http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman/scotland/hogmanay-scotland-welcomes-greatest-party-of-all-1-271 3830

TOURISM leaders have hailed Edinburgh's Hogmanay celebrations as Scotland's equivalent to the Olympic Games, as up to 75,000 revellers flocked into the capital last night.

Experts at VisitScotland said the impact of images beamed around the world from the capital's celebrations to more than a billion TV viewers were as strong as ever.

And hoteliers claimed scenes of famous backdrops, such as Edinburgh Castle and Calton Hill, which were being broadcast during the three-day festival were the "envy of the world".

After a handful of controversial remarks, some in Germany are asking if Social Democratic Party (SPD) chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück is doing himself any favors with his outspoken demeanor.

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS), Steinbrück, a former finance minister, complained of poor pay for elected officials, saying that a regional director of one of Germany's Sparkassen savings banks in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia earns more than the country's leader. While the claim may be subject to debate, many are questioning Steinbrück's timing, which comes at the start of the election campaign.

Incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel earned €289,986 ($382,521) in 2011. That sum will increase this year following the first raise given to the chancellor in 12 years. The Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung, citing public records, reported that the average Sparkassen director in North Rhine-Westphalia earns between €311,500 and €593,000.

Asked if the euro crisis would continue to worsen in 2013, Schäuble told German daily Bild: "I think we have the worst behind us. Countries like Greece have recognized that they can only overcome the crisis with hard reforms. I hope the progress will continue. We are moving ahead step by step."

Asked if France would turn out to be the biggest threat to the euro, Schäuble said: "I am sure that France will meet its obligations. The government knows very well that every country has to continually carry out reforms to remain competitive. That applies to us Germans as well, by the way."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/02/us-usa-fiscal-idUSBRE8A80WV20130102

The United States averted economic calamity on Tuesday when lawmakers approved a deal preventing huge tax hikes and spending cuts that would have pushed the world's largest economy off the "fiscal cliff" into recession.

By a vote of 257 to 167, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a bill that fulfills President Barack Obama's re-election promise to raise taxes on top earners.

The Senate passed the measure earlier in a rare New Year's Day session and Obama said he will sign it into law shortly.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/31/turkish-peace-talks-kurdish-militants-pkk

If you were looking for some new year cheer, you could do worse than look toward Turkey, with confirmation this weekend that talks between Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government and Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK), are continuing and that the focus of the negotiations was getting the movement to lay down its arms.

Any glimmer of hope for an end to an insurgency that has cost at least 40,000 lives is to be welcomed. Especially since the last 18 months have witnessed a surge in violence the like of which has not been seen since Ocalan was seized by Turkish special forces in 1999.

Please forgive me if this should go in the Europe section...

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes

If you read Calitics at any time between 2007 and 2010, you'd have seen a site focused on the same problem now facing the country as a whole: how to keep a government, an economy, and a society functioning in the face of Republican obstruction. The latest nonsense surrounding the so-called "fiscal cliff" shows that the House Republicans have learned well from their Sacramento counterparts. The method is the same: make Democrats do what they otherwise would not do by threatening to block passage of crucial legislation, then up the ante by rejecting initial deals and demanding even more once Democrats have shown they will make concessions to avoid the predicted disaster that comes with legislative inaction. The resulting deals were destructive to the state's economy and safety net, worsening the already bad financial and social crisis.

For a long time, Sacramento Democrats argued they had no other choice. We heard from Speakers of the Assembly and Presidents of the Senate that unless concessions were made to obtain Republican votes, budgets would not be passed and people would suffer. Republicans made good on their threats and delayed budgets - the 2008-09 budget was three months late.  Now we're watching a similar script play out in Congress.

Here in 2013, California is in a very different place - precisely because of the lessons learned from the era of Republican obstruction. Voters approved a tax increase to help schools. The state budget is headed toward surplus. Budgets are passed on time and without hostage tactics. State government is starting to become functional again.

That did not happen by accident. It happened because Democrats and progressives decided they had enough of Republican obstructionism and developed a plan to stop it for good. The plan included smarter legislative tactics, but the real keys were changes to the political process as well as an unprecedented organizing effort, all aimed at the same core goal: restoring political power to the people, not allowing it to remain concentrated in an extremist fringe.

The first step requires being honest about how politics now works.

In an unusual televised address for the new year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called to defuse tensions with South Korea and boost the economy of his  impoverished nation.

"An important issue in putting an end to the division of the country and achieving its reunification is to remove confrontations between the north and the south," Kim declared.

Almost anything emerging from the isolated North Korean regime is bound to be parsed by analysts seeking clues to its next steps, but it is striking that Kim gave such a speech at all.

[...]

Despite the call to make peace, some experts were skeptical that it signaled any dramatic shift by North Korea. The regime prizes its military might, Kim emphasized later in his speech, delivered just a few weeks after North Korea  launched a rocket to loft a satellite into space.

There's something uncomfortably neocolonial about the way the Delhi gang-rape and subsequent death of the woman now known as Damini is being handled in the UK and US media. While India's civil and political spheres are alight with protest and demands for changes to the country's culture of sexual violence, commentators here are using the event to simultaneously demonise Indian society, lionise our own, and minimise the enormity of western rape culture.

A particularly blatant example of this is Libby Purves's piece for the Times. She says the Delhi bus rape should "shatter our Bollywood fantasies". For Purves, westerners enjoy a romanticised view of India, all heady spirituality and Marigold Hotels; and especially romantic in their views, for reasons Purves neglects to address, are the British. Thus, upright Europeans have sentimentally ignored the "murderous, hyena-like male contempt" that Purves says is an Indian cultural norm. Neatly excised from her account however is the relationship between poverty, lack of education and repressive attitudes towards women, and, by extension, the role of Europe in creating and sustaining poverty in its former colonies. Attitudes towards women in the east were once used by colonialists to, first, prop up the logic of cultural superiority that justified unequal power relations (the "white man's burden") and second, silence feminists working back in the west by telling them that, comparatively, they had nothing to complain about.

PUERTO SAAVEDRA, Chile, Dec 27 2012 (IPS) - For more than two decades, Mapuche indigenous people in the Chilean region of Araucanía have been fighting the construction of the Ruta Costera (Coastal Highway), a megaproject initially conceived during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) which has already caused significant archeological and cultural losses and damages.

The Coastal Highway is meant to connect one end of Chile's long, narrow territory to the other, running north to south as close to the Pacific Ocean as possible. The completed highway would be more than 3,340 km long, of which more than 2,600 km have already been built.

This highway project has become one of the main challenges facing numerous successive governments in Chile, who have consistently come up against the opposition of native communities.

...crap - I can't remember the html for linking, so here it is in it's cludgy format

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/01/maryland-gay-marriage-new-year

Seven gay couples rang in the New Year in Maryland with wedding bells early Tuesday, marking the first wave of nuptials since voters in the state backed the legalization of same-sex marriage. The couples were pronounced lawfully married at the 12.30am ceremony on New Year's Day in Baltimore's City Hall.

Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake officiated at the wedding of the first of the couples, 68-year-old James Scales and 60-year-old William Tasker. The couple have been together for 35 years. The mayor joked that everyone had come to celebrate a relationship that began many years ago - "and I mean that, many years ago." Soon after the November vote legalizing gay marriage, Scales, a long-time city employee, asked the mayor to marry the two.

The mayor's press secretary, Ian Brennan, said the mayor "wanted to make a statement to tell gay, lesbian, transgendered couples that they're welcome here".

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/21/us-bats-immunity-flight-idUSBRE8BK0BV20121221

The bat, a reservoir for viruses like Ebola, SARS and Nipah, has for decades stumped scientists trying to figure out how it is immune to many deadly bugs but a recent study into its genes may finally shed some light, scientists said on Friday.

Studying the DNA of two distant bat species, the scientists discovered how genes dealing with the bats' immune system had undergone the most rapid change.

This may explain why they are relatively free of disease and live exceptionally long lives compared with other mammals of similar size, such as the rat...

[...]

What was missing from both species of bats was a gene segment known to trigger extreme, and potentially fatal, immune reactions to infections, called the cytokine storm.

Cytokine storms end up killing not only offending viruses in the body, but the host's own cells and tissues too.

"Viruses rarely kill the host. The killing comes from the host's immune response. So it looks like what bats are doing is depress the inflammation (cytokine storm). If we can learn that, we can design drugs to minimize the inflammation damage and control viral infection," Wang said.

Last week, sexism in hacker culture became a topic of worldwide dialogue again. The trigger was a series of sexist incidents at the 29th Chaos Communications Congress, held every year in Germany during the last week of the year.

The incidents started with a wall in the conference center, where a picture of a woman's nude body (link does not show image directly) was created using "Creeper Move cards," printed paper cards used to raise awareness of sexism. (They definitely raised awareness in this case.) The conference wiki was edited to create a game in which participants were rewarded for offending people by making sexist comments or unwanted sexual propositions. During the popular conference event "Hacker Jeopardy," a moderator repeatedly made sexist comments like "For reasons of gender-equality, we'll sadly have to pick a woman now," unhindered by the conference organizers present.

The reaction was swift, both at the conference and around the world. Many of the incidents were chronicled on a web site set up to document sexist incidents at CCC (in German, English here). Social media exploded with criticism of the events - e.g., "I think the conference leadership (the ccc) has failed horribly and that your team is a token and meaningless gesture." - which quickly spread to include not just people at the conference but also people around the world.

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/music/news-and-features/ultravox-have-the-last-laugh-as-vienna-is- no1-1-2713856

A GRAVE musical wrong has at last been set right.

Three decades ago Ultravox's classic track Vienna was held off the No1 spot in the charts by an Australian in a tiny pork-pie hat and a mandolin screeching "Shaddap You Face".

Today, the track written by the Scots singer Midge Ure will be hailed as an honorary chart-topper after being named Britain's favourite No2 single.

Beate Sirota Gordon, the daughter of Russian Jewish parents who at 22 almost single-handedly wrote women's rights into the Constitution of modern Japan, and then kept silent about it for decades, only to become a feminist heroine there in recent years, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.

[snip]

A civilian attached to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's army of occupation after World War II, Ms. Gordon was the last living member of the American team that wrote Japan's postwar Constitution.

Her work -- drafting language that gave women a set of legal rights pertaining to marriage, divorce, property and inheritance that they had long been without in Japan's feudal society -- had an effect on their status that endures to this day.

"It set a basis for a better, a more equal society," Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University, said Monday in a telephone interview. "By just writing those things into the Constitution -- our Constitution doesn't have any of those things -- Beate Gordon intervened at a critical moment. And what kind of 22-year-old gets to write a constitution?"

a sense of marvel and humility for the new year

De Gondi's natural-leavened sour batter buckwheat and cornmeal pancake with no-sugar wild strawberry preserves.

Maple syrup lurking in the background.

What a minister for emigrés does : Tries to talk them into coming home, I guess. I wish him luck with Tunisian Jews, who are probably 50/50 between Israel and France.

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

A great day

keep to the Fen Causeway