The European Union is set to promote green energy after finally resolving a long-running conflict over biofuels. Demanding that the legislation be reviewed in 2014, Italy could slow Europe's race to fight climate change.

"We have agreement on everything except the deletion of the review clause," the European Parliament's lead negotiator Claude Turmes said on Thursday, Dec. 4 following extensive closed-door talks.

The debate surrounding biofuels flared up in January when the European Commission proposed that 10 percent of road transport fuel should come from renewable resources by the year 2020. Biofuels would comprise a large portion of such resources, meaning that a large market currently coveted by exporters such as Brazil and Indonesia would be opened up.

Environmentalists have opposed this move, claiming that biofuels made from grains and oilseeds were driving food prices higher and causing famers to expand their farms by infringing upon rainforests and wetlands.

Europe's top courts have ruled in favor of a French school that expelled two Muslim girls for refusing to remove their headscarves for physical education classes. The ruling fuels the debate over secularism in France.

The European Court of Human Rights has dismissed a complaint by two French Muslim girls that their school violated their freedom of religion and their right to an education. The girls were expelled after repeatedly refusing to remove their headscarves for physical education classes.

The teacher had said that wearing a headscarf was incompatible with physical education classes. The girls, Belgin Dogru and Esma-Nur Kervanci, are French nationals and were 11 and 12 respectively when they were expelled from the school in the north-western town of Flers in 1999.

PARIS: Armed robbers -- some disguised as women -- snatched €85 million ($108 million) worth of diamond rings, necklaces and luxury watches from a Harry Winston boutique on a posh Paris avenue in one of the largest jewel heists in history, officials said Friday.

The gang of three or four robbers threatened about 15 employees with handguns and hit some on the head before taking the jewels from display cases from the store near the Champs-Elysées, said a police official, who was not authorized to be publicly named under agency policy.

At least two of the bandits were men wearing wigs and women's clothes, the official said. The robbers also spoke a foreign language at times and appeared to know employees' names when they robbed the store before it closed early Thursday at the height of Christmas shopping season.

The brazen theft was among the world's costliest jewel heists. Five years ago, thieves plundered 123 maximum-security vaults in Antwerp, Belgium, stealing $100 million (€78.96 million) worth of diamonds in the biggest theft in the world's diamond-cutting capital.

Tony Blair has arrived back in Washington with an important message for the Obama team. The search for peace in the Middle East must be a priority for the new administration. The terrain is difficult but not impossible. The end of the Bush era offers real opportunities for this benighted region.

Mr Blair is right. He made his case before the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington articulately and passionately. He knows all the key players involved and is familiar with the issues. He seems genuinely devoted to the cause. He brings to the table his success in conflict resolution from Northern Ireland.

But Mr Blair is no longer the right man for the job. He should share the wealth of his knowledge with the incoming Obama foreign affairs chiefs and bow out gracefully.

A new era in the Middle East may or may not be about to unfold but it has a better chance of success without Mr Blair in the key role as envoy for the Quartet, the leading diplomatic group comprising America, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.

Irish EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy has argued that the negative result of his country's referendum on Europe's Lisbon treaty should be respected, admitting that the No campaign had won the argument against "the might" of media and most politicians.

"We live in a democracy. Mr [Declan] Ganley decided that he was going to front a campaign to get the Irish people to vote No. He was singularly successful in that against the might of all the political parties in Ireland," Mr McCreevy said in an interview with "Hot Press" magazine.

People in Ireland knew why they voted No, says Charlie McCreevy

Referring to Declan Ganley, the founder of the Libertas group, which emerged before the June vote to fight against the treaty ratification in Ireland, Mr McCreevy said that Mr Ganley had won the argument "because the Irish people listened to him more than anybody else."

The outspoken commissioner, responsible for internal market affairs, also argued that Ireland's referendum results should be taken as a true indication of voters' opinion as the turnout suggested that a "considerable segment" of treaty opponents were those who had failed to vote in last year's general election.

Today's meeting between Czech president Václav Klaus and the Conference of the Committee Chairmen of the European Parliament resulted in a sharp diplomatic skirmish.

The other czech daily mentions (it's phrased slightly differently than this one) the issue came when Cohn-Bendit asked how can Klaus meet someone like Ganley whose financing is not clear. Klaus replied that he doesn't know who finances the Greens and their activities in the European Parliament.

It also should be noted that questionable financing is what brought the cabinet headed by Klaus down back in the 90ties.

This comes after people around Klaus started to make noises about splitting from ruling civic democrats and creating Libertas.cz

Now, even so, ideologies don't count that much. A special feature of Romanian politics is a high frequency of parliamentarians who are ready to abandon the party that got them into parliament right after the elections. A tradition that may continue:

How fast can a newly elected parliamentarian sell out his party? - Politics - HotNews.ro

Despite the fact that parties are in the middle of critical negotiations for the forming of the future government, their members seems to be quite strange to the parties' policies and very close to making their own games. HotNews reporters randomly called seven anonymous parliamentarians, newly elected after the scrutiny on Sunday, pretending they represent a top Liberal. They found that there is a strong betrayal potential among Social Democrats.

Moldovan Foreign Minister Andrei Stratan demanded Russia on Friday to withdraw "unconditionally" all its troops from the pro-Russian separatist region of Transdniester. The call was made during the OSCE (European Organization for Cooperation and Security) meeting, AFP informs.

"the withdrawal of the Russian military forces, weaponry and ammunition must take place fully, unconditionally and transparently", said the Foreign Minister in front of his OSCE homologues.

Stratan also asked for the replacement of Russian troops, controlling the border between the self-proclaimed republic of Transdniester and Moldova, with a civilian mission.

The US chief of delegation and OSCE appreciated the Russian military presence in Moldova as a "major problem" for Europe.

Patriarch Aleksy II of the Russian Orthodox Church, who presided over the restoration of his church as the largest Orthodox church in the world and a powerful influence in Russian society after decades of Soviet persecution, died on Friday at his country residence in Peredelkino, outside of Moscow. He was 79.

Last December, Aleksy II reported that the Russian Orthodox Church had more than 730 monasteries, nearly 28,000 parishes and 30,000 priests and deacons under its jurisdiction, which includes the former Soviet Union. According to a 2007 poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, 75 percent of Russians identify themselves as Orthodox, although polls show less than 10 percent attend church regularly.

On Monday British Prime Minister Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and EU Commission President Barroso are meeting for crisis talks on the economic crisis. Not on the guest list -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

European political and business leaders are to meet on Monday to discuss ways to revive the continent's flagging economy, but the leader of the biggest European economy won't be there.

Germany has come in for fierce criticism in some European capitals for its reluctance to adopt more aggressive measures to deal with the looming economic crisis. Now three of the biggest advocates of Europe-wide anti-recession measures are to hold crisis talks in London with European business leaders and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not invited.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, speaking Thursday, Dec. 4 during his annual live television address to the nation, said he was confident Russia would survive the global financial crisis with minimal losses.

"Our chances are good of going through this complicated period with minimal losses both for our economy and our citizens," Putin said in the question-and-answer session.

He added that, unlike other countries, Russia will not be lowering pensions and unemployment benefits to its citizens.

While Putin was president, the broadcast became an annual tradition and helped him boost his popularity among the Russian population.

The marathon session lasted more than three hours during which Putin answered questions ranging from everyday issues to global politics, which were asked in advance via text messages, a special website and on free phone numbers.

German car parts producer Dräxlmaier announced that it will prolong the holidays for the employees for all its five factories in Romania, in order to avoid building further stocks. Two factories will halt production for a month, while the others - for some three weeks. The company employs some 15,000 people in Romania.

There is a larger trend here. Romania, like Slovakia, applied the big weapon in the race to the bottom to attract foreign investors: the flat tax. In Romania, like Slovakia, the arriving investors were in no small part car manufacturers. Which are hit hardest by the current phase of the global financial crisis.

I note that shortly before the crisis hit, just Dräxlmeier and Romania were an example of how soon you'll be overtaken in the race to the bottom: Dräxlmeier's newest factory was opened in Serbia this spring. For that reason, the number of employees in Romania Talready fell from 18,500 to 15,000 before the crisis.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Investors accuse Citi execs of "suspicious" trades

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An investor lawsuit contends that Citigroup Inc insiders, including senior counselor and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, sold more than $150 million of their own shares at inflated prices while concealing the bank's true financial health.

The allegations were made in a nearly 500-page court complaint filed by shareholders who are suing the bank for fraud related to its disclosures over mortgage-linked securities. The complaint was filed late Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The first evidence of a home-grown terrorist link to the Mumbai attacks emerged today as police revealed an Indian suspect arrested earlier this year may have been involved in the planning.

Officers said they had maps seized from a man picked up in February suggesting intelligence gathering had begun more than a year ago.

Police apparently failed to recognise the importance of the nine maps, which included detailed floor plans of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel and marked the position of Mumbai's main railway terminus, after arresting Faheem Ansari.

Both locations were targeted by gunmen last week, alongside a hotel complex, a restaurant and a Jewish resident.

Ansari, who was born in India, has been accused of joining the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) after emigrating to Dubai five years ago.

With the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation's employers shed 533,000 jobs in November, the 11th consecutive monthly decline, the government reported Friday morning, and the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent.

The decline, the largest one-month loss since December 1974, was fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression. The previous record was 16 months, in the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

The alarming job decline suggests that consumers and businesses have pulled back sharply on spending in response to the worsening credit crisis. That has put pressure on Congress and the White House to come up with a stimulus package that would substitute for the missing private-sector outlays.

Over all, the losses since January now total more than 1.9 million, with most coming in the last three months.

Furious Jewish settlers went on a violent rampage last night after security forces unexpectedly stormed and evacuated a house the settlers had commandeered in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Fire officers said that three Palestinian houses and nine cars were alight, while the Israeli human rights organisation Btselem released a video apparently showing a settler shooting and wounding a Palestinian at close range and other Palestinians retaliating by pelting the gunman with stones.

The protests - and others mounted with sporadic violence elsewhere in the West Bank - came after 100 border police with visors and riot shields used clubs and tear gas to drag out the dozens of settlers, some kicking and throwing stones, who had been in the building at the time.

As night fell, angry youths - some masked - stoned an isolated Palestinian house in an orchard below the evacuated building, which was lit up by fires started by protesting settlers who set alight the family's laundry and some of the orchard's olive trees.

Fidel Castro, the former President of Cuba, has offered to talk to Barack Obama, in Havana's latest overture to the US President elect.

"With Obama, talks could happen anywhere he wants," the former head of the Communist regime wrote in the latest of a series of columns he has published in state-run media since falling ill in 2006.

His remarks follow an offer from his brother, President Raul Castro, to meet Mr Obama "on neutral ground" to try to end the 40 year long conflict between the two countries.

If taken up it would be the first meeting in half a century between the leaders of Cuba and the US. The head of the Communist regime and a US president have not come face to face since the island's revolution in 1959.

OTTAWA: Canada's parliamentary opposition reacted with outrage after Prime Minister Stephen Harper shut down the Legislature until Jan. 26, seeking to forestall a no-confidence vote that he was sure to lose and that might have provoked a constitutional crisis.

Harper acted Thursday after getting the approval of Governor General Michaëlle Jean, who represents Queen Elizabeth as the nation's head of state. If his request had been rejected, he would have had to choose between stepping down or facing the no-confidence vote on Monday.

The opposition fiercely criticized the decision to suspend Parliament, accusing Harper of undermining the nation's democracy.

"We have to say to Canadians, is this the kind of government you want?" said Bob Rae, a member of the opposition Liberal Party. "Do we want a party in place that is so undemocratic that it will not meet the House of Commons?"

That sentiment was echoed by constitutional scholars, who lamented that the governor general might have created a mechanism that future prime ministers could use to bypass the legislature when it seemed convenient.

Israel drew fire regarding its human rights record at a United Nations forum where its neighbours accused it of committing systematic violations against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Delegations from Syria, Egypt and Iran raised concerns about Israel's security wall, its detentions of young Palestinians, and what they called "illegal" Jewish settlements during the regular review by the UN Human Rights Council.

Western countries, including Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany, urged Israel to lift its blockade on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip which they said had led to a worsening humanitarian situation.

Palestinian ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Ibrahim Mohammad Khraisi, called for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, removal of the blockade on Gaza, and a halt to what he called "collective punishment" of Palestinians.

U.S. citizens and staff workers at its embassy in Tel Aviv received an advisory on Friday to avoid traveling to Jerusalem in the wake of Thursday's evacuation of a Jewish squatters from a disputed house in the West Bank town of Hebron.

The government is also advising Americans to refrain from driving on the main highway connecting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Highway 1, due to heavy traffic delays and "ongoing police activity."

NEW BEDFORD -- After the November election, Democrats will push for a second economic stimulus package that includes money for the states' stalled infrastructure projects, along with help paying for healthcare expenses, food stamps and extended unemployment benefits, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank said Thursday.

In a meeting with the editorial board of The Standard-Times, Rep. Frank, D-Mass., also called for a 25 percent cut in military spending, saying the Pentagon has to start choosing from its many weapons programs, and that upper-income taxpayers are going to see an increase in what they are asked to pay.

The military cuts also mean getting out of Iraq sooner, he said.

"The people of Iraq want us out, and we want to stay over their objection," he said. "It's extraordinary." The Maliki government in Iraq "can't sell (the withdrawal deal with the U.S.) because it sounds like we're going to stay too long."

"I was teasing (U.S. Rep.) Jack Murtha (a key supporter of military budgets) and I said to him, 'For the first time, somebody else has got a bill that's almost as big as yours.' We don't need all these fancy new weapons. I think there needs to be additional review."

Not a big fan of Barney Frank, but I do like the sound of that.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic leaders and the White House reached a deal to provide billions of dollars in relief to the ailing U.S. auto industry, a senior congressional aide told Reuters on Friday.

The package, which Democratic leaders hope to win passage of next week and send to President George W. Bush, totals between $15 billion and $17 billion, the aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The amount is far less than the $34 billion requested this week by General Motors, Ford Motor, and Chrysler, but Democratic leaders believe the money will keep them going until Barack Obama replaces Bush as president on January 20 and a new effort can be made for a rescue plan.

So the automakers get enough to make it to Inauguration Day.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

... An almost perfect plan

The Mumbai attack relied on local al-Qaeda-linked militants (Indian Mujahideen) such as Abdus Subhan Qureshi (Tauqir).

... Abdus Subhan had planned other attacks on Indian strategic targets immediately after the Mumbai attack, but [21-year-old terrorist Ajmal Amir] Kasab's arrest prevented this through his revelations of his LET background.

Washington appears to accept that the Mumbai attack was not carried out at the behest of Islamabad or the Pakistan army, or even by the ISI's high command. But there is now proof of the involvement of the LET and of some junior ISI officials. It is on this point that the US will apply pressure on Islamabad: it must curtail such militants.

But there is a problem.

Militants tighten their grip

... In the past four days, militants have abducted a record 60 people from the provincial capital Peshawar, most of them retired army officers and members or relatives of the Awami National Party (ANP), which rules in the province. ...

Meanwhile, North Atlantic Treaty Organization supply convoys passing through Khyber Agency en route to Afghanistan have come under increasing attacks. ...

In this anarchic situation, the Jamaatut Dawa (LET), with its well-defined vertical command structure under the single command of Saeed, could commit its several thousand members, virtually a para-military force, to the cause of the anti-state al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani militants.

... To date, the authorities have not given any indication of their plans. If they do indeed resist the overtures of Mullen and Rice, it is most likely that the Pakistani armed forces will withdraw from the Swat Valley and Bajaur Agency, leaving that area open for the Taliban-led insurgency n Afghanistan. Militants can also be expected to launch further attacks on India, with dire consequences for whole South Asia region.

Yet the alternative of cracking down on the LET is equally unappealing, and potentially as disastrous.

I hate to keep harping on this -- but since nobody else is really talking about it, at least in the organs of public discussion, the job is left to me -- we have to get cracking on the revival of the railroad system in this country, if we expect to remain a united country. This is such a no-brainer that the absence of any talk about it is a prime symptom of the zombie disease that has eaten away our brains. Automobiles (the way we use them) and airplanes are utterly dependent on liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and you can be certain we'll have trouble getting them. You can run trains by other means -- electricity being state-of-the-art in those parts of the world that do it most successfully. I know that California just voted to create a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It's an optimistic sign, but it shows more than a little techno-grandiose over-reach. High speed rail would require a mega-expensive re-do of the tracks. We need to scale our ambitions for this more realistically. California (and every other region of America) would benefit much more from normal-speed trains running every hour on the hour on tracks that already exist than from a mega-expensive, grandiose sci-fi program that might not get built for ten years. The dregs of the Big Three automakers can and should be reorganized to produce the rolling stock for a revived railroad system.

I also will keep harping on this till it either becomes moot by a return to cave dwelling with semi-extinct animal power, or there is some real public discussion of the best way to begin.

GM's logo should be on rail cars. They always did go in for the heavy iron.

Interesting bit, the "united country" thing.

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.

Now Would Be a Good Time for Congress to Ask the Automaker Why They Killed Their Perfectly Good and Much-Beloved All-Electric Car in 1999...

I haven't been able to watch all of the Capitol Hill hearings with the Big 3 automaker CEOs, but caught a fair portion. I've yet to hear anybody ask GM CEO Rick Wagoner why the hell his company killed their perfectly good, and rather popular, fully electric car which was introduced in CA in 1996.

The EV1 was much beloved by its owners (leasers, actually, since they were not allowed to buy them). There were waiting lists to be able to get one, before finally, three years later, with little or no explanation, GM announced they would not be renewing any of the leases on those cars and those who used them would have no recourse but to give them back.

Customers were outraged, heartbroken even. Many had tried to buy them outright --- and even sign contracts that they'd not hold GM accountable for any future problems or repairs --- but they were all turned down. One the devoted customers learned the fate of the cars --- and discovered, by helicopter, that they were all being rounded up in the desert --- they took up a round-the-clock, 24/7 vigil in an effort to block what GM had planned for them.

Incredibly, not only had GM taken back the cars, they were actually sending them, in perfectly good working order, to be shredded --- literally shredded --- as the EV1 supporters were threatened with arrest if they didn't allow the perfectly usable, and almost brand new cars to be taken out by trucks to be completely destroyed.

Why? That was never really made clear, at least not in the excellent 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? which detailed the entire heartbreaking tale of the cars which ran quickly and quietly, and without a drop of gasoline.

Scientists in Barcelona have created a new musical instrument that will produce remarkable sounds, even for an untrained novice. But the 'Reactable' is more than a digital synthesizer. It might also point to a new way of using computers.

Rarely have men been seen playing with blocks with such devout intensity. Four stand around a circular table, placing colorful disks and cubes onto the surface, occasionally moving, rotating or plucking them off again.

Each of these seemingly minor changes produces an effect -- noise ranging from gurgles, taps or booming to a loud drumbeat. When the objects on the table are moved a new and unexpected sound results. Suddenly there's a buzzing, followed by a heavy stomping bass. The sky-blue glow of the tabletop reflects in the faces of these peculiar musicians.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is to have an early warning system installed to guard against a repeat of the catastrophic fault that caused the world's largest atom-smasher to break down just days after it was switched on in September.

CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, is to fit the accelerator with 100 miles (160km) of cables and 2,000 crates of electronic monitors, so that engineers will be alerted to potentially hazardous abnormalities before they can cause serious damage.

The £4 billion "Big Bang machine", which was switched on to global acclaim on September 10, was shut down just nine days later, after a huge helium leak caused extensive damage to many of its magnets.

The accelerator was then mothballed for repairs until next May or June, and its first experiments to investigate the fundamental nature of the Universe are not now scheduled to begin until July 2009 at the earliest.

EU commissioners and their staff will have to stand in line at the coffee shop again, after 20 state-of-the-art espresso machines installed in January for their exclusive use proved to brew contaminated coffee.

Tests have confirmed that the levels of nickel and lead in 17 of the machines were above the allowable threshold, Dennis Abbott, a spokesman for the commission said.

Commissioners were told not to drink coffee from the expensive espresso machines in the Berlaymont building.

"We can't switch these machines on if we have these concerns," he added.

The commission's tests were run after one archivist working in the upper levels of the commission's headquarters found that the coffee tasted odd and sent a sample to a lab in his home country, Austria, International Herald Tribune reported.

Mr Alexander Just's findings proved that the levels of heavy metals in the coffee were a danger to the health of EU officials, at more than 17,000 percent above the legal threshold for nickel and over 16 percent for lead.

DemocracyNow! headlines were just saddening this morning.

Back in the United States, President-elect Barack Obama is coming under criticism for apparently backtracking on a campaign promise for a windfall tax on oil company profits. The American Small Business League says the Obama campaign has deleted the windfall tax proposal from its transition website. An Obama aide said the windfall tax proposal was only introduced when oil was above eighty dollars a barrel.

Now, I'd never heard of this group. The Chamber of Commerce does tend to suck all the oxygen out of MSM attention to American ingenuity. Plus I never read HuffPo, so Lloyd Chapman is a stranger to me. Oh snap...

Since 2003, over a dozen federal investigations have found that billions of dollars in federal small business contracts have been diverted to Fortune 500 firms, their subsidiaries and other clearly large firms in the United States and even Europe. The story has been covered by nearly every major newspaper in the nation, over a hundred radio stations, and by ABC, CBS and CNN.  

Some of the firms that have been exposed as recipients of federal small business contracts include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computers [hee hee], Rolls-Royce, Home Depot, Xerox, John Deere and British Aerospace (BAE).

Report 5-16 from the Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General (SBA OIG) found that large businesses had received government small business contracts through, "vendor deception" and "false certifications". (http://www.sba.gov/IG/05-16.pdf)

Have they got their work cut out.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

...From Lawrence Lipton's book 'The Holy Barbarians' that recorded the Beat zeitgeist in California in the later Fifties. Reading it changed my direction at a formative time of life. Lipton is the father of James Lipton -who does those informative TV interviews with actors.

You can't be me, I'm taken