Country music's Tammy Wynette `standing by her man' aside, Labour Health Minister Edwina Hart, currently standing for election as leader of the Welsh Labour Party is again today being skewered by the male-dominated Western Mail (or is it Male?) for, seemingly, not being a man.

This time they say it is for NOT speaking the national language, something more than 2-million residents of this land DO NOT speak in the latest `straw man' argument and attempt to derail her leadership chances.

Residents of Greater Manchester will become guinea pigs for the government's new identity cards at the end of this month, but the Conservatives have advised the general public to boycott the controversial scheme.

The government has been pouring money into the development of its much criticised ID card since its 2006 inception.  So for, over 216 million GBP has been invested in the new cards, which will include photos and fingerprints, but only 2,000 Mancunians have so far registered their interest.

The cards are being aimed at students and other young people, pitched as a convenient way to prove age when buying alcohol and travelling, and will cost anyone wishing to carry one £30.

Czechs are marking the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution which led to the end of communist rule in the country.  

Citizens across the Czech Republic have taken to the streets to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, which led to the downfall of the communist regime.

Thousands of people in the capital Prague plan to stage a reenactment of the peaceful student protest that took place on November 17, 1989 - in what was then Czechoslovakia - that sparked the Velvet Revolution.

Festivities - which kicked off with a concert on Saturday and were opened by former Czech President Vaclav Havel - include exhibitions, concerts, speeches and rallies.

 

In a video message, US President Obama said, "Your courage inspired the world"; while German Chancellor Angela Merkel also paid tribute to the demonstrators at Wenceslas Square in Prague. 

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A deal on the EU top jobs remains far from reach ahead of a special summit on Thursday (19 November) that could require a follow-up meeting the next day.

"There are still some days to go. I wouldn't say it's a complete mess, but there's no agreement still," Swedish minister for EU affairs Cecilia Malmstrom said during a press conference on Monday.

EU leaders are set to convene on Thursday for an 'early' working dinner starting at 6pm Brussels time to reach a political consensus on the top three posts created by the Lisbon Treaty once it comes into force on 1 December. The decision will be formalised by so-called written procedure on 1 December, by the member states' ambassadors in Brussels.

First is the permanent president of the Council, who will chair all the EU summits and be a more constant presence on the international stage on behalf of the 27 member states. The UK is still officially pressing for former PM Tony Blair for the job, while Belgian Prime Minister Hermann van Rompuy is said to have the support of other big member states such as Germany and France. Eastern candidates for the job are Estonian President Toomas Ilves and former Latvian head of state Vaira Vika-Freiberga.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Greece is perceived as the most corrupt of EU countries, along with Bulgaria and Romania, an annual corruption perception ranking released on Tuesday (17 November) by Transparency International shows.

Carried out in 180 countries around the world, the 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index measures the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians on a scale where 0 is the most corrupt and 10 is graft-free.

The Parliament in Athens - corruption in the public sector is widespread, say experts

As in previous years, Denmark is perceived as the least corrupt among EU countries, with a score of 9.3, followed by Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands. At the lower end, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania share last place with 3.8. They are followed by Italy, which also registered a major slide compared to last year, and now ranks below Poland and Lithuania as well as EU candidate Turkey and Cuba in the corruption stakes.

"Greece's poor score shows that joining the EU does not automatically translate into a reduction in corruption. Immediate and sustained efforts are required to ensure the country lives up to acceptable levels of transparency and accountability," the anti-corruption watchdog concludes.

Silvio Berlusconi, the increasingly beleagured Italian Prime Minister, yesterday won a two-month delay in his trial on charges of tax fraud after claiming he was too busy with state engagements to attend court.

The Italian Prime Minister said he had to attend a three-day UN world summit on food security, being held in Rome.

Edoardo D'Avossa, the presiding judge in Milan, agreed that the summit was a "legitimate impediment" and postponed the hearings on alleged tax fraud by Mr Berlusconi's Mediaset television company until January 18 and 25. Niccolo Ghedini, Mr Berlusconi's lawyer, claimed the Prime Minister would attend on those dates.

"There is no desire to delay the trial," Mr Ghedini said. "The Prime Minister really wants to take part in the proceedings."

Why would an American president not come to a celebration marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with it, the triumphant end of the Cold War -- one of the high points of the United States' and Europe's common 20th-century history?

Whatever the exact answer -- and it could be that a fatigued Barack Obama didn't want the physical strain of a trans-Atlantic trip days before a weeklong tour of Asia -- his absence from the Nov. 9 ceremonies in Germany has reinforced Europe's fear that it has become an increasingly insignificant part of the president's worldview.

This week offers a telling juxtaposition:

Mr. Obama, after giving Berlin a conspicuous miss, is concentrating by his presence America's attention and future hopes on China and Asia. Virtually at the same moment, the European Union, in what's plainly an effort to assert its relevance, will choose (with considerable difficulty and potential irrelevance) a common president and foreign minister for the first time.

Together, that's hardly a guarantee of a warmer trans-Atlantic clasp of hands. Instead, it's a remarkable contrast to Secretary of State James Baker's proposal, a month after the wall fell, of a new, organic economic and political relationship between Europeans and Americans.

The government will promise a law obliging it to halve its budget deficit when it announces its programme of legislation in the Queen's Speech.

Ministers are also likely to pledge to prevent bankers who take "reckless" risks from getting bonuses.

Other measures are set to include free social care for the most needy, which Gordon Brown has said is a "priority".

The race to be president of the EU is heating up, with seven candidates standing out from the pack.

With the decision looming, Europe correspondent Jonny Dymond has profiled the runners and riders.

Click on the images below to listen to his take on the personalities in line for the biggest job in Europe

There's a revelatory short post at the Adam Smith Institute yesterday. Here's the most salient part:

You will never streamline the public sector by Treasury ministers bullying departments over money. Instead, you need a complete review of what government does, what it has to do, what it can do better, and what can be done better by other people and by the public. All departments need to buy into that, and it needs a reform, not a finance minister in charge if everyone is going to trust the process and be a part of it. After all, the process may find that spending in some areas should be increased, even if other departments are found to be doing a lot of pointless stuff.

In other words, the influential Adam Smith Institute wants to see an immediate post-election push towards savage public spending reductions in every single government department.

Der Vorsitzende der Linkspartei, Oskar Lafontaine, hat Krebs und muss sich operieren lassen. Der seit längerem geplante chirurgische Eingriff finde am Donnerstag statt, teilte der 66-Jährige am Dienstag in einer knappen Presseerklärung mit. Anfang 2010 werde er "unter Berücksichtigung meines Gesundheitszustandes und der ärztlichen Prognosen" entscheiden, in welcher Form er seine politische Arbeit weiterführe.

A great chart from SloshSpot:

Suntech Power, China's largest solar panel manufacturer, plans to open its first American plant near Phoenix, the company announced on Monday. It would be the first time a Chinese solar company has built a manufacturing plant in the United States, experts said.

The plant will begin production in the third quarter of 2010 and will build panels from solar cells shipped from China. Those cells, in turn, contain substantial amounts of a substance called polysilicon manufactured at a factory in Texas.

Roger Efird, a managing director of Suntech, said in a telephone interview that shipping costs were an important factor in the decision to put a factory in the growing American market. Solar panels, with substantial amounts of glass and aluminum, are heavy, he said. "As the price of solar panels has reduced dramatically in the last 12 months, the shipping costs have become a larger and larger portion of the overall cost of getting these projects to market," Mr. Efird added.

....

Suntech has been under scrutiny because American manufacturers fear being overwhelmed by cheap Chinese panels. Suntech's chief executive, Shi Zhengrong, told The New York Times in August that his company was selling panels to American customers for less than the cost of the materials, assembly and shipping, in order to build market share. However, he swiftly reversed those comments.

"Banking on the State" by Andrew Haldane and Piergiorgio Alessandri is making waves in official circles.  Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, is widely regarded as both a technical expert and as someone who can communicate his points effectively to policymakers.  He is obviously closely in line - although not in complete agreement - with the thinking of Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England.

Haldane and Alessandri offer a tough, perhaps bleak assessment.  Our boom-bust-bailout cycle  is, in their view, a "doom loop".  Banks have an incentive to take excessive risk and every time they and their creditors are bailed out, we create the conditions for the next crisis.

....

The overall conclusion of the paper follows uneasily from the main analytical thrust.  How can we believe that for the regulators, "next time is different"?  Most likely, next time will be exactly the same, with different terminology: the financial sector "innovates", regulators buy their story that risks are now properly managed, and the ensuing bailout (again) breaks all records. It's all politics.  Unless and until you break the political power of our largest banks, broadly construed, we are going nowhere (or, rather, we are looping around the same doom).

....

Our core problem is that we now have banks that are Too Big To Fail; if you don't agree, read and publicly refute Haldane.  In theory, these big banks could be effectively regulated, but this is a leap of faith that experienced policymakers (e.g., Mervyn King and Paul Volcker) are increasingly unwilling to make.

The biggest banks must be broken up.  This is not sufficient to end the doom loop, but it is necessary.

China desires to keep the yuan pegged to the US dollar at a low value because it believes this is the best way to boost Chinese manufacturing and create millions of job. Such domestic concerns explain why Beijing largely rebuffed efforts by the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration, to raise the value of its currency.

....

First, there is no issue of "manipulation" with China's currency. The Chinese government is not sneaking around in the middle of the night trying to influence currency prices. China has an official exchange rate that puts the value of its currency well below the market exchange rate. This official exchange rate is widely publicized. We don't have to catch them acting improperly in the dark; anyone can just look in the paper or call the Chinese embassy to ask what the exchange rate target is.

Second, the US doesn't have to "pressure" China to boost the yuan. Contrary to what you may have read in the paper, Washington is not helpless in this story.

Just as China can set a value of its currency against the dollar, the US government can set a value of the dollar against the yuan. The Chinese government currently supports an exchange rate at which the dollar can buy 6.8 yuan. This high value of the dollar makes US goods uncompetitive relative to China's. To make US goods more competitive, the US could adopt a policy through which it will sell dollars at a much lower price, say 4.5 yuan.

The difference in exchange rates would provide an enormous incentive for Chinese businesses and individuals to exchange their yuan at the Treasury rate rather than the official Chinese rate. While this may violate Chinese law, the enormous potential profits would make the law difficult to enforce. In a relatively short period of time, the US exchange rate is likely to become the effective market exchange rate.

At one level, there's not much news in the SIGTARP (YHTMAAAIYP) report on the AIG bailout: officials asked bankers to take a haircut, bankers said Ni!, and that was that. But the report has renewed the debate over whether officials could have extracted something. I say yes.

Yes, you can make the legal argument: the TARP isn't a bankruptcy court, so the Feds had only two choices: let AIG go into bankruptcy, with possibly disastrous consequences, or pay up its contracts in full.

But Wall Street doesn't work like that, and never has.

Israel has given the go ahead for the construction of 900 housing units in occupied East Jerusalem, rebuffing a reported US request that it block construction at the Gilo settlement, officials have said.

Israeli officials had earlier on Tuesday declined to comment on a report in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that said George Mitchell , the US envoy to the Middle East, had asked an aide to Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to halt the process.

Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said that a  report into a new uranium enrichment facility proves the country's nuclear programme is peaceful.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh remarks on Tuesday came after the agency said that last month's inspection of the facility near the city of Qom had raised issues that needed "further clarification".

"The report by the agency showed that there was no deviation in Iran's peaceful nuclear programme," Soltanieh said on Iranian television.

"In the report it is clearly said that no centrifuge machine has been installed in the site and no nuclear fissile has been used there."

US President Barack Obama came to office promising hope and change. But on climate change, he has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Now, should the climate summit in Copenhagen fail, the blame will lie squarely with Obama.

The folder labeled "climate change" that George W. Bush left behind for his successor on the desk of the Oval Office in January likely wasn't a thick one. Although Bush once said that America is overly dependent on oil, he never got beyond that insight. He was too busy waging war on Iraq and searching for a legal basis for extraordinary renditions to pay much attention to the real threat facing humanity. "Forget the climate" seems to have been Bush's unofficial motto.

But few people expected that Barack Obama, of all people, would continue his predecessor's climate change plan. When he took office at the beginning of 2009, it was clear that the success of the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen in December depended almost entirely on the US -- that America needed to take a clear leadership role on a problem that could shake civilization to its very core.

From the French overseas territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which were rocked by two months of riots over rising food prices this year, to the British-held Caymans, which last week adopted a new constitution appointing their first prime minister, change is stalking the Caribbean.

Two days before the Commonwealth's heads of government meet in Trinidad & Tobago on Nov. 27, the 32 islands that make up St. Vincent & the Grenadines will vote on a draft constitution that eliminates the monarchy and replaces the Queen with a president elected by the National Assembly.

On Jan. 10, Martinique and French Guiana, situated on the northern coast of South America, will hold referendums on whether to seek more autonomy or a change of status within the French Republic.

Good Gosh!  I mistook Chirac for LBJ!

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

WASHINGTON -- Suicides in the Army are expected to reach a new high this year, with 140 suspected cases among active-duty soldiers so far, Army officials said Tuesday.

This will be the fifth year in a row that grim statistic rose despite an aggressive military campaign to tackle the mental health stigma in the Army. This year's number already matches that for all of 2008. There were 115 suicides in 2007 and 102 in 2006.

These new statistics come as the military is investigating what may have driven Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, who allegedly shot 55 people Nov. 5 at Fort Hood, Texas. The military has charged Hasan, who was set to deploy to Afghanistan, with 13 counts of premeditated murder.

Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, said that the military wasn't seeing any trends that explained the rise. Forty suicides occurred in the first two months of the year. About a third were by soldiers who'd never deployed to war zones, and 40 percent of those who committed suicide had seen mental health specialists.

(CNN) The Republican fratricide in the Nov. 3 special election in upstate New York may prove just an opening round of an even more spectacular bloodbath in Florida in 2010. In New York, Republican feuding lost the party a seat in the House of Representatives. At stake in Florida is not only a senatorship -- but very possibly Republican hopes for 2012 as well.

The battle in Florida pits Gov. Charlie Crist against former Speaker of the Florida House Marco Rubio. Both men claim to be conservative, pro-life, tax cutters. On the issues, they would seem to agree far more than they disagree. But on one issue they have disagreed passionately: President Obama's fiscal stimulus. Squeezed by his state's desperate fiscal condition, Crist endorsed and campaigned for the Obama stimulus. Inspired by his conservative ideology, Rubio opposed stimulus.

Now Rubio is the darling of conservatives nationwide. Just this week it was announced that he would give the keynote address at next year's annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. He has been profiled on the cover of National Review, endorsed by the Club for Growth, and feted by radio talk show hosts.

....

 Rubio's national base is generating national dollars. Writing on FrumForum.com, the website I edit, Tim Mak reports that Crist has raised less than one-quarter of his money from outside Florida. More than one-third of Rubio's money has come from out of state. Only 13 percent of Crist's out-of-state dollars come from the Washington area, as compared to 22 percent of Rubio's. The candidate who purports to speak for populist rage in fact turns out to be the candidate of a national political leadership. They used to have a saying in Tammany Hall: "It's better to lose an election than lose control of the party" -- and control of the party is precisely what is at stake in Florida 2010.

Jerusalem police arrested a woman praying at the Western Wall for wearing a tallit.

The woman, who was participating in Rosh Chodesh services, was arrested Wednesday based on an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that the public must dress according to the customs of the site, Israel Radio reported.

Intel will not employ Jewish workers on Saturday shifts in its Jerusalem plant, the chip-maker has suggested in a new compromise proposal. The move comes after large crowds of ultra-Orthodox protesters attacked the plant on Saturday, in protest of it continuing operations on Shabbat. The plant, in the Har Hotzvim industrial area in Jerusalem, employs some 150 workers.

According to the six clauses that make up the proposal, only conveyers producing the most sensitive components will operate on Saturday; only 60 employees will work on Saturday, in three 20-workers shifts; and all Jewish workers who were employed on Saturdays will be replaced by non-Jewish ones that day.

Like a phoenix rising from the flames, space shuttle Atlantis emerges from the exhaust cloud on Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Liftoff on the STS-129 mission occurred on time Nov. 16, 2009 at 2:28 p.m. EST.

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or Wise, is chilled out, sporting a sunshade and getting ready to roll. NASA's newest spacecraft is scheduled to roll to the pad on Friday, Nov. 20, its last stop before launching into space to survey the entire sky in infrared light.

Wise is scheduled to launch no earlier than 9:09 a.m. EST on Dec. 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will circle Earth over the poles, scanning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months. The mission will uncover hidden cosmic objects, including the coolest stars, dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies.

Hunger now scars the lives of over 1 billion people -- a new record. Today, Monday the 16th, world leaders will gather at a UN food summit in Rome to debate what to do about it. As a former Goodwill Ambassador for the World Food Program, I sense how the meeting may go. There will be more media attention on the politicians than on the issues, an abundance of speeches, and a series of oddly fancy luncheons -- with more speeches. At a similar luncheon, I remember wondering: What if I could magically transfer the 1000 calories in this vanilla souffle in front of me to a malnourished child begging in the slums of Nairobi? Sharing the extra calories eaten in the United States or Europe alone would end hunger in Africa.

These gratifying fantasies highlight some terrible inequities in how the world handles its food supply. In 2006, the World Food Program produced, but never publicly released, a map charting food consumption. Dubbed the "Fat Map," it shows where the world's calories go. Nations grow or shrink based on how much the average person eats. Depending on your perspective, it maps starvation or overeating.

Chalk up another effect of climate change: it's getting windier over Lake Superior. That is the conclusion of a study by scientists who have looked at the effects of increasing surface water temperatures in the lake and air temperatures over it. The water has warmed faster than the air, creating instability in the air mass that results in stronger winds.

Ankur R. Desai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an author of the study in Nature Geoscience, said the effect was due to ice, or lack of it. "Less ice in the winter means stronger winds in the summer," Dr. Desai said. Ice coverage of Lake Superior has declined in recent decades, which means that the lake starts to warm sooner, becoming stratified. The earlier this stratification occurs, Dr. Desai said, the warmer the top layer gets in the summer.

Data from buoys and satellites showed that this warming outpaced that of the air above it. That means the thermal gradient between the two was reduced. A large thermal gradient makes for stable air, which is why the wind often dies down at night, when the ground cools. In this case, with a smaller gradient, instability increased. This was confirmed by data showing that average wind speeds over the lake have increased by 5 percent per decade since the 1980s.

If the U.S. wants to help stop global warming, nuclear power is not the way to go, according to a new report released today. The Environment California Research & Policy Center concluded that launching a nuclear power industry nearly from the ground up is too slow and expensive a process. Energy efficiency standards and renewable energy options are better solutions, researchers said.

....

The $600-billion upfront investment necessary for the 100 reactors would slice out twice as much carbon pollution in that period if invested in clean energy, according to the report. And given the costs of running a power plant, clean energy could deliver five times as much progress per dollar in lowering pollution.

Peter Bradford, a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission member, made this comparison in a statement: "Counting on new nuclear reactors as a climate change solution is no more sensible than counting on an un-built dam to create a lake to fight a nearby forest fire."

In 2002 Responsible Travel became one of the first travel companies to offer customers the option of buying so-called carbon offsets to counter the planet-warming emissions generated by their airline flights.

But last month Responsible Travel canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more.

<...>

... it has proved difficult to monitor or quantify the emissions-reducing potential of the thousands of green projects financed by customers' payments, and there are no industrywide standards.

Responsible Travel is not the only organization that has changed its mind about the usefulness of offsets: Yahoo and the United States House of Representatives both ended trial offset-purchase programs this year, concluding that the money was better spent on improving their buildings' energy efficiency.

Some of the world's leading experts on the emissions issue have reviewed and rejected purchasing offsets for air travel. ...

Scientists have warned that global temperatures could rise by six degrees Celsius by the end of the century, four degrees higher than previously predicted and at a level that could wipe out species and cause widespread natural disasters.

In addition, the study by the Global Carbon Project (GCP) said on Wednesday, that the ability of the world's forests and oceans to absorb carbon emissions was declining.

The paper, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, comes in the run up to UN talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, aimed at crafting a pact to combat climate change from 2013.

A major Wiltshire town is to become the first in the UK to offer free public wireless internet access to its entire population, it was claimed.

Swindon Borough Council plan for all 186,000 citizens to have blanket "Wi-Fi mesh" coverage by April 2010.

Line rental will be free, and there will be no connection charge, say council officials.

Wireless internet allows computer users to access the internet without the need for wired connection to phone lines.

Time to bring you up to date on the latest science headlines I've put together for other sites this last couple of weeks, so here's a quick round-up:

James Harding, the editor of the Times, today gave the clearest indication yet of how News International is going to start charging for its journalism online.

Pledging to "rewrite the economics of newspapers", Harding said the Times would charge for 24-hour access to that day's edition of the paper alongside a subscription model, but dismissed the idea of micro-payments for individual articles.

Harding said the newspaper business had to avoid the mistakes of the music industry - and call time on free distribution.

"We created a culture of free, and we absolutely were party to that," he told an audience of senior editors and executives at the Society of Editors conference in Stansted, Essex.

A libel action over an article that appeared on the website of a South African magazine has been dismissed by a court in England. Evidence suggested that the article had received only four visits from the UK in a two month period.

Describing the claim as being "totally without merit," Mr Justice Tugendhat said the claimants had failed to establish "substantial publication" within the court's jurisdiction.

The action was brought by LonZim, an investment firm listed in London on the Alternative Investment Market, part owned by African conglomerate Lonrho. Isle of Man-based Senior executives of both companies, Geoffrey White and David Lenigas, were also claimants. They were suing Andrew Sprague, a non-executive director of a company that held LonZim shares.

Comments attributed to Sprague that criticised LonZim's management appeared in a South African weekly magazine called Financial Mail in May 2009. The claimants said he was accusing them in the article, among other things, of having "cynically and greedily indulged in self-enrichment at the expense of, and contrary to the interests of, shareholders."

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has resigned from the Press Complaints Commission's code committee.

His resignation came days after the press watchdog published a report last week into the News of the World phone-hacking affair.

The report found no evidence that the commission had be "materially misled" by the paper or that the practice was "ongoing".

By Chris Tryhorn: James Harding, the editor of the Times, today gave the clearest indication yet of how News International is going to start charging for its journalism online.

Pledging to "rewrite the economics of newspapers", Harding said the Times would charge for 24-hour access to that day's edition of the paper alongside a subscription model, but dismissed the idea of micro-payments for individual articles.

Harding said the newspaper business had to avoid the mistakes of the music industry - and call time on free distribution.

"We created a culture of free, and we absolutely were party to that," he told an audience of senior editors and executives at the Society of Editors conference in Stansted, Essex.

"In the last few years, we have talked with great pride - we believed advertising would sustain us - about unique users.

"These people were window shopping down Oxford Street - they were not coming into our shops."

Maybe I'm just getting cranky, but over the weekend and into today I've found myself thinking about some building blocks of journalism and thinking, "You know, this is broken." Not broken as in "this really needs to be recast for the Web" or "some kind of digital adjunct would help here," but broken as in "this no longer works, and we need to stop doing it."

My latest sportswriting column for Indiana University's National Sports Journalism Center looks at ways to reinvent game stories -- the day-after accounts of sporting events that tell you who won, how they won and (hopefully) why they won. In discussing how the game story could be re-prioritized, reimagined or reinvigorated, I talked with four very smart sportswriters (Buster Olney, Joe Posnanski, Chico Harlan and Jason McIntyre), and kept in mind the opinion of a fifth, my co-columnist Dave Kindred, whose plea for game stories can be found here.

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11/17/2009   Lyon's Festival of Lights A Dazzling Orgy of Colors

If you find yourself anywhere near Lyon in early December, make sure to stop by for the marvels of the four-day festival of lights. What began over 150 years ago as a spontaneous celebration when a storm cleared has grown to become a must-see event.

A network of lasers crisscrosses the inner courtyard of Lyon's town hall, and a multi-colored, glowing garden of almost 50 gigantic flowers is perched on the local mountain. The facades of the Church of Saint Nizier on the peninsula have been brought to life using projections and soundtracks, and even the town's landmark, the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, has been lit up by a range of lighting effects that pulsate in time to the chimes of its church bells.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could restart as early as this weekend after more than a year of repairs.

But officials have avoided giving an exact date for sending beams of protons around the 27km (17 mile) circular tunnel which houses the collider.

The LHC was first switched on in 2008, but had to be shut down when a faulty electrical connection caused one tonne of helium to leak into the tunnel.

The vast machine is located 100m below the French-Swiss border.

Operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), the LHC will recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang.

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, has been diagnosed with the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma form of cancer.

In a memo sent to employees, Jody Allen, his sister and the CEO of his investment firm Vulcan said he had been diagnosed early this month and was undergoing chemotherapy.

The memo said the 56-year-old had diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a relatively common form of lymphoma.

Cage has been forced to reassess his cash flow after being hit with a $6 million tax bill, allegedly due to his former financial adviser's monetary mismanagement. Depp, who earns an estimated $68.8 million annually, is said to be eager to help his old friend out of his reported debt because Cage helped him land his first major role in "A Nightmare on Elm Street" in 1984, reports Imdb.

As Secretary of State for "Communities" (and it's worth pausing here, just for a moment, to notice the typically New Labourish elision of title and propaganda - seen also in Miliband Minor's billing as secretary for "climate change") one of John Denham's responsibilities is to front the government's effort to cosy up to representatives of "Faith". Apparently, he wants Faith leaders to have "a central role" in shaping government policies. In a recent speech, he described himself as a secular humanist; which you might think would give him some sense of perspective - but no, he went on to eulogise Faith in terms that seem to have been ripped almost word-for-word from one of St Tony's regular sermons.

The trial of a husband accused of murdering his wife as they slept in a camper van has heard he killed her while he dreamt she was an intruder.

Christine Thomas, 57, was killed in Aberporth, Ceredigion, in July 2008.

Swansea Crown Court heard Brian Thomas, 59, of Neath, accepts he killed her but says he has a sleep disorder which had been triggered by "boy racer activity".

Jurors have been told they can reach a verdict of not guilty or of not guilty by reason of insanity.

The rule banning women from dressing like men - namely by wearing trousers - was first introduced in 1800 by Paris' police chief and has survived repeated attempts to repeal it.

The 1800 rule stipulated than any Parisienne wishing to dress like a man "must present herself to Paris' main police station to obtain authorisation".

In 1892 it was slightly relaxed thanks to an amendment which said trousers were permitted "as long as the woman is holding the reins of a horse".