Russia and Serbia have signed a controversial energy deal that will hand Russian gas giant Gazprom control of NIS, Serbia's oil monopoly.

Under the deal, Gazprom is to build a gas pipeline through Serbia and an underground gas storage facility there.

Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev and his Serbian counterpart Boris Tadic signed the agreement in Moscow.

The plan is for Serbia to host part of a new pipeline called South Stream, to deliver Russian gas to southern Europe.

Gazprom is taking a 51% stake in NIS for 400m euros (£380m; $560m), officials say.

The news, if confirmed, may irk Germany's neighbors in Europe. Newspapers are claiming the second economic stimulus package due to be unveiled next month will total just €25 billion rather than the originally planned €40 billion because Germany doesn't want to give other nations an excuse to breach deficit rules.

 Clouds loom over the port of Hamburg: Germany's giant economy is expected to fall into recession next year.

Germany's second economic stimulus package due to be unveiled in January will be far smaller than initially discussed because the government doesn't want to give other European Union countries an excuse to break EU deficit rules, two German newspapers reported on Wednesday.

Reports in Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Rundschau said the new program to avert recession would amount to €25 billion ($34.9 billion) compared with the figure of €40 billion initially discussed.

The finance minister of the regional state of Rhineland-Palatinate, Ingolf Deubel, confirmed the figure of €25 billion in an interview with the Rhein-Zeitung newspaper following a meeting of regional government representatives with Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff, Thomas de Mazière, in Berlin on Tuesday.

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A village in Germany is pioneering a method of saving energy and reducing carbon emissions by switching off the street lights at night.

But local residents can use their mobile phones to turn the street lights back on again for 15-minute periods whenever they want.

Steve Rosenberg visited Doerentrup in north-west Germany to see how it works.

The era of cheap gas is coming to an end, Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has told ministers from the world's major gas-exporting countries.

Mr Putin said the cost of extracting gas was rising sharply, therefore "the era of cheap energy resources, of cheap gas, is of course coming to an end".

The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) meeting in Moscow has agreed a charter and plans for a permanent base.

Some observers say the GECF may develop into an Opec-style producers' cartel.

This speculation increased with the news that the charter had been adopted and that GECF leaders had agreed to establish permanent offices in Doha, Qatar.

The rail industry, the Government and regulators were engaged in a farcical blame game last night over who is responsible for Britain's annual 58-hour Christmas railway shut down, which begins tonight.

Train operating companies said yesterday that they would be ready to introduce services from next year but blamed the Association of Train Operating Companies (Atoc) for not co-ordinating an agreement. Atoc, however, said it was prepared to take part in meetings with Network Rail and the Government to discuss a new Christmas timetable, but it blamed the Government for failing to co-ordinate talks. Meanwhile, the Government has laid the blame at the door of individual operators, which it says are the only ones who can act to introduce the services.

The failure to act has led to another Christmas in which anyone wanting to travel on Boxing Day will be stranded. It comes a year after pledges from Iain Coucher, the chief executive of Network Rail, that action would be taken after an identical closure last year. "We now need to run railways every single day of the week. We need to run them on Christmas Days and Boxing Days," he said in January. Major train services will stop running at 8pm this evening and will not begin again until 6am on Saturday, despite a full programme of football fixtures on Boxing Day, as well as the high street sales. Football supporters alone will add tens of thousands of cars to the nation's roads on Boxing Day. However, the Government had been aiming to cut emissions from traffic severely to meet its target of cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

The German government whipped its €480 billion bank bailout package through parliament in record time, but now the program has run into trouble. The banks are still fighting for survival, the money market isn't functioning properly, and taxpayers' money is being burned.

Who knows Claudia Hillenherms? Almost no one, and yet, for some time now, she has been one of the most powerful women in Germany.

To reach Ms. Hillenherms, one has to pass through a thick, heavy steel door. The painters have left their paint buckets standing in the stairwell of the historic building that belongs to Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank. Everything there smells new and seems temporary.

A growing number of European Union countries are reportedly interested in helping US President-elect Obama meet his promises to close Guantanamo Bay by taking in inmates from the controversial detention camp.

Throughout his campaign, US President-elect Barack Obama promised to shutter the controversial military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And as his inauguration day draws nearer, European countries are trying to find ways to help him keep that promise.

One especially difficult question Obama faces is what to do with those inmates who have been determined to pose no threat but who would face persecution and possibly torture if returned to their home country. That's where a half-dozen EU nations would now like to step in, according to a new report in The Washington Post.

As an independent state emerged here after 47 years of Soviet rule, a jovial, meticulous police official named Herman Simm was promoted again and again. By 2001, he occupied a post that satisfied his fascination with secrets: As chief of the National Security Authority, his job was to secure all classified communication between Estonia and its allies.

Helsinki has always had a generous allocation of spies of all sorts: military, industrial, political - witness the size of the Russian and US Embassies and staffs. Nobel peace man, former President Ahtisaari, could not have functioned without associating with all kinds of of them.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Nordlund's interest in self-sufficiency arose in the mid-1980s. He noticed that he was unable to define his place in society after finishing school. He lived in Germany at the time.
      An issue of conscience became a problem: "Can I be involved in developing a society if I feel that it is built with no foundation?"
      He found the answer in self-sufficiency.
      "When a person produces everything he needs himself, he reaches a state in which it is possible to choose how to target his labour input, free from the monetary economy."

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Missouri's plan to spend $750 million in federal money on highways and nothing on mass transit in St. Louis doesn't square with President-elect Barack Obama's vision for a revolutionary re-engineering of the nation's infrastructure.

Utah would pour 87 percent of the funds it may receive in a new economic stimulus bill into new road capacity. Arizona would spend $869 million of its $1.2 billion wish list on highways.

While many states are keeping their project lists secret, plans that have surfaced show why environmentalists and some development experts say much of the stimulus spending may promote urban sprawl while scrimping on more green-friendly rail and mass transit.

"It's a lot of more of the same," said Robert Puentes, a metropolitan growth and development expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who is tracking the legislation. "You build a lot of new highways, continue to decentralize" urban and suburban communities and "pull resources away from transit."

Wall Street bankers and London fund managers have little in common with Mongolian craftsmen and Philippine tuk-tuk drivers.

But the world of high finance is beginning to take an interest in the lives of those at the bottom of the economic heap.

Microfinance - making tiny loans to the very poor - is increasingly viewed as an investment opportunity and not just a way to fight poverty.

"Its potential as an asset class is colossal," says Jack Lowe, a former businessman, who now works for Blue Orchard, a Geneva-based company that manages microfinance investments.

The formation of Afghan militias comes on the heels of a similar undertaking in Iraq, where 100,000 Sunni gunmen, many of them former insurgents, have been placed on the government payroll. The Awakening Councils, as they are known, are credited by American officials as one of the main catalysts behind the steep reduction in violence there.

But the plan is causing deep unease among many Afghans, who fear that Pashtun-dominated militias could get out of control, terrorize local populations and turn against the government. The Afghan government, aided by the Americans, has carried out several ambitious campaigns since 2001 to disarm militants and gather up their guns. A proposal to field local militias was defeated in the Afghan Senate in the fall.

"There will be fighting between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns," said Salih Mohammad Registani, a member of the Afghan Parliament and an ethnic Tajik. Mr. Registani raised the specter of the Arbaki, a Pashtun-dominated militia turned loose on other Afghans early in the 20th century.

"A civil war will start very soon," he said.

The number of people filing for unemployment benefits hit a 26-year high last week, as the deepening recession forced more employers to cut jobs.

First-time claims for unemployment rose 5.4 percent, to 586,000 for the week ending Dec. 20, the Labor Department reported this morning. The last time claims were that high was Nov. 27, 1982. The four-week moving average, which is a less volatile indicator, rose to 558,000 from 544,250, also a 26-year high.

Orders for durable goods, such as appliances and televisions, dropped 1 percent to $186.9 billion, the U.S. Census Bureau said today. It was the fourth consecutive monthly drop but a much smaller decline than the 8.4 percent drop in October, thanks largely to orders for defense-related goods.

Really good to see that America's Military-Industrial-Complex is still trundling along.

By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States) and no abstentions, the Committee also approved a resolution on the right to food, by which the Assembly would "consider it intolerable" that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world's present population. (See Annex III.)

On Dec. 23 President Bush pardoned Isaac Toussie, who had defrauded low-income home buyers, then on Dec. 24 he revoked the pardon. It is a bit early to tell how this will play out, but suppose Toussie goes to federal court to claimed "once a pardonee, always a pardonee" and loses. In other words, supposes the courts rule that if President's have to power to pardon, they also have the power to revoke a pardon. That could have implications if President Bush pardons members of his administration on his last day in office and then incoming President Barack Obama revokes the pardons. This is definitely uncharted territory.

Italy's Right-wing Northern League have reacted with fury after it emerged that a Roman Catholic priest added a model mosque to his church's nativity scene.

The League, which has campaigned against the building of new mosques, bitterly attacked Father Prospero Bonzani as an "imbecile".

The miniature mosque, complete with a minaret, was included in the skyline of Bethlehem in the nativity scene at Father Bonzani's Our Lady of Providence church in the northern port of Genova.

The anti-immigration Northern League has called for a referendum to before any more mosques are built. Mario Borghezio, a Northern League MEP, called the priest an "imbecile" and said: "What on earth possessed him to put a mosque in a traditional Christmas nativity scene? I hope that the Church authorities in Genova will investigate this as a matter of urgency.''

He added: "What will this priest do when he says Mass during Ramadan? Ask us to turn towards Mecca? He may as well have included a suicide bomber wearing dynamite."

Orangutans can use their own "currency" which they use to buy favours such as winning bananas, scientists have discovered.

The apes can help each other get food by trading tokens, learning the value of each token and handing it over only in exchange for favours or food at the right value.

Researchers from the University of St Andrews found orangutans could learn the value of tokens and trade them, helping each other win bananas.

The discovery is the first evidence of "calculated reciprocity" in non-human primates, according to an article in Biology Letters.

The research found two orangutans - Bim and Dok - who live in Leipzig Zoo, Germany, were especially good at helping each other.

Initially, they were given several sets of tokens. One type of token could be exchanged by an orangutan for bananas for itself, another type could be used to gain bananas for a partner, and a third had no value.

Liquor companies and bartenders are finding inspiration in the financial crisis, devising new recipes and reviving old cocktail standards to keep spirits alive during the holidays.

They hope to lure Americans who are drinking more at home or finding that parties are drying up to cut costs.

The industry has seen a resurgence of drinks that hark back to the prewar eras of Prohibition and the Great Depression, such as the Sidecar, the Old Fashioned and the Manhattan.

Julian Cohen, head of the consumer insights team at Fortune Brands Inc's beverage division, said those "heritage cocktails," traditionally made with heavier-flavoured spirits like bourbon and cognac, mirror a wider preference.

A Dutch biologist has extensively studied the reproductive techniques of deep-ocean squid. During sex, they are brutal and ruthless -- and sometimes clumsy.

Sex in the deep sea is a difficult proposition. The problems already begin with the partner search: How do you find someone to mate with in the pitch-black depths of the ocean? And for any creature that does manage to have a rendezvous beneath the waves, failure is simply not an option.

"Seize the moment," is how Dutch researcher Hendrik Jan Ties Hoving describes the most basic rule of undersea reproduction. "Chances are low of finding a partner a second time."

^{An estimated 1.3 million people visited the West Bank this year, boosting the troubled economy.}

At the height of the Palestinian uprising six years ago, the only traffic in this holy city, believed to be Jesus' birthplace, were Israeli military jeeps enforcing curfew.

Now, with record bus loads of Christian pilgrims filing through the Church of the Nativity and sleeping at local hotels, Bethlehem is abuzz.

The revival of tourism in the West Bank is one of the few bright spots in the Palestinian economy...

While tourists must pass through the Israeli security barrier at the main entrance to Bethlehem, West Bank visitors have doubled over the past year. The 1.3 million tourists expected for 2008 surpasses the pre-uprising peak nine years ago. The surge is filling hotels to capacity - an encouraging sign as chains Mövenpick and Days Inn pursue plans to open in Ramallah.

FT.com / Columnists / Martin Wolf - Keynes offers us the best way to think about the financial crisis

... This same moralistic debate is with us, once again. Contemporary "liquidationists" insist that a collapse would lead to rebirth of a purified economy. Their leftwing opponents argue that the era of markets is over. And even I wish to see the punishment of financial alchemists who claimed that ever more debt turns economic lead into gold. <...>

The shorter-term challenge is to sustain aggregate demand, as Keynes would have recommended. Also important will be direct central-bank finance of borrowers. It is evident that much of the load will fall on the US, largely because the Europeans, Japanese and even the Chinese are too inert, too complacent, or too weak. Given the correction of household spending under way in the deficit countries, this period of high government spending is, alas, likely to last for years. At the same time, a big effort must be made to purge the balance sheets of households and the financial system. A debt-for-equity swap is surely going to be necessary.

The longer-term challenge is to force a rebalancing of global demand. Deficit countries cannot be expected to spend their way into bankruptcy, while surplus countries condemn as profligacy the spending from which their exporters benefit so much. In the necessary attempt to reconstruct the global economic order, on which the new administration must focus, this will be a central issue. It is one Keynes himself had in mind when he put forward his ideas for the postwar monetary system at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944.

No less pragmatic must be the attempt to construct a new system of global financial regulation and an approach to monetary policy that curbs credit booms and asset bubbles. As Minsky made clear, no permanent answer exists. But recognition of the systemic frailty of a complex financial system would be a good start. ...

Posted a couple of hours ago with different excerpt.  Not used to this time zone yet.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

... For Felt to have been able to guide and control the young reporters' investigation, he needed to know a great deal of what the White House had done, going back quite far. He could not possibly have known all this simply through his personal investigations. His knowledge covered too many people, too many operations, and too much money in too many places simply to have been the product of one of his side hobbies. The only way Felt could have the knowledge he did was if the FBI had been systematically spying on the White House, on the Committee to Re-elect the President and on all of the other elements involved in Watergate. Felt was not simply feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein; he was using the intelligence product emanating from a section of the FBI to shape The Washington Post's coverage.

Instead of passing what he knew to professional prosecutors at the Justice Department -- or if he did not trust them, to the House Judiciary Committee charged with investigating presidential wrongdoing -- Felt chose to leak the information to The Washington Post. He bet, or knew, that Post editor Ben Bradlee would allow Woodward and Bernstein to play the role Felt had selected for them. Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee all knew who Deep Throat was. They worked with the operational head of the FBI to destroy Nixon, and then protected Felt and the FBI until Felt came forward.

In our view, Nixon was as guilty as sin of more things than were ever proven. Nevertheless, there is another side to this story. The FBI was carrying out espionage against the president of the United States, not for any later prosecution of Nixon for a specific crime (the spying had to have been going on well before the break-in), but to increase the FBI's control over Nixon. Woodward, Bernstein and above all, Bradlee, knew what was going on. Woodward and Bernstein might have been young and naive, but Bradlee was an old Washington hand who knew exactly who Felt was, knew the FBI playbook and understood that Felt could not have played the role he did without a focused FBI operation against the president. Bradlee knew perfectly well that Woodward and Bernstein were not breaking the story, but were having it spoon-fed to them by a master. He knew that the president of the United States, guilty or not, was being destroyed by Hoover's jilted heir.

This was enormously important news. The Washington Post decided not to report it. The story of Deep Throat was well-known, but what lurked behind the identity of Deep Throat was not. This was not a lone whistle-blower being protected by a courageous news organization; rather, it was a news organization being used by the FBI against the president, and a news organization that knew perfectly well that it was being used against the president. Protecting Deep Throat concealed not only an individual, but also the story of the FBI's role in destroying Nixon. ...

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Liliane Bettencourt, the world's wealthiest woman, entrusted part of her $22.9 billion fortune with Bernard Madoff through the fund manager found dead in New York yesterday, two people familiar with the matter said.

The 86-year-old daughter of L'Oreal SA founder Eugene Schueller was the first investor in a fund managed by Access International Advisors, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because her investment isn't public. The body of Access co-founder Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, 65, was found in his Madison Avenue office yesterday. Police said he probably killed himself.

Bettencourt, a Parisian, joins wealthy individuals from around the world, including Spanish billionaire Alicia Koplowitz, U.S. moviemaker Steven Spielberg and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, among victims of what Madoff, 70, told investigators was a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

"More high-profile names who have been victimized by Madoff will start to become known now," said Ron Geffner, who represents hedge funds at the New York-based law firm Sadis & Goldberg LLP. "There's a strong sense of anguish, fear and distrust."

Rich people victims? OMG!!!!!

BERLIN: Helmut Schmidt, a chain-smoking former German chancellor, celebrated his 90th birthday Tuesday amid an improbable revival in popularity for a prickly man with no-nonsense views that contrast sharply to many current leaders.

Schmidt may not have scaled the heights of popularity while chancellor of West Germany for eight turbulent years. Critics say his dismissal of leftist views spawned the Greens Party and cost his Social Democrats, or SPD, a power base it has yet to win back.

But in retirement, he has attained the broad acclaim he lacked during his years in office from 1974-82.

According to a survey by the Forsa polling institute, Schmidt ranks as the "coolest guy in Germany" and he tops several other polls as the country's most popular leader.

Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, a fellow Hamburg native and a determined opponent of government spending to stimulate growth in the current crisis, regularly seeks Schmidt's counsel.

The inquiry into whether President-elect Barack Obama's staff had any inappropriate contacts with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was bound to meet its pre-conceived conclusion

Brought to you from Fox Noos, Closed-Loop specialists working from a TV set near you.

LONDON (AFP) -- Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will deliver an alternative Christmas message on Channel Four to rival Queen Elizabeth II's annual address, the broadcaster said Wednesday.

Ahmadinejad, whose comments will go out on 1915 GMT on Christmas Day, will say that if Jesus Christ were alive today, he would oppose "bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers," according to a pre-released transcript.

Britain and Iran have had rocky relations since the 1979 Islamic revolution, particularly over Iran's disputed nuclear programme, which the West fears could be used to build arms but Tehran insists is for civilian purposes.

Ahmadinejad is the most high-profile guest yet on Channel Four's alternative broadcast, which was started in 1993 and has seen Jesse Jackson, Brigitte Bardot and cartoon character Marge Simpson among others take to the airwaves.

FYI:

Haltija (haltia) is a spirit, gnome or elf-like creature in Finnish mythology, that guards, helps or protects something or somebody. The word is possibly derived from the Gothic *haltijar, and referred to the original settler of a homestead -- although this is not the only possible etymology.

In common Finnish, depending on the context, "haltija" means holder, occupant, lord, master, owner-occupier, occupier, possessor, bearer, or owner.

There are lots of different haltijas. Nature has its own haltijas, for example the haltijas of water and haltijas of the forest. The graveyard has its own haltijas, Kalman väki, ("folk of death").

Human settlements have haltijas. One type is Tonttu or Maan haltija (Haltija of land). Tonttu is a Finnish version of the Swedish Tomte. Both tonttu and tomte are related to the words tontti (Finnish) and tomt (Swedish). They mean a lot and building site, and later protected by a local spirit, a tonttu (tomte is also known as tomtgubbe, "lot old man" in Swedish) . Kotihaltija (home elf, home gnome) is the word for the tonttu who lives in every home. He takes care of the house, but it is important to treat him with respect. The saunatonttu lives in the sauna and protects it, but also makes sure that people will not behave improperly in it. Joulutonttu is Finnish for Christmas elf. Unlike some Christmas elves, the Finnish Joulutonttu is thought not to have pointy ears.

Even humans have their personal haltijas, which are their protecting spirits similar to angels in Christianity. One of them is Luonto, which means "nature".

Tonttu Kim is my dearest friend's daughter, 'enjoying' her first Jul or Yule. This picture was taken before the schnapps

You can't be me, I'm taken