Opposition mounts against a proposal from the German and French interior ministers that called for the ability to reintroduce border controls in the Schengen area for up to a month at a time.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has warned repeatedly in the run-up to Sunday's presidential election that if countries bordering non-Schengen nations fail to comply with their obligations to secure the frontiers appropriately, France have no choice but to protect its borders against illegal immigration by reinstituting passport controls.

This week, German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is singing from the same hymn book. He and his French counterpart Claude Gueant wrote a letter to the Danish EU Council Presidency, calling for countries to have the right to reintroduce checks at the internal borders for no more than 30 days.

It is an election campaign maneuver, say critics, who reacted promptly. But Ska Keller, a German member of European Parliament for the Greens, said she believes there is more to the joint letter than just electoral politics.

Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, is threatening another controversial revolution in the NHS by proposing that its staff be paid less if they work in poorer parts of the country.

The cabinet minister is backing a plan for regional pay, which would mean that nurses, midwives, hospital porters, cleaners and paramedics would earn less if they work in the north or the Midlands rather than in the south of England. Official documents reveal that the only exemption backed by the Department of Health would be for highly paid managers working in new bodies established to deliver Lansley's controversial NHS reform programme, widely criticised as a privatisation of the health service.

The department, according to a submission to the NHS pay review body, believes special arrangements would be necessary for this new cohort of executives to "attract and retain high-calibre leaders and staff responsible for transforming delivery".

The revelation was seized upon by the government's critics on Saturday night as fresh evidence that the coalition is out of touch with the British public.

Nick Clegg has delivered a thinly veiled warning to David Cameron that he must stand his ground in the face of a major Tory rebellion over Lords reform.

The deputy prime minister pointed out that he had asked Liberal Democrats to support coalition measures they did not like, and others should act in the same "spirit".

However, he also hinted at possible concessions to placate opponents - even avoiding ruling out a referendum.

The comments, on the BBC's Sunday Politics show, came amid reports that at least six cabinet ministers would prefer to see the changes delayed.

At the FDP's national meeting, leader Philipp Rösler failed in trying to revive the party's self-esteem. The party's former general secretary did a little better. But is it enough for success in upcoming key elections?

Soccer fans among the FDP's party members with the slightest tendency towards superstition would probably have preferred a different location for the party congress other than Karlsruhe. Just three years after playing in Germany's top soccer league, Karlsruhe SC is threatened with relegation to the third division.

Parallels with the pro-business and free-market, liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) seem as strange as they are astonishing: At the federal elections three years ago, the party earned some 14.6 percent of votes and became the junior partner in Germany's governing coalition with the Christian Democrats. But since then, voters have kicked the party out of five state parliaments.

But the FDP still has a chance to avoid further decline if it manages to grab the minimum of 5 percent of votes it needs to remain represented in the state parliaments of Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia during elections in May. Polls, however, predicted the FDP below the 5 percent threshol

In a rare, authorized rally just outside the capital of Azerbaijan, host of next month's Eurovision Song Contest, thousands of protesters have called for new elections and democratic reforms.

Some 5,000 Azerbaijanis protested Sunday near the venue for next month's Eurovision Song Contest, demanding greater freedoms, release of political prisoners and elections.

Organized by the Public Chamber opposition coalition, protestors demanded the resignation of President Ilham Aliyev. Aliyev succeeded his father, Haidar, in 2003 and has been accused of election fraud and civil rights abuses.

The UK's intelligence services have come under renewed pressure with the emergence of a fresh cache of secret documents that suggest MI5 officers forced Libyans seeking asylum in Britain to co-operate with the very regime from which they had fled.

For the last three months, Scotland Yard detectives have been investigating MI6's alleged involvement in two so-called rendition operations that saw two Libyan dissidents kidnapped along with their families and flown to one of Muammar Gaddafi's prisons in 2004.

The role that MI6 is said to have played is detailed in a batch of documents discovered in an abandoned government office in Tripoli last September. The two men have lodged civil claims against MI6 and against Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time.

Well-placed officials said on Sunday that a key question, and the one that worried them, was how much information MI5 offered Libya about individuals in Britain. That is a central issue in investigations now under way into MI5 and MI6 relations with Gaddafi and his security and intelligence agencies, they made clear.

Tens of thousands prayed outside Moscow's main cathedral on Sunday to show their support for the Russian Orthodox church in a controversy over a punk rock political protest.

Christ the Saviour cathedral was the scene of a brief surprise performance in February by Pussy Riot, a female punk rock group protesting against Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency. Three band members remain in police custody and face up to seven years in jail on charges of hooliganism.

Their treatment has provoked a public outcry and contributed to growing criticism of the church and its close ties to the Kremlin.

Patriarch Kirill has portrayed the punk performance as part of a broader attack on the church, considered by many Russians to be part of their national identity and an intrinsic part of a powerful state.

Francois Hollande wins first round of French presidential elections - 1.5pp ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy; Marine Le Pen is surprisingly strong, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Francois Bayrou is surprisingly weak; latest polls show Hollande ahead in the second round with 54% against 46%; Le Pen now styles herself as France's opposition leader; Günter Nonnenmacher says France is in real trouble with one third of the voters against the EU; Thomas Hanke says new French president will have a nightmare job; Olli Rehn's calls on the next French president to respect deficit rules; so does Jens Weidmann; Geert Wilders rejected the budget cuts,  a decision likely to trigger new Dutch elections; Wilders is likely to return to his anti-establishment roots, political analysts say; latest poll suggests the country is likely to remain politically fragmented; Antonis Samaras promises lower taxes, and higher social spending; Olivier Blanchard appeals to Germany to accept higher inflation and eurobonds; Spain has taken a decision to set up real estate companies to manage the banks' property portfolios; Paul Krugman says a euro exit would be similar to the abandonment of the gold standard in the 1930s; Wolfgang Münchau warns against underestimating the politics of eurozone-wide bank resolution regimes; Gavyn Davies, meanwhile, says the eurozone may have lost its ability to shock, but ability may soon return.

French Presidential Election: first round open thread

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

French voters were making a strong showing at polling stations as they cast ballots in the first round of presidential elections. The poll is an acid test for President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose popularity is at a lowpoint.

Polling stations in France experienced the second highest turnout in any presidential election since 1981, as voters choose from a list of 10 candidates across the political spectrum on Sunday.

The Interior Ministry said early turnout figures showed 28 percent of eligible voters cast their ballot before midday - less than the 31 percent by noon in 2007, but more than in the four previous races.

Francois Hollande has been ahead in pre-election polls

In Paris, turnout was even higher than in 2007, at 21.68 percent compared with 20 percent. The 2007 poll saw an especially high final turnout of nearly 84 percent in the first round, as conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy fought it out with Socialist Segolene Royal.

Incumbent French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist candidate Francois Hollande advanced to the second round of France's presidential poll with 25.5% and 28.4% of the vote respectively in Sunday's first round, according to exit polls by French pollster Ipsos. The far right's Marine Le Pen came third with a surprise 20% of the vote.

Résultats nationaux mise à jour : 03:38

François Hollande 28,63 %

Nicolas Sarkozy 27,08 %

Marine Le Pen 18,01 %

Jean-Luc Mélenchon 11,13 %

François Bayrou 9,11 %

Eva Joly 2,28 %

Nicolas Dupont-aignan 1,8 %

Philippe Poutou 1,15 %

Nathalie Arthaud 0,57 %

Jacques Cheminade 0,25 %

Taux d'abstention : 19,84 % - Source : ministère de l'intérieur - Résultats sur 99 % des inscrits (ne manquent que les Français de l'étranger)

MEXICO CITY -- In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company's largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The former executive gave names, dates and bribe amounts. He knew so much, he explained, because for years he had been the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits for Wal-Mart de Mexico.

Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico's top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart's lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: "There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated."

The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.

Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart's leaders shut it down.

Aviva Plc (AV/), the U.K.'s second- biggest insurer by market value, said the company's investment unit mistakenly sent an e-mail dismissing its entire staff before retracting the message.

The e-mail, which was sent by the Aviva Investors human resources department to 1,300 employees globally, told recipients to turn over company property as they left the building and reminded them of their obligation to guard the firm's confidential information, according to Paul Lockstone, spokesman for the unit of the London-based insurer.

"It was intended that this e-mail should have gone to one single person," Lockstone said by phone. "Unfortunately, as a result of a clerical error, it was sent to all of the Investors staff worldwide." Most people recognized immediately that the e-mail was a mistake, he said, adding, "From time to time, things go wrong."

The human resources department issued an apology "fairly quickly" after the message was sent, Lockstone said. The e-mail is part of the company's administration process when people leave the organization, he said. News of the mistake was reported earlier today by the Daily Telegraph.

Among the Citigroup Inc. (C) bankers gathered in Hong Kong on Aug. 11, 2006, with the mayor of the northeastern Chinese city of Tieling to discuss investments in an industrial park was the son of a powerful China princeling.

Li Wangzhi, who had joined Citigroup after earning a master's degree at Columbia University, was the first son of Bo Xilai, according to two schoolmates of Li and repeated on an online publication affiliated with the Ministry of Culture. Extended family members of Bo, then commerce minister and now the ousted Communist Party boss of Chongqing, have also held positions in such firms as alternative-energy company China Everbright International Ltd. (257), according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

While the accumulation of influence is commonplace among relatives of politicians worldwide, the Bo family fortune of at least $136 million may fuel perceptions of corruption in the Communist Party and deepen social tensions over China's widening wealth gap. The party has sought to cordon off from politics the investigations of Bo and his second wife, arrested on suspicion of murder, with an official commentary stating that the inquiry is solely a matter of law.

Get ready for the tax wars.

President Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich, setting a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on millionaires (the so-called Buffett Rule, named after billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who says it's unfair that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary).

Mitt Romney, the presumed Republican presidential candidate, wants to lower taxes on the rich. He supports the House Republicans' plan to cut the highest tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, thereby reducing the taxes of millionaires by an average of at least $150,000 a year.

This should be a no-brainer. Rich Americans are taking home a larger share of America's total income than they have at any time since the 1920s, yet paying the lowest tax rate in more than 30 years.

The party of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's pro-democracy leader, has threatened to boycott the parliament's opening session set to take place on Monday over a dispute regarding the constitutional oath of office.

A senior member of the National League for Democracy's executive committee says that its 43 newly elected MPs will not take up their seats unless the military-led government rewords the vow of allegiance.

NLD wants change in the wording of the swearing-in oath from "safeguarding" the constitution to one that pledges to "respect" it, a demand authorities have reportedly rejected.

It appears to be the first sign of discord between the quasi-civilian Myanmar government and the NLD since April 1 by-elections that gave Suu Kyi her first-ever seat in parliament.

The entire population of the Heglig area has fled a military standoff between Sudan and South Sudan, leaving thousands of civilians displaced without shelter, the United Nations has said.

"According to the government of Sudan's Humanitarian Aid Commission [HAC] and other reports received by the UN, the entire civilian population of Heglig town and neighbouring villages fled," the UN's humanitarian agency said on Sunday.

The report cited HAC figures as saying 5,000 people had escaped from Heglig, mostly to the communities of Kharasana and Keilak, about 100km north of Heglig, Sudan's main oilfield.

South Sudan's army said on Sunday that it had completed its withdrawal from Heglig, but condemned the north for bombing the area as the pullout was still under way.

Formula One world champion Sebastian Vettel has won the Grand Prix in Bahrain while rage boiled beyond the track among protesters who say the ruling family that crushed Arab Spring demonstrations last year should not have hosted the race.

High security kept trouble well away from the track on Sunday, where Red Bull's 24-year-old driver had started in pole position, before securing the twenty-second triumph of his career, in a race that passed without incident.

As the race came to an end, protesters called for afternoon protests in the capital Manama's Pearl roundabout, the site of last year's uprising against the ruling al-Khalifa family.

Similar protests were held outside the London offices of Formula One chief, Bernie Ecclestone, with demonstrators chanting "down, down Bernie" and "shame on you Bernie".

Iran says it has reverse-engineered a US spy drone captured by its armed forces last year and has begun building a copy.

General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the aerospace division of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, related on Sunday what he said were details of the aircraft's operational history to prove his claim that Tehran's military experts had extracted data from the US RQ-170 Sentinel captured in December in eastern Iran.

Among the drone's past missions, he said, was surveillance of the compound in northwest Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden lived and was killed.

Tehran has flaunted the capture of the Sentinel, a top-secret surveillance drone with stealth technology, as a victory for Iran and a defeat for Washington in a complicated intelligence and technological battle.

A French official of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been kidnapped by armed men while travelling from northern Yemen to the Red Sea port city of Hudaida.

The kidnapping of the official, whose identity was not disclosed, comes amid renewed fighting between the military and the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda in the southern city of Zinjibar that left 19 people killed.

Dibeh Fakhr, an ICRC spokeswoman in Sanaa, said that the man, who works in the northern city of Saada, was kidnapped late on Saturday, about 30 km from Hudaida.

"He was with two Yemeni drivers who the kidnappers released shortly afterwards," Fakhr said.

The UN is to conduct an investigation into the plight of US Native Americans, the first such mission in its history.

The human rights inquiry led by James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples, is scheduled to begin on Monday.

Many of the country's estimated 2.7 million Native Americans live in federally recognised tribal areas which are plagued with unemployment, alcoholism, high suicide rates, incest and other social problems.

The UN mission is potentially contentious, with some US conservatives likely to object to international interference in domestic matters. Since being appointed as rapporteur in 2008, Anaya has focused on natives of Central and South America.

Desperate for new revenue, Ohio lawmakers introduced legislation last year that would make it easier to recover money from businesses that defraud the state.

It was quickly flagged at the Washington headquarters of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a business-backed group that views such "false claims" laws as encouraging frivolous lawsuits. ALEC's membership includes not only corporations, but nearly 2,000 state legislators across the country -- including dozens who would vote on the Ohio bill.

One of them, Bill Seitz, a prominent Republican state senator, wrote to a fellow senior lawmaker to relay ALEC's concerns about "the recent upsurge" in false-claims legislation nationwide. "While this is understandable, as states are broke, the considered advice from our friends at ALEC was that such legislation is not well taken and should not be approved," he said in a private memorandum.

The legislation was reworked to ease some of ALEC's concerns, making it one of many bills the group has influenced by mobilizing its lawmaker members, a vast majority of them Republicans.

We have a long and very expensive lease which still has twenty-one (21) months to run. As you know, we have more space than we need and our monthly lease cost is in excess of current, comparable market lease rates. When I was elected on December 31, 2011, the rent had not been paid since August 2011 and as part of our continuing financial issues and our effort to re-negotiate the lease, no lease payments have been made in 2012 to date.

Rather than continue discussions with us, the landlord chose to exercise its rights and filed a notice of eviction in Ramsey County court. We're not going to be evicted, and at the same time, are continuing to negotiate on the back payments as well as on a lease that better fits both our space needs and our budget.

Two years ago, 11 men lost their lives as a backlash of gas exploded into the night from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. In the ensuing months, roughly 5 million barrels of oil and more than 6 billion cubic feet of natural gas spewed into the ocean from the Macondo well more than a kilometer underwater. It took the combined efforts of the U.S. government, the world's major oil companies and, finally, a lonely hydrologist working through the night from a cellphone picture of pressure reading graphs to cap the spill on July 15, 2010.

Two years later, Gulf seafood remains suspect in consumers' minds, despite the "sniff test." Fishermen and scientists report an excess of deformed or sickly sea life, and more than a million barrels of spilled oil remain "missing," likely never to be found. The Gulf's dolphins have been dying, deepwater corals remain coated in hydrocarbons and many people involved in the clean-up complain of poor health.

It will take decades to fully reckon the toll of BP's 2010 oil spill. In fact, science is still grappling with the after effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill. It took three years for Prince William Sound in Alaska's herring fishery to collapse and 20 years to reach a legal settlement.

Meanwhile, an invisible leak of natural gas is ongoing in the North Sea from an offshore platform operated by French oil company Total. Oil spills occur weekly in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. And the oil industry has resumed deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico as well as prospecting in the melting Arctic, without adequate oversight or the resources to contain or clean up any future spills in the frigid north.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 16, 2012) -- Overall, 17% of children in the United States are obese, and in inner-city neighborhoods, the prevalence is as high as 25%. While poor diets and physical inactivity are the main culprits, there is new evidence that air pollution can play a role.

A study by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health finds that pregnant women in New York City exposed to higher concentrations of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, were more than twice as likely to have children who were obese by age 7 compared with women with lower levels of exposure. PAHs, a common urban pollutant, are released into the air from the burning of coal, diesel, oil and gas, or other organic substances such as tobacco.

Results are published online in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

"Obesity is a complex disease with multiple risk factors. It isn't just the result of individual choices like diet and exercise," says the study's lead author Andrew G. Rundle, DrPH, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. "For many people who don't have the resources to buy healthy food or don't have the time to exercise, prenatal exposure to air pollution may tip the scales, making them even more susceptible to obesity."

ScienceDaily (Apr. 19, 2012) -- A pan-European study published in Science shows that mountain plants across the continent are moving to higher altitudes. This often results in raised species numbers on mountain tops, when colonizers from lower down start to dwell on the summits. This study, however, also shows that upward shifts can lead to a reduction in species richness. The paper is based on detailed surveys of 66 mountain summits distributed between the north of Europe and the southern Mediterranean Sea. An international research group, led by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna, mapped all plant species at each site in 2001 and 2008 using the same standardized procedures.

The study was coordinated by Harald Pauli, Michael Gottfried, Stefan Dullinger and Georg Grabherr.

Increasing species numbers were only found on summits of northern and central Europe. By contrast, species numbers were stagnating or declining at nearly all sites in the Mediterranean region. Harald Pauli from the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments (GLORIA) programme, which coordinated the study, said, "Our results showing a decline at the Mediterranean sites is worrying because these are the mountains with a very unique flora and a large proportion of their species occur only there and nowhere else on Earth

OZEMAN, Mont.--Locked in frozen vaults on Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Like a time-capsule from the distant past, the polar ice sheets offer a glimpse of tiny organisms that may have been trapped there longer than modern humans have walked the planet, biding their time until conditions change and set them free again. 

With that ice melting at an alarming rate, those conditions could soon be at hand. Masses of bacteria and other microbes - some of which the world hasn't seen since the Middle Pleistocene, a previous period of major climate change about 750,000 years ago - will make their way back into the environment. 

Once thought to be too harsh and inhospitable to support any living thing, the ice sheets are now known to be a gigantic reservoir of microbial life. Altogether, the biomass of microbial cells in and beneath the ice sheet may amount to more than 1,000 times that of all the humans on Earth

A US judge has put a bomb under the Megaupload case by informing the FBI that a trial in the United States may never happen. The cyberlocker was never formally served with the appropriate paperwork by the US authorities, as it is impossible to serve a foreign company with criminal charges.

The US Government accuses Kim Dotcom and the rest of the "Mega Conspiracy" of running a criminal operation.

Charges in the indictment include engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, conspiring to commit money laundering and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement.

While the prosecution is hoping to have Megaupload tried in the US, breaking news suggests that this may never happen.

It turns out that the US judge handling the case has serious doubts whether it will ever go to trial due to a procedural error.

An analysis of 1.95 billion cell phone calls and 489 million text messages reveal how men and women follow different relationship patterns during their lifetimes. The researchers argue that women's friendships in particular drive the process of finding a mate and supporting the next generation.

The data could also undermine traditional notions about how humans like to organize themselves. "There has been a view in anthropology that the ancestral state for humans is a form of patriarchy, and I'm not sure that that's true," says University of Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, an author of the study published April 19 by Nature Scientific Reports. (Scientific American is a part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Dunbar and an interdisciplinary team examined cell phone data from a single provider in an undisclosed European country. (Specific locations were kept anonymous to protect cell phone users' identities.) The researchers worked with data gathered over a seven-month timeframe and restricted themselves to studying communications between cell phone users of a known age and sex, making a data set of about 3.2 million subscribers, or about 20 percent of the nation's cell phone users. Working on the assumption that close friends communicate most frequently, the team analyzed the top three friendships of each cell phone user based on the frequency of communication to spot patterns in the average male or female user at various ages.

Researchers predict a new type of lithium battery under development could give an electric car enough juice to travel a whopping 800 kilometers before it needs to be plugged in again--about 10 times the energy that today's lithium ion batteries supply. It is a tantalizing prospect--a lighter, longer-lasting, air-breathing power source for the next generation of vehicles--if only someone could build a working model. Several roadblocks stand between these lithium-air batteries and the open road, however, primarily in finding electrodes and electrolytes that are stable enough for rechargeable battery chemistry.

IBM plans to take lithium-air batteries out of neutral by building a working prototype by the end of next year. The company announced Friday it has stepped up development efforts by adding two Japanese technology firms--chemical manufacturer Asahi Kasei Corp. and electrolyte maker Central Glass--to the IBM Battery 500 Project, a coalition IBM established in 2009 to accelerate the switch from gas to electric-powered vehicles among carmakers and their customers.

The lithium ion batteries used in today's electric vehicles rely on a metal oxide or metal phosphate (typically cobalt, manganese or iron-based materials) cathode as a positive electrode, a carbon-based anode as a negative electrode and an electrolyte to conduct lithium ions from one electrode to the other. When the car is driven, the lithium ions flow from the anode to the cathode through the electrolyte and separator membrane. Charging the battery reverses the direction of ion flow.

Sweden's Missionary Church of Kopimism, which was founded in the fall of 2010 and granted official recognition by the Swedish government this past January, has already established branches in eighteen countries, including the United States. Now the upstart religion is beginning to attract mainstream attention.

This news item is not in Klatsch because potentially it could be a massive cat put among some very influential pigeons. It would be hard to ban it in the US without exposing the deep fuckedupness of 'conventional religions'. It could gain a lot of 'adherents' fast.

You can't be me, I'm taken