At least 21 people have been killed in a fire at a hostel for homeless people in north-western Poland, officials say.

Another 20 were injured in the blaze in the town of Kamien Pomorski, 60km (37 miles) east of the border with Germany, which began in the middle of the night.

Many of the injuries were sustained as residents jumped from upper floors of the three-storey building.

The Constitutional Court in Moldova has ordered a recount of the country's parliamentary election results, after days of anti-government protests.

The initial count after last Sunday's election was won by Moldova's ruling Communists, with almost 50% of votes.

But opposition groups have dismissed calls for a recount, saying it is an attempt to mask election fraud.

Several thousand people are protesting in the capital Chisinau against alleged police violence earlier in the week.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday insisted the European Union show "respect" and transparency in dealings with ex-Soviet states and criticised the bloc's policies on Ukraine.

"We're not asking for or demanding anything from our Western partners, including the EU, except an understandable, transparent policy on the CIS area, a policy based on principles of complementarity and respect for the legal interests of the countries of this area," Lavrov said, referring to ex-Soviet countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Lavrov was speaking at a foreign policy conference broadcast on television and went on to criticise a new agreement between Brussels and Ukraine on helping modernise the Ukrainian gas transit network at the centre of a dispute with Moscow in January.

More than 100 people have been arrested in Nottingham over a suspected plan to target a power station.

Police said 114 men and women were arrested in Sneinton Dale on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage.

Officers said they believed those arrested were planning to protest at nearby Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.

A spokesman said "specialist equipment" had been found by officers who feared a threat to the safety of the site.

He said police thought there was a "serious threat" to the coal-fired power station, which is eight miles south-west of Nottingham.

Tempted by the promise of job opportunities back home, many Poles who migrated to Britain have packed up their lives and belongings and returned. The Polish authorities were very explicit in their efforts to persuade their compatriots to come home; we were all asked to return and help rebuild our economy, to use the skills we developed in UK. Offers were duly taken up.

But to their surprise, Polish job centres did not welcome the returning emigres warmly. In fact, there are no jobs for the returning flock.

For the past several weeks, more than 60 firemen and volunteers have been spending most of their days at the site where the archive once stood. With scoops, cranes and even their bare hands, they search through the rubble not for bodies, but for paper.

 

That is because the documented history of the entire region now lays buried under 60 tons of rock and other debris.

 

"Today we just found a document from the 11th century," said Cologne fireman Thomas Buergermann. "This is what we are doing, looking and searching for archival material, 12 hours a day every day, with the exception of Sunday."

 

Since the collapse of the archive building on March 3, workers have been present at the site. They plan to stay until the last document has been uncovered.

 

"We'll do this job until the last historical items have been found, said Johannes Feirer, Cologne's deputy fire chief. "I think that we have already recovered more than half of the historical materials," he said.

The billionaire Russian owner of London's Evening Standard was disqualified today from standing as a candidate for mayor of Sochi, in an apparent setback for President Dmitry Medvedev and his attempt to portray Russia as a modern democracy.

A court in the Black Sea resort of Sochi declared Alexander Lebedev's candidacy invalid. A judge ruled that the local election committee had acted "illegally" when it allowed the billionaire to register as a candidate last month for the mayoral elections on 26 April.

Lebedev described the decision as "insane". He blamed the ruling on the pro-Kremlin regional administration and said that officials had grown increasingly terrified that their candidate, Anatoly Pakhomov, who is backed by Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, may lose.

Sorpresi? Indignati? Difficile dirlo. La maggior parte degli italiani semplicemente non sa che durante una visita ai terremotati Berlusconi ha paragonato l'esperienza delle famiglie costrette a dormire in tenda nel clima gelido dell'Abruzzo ad una gita in campeggio.

I telegiornali passarono diplomaticamente sotto silenzio l'ultima gaffe e i quotidiani, perlopiù, seguirono il loro esempio. Il buon uomo, dopotutto, voleva solo tirare su il morale a tanta povera gente. L'unico titolo di rilievo fu quello del Manifesto: "Berlusconi gaffeur anche in Italia. Il "giorno in campeggio" fa scandalo. Ma solo all'estero". Tutto qua. Tutto normale, anche lo spettacolo del primo ministro che si agita davanti alle telecamere e le autorità riunite con un enorme casco da pompiere in testa mentre saluta un'anziana signora rimasta senza casa. Siamo assuefatti.

When you start to list the building blocks that are missing in the construction of Europe, the lack of a common social approach is certainly one that springs most readily to mind - at least, in France. The recent publication by Jean-Claude Barbier of La Longue marche vers l'Europe sociale [The long march towards a social Europe][1] does have the merit of clarifying and amplifying the actual terms that I used in my first sentence. What do we actually mean when we speak of a "social Europe" and why is it that, when we speak of its place in the construction of Europe, we have to use different terminology for each of the EU countries?

It is not my purpose here to provide a complete survey of Barbier's invaluable study; my intention is rather to show how the line of inquiry that he pursues is essential for anyone who not content with mere slogans and who wishes to find ways for the European Union to extend its social dimension. It seems to me that we should make a distinction between two levels within what may be called "social Europe". There is a weak version and a strong version and each depends on the degree of interdependence and social cohesion that one might imagine to exist between European countries.

Political parties perform important roles in European societies. Parties are institutions in which citizens with similar political views organise, develop political programmes and actively participate in the political process. They are vital for democracy because parties offer the most clear-cut political choices that are put to the electorate. Parties are also recruitment organisations, through which parliamentarians and members of government are sourced. Even though the latter functions are important, the general effectiveness of parties is closely linked to the first characteristic: their societal embeddedness - the main channel between a party and citizens. And in this respect, political parties have been declining dramatically.

The demise of political parties is not a new phenomenon. Since at least the 1980s, parties in all established European democracies have suffered massive membership losses to the point where they only retain a very limited capacity to engage citizens. The societal anchor of political parties is seriously threatened. Vernon Bogdanor wrote in 2006 that `the story of the rise and fall of the mass political party is one of the great unwritten books of our time'. So why do I pick this rather old problem up again in 2009? Not because I want to write the obituary of the mass political party but because we can now see where the development of political parties might lead us. This potential new future became apparent during the US Presidential campaign.

Europe has been a fascinating idea of peace, stability and social justice. After decades of unstable balance of power systems, disastrous conflicts and two World Wars, a new era in Europe's history began when the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was established. The idea `to create peace through integration' became a reality. Following decades of war, battlefields and deep wounds, the peace project `Europe' arose. Overcoming the fear of war and opening borders between Europe's nation states was the dream of millions of people, which came true. Through the voluntary transfer of sovereignty from nation states to a supranational institution, an integration process started which over the years has evolved further and further. From the 1950 Schuman Plan - the beginning of the integration process - to the 1958 Treaty of Rome, which laid the foundation stone of the single market, and eventually to the single currency, the `monetary non-aggression community' reached a degree of integration, which, if one pauses for a moment, is amazing.

The number of member states has expanded from the six founding states - France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands - to currently 27 member states. Core principles like peace, freedom, democracy, prosperity and social development were extended to Spain, Portugal and Greece after the fall of their dictatorships; later, after the end of the Cold War, these principles were also adopted by the former Warsaw Pact states. The eastern enlargement of the EU eventually ended the artificial division of Europe through the `Iron Curtain'. A war between the EU member states is unthinkable today.

The survey predicts that the EPP will remain the biggest group after the 4-7 June poll and the Socialist group will fall slightly.

It says the Greens/EFA group will fall from 43 members to 35 while the ALDE group will also lose seats.

The UK Independence Party, it forecasts, will perform badly as will Libertas, the anti-Lisbon treaty group.

Reaction to the study was swift, with EPP leader Joseph Daul saying,"You have to be careful with such surveys but we expect and hope that the EPP will remain the biggest and most influential group."

To understand how economies work and how we can manage them and prosper, we must pay attention to the thought patterns that animate people's ideas and feelings, their animal spirits. We will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature.

It is unfortunate that most economists and business writers apparently do not seem to appreciate this and thus often fall back on the most tortured and artificial interpretations of economic events. They assume that variations in individual feelings, impressions, and passions do not matter in the aggregate and that economic events are driven by inscrutable technical factors or erratic government action. In fact, as we shall discover in this book, the origins of these events are quite familiar and are found in our own everyday thinking.

We started work on this book in the spring of 2003. In the intervening years the world economy has moved in directions that can be understood only in terms of animal spirits. It has taken a rollercoaster ride. First there was the ascent. And then, about a year ago, the fall began. But oddly, unlike a trip at a normal amusement park, it was not until the economy began to fall that the passengers realised that they had embarked on a wild ride. And, abetted by this obliviousness, the management of this amusement park paid no heed to setting limits on how high the passengers should go. Nor did it provide for safety equipment to limit the speed, or the extent, of the subsequent fall.

Akerlof and Shiller are talking about animal spirits in a sense I'd recognise from Santayana (Scepticism and Animal Faith), though spirit designates the ideal for him. Akerlof and Shiller derive it from Keynes. I guess that it's an archaic term used more often before the second world war. As for spirit guides, my sister has divined that mine is an owl.

Cross-border research projects in Europe could be set for billions of euros in tax breaks under proposals that will be considered by European Union ministers in coming weeks.

As part of a broader plan to step up EU investment in research, Brussels is proposing to create a group of schemes called "European research infrastructure" (ERI) projects.

These would need to involve at least two member states, have legitimate research objectives, and be "non-economic" in nature.

Private investigator Michael Kessler traveled to Honduras to track down some bleach.

The bleach's manufacturer sent him to investigate how its merchandise, sold to a Central American distributor, kept showing up in U.S. stores at a higher price, cutting the maker out of the increased profit. Kessler arrived at the purchaser's address only to find a gas station selling tires and chickens running across a dirt road. No buyer. No bleach.

"That bleach did what we call a U-boat," said Kessler, president of Kessler International in New York, who declined to identify the brand. "It was shipped from the U.S. to Honduras and went right back to the U.S. again."

Sleuthing is one way consumer-goods makers such as Procter & Gamble Co. are fighting back against a growing market for trafficking genuine goods outside of official distribution channels. The practice, known as product diversion, siphons as much as $63 billion of U.S. industry sales, according to Deloitte LLP, the New York-based consulting firm.

Oil prices fell sharply on Monday to below $50 a barrel following forecasts by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that demand for crude would decline this year by 2.4 million units a day.

The IEA's latest forecast is one million barrels a day lower than last month's estimate after it cut the economic assumptions it uses to underpin its forecasts for the fourth time since October. It now expects the global economy to contract 1.4 per cent this year instead of expanding modestly.

[Murdoch Alert]

This could get interesting. The Financial Times tells us that Neil Barofsky, the special investigator general for the TARP, is looking whether banks cooked their books by overvaluing assets to qualify for TARP funding, Remember, bank had to fall into this funny construct of being sick enough to need help, but not so sick as to be terminal.

And since we are widely reading reports of banks carrying lots of mortgage paper at higher than 80 cents on the dollar (we've even seen reports of over 90 cents on the dollar being common) it would appear that Barofsky's suspicions are well founded.

So play this out: we have the public private partnerships designed to hoover up assets at well above market levels. These programs are voluntary, so the banks most decidedly will not sell assets unless they get a price that is above the current carrying value on their books. And recent research suggests that, contrary to the Treasury's claims otherwise, the current market values are likely to reflect accurately what this dreck is worth. So taxpayers are being asked to overpay substantially for junk in an opaque and unnecessarily costly subsidy...

But now Barofsky is likely to find the banks overvalued their assets to make themselves look less sick. That's tantamount to saying they defrauded the government, and that the PPIP is overpaying for assets by an even larger margin than previously thought.

The FT article is extensively quoted in the post.

Businesses have warned the recession has only just started in Northamptonshire and will get worse before it gets better. A study by Northamptonshire Chamber has revealed that the recession has hit the area "in a big way" and that the local economy faces severe threats.

The survey of more than 100 firms revealed that half of manufacturing companies had seen sales fall and more than a third had made staff redundant.

Shops, restaurants and transport firms have also seen trade halved, with a quarter making job cuts.

Chief executive Paul Griffiths said: "These results make grim reading, marking early 2009 as the true beginning of the recession in Northamptonshire.

There were many fine words about the fight against tax havens at the G-20 summit. But the reality looks very different: The OECD's new tax haven blacklist contains exactly zero entries.

The heads of state of the world's most powerful nations seemed somewhat tired, and yet extremely satisfied. On the Thursday of the week before last, after hours of negotiations, they had finally agreed to a plan for a new, cleaner global financial system.

"The era of banking secrecy is over," the official communiqué issued at the end of the G-20 summit in London concluded. From now on, the authors wrote, "non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens," can expect to face sanctions and be placed on a list of countries not in compliance with the "international standard for exchange of tax information."

Thai troops fired into the air in Bangkok and used teargas to clear protesters from the streets today as the government moved to reassert its authority amid deepening political turmoil.

Fires blazed in the street and plumes of smoke rose from burning tyres during the morning standoff between troops and protesters, with ambulances and fire engines on standby. A Buddhist monk with a megaphone stood in the intersection pleading for calm and telling the soldiers: "Don't shoot. Think about your country." Police on motorbikes shuttled between troops and demonstrators to mediate.

The first and most serious clash began between 4am and 5am as troops in full combat gear advanced to disperse the protesters. The soldiers reportedly fired hundreds of rounds from their M16 automatic rifles over the heads of the demonstrators.

At the Guns and Ammo Warehouse they are reluctant to admit Barack Obama is right about very much. But customers enjoy the thought that his controversial campaign comment, that "bitter" small-town Americans are clinging to their guns, has proved more true than the president could have imagined.

Firearms sales have surged in the six months since Obama's election as millions of Americans have gone on a buying spree that has stripped gun shops in some parts of the country almost bare of assault weapons and led to a national ammunition shortage.

The FBI says that since November more than seven million people applied for criminal background checks in order to buy weapons, a figure excluding the many more buying at thousands of gun shows in states such as Virginia, without facing any checks.

WASHINGTON, Apr 11 (IPS) - If the past week was any indication, the U.S.-Israeli relationship, which could scarcely have been smoother during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush, appears headed for choppy waters.

Since taking office 10 days ago, the new government headed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been slapped down - at least, rhetorically - by the two most senior members of the Barack Obama administration, including the president himself.

Other steps taken by the administration in the past week, particularly its vow to participate fully in multilateral talks with Iran on its nuclear programme "from now on", have bolstered the notion that Washington under Obama no longer sees eye to eye with the Jewish State, and especially its new right-wing leadership.

The latest developments come as the administration has given top priority to redressing the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, increasingly referred to as "AfPak", as part of an ambitious strategy whose ultimate goal is to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al Qaeda. Planning for the new strategy was overseen by Bruce Riedel, a former top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst on Middle and South Asia, who has long insisted that resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would go a long way toward reducing al Qaeda's appeal throughout the region.

BAGHDAD -- The Iraqi military put local journalists on notice on Monday that their organizations could be shut down for misquoting officials, while the Iraqi government accused the news media of deliberately seeking to promote sectarian strife.

The top military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said he was filing a lawsuit seeking to close the Baghdad offices of the newspaper Al Hayat, one of the most prominent in the Arab world, as well as Al Sharqiya television, a popular Iraqi satellite channel that has been a strong critic of the government. The lawsuit was announced on the Web site of the Baghdad Operations Command, which coordinates Iraqi security forces in the capital.

The National Media Center of the Council of Ministers on Monday criticized local, Arab and international news media for recent reports about government arrests of Awakening Council members, also called Sons of Iraq. "These attempts by some media to depict wanted persons as heroes targeted by security forces provoke hateful sectarian strife in order to damage Iraqi unity," the government statement said, adding that such reports "make us wonder about the true goals of these campaigns and the groups behind them."

General Atta claimed that the two media outlets falsely quoted him as reporting that the government would re-arrest detainees released by the Americans, and would distribute pictures of them to military and police checkpoints. "I haven't spoken to Al Hayat in six months," he said. Al Sharqiya apparently picked up the Al Hayat report.

President Obama will announce today that he is lifting travel restrictions that block Cuban Americans from traveling to Cuba and will relax the rules governing what items can be sent to the island, a senior White House official said.

The decision does not lift the trade embargo on communist Cuba but eases the prohibitions that have restricted Cuban Americans from visiting their relatives and has limited what they can send back home.

Sri Lanka's security forces have begun a two-day suspension of military operations against the Tamil Tiger rebels, intended to allow tens of thousands of trapped civilians to flee to safety.

Beginning on Monday, Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Sri Lankan president, ordered his forces to suspend offensive operations during Sri Lanka's New Year celebrations.

Udaya Nanayakkara, a military spokesman, said: "We have not fired and we have not received any fire so far from the other side."

But he also said that government troops had not reported any civilians leaving the remaining Tamil held territory since the lull in fighting began.

Rajapakse ordered the suspension in fighting after intense international pressure, including repeated calls from the United Nations and the US and protests held in cities across Europe.

_{aspiring to genteel poverty}

An overwhelming majority of 87 percent of French consumers are opposed to an EU scheme to allow a blend of red and white wines to be sold as rose, according to a poll to be published Sunday.

The poll found the rejection was across the board, with no difference between men and women or people living in the countryside or the Paris region.

But the older age group was the most vehemently against the proposal, with 95 percent of people polled aged over 65 saying they were opposed, against only 71 percent in the 18-24 age range.

Contemporary novelists are so busy writing about the past, they're neglecting the times they live in. It's time to get real, argues Amanda Craig

When the star of The Wire,Dominic West,recently attacked Cranford-style adaptations of classic English novels by the BBC on its Today programme earlier this month, there was a collective sigh of relief. Not everyone is going to find The Wire as easy to watch as Cranford, and yet - how bored we are with bonnets and bustles!

This nostalgia-fest, which would be met with scornful laughter in art, or architecture, or theatre, is also rampant in literature. My latest novel is being published in the same month as AS Byatt, Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters. All of these are very fine writers, and all, it so happens, have written period novels. Anyone who is interested in Tudor England, in Victorian England or in post-War England will probably be buying them, and all are pretty much guaranteed places on the bestseller charts and prize shortlists. Whereas I have set out to take the DNA of a Victorian novel - its spirit of realism, its strong plot, its cast of characters who are not passively shaped by circumstances but who rise to challenges or escape them - to write a big London novel about immigrants, legal and illegal, that is so up-to-the minute that journalists are asking me, a little suspiciously, how I knew the crash was coming.

A Cambridgeshire council has resorted to flying over people's homes with thermal imaging equipment to alert them to the amount of energy being wasted.

The data was gathered in March and will be available online later this year.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2009) -- Research into epigenetics has shown that environmental factors affect characteristics of organisms. These changes are sometimes passed on to the offspring. ETH professor Renato Paro does not believe that this opposes Darwin's theory of evolution.

A certain laboratory strain of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has white eyes. If the surrounding temperature of the embryos, which are normally nurtured at 25 degrees Celsius, is briefly raised to 37 degrees Celsius, the flies later hatch with red eyes. If these flies are again crossed, the following generations are partly red-eyed - without further temperature treatment - even though only white-eyed flies are expected according to the rules of genetics.

Environment affects inheritance

Researchers in a group led by Renato Paro, professor for Biosystems at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), crossed the flies for six generations. In this experiment, they were able to prove that the temperature treatment changes the eye colour of this specific strain of fly, and that the treated individual flies pass on the change to their offspring over several generations. However, the DNA sequence for the gene responsible for eye colour was proven to remain the same for white-eyed parents and red-eyed offspring.

The concept of epigenetics offers an explanation for this result. Epigenetics examines the inheritance of characteristics that are not set out in the DNA sequence. For Paro, epigenetic mechanisms form an additional, paramount level of information to the genetic information of DNA.

Such phenomena could only be examined in a descriptive manner in the past. Today, it has been scientifically proven, which molecular structures are involved: important factors are the histones, a kind of packaging material for the DNA, in order to store DNA in an ordered and space-saving way. It is now clear that these proteins have additional roles to play. Depending on the chemical group they carry, if they are acetylated or methylated, they permanently activate or deactivate genes. New methods now allow researchers to sometimes directly show which genes have been activated or deactivated by the histones.

Surgeons in Russia thought they were going to remove a cancerous tumor from a 28-year-old patient - but instead they found a 5-centimeter tree growing inside his lung.

It happened in Russia's Urals region while doctors were operating on Artyom Sidorkin, the Russian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda Daily reported Monday.

Doctors suspected Sidorkin had cancer after he complained of extreme pain in his chest and had been coughing up blood.

"I blinked three times and thought I was seeing things," Surgeon Vladimir Kamashev told the newspaper.

Doctors believe Sidorkin somehow inhaled a seed, which later sprouted inside his lung.

The spruce, which was touching the man's capillaries and causing severe pain, was removed.

A NEW "apolitical" party was launched in Wales yesterday, hoping to draw support from those disillusioned with conventional politics.

Writer and philosopher Martin Davies, founder of the Red Dragonhood design label, announced the formation of Newid (Change) during the Laugharne Weekend festival in Carmarthenshire.

Mr Davies, from Swansea, said the new party intended to contest every constituency at the next National Assembly election in 2011, campaigning for the establishment of an independent Welsh "demarchy" - a progressive form of democracy that does away with politicians and political parties in favour of a nationally representative assembly of ordinary citizens.

If it won control, Newid would hold a referendum to gain approval for a written constitution that would set out the rights and responsibilities of every Welsh citizen. Armed with a constitutional mandate, it would renegotiate the national status of Wales with the UK Parliament. Then, having achieved its objectives, the party would disband to make way for a citizen's assembly.

In a demarchy, decision- makers are selected by lot from the whole adult population rather than by election. Everyone selected would be expected to serve for three months at their normal rate of pay with tenure of employment protected by law.

Mr Davies, who recently advocated a parallel Welsh currency that would depreciate in value to encourage consumer spending, said: "This will enable elections to be abolished, saving many millions that can be better spent on health or education, and political parties will no longer be relevant. The same system will be introduced in local authorities.

Martin is also a follower of Gesell's idea of a currency that "rusts" and is IMHO a generally good egg.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

The trustee in charge of liquidating the assets of Bernard Madoff is planning to sell the jailed financier's New York Mets baseball season tickets on eBay, the internet auction site, to raise money for his victims.

The seats, which include a parking permit, are located in the second row behind the batter in the Delta Club Platinum section of the Met's new Citi Field Stadium, in Queens, New York.

In what could be an attempt to trump Jesus of Nazareth's record for divine Easter resurrections, NASA has said its Mars Exploration Rover Spirit mysteriously rebooted twice during the holiday weekend.

"While we don't have an explanation yet, we do know that Spirit's batteries are charged, the solar arrays are producing energy and temperatures are well within allowable ranges," said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a statement.