Western powers which have overseen Kosovo since its 2008 unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia have ended their supervision over the territory, a top official said Monday.

The Kosovar leadership welcomed what it called a "historic turnaround" but also recognised the challenge of trying to integrate the ethnic Serbs in the north while Serbia dismissed the announcement as meaningless.

"The supervision of Kosovo is finished," Dutch diplomat Pieter Feith, the highest international representative in Kosovo, told a press conference, speaking in Albanian.

"The International Steering Group has decided to end the period of (Kosovo's) supervised independence," Feith said.

Prime Minister Hashim Thaci called the decision a "historic turnaround" for Kosovo.

"This is an international success for Kosovo which confirms that the international community respects Kosovo," he said at the joint press conference with Feith.

The International Steering Group (ISG), made up of 23 European Union members, Turkey and the United States, had overseen Kosovo for the last four years.

In July the ISG said the end of supervision would mean Kosovo would gain "full sovereignty". However, on the ground Pristina has no effective control over Serb-majority northern Kosovo which rejects the ethnic Albanian authorities.

France's Socialist President Francois Hollande pledged 30 billion euros in new taxes and savings to balance the budget and fund a turnaround in two years, and rejected criticism of dragging his feet.

The pledge, made to the nation in a prime time television interview, comes four months into his presidency as tumbling ratings and talk of inertia have forced him to become more proactive on the economy.

"I am in a battle and will not look back," he said. "I am setting up a calendar ... two years to create a policy for work and competitiveness. I am accelerating," he said.

Hollande's remarks were clearly aimed at turning around perceptions that he is not moving fast enough.

"I know where I am going. I will assume all the responsibility and I will talk regularly to the French people," he said.

He also said a 75 per cent wealth tax on incomes more than one million euros ($1.28 million) would not be diluted.

Hollande, whose immediate challenge will be to find $38.40bn in savings in the 2013 budget, said the government would lower its growth forecast to 0.8 per cent from 1.2 per cent for next year.

Hollande - who has famously said he does not "like the rich" - said $10bn would come from additional taxes on households "especially the well-heeled", 10 billion more from businesses and 10 billion from savings in government spending. It would be the biggest hike in three decades.

The budget is expected to be the most austere in 30 years as France tries to hit a deficit target of 3 per cent of gross domestic product next year, or risk losing investors' trust.

With just two days to go before the Netherlands elects a new 150-seat lower house of parliament, and polls suggesting a two-way race for the prime minister's job, party leaders are again out in force to get their message across.

Opinion polls show the right-wing VVD and Labour party PvdA are now neck and neck and pundits suggest a centre 'purple' coalition may be inevitable, leading both party leaders to emphasise the wide gap between their policies

VVD leader and prime minister Mark Rutte said in an interview with website nu.nl single mothers on welfare benefits are exactly the sort of people who should be voting for his party.

Far too many people are told by social services that they will never get a job, Rutte said. `Don't let them tell you what to do. A job gives you independence, social contact and you develop your talents, the VVD leader said.

`Election debates are about 1% more or less in welfare benefits. But have a much better income if you get a job,' Rutte said. `That is why single mums on welfare should vote VVD.'

Divisions

Labour leader Diederik Samsom himself told a campaign meeting in Drachten on Sunday evening that two years of `rotten right-wing policies' had increased divisions in Dutch society.

Belarusians will vote for a new, but still regime-controlled parliament on Sep. 23. At least those who do not respond to calls for boycotting the poll.

The opposition is far from united in their positions on the election: some are campaigning, some boycotting, others plan to pull out right before voting day. But all are agreed that the election process is being rigged.

The seats, dissidents believe, will again be distributed according to the will of president Alexander Lukashenko who has ruled the nation of 10 million since 1994, earning the title "Europe's last dictator". The parliament in Belarus, as in most autocracies, has in any case very little say.

The election campaign started Aug. 22. The registration process ended the same day. Every fourth contender has been denied the right to run.

The election commissions registered most opposition candidates, but banned the most popular - on the ground of alleged irregularities in their financial disclosure, or claims that some of the signatures on their supporters' lists were forged.

"Registration has been denied to those who would run till the end with a fair chance to win," analyst Valery Karbalevich tells IPS.

Among the excluded are Aleksander Milinkevich, leader of For Freedom movement, a former Lukashenko rival in the presidential race, Anatol Liaukovich, former leader of the Belarusian Social-Democratic Party and Mikhail Pashkevich from `Tell the Truth!'.

Some popular dissidents are still in jail, like Mikola Statkievich who was sentenced for six years for "driving riots" on Dec. 19 2010 - the day of the rigged presidential election. An estimated 20,000 protesters assembled in the main square of capital Minsk on that day, leading to a massive crackdown against opponents of the regime.

Some opposition members cannot run because of their suspended sentences. Others fled abroad, such as Ales Mikhalevich, another presidential candidate, who was arrested and charged for organising riots.

Member states have been warned they "need to do more" to ensure that the 'European Electronic Toll Service' (EETS) scheme remains on track.

EETS was introduced as far back as 2004 in order to reduce the hassle for truckers and other road users.

This was to be done by facilitating toll payments across the EU with a single on-board unit and service contract.

The aim was to result in fewer cash transactions at toll stations and the elimination of cumbersome procedures for cross-border users.

Truckers and other road users have complained about the variety of electronic road tolling systems between and often within member states.

For instance, a truck driver travelling from Lisbon to Bratislava via Lyon, Milan, Munich and Vienna, wishing to pay the tolls electronically, currently needs to subscribe to at least seven toll payment contracts with as many concessionaires and to host as many on-board units in the truck's cabin.

The commission hoped the new scheme would improve traffic flow and reduce congestion.

The first hearing of Turkey's biggest trial against members of the press has started, involving 44 journalists. Thirty-six of those have been in pre-trial detention since December, facing terrorism charges and accused of backing the illegal pan-Kurdish umbrella group, the KCK.

"This trial is clearly political," said Ertugrul Mavioglu, an investigative journalist, whose terrorism charges for interviewing Murat Karayilan, a member of the KCK - which includes the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) - were dropped in December last year.

"The government wants to set an example; it wants to intimidate," he added. "Journalists are being told: 'There are limits on what you are allowed to say.'"

Human rights groups repeatedly criticise the Turkish government for the prosecution of pro-Kurdish politicians and activists and journalists who exercise the right to freedom of expression.

Andrew Gardner, Turkey researcher at Amnesty International, said: "This prosecution forms a pattern [in Turkey] where critical writing, political speeches and participation at peaceful demonstrations are used as evidence of terrorism offences."

Amnesty International will, in October, publish a report entitled Criminalising dissent: freedom of expression under attack in Turkey. The document is expected to cover a wide range of cases involving the country's journalists.

More than 100 journalists are in jail in Turkey (more than in Iran or China), and many of these work for Kurdish media outlets. About 800 more face charges, and numerous journalists have been fired or have had to leave their jobs because of pressure from the Turkish government.

German newspapers are outlining the options of the court; there seems to be a consensus that the court cannot simply strengthen the role of the parliament any further, as it did in previous rulings; one option would be to demand opt-out rights, but this would weaken Germany's overall position; a majority of commentators believe the court will approve the ESM and fiscal pact; Suddeutsche writes that the ECB's OMT programme can go ahead even if the court votes No, as it can interlink with the EFSF; the liberal VVD and the labour party PvdA are running neck and neck ahead of tomorrow's general election in the Netherland; another grand coalition seems likely; last night's debate between the two party leaders, which focused on the multicultural society, had no conclusive winner; Portugal's finance minister will announce the fifth review of the programme today; the country is not expected to meet its budget goals this year and next; Vitor Constancio is tipped to head the ECB's new bank supervisory agency, according to a news report; the IMF warns of the impact on the eurozone crisis on the world economy; the EBRD warns of the impact of the eurozone crisis on eastern Europe; its president says the numbers look frightening; Mariano Rajoy's political ratings have crashed according to polls, as Spaniards believe their PM has no plan; his first TV interview Rajoy succeeded in failing to answer the questions and to clarify his policies; corporate bond yields for Spain's largest companies have fallen to the Draghi effect; the decline of the Italy's economy intensified according to the latest data; the Italian media are speculating on Mario Monti's presidential ambitions; Il Messaggero warns of rising social unrest on the streets of Rome; Tommaso Monacelli warns that the OMT is ill-targeted, as it leaves out countries in difficulty, but not yet on the brink of disaster; Gideon Rachman warns that the isolation of Germany in the ECB's governing council is a bad omen for the programme; Commerzbank's Jorg Kramer, meanwhile, believes the OMT will trigger a collapse of the eurozone in five-to-ten years, as a result of a boom-bust spiral in Germany.

Yet another obstacle in European leaders' approach to fighting the euro crisis has been overcome. Germany's Federal Constitutional Court has rejected a new petition for a temporary injunction by Peter Gauweiler, a member of parliament. The court discussed Gauweiler's petition on Monday afternoon and announced its decision early the following morning.

The decision means that the court will announce its keenly awaited ruling on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the permanent euro bailout fund, on Wednesday, as was originally planned.

Gauweiler, a member of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, had tried to torpedo the court's ruling on the ESM at the last minute by demanding that the court hold another oral hearing.

Blueprints for a European banking union to be published on Wednesday (12 September) will trigger fevered debate over the powers of the European Central Bank (ECB), if a draft leaked late last week remains unchanged.

The draft proposal gives the ECB sweeping powers to carry out spot checks and withdraw banking licences, previously the preserve of national supervisors.

The ECB would assume its new duties on 1 July 2013, the paper says, taking sole authority at the beginning of 2014.

The proposals - which still face months of negotiation between governments and the European Parliament - give the ECB the power "to authorise credit institutions and to withdraw authorisation of credit institutions".

ECB would get power over all eurozone banks

On two key issues the draft indicates that the debate will be fierce.

As expected, the draft gives the ECB the right "to be able to exercise supervisory tasks in relation to all banks" within the eurozone, a move resisted by Berlin.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble last week lambasted the idea of giving the ECB powers to monitor all eurozone banks, saying it should instead focus only on systemically important institutions.

"The ECB has itself said it does not have the potential to supervise the European Union's 6,000 banks in the foreseeable future," Schäuble told German radio, expressing scepticism about the timeframe envisaged in the Commission proposals.

The majority of EU banks are small and more than 90% of all assets are believed to be held by some 200 institutions.

Berlin is keen to retain an exception from supervision for its state-owned and politically connected Landesbanks.

Germany's constitutional court is not likely to topple the ESM with its ruling this week, according to legal experts. Not even the plaintiffs are expecting that. But the Karlsruhe judges could demand readjustments.

Would it be right if German President Joachim Gauck signed the treaties on the ESM and the fiscal compact? Or do they infringe on the German constitution? Christoph Degenhart, an expert in constitutional law from Nürnberg, believes the latter is true.

And he's not the only one. Together with former Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin from the opposition party SPD, Degenhart has filed a constitutional complaint against both euro rescue mechanisms. According to him, the mechanisms risk whittling away the democratic principles at work in Europe and Germany.

All in all, 37,000 citizens have filed constitutional complaints against the ESM and the fiscal compact. Of those, 25,000 have done so by supporting the complaints filed by Degenhart and the former justice minister.

Democratic deficit

The plaintiffs also criticize that there is no cancellation clause and no limitation of liability in the rescue mechanisms. If the ESM goes through, the Governors' Board - the eurozone finance ministers - could in theory top up the capital stock whenever deemed necessary.

That would mean the German Parliament would lose its budgetary sovereignty. In addition, the authors of the complaint claim that the ESM stands in stark contrast to the no-bail-out clause written down in the European treaties which stipulates that no state can be liable for other countries' debts.

But Ingolf Pernice, an expert on European and constitutional law and the founder of the Walter-Hallstein-Institute for European Constitutional Law in Berlin, opposes this view. According to him, there is no democratic deficit when it comes to the ESM and the fiscal compact. Special committees in the European Parliament or in national parliaments could be included in the decision-making process, he suggests.

Greece's prime minister started a new round of negotiations today with representatives of the country's bailout creditors, who are demanding a fresh set of controversial austerity cuts to release the next batch of rescue loans the country desperately needs to stay afloat.

Antonis Samaras' meeting with officials from the so-called troika of the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank comes a day ahead of his talks in Frankfurt with ECB president Mario Draghi. 

Troika officials are "evaluating" Greece's proposals for the €11.5 billion austerity package for 2013-14, Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras said. 

"It's a tough discussion, because the measures are tough," he told journalists after attending today's negotiations. Asked whether Greece's creditors are insisting on job cuts in the country's bloated, inefficient civil service, Stournaras only commented that: "We are trying to convince them that our arguments are correct." 

In talks with Stournaras on Sunday, troika officials rejected part of the Greek proposals. That leaves Samaras battling on two fronts: He has to satisfy Greece's creditors -- or lose the vital bailout funds. But he must also keep the peace with his center-left coalition partners, who publicly reject some of the cutbacks that will cause further widespread pain. Without their support, the government formed in late June would collapse, leaving the way open for the radical left main opposition to seize power. The opposition wants Greece to tear up its bailout commitments -- even at risk of its leaving the euro. 

Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has said he will not accept outside conditions over a possible bailout.

Mr Rajoy made the pledge in his first television interview since taking office. But he said no decision to request a bailout had been taken.

Last week, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) unveiled plans to buy bonds from indebted countries - under bailout conditions.

Mario Draghi said the ECB would provide a "fully effective backstop".

The aim of the programme was to cut the borrowing costs of debt-burdened eurozone members by buying their bonds.

The Spanish government's implied borrowing costs fell sharply after the announcement. Pensioners reassured

"I am absolutely convinced that everyone will be reasonable but I insist that we haven't taken a decision," Mr Rajoy told Spanish state television.

"I will look at the conditions. I would not like, and I could not accept, being told which were the concrete policies where we had to cut," the prime minister added.

And he promised that pensioners would not be affected by any decisions.

Directors at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. are wrestling with new approaches to executive compensation, in a bid to respond to a series of management miscues this year, said people close to the institutions.

At J.P. Morgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, directors are considering lower 2012 bonuses for Chief Executive James Dimon and other top executives in the wake of a multibillion-dollar trading disaster, said people close to the discussions. But they also are grappling with the question of how to do that without drastically reducing the executives' take-home pay, the people said.

George Soros has been on a serious media blitz lately.

He has a new Project Syndicate column up about how Germany should lead the eurozone (as a benevolent hegemon) or get out (and let the Euro drop to competitive levels).

He also has a much longer New York Review of Books essay about how Germany can still make things work.

And today he's doing an interview and Q&A at a conference in Germany expanding on what needs to be done.

It's very long and we hope to watch the whole thing again at some point, because Soros has an endless string of insights.

But one point that he keeps coming back to is the tragedy of Germans' misunderstanding about their own role in the crisis.

Whereas Germans think they're already incredibly on the hook for peripheral finances, the fact of the matter, says Soros, is that from the beginning, Germany has only done "the minimum."

That's a tragedy.

A British bank potentially backed with public money will be created to shake up the market in business finance, Vince Cable will announce on Tuesday in a major speech setting out a new industrial strategy.

The business secretary said the government had a role as a catalyst in areas where the lending market "doesn't work well".

Heretic! Burn him!

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

A belief that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable and fear of a future civil war has persuaded Taliban leaders of the merits of a ceasefire, power-sharing and a political deal, according to a group of experts and academics who conducted private talks with senior Taliban figures.

Two former Taliban ministers, a former mujahideen commander and an Afghan mediator with experience of negotiating with the Taliban spent between three and five hours in individual discussions with professors Anatol Lieven, Theo Farrell and Rudra Chaudhuri of King's College London and Michael Semple of Harvard.

Separately, Matt Waldman, a former key UN official in Kabul involved in promoting dialogue and reconciliation in Afghanistan, has told the Guardian: "It would be a grave mistake to assume the Taliban would settle for nothing less than absolute power."

At a press briefing on Monday on their report published by the Royal United Services Institute, Lieven and his colleagues painted a picture of a pragmatic Taliban leadership around Mullah Omar.

Three of his group's four interlocutors said they could imagine a "long-term US military role in Afghanistan ... so long as the US military presence contributed to Afghan security", Farrell said. But it could be used to attack Afghan's neighbours, including Iran, the Taliban leaders insisted.

Abdel Jabbar al-Ughaidy, a defected Syrian army colonel, is trying to command the loyalty of rebel ranks around Aleppo. So is Abdel Aziz Salama, a former honey merchant.

The two men, at once allies and rivals, capture the challenges facing Syria's insurgents as they struggle to cobble together a cohesive fighting force and topple President Bashar al-Assad.

Rebels in the northern province of Aleppo joined the uprising late but have proved more adept than those elsewhere in Syria. They have driven government forces out of the countryside north of Syria's largest city and seized a major swath of the city itself.

But destabilizing rifts threaten the effort--stoking fights over ideology, weapons and political influence. The rifts partly explain a stall in the rebels' momentum to capture Aleppo, which was the scene of a lethal car bombing Sunday. The splits also offer a glimpse into the nascent political forces that would vie for power in a post-Assad Syria.

How these differences shake out in coming days could determine which side prevails in the 18-month conflict and lay the groundwork for either cooperation or fresh rounds of internecine bloodletting if Mr. Assad falls.

The run-off pitted him against former president Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.

Mohamud garnered 190 votes against 79 for Sharif, according to a tally by an AFP reporter at the scene.

The two men were neck and neck in the first round of voting but Hassan Sheikh Mohamud emerged victorious in the second and final round.

"Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is the winner for today's presidency," parliament speaker Mohamed Osman Jawari announced.

Two other candidates, outgoing prime minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali and Abdikadir Osoble, pulled out after the first round of the polls that mark the final stage of a UN-backed process aimed at setting up a new administration for the war-torn country.

Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was a largely unknown candidate who comes from the same Hawiye clan as Sharif. Analysts say he has been actively involved with Somalia's NGO community.

He is an academic, and a political and civic activist who has worked for several national and international peace and development organizations

The arrest of an Indian anti-corruption cartoonist on sedition charges has sparked widespread criticism.

Aseem Trivedi appeared in court in Mumbai and was remanded in custody until 24 September for cartoons allegedly mocking the constitution.

Mr Trivedi is demanding the charges be dropped. Many Indians see his arrest as an attack on freedom of expression.

The cartoonist has been participating in the anti-corruption movement led by campaigner Anna Hazare.

"As of now we demand sedition charges are dropped against him," Mr Trivedi's lawyer, Vijay Hiremath, said after Monday's court hearing, AFP news agency reports.

"Obviously they don't have a case so they should have dropped it instead of giving him judicial custody."

Where is Xi Jinping? The man anointed to run the world's most populous nation and second-largest economy has disappeared from public view just weeks before his expected elevation to lead the Chinese Communist Party.

Over the past week Mr Xi has cancelled at least four scheduled meetings with visiting dignitaries including a Russian delegation, Singapore's prime minister and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton last Wednesday and the prime minister of Denmark on Monday.

An official account did not list him among the attendees at an unscheduled meeting held last Friday by the party's powerful central military commission, of which Mr Xi is vice-chairman.

Late last week the foreign ministry invited overseas media to cover a meeting between Mr Xi and Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt scheduled for Monday afternoon. But on Monday the ministry denied that the meeting was ever supposed to take place.

The Japanese government made a formal decision to buy islands at the center of a dispute with China, a move to prevent the islands from ending up in Japanese nationalists' hands but one that provoked an angry response from Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

Japan's chief government spokesman said it had agreed with the islands' private owners to purchase them, stressing it was in line with the government's policy of maintaining control of the islands in a "peaceful and stable" manner.

"The government has been renting the islands since fiscal 2002 to keep them under peaceful control. But since the current private owners intended to put them on the market, we've decided to buy them," Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura told a regular news conference.

The move prompted anger from the highest levels of the Chinese leadership, with Mr. Wen saying late Monday that the islands--controlled by Japan, which calls them the Senkaku, but claimed by China and Taiwan; they're called Diaoyu in Chinese--are an inalienable part of China's territory. He said China will "absolutely make no concession" on issues concerning its sovereignty and territorial integrity, according to state-run Xinhua news agency.

A former hunger strike prisoner at Guantánamo Bay has died, the US military said Monday, after the man was apparently found unconscious in his cell at the isolated, high-security prison.

The prisoner, whose name and nationality were not released, was found by guards on Saturday and taken to a base hospital, where he was declared dead "after extensive lifesaving measures had been performed," the US military's southern command said in a brief statement.

He was the ninth prisoner to die at the facility since it was opened in January 2002 to hold men suspected of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban. The military has said two of those deaths were by natural causes and six were declared suicides.

The death occurred in Camp 5, a section of the prison used mostly to hold prisoners who have broken detention center rules, said navy captain Robert Durand, a spokesman for the prison.

This prisoner had recently splashed a guard with what military officials call a "cocktail," typically a mixture of food and bodily fluids, which is why he was on disciplinary status, Durand said.

He had been on a hunger strike in the past but had resumed eating on June 1 and was at 95% of his ideal body weight and 14lb heavier than when he came to Guantánamo, the spokesman said.

A leading British academic has called for accelerated research into futuristic geo-engineering and a worldwide nuclear power station "binge" to avoid runaway global warming.

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, said both potential solutions had inherent dangers but were now vital as time was running out.

"It is very, very depressing that politicians and the public are attuned to the threat of climate change even less than they were 20 years ago when Margaret Thatcher sounded the alarm. Co2 levels are rising at a faster than exponential rate, and yet politicians only want to take utterly trivial steps such as banning plastic bags and building a few windfarms," he said.

"I am very suspicious of using technology to solve problems created by technology, given that we have messed up so much in the past but having done almost nothing for two decades we need to adopt more desperate measures such as considering geo-engineering techniques as well as conducting a major nuclear programme."

Geo-engineering techniques such as whitening clouds by adding fine sprays of water vapour, or adding aerosols to the upper atmosphere have been ridiculed in some quarters but welcomed elsewhere. Wadhams proposes the use of thorium-fuelled reactors, being tested in India, which are said to be safer because they do not result in a proliferation of weapons-grade plutonium, experts say. Also, under certain circumstances, the waste from thorium reactors is less dangerous and remains radioactive for hundreds rather than thousands of years.

Wadhams, who is also head of the polar ocean physics group at Cambridge and has just returned from a field trip to Greenland, was reacting to evidence that Arctic sea ice cover had reached a record low this summer.

This latest rate of loss is 50% higher than most scenarios outlined by other polar scientists and coincide with alarming new reports about a "vast reservoir" of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, that could be released in Antarctica if the ice melts equally quickly there. Greenpeace said last night that it agreed with the academic's concerns but not with his solutions.

"Professor Wadhams is right that we're in a big hole and the recent record sea ice low in the Arctic is a clear warning that we need to act. But it would be cheaper, safer and easier to stop digging and drilling for more fossil fuels," said Ben Ayliffe, the group's senior polar campaigner.

"We already have the technologies, from ultra-efficient vehicles to state-of-the-art clean energy generation, to make the deep cuts in greenhouse gases that are needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Unfortunately, we're still lacking the political and business will to implement them," he added.

Wadhams, who has done pioneering work on polar ice thinning using British naval submarines from 1976 onwards, said these latest satellite findings confirmed his own dire predictions.

And they feed into the alarming scenarios that the Arctic Methane Emergency Group have been warning about.

As government negotiators from the world's poorest countries ended a round of United Nations climate change talks in the Thai capital, they sounded a grave note about what appears imminent when they assemble in November in Doha - the reading of the last rites of the Kyoto Protocol.

"We are concerned that the environmental integrity of the Kyoto Protocol, which is the only international treaty that binds developed nations to lower (greenhouse gas) emissions, and thus our lone assurance that action will be taken, is eroding before our eyes," declared a statement released by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Africa Group, which represent over a billion people vulnerable to the ravages of extreme weather.

Such concern about the fate of the Kyoto Protocol in the capital of Qatar, where negotiators from over 190 countries will gather for a U.N. climate summit, is with reason. The upcoming 18^th conference of the parties (CoP 18) will be the last meeting before the clock runs out on Dec. 31for the world's industrialised countries to meet their initial, legally-binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and to announce new legally binding cuts for the second period as 2013 dawns.

But as analysts who followed the week-long talks in Bangkok noted, the world's richer nations appear determined to walk away from the leadership they have been expected to demonstrate under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty, which entered into force in 2005 after nearly a decade of negotiations.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, a cornerstone of the U.N.'s international climate change architecture - the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFFC) - the world's 37 industrialised nations and the European Union (EU) pledged to reduce their greenhouse gases by five percent, measured against 1990 levels by the end of 2012, when the first phase of the protocol ends.

During the climate talks here, which ran from Aug. 30 to Sept. 5, the "Annex 1 countries" as the bloc of industrialised countries are dubbed under the Kyoto Protocol, offered little hope to the developing world that the talks will produce new, legally binding emission cuts that are higher than the prevailing five percent to cover a period from 2013-2020.

"The negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol need to be concluded successfully, and that means having the second commitment period in place by the Doha CoP," says Martin Khor, executive director of the South Centre, a Geneva-based intergovernmental policy think tank of developing countries. "It was meant to be revealed at the last Cop in Durban, but it was postponed by a year.

The world's only global system of carbon trading, designed to give poor countries access to new green technologies, has "essentially collapsed", jeopardising future flows of finance to the developing world.

Billions of dollars have been raised in the past seven years through the United Nations' system to set up greenhouse gas-cutting projects, such as windfarms and solar panels, in poor nations. But the failure of governments to provide firm guarantees to continue with the system beyond this year has raised serious concerns over whether it can survive.

A panel convened by the UN reported on Monday at a meeting in Bangkok that the system, known as the clean development mechanism (CDM), was in dire need of rescue. The panel warned that allowing the CDM to collapse would make it harder in future to raise finance to help developing countries cut carbon.

Joan MacNaughton, a former top UK civil servant and vice chair of the high level panel, told the Guardian: "The carbon market is profoundly weak, and the CDM has essentially collapsed. It's extremely worrying that governments are not taking this seriously."

The panel said that governments needed to reassure investors, who have poured tens of billions into the market, by pledging a continuation of the system, and propping up the market by toughening their targets on cutting emissions, and perhaps buying carbon credits themselves.

Governments have a last chance to restore confidence in the system when they meet in Qatar this December to discuss climate change. But few participants hold out any hope that they will agree to toughen their 2020 emissions targets, which are scarcely even on the agenda. Instead, governments are focusing on drawing up a new climate change treaty by the end of 2015, which would stipulate emissions cuts for the period after 2020.

New computer models suggest there could be many more habitable planets out there than previously thought.

Scientists have developed models to help them identify planets in far-away solar systems that are capable of supporting life.

Estimates of habitable planet numbers have been based on the likelihood of them having surface water.

But a new model allows scientists to identify planets with underground water kept liquid by planetary heat.

The research was presented at the British Science Festival in Aberdeen.

Water is fundamental for life as we know it.

Planets too close to their sun lose surface water to the atmosphere through evaporation.

Surface water on planets located in the more frigid distant reaches from their sun is locked away as ice.

The dogma was, for water to exist in its life-giving liquid form, a planet had to be the right distance from its sun - in the habitable zone.

As Sean McMahon, the PhD student from Aberdeen University who is carrying out the work explained: "It's the idea of a range of distances from a star within which the surface of an Earth-like planet is not too hot or too cold for water to be liquid.

The Russian Federation's state nuclear energy corporation Rosatom hopes to win a contract to help realise a prospective nuclear plant in Poland.

"Rosatom wants to participate in the tender for the construction of a nuclear power plant in Poland," Sergei Boyarkin, engineering projects manager at Rosatom, told the Polish Press Agency.

Boyarkin revealed his hopes at the XX Economic Forum in Krynica, southern Poland.

"If Poland launches a tender, we are ready to present our offer, but we are waiting for the conditions of the tender," Boyarkin said.

The current Polish government is aiming for a nuclear plant to be built by 2023.

Four Polish state-controlled companies signed a preliminary deal on Wednesday, agreeing to share the brunt of the costs of construction of the plant (PGE, Tauron, KGHM and Enea).

However, it is unlikely that the general contractor for the construction will be appointed before 2014. French and American companies have also voiced an interest.

Meanwhile, although a short-list of potential sites for a nuclear power plant was presented in November 2011, the ultimate location has not been confirmed.

The three prospective locations are all near the Baltic Sea - in Mielno, Zarnowiec and Choczewo, although the government faces potential stumbling blocks in winning over public opinion.

Like former Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond, the bosses of Glencore and Xstrata are a breed apart. These mining and commodities trading giants, which are in the midst of a £37bn merger, have ridden an extraordinary boom in demand over the last 10 years and creamed off much of the profits for themselves and their shareholders.

Based offshore and paying little tax, Glencore orchestrates a business that few people would understand, least of all politicians who must judge whether the merger creates a monopolistic industry. Exotic derivatives and super-fast computer systems are deployed to maximise profits. Like the bankers, commodities traders argue their sophisticated systems enhance the smooth working of market capitalism. For those not in the habit of reading business pages, here are five reasons why you should care about this merger.

1. Pay and wealth

Bankers once enjoyed the salaries and bonuses commanded by mining company bosses. Mick Davis, the Xstrata chief executive, is already the best paid boss in FTSE 100, taking home £18.5m last year. Until last week, when the merger was still friendly, he was due to receive a £30m golden handcuff to keep him at his desk. Now Glencore boss Ivan Glasenberg, who owns a £5bn stake in his company, has performed an extraordinary U-turn. He has upped his offer for Xstrata and made Davis's exit a condition of the deal, though Davis will likely leave with £8m in cash and £38m in shares.

The two men are well known to each other. Davis and Glasenberg met at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and decided to cement their already strong business relationship into a merger of the two companies over a dinner in London last December.

2. Food

Droughts and floods have damaged this year's food harvest, though conflicting reports of the overall effect on global stocks often make it difficult to fathom the shortfall.

Nevertheless, foodstuff prices are already up more than 20% since the spring and trading is frantic as a glut of panicky stories flood the media. Soybean prices are above the peak reached in the last food crisis in 2008.

Glencore has grown over 20 years to be one the biggest food traders in the world, dominating the trade in wheat, maize and barley, edible oils and sugar. The head of Glencore's food trading business created a storm when he said last month that the chronic drought affecting the US midwest would be "good for Glencore" because it would be able to exploit soaring prices.

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Acupuncture, an ancient Chinese therapy that inserts needles into the body, reduced back and neck pain, arthritis and headaches, according to the largest analysis of the treatment.

Data compiled from 29 studies of almost 18,000 people found that acupuncture was better at relieving pain than not having the treatment at all or undergoing a sham procedure, according to research reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine today.

About 3 million U.S. adults get acupuncture each year, mostly for chronic pain, the authors wrote. Doctors don't know why the ancient Chinese therapy can help relieve pain and more studies are needed to determine how the treatment fits with remedies such as drugs, surgery and physical and behavioral therapy, said Andrew Vickers, the lead author of the analysis.

"We thought for a long time that the reason why acupuncture worked was just because people believed it work," Vickers, a researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said in a Sept. 7 telephone interview. "We now know that the effect of acupuncture goes above and beyond the placebo effect. Acupuncture is a reasonable option for chronic pain."

Traditional Chinese medicine explains acupuncture as a technique for balancing the flow of energy in a person's body, according to the Mayo Clinic. Inserting needles into specific points along pathways in the body changes the flow.

Austria is to hold a referendum on whether to abolish its long tradition of compulsory military service for young men. But there's little public or political consensus on the issue.

Austria's Defence Minister, Norbert Darabos, wants a professional army made up of well paid volunteers rather than poorly paid conscripts.

"The questions should be put: Professional army - yes or no. Retaining general conscription - yes or no. In my opinion that's sufficient," said Darabos.

But many disagree with the minister including most of the army's top brass. In fact, the chief of staff is in open conflict with the minister on the issue. Author and defence expert Conrad Seidl says the Bundesheer, as the army is called, is mostly happy with the status quo.

"The Bundesheer has a long tradition," says Seidl. "For over 50 years now they have had a conscript system, and a large part of the Austrian military is composed of reserves or, as we call them, militias

New York officials were locked in negotiations Monday in a last-ditch attempt to break the deadlock that has delayed the building of the ground zero memorial museum ahead of the 11th anniversary of 9/11.

Parties to the talks were hopeful that a deal could yet be done ahead of Tuesday's anniversary ceremony in order to avoid yet another embarrassing chapter in the rebuilding of ground zero.

The current dispute between funding parties has pushed back the opening of the museum, which is conceived as the memorial heart of the 16-acre site, until 2014 - fully five years after it was initially meant to be completed.

Family members of some of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, who have been involved in designing the museum, said they were reaching the end of their patience. Ten of the 40 seats on the board of the September 11 foundation, which controls the memorial and museum, are taken by victims' family members.

"Family members are very sad that politics have got in the way of building this museum. If a deal isn't reached many of us will be speaking out about it," said Christine Ferer, a board member who lost her husband, Neil Levin, on 9/11.

Ferer, whose husband was the executive director of the port authority of New York and New Jersey, said that the current dispute paradoxically arose from an attempt by politicians on the port authority to wrest control of the museum away from the September 11 foundation. "The foundation is a private body that raised $450m to build the museum - it is not appropriate for government bodies to try and control it."

The disagreement has led to work on the memorial museum to be suspended for the past nine months. It has also pitted some of the most powerful political figures in the US north-east against each other.

Three men have been arrested in Delhi for trying to board a flight with small primates hidden in their underwear.

Two of the men were found with slender lorises concealed in pouches in their briefs, a customs official at Indira Gandhi International Airport told the BBC.

The men were transit passengers, en route to Dubai from Bangkok.

The animals were uncovered when security guards noticed a bulge in their underwear during a frisk.

The Press Trust of India reported that one of the lorises was 7in (17.8cm) in length.

The condition of the animals was "OK, but deteriorating" according to the official, who declined to be named.

They have been transferred to the Delhi-based organisation People For Animals, which said the lorises were being treated in hospital.

Photographs of the lorises sent to the BBC by the hospital show the red-coated creatures inside an animal transit box lined with newspaper. Popular pet

Lorises, which are nocturnal and carnivorous primates, are native to parts of South Asia and South East Asia, and live in tropical forest areas.

The lioness lay sleeping in the bed of a dark green pickup, her eyes covered with a soft blue cloth, as a veterinarian in camouflage stood over her. "Ni kubwa!" he said in Swahili: "She's big!"

 She was in fact surprisingly fat, fluffy and young. Surprisingly because she had been living in the suburbs of Nairobi for at least four months, and it was hard to believe she was so fit and healthy.

And hard to believe that she was actually captured. Tranquilizing a wild large carnivore is always stressful, and these were hardly the best circumstances. Cornered by one of my dogs at 6:30 that morning, she was protecting a trio of 2-month-old cubs in thick bushes at the bottom of my property.

It took 12 rangers and 3 vets from the Kenya Wildlife Service -- aided by two Land Cruisers, a pickup and a tractor -- more than six hours to dart her and capture the cubs by hand. The small, swarming crowd of onlookers, many taking pictures on their phones, did not make things easier.

As difficult and exciting as capturing the lions was, a more imposing question now loomed: What do you do with them?

The vision of lion prides roaming endless African savannas, unaffected by people, is a romanticized image that survives in just a few very large protected areas. Lions play important roles in ecosystems and bring in millions of dollars from safari tourism, but they are hard to live with and potentially very dangerous.

The African lion is listed as a threatened species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Only 20,000 to 40,000 wild lions remain, in just 20 percent of the historical range of the species.

As the human population continues to grow rapidly here, rates of conflict with lions and other wildlife are growing too. These conflicts are a great threat to carnivores in Africa, and how they are managed will determine the fate of the lion in Kenya.

Unfortunately, we know very little about suburban wildlife in Africa. Large carnivores that make their way into urban or suburban areas are often quickly killed by vehicles or people -- leaving no time to study them. Or as the biologist Craig Packer at the University of Minnesota bluntly puts it, "Usually, urban carnivores are encountered as road kills."

Dr. Packer, the director of the Serengeti Lion Project, a long-running study of lions in Tanzania, agrees with other experts that the best solution for lions like the ones captured in my yard may be euthanasia -- despite the lion's threatened status. The reasons are rooted in geography and fundamental aspects of lion biology.

My neighborhood, Mukoma Estate, is a partly forested, developing suburb on the south side of Nairobi. It is immediately west of Nairobi National Park, about 45 square miles of partly fenced grassland and forest less than five miles from the central business district of a city of more than three million people. Long-term residents recall lions moving through Mukoma in the past; baboons, warthogs and a leopard still call Mukoma home.

Successful urban carnivores include coyotes, foxes, raccoons and badgers -- smaller animals with generalist diets that allow them to eat just about anything. But lions, weighing 240 to 600 pounds and eating only meat, certainly do not meet these criteria; the Mukoma lions were a direct threat to people, and they killed numerous warthogs, several dogs and goats, and two young giraffes.

But it is unlikely that they were lured here by the availability of such prey. From limited monitoring by the group Friends of Nairobi National Park, Dr. Packer says that lionesses are probably living and having cubs outside the park because there is a large lion population inside it -- including a number of adult males that pose a risk of infanticide.

"If lions are indeed at high density within the park," said Laurence G. Frank of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Kenyan research group Living With Lions, "as long as she can get through the fence, she is likely to move the cubs back out. This situation is likely to arise again in the near future, creating an ongoing management problem and continuing threat of someone being killed or injured." So returning the lioness and her cubs to the park was not a solution.

Human-lion conflict occurs often in more rural settings, and people are advised to not kill carnivores or they will face prosecution. Thus, under pressure to "not kill any lions themselves," Patrick Omondi, head of species conservation at the Kenya Wildlife Service, told me that the captured lions were taken to Meru National Park, about 200 miles northeast of Nairobi.

Carnivore biologists collectively cringed. Again, Dr. Packer put it bluntly: "Sending them to Meru is a death sentence."  The technique, translocation, is an important tool for the management of carnivores in networks of intensively managed, fenced reserves, as in South Africa. But such a network does not exist in Kenya, and moving lions that are known livestock killers only shifts the problem to another area.

In addition, lions are highly territorial, and do not welcome newcomers. "The great majority of people are not aware of the true consequences of translocating carnivores, and just assume that it is the `kind' thing to do," Dr. Frank said. "Translocating a lion kills it slowly and cruelly, but out of sight.

Explaining the decision Sharon Bowles (ALDE, UK), Chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee said:

"On Thursday a decision was taken by the coordinators of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee to postpone the hearing of Yves Mersch, candidate for a post on the ECB's executive board, after it became evident that no female candidate had been considered for the position before the official Council recommendation was made.

The committee has raised its concerns on lack of gender balance on the ECB Board and Governing council this for a long time. There is now not even a single woman sitting on the main board of what is one of the most powerful and essential institutions in the EU.  The symbolic and practical effects of this absence are not without note.

It was billed as China's answer to the Arc de Triomphe -- a spectacular £445m British-designed skyscraper paying homage to the Asian country's turbo-charged economic rise.

 But even before the 74-storey Gate to the East is complete it has come under attack from critics who compare it not to the famous Parisian war memorial but to a pair of "giant underpants".

Located in Suzhou, 45 miles west of Shanghai, the 270 yard-high skyscraper is the work of British architecture practice RMJM, founded in Edinburgh in 1956 by Sir Robert Matthew and Stirrat Johnson-Marshall.

According to the company bankrolling the project, Suzhou Chinaing Real Estate Co, the Gate to the East will be completed later this year becoming the largest gate-shaped structure in the world.

According to a PPP poll of likely Ohio voters, 15 percent of Republicans in Ohio think Romney is "more responsible" for bin Laden's death than Obama, while 47 percent of Republicans are "not sure" whether Obama or Romney deserves more of the credit.