Germans are mad about cars and Germany is ranked the most fuel-efficient country on the planet, but when it comes to electric vehicles, Europe's top economy is in the slow lane.

And moves by the government last week to try to jump-start public interest in the technology are unlikely to change much, experts say.

In 2009, Chancellor Angela Merkel set an ambitious target for one million electric cars to be on the road in Germany by 2020, and this in a country where some motorways are free of any speed limit.

"We're confident that we'll reach that goal," Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt said as recently as last week when he launched a number of new electromobility initiatives.

But for Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, expert at the CAR Center for Automotive Research at Duisburg-Essen University, the target was totally unrealistic.

Merkel "might have just as easily said that we would have 100,000 cars driving on the moon by 2020," he said.

BERLIN, August 17 (RIA Novosti) - The foreign ministers of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine will meet on Sunday in Berlin to develop a "roadmap" for a ceasefire in the east of Ukraine, says German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

"First of all, we are talking about a roadmap and a framework for effective border control. It is only by following this path that eastern Ukraine can come to a settlement, and Kiev can continue the national dialogue and properly engage people from the east in it," according to the minister's statement, obtained by RIA Novosti. Steinmeier said he believed there was no simple solution.

The Liberal Democrats have pledged to examine allegations of discrimination made by Pauline Pearce, the "Hackney heroine" who confronted rioters in 2011, after she abandoned her campaign to become party president on the grounds of its "neanderthal views on diversity".

A spokeswoman for the Lib Dems said that the party was saddened to hear that Pearce had decided not to contest the senior post and asked for her to pass on any evidence of discrimination.

Pearce, who rose to national celebrity after her intervention during the riots, posted a five-minute video on her Facebook page in which she expressed her disappointment that she had encountered what she described as a patronising attitude from the party.

In a note attached to the video, Pearce said: "Sadly the Liberal Democrats, like all political parties, need to look again at their too often neanderthal views on diversity, inclusivity and accessibility."

The French aristocrat and conservative politician who paired up with a blacklisted Russian oligarch to build amusement parks in Crimea and Moscow defended his plans on Saturday and lambasted EU sanctions as a "reign of terror."

Philippe de Villiers, the founder of the widely popular Puy du Fou theme park near the western city of Nantes and leader of the eurosceptic Movement for France party, announced his plans with Konstantin Valerevich Malofeev on Friday.

The Puy du Fou park was named the world's best amusement park in 2012 and and attracted 1.7 million visitors last year.

Villiers, 65, says he hopes to replicate its success in Moscow and on the Crimean peninsula in a joint venture with Malofeev, a banker and prominent personality in Russian orthodox conservative circles who embraces expansionist ideologies.

(...) Russian media reported that the "Tsargrad" parks will not be just a place for fun, but rather an immersion into the history of Russia.

(...) The agreement was signed on Friday, a day after the elder Villiers met with Russian president Vladimir Putin in the seaside resort of Yalta in Crimea.

"Politicians are weaklings. It's another thing to fight for civilisation and for values that I have always defended, for a non-globalised world that nourishes deep roots, which Vladimir Putin seems the sole head of state to defend today," Villiers told French radio RTL. "It's true, I love Russia, I identify with it, I feel good there."

The far right's fascination for Putin. In other news, de Villiers is a nutcase.

Some Wall Street banks are drawing up preliminary plans that include moving some of their London-based operations to Ireland to deal with the possible scenario of Britain leaving the European Union, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the situation.

Citigroup Inc (C.N), Morgan Stanley (MS.N) and Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) are considering Ireland as an alternative location for some of their European activities if they need to move them out of the UK, according to people familiar with the banks, the Financial Times reported.

The FT reported that the plans were at a very early stage.

The stakes around Ukraine's vast agricultural sector, the world's third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest exporter of wheat, constitute a critical factor that has been overlooked. With ample fields of fertile black soil that allow for high production volumes of grains, Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe.

In the last decade, the agricultural sector has been characterised by a growing concentration of production within very large agricultural holdings that use large-scale intensive farming systems. Not surprisingly, the presence of foreign corporations in the agricultural sector and the size of agro-holdings are both growing quickly, with more than 1.6 million hectares signed over to foreign companies for agricultural purposes in recent years.

Now the goal is to set policies that will benefit Western corporations. Whereas Ukraine does not allow the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture, Article 404 of the EU agreement, which relates to agriculture, includes a clause that has generally gone unnoticed: both parties will cooperate to extend the use of biotechnologies.

Given the struggle for resources in Ukraine and the influx of foreign investors in the agriculture sector, an important question is whether the results of the programme will benefit Ukraine and its farmers by securing their property rights or pave the way for corporations to more easily access property and land.

(Reuters) - Flashes of illumination rather than fireworks are expected at this week's annual meeting of top central bankers and economists in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Few predict anything so momentous as the speech by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke two years ago that paved the way for an unprecedented $85 billion per month stimulus plan.

But policymakers will discuss at length their thinking around the labor markets of major economies at the Aug. 21-23 meeting, perhaps dropping clues about the path for monetary policy in the months ahead.

The spotlight will be on Janet Yellen, who will speak on Friday in her first appearance at Jackson Hole as Fed chair.

"I don't think she's going to go anywhere close to monetary policy," said Stephen Lewis, chief economist at ADM Investor Services.

"The theme of the meeting is going to be dynamics of the labor market, which is a subject very close to her heart, and it is a key question for the Fed as it tries to work out what its policy should be over the next few months."

As Stanley Fischer, the new vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, lamented on August 11 in his first major policy speech: "Year after year, we have had to explain from mid-year onwards why the global growth rate has been lower than predicted as little as two quarters back. ... This pattern of disappointment and downward revision sets up the first, and the basic, challenge on the list of issues policymakers face in moving ahead: restoring growth, if that is possible."

The central message of Fischer's speech -- that central bankers and governments should try even harder than they have in the past five years to support economic growth -- was closely echoed by Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, at his quarterly press conference two days later.

(...) Even at the European Central Bank, the once taboo idea that monetary policy can be used to stimulate growth is suddenly open for discussion -- if not yet conventional wisdom.

Draghi, in his recent policy statements, has unequivocally promised that the European Central Bank would keep interest rates at zero far longer than the Fed and has openly welcomed the weaker euro this policy should produce. There has also been no criticism for this ultra-dovish policy from German Chancellor Angela Merkel or the Bundesbank -- if only because the German economy is reeling from the body-blow of the sanctions war with Russia and the violence in Ukraine.

But what of Fischer's discouraging caveat at the end of his quote? The challenge, he said, "is restoring growth, if that is possible."

I particularly like how it zeroes in on the faith based nostrum in economics that there will always be new kinds of jobs...

(Annoying voice on the video though...)

(Reuters) - Establishing a tax domicile abroad to avoid U.S. taxes is a hot strategy in corporate America, but many companies that have done such "inversion" deals have failed to produce above-average returns for investors, a Reuters analysis has found.

Looking back three decades at 52 completed transactions, the review showed 19 of the companies have subsequently outperformed the Standard & Poor's 500 index, while 19 have underperformed. Another 10 have been bought by rivals, three have gone out of business and one has reincorporated back in the United States.

Among the poorest performers in the review were oilfield services and engineering firms, all from Texas. Among them was the first of these companies to invert, McDermott International Inc (MDR.N), which moved its tax home-base to Panama in 1983.

Drugmakers are dominating the latest wave of inversions and most of them have outperformed the benchmark index. So far in 2014, five U.S. pharmaceutical firms have agreed to redomicile to Ireland, Canada or the Netherlands. Deals that have not been completed were excluded from the review.

It is impossible to know how the companies might have fared in the market had they not inverted. Innumerable factors other than taxes influence a stock's performance, and no two of these deals are identical, complicating simple comparisons.

The Green Party's policy of raising the top tax rate to generate close to $1 billion to tackle child poverty is not about penalising the rich but sharing the benefits of wealth more fairly, co-leader Metiria Turei says.

If the Greens got into Government, they would want to create a new top tax rate of 40 per cent for those earning above $140,000, Ms Turei announced at the party's campaign launch in Auckland.

The new top tax rate would affect only 3 per cent of all taxpayers, but the revenue raised would make "the world of difference to the hundreds of thousands of children living in poverty", she said. The tax threshold was set at $140,000 so MPs' salaries were captured.

And the government party's response :

National's Associate Finance Minister, Steven Joyce, said more taxes would result in a slower economy and fewer jobs. "Keeping with the plan is the best way of helping people."

The Greens' proposed 40 per cent top tax rate would affect many hard-working New Zealanders, including school principals, doctors and many small business owners, Mr Joyce said.

"We've been here before. A 40 per cent tax rate is damaging to the economy because it increases tax avoidance, penalises hard work and sends some of our best and brightest offshore.

"Just when the economy is heading in the right direction ... the Greens want to go back to the old tax-and-spend approach that clearly didn't work in the lead-up to the [Global Financial Crisis]."

A second canal joining the Pacific and Atlantic oceans is planned for Nicaragua, writes Nathan Wood. But the gigantic project is raising growing fears due to a grossly unfair contract, glaring failures of process, close links to the Chinese government, and its enormous - but uncosted - ecological impacts.

For the second poorest country in the western hemisphere, the Nicaragua canal could be seen as a much needed economic boost.

But the 278 kilometre project involves the construction of two deep water ports, two free-trade shipping zones, an international airport, an oil pipeline and a railway could be an environmental disaster.

With huge environmental impacts and questionable motives of those backing the project, economists, sociologists and environmentalists are already voicing concerns.

Kurdish forces aided by an expanded US air campaign have advanced to within kilometres of Iraq's largest dam, less than two weeks after it was captured by the Islamic State group.

General Tawfik Desty, a Kurdish commander, on Sunday told the AP news agency that his Peshmerga forces were in control of the eastern part of Mosul dam, and that fighting was still under way.

The claim, which Al Jazeera has not confirmed, comes after Kurdish forces took control of Tel Skuf, about 15km east of the dam, as well as the towns of Sharafiya and Batnaya, from the Islamic State group, formerly known as ISIL.

Their advance was aided by US air strikes on Islamic State positions. The US central command said it had launched 14 raids on Sunday, to support "Iraqi security forces and Kurdish defence forces ... to combat ISIL" - suggesting its role in northern Iraq had expanded beyond of "supporting humanitarian efforts".

Well, it sounds familiar to us, so familiar that many Palestinians took to Twitter to advise their American counterparts in Ferguson on how to deal with such attacks.  We saw tweets like, "Remember to not touch your face when tear-gassed or put water on it." And, "Always make sure to run against the wind /to keep calm when you're teargassed, the pain will pass, don't rub your eyes!" And my personal favorite, "Don't keep much distance from the police, if you're close to them they can't tear gas."  Yes, we Palestinians are very creative when it comes to anti-anti-protesting. We are professional protestors.

Transportation Security Administration workers will be getting training on how to recognize District of Columbia driver's licenses and identification cards.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district's delegate to Congress, says the training will help the TSA resolve the recurring problem of officers not recognizing the validity of District licenses at airports.

The US is poised to 'deregulate' GMO corn, soybean and cotton varieties resistant to the herbicides 2,4-D and dicamba. The result will be a big increase in the use of those herbicides, as high as 600%. Only a huge public outcry can now stop the GMO-herbicide juggernaut.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has issued its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and proposed approval for new GMO corn and soybean varieties genetically engineered to be resistant to the toxic herbicide 2,4-D.

The approval comes despite USDA's acknowledgment that Dow's crops will trigger a three- to seven-fold increase in agricultural use of 2,4-D, foster 2,4-D resistance in weeds, and inhibit farmers' use of non-chemical weed control methods.

India's top court on Wednesday accused the new Hindu nationalist government of failing to move on its promise to clean up the sewage-ridden, sacred river Ganges.

The Supreme Court urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government to deliver a road map on its highly-publicised pledge to restore the Ganges, which is revered by Hindus and is believed to cleanse sins.

"You are showing no urgency to protect Ganga. Are you saving the holy river?" Justice TS Thakur asked the government's top legal adviser.

"This is a part of your manifesto. What is the government doing about it?

"You are showing no urgency in this matter, only in other matters. Issues that ought to be on the backburner are out on the frontburner," he added.

On the political right, it's pretty popular these days to claim that the left exaggerates scientific worries about hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." In a recent National Review article, for instance, a Hoover Institution researcher complains that 53 percent of Democrats in California support a fracking ban "despite the existence of little if any credible scientific evidence of fracking's feared harms and overwhelming scientific evidence of its environmental benefits, including substantial reductions in both local and global pollutants."

Three or four years ago, a statement like that may have seemed defensible. The chief environmental concern about fracking at that time involved the contamination of drinking water through the fracking process--blasting water, sand, and chemicals underground in vast quantities and at extreme pressures to force open shale layers deep beneath the Earth, and release natural gas. But the science was still pretty ambiguous, and a great deal turned on how "fracking" was defined. The entire mega-process of "unconventional" gas drilling had clearly caused instances of groundwater contamination, due to spills and leaks from improperly cased wells. But technically, "fracking" only refers to the water and chemical blast, not the drilling, the disposal of waste, or the huge industrial operations that accompany it all.

The federal anti-terrorism agency OCAD has joined in an investigation of an oil leak at the nuclear power reactor Doel 4 in Beveren, East Flanders. Last week the agency for nuclear control (Fanc) said it was looking into allegations of sabotage.

The reactor was shut down unexpectedly last week, after about 90,000 litres of oil leaked into the steam turbine, causing it to overheat. Electricity producer Electrabel called it "an apparently deliberate manual intervention".  A spokesperson for Fanc said inspectors had been to the scene and found "indications" that the leak had been caused deliberately.

The investigation began with representatives of the agency and Electrabel interviewing members of staff. The prosecutor's office of Dendermonde was then included in the enquiry, according to Jan Bens, director of Fanc, who previously served as the director of the Doel plant.

"There are numerous cameras on the site, but they don't see everything,

Who Could Have Predicted?


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Reuters) - Police arrested seven protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, early on Sunday as they imposed a curfew aimed at quelling days of violence that erupted after an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by a white police officer.

The latest confrontation occurred when demonstrators remained in the streets of the St. Louis suburb after the curfew took effect at midnight (0100 ET). Seven people were arrested for failing to disperse, police said.

A person was shot and critically wounded during the night. It was not clear why, and the shooter was still at large, police said.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon imposed the curfew on Saturday after a week of racially charged protests and looting over the Aug. 9 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

KAMPALA, Aug 15 2014 (IPS) - When Peninah Mamayi got her period last January, she was scared, confused and embarrassed. But like thousands of other girls in the developing world who experience menarche having no idea what menstruation is, Mamayi, who lives with her sister-in-law in a village in Tororo, eastern Uganda, kept quiet.

"When I went to the toilet I had blood on my knickers," she told IPS. "I was wondering what was coming out and I was so scared I ran inside the house and stayed there crying.

"I just used rags. I feared telling anybody."

Not having access to or being able to afford disposable sanitary pads or tampons like millions of their Western counterparts, desperate Ugandan girls will resort to using the local ebikokooma leaves, paper, old clothes and other materials as substitutes or even, as a health minister told a menstrual hygiene management conference this week, sitting in the sand until that time of the month is over.

Magpies do not steal trinkets and are positively scared of shiny objects, according to new research.

The study appears to redeem the myth of the "thieving magpie", which pervades European folklore.

It is widely believed that magpies have a compulsive urge to steal sparkly things for their nests.

But Exeter University scientists show that the birds are actually nervous of such objects, presumably because they are novel and may prove dangerous.

The study involved a pile of shiny items (metal screws, small foil rings, and a small rectangular piece of aluminium foil), and a pile of the same objects covered with matt blue paint.

A quarantine centre for suspected Ebola patients in the Liberian capital Monrovia has been attacked and looted by protesters, police say.

The incident happened in the densely populated West Point township on Saturday evening.

At least 20 patients who were being monitored for signs of the illness have left the centre.

Officials said blood-stained bedding looted from the centre posed a serious infection risk.

The protesters were unhappy that patients were being brought in from other parts of the capital, the assistant health minister said.

So instead of somebody paying money to get their photo developed, and somebody getting a part of a job, a little fragment of a job, at least, and retirement and all the other things that we're accustomed to, it works informally now, and intangibly.

Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He's a friend so I don't want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.

And you know, that's all kind of true when you're young and if you're not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you're a person in the West, in the developed world. And then meanwhile this loss, or this shift in the line from what's formal to what's informal, doesn't mean that we're abandoning what's formal. I mean, if it was uniform, and we were all entering a socialist utopia or something, that would be one thing, but the formal benefits are accruing at this fantastic rate, at this global record rate to the people who own the biggest computer that's connecting all the people.

So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there's this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There's not a middle-class hump. It's an all-or-nothing society.

Right, and also I think part of what you're saying too is that it's still in most ways a formal economy in that the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can't pay his rent with cultural capital that's replaced it.

Another huge part of the unemployment issue.

(h/t Sven)

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

A review and update of a controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness claims that consciousness derives from deeper level, finer scale activities inside brain neurons. The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in "microtubules" inside brain neurons corroborates this theory, according to review authors. They suggest that EEG rhythms (brain waves) also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations, and that from a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.

Treating brain microtubule vibrations eh.

And to think we just used to call it music!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

A four-year-old girl was recovering in hospital Wednesday after being lost for nearly two weeks in a bear-infested forest in the Russian north with only her puppy to defend her.

Karina Chikitova was found emaciated but alive at the weekend, having survived 11 days in the Siberian wilderness, where temperatures plunge below freezing at night, with only berries to sustain her in what rescuers said was nothing short of a miracle.

The little girl had left her tiny village in Russia's Sakha region with her dog on July 29 to go and stay with her father who lived in a neighbouring hamlet.

But her father had gone to fight a wildfire and the girl apparently set off by herself into the forest to find him.

When I was 12 my mother moved us into a commune. Eight families ate together every night, saving a lot of time on shopping and cooking. Each adult had to cook only twice a month and each child once a month. So - the very first time I cooked in my life - I had to make burgers for 30 or more people. And I wonder where my great fear of failure at cooking comes from.

in the flesh he comes across less like an international fugitive from justice than a misplaced German exchange student. He's 40, and dressed in black as he invariably is, but there's still more of the teen geek about him than cyber outlaw being hunted by the FBI. Though that is exactly what he is: in the last two years, the founder of the file-sharing website Megaupload has become, for many, an internet folk hero. The US government alleges he is a pirate, a career criminal who swindled the Hollywood studios out of their rightful copyright earnings, and they are desperately trying to extradite him from his adopted home in New Zealand to stand trial in the US, where he faces up to 88 years in jail. To others, younger people predominantly, he's up there with Assange and Snowden: a web freedom fighter unwilling to kowtow to the US government's bullying ways.

At the event in Christchurch, he's articulate, intelligent, personable and in command of his facts, a naturally charismatic public speaker who has drawn a capacity crowd. The reason he's on stage is because his extraordinary career, one that includes three stints in jail, has just taken an even more extraordinary twist. He's founded his own political party, the Internet party, which he claims will be the start of a global political youth movement. And if this sounds like so much hot air, you'd be right... except that, in an even more bizarre twist, he may - may - succeed in bringing down the New Zealand government, a rightwing coalition led by former banker John Key.

On 15 September, five days before New Zealand's general election, Dotcom and Glenn Greenwald will be holding a press conference in Auckland at which Dotcom claims they will unveil explosive new revelations relating to the NZ and US governments' spying programmes. And owing to the country's highly complex proportional representation system - think Borgen-style machinations - the Internet party, and its alliance partner, Mana, a Maori social justice party, could hold the balance of power.

"Hold the balance of power" is the wrong way of putting it, because they will only support a government of the left. But they may well tip the balance to the left. Looking like four or five seats out of 120.

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