BELGRADE, Dec 29 (IPS) - Prominent theatre actor Tanasije Uzunovic loves to take long walks in the large Kalemegdan Fortress Park but generally avoids the Dedinje neighbourhood, a more popular green zone in the Serbian capital.

"Walking through Dedinje sets off bitter reminders,'' Uzunovic told IPS. Set into the neighbourhood is a huge villa, now the residence of the United States ambassador, that belonged to his grandfather Nikola before World War II.

Nikola Uzunovic was four times prime minister of what used to be the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Today's Serbia was one of its parts, and Tanasije Uzunovic is one of 140,000 people who have filed requests for restitution of property seized by communists when they came to power in 1945.

"When the war ended, the communists gave this villa as a gift to the U.S., for the ambassador's residence. My family was left without anything from my grandfather who was proclaimed 'capitalist enemy of the state','' Uzunovic said. "We're waiting to see what happens next," he added.

An envelope containing suspicious white powder was sent to the communities minister Shahid Malik at the House of Commons, triggering an anti-terrorist investigation, the Guardian has learned.

The letter, sent from within the UK, led to a major alert on Monday as it was intercepted by security screening staff who feared it held potentially deadly anthrax.

Comments on the envelope suggest it was sent by a supporter of the far right or someone purporting to be one.

Emergency procedures were activated and the powder was tested and found to be harmless. It is understood that the Speaker, John Bercow, and his most senior officials were kept fully informed.

Detectives are examining the envelope, the written comments and the postmark to try to trace the sender. They want to establish whether this is an isolated incident or the beginning of a campaign by criminal elements on the far right.

The major international airport of the Netherlands will begin using full-body scanners on passengers flying to the United States to prevent a recurrence of the security breach that allowed a would-be bomber to smuggle explosives onto a flight to Detroit from Amsterdam on Christmas Day, the Dutch authorities said Wednesday.

The new measures were announced as the Dutch interior minister discussed the government's early investigation into the thwarted bombing.

At a news conference at The Hague in the Netherlands the interior minister, Guusje Ter Horst, characterized preparations for the attack as professional but its execution as amateurish, according to The Associated Press.

"It is not exaggerating to say the world has escaped a disaster," Ms. Ter Horst said. Dutch officials said the accused bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, had raised no red flags as he arrived in Amsterdam from Nigeria and transferred to his Detroit-bound flight at Schiphol Airport. He arrived at 5:37 a.m. on Dec. 25, passed through security screening at a metal detector without setting off any alarms and departed for the United States at 8:55 a.m.

Discotheques across France can now stay open until 7:00 am under new regulations that business leaders said Monday would liven up Paris and other French cities.

The measure seeks to harmonise closing hours for bars across France and cut down the number of party goers who drive from one area to the next in search of a place to spend the night on the dance floor.

The new rules published in the government gazette at the weekend state that any establishment that serves alcohol and has a dance floor can now stay open until seven in the morning.

But last call will be at 5:30 am, allowing for a one-and-half-hour "dry period" when no alcohol will be served.

A Kurdish man has been sentenced to life in prison for ordering the honor killing of his daughter. The girl's brother was also sentenced for his role in carrying out the brutal murder with the help of an accomplice.

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Gulsum was murdered, a German court in Kleve found, because she was no longer a virgin. Judges said the young woman's lifestyle was seen as an affront to the family honor.

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The court sentenced Gulsum's 20-year-old brother to nine-and-a-half years in prison. The brother allegedly lured Gulsum to get into a car with him before picking up a friend of his. The two men then drove Gulsum to a secluded spot near their western German home close to the Dutch border, choked her with a rope and clubbed her to death.

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German authorities have vowed to crack down on so-called "honor killings" by Kurds, Turks and other ethnic groups. German authorities say there have been 55 honor killings over the last nine years.

German retailers say there is no room for flash mobs - large groups of people who assemble suddenly in a public place to perform an unusual action - when it comes to labor disputes.

... Judges recommended that store owners counter the spontaneous protests by closing their stores for a short time or banning participants from entering the premises.

But the HDE says that decision is both impractical and unfair.

"The people who suffer are customers who are not involved in the dispute," HDE labor expert Heribert Joeris told the Associated Press.

Joeris warned that the term 'labor dispute' would become disreputable if flash mobs were permitted to make a nuisance of themselves in retail outlets, or if store workers could only clear protesters from their premises by using physical force. ...

Italy's crackdown on tax evasion this year raked in a whopping 7.5 billion euros, a 7.5% increase over last year, the state tax collection agency Equitalia reported on Wednesday.

The amount of unpaid taxes uncovered in 2009, Equitalia observed, was greater than the impact of the government's 2010 budget and twice what the Treasury earned through its tax amnesty on assets hidden abroad.

3 men and a women were shot dead in a Finnish mall this morning, in a large grocery store. The gunman has been identified already, but not captured yet. Ibrahim Shkupolli is 'known to police'. He was dressed in black, very deliberately approached the group, shot them and then moved calmly out of the store. It sounds like a hit, maybe Russian/Georgian related.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Details of how Margaret Thatcher berated her senior cabinet colleagues over their timid approach to spending cuts when she first came to power are revealed today in previously secret cabinet documents.

A series of tense cabinet meetings in July 1979 show the deep unease among some ministers after Geoffrey Howe, chancellor, outlined plans to save £6.5bn the following year despite rising unemployment and global recession.

The 30-year-old papers - consisting of ministerial letters and cabinet minutes - provide a stark history lesson for David Cameron as the Tory leader wrestles with how he would manage a far greater crisis in public finances if he wins an election next year.

The documents, released by the National Archives, show how Mrs Thatcher embarked on a personal crusade during the first weeks of her administration to make sure Sir Geoffrey did not flag in the face of resistance from fellow ministers. The papers are full of angry hand-written comments from the Iron Lady complaining "this will not do", "too small" and in one case just "no" heavily underlined.

She dismissed Treasury recommendations on public spending as "not nearly tough enough". She argued there was "enormous waste in most departments" and that "overall strategy right from the start must involve large cuts this year leading on to more substantial reductions in later years".

Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Boeing Co., the U.S.'s second- biggest defense contractor, may lose as much as $271 million in government payments for satellite launch services if Pentagon auditors conclude it violated federal accounting rules, according to officials and documents.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency is reviewing whether Boeing "improperly billed" the Air Force in a 2006-2008 contract for labor, management, quality control and support costs that were incurred between 1998 and 2006 in the Delta IV rocket program, said Pentagon spokesman Navy Commander Darryn James. Federal accounting standards require the billings take place in the year the costs were incurred.

The question was simple: Should the lending practices of auto dealers be regulated?

It was already October and the 42 Democrats and 29 Republicans on the House Committee on Financial Services had spent the better part of the year hashing out the details of a new federal agency dedicated to protecting consumers from dangerous and deceptive financial products.

Auto dealers seemed like an obvious target for the new agency; nearly every time someone buys a car, the dealer also sells them an auto loan, complete with promises like zero per cent interest and a pile of cash back. Americans hold some $850 billion in car debt and dealers are responsible for marketing roughly four-fifths of that amount. They pocket lucrative commissions with little oversight, and the committee seemed poised to change that.

Thank you, China. Your consumers' hunger for European goods helped the Czech car industry fend off the blues and post its best-ever overall sales result in 2009.

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... robust sales of Czech cars didn't come domestically, where deliveries rose a meager 3.7% on year in 2009 while annual domestic automotive production was down over 11%.

And despite a summer surge in sales of Czech cars in Germany due to that country's car scrapping subsidy, the lion's share of growth still comes from China, where Skoda Auto via parent Volkswagen has a production plant in Shanghai and produces cars locally.

Skoda Auto will release specific data on Chinese sales when it releases its 2009 financial results in early spring, but the Czech car maker in November said that in the year through October, it posted a 93% annual rise in Chinese sales, selling 95,679 cars there through Oct. 31.

After two years of crashing banking systems and economic recession, the euro zone enters 2010 with a full-blown debt crisis.

The European Commission warns that public finances in half of the 16 euro-zone nations are at high risk of becoming unsustainable.

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Fitch warns in a December report that particularly the U.K. (which isn't in the euro zone) and Spain and France (which are) risk being downgraded if they don't articulate more-credible fiscal-consolidation programs during the coming year given the pace of fiscal deterioration. ...

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... Not many Europe watchers believe the euro zone would allow one of its own to go into default, discrediting the euro currency and the philosophy of a monetary commonwealth behind it.

If things did get that far, euro-zone governments would be expected to rush in with a rescue plan to absorb some of Greece's debt, or issue guarantees.

As if to cover all possibilities, ECB legal counsel Phoebus Athanassiou in December discussed in a working paper how and under what conditions a euro-zone country might withdraw or be expelled from the currency union. ...

Major article, but doubt it answers the questions Jérôme posed in yesterday's Salon.

La Chine dorme. Laisse la dormir. Quand la Chine s'éveillera, le monde tremblera.

Investment law says big deals must represent 'net benefit' for Canada

The Harper government is quietly reviewing the $1.9-billion investment by a state-owned Chinese oil company in two oilsands projects, more than a month after the deal was originally supposed to close.

In an exclusive interview on Friday, Industry Minister Tony Clement confirmed that the government is reviewing PetroChina's proposal to buy a 60-per-cent stake in two projects in northern Alberta planned by Athabasca Oil Sands.

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Last September, the chair of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said the PetroChina deal should raise national security concerns in both Canada and the U.S.

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Under the guidelines, the department will review the "nature and extent" of control by the Chinese government, PetroChina's corporate governance and reporting practices, as well as whether the acquired projects will operate on a "commercial" basis.

A source familiar with the transaction said it's unknown when the deal will get the green light.

Iceland's parliament has approved a bill to repay $5.4bn (3.8bn euros) to savers in Britain and the Netherlands.

The money will go to the British and Dutch governments, who partially compensated savers when the Icesave online bank failed.

More than 320,000 savers lost out when the bank collapsed in 2008.

The measure, narrowly approved against strong opposition, was seen as crucial to Iceland's bid to join the EU and rebuild its economy.

The bill was passed by 33 votes to 30. The Icelandic government had threatened to resign if the measure was rejected.

"Approving the bill is the better option and will avoid even more economic damage," Finance Minister Steingrimur Sigfusson said during the debate.

"History will show that we are doing the right thing."

Goldman is trying to diffuse the increasingly harsh light being turned on its dubious practices in the collateralized debt obligation market, with the wattage turned up considerably last week by a story in the New York Times that described how a synthetic CDO program called Abacus was the means by which Goldman famously went "net short" subprime. We've mentioned Abacus repeatedly because AIG wrote guarantees on at least some of the Abacus trades.

....

If you sell a stock when have inside, non public information that the company was in serious trouble without disclosing this information - you are likely to be held accountable. If you sell a manufactured product and it causes harm, you might be held liable regardless of whether you knew it was faulty (strict liability). In fact, if sellers were not held responsible for product quality to some degree, commerce would become impractical. In a pure "buyer beware", dog-eat-dog world, every transaction would require extensive and prohibitively costly due diligence.

Now let us turn to the CDO market (and by "CDO" we mean "ABS CDO" or "asset backed security CDO; there are other types), where buyers (contrary to uninformed views otherwise) DID routinely perform extensive due diligence, and nevertheless, lemming-like, went to slaughter. It wasn't just the investors or the now-derided guarantors; many banks wound up with lots of CDOs on their balance sheets (for not very good reasons, but that is beyond the scope of this post).

But then we have the famed short sellers who used synthetic CDOs as their means for getting short. With a synthetic CDO, no one puts up cash. It is a little corporate entity. The asset side is various credit default swaps, in this case, "referencing" mainly subprime bonds, the BBB tranches. So the cash flow comes from the premium payments on these CDS. The liability side is tranched, so you have an equity tranche, BBB, A, AA, and a junior AAA layers, then say two more AAA layers and the infamous super senior tranche (there could be more tranches than this, but you get the general idea). But the investors do not make cash payments; they are effectively protection sellers, or insurers. But it is important to note that is not how the deals were hawked; they were presented as a convenient, faster-to-launch alternative to the old-fashioned cash CDO. (This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but as you will see soon, it matters).

....

Now let us turn to Goldman. The New York Times last week published a story that discussed how a Goldman synthetic CDO program (series of deals) called Abacus. Goldman was not merely the structurer of these deals; unbeknownst to its investors, it was usually the ONLY protection buyer in these deals; it occasionally let some favored hedge funds participate in a minor way on the short side. In other words, the sole purpose of these deals was for Goldman to put on a short position.

Israel has approved a plan to promote the construction of 14 structures in northern settlement of Kiryat Netafim in the occupied West Bank, the Haaretz newspaper says quoting Army Radio.

The defence ministry on Tuesday approved the Kiryat Netafim construction plans to legalise the construction of 14 structures, the paper quoted the Radio as saying on Wednesday.

Peace Now, the leftists human-rights group, petitioned the High Court of Justice recently against the construction of 14 structures that were illegally built, some of them on Palestinian land without any authorisation.

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- A suicide bomber struck a forward operating base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, causing an unknown number of American casualties, a U.S. military official said.

A suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest attacked Forward Operating Base Chapman near the district of Khost in Khost province, said the official, who asked not to be named.

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) - U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.

The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials - as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.

The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel's threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.

U.S. news media reporting has left the impression that U.S. intelligence analysts have not made up their mind about the document's authenticity, although it has been widely reported that they have now had a full year to assess the issue.

Pro-government rallies were staged in Shiraz, Arak, Qom and Tehran, among other cities. Demonstrators at a rally in Tehran chanted "Death to Mousavi," a reference to opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi. Some shouted "Rioter hypocrites must be executed" and held up a banner that read: "We sacrifice our blood for the supreme leader."

The government gave all civil servants and employees a day off to attend the rallies and organized buses to transport groups of schoolchildren and supporters from outlying rural areas to the protests.

Hard-line cleric Ahmad Alamolhoda called opponents of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supporters of Satan.

Provincial governor Qassim Mohammed was seriously injured in the second bombing.

Al Iraqiya state television initially reported he had been killed in the attacks near the provincial government headquarters in Ramadi, the Anbar capital, 60 miles west of Baghdad.

But Deputy Governor Hikmet Khalaf later said Mr Mohammed was still alive and was being treated in hospital.

A Kyrgyz opposition journalist died yesterday after apparently being thrown from the sixth-floor window of an apartment in Almaty with his hands and feet bound with duct tape, officials said.

A Kazakh interior ministry spokesman said the journalist, Gennady Pavlyuk, had been in a coma since he was hospitalized after the incident last Wednesday and died without regaining consciousness, Interfax-Kazakhstan said.

In Bishkek, a Kyrgyz interior ministry spokesman told reporters that Pavlyuk, 40, had been admitted to hospital with multiple injuries, including broken ribs, and was found after the fall with his hands and feet bound with duct tape.

He was a leading critic of Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and the officials in both countries said a criminal investigation had been opened into his death.

"There is a version that it is an attempted murder," the Kyrgyz ministry spokesman told reporters.

Top Republican Myths about the Crotch Bomber Affair

I hear these on tv or from Reps. Pete Hoekstra and Peter King and Sen. Joe Lieberman.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Behind an electrified fence, blast-resistant sandbags and 53 National Police outposts, the Afghan surge is well under way.

But the foot soldiers in a bowl-shaped valley about 20 miles southeast of Kabul are not fighting the Taliban, or even carrying guns. They are preparing to extract copper from one of the richest untapped deposits on earth. And they are Chinese, undertaking by far the largest foreign investment project in war-torn Afghanistan.

American officials say intelligence efforts are focused on identifying and tracking down those who plotted to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the plane with enough explosive in his underwear to bring down the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam. But they warn that finding those responsible is unlikely to be swift and say that identifying other "high-value" al-Qaida targets for retaliatory attack would also be a priority.

...

The official acknowledged that there was likely to be political and public pressure on Barack Obama to strike back at al-Qaida, particularly with Republican opponents breaking with the usual solidarity on national security issues to accuse him of weakness and making America vulnerable to attack.

...

But given the regular attacks against al-Qaida in Yemen, these may have a greater impact on American public opinion than on the extremist group.

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Republican attorneys general in 13 states say congressional leaders must remove Nebraska's political deal from the federal health care reform bill or face legal action, according to a letter provided to The Associated Press Wednesday.

"We believe this provision is constitutionally flawed," South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster and the 12 other attorneys general wrote in the letter to be sent Wednesday night to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

"As chief legal officers of our states we are contemplating a legal challenge to this provision and we ask you to take action to render this challenge unnecessary by striking that provision," they wrote.
13 state AGs threaten suit over health care deal

In a rare Christmas Eve vote, Senate Democrats pushed sweeping health care legislation to the brink of Senate passage, crushing a year-end Republican filibuster against President Barack Obama's call to remake the nation's health care system. The 60-39 vote marked the third time in as many days Democrats posted a supermajority needed to advance the legislation.

The letter was signed by top prosecutors in Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Washington state. All are Republicans, and McMaster and the attorneys general of Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania are running for governor in their respective states.

KABUL (Reuters) - Insurgents intensified their campaign against military targets and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, killing eight U.S. CIA agents at a base and four Canadian servicemen on patrol and a journalist accompanying them.

U.S. officials said the dead Americans -- killed in a suicide bombing on a military base in southeastern Khost province on Wednesday -- were CIA agents.

It was one of the highest foreign non-military death tolls in the eight-year war against the Islamist Taliban. The four Canadians and the journalist from the Calgary Herald were killed when their armored vehicle was hit by a bomb in southern Kandahar province on Wednesday, the Canadian Defense Ministry said.

The base in Khost province, Forward Operating Base Chapman, was engaged in reconstruction projects, a key part of U.S. President Barack Obama's strategy to stabilize the country. Some people were wounded in the explosion, defense officials said, but no U.S. or NATO troops were among them.

Asked whether the suicide blast occurred inside the base, one official said: "That's my understanding." Another senior official confirmed the attack involved an explosive vest.

Some Chinese Businesses Resist as Developers Seek Eviction - NYTimes.com

Last Thursday, as the temperature dipped well below zero, Mr. Lu and Ms. Qin recalled this and other skirmishes with their adversaries. As they spoke, a pack of grim-faced men in long dark coats circled the storefront, but then veered away when they found themselves receiving unwanted attention from a newspaper photographer.

In addition to Mr. Lu, Ms. Qin and her boyfriend, Zhong Boxin, the Fish Castle defenders include the restaurant's former cooks and waiters. Everyone slept on banquettes piled high with blankets. "I feel small and insignificant on this planet," Ms. Qin said quietly. "This is much more difficult than I imagined."

<...>

Whether it was superstition or an old-fashioned victory of good over evil, the battle over the Fish Castle Restaurant ended in Ms. Qin's favor. On Monday, she received a call from the developers, New Olympic Development, saying they hoped to strike a deal. Lawyers were summoned, papers were signed, full payment was guaranteed, and by Tuesday evening, the Fish Castle defenders had gathered up their blankets and abandoned their posts.

On Wednesday, Ms. Qin said she had already started looking for a new restaurant space. As for Mr. Lu, he said he hoped to continue fighting on behalf of other nail houses.

"Sometimes righteousness wins," Mr. Lu said.

Despite the general belief, the percentage of calories gained by eating fat, as opposed to protein or carbohydrates, does not influence the weight gain process.

Dietitians generally recommend individuals to confine their fat intake to 20 to 35 percent of the total daily calories, urging them to substitute saturated and trans-fats by eating fish, nuts and vegetable oils as they contain healthy fats.

According to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, there is no significant relation between fat intake and the amount of weight gained over time.

The study found the intake of polyunsaturated fats versus saturated fats was also not linked to any considerable changes in weight.

ROME, Dec 27 (IPS) - An animal 'black death' that has devastated livestock around the world for thousands of years, causing famine and untold human misery, is about to be permanently consigned to the history books.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is confident that rinderpest is beaten after being at the centre of efforts to wipe out a disease that had seemed unstoppable for much of the 20th century and it expects the official declaration of its extinction to arrive next year.

Rinderpest is a virus affecting cattle, buffalo, yaks and hoofed wild animals that spreads through contact and contaminated materials and has death rates during outbreaks of up to 100 percent.

Although humans cannot contract the fast-spreading disease, also known as cattle plague, its effects on sources of food and income mean it has frequently been as lethal for people as for animals.

Roscosmos will soon consider a project to prevent a large asteroid from colliding with Earth after 2030, the head of Russia's space agency said on Wednesday.

"A scientist recently told me an interesting thing about the path [of an asteroid] constantly nearing Earth... He has calculated that it will surely collide with Earth in the 2030 s," Anatoly Perminov said during an interview with the Voice of Russia radio.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy faced an embarrassing setback Wednesday after the high court struck down a planned carbon tax to fight global warming, just days before it was to kick in.

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In its ruling Tuesday, the Constitutional Council said the "large number of exemptions from the carbon tax runs counter to the goal of fighting climate change and violates the equality enjoyed by all in terms of public charges."

The Council said more than 1,000 of France's top polluters would have been able to dodge the tax and that the legislation did not apply to 93 percent of emissions from industrial sources.

The new levy on oil, gas and coal consumption set at 17 euros (25 dollars) per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions was aimed at encouraging French consumers to adopt good green behaviour and stop wasting energy.

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France would have been the biggest economy to have applied a direct carbon tax when it was to come into effect on January 1, mirroring measures that exist in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. ...

FRANKENSTEIN, Mo. - The mystery started the day farmer Russ Kremer got between a jealous boar and a sow in heat. The boar gored Kremer in the knee with a razor-sharp tusk. The burly pig farmer shrugged it off, figuring: "You pour the blood out of your boot and go on."

But Kremer's red-hot leg ballooned to double its size. A strep infection spread, threatening his life and baffling doctors. Two months of multiple antibiotics did virtually nothing. The answer was flowing in the veins of the boar. The animal had been fed low doses of penicillin, spawning a strain of strep that was resistant to other antibiotics. That drug-resistant germ passed to Kremer.

Like Kremer, more and more Americans -- many of them living far from barns and pastures -- are at risk from the widespread practice of feeding livestock antibiotics. These animals grow faster, but they can also develop drug-resistant infections that are passed on to people. The issue is now gaining attention because of interest from a new White House administration and a flurry of new research tying antibiotic use in animals to drug resistance in people.

Researchers say the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals has led to a plague of drug-resistant infections that killed more than 65,000 people in the U.S. last year -- more than prostate and breast cancer combined. And in a nation that used about 35 million pounds of antibiotics last year, 70 percent of the drugs went to pigs, chickens and cows. Worldwide, it's 50 percent.

"This is a living breathing problem, it's the big bad wolf and it's knocking at our door," said Dr. Vance Fowler, an infectious disease specialist at Duke University. "It's here. It's arrived."

CALGARY, Alberta - A nearly decade-long quest to build a multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline in Canada's north has cleared a major hurdle with the release of a years-overdue regulatory report Wednesday.

The government-appointed panel examining the environmental and socio-economic effects of the 16.2 billion Canadian dollar ($15.4 billion) Mackenzie Gas Project said it will "provide the foundation for a sustainable northern future" if the panel's 176 recommendations are adopted.

The Mackenzie Gas Project is a 750-mile proposed pipeline through the Mackenzie Valley of Canada's Northwest Territories that would connect a dozen potential northern onshore gas fields with North American markets. The Joint Review Panel's recommendations include calls for government funding to protect environmentally sensitive areas.

Canada's National Energy Board will begin its own hearings in April, taking the panel's recommendations into consideration when it decides whether to let construction go ahead.

Imperial Oil Ltd. is the lead partner in the Mackenzie project, which also includes Imperial's U.S. parent Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. Natural gas shipper TransCanada Corp. would feed the Mackenzie gas into its Alberta pipeline network.

Tehran's Sa'adabad Cultural Complex has mounted an exhibition of works by renowned Iranian calligrapher Mir Emad.

The month-long exhibition has displayed nine of Mir Emad's best works at Sa'adabad's Museum of Fine Art since Dec. 19, 2009.

Mir Emad is known as the most celebrated Persian calligrapher, whose Nasta'liq works have been housed in numerous museums around the world.

A Mars-bound lander that disappeared 10 years ago and has yet to be found may be hidden in an image such as this. Mission controllers lost contact with the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) in December 1999 as the probe descended toward the Martian surface. A review board later determined that a premature shutdown of the descent engines, while the lander was still 40 meters above the surface, probably caused the loss of MPL.

The Russian scientific satellite Coronas-Foton has started transmitting signal after staying silent for several weeks.

The satellite, which was feared to have gone dead, sprung to life on Tuesday after its solar panels received enough light to power its control systems, head of Russian space agency, Anatoly Perminov, told journalists.

Back, as promised, to John Arlidge's profile of Tony Blair in The Sunday Times before Christmas. Not all its 6,000 words were original. One particularly pithy quotation caught my eye, as it did the first time it was used, by David Rose in the Mail on Sunday in November:

The US space agency Nasa has selected three projects as finalists for its next celestial mission.

The projects aim to either probe the atmosphere and surface of Venus, return an asteroid fragment to Earth, or send back rocks from the Moon's south pole.

Washington Times Managing Editor for Digital Jeffrey Birnbaum has resigned effective Friday, and several other top editors are being let go as the dismantling of the conservative newspaper continues, according to newsroom sources.

An all-staff meeting has been called for 3:30 p.m. ET at the struggling Times, which announced earlier this month it is laying off at least 40 percent of its staff.

Fulfilling one of the transparency goals of President Obama's administration, the White House today released more than 25,000 records of visitors who came through the gates at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this year.

Check out the names here, and TPMDC will update readers as we go through the names.

The spreadsheet posted at WhiteHouse.gov offers the visitor's full name, date of visit, who they met with and in what room. These records cover from Sept. 16 to Sept. 30, and the monthly visitors logs will be a regular release going forward.

"Wars and elections have been the main threats to journalists in 2009", said Jean-Francois Julliard, secretary general of the watchdog group (Reporters sans frontieres - RSF).

"Violence committed against journalists pre- or post-election have been especially high in 2009 in countries with weak democracies."

The year also saw an increase in the number of journalists kidnapped (33 compared with 29 in 2008) and physically attacked or threatened (1,456 compared with 929) and more bloggers were censored (151 in 2009 against 59 in 2008).

It is a church without preaching, and without prayer.

At its Sunday morning services there is something spiritual, all right, but it doesn't have to do with Allah, or Buddha, or God.

Instead, it comes from music, from passionate renditions of works composed by Brahms and Bach and, of course, Beethoven -- for whom the church is named.

Each week the Church of Beethoven's musical performances draw a committed group of art-loving locals.

The service, which also features poetry, visual art and other types of music, is at home in Albuquerque, a city known for its eccentricities (its nickname: Albu-quirky) as well as for being a crossroads of culture.

The Information Commissioner's Office has ordered two public bodies to improve the way they deal with internal reviews

It has issued practice recommendations to both the UK Border Agency (UKBA) and Cardiff Council over internal reviews, which someone refused data under Freedom of Information can require. Such reviews normally precede a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) about an FoI refusal.

According to a report released today [PDF] by Reporters Sans Frontières, the number of bloggers around the world arrested because of their online work jumped from 59 to 151 between 2008 and 2009, an increase of 155%. Additionally, one blogger died in prison and 61 were physically assaulted. The most infamous cases perhaps occurred during the violent unrest in Iran following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed reelection. But RSF said the number of overall arrests and attacks can actually be traced to crackdowns in at least 10 countries.

"The number of countries affected by online censorship has doubled from one year to the next - a disturbing tendency that shows an increase in control over new media as millions of netizens get active online," said Lucie Morillon, head of the group's Internet and Freedoms Desk.

Nearly a third of Detroit's homes are vacant, and along with the residences, the city's stately hotels and cultural centers have been abandoned as well, falling into dramatic disrepair, their grand ruins still showing the promises of a once-booming city.

In a letter to Israel's faithful, Yona Metzger, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, and his Sephardic colleague Shlomo Amar, said the country's high rate of terminations cause a "delay [of] the messianic redemption," according to a report on the Ynetnews website.

MELBOURNE musician Rowland S. Howard - the guitarist in Nick Cave's cult punk-era bands The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party - died yesterday at the Austin Hospital from liver cancer. He was 50.

Howard wrote the 1979 cult hit Shivers for The Boys Next Door. He then played with Cave in The Birthday Party until the influential band split in 1983 amid turmoil and drug abuse.

On this day in 1999...

Lou Dobbs was a respected, middle-of-the-road journalist.

The prospect of achieving Middle East peace seemed imminent.

Beltway pundits believed Al Gore and George W. Bush were centrists who would govern similarly.

You could meet your loved ones at their arrival gate.

There were more than 2 million Christians living in Iraq.

Osama bin Laden was living with his family in a compound in Kandahar.

China's GDP was $1.4 trillion, half of Germany's.

Top conservative U.S. radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a hospital in Hawaii on Wednesday with chest pains, a local television station reported.

KITV television station said Limbaugh was in serious condition at Honolulu's The Queen's Medical Center after being treated at a hotel by paramedics, citing unnamed sources.

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Limbaugh, 58, has suffered from medical problems in the past decade, including a loss of hearing reversed by a cochlear, or electronic hearing device, implant, and an addiction to painkillers.

But one scene was quite intriguing, if a bit tin-hatty:

(Start at 1:05)

DA Whitman: Mr. Calvini, we'd like to know why the IBBC, a bank would be purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of missile guidance and control systems from your company?

Calvini: The IBBC has purchased billions of dollars worth of Silkworm missiles from the People's Republic of China which they have presold to clients in the Middle East. Contingent upon the missiles being equipped with VOLCON guidance systems. My company is one of only two in the world which produce the VOLCON.

DA: But why is the bank committing so much of its capital and resources to the sale of these missiles?

Calvini: It's a test. Small arms are the only weapons used in 99% of the world's conflicts and no one has the capacity to manufacture them faster and cheaper than China. What Skarssen (IBBC CEO) is attempting to do is to make the IBBC the exclusive broker of Chinese small arms to the Third World. And the missile deal is the gateway transaction.

Lou: Yeah, but billions of dollars invested simply to be a broker? There can't be that much profit for them.

Calvini: No. This is not about making a profit from weapon sales. It's about control.

DA: Control the flow of weapons, control the conflict.

Calvini: No, no. The IBBC is a bank. Their objective isn't to control the conflict; it's to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. You find this upsetting, yes? But this is the very essence of the banking industry, to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals slaves to debt.

Transcription from "Slaves to Debt" in "The International" « Money as Debt also known as Credit

La Chine dorme. Laisse la dormir. Quand la Chine s'éveillera, le monde tremblera.

The science genius enjoyed a festive dinner with his mum, dad and his £30,000 fembot which he designed and built by hand.

Le, 34, from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, even bought gifts for his dream girl, who is so lifelike she speaks fluent English and Japanese, helped cook the turkey and hang up decorations.

'Aiko is like any woman, she enjoys getting new clothes,' he said.