WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Monday that Washington wanted him to win elections in April, though this did not mean the United States was interfering in Italy's domestic affairs.

"The American government fears a change of government in Italy," Berlusconi told Italian reporters after meeting President George W. Bush at the White House, according to the Italian news agencies ANSA and AGI.

"I assured him that we would win," the Italian prime minister said, adding later that the United States was not interfering in Italian political affairs.

"The president believes Prime Minister Berlusconi has provided strong leadership. Under his leadership Italy has been one of our closest allies and made enormous contributions to peace and security," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. Berlusconi is trailing center-left rival Romano Prodi in opinion polls ahead of April elections. Prodi has promised to withdraw Italy's forces from Iraq if he is elected.

Berlusconi is one of Washington's strongest allies. Although he did not send troops to join the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he did send Italian forces after the fall of Baghdad.

LONDON, Nov 1 (Reuters) - Strong global demand boosted exports from the euro zone and Britain, pushing manufacturing sector growth in both areas to multi-month highs, surveys of purchasing managers showed on Tuesday.

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The equivalent gauge for the euro zone climbed one point to a 13-month high of 52.7 in October, moving further above the 50 line between growth and contraction and strengthening the case for a hike in interest rates next month or in early 2006.

"This could provide a small additional backing to the idea that the euro zone economy is recovering and therefore might support an early hike," said Lorenzo Codogno at Bank of America, who last week changed his rates view and now sees a slightly greater than 50 percent chance of a hike as early as December.

However, others noted that domestic demand in the euro zone still remained weak. They said the ECB may be reluctant to hike rates from a historic low of 2 percent until the economy is less dependent on global demand -- especially as growth is expected to slow in many countries, including the United States.

Angela Merkel insisted yesterday the Christian Democrats would form a grand coalition government with the Social Democrats, despite the decision by a key conservative powerbroker not to join her cabinet and a power struggle in the SPD that is threatening to derail power-sharing negotiations.

Only a few days ago the two parties, which won an overwhelming majority of seats in the Bundestag, looked as though they were making good progress on the coalition's policy platform.

But forging a working alliance between the largest parties of the left and right has been made significantly harder by power struggles that have emerged on both sides more than a month after voters delivered a hung parliament.

Opposition parties are calling for fresh elections. The liberal Free Democrats called for the CDU to join it in a "Jamaica coalition" together with the Greens, but the environmental party last night ruled this out. Volker Kauder, general secretary of the CDU yesterday dismissed both options. "There will be a grand coalition government in Germany," he said.

Yet behind the scenes, few doubt there is what one senior politician yesterday called "political chaos".

US planning for Cuba's "transition" after the demise of Fidel Castro has entered a new stage, with a special office for reconstruction inside the US State Department preparing for the "day after", when Washington will try to back a democratic government in Havana.

The inter-agency effort, which also involves the Defense Department, recognises that the Cuba transition may not go peacefully and that the US may have to launch a nation-building exercise.

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The US Institute of Peace, funded by Congress to work on conflict management, declined to lend its expertise to the Cuba project. "This was an exercise in destabilisation, not stabilisation," said one person involved.

Mr McCarry acknowledges wearing two hats: to help a post-Castro Cuba establish a democratic government and market economy, and to hasten that transition.

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"The transition genie is out of the bottle," he said, referring to opposition activities inside Cuba, and a "broad consensus" reached with the exiled community. "They are the ones to define a democratic future for Cuba."

Officials say the US would not "accept" a handover of power from Mr Castro, who is 79, to his brother Raul, aged 74. While it is not clear what the US position means, Mr McCarry stressed the US would not "impose" its help.

(AP) A map of South America flashed on the screen and theme music played as live news broadcasts began Monday on a new Latin American TV station backed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as an alternative to large corporate media outlets.

Telesur _ financed by mainly by Venezuela with help from Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay _ began with top stories on political tensions in Bolivia and Chavez's predictions of a hearty debate over U.S.-style capitalism at this week's Summit of the Americas in Argentina.

One news anchor proclaimed it "a great day for Telesur," which has been running taped programs and limited news segments since its July 24 launch.

The station promises to be a Latin alternative to large media conglomerates like CNN, and has taken on the slogan "News from the South."

Chavez proposed the idea of a region-wide TV channel in 2003, and his government is the largest sponsor _ providing more than half of the station's startup capital.

An Orange Revolution memorabilia stall on Kiev's chestnut-lined main street, the Khreshchatyk, says quite a lot about the current state of Ukrainian politics.

A t-shirt depicting the revolution's figurehead, Viktor Yushchenko - now the country's president - has stopped selling and will not be re-ordered, says saleswoman Viktoria Kucherenko.

But a t-shirt of the revolution's leading lady, Yulia Tymoshenko - recently sacked as prime minister by Mr Yushchenko - is selling briskly.

To be fair, the Yushchenko shirt is an older product and the Tymoshenko shirt is more popular partly because it is newer and more topical.

But the way the two of them are going head-to-head in the shirt market mirrors the personal rivalry that has now come out into the open and which could be Ukraine's big political story for years to come.

The Tymoshenko shirt carries a quotation from the first television interview she gave after her dismissal: "I'm not going to hide myself away - I'm not going anywhere."

"I learned German at school," said David Montgomery, the former chief executive of the Mirror Group.

I met him while he was on a visit to Berlin.
Mr Montgomery was in the city after the news broke that his consortium had bought a German publisher, the Berliner Verlag, which owns the Berliner Zeitung and its sister tabloid, the Berliner Kurier.

To his critics, David Montgomery is known as a cold, ruthless manager. In Germany, his new employees have already been on the attack.

The Berliner Kurier printed an upside down picture of the media mogul on its front page, with the headline, "No Sir. You are not going to get our paper."

"We looked hard on the internet, as we are also journalists, and we could not find a single good word about this man," Renate Gensch, the head of the Berliner Zeitung's works' council, told me.
"Staff are worried about job cuts. They do not trust Mr Montgomery when he talks about efficiency."

So why all the fuss? David Montgomery, the former chief executive of the Mirror Group, has bought the Berliner Verlag, which is Berlin's leading newspaper group.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Syria's foreign minister sparked a diplomatic dustup in the U.N. Security Council on Monday, when he said that concluding his government knew about plans to kill a former Lebanon leader was like suggesting the U.S., Spain and Britain knew in advance about 9/11 and other major terror attacks.

Farouk Al-Sharaa made the claim after the Security Council passed a resolution and backed a U.N. report that said the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri could not have occurred without Damascus' approval.

His remarks drew heated denunciations from British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who called al-Sharaa's comments an ``unbelievable tirade'' and ``bizarre.''

The testy exchange between al-Sharaa and Straw punctured a morning of largely civil speeches once the Security Council passed a resolution demanding Syria cooperate with a probe into Hariri's assassination.

US terrorism experts Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have reached a stark conclusion about the war on terrorism: the US is losing.

Despite an early victory over the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the two former Clinton administration officials said President George W Bush's policies have created a new haven for terrorism in Iraq that escalates the potential for Islamic violence against Europe and the US.

America's badly damaged image in the Muslim world could take more than a generation to set right.
And Bush's mounting political woes at home have undermined the chance for any bold US initiatives to address the grim social realities that feed Islamic radicalism, they said.

"It's been fairly disastrous," said Mr Benjamin, who worked as a director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council (NSC) from 1994 to 1999.

"We have had some very important successes getting individual terrorists. But I think the broader story is really quite awful. We have done a lot to fuel the fires, and we have done a lot to encourage people to hate us."

Male mice serenade potential mates with ultrasonic love songs, a study by US scientists has revealed.

The research adds mice to the exclusive club of mammals that can sing, which has until now comprised only human beings, bats and cetaceans.

A Washington University, St Louis, team studied ultrasonic squeaks emitted by mice when they smelt a female and found that they formed complex songs.
They have published details in the scientific journal PLoS Biology.

Scientists have known for some time that mice emit sounds at a frequency outside the range of human hearing, but it was always possible that these could have been random vocalisations.

Washington researchers Tim Holy and Zhongsheng Guo now demonstrate that this is not the case.

LONDON, Nov 1: More than 1,500 workers of Royal Dutch Shell went on strike on Tuesday at Europe's biggest oil refinery in The Netherlands, in protest at group plans to alter their pension rights, union leaders said.

Workers at the Pernis refinery, in the Dutch port of Rotterdam, and the petrochemical facility in nearby Moerdijk joined the strike that had begun late on Monday, a spokesman for Dutch union CNV said.

The walk-out was the first faced by the Anglo-Dutch energy giant in The Netherlands since 1979.

Those on strike meanwhile accounted for 60 per cent of the facilities' combined workforce of about 2,500.

The Pernis refinery normally produces 416,000 barrels of oil per day, while the Moerdijk facility produces about 900,000 tons of petrochemicals per year.

The (strikers') plan is to bring down (the operations) completely, the union spokesman said, adding that the total shutdown could be achieved in around a week's time.

Around 1,000 employees at a natural gas subsidiary owned jointly by Shell and US-based ExxonMobil, the Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (NAM), would join the strike on Wednesday, he added.

Amazing

I have also set up a diary.

A "micro-house" created by British architect Richard Horden is being tested by students in Munich, Germany.

It has two bedrooms, a lounge, a dining room, a kitchen and a bathroom, and it is just 9ft by 9ft by 9ft.

The mini-home is already being looked at by a number of local authorities in Britain as way of dealing with short term shortages in accommodation.
It could also be a self-contained home for elderly relatives or teenagers and can be sited in a garden.
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The structure has been designed around ideas from 200 architecture students and a small village is now being set up in the campus of Munich University.

The university is keen to test the idea as it has around 90,000 students and only around 10,000 apartments. It has already tried using sea containers as flats but the new micro-house is half their size.
The pods can be stacked on one another or laid out in small colonies.

The architects behind the scheme say they are perhaps too small to live in permanently but can offer everything someone would need for a few months before they find a permanent home.

LONDON, Nov 1: British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Tuesday ruled out a policy of regime change against Iran amid mounting Western concern about Tehran's development of nuclear weapons and its stance towards Israel.

"I have to say to you that regime change in Iran is not part of the policy of Her Majesty's Government, nor do I think it would be wise," Mr Straw said during a question period in parliament.

He had been asked whether London still ruled out discussions with groups opposed to the Iranian government, and was responding to claims that internal regime change `could reduce the implied (nuclear) threat considerably'.

Mr Straw said Britain was working with other European countries as well as the United States and Russia to ensure that Iran complies with its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations.

http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=335531