Watchdog changes rules in bid to stem rising tide of teenage pregnancies

Television ads for abortions will be allowed for the first time under the biggest shake-up of advertising rules for 50 years to be announced today.

In a move which the advertising watchdog acknowledges will offend members of the public, ads for pregnancy advisory services will be allowed in prime-time evening slots on the major channels: ITV, Channel 4, Sky and other broadcasters.

Britain's biggest independent pregnancy advisory service, whose clinicians perform abortions as well, said it would immediately consider running ads. "Absolutely," said Julie Douglas, who is head of marketing at Marie Stopes International. "I don't know if we could afford to do it in prime-time TV, but it would be a very interesting thing to do."

LONDON: Tempers are flaring across Europe as the economic pain deepens and more people lose their jobs.

Just ask Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the ailing Royal Bank of Scotland, whose house and car were vandalized in the early morning on Wednesday. Or Luc Rousselet, the manager of a 3M factory in France, who was barricaded in an office for a second day by workers demanding better severance packages for 110 employees being laid off.

While such instances are scattered so far, the angry mood threatens to overshadow the Group of 20 summit meeting in London next week, where world leaders hope to find approaches to the financial crisis.

Several protests are planned in the City, the financial center of London, and the police are warning financial institutions to beef up security, to cancel unnecessary meetings and to keep employees inside. Bankers are being advised to wear "casual clothing" so as not to attract attention.

MOSCOW: The Georgian authorities Wednesday made public surveillance video in which a political activist associated with the opposition leader Nino Burjanadze said Ms. Burjanadze and her followers were hoping that violent clashes with the authorities would force President Mikheil Saakashvili from office.

Ms. Burjanadze denied the allegation, saying the government had produced compromising material to discredit her. But the film -- the third such exposé in three days -- hit the Georgian airwaves immediately, sparking debate over its authenticity and, in some quarters, casting a shadow over the opposition.

"All my friends are divided now," said Tamar Otarashvili, 21, a university student. "The videos are a stimulus to those who are against the government. And those who are with the government started supporting it even more."

BERLIN: It may be that Poland never had a serious chance at winning NATO's top political job, but that has not stopped Poles from sensing another snub from their big European neighbors to the West, analysts and officials in Europe say.

Poland's long-shot bid to secure the post of secretary general of NATO for its foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, diminished even further this week when the United States threw its support behind Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister. Mr. Rasmussen may or may not survive a challenge to his candidacy from Turkey, but if his prospects fall through, Mr. Sikorski, aged 46, does not even appear to be next on the list.

Rightly or wrongly, this rankles Poland, the largest East European member of NATO and the European Union and a nation that longs to exert an influence reflecting its size. As a result, standing in line and waiting for major international appointments has become a sore point for Poland's political class, which believes it has supported the United States and its European neighbors in some major initiatives but reaped little in return.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The presidents of both the European Commission and the European Parliament on Wednesday (25 March) urged the Czech Republic to proceed with the ratification of the EU's Lisbon Treaty despite the fall of the Czech government the day before, while Czech deputy premier Alexandr Vondra admitted the ratification would now become "more difficult."

Mr Topolanek's government was voted down on Tuesday (24 March)

"I would like to urge all political leaders not to use this political crisis in a way to make the Lisbon Treaty hostage to domestic problems. That would not be fair to the other countries of Europe," Mr Barroso said at a press conference in Strasbourg.

His comments came just a few hours after the centre-right Czech government of Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek lost a no-confidence motion by a single vote on Tuesday night.

The most likely scenario however is that the current government will remain in place until the end of the Czech EU presidency in June.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Anheuser-Busch, the American brewing giant bought last year by Belgian brewer Inbev, has lost its appeal with the European Court of First Instance to trademark the name `Budweiser' across the European Union.

The firm first attempted to register the lager brand in the EU in 1996, a move opposed by Czech brewing firm Budejovicky Budvar, whose own Budweiser Budvar had been registered in Austria, France and the former Czechoslovakia in 1958.

Bottles of US beer 'Bud' and Czech beer 'Budweiser Budvar'

The European trade mark office, OHIM, backed the Czech firm. Anheuser-Busch unsuccessfully appealed the OHIM decision in 2007, which found that the trade mark applied for was identical to Budvar's brand, protected in particular in Germany and Austria.

Anheuser-Busch then brought the case before the Court of First Instance.

Romania is set to receive a nearly 20 billion euro ($27 billion) aid package cobbled together by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the European Union to help it weather the ongoing financial crisis. 

"We have successfully concluded negotiations on a multilateral support package including the IMF, the EU, the World Bank and other international organizations," said Jeffrey Franks, head of the IMF mission, at the end of negotiations Wednesday.

The IMF will make 12.95 billion euros available in a two-year standby credit, Franks said.

The IMF acknowledged the bleak economic prospects for Romania, already one of the EU's poorest countries in per capita terms, but said aid would limit the impact of the global financial crisis.

"In (the) current world economic environment ... the financing gap has opened up," Franks told reporters. "With international support, the adjustment will be cushioned and we are hoping to avoid the worst and have a gradual adjustment over time."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said success in Afghanistan is critical for the future of NATO, ahead of a historic summit for the transatlantic alliance. That would mean rethinking strategy altogether, she said.  

"Afghanistan is NATO's biggest test at present," Merkel told the German parliament on Thursday, March 26, just over a week before Germany and France co-host a historic NATO summit marking the 60th anniversary of the military and strategic alliance.

"For me our aim remains clear ... that Afghanistan no longer poses a terrorist threat to our security, in other words in NATO member countries," Merkel said.

Success in Afghanistan and elsewhere will require a rethinking of NATO's strategic concept, she said.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - With MEPs and European Union member states just inches away from clinching a deal on a sweeping revision of EU telecommunications rules, one major issue remains the sticking point: whether the flow of information on the internet will remain neutral or be split, with some data being privileged over other data.

Supporters of net neutrality say that the EU is heading towards a two-tiered internet

Internet innovators, from Google to Skype to web-based start-ups are afraid that in the rush to get a deal on a telecoms package through the European institutions before the June parliamentary elections, so-called net neutrality is being left by the wayside.

Currently, wherever data comes from, whether from a silver-surfing Latvian granny blogging about her favourite traditional recipes or a multinational corporate content provider, the packets of information are treated equally, or neutrally, hence `net neutrality'.

Amendments to a proposal on the minimum levels of service provision by network operators backed by some centre-right MEPs however would permit telecoms companies and internet service providers to block or degrade some of the data passing through its lines while privileging other data.

PARIS: The European Union's crisis of leadership during this severe economic downturn was thrown into sharp relief on Wednesday, as the prime minister of the country that holds the rotating presidency lambasted President Barack Obama's emergency stimulus package as "a way to hell" that will "undermine the stability of the global financial market."

The blunt comments of the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, coming just a week before a crucial meeting of the Group of 20 that is supposed to show leaders coming together to cope with the crisis, were greeted with embarrassment by many Europeans, who believe that the Czechs do not represent the consensus in the European Union in any case.

What made the situation even more absurd was that Mr. Topolanek lost his parliamentary majority in the Czech Republic on Tuesday, with his new lame-duck status further weakening Prague's European presidency. Adding to the awkwardness, Mr. Topolanek will host Mr. Obama in Prague a few days after the G-20 meeting, at a United States-European Union summit.

So the old question of who speaks for Europe and when, especially in a crisis, has again become more acute, especially with persistent internal strains between more prosperous West European countries, which use the euro, and newer members in Central and Eastern Europe, which do not.

Police are to investigate whether an MI5 officer was complicit in the torture of ex-Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.

The Attorney General, Baroness Scotland QC, said the probe would be "the appropriate course of action".

Mr Mohamed, 30, a UK resident, said MI5 had prolonged his detention and torture while he was being held in Morocco.

The MI5 agent who questioned him has denied threatening or putting any pressure on Mr Mohamed.

President Obama is finally to make the appointment - five months after his election - in the guise of Mr Susman, a 71-year-old investment banker and donor to the Democratic Party.

Mr Susman will officially carry the title of Ambassador to the Court of St James's.

"He has got the necessary clearances now and I would expect an announcement within the next week or so," says my man in Washington.

The appointment of a 'crony' of the President rather than a diplomatic high-flyer will be a disappointment for Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, who has already had to come to terms with the fact Britain now only has a "special partnership" with America rather than a "special relationship".

Expats police storied streets for discarded waste but residents prove mostly indifferent

... These men and women belong to an army of environmentalists who have made it their job to rid Paris' legendary monuments and streets of cigarette butts, food scraps, dog droppings and a host of other indignities. But most of the volunteers are not in fact French -- they're Japanese.

Greenbird Paris is the first overseas wing of a Tokyo-based nonprofit organization that has spread its antipollution message in Japanese neighborhoods since 2003. The Paris group debuted in March 2007 to clean up a city that has long been a favorite tourist destination for the Japanese. <...>

Alexandre Atwan, who owns a boutique inside the Palais des Congres, said the Greenbirds set a good example and lamented the days of more pristine pavements.

"The Champs Elysees, 23 years ago, was one of the most beautiful avenues in Paris -- there was no other street like it. Today, it attracts all the scum who believe that you must be dirty to be fashionable," Atwan said, as he threw his cigarette butt on the ground.

"I'll pick it up, it's just a joke," he quickly added, sheepishly. He never did.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has dismissed an EU-Ukraine gas deal as "unprofessional", saying Russia - the main supplier - had not been consulted.

"If Russia's interests are ignored, then we shall also be forced to start reconsidering the principles of our relations with partners," he warned.

On Monday, Ukraine signed a deal paving the way for $3.4bn (£2.4bn) of Western investment in its gas infrastructure.

Ukraine's president pledged to stamp out corruption in the gas industry.

The agreement comes after a price dispute between Ukraine and Russia in January led to a shutdown of gas supplies to much of Europe for weeks, causing severe shortages for millions.

Spain will launch a fresh round of government spending to pull its economy out of recession if another stimulus is needed later this year, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, prime minister, said on Thursday.

In an interview with the Financial Times and other newspapers, Mr Zapatero said he would back a fresh round of European spending focused on renewable energy and biotechnology.

He acknowledged that such a fiscal stimulus would have to be better co-ordinated, more modest and more focused than the previously announced stimulus packages that are draining the coffers of most of the world's big economies.

The relative resilience of consumer spending across much of continental Europe is a striking feature of the recession, the worst since the second world war. While gauges of eurozone manufacturing activity, such as purchasing managers' indices, have fallen precipitously a result of collapsing export demand, the woe seems to be weighing less heavily on consumers in the 16-country region.

Germany's GfK research institute said on Thursday its consumer confidence index, which has held steady in recent months, would dip only slightly in April. Given the economic turmoil, the mood remained "robust", it said. In France, the Insee statistics office reported French consumer confidence was stable in March, albeit at a low level. In its otherwise gloomy outlook, which sees the French economy contracting by 2.9 per cent in the first half of this year, Insee expects household consumption to rise by 0.2 per cent in the first three months of this year and by 0.1 per cent in the second quarter.

A special investigator for the Council of Europe testified before a German parliament committee that the NATO countries must have known about the secret CIA rendition flights used by the US in the War on Terror. 

NATO countries, including Germany, were aware early on that the United States was conducting secret rendition flights of terror suspects for possible torture following the attacks of September 11, 2001, says Dick Marty, who has been heading up an investigation into the flights on behalf of the Council of Europe.

Marty was speaking on Thursday before a special committee of the German parliament, set up to investigate the involvement of the German federal intelligence service (BND) in America's War on Terror.

The Swiss MP said that it was "absolutely incredible" that European governments had no knowledge of the activities carried out by the CIA prior to 2005.

He also finds it hard to believe that Germany could have been isolated from these activities.

Hundreds of Russian banks are likely to go under by the end of the year as the amount of bad loans surges, potentially hitting as much as 20 per cent of credit portfolios, a senior Russian banker has warned.

Pyotr Aven, president of Alfa Bank, one of Russia's largest private banks, called on the government to move swiftly to recapitalise the top 30 banks and name the institutions that will receive assistance to help kick-start the flow of credit, which has almost dried up amid growing fears over bad loans.

"We can expect that the level of overdue loans for the whole system might reach 15-20 per cent" by the end of the year, Mr Aven told the Financial Times. "Maybe the 20-30 biggest banks, including Alfa, will receive state support - we're sure.

"But the future of hundreds of small banks is under big question ... believe that hundreds of banks will disappear by the end of the year."

Lucas Papademos, ECB vice-president, heightened expectations that the central bank could soon start buying assets outright after noting in Brussels on Thursday that purchases of private debt securities could "reduce the cost of funding of the real economy, thus helping its recovery".
...
A distinct possibility is that the ECB will next week extend the maximum maturity of the funds it lends from the current six months - perhaps to nine or 12 months.

More indicative of the way the debate is going will be what happens to its "deposit facility" interest rate, paid on sums deposited at the ECB overnight, and set at 100 basis points below the main policy rate.
...
Even worse for some, would be buying government bonds - which would blur the boundaries between central banks and governments and thus threaten the ECB's cherished independence.

http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Germany/Price-History

From "Georgist" point of view, this is fantastic reading; it seems, that there is no housing bubble in Germany! Rents have been stable for 20 years and prices of houses have actually decreased during the same period. According to georgist theory business cycle is caused by the "land" bubble, which "locks up" the principal resource of the economy. If this is true, no such thing has happened in Germany. Perhaps we may soon hear some positive news from there.

Members of the European Parliament postponed, on March 17, the approving of the Council's administrative spending for the year 2007. Members of the Budgetary Control Committee claimed that the spending had become increasingly operational and therefore the Parliament should have scrutiny over the Council budget. Moreover, the Council has refused to give the committee more detailed facts. "The vote to postpone `granting discharge' was to show that MEPs took this issue very seriously but also to give Council the opportunity to deliver the information requested before the April plenary session, when the full House will vote on budget discharges for the EU institutions and agencies," said Søren Søndergaard, rapporteur for this issue. The Budgetary Control Committee decided to postpone granting discharge to other bodies also, for instance the Police College, mainly because of the lack of appropriate information as was the case for the Council. However, the Commission and other institutions and agencies got the approval of the EP.

The story, in short, is this. By virtue of having made it to the grand age of 80, Jean Marie Le Pen is likely to be the oldest member of the incoming European parliament. Under existing parliamentary rules, he would therefore be asked to chair its inaugural session. Le Pen's function would be essentially ceremonial. He will perform the role for the briefest of moments: until the assembly's president or speaker is decided. The whole business is, a little bit of flummery: a method of honouring a veteran parliamentarian.

For that reason, a coalition of anti-fascists in the European parliament has emerged, who are determined that this accolade is not bestowed on Le Pen. To deprive him of his five minutes of glory, they want to change the parliamentary rules. According to the European parliamentary Labour party, however, the move is being blocked by Graham Watson, the Liberal Democrat MEP and leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in the European parliament.

I've spoken to Graham Watson. His view is reasonable enough. Essentially, what he says is that to fuss about Le Pen's five minutes in the sun is to give the man publicity that he does not deserve. Moreover, he points out, it is easy enough to stop Le Pen: just put up an older "dinosaur" for election.

Allied Irish Banks was revealed as the victim of a £56 million alleged fraud today as the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it had raided three addresses in Central London as part of a formal investigation.

Other financial institutions had also been deceived by the suspects, the SFO said, raising the prospect that the alleged fraud was even larger.

The main suspect, who operated with the assistance of others, controlled companies provided with loans from Allied Irish Banks between 2003 and 2007. It turned out that supposed guarantees from a blue chip property company supporting the loans were fraudulent, the SFO said.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Central Bank gave its strongest indication to date on Thursday (26 March) that it is ready to step in and help European businesses that are struggling from a shortage of credit and are unable to get bank loans to finance their activities.

ECB Vice-president Lucas Papademos said the bank was actively considering a programme to start buying European corporate debt in a bid to get the market flowing again.

Guenter Verheugen (r) says more and more companies are coming to him with complaints of credit shortages

"It may be warranted that the central bank purchases private sector bonds in the secondary market in order to enhance its liquidity," said Mr Papademos.

Such a move, known as quantitative easing, would help SMEs and larger European companies who are currently finding it difficult to fund further investment.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has blasted Germany's Peer Steinbrück for his resistance to economic stimulus spending. Now the "boneheaded," "know-nothing" finance minister has sent Krugman an invitation to come to Berlin to discuss their differences.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is used to addressing large audiences, whether in the lecture halls of Princeton University or from his prominent perch as a columnist at the New York Times. But, Krugman will soon receive an request to speak before an audience of one. Earlier this week, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück sent an official invitation to Krugman to meet with him in Berlin to discuss their differences on the financial crisis.

 Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück wants to chat with Paul Krugman It won't be the first time the two men have corresponded -- though until now, the communication has been one-sided and consisted mainly of Krugman making disparaging remarks about Steinbrück via his column and blog. Indeed, Krugman has repeatedly emphasized his belief that deficit spending is among the few bulwarks against a reprise of the Great Depression and he hasn't shied from pillorying those with a cooler attitude towards stimulus.

The French government is to issue a decree banning bonuses and share options for executives of banks that have received government aid.

Presidential official Claude Gueant said the decree would be adopted next week as employers refused to draw up their own code of conduct.

Bonuses to executives of troubled banks have caused anger across the world.

US lawmakers have voted for a 90% tax on big bonuses to employees of banks that have taken government funds.

"A decree will be issued next week to set conditions under which the distribution of stock options or other advantages like bonuses is forbidden for companies that have benefitted from state aid," said Mr Gueant.

"Capitalism is there to enrich all the population and not just the bosses," he added.

GORDON Brown's campaign for a G20 agreement committing governments around the world to spend up on recession-busting fiscal stimulus packages has been undermined by an embarrassing warning that Mr Brown's own Government cannot afford to follow his advice.

Mervyn King, Bank of England governor, yesterday warned against increasing debt by spending more on stimulus packages.

The warning from Britain's top central banker came as Mr Brown was in Strasbourg addressing the EU parliament before travelling on to New York, Brazil and Chile and then hosting next week's G20 summit in London.

Mr Brown has already loosened his Government's purse strings in response to the recession but has backed US President Barack Obama's calls for further co-ordinated stimulus spending around the world, saying that the impact would be much greater if many governments injected new funds at the same time.

LONDON (Reuters) - The global financial crisis and collapse in the oil market have stalled vital investment in oil exploration and production and are likely soon to lead to a sharp spike in prices, an energy consultant and financier says.

Matt Simmons, founder of Houston-based investment bank Simmons & Co, argues the underlying rate of decline of the world's ageing oilfields is as much as 20 percent a year and only high levels of investment can reduce that to single digits.

With credit tight and oil prices almost $100 (68.75 pounds) a barrel below their highs last year, oil companies are unable to sustain previous levels of spending and the result is falling production, he said in an interview on Thursday.

"We are three, six, maybe nine months away from a price shock. We are not talking about three to five years away -- it will be much sooner," Simmons told Reuters in London.

The Obama administration wants to force a wide range of large financial institutions to hold more capital as part of a sweeping regulatory overhaul that Tim Geithner, US Treasury secretary, yesterday called the "new rules of the game".

Mr Geithner told Congress that the US needed a fresh approach to regulating risk that identified problems across the financial system as a whole if it were to prevent a repeat of the current financial crisis.

The heaviest demands would be placed on institutions deemed to be systemically important - ranging from large banks to insurance companies, financial groups such GE Capital and, potentially, hedge funds of sufficient size. But regulations would also be tightened for an even broader range of institutions and products, including over-the-counter derivatives.

At the time, it became pretty evident that OTP was subject to an attack by speculators (with the suspected intent of enabling a takeover). Financial oversight authorities announced an investigation, but kept details secret.

Today, it was announced that Soros Fund Management LLC was fined 500,000,000 Forints (€1.66 million) for illegal market manipulation, a record for the oversight authority. The Soros Fund conducted the short-selling electronically from London, as explicitely proven by a taped telephone call of the broker. Te profit was $675,000.

Soros himself says that, having retired from active trading in the fund, he did not order this and is very sorry about it, but will initiate an internal investigation.

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

A university professor who warned that bankers could be "hanging from lampposts" during G20 protests next week has been suspended from his job.

Chris Knight, of the University of East London, told BBC Radio 4 things "could get nasty" after ex-bank boss Sir Fred Goodwin's Edinburgh home was attacked.

The university confirmed in a statement the professor of anthropology had been suspended from duties on Thursday.

An investigation was being launched into his comments, it said.

The statement read: "Professor Chris Knight has been suspended from his duties at the University of East London, pending investigation.

For the Fed's potential $1 trillion exposure to private credit risk through the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, for instance, the Treasury only guarantees $100 billion. They call it 10 times leverage. I call it the Fed being potentially in the hole for $900 billion. Similar credit risk exposures have been assumed by the Fed in the commercial paper market, in its purchases of Fannie and Freddie mortgages, in the rescue of AIG, and in a host of other quasi-fiscal rescue operations mounted by the Fed and by the Fed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the US Treasury jointly.

I consider this use of the Federal Reserve as an active (quasi-)fiscal player to be extremely dangerous and highly undesirable from the point of view of the health of the democratic system of government in the US.

There are two reasons for this. First, it undermines the independence of the Fed and turns it into an off-budget and off-balance sheet special purpose vehicle of the US Treasury. Second, it undermines the accountability of the Executive branch of the US Federal government for the use of public resources - taxpayers' money.

Switzerland's private banks have started to ban their top executives from travelling abroad, even to neighbouring France and Germany, because of fears they will be detained as part of a global crackdown on bank secrecy.

The head of one leading private bank in Geneva said the growing determination of countries such as the US and Germany to tackle tax evasion and secrecy meant banks felt they had to take extra measures to protect employees.

"Some banks have taken this precaution," he said. "If today I go to Germany to visit two banks I deal with...German customs can take me in and question me."

World leaders should give urgent attention to reaching consensus on creating a global reserve system that would replace the US dollar as the main international currency, the United Nations General Assembly was told on Thursday.

The recommendation, by an advisory committee set up by the 192-member world body, followed China's proposal for an extension of the use of special drawing rights (SDRs) created by the International Monetary Fund and the eventual replacement of the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

Russia weighed into the growing debate by proposing a conference of government representatives and experts aimed at drafting international agreements on a new global monetary and financial architecture.
...
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prizewinning US economist who chairs the UN advisory committee, said reform of the global reserve system was long overdue. In the context of the present financial crisis, the dollar-based system meant that poor countries were lending to rich countries at virtually zero interest rates rather than using reserves to stimulate their own economies.

He told the General Assembly that financial instability had obliged developing countries to accumulate dollar reserves to protect against a rainy day. The consequence, however, was to tie up trillions of dollars that could be spent on helping them combat the worst effects of the financial crisis.

"The current system contributes to global instability, it contributes to the insufficiency of global aggregate demand," Mr Stiglitz said.

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government--a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.
...
The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight--a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent. Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world's most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

Paul Krugman sounding increasingly like Chris Cook

Much discussion of the toxic-asset plan has focused on the details and the arithmetic, and rightly so. Beyond that, however, what's striking is the vision expressed both in the content of the financial plan and in statements by administration officials. In essence, the administration seems to believe that once investors calm down, securitization -- and the business of finance -- can resume where it left off a year or two ago.

To be fair, officials are calling for more regulation. Indeed, on Thursday Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, laid out plans for enhanced regulation that would have been considered radical not long ago.

But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules.

As you can guess, I don't share that vision. I don't think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don't think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don't believe it should try.

Apparently visit to Brazil has excedeed Brown's expectations on the eve of "spicy" G20 summit.

Better than any other sociologist, Sudhir Venkatesh understands the economics of underground workers. What should we do about them?

You may think the economic meltdown is hitting bankers and Realtors hard, but spare a thought for members of the underground economy--prostitutes, drug dealers and purveyors of stolen goods, to name just a few participants. That's what sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh does, having spent much of the last 15 years studying, and sometimes living within, the underground economies of New York and Chicago.

"The recession is engendering more violence," says Venkatesh, a professor at Columbia University. "There's far greater competition for whatever meager resources there are. The folks down on Wall Street peddling drugs, they're fighting. The sex workers are trying as hard as they can to retain their clients," he says

Venkatesh is struck by how much the black market resembles the wider society in which it is enmeshed. In the same Parisian banlieues that erupted in riots in 2005, he observed an "almost aristocratic," highly centralized criminal operation. In the ghettos of Chicago, by contrast, he observed underground workers convene an ad hoc court to solve a dispute. His dismisses the "culture of poverty" theory, which suggests that poor blacks in America don't work because they don't value employment. "People in America want to work," he says. They do so ever so industriously, even when they're breaking the law.

The market mystique didn't always rule financial policy. America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business. Banks attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two; they used the money thus attracted to make loans, and that was that.

And the financial system wasn't just boring. It was also, by today's standards, small. Even during the "go-go years," the bull market of the 1960s, finance and insurance together accounted for less than 4 percent of G.D.P. The relative unimportance of finance was reflected in the list of stocks making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which until 1982 contained not a single financial company.

House prices are falling even faster than before in England and Wales, according to the Land Registry.

Prices dropped by another 2% in February, pushing the annual rate of decline from 15.1% to 16.5%.

It means the average property is now worth £153,862, down by £30,361 in the past year, and back to the level last seen in September 2004.

Thousands of Punjab farmers suffer as river Chenab runs dry

Crucial, coveted and increasingly scarce, water has become the latest issue to stoke tensions between India and Pakistan, with farmers in Pakistan's breadbasket accusing Delhi of reducing one of the subcontinent's most important rivers to little more than a trickle.

A group of more than 20 different UN bodies warned earlier this month that the world may be perilously close to its first water war. "Water is linked to the crises of climate change, energy and food supplies and prices, and troubled financial markets," said the report. "Unless their links with water are addressed and water crises around the world are resolved, these other crises may intensify and local water crises may worsen, converging into a global water crisis and leading to political insecurity and conflict at various levels."

The crisis in the agricultural heartland of Pakistan relates to the Chenab, one of a series of waterways that bisect the Punjab, which means 'five rivers'. The Chenab is fed with glacial meltwaters from the Himalayas and for centuries has provided crucial irrigation for the region. But last summer farmers began to notice the levels of both the river and groundwater begin to fall.

Paris, March 19. 2009 - The fog around NATO's future deepens as the treaty organization approaches its 60th anniversary. Judy Dempsey, central European expert for the International Herald Tribune, reports that the United States has all but concluded that it is time for the American commend in Afghanistan to take over complete control of the (illogically) divided dual western force in Afghanistan, part NATO and part American (the latter Operation "Enduring Freedom," according to the grotesque names the Pentagon has long chosen to assign operations which once were given such human-scale titles as "Anvil," "Torch," etc.)

The dual force is the result of the initial failure to get NATO seriously involved in Afghanistan. In the accepted if informal Allied scheme of things the U.S. is supposed to wage wars for freedom, and the Europeans clean up the smashed crockery and build schools and democratic institutions.

In Afghanistan, while the bureaucratically indivisible attention of Washington was on Iraq, the Taliban came back into Afghanistan, and the NATO units there had to react.

So they did, but in a predictably riven way, with the separate governments involved placing their own units under different mission-definitions and operational limitations. Some, like the Canadians, fought; others went on building schools. The American forces present were mainly separated geographically from where NATO was operating, and were in gung-ho, if unsuccessful, pursuit of Osama bin-Laden and what Donald Rumsfeld used to call the Bad People.

The UN Secretary-General bowed to American pressure yesterday and named a former US ambassador to a key role in Afghanistan.

Peter Galbraith, son of the late economist J.K. Galbraith, became the UN's second-in-command in Afghanistan, despite the protests from the man who will now be his boss. The appointment strengthens US influence over the UN operation in Afghanistan as the Obama Administration is about to reveal its new strategy to win the war against the resurgent Taleban.

Mr Obama is planning a "civilian surge" of hundreds of US diplomats and aid workers alongside the injection of 17,000 more US troops. In his new post Mr Galbraith will be responsible for political issues, including election and parliamentary matters, security sector reform, peace and stability and human rights, the UN said. He replaces Christopher Alexander, a former Canadian Ambassador to Kabul.

Mr Galbraith is a long-time ally of Richard Holbrooke, Mr Obama's assertive new troubleshooter for Afghanistan and Pakistan - or AfPak, as it is becoming known.

FRESNO, Calif.: As the operations manager of a outreach center for the homeless here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.

"They just popped up about 18 months ago," Mr. Stack said. "One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there."

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was "not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours."

While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root -- or grown from smaller enclaves of the homeless as more people lose jobs and housing -- in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.

PARIS: Officials from 35 nations began voting Thursday for a successor to Mohamed ElBaradei as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a watchdog body that plays a central role in monitoring and investigating charges of illicit nuclear proliferation and promoting atomic energy for peaceful purposes.

But an initial three rounds of voting failed to deliver a decisive winner and the balloting will continue Friday, news reports said.

The post, held by Mr. ElBaradei, 66, since 1997 when he took over from Hans Blix of Sweden, carries a high-voltage political charge at a time when the Obama administration is seeking to coax Iran into talks over its contentious enrichment program and the IAEA itself is investigating whether Syria has sought to build a covert nuclear capability.

Only last week President Barack Obama offered a video-recorded message to Iran urging the leadership in Tehran to talk out its many differences with the United States -- an offer that was swiftly rebuffed by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other officials.

WASHINGTON - Despite United States President Barack Obama's statement at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, on February 27 that he had "chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months", a number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), which have been the basic US Army combat unit in Iraq for six years, will remain in Iraq after that date under a new non-combat label.

A spokesman for Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick S Ryder, told Inter Press Service on Tuesday that "several advisory and assistance brigades" would be part of a US command in Iraq that would be "re-designated" as a "transition force headquarters" after August 2010.

Israel's armed forces admitted on Wednesday that 189 Palestinian children under the age of 15 were killed during the assault on the Gaza Strip.

The first official figures released by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) of the casualties inflicted by the three-week campaign found that a total of 309 Palestinian civilians were killed. But the IDF said that armed fighters from Hamas and other militant movements accounted for most of the 1,370 dead.

The survey was disclosed as Benjamin Netanyahu, the incoming prime minister, presented himself as a peacemaker and assured Palestinians that his government would be their "partner". One day after enlisting the Labour Party into a broad coalition, embracing Left and Right, Mr Netanyahu focused on his plans to help the Palestinian economy.

Beijing has reacted angrily to a Pentagon report on China's military power, which claimed it was altering the military balance in Asia.

A foreign ministry spokesman called it a "gross distortion of the facts", and urged an end to "Cold War thinking".

In its annual report to Congress, the Pentagon said China was developing "disruptive" technologies for nuclear, space and cyber warfare.

It could be used to enforce claims over disputed territories, the report said.

Beijing was again criticised for a lack of transparency in reporting military spending and security policy.

The number of chronically hungry people has surpassed the 1bn mark for the first time as the economic crisis compounds the impact of high food prices, the United Nations' top agriculture official has warned.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, warned that the increasing numbers of undernourished people could trigger political instability in developing countries.

"The issue of world food security is an issue of peace and national security," he said, urging world leaders who are discussing ways to resolve the economic crisis not to forget that last year more than 30 countries suffered food riots.

The Rome-based organisation estimated last year that about 960m people were chronically hungry in 2008. Mr Diouf said that had since risen and "unfortunately, we are already quoting a number of 1bn people on average for this year".

The latest cartoon by the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the world has raised the ire of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism.

The ADL's director called the syndicated cartoon, published Wednesday and reprinted below, "hideously anti-Semitic."

"Pat Oliphant's outlandish and offensive use of the Star of David in combination with Nazi-like imagery is hideously anti-Semitic," Abraham Foxman said in a statement released Wednesday. "It employs Nazi imagery by portraying Israel as a jack-booted, goose-stepping headless apparition. The implication is of an Israeli policy without a head or a heart."

As of late Wednesday, Oliphant had not responded publicly to the ADL's criticism of the cartoon.

Two psychics from Wales have been awarded £4,500 of government funding to teach people how to 'communicate with the dead'.

Paul and Deborah Rees, who are both self-styled mediums, have been awarded the cash under the Government's Want2Work job creation scheme.

The couple, from Bridgend, south Wales, will use it to instruct people on how to contact friends and relatives "on the other side".

The Russian government has announced a ban on the hunting of harp seals younger than 1 year old.

Following a statement by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that it is "such a bloody hunt, and it is clear that it should have been banned a long time ago," the Russian Federal Fisheries Agency updated a ruling from last month, which banned hunting seals younger than a month old, to instead ban the hunting of seals under 1 year of age.

"This bloody seal slaughter, the killing of defenseless animals, which can't even be called a 'hunt,' is now prohibited in Russia as it is in most developed countries," said Yuri Trutnev, Russia's Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology. "It is a serious step toward the conservation of biodiversity in Russia."

Apologies if this has already been posted.  I searched and didn't see that it had.

"Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms." -Dostoevsky

Apparently, America is a country full of potheads. That would be the assumption if you took a look at the questions submitted by internet users for Barack Obama's town hall meeting today.

The four most popular questions under the category of "financial stability" sent to the White House's website were marijuana-related.

One of the world's most prestigious medical journals, the Lancet, has accused Pope Benedict XVI of distorting science in his remarks on condom use.

It said the Pope's recent comments that condoms exacerbated the problem of HIV/Aids were wildly inaccurate and could have devastating consequences.

The Pope had said the "cruel epidemic" should be tackled through abstinence and fidelity rather than condom use.

Correspondents say the attack from the Lancet was unprecedentedly virulent.

Mars Climate Orbiter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mars Climate Orbiter (formerly the Mars Surveyor '98 Orbiter) was one of two spacecraft in the Mars Surveyor '98 program, the other being the Mars Polar Lander (formerly the Mars Surveyor '98 Lander). <...>

The Mars Climate Orbiter was intended to enter orbit at an altitude of 140-150 km above Mars. However, a navigation error caused the spacecraft to reach as low as 57 km. The spacecraft was destroyed by atmospheric stresses and friction at this low altitude. The navigation error arose because a NASA subcontractor (Lockheed Martin) used Imperial units (pound-seconds) instead of the metric system.

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The metric/imperial mixup

The metric/imperial mixup which destroyed the craft was caused by a software error back on Earth. The thrusters on the spacecraft which were intended to control its rate of rotation, were controlled by a computer which underestimated the effect of the thrusters by a factor of 4.45. This is the ratio between a pound force - the standard unit of force in the imperial system - and a newton, the standard unit in the metric system. The software was working in pounds force, while the spacecraft expected figures in newtons; 1 pound force equals approximately 4.45 newtons.

The software had been adapted from use on the earlier Mars Climate Orbiter, and was not adequately tested before launch. The navigation data provided by this software was also not cross-checked while in flight. The Mars Climate Orbiter thus drifted off course during its voyage and entered a much lower orbit than planned, and was destroyed by atmospheric friction.