil rights activists from Georgia and neighbouring countries accused the country's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, of preparing massive fraud for the 1 October parliamentary election (see background).

Activists representing the organisation GUAM (named after the names of participating states Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova), made their case in Brussels yesterday (25 September), accusing the EU institutions of "keeping their eyes wide shut" on Georgia.

Mikhail Malkov, a Ukrainian expert on transborder conflicts, stressed that the visiting group were not lobbying for opposition leader Bidzina Ivanishvili and represented a variety of political opinions.

Members of the group, who held a public conference yesterday at the Brussels Press Club, said that they rejected the stereotype promoted by the Georgian authorities that the opposition, represented mainly by Ivanishvili's Georgia Dream coalition, was pro-Russian.

Protestors clashed with police in Spain's capital yesterday (25 September) as the government prepared a new round of unpopular austerity measures for the 2013 budget.

Thousands gathered in Neptune plaza, a few meters from El Prado museum in central Madrid, where they formed a human chain around parliament, surrounded by barricades, police trucks and more than 1,500 police in riot gear.

Police fired rubber bullets and beat protestors with truncheons, first as protestors were trying to tear down barriers and later to clear the square. The police said at least 22 people had been arrested and at least 32 injured, including four policemen.

As lawmakers started to leave the parliament late Tuesday in official cars or by foot, a few hundred people were still demonstrating in front of the building. Most dispersed shortly afterwards.

The protest, promoted over the Internet by different activist groups, was younger and more rowdy than recent marches called by labour unions. Protestors said they were fed up with cuts to public salaries and health and education.

"My annual salary has dropped by €8,000 and if it falls much further I won't be able to make ends meet," said Luis Rodriguez, 36, a firefighter who joined the protest. He said he was considering leaving Spain to find a better quality of life.

Green MEP Carl Schlyter has mounted a legal challenge against the commission which he accuses of "lack of transparency" and a failure to release public documents.

The case concerns a move by the French authorities to set up a register for nanomaterials to which the commission has objected.

The executive is refusing to make the documents detailing its objection public.

Speaking at a news conference in parliament on Wednesday Schlyter said he would challenge the commission over this on the grounds that it is in "conflict with EU legislation on transparency".

German Socialist MEP Jo Leinen has called for more effort to highlight the need to adapt to global warming.

His demand came at the launch of a new report on climate change adaptation in Europe.

The report was drafted by the leading think tank the European Policy Centre and the King Baudouin Foundation.

It says the study should serve as a "wake-up" call to policymakers.

The report makes a number of recommendations for policymakers, particularly the European commission as it prepares to come forward with its proposal for an EU strategy for adaptation in the spring of 2013 and with the EU budget for 2014-2020 about to be finalised.

Ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky should be pleased. His prophecy, announced shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, that the day when "Russians would wash their boots in warm seas" was near at hand, appears to be coming true. But this Tsarist dream of an empire that extends from the Mediterranean to the Indian ocean will not be realised by force of arms, but rather by tourist flows.

With his offer of a range of luxury holiday homes on the Kassandra Peninsula [southeast of Thessaloniki], entrepreneur Sergei Fentorov, a member of the Moscow Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a former nuclear submarine lieutenant, is already part of this dream.

And he is not alone. Just opposite, on the Sithonia Peninsula, the villa nestling amid four hectares of pine covered hills with a remarkable view on Mount Athos apparently belongs to Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, Russia's second most powerful man after Vladimir Putin.

BRUSSELS - The European Commission adopted rules on Tuesday (25 September) to increase transparency on farmers who receive billions in EU subsidies every year.

"We not only have to reform the CAP [common agricultural policy] to make it easier to understand but we also need to make it absolutely transparent," EU agriculture commissioner Dacian Ciolos told reporters in Brussels.

The new rules require member states to publish the first and last names of beneficiaries as well as the reasons why they obtain the funds. The aim, says the commission, is to better protect the EU coffer from fraud.

CAP makes up a third of the EU budget, with farmers and agricultural-related programmes receiving some €55 billion each year. The money is supposed to help rural development and guarantee EU food security.

The exit of one or more member states from the euro won't destroy the monetary union or the project of European integration, Czech President Vaclav Klaus said.

And a Greek departure from the currency would be a "victory" for that country, which has been a victim of the monetary system, Klaus said yesterday in an interview at Bloomberg's headquarters in New York.

The Czech Republic, which pledged to adopt the euro as part of its agreement to join the European Union in 2004, is under no official deadline to do so and the question of joining the common currency is a "non-issue" in the country, said Klaus, whose second term as president expires in March.

"I don't think the euro as a currency disappears," Klaus, 71, said. "The issue is whether all of the 17 countries and potentially a few others should be or will be in this system or not."

Spanish spreads rise to over 4.6%, as markets are sensing that Mariano Rajoy is not really serious about applying for a Spanish programme; the comments by the German, Dutch and Finnish finance ministers have also ditched expectations that the eurozone is likely to adopt a meaningful banking union in time; Spain's Ibex 35 index dropped nearly 4% as pessimism sets in a again; the European Commission insists that the banking union should be adopted by the end of the year, as agreed during the June 28/29 summit; Michael Noonan says there are differences of opinion over the details of the banking union, but the summit agreement foresees a break in the link between sovereign and banking debt (the German/Dutch/Finnish position would reinsert that link);  Mark Schieritz says the crisis is getting worse because markets understand that the Italy and Spain will not get a programme, that the ESM will not deal with legacy banking problems, and that Germany is not serious about banking union; credit market analysts have expressed doubt over estimates, due out this week, about the recapitalisation needs for Spanish banks; Klaus Regling says the change in the ESM seniority status can be done under the Treaty, but may require parliamentary approval in some countries - direct bank recapitalisation only requires a unanimous vote of the board; Madrid saw a second day of protests, with more protests planned; Catalonia has moved a further step towards a referendum on autonomy; French unemployment is now of 3m for the first time in 13 years; the protests in Greece have become more violent; one third of the latest austerity measures in Portugal are due to the recession; Mario Monti is forcing drastic spending cuts in Italy's regions; the euro crisis has led to an increase in the market for counterfeit products in Italy; Alberto Quadrio Curzio advocates large infrastructure projects to improve economic integration; Wolfgang Munchau says German unification was a historical error; a film, meanwhile, depicts what would happen if Greece and Germany were a married couple.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

VENICE, Sep 25 2012 (IPS) - "We should find the way, with our small degrowth movement in the global North, to align ourselves with the environmental justice movement originating with indigenous peoples from the South," Catalan ecological economist Juan Martinez-Alier said at the third international degrowth conference in Venice, Italy.

Degrowth is popular concept particularly in France, Italy and Spain, and is slowly gathering fans in other parts of Europe and North America. It argues that a democratic collective decision to consume and produce less in the global North is the most appropriate solution for the multiple crises facing the world today.

Renouncing economic growth in the North, say the proponents, would not only allow humanity to stay within the ecological limits of the planet but also contribute to restoring global social justice.

In practice, degrowth is compatible with grassroots projects such as food cooperatives, urban gardening, local currencies, co-housing projects, waste reduction and reuse initiatives, or the `transition towns' idea originating in the UK. It allows for cooperation with local, regional and even national authorities, albeit not heavily relying on governmental measures, and it is anti-corporate.

The third international degrowth conference that took place Sep. 19-23 in Venice in Italy brought together about 600 activists and intellectuals to discuss issues as varied as food sovereignty, the energy transition, a minimum guaranteed income, the debt crisis, and participative politics. Among these, one of the most visible themes this year has been the increased attention paid to solutions to the global crises stemming from the global South and their compatibility with the degrowth vision.

(Reuters) - Luxury auto giants BMW (BMWG.DE), Audi (VOWG_p.DE) and Mercedes (DAIGn.DE) have been enjoying robust demand in China for almost three years as they vie to be the world's biggest premium car manufacturer. That could be about to change.

While carmakers will use this week's Paris auto show to display models such as Audi's updated $146,600 top-of-the-line R8 coupe and Porsche's $126,000 four-wheel drive 911, the fate of the vehicles will be decided thousands of miles away in China, where premium-car buyers are showing signs of saturation.

Effects of a slowdown in the world's second-largest economy, where BMW, Audi and Mercedes account for about three quarters of luxury car sales, have already made themselves felt.

There is much at stake for the European carmakers, which have invested in local factories with Chinese partners to sidestep hefty duties on imported cars.

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Mervyn King is at it again. The governor of the Bank of England backed the government's austerity policies too explicitly and is now writing its excuses for missing its fiscal targets. That's outside the scope of King's monetary remit. But George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, should make the most of the governor's green light. The weakness of global growth ought to encourage the UK to move its targets, not tighten its fiscal policy further.

The governor's loose talk is undesirable because the BoE must appear impartial. Fiscal policy is all about political choices. The opposition thinks the coalition made the wrong ones. The latest woeful fiscal figures might seem to support that: the government's aim for 2012/13 is that its deficit should fall by 4.6 percent. In the first five months of the fiscal year, excluding the transfer of Royal Mail pension funds, it has risen by 21.8 percent.

WASHINGTON, Sep 26 2012 (IPS) - With all foreign troops due to leave Afghanistan just two years from now, the news out of the Central Asian nation is becoming increasingly gloomy.

Adding to the pessimism is a just-released report by one of the most astute observers of the U.S. war, Gilles Dorronsoro, an Afghanistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), who, among other things, predicts that the regime in Kabul "will most probably collapse in a few years" given current trends.

"Political fragmentation, whether in the form of militias or the establishment of sanctuaries in the north, is laying the ground work for a long civil war" that is likely to be fuelled by competition among regional powers, according to his report, which also joined the call by a growing number of experts for Washington to open negotiations with the Taliban as soon as possible.

Indeed, a series of setbacks just this month have renewed questions about even the short-term viability of the U.S.-led strategy to keep the Taliban at bay while bolstering the central government enough to persuade key elements of the insurgency to negotiate rather than fight on.

In recent days, some of the most die-hard Republican supporters of U.S. intervention have suggested throwing in the towel early, particularly in view of the growing number of fatal "insider" attacks - 51 so far this year - by uniformed Afghan personnel against U.S. and coalition trainers and soldiers.

WASHINGTON, Sep 26 2012 (IPS) - The United Nations Security Council on Wednesday began to debate a plan to deploy West African peacekeeping troops to tackle the six-month Islamist insurgency in northern Mali.

At the Security Council, both the United States and France forcefully backed the call for greater international involvement, as did several African leaders. But while France, the former colonial power in Mali, has for months spearheaded the push for foreign military involvement, the United States has been reluctant to formally back such an operation.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Security Council that the situation in Mali was "not only a humanitarian crisis" but "a powder keg that the international community cannot afford to ignore". She appeared to hold back, however, from calling for an immediate intervention.

"The United States supports the appointment of a senior U.N. envoy empowered to lead a comprehensive international effort on Mali and the creation of a diplomatic core group," she said. "We have to train the security forces in Mali, help them dislodge the extremists, protect human rights, and defend borders."

Since late March, spurred by a power vacuum brought about by a coup in Bamako, Mali's massive northern section has fallen under the control of several loosely aligned groups of ethnic Tuareg nationalists, Islamists, drug traffickers and opportunists.

On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch released a new report warning that Islamist armed groups have become "increasingly repressive", including having recruited several hundred children to fight.

Earlier this week, following long negotiations, the interim Malian government formally agreed to an intervention force from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). This ended the longstanding sense that the idea of foreign troops coming into Mali, while seeming increasingly inevitable, has nonetheless remained politically unpalatable, if not impossible, in Bamako.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 2012 (IPS) - Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and representatives from more than 50 non-governmental organisations, including actor-activist Sean Penn, met in New York on Monday to present a new roadmap for humanitarian aid in the country.

"It is gonna help the NGOs, the serious NGOs, and it is gonna weed out the bad apples," Lamothe told IPS after the meeting.

"We have a new coordination unit for NGOs that will have guidelines and standards to abide by. So there is a continous effort and push to monitor what the NGOs are doing," he said.

The event, organised by the U.N. Development Programme, took place during the 67th session of the U.N. General Assembly. The roadmap presented at the meeting is intended to help the Haitian government to supervise the 560 NGOs registered as working in the Caribbean state.

In brief, the roadmap outlines the government's next steps in coordinating humanitarian, development and charity-based organisations in the country. Two important steps will be the establishment of a national NGO Forum, and the establishment of a consultation process on a new NGO legislation.

The roadmap points out that the responsibility of all prioritisation of efforts shall rest in the hands of national authorities, in order to avoid fragmentation of efforts.

The US and Russia have offered starkly differing assessments of the situation in Syria at the UN Security Council session, underscoring the global body's inability to unite around a strategy to end the civil war in the Arab country.

Whereas Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, decried Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for "murdering his own people," Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, accused the US and other countries of encouraging terrorism.

Clinton appealed on Wednesday for the "paralysed" council to make a new attempt to reach an accord on taking measures over the conflict.

"The atrocities mount while the Security Council remains paralysed and I would urge that we try once again to find a path forward," Clinton said.

The Russian foreign minister, however, showed no sign of changing tack and said violence by the government and opposition had to be condemned.

"A significant share of the responsibility for the continuing bloodshed rests upon the states that instigate the opponents of Bashar al-Assad to reject a ceasefire and dialogue and demand an unconditional capitulation of the regime," Lavrov said.

Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has insisted that there could be no compromise with China on the ownership of a disputed island chain and denounced attacks on Japanese interests.

"So far as the Senkaku islands are concerned, they are an integral part of our territory in the light of history and of international law," Noda told reporters at the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, referring to an archipelago in the East China Sea that China knows as Diaoyu.

"It is very clear and there are no territorial issues as such. Therefore there cannot be any compromise that could mean any setback from this basic position. I have to make that very clear," he told reporters.

"The resolution of this issue should not be by force, but calmly, through reason and with respect for international law."

China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told his Japanese counterpart Koichiro Gemba at the United Nations on Tuesday that Japan had been guilty of "severely infringing" its sovereignty, according to Beijing's foreign ministry.

"The Chinese side will by no means tolerate any unilateral action by the Japanese side on the Diaoyu Islands," Yang told Gemba, according to his office.

That last thing I would say is probably appropriate, except for the fact that hundreds of thousands of poor (and mostly black and Hispanic) kids get tossed by cops every year (would you believe 684,000 street stops in New York alone in 2011?) in the same city where Wall Street's finest work, and those kids do real time for possession of anything from a marijuana stem to an empty vial. How many Wall Street guys would you think would fill the jails if the police spent even one day doing aggressive, no-leniency stop-and-frisk checks outside the bars in lower Manhattan? How many Lortabs and Adderalls and little foil-wraps of coke or E would pop out of those briefcases?

For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate for the presidency four years after the crash, the Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect perfectly represents this class of people. Mitt Romney is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only has never done a hard day of work in his life - he never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until 1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague's missing daughter ("It was a shocker," Mitt said. "The number of lost souls was astounding").

He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive. He has used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay for payments to his own company) and moved American jobs overseas.

The point is, Mitt Romney's natural constituency should be about 1% of the population. If you restrict that pool to "likely voters," he might naturally appeal to 2%. Maybe 3%.  

If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements" like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him on time?

If you're one of those folks who thinks President Obama is a "disappointment," you haven't been paying attention the last few years. And those of you who try to draw comparisons with the Bush Administration should put away the hallucinogens and have your memory checked.  If you were in a coma for the eight Bush Years, I apologize and forgive you. But please join the real world. So far, this president has done most of what he said he would do if elected; imagine what he could have done by now if progressives had supported him and not given him a Congress that doesn't look at him as if he's the demon seed.

A move towards a 'circular economy' will improve investment and innovation in resource efficient industries and technologies, a parliament debate has heard.

The event, hosted by S&D MEP Jo Leinen on Wednesday, brought together officials and policymakers to discuss the role Europe's industries could and should take to improve resource efficiency.

Fellow S&D member Judith Merkies told participants that Europe must move towards a more circular economy focusing on a 'leasing society'.

"This would mean no longer selling our products, but 'leasing' them and creating a producer-responsibility model."

The event, in association with the Nickel Institute, Metals Pro Climate and Eurometaux, also looked at the European commission's initiative on a resource efficient Europe as part of its Europe 2020 strategy.

"Typically, in the West we import goods whose production causes a lot of greenhouse gas emissions in poorer countries - and it is a contested question to which countries these emissions should be attributed," explains Michael Jakob from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), one of the authors.

This is a delicate issue, because many Western countries have ambitious targets for emissions reductions. Simply transferring emission-intensive industries to third countries in order to achieve these goals would not serve climate protection - and might even damage the economy.

Almost half of the CO2 transfers into the US are caused by the American trade deficit

"For the first time, we have now broken down the known emission transfers into their components," Jakob says. The economic analysis is based on an evaluation of estimates that were determined by other researchers in earlier studies.

"We can show that of the CO2 flowing into the US in form of imported goods, almost 50 per cent are due to the American trade deficit alone," Jakob explains. The US emits less CO2 in the production of its exports than is contained in its imports, simply because it imports more than it exports.

"And only about 20 per cent of CO2 transfers from China into the US can be traced back to the fact that China is in effect relatively more specialized in the production of dirty goods," Jakob says. But this is the only driver of emission transfers on which the currently controversially discussed climate tariffs could take effect.

AREVA, a global leader in nuclear energy and Atkins, one of the world's leading engineering and design consultancies, have formed a joint venture to compete for projects in the UK nuclear fuel management and decommissioning sector.

The AREVA-ATKINS Partnership UK is expected to bid for significant contracts at Tier 2 level* in the UK nuclear engineering sector.

The partnership will draw on the expertise of both companies. It offers a unique combination of international technology along with unbeatable design and engineering consultancy and deep understanding of the UK market and regulations.

(...) AREVA is the world leader in the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle with expertise in all back-end operations. Back-end activities include used-fuel recycling, decommissioning, waste management and transport solutions for each stage of the cycle. AREVA is part of Nuclear Management Partners in the United Kingdom which manages Sellafield.

Atkins is one of the world's leading engineering and design consultancies with around 9,000 of its 17,500 people based in the UK. Its international nuclear consultancy has been working at Sellafield, Magnox and former UKAEA sites for around 25 years.

In the Great Soda Wars, it often seems that beverage companies have the upper hand. Critics of restricting access to soda and other sweetened beverages have the rhetoric of freedom and liberty -- or rather Freedom! and Liberty! -- to draw on as well as the whole history of failed government attempts to restrict stuff people like that's bad for you. But now we have the latest entry in the Soda Wars saga; what I'd call: The Researchers Strike Back.

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has published a series of articles dedicated to research and commentary on the health effects of sugar-sweetened beverages (soda, yes, but also 100 percent fruit juice). The conclusions are striking. As The New York Times put it, the articles offered critics of soda consumption "a potent weapon: strong evidence that replacing sugared drinks with sugar-free substitutes or water really can slow weight gain in children."

Two of the studies in the series stood out for me.

The question that headlines this post has caused great confusion and strife ever since climate change first entered the public consciousness.

From the very beginning, climate deniers set about to exaggerate the degree of uncertainty. As GOP messaging maestro Frank Luntz said in his infamous memo, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly." Luntz sensed, accurately, that the lay public has a pretty naive, linear view of decisionmaking; they tend to think that understanding and quantifying the risks is the first step, to be completed before moving to action.

This has led climate hawks to emphasize, and sometimes overstate, the degree of certainty around climate change. To counter Luntz, they insist that "the science is settled" and "we have the tools we need to solve the problem."

This is all ... kind of dumb. "Certainty vs. uncertainty" is a red herring. Of course the science isn't "settled." Of course substantial uncertainty remains about what will happen and the way to avoid or adapt to it. Of course that doesn't mean what climate deniers say it means.

The seawater comes into play as a source of raw ingredients for liquid jet fuel, namely carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, according to NRL, drawing carbon dioxide from seawater can actually be more efficient than using airborne carbon dioxide, because the concentration of carbon dioxide in seawater is 140 times greater than in air.

To split the carbon dioxide and hydrogen away from other elements in seawater, NRL has been developing an electrochemical acidification cell based on chlorine dioxide. It works by using small amounts of electricity to acidify seawater, forming sodium hydroxide.

With the carbon dioxide and hydrogen in hand, the next step is an iron-based catalyst that NRL has tweaked to reduce the production of methane gas (an undesirable byproduct) while producing more hydrocarbons called olefins. Another step in the process converts the olefins to a liquid, and a final step using nickel-based catalysts converts the liquid to a form suitable for jet fuel.

With portability in mind, the research team has been working on a self-contained system that includes a power supply, pump and other accessories, all fitting into a movable skid measuring only 3 feet wide, 5 feet long, and 5 feet high.

So far, tests in the lab indicate that the process could produce jet fuel costing in the range of $3 to $6 per gallon. The next hurdle is to give the process a spin in open waters.

Drug giants fined $11bn for criminal wrongdoing - Health News - Health & Families - The Independent

The global pharmaceutical industry has racked up fines of more than $11bn in the past three years for criminal wrongdoing, including withholding safety data and promoting drugs for use beyond their licensed conditions.

In all, 26 companies, including eight of the 10 top players in the global industry, have been found to be acting dishonestly. The scale of the wrongdoing, revealed for the first time, has undermined public and professional trust in the industry and is holding back clinical progress, according to two papers published in today's New England Journal of Medicine. Leading lawyers have warned that the multibillion-dollar fines are not enough to change the industry's behaviour.

The 26 firms are under "corporate integrity agreements", which are imposed in the US when healthcare wrongdoing is detected, and place the companies on notice for good behaviour for up to five years.

27 September 2012

 

The European Union has passed the milestone of 100 gigawatt (GW) of installed wind power capacity, according to the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA).

100 GW of wind power can generate electricity over a year to meet the total consumption of 57 million households, equivalent to the power production of 39 nuclear power plants.

It took the European wind energy sector some twenty years to get the first 10 GW grid connected. It only needed 13 years to add an additional 90 GW. Half of the total European wind power capacity has been installed over the past six years.

"It would require burning 72 million tonnes of coal annually in coal fired power plants to match Europe's annual wind energy production. Loading that amount of coal on trains would require 750,000 wagons with a combined length of 11,500 kilometres - the distance from Brussels to Buenos Aires, Argentina," said Christian Kjaer, CEO of EWEA.

KAMULI, Uganda, Sep 26 2012 (IPS) - Three years ago, after Irene Kamyuka finished her sixth year of primary school in Uganda, her father ran short of money. With four siblings ahead of her in school, Kamyuka's father told her she would have to drop out until his finances turned around.

"My father told me the money was finished," she said. "He said: `You (wait) until the others are finished.'"

Kamyuka, determined to "study so that in my future I can get a job," stuck it out. Eventually enough money was available so she was able to finish the last year of primary school, the seventh, in May this year. Then it ran out again before she could go on to secondary school.

Though this East African nation's government-run schools are theoretically free, in reality parents who cannot afford to pay for uniforms, books and supplies cannot send their child to school.

Ugandans who live in rural areas, like Kamyuka, from Kamuli - a town on the edge of Lake Kyoga in central Uganda - and who make their living as subsistence farmers, run into consistent difficulties paying for their children's schooling.

Giving a whole new meaning to "pregnancy brain," a new study shows that male DNA--likely left over from pregnancy with a male fetus--can persist in a woman's brain throughout her life. Although the biological impact of this foreign DNA is unclear, the study also found that women with more male DNA in their brains were less likely to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease--hinting that the male DNA could help protect the mothers from the disease, the researchers say.

During mammalian pregnancy, the mother and fetus exchange DNA and cells. Previous work has shown that fetal cells can linger in the mother's blood and bone for decades, a condition researchers call fetal microchimerism. The lingering of the fetal DNA, research suggests, may be a mixed blessing for a mom: The cells may benefit the mother's health--by promoting tissue repair and improving the immune system--but may also cause adverse effects, such as autoimmune reactions.

One question is how leftover fetal cells affect the brain.

We humans aren't the most logical creatures. Take information processing: if we were perfect reasoners, we would absorb all the new facts we learn and use them to modify our view of the world. But while we do something like this with good news, bad news tends to go in one ear and out the other. While this good news / bad news effect gives you a more positive outlook on life, it can make you blindly optimistic, unprepared for the real consequences of medical problems or natural disasters.

In order to unravel this irrational thinking, researchers wanted to identify the responsible brain structure. They suspected the left or right inferior frontal gyrus, which is a ridge on the frontal lobes. These parts of the brain helps us update our beliefs and inhibit actions and memories, so the scientists suspected that they may be able to also inhibit our absorption of bad news.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers used magnetic stimulation to disrupt normal brain activity in 30 subjects, targeting either the left or right inferior frontal gyrus, or a control region of the brain. Then the participants had to estimate how likely 40 different negative events, from disease to robbery, were to happen to them. After making their best guess for each event, the subjects either received the uplifting news that the even was less likely to occur than they'd estimated, or the negative news that it was more likely to occur. In a follow-up session, the participants made new guesses for each event.

Tunisian civil society groups have expressed outrage after a young woman was accused of indecency by two policemen jailed for raping her, amid criticism of the Islamist-led government on women's rights.

The woman and her fiance were summoned by a magistrate on Wednesday to face the two policemen, both found guilty of rape and jailed, who accuse her of "indecency," a group of Tunisian NGOs said. The crime is punishable by six months in prison.

The hearing was adjourned until next Tuesday, according to the NGOs, which urged rights activists to stand in solidarity with the accused, as social media networks called for a demonstration outside the court in Tunis on that day.

The interior ministry said the woman and her boyfriend were "apprehended" by three policemen on September 3, when they were found in an "immoral position".

Two policemen then raped her, while the third held the fiance handcuffed. All three policemen were imprisoned.

The justice ministry said both sides might have broken the law.

"The crime committed by the two police agents does not rule out the possibility that she was doing something illegal" with her boyfriend, said a source at the ministry.

It was 50 years ago this coming Sunday that the Jetson family first jetpacked their way into American homes. The show lasted just one season (24 episodes) after its debut on Sunday September 23, 1962, but today "The Jetsons" stands as the single most important piece of 20th century futurism.

But it's just a cartoon, right? So what if today's political and social elite saw "The Jetsons" a lot? Thanks in large part to the Jetsons, there's a sense of betrayal that is pervasive in American culture today about the future that never arrived. We're all familiar with the rallying cries of the angry retrofuturist: Where's my jetpack!?! Where's my flying car!?! Where's my robot maid?!? "The Jetsons" and everything they represented were seen by so many not as a possible future, but a promise of one.

There are a lot of "what-ifs" in "The Jetsons" universe that may have had substantial bearing on politicians, policymakers and the average American today. If we accept that media has an influence on the way that we view culture, and our own place in the future--as "The Jetsons" seems to ask us to do--we have to ask ourselves how our expectations might have changed with subtle tweaks to the Jetson story. What if George took a flying bus or monorail instead of a flying car? What if Jane Jetson worked outside of the home? What if the show had a single African-American character?