news20091130jt1

[TODAY'S TOP STORIES] from [The Japan Times]

[NATIONAL NEWS]
Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
Retired diplomat to testify on secret pact
Ex-bureaucrat, 91, set to tell court of Okinawa reversion deal
Kyodo News

A former senior Foreign Ministry official will testify Tuesday before the Tokyo District Court about state documents that plaintiffs argue indicate the existence of a secret Japan-U.S. pact about cost burdens for the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japan.

{To take the stand: Bunroku Yoshino, 91, a retired senior Foreign Ministry official, is interviewed recently.}

Although successive administrations of the now-ousted Liberal Democratic Party consistently denied the secret pact existed, 91-year-old Bunroku Yoshino, the ministry's former American Bureau chief who was one of Japan's negotiators for the reversion, has claimed otherwise.

The documents include one that is supposed to indicate that Japan secretly shouldered $4 million in costs on behalf of the United States to restore Okinawa farmland used by the U.S. military.

Presiding Judge Norihiko Sugihara summoned Yoshino to appear in court in October. The summons had to be approved by the Foreign Ministry based on a provision in the code of civil procedure pertaining to questions to a witness involving secrets handled as part of diplomatic work.

Yoshino's testimony is expected to give impetus to moves to disclose other secret pacts, particularly one in which Japan allegedly turned a blind eye to stopovers by nuclear-armed U.S. vessels and aircraft — an agreement that goes against the nation's three nonnuclear principles of not possessing, developing or permitting the entry of nuclear weapons.

Those pacts are now under investigation by a Foreign Ministry team after the Democratic Party of Japan came to power in the August general election by ousting the long-ruling LDP.

One of the plaintiffs, former Mainichi Shimbun reporter Takichi Nishiyama, 78, is seeking to clear his name. He was convicted in the 1970s of arranging for a female Foreign Ministry bureaucrat to hand over classified documents about the negotiation process behind the reversion of Okinawa.

In an earlier trial involving Nishiyama, Yoshino testified for the prosecution, denying the existence of the secret documents. He made similar denials in the Diet.

But in court Tuesday, Yoshino will testify on behalf of the plaintiffs, standing by Nishiyama nearly four decades after testifying against his claims.

Yoshino apparently changed his position after the United States between 2000 and 2002 declassified official documents that included secret pacts with Japan regarding the Okinawa reversion.

In April 2005, Nishiyama filed a damages suit with the Tokyo District Court, claiming his career as a reporter was ruined by the conviction. The suit was rejected by the Supreme Court in September 2008 without referring to whether the pact existed.

Yoshino meanwhile began featuring in media reports in 2006 — while Nishiyama was still pursuing damages. Yoshino admitted the secret pact existed and said the initials "B.Y." on related documents were his.

The latest litigation was brought by 25 plaintiffs, including Nishiyama, in March. They are demanding that the government disclose documents pertaining to the alleged secret pacts based on the people's right to know.

"The significance of the latest trial is that it demonstrates we will continue to pursue this issue," Nishiyama said recently.

"Mr. Yoshino will appear as a sworn witness in court. It's different from appearing in the media. (In court) he could face a perjury charge," Nishiyama said, adding the retired bureaucrat's testimony carries "very important meaning as it will be tantamount to an assertion that the government has lied about the secret pact."

Yoshino said he now wants to reveal the truth because the United States has disclosed the official documents for the secret pacts, and there have been several publications on the issue released in Japan.

"There is no doubt that I signed those official documents and they are authentic documents. All the records are there, so I believe nothing should be hidden any longer," he added.

Yoshino said had he admitted the existence of the secret pact before Okinawa was finally returned to Japanese sovereignty from the United States on May 15, 1972, the reversion "would have undoubtedly been broken off."


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
Starfish threaten Shirahama coral reefs

OSAKA (Kyodo) The coral reefs of Shirahama, Wakayama Prefecture, are being devoured by an explosive increase in poisonous starfish, and only five volunteer divers armed with tongs are combating them to save the rich marine environment.

The crown-of-thorns starfish ("oni-hitode") originally lived in subtropical seas. But after the 1990s, they started appearing off Kyushu and Shikoku as well as Wakayama, apparently because of global warming and eutrophication caused by the development of coastal areas of Japan.

Unless drastic eradication efforts are mounted, the coral reefs of Shirahama, a popular tourist spot on the Kii Peninsula, could be decimated within one or two years, experts warn.

"If we keep removing (the starfish) in limited areas on a regular basis, there should be some effect," said Katsuyuki Nakaya, 53, who runs a shop catering to divers and chairs an environmentalist group based in the city of Wakayama.

The five volunteer divers, including Nakaya, must wear protective gear when prying the starfish off the coral because of the creatures' poisonous thorns.

Kushimoto, another Kii port east of Shirahama, was hit by a massive onslaught from the pest from 2004 through 2007.

The municipal government of Kushimoto, also a popular diving and tourist spot, gave subsidies to divers who helped remove around 60,000 of the starfish over the four-year period. This apparently resulted in only 3,000 crown-of-thorns starfish sightings in 2008.

Nakaya and the other four divers are shouldering the entire cost of their starfish-removal activities, including boat fuel. They have asked the Wakayama Prefectural Government and other bodies to help.

"Coral reefs have been destroyed by humans. Humans should take responsibility and protect (the environment)," Nakaya said.

Tatsuo Motokawa, a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, said corals live in shallows with temperatures 18 or higher near over 80 countries.

The area accounts for only 0.1 percent of the world's seas, but about one-third of all ocean fish live among them, the reason coral is dubbed the "oasis of the sea."

However, only one-third of coral reefs are believed to be healthy.


[NATIONAL NEWS]
Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
Cabinet told to budget for market-coping measures
Kyodo News

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama ordered Cabinet ministers on Sunday to insert measures for coping with the yen's rapid appreciation and the stock market's decline in a new supplementary budget for fiscal 2009.

Hatoyama issued the order at a meeting with Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii and other key figures after coming to agreement that fresh, swift measures will be necessary to shield the Japanese economy from volatility arising from the currency and stock market situations.

Some at the meeting were concerned the yen's recent rise against the dollar will deal a blow to exporters and the economy as a whole. They agreed to come up with countermeasures in the second fiscal 2009 supplementary budget, which is currently being formulated.

The new supplementary budget is expected to be worth around ¥2.7 trillion, but its size is likely to increase if it the new market measures are included.

news20091130jt2

[TODAY'S TOP STORIES] from [The Japan Times]

[BUSINESS NEWS]
Monday, Nov. 30, 2009
JAPANESE PERSPECTIVES
When real is nominal and nominal real: the world of falling prices
By NORIKO HAMA
Special to The Japan Times

A newspaper headline tells me 'Pace of growth picks up in Japan." The actual figures bear out the statement. Japan's real GDP registered a quarter-on-quarter increase of 1.2 percent in the July-September quarter. The Japanese economy is expanding.

But is it? Take a look at the nominal GDP figures and one finds that by this measure, the quarter-on-quarter growth rate was a negative 0.1 percent. It's a tiny figure, admittedly, but clearly a shrinkage nonetheless.

So what is happening? Is the Japanese economy growing or isn't it? Are the real figures unreal? Are the nominal figures not nominal? Is it that the real is nominal and that the nominal is real? The mind boggles.

What a thing for an economist to say, you might exclaim accusingly. Or derisively, perhaps. Am I not aware that the difference between the nominal and the real in GDP statistics is the treatment of price changes?

Nominal figures take them on board. Real ones don't. In real terms, an orange is always an orange. Yesterday, today and tomorrow. But if the price of that orange doubles between today and tomorrow, tomorrow's one orange counts as today's two oranges in the nominal world. Thus, inflation creates the illusion of growth, when all that is actually happening is that consumers are being made to pay more for the same thing. People get conned in the nominal world. So we should always turn to the real world for the real answers. Right?

Not really. In a world of falling prices, which is where we dwell at present, the real can be just as much an illusion as the nominal. A 1.2 percent quarter-on-quarter growth translates into a 4.8 percent growth in annualized terms. An almost 5 percent economic expansion doesn't sound at all bad.

Yet look around you and what do you see. Workers registered with manpower dispatching agencies get dispatched nowhere. Job-seeking graduates cannot find jobs anywhere. Wage earners are earning less and less wages. Is all this supposed to happen in a growing economy? The situation is bizarre.

This is a world in which tomorrow's one orange is worth not two of today's oranges but only half. Good, you might say. Wait until tomorrow and we can all buy two oranges for the price of one. Yes, but not all of us. What good is a half-price orange to people whose wages are falling faster than its price? Or for people who have lost jobs altogether in the interim. For them, a real-term growth rate of 4.8 percent has no reality whatsoever.

I have it on good authority that there are now sweaters on sale for 99. Not 990. Just plain 99. Imagine the level, or indeed the nonlevel, of wages required to arrive at that kind of selling price. The nonlevel wage earners involved in producing those 99 sweaters will certainly not be able to afford them. A 4.8 percent real GDP growth rate that is achieved on the strength of 99 sweater production surely does nobody any good.

We really ought to stop using the terms nominal and real when all this stuff is going on. Money-GDP and goods-GDP might be marginally better terms for expressing it. In that case, we can say that when prices are spiraling upward, goods-GDP is a better gauge of what is really happening. When the price trajectory is diving, money-GDP tells the real story better.

Either way, though, it is people-GDP that gets the raw deal. What a terrible world.

Noriko Hama is an economist and a professor at Doshisha University Graduate School of Business

news20091130lat1

[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[Local > Solar panels]
Solar panels causing some storms
Even as California and the federal government encourage solar power, homeowners often have to fight homeowners associations for their right to install the systems.
By Catherine Saillant
November 30, 2009

Ready to chuck his electric bills, Camarillo resident Marc Weinberg last year asked his homeowners association for permission to put solar panels on his roof.

When the Spanish Hills Homeowners Assn. said no, Weinberg sued the group. Under the state's Solar Rights Act, he argued, a homeowners association can't unreasonably block solar installations.

Weinberg won, and the Spanish Hills Homeowners Assn. was ordered to not only permit the solar panels but to cover the tens of thousands of dollars that Weinberg had spent on legal fees. Since last fall, when he installed a double row of matte black panels, three other homes in the hilltop neighborhood of luxury estates have added panels.

"We didn't set out to be green activists," said Weinberg, 39, a real estate attorney. "That's not where we're coming from. We honestly looked at it from a financial standpoint."

Whether motivated by pocketbook or environmentalism, similar battles between homeowners groups and property owners are cropping up across the state as the installation of solar systems becomes more affordable and utility costs rise.

Homeowners boards insist that they are protecting property values by enforcing rules that govern everything from paint color to how early trash bins can be set out for collection. But residents say their right to invest in alternative energy trumps the sensibilities of neighbors who don't like how the panels look.

Results of the battles have been mixed even as the nation is being urged by the Obama administration to embrace alternative energy.

Santa Clarita homeowner Marty Griffin put solar panels up anyway after his homeowners association rejected his application. The Tesoro Del Valle Homeowners Assn. sued him, and in early November a jury told Griffin the panels should be moved to a more discreet spot on his property.

Solar installer Bradley Bartz earlier this year threatened a Palos Verdes commun- ity group with legal action after it denied three clients permits to install solar panels. He filed a claim against the city of Torrance after it rejected another client's application. In all four cases, Bartz said, he prevailed.

Homeowners' main defense is the Solar Rights Act, adopted by California in 1978 to protect consumers' right to install solar energy technology. The law makes it difficult for homeowners groups to reject solar energy equipment unless it creates a safety hazard or a modification can be made without great cost.

Now, solar advocates are pushing for a federal version of the California law. Energy legislation that moved through the House earlier this year included a provision that would make it illegal for HOA rules, leases or private contracts to prohibit the installation of solar systems.

It's uncertain whether the Senate will keep the language in its version of the bill, said Raymond Walker, a government affairs spokesman for Standard Renewable Energy, a Houston-based solar installer. As debate continues, solar industry advocates are forming a lobbying group to make sure their voices are heard, Walker said.

Industry officials say fewer regulatory hassles would speed the growth of jobs and move the nation closer to energy independence, he said.

"We want to make this into a real industry, and we're trying to make sure the regulatory landscape is clear so this can take off," he said.

Homeowner and commun- ity groups haven't taken a position on the bill yet. Commun- ity Associations Institute, an education and advocacy group based in Alexandria, Va., said such "green issues" arise regularly in the estimated 300,000 community groups nationwide.

The institute advises striking a balance between conservation and aesthetics, said spokesman Frank Rathbun.

Advocates say those who invest in alternative energy should be applauded instead of punished. They ultimately benefit ratepayers by reducing demand on the state's grid, said Adam Browning of Vote Solar, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that promotes the use of solar energy.

"It's somebody doing their part to reduce peak load," Browning said. "That's the most expensive electricity utilities have to buy."

California two years ago launched a $3.3-billion effort to increase the use of solar statewide, offering rebates and tax credits to consumers who install energy systems. Since then, the number of homes and businesses with installed solar has more than doubled, growing from 23,000 in 2006 to 52,700, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.

The cost of small solar systems declined 9% in the last year and larger installations have fallen 13%, the PUC said in an October report. Still, the state is far from being on track to its goal of adding 3,000 megawatts in solar panels by 2016, sufficient to power 600,000 homes.

Property owners who install panels can sell excess energy back to the power companies for credit on their monthly bills.

Weinberg, the Camarillo resident, said he no longer pays electric bills that rose as high as $500 a month for his 3,000-square-foot home during hot summer months. He's already earned a $60 credit for sending excess energy to the state's grid, he said.

"There is now a greater financial incentive for people to adopt this stuff," Weinberg said. "So I've got to think there's more incentive to fight."

The heightened activity has produced more battles, not just in California but across the nation. A Woodbury, Minn., man was reportedly denied permission to install solar panels on his roof because his homeowners association found them too obtrusive.

In Somerset County, N.J., a homeowner was reportedly ordered to remove 28 installed panels. In Avondale, Ariz., retiree Hank Speak has been fighting for more than six years to keep his solar equipment. Arguing that the panels were ugly, his homeowners group imposed huge fines.

But last year, an Arizona judge ruled that the association's restrictions were contrary to the state's support of solar power.

Walker, the Houston solar installer spokesman, estimates that his firm has lost $2 million in jobs this year because homeowners groups have blocked installations in several of the states where the company operates.

Several states, including California, Arizona, Colorado and Florida, have laws that prevent homeowner groups from imposing too many restrictions. But as the California cases demonstrate, homeowners sometimes have to fight for their rights.

Weinberg took on his homeowners group, he said, because the law appeared to be clearly on his side, he said. The Spanish Hills Homeowners Assn. wanted him to move the panels from the front of his house to the back. But that orientation would have caused him to lose about 40% efficiency, a violation of the act, he said.

Griffin, the Santa Clarita homeowner, said he installed his panels without his homeowners group's permission because it was taking too long to respond. His attorney, Michael Ribons, said delay is often a tactic.

"Homeowners associations stall, they say they want more information," Ribons said. "But everyone knows it's all about looks."

The jury's finding that Griffin should relocate some of the panels to a newly built platform would cost him about $8,000, Ribons said.

Bartz, who's run ABC Solar in Rancho Palos Verdes since 2000, said he regularly runs up against homeowner association boards -- and even city planning departments -- that throw up roadblocks. They usually back down once they learn about the Solar Rights Act, Bartz said.

"Some homeowners groups are just unaware," he said. "But they also like their control."

The community board for the Palos Verdes homes rejected the permits because the proposed solar panels were blue, Bartz said.

"They wanted it black. It just was arbitrary," he said. "I don't care how they feel. I know every time the meter spins backwards, I feel good."

news20091130lat2

[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[Local > Recycling]
Recycling centers close, eliminating 'green' jobs
Operators are suing the state over its raid of deposit funds, and regional conservation groups have eliminated jobs for at-risk youths.
By Shane Goldmacher
November 30, 2009

Reporting from Sacramento - Recycling centers across California are closing, and scores of troubled youths are being tossed from "green" jobs onto unemployment rolls in the wake of Sacramento's raid on bottle deposit funds.

California's recycling treasury, filled by consumers' nickel and dime deposits on drink containers, had hummed along successfully for two decades until state officials left it nearly bankrupt after taking $451 million out to help balance the budget.

The unredeemed deposits that subsidized recycling facilities and such projects as a local conservation corps are virtually gone, leaving the programs in the lurch.

Now operators of recycling depots in many supermarket parking lots are suing the state. Without the subsidies, Tomra Pacific Inc., a leading depot company, has closed at least 33 recycling sites -- more than 8% of its total, said company president Adrian White.

"Finding a location to recycle is going to get harder," White said.

Lacking a nearby redemption center, consumers can return containers to the grocery store. But the obscure state law permitting that is as unfamiliar to consumers as it is to most store employees.

"If . . . you have to be in the know just to get your deposit back," then the promise at the core of the bottle program -- pay a deposit, get it back when you recycle -- is voided, said Susan Collins, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Container Recycling Institute.

Beyond the recycling program are the regional conservation groups that employ at-risk youths -- high-school dropouts, former gang members and parolees.

Scott Dosick, spokesman for the California Assn. of Local Conservation Corps, said that the state's 12 programs typically employ 4,000 but that cutbacks this year have eliminated roughly 500 of those jobs.

"We are their last resort," Dosick said of corps members. "If we lay them off, they're pretty much back on the street.

"Once they're gone," he said, "the odds of getting them back are extraordinarily slim."

Lawmakers tried last summer to increase deposits or impose new ones on roughly 5 billion drink containers to replenish the recycling fund. Opponents called the effort a back-door tax increase; Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it. On July 1, the Schwarzenegger administration cut 85% of the state subsidies, and this month it eliminated them entirely.

White said the governor had cast "a veto against green jobs."

H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the state's Finance Department, said he "would defy anyone to find a governor in this country more committed to the green jobs agenda than Arnold Schwarzenegger."

The governor will propose a plan to refillthe fund in January, when he unveils his next budget proposal, Palmer said.

A hint of the fight to come was in Schwarzenegger's veto message, which chastised lawmakers for trying to expand the deposit program without including liquor and wine bottles. Requiring deposits on those items would pit lawmakers against the powerful alcohol lobby, a major source of political contributions that has scuttled similar efforts in the past.

Schwarzenegger also demanded in his veto message that legislators pass a law forbidding future raids of the deposit fund. It was Schwarzenegger himself who first proposed taking $100 million from the fund in early 2009.

That struck recycling advocates, such as Californians Against Waste Executive Director Mark Murray, as more than a bit hypocritical.

Murray, in an analysis of the veto, said the governor's demand was akin to yelling, "Save me from myself!"

news20091130nyt1

[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Business Computing]
Open Source as a Model for Business Is Elusive
By ASHLEE VANCE
Published: November 29, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — In many ways, MySQL embodies the ideals of the populist software movement known as open source, in which a program’s creator releases it to the world free of charge, and legions of volunteers contribute improvements that are also freely shared.

The start-up company came out of nowhere, building a database application beloved by vibrant, young Internet companies. Logging in from homes scattered around the globe, its workers seemed more a part of a virtual commune than a corporate monolith, and they relished taking on proprietary software giants like Microsoft.

But like most open-source companies, MySQL’s sales, tied to support deals, never matched the astronomical number of downloads for its product, about 60,000 a day. In January 2008, the founders decided to sell the company for $1 billion to Sun Microsystems. And this year, Sun agreed to sell itself to Oracle, which makes database software aimed at larger companies and tougher jobs, for $7.4 billion.

Now, disagreement over the value of MySQL — both as a stand-alone entity and as part of a big company — lies at the heart of a bitter public battle between Oracle and the European Union over the Sun acquisition. The fight illuminates a larger truth about open-source companies: their societal and strategic importance far exceeds their financial value as operating businesses.

European regulators view MySQL as sort of a database of the people, a low-cost alternative to Oracle’s costly proprietary products. The regulators worry that Oracle may stop improving MySQL in favor of protecting its core traditional products, and customers will lose an important option in the database market.

“In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective I.T. solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions,” said the European Commission’s competition chief, Neelie Kroes, in a recent statement. “The commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.”

Oracle, meanwhile, insists that it will continue to develop MySQL and other Sun technologies. Oracle’s chief executive, Lawrence J. Ellison, contends that MySQL serves a different part of the database market than Oracle’s main products do — an assessment supported by many analysts. One main incentive for Oracle to keep improving MySQL is that the program serves as a bulwark against Microsoft’s SQL Server database, which challenges Oracle’s products on the low end.

“The commission’s statement of objections reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics,” Oracle said in a statement.

To Ms. Kroes’s point, there is an open-source alternative, and usually a pretty good one, to just about every major commercial software product. In the last decade, these open-source wares have put tremendous pricing pressure on their proprietary rivals. Governments and corporations have welcomed this competition.

Whether open-source firms are practical as long-term businesses, however, is a much murkier question.

The best-known open-source company is Red Hat, which produces a variant of the Linux operating system for server computers. Like most of its peers, Red Hat offers a free version of its base product and relies on selling support services and extra tools for revenue. In its last fiscal year, which ended in March, the company’s revenue rose 25 percent to $653 million, and it reported net income of $79 million.

But Red Hat is a rare case. “There’s only one company making real money out of open source, and that’s Red Hat,” said Simon Crosby, the chief technology officer at Citrix Systems, which acquired the open-source software maker XenSource for $500 million in 2007. “Everyone else is in trouble.”

The enduring appeal of open-source software revolves more around its disruptive nature than blockbuster sales.

As long as there has been software, there have been some people eager to share and improve it for the common good. The rise of the Internet made such sharing easier than ever, enabling people the world over to work together on projects outside the confines of a formal corporate structure.

Open-source software has thrived and played a prominent role in the building of the Internet’s infrastructure. Many companies rely on Linux-based computers and Apache Web server software to display their Web pages. Similarly, the Mozilla Firefox Web browser has emerged as the most formidable competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The grass-roots nature of open source has led advocates to view the projects as a populist foil to proprietary software, where a company keeps the inner workings of its applications secret.

But in the last decade, open-source software has become more of a corporate affair than a people’s revolution.

In some cases, dominant technology companies have used open-source projects as pawns. Google, for example, has needled Microsoft by providing financial support to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees of the development of Firefox. I.B.M. has been a major backer of Linux, helping to raise it as a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows and other proprietary operating systems.

Many of the top open-source developers are anything but volunteers tinkering in their spare time. Companies like I.B.M., Google, Oracle and Intel pay these developers top salaries to work on open-source projects and further the companies’ strategic objectives.

In the last three years, there have been five big acquisitions in which a major technology company bought an up-and-coming open-source company for many times its annual revenue. Sun, for example, bought MySQL for about 10 times its revenue, while Citrix bought XenSource for more than 150 times its revenue, according to people familiar with the companies’ sales.

Most recently, VMware, the leading maker of virtualization software, brought SpringSource for $420 million, or about 20 times its annual sales.

“A lot of these guys were getting close to an I.P.O., but they elected to go the acquisition route instead,” said Michael Olson, the chief executive of Cloudera, an open-source start-up. “A lot of open-source firms are one-product companies, and it’s hard to build a long-term, successful business that way.”

The larger technology companies have tended to buy these one-trick ponies for strategic purposes. With its core server business declining, Sun hoped it could piggy-back on MySQL’s momentum with Internet companies. In SpringSource, VMware acquired a company that had cultivated deep interest with software developers and helped VMware diversify beyond its virtualization roots.

“VMware took into consideration that which money can’t buy, which is a critical mass of adoption,” said Peter Fenton, a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital, who has been involved in some fashion with many of the large open-source deals. “SpringSource’s main product was the equivalent of a best-selling novel.”

Citrix took perhaps the biggest risk of all, paying a huge premium for XenSource in the hopes of disrupting VMware’s position in the virtualization market.

“I don’t think Citrix would ever say it paid too much,” Mr. Crosby said. “Citrix leaped to the forefront of a whole software category. The ability to talk credibly about virtualization is worth a huge amount in its own right.”

Meanwhile, the ideal of an independent open-source giant has faded.

Mr. Fenton said that many open-source advocates had once hoped Red Hat would scoop up the top open-source start-ups, keeping these crown jewels out of the hands of proprietary software makers. But the company failed to go after other open-source companies initially and later could not afford to pay the high prices offered by larger companies.

“You could make the case there was a window of opportunity to do that three to five years ago,” Mr. Fenton said. “That opportunity has gone away. And it’s hard to put Humpty Dumpty back together again now.”

news20091130nyt2

[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Technology > Internet]
In Japan, an Odd Perch for Google: Looking Up at the Leader
By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: November 29, 2009

TOKYO — In 2001, a fledgling Internet company named Google opened its first overseas office in Japan, eager to tap a huge technology market.

But after eight years, Japan is one of a few major countries Google has yet to conquer. The Web giant still trails far behind Yahoo Japan, the front-runner here, operated by the Japanese telecommunications giant Softbank.

In a reversal of the rivalry in the United States, Yahoo Japan dominates Japan’s Web search market with 56.5 percent of all queries, according to the Internet research company, GA-Pro. Google, at 33.7 percent, is a distant second.

Unaccustomed to being second, Google is bending some of its most time-honored traditions in a renewed push into the Japanese market. Earlier this year, Google’s splash page for Japan abandoned the company’s classic spare design and added links to YouTube, Gmail and other services — an attempt to lure Japanese users who favor sites decorated with a cacophony of text and graphics.

And in a first for Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., it initiated branding ads for Japan and staged attention-grabbing publicity stunts, including one in which it invited passers-by to float into the air with the help of 2,500 balloons.

Google’s dogged interest in Japan has partly to do with sheer size. Japan is one of the world’s most wired countries, with more than 90 million regular Internet users — of which three-quarters use fast broadband connections and two-thirds also log in from cellphones.

And despite a sluggish economy, Japan’s 6.6 trillion yen ($77 billion) advertising market remains the world’s second-largest, one that an increasingly global advertising force like Google cannot afford to ignore.

“Japan is absolutely a key market for Google,” said Koichiro Tsujino, president of Google Japan. Every day, for example, Japanese view 10 million clips on YouTube, Google’s video-sharing site — and that is just from their cellphones, making them the world’s most avid adopters of video on-the-go. “Japan leads the world in many ways,” he said.

That Japanese propensity to try new things is the other reason Google is intent on staying put in Japan. Over the years, Japan has become a testing lab for many of the Web giant’s cutting-edge new ideas, especially in mobile technology. Google’s Tokyo-based programmers, immersed in Japan’s mobile and Web culture, have become a valuable source of ideas for the entire company.

Overseas markets now account for half of Google’s revenue, and the company is becoming more keenly aware of the need to tailor its services to local markets, as well as the advantages of absorbing ideas from outside the United States, company executives say. “Japan made us realize that non-U.S. ideas can go global,” David Eun, a vice president for Google, said on a recent trip to Japan, where he closed deals with two Japanese broadcasters to allow YouTube to run some of their content.

Google Japan’s offices occupy several floors in a skyscraper in Shibuya, a Tokyo neighborhood popular with start-ups that is also a hangout for the city’s hippest teenagers. Minutes away from where Google developers work, young Japanese perch on sidewalks, playing with their Web-enabled cellphones, thumbs flying and eyes glued to the tiny screens.

But most of those trendsetters do not regard Google as being very Japanese — a big headache for the company. Google has never been able to overcome Yahoo’s advantage as the first Web-based search engine. And although 35 percent of Yahoo Japan is owned by Yahoo in Sunnyvale, Calif., it is viewed as a local company.

“Yahoo Japan is a Japanese company, and most of their employees are Japanese people who fluently understand how the Japanese mind-set and business work,” said Nobuyuki Hayashi, a technology analyst. “But Google’s still a foreigner who’s learned how to speak some Japanese.”

Popularizing Google in Japan has been fraught with 21st-century versions of the cultural mishaps that have long plagued American companies here. In May, Google was forced to reshoot its entire “Street View” image stock in Japan — with a camera positioned to capture views 15 inches lower — after intense criticism that the service peeked over fences and into people’s homes, invading privacy. The narrower width of Japan’s roads made the service especially intrusive, bloggers fumed.

Google Earth also came under fire after posting historical maps that detailed locations of former communities of an “untouchable” caste, still a sensitive topic in Japan. Human rights advocates were furious that the maps could be used to identify families that had lived in the low-caste neighborhoods.

But Google keeps trying. After studying feedback from Japanese users, developers designed Google’s maps service here so that a query led users to the town’s train station or bus terminal, not the center of town as it would in the United States, reflecting the way the Japanese, heavily reliant on public transportation, think of their personal geography.

Programmers based in Tokyo have proposed and developed a line of services and functions, including “emoticons” for Gmail — a particular Japanese obsession — and a function allowing users to add photos to Google Maps. It created “Spellmeleon,” to correct misspelled queries. It took developers based in Tokyo to realize that non-native English speakers, who might not be very good spellers of English words, could use a little help with queries.

“Part of our job is to think specifically about the Japanese market,” said Kentaro Tokusei, group product manager at Google Japan. “We find whatever we build works globally, too.”

Some services in Japan offer a glimpse into the future. The Japanese version of Google’s photo-sharing service, Picasa, offers quick response, or Q.R., bar codes that contain Web address information. Scanning a Q.R. bar code with a Japanese cellphone takes the user to a Web site to view an online photo album.

Japan has been an especially important market for YouTube, with viewers here making up the site’s biggest audience outside the United States. The site’s big presence in Japan has put developers here at the forefront of crucial projects — for example, a recently announced feature that will bring text captions to many videos on the site, linked with automatic translation into 51 languages.

The captions will go a long way toward helping videos go viral across language divides, said Hiroto Tokusei, YouTube product manager in Japan and Kentaro Tokusei’s younger brother. (The Tokusei brothers, both Stanford graduates with experience in Silicon Valley, were brought to Google Japan with an eye to localizing Google’s products while keeping Google at the cutting edge of innovation.)

Next month YouTube will also start a mobile version of its “Click-to-Buy” feature, which identifies songs used in video clips, then lets users download them to their cellphones for use as ring tones.

“To have an audience so obsessed with video and TV, and with access to broadband, means Japan is the perfect place to experiment,” Mr. Tokusei said.

news20091130wp1

[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[Business> Wires]
Asian shares rebound but eyes on Dubai
By Umesh Desai
Reuters
Monday, November 30, 2009; 3:07 AM

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Asian stocks recovered after last week's steep sell-off over the Dubai debt crisis on growing speculation the fallout from a potential default will be limited, while assurances from various authorities also helped calm nerves.

European stock index futures pointed to a higher open, futures for the Eurostoxx 50, German DAX and French CAC gaining 0.3-0.4 percent.

Banking shares, which bore the brunt of the selling on Friday on worries about banks' exposure to Dubai World and property group Nakheel, were at the forefront of Monday's rebound in Asia.

"I think it's going to be okay. At the end of the day Dubai and Abu Dhabi need each other. And there will be a lot of pressure on Abu Dhabi to step in, from the neighboring countries," Templeton Asset Management fund manager Mark Mobius told Reuters.

Hong Kong shares, which posted their biggest single day loss in eight months on Friday, and stocks in Japan, which ended last week at a four-month low, were among the strongest performers in the region on Monday.

In South Korea, the government pledged it will stay vigilant while a top Indonesian central banker said there would be no fallout from Dubai's debt problems on Southeast Asia's biggest economy.

South Korean markets have been especially sensitive to international financial instability mainly because the highly leveraged local banking system is heavily exposed to the global credit market situation.

The MSCI index of Asia Pacific stocks traded outside Japan <.MIAPJ0000PUS> rose 2.8 percent while the Thomson Reuters index of regional shares <.TRXFLDAXPU> was 2.6 percent higher.

Reflecting some of the calm, U.S. stock futures are up 0.4 percent pointing to a firm start at Wall Street, which had already started showing some signs of a recovery on Friday having erased some of the losses toward close.

However, stocks in the United Arab Emirates, trading for the first time since the call for a delay in repaying billions of dollars in debt, dived with Dubai's index <.DFMGI> down 6.9 percent and Abu Dhabi's share benchmark <.ADI> 8.1 percent lower.

The dollar surrendered some of last week's gains against other major currencies and the yen retreated from a 14-year high hit last week. The two units rose sharply last week as fears of a possible Dubai debt default led to unwinding of carry trades.

AUTHORITIES SOOTHE NERVES

Investors were also placated by authorities' moves to prevent any major fallout from a looming debt default by two of Dubai's flagship firms.

Financial markets shuddered last week after Dubai said it would ask creditors of state-owned Dubai World and Nakheel, the builder of its palm-shaped islands, for a standstill agreement as a first step toward restructuring billions of dollars of debt.

On Sunday, the United Arab Emirates offered banks emergency support to ease fears in financial markets although analysts say the move to inject liquidity into Dubai's banks by the central bank, together with promises by neighboring city-state Abu Dhabi to provide selective support, was the bare minimum they could do.

In Seoul, Vice Finance Minister Hur Kyung-wook said the government would maintain a daily monitoring system until the Dubai incident was resolved.

Indonesia's central bank deputy governor said the country is not expected to feel any fall-out from Dubai's debt problems while the Philippine central bank governor said the crisis was not seen having a major impact on remittances from the Filipino diaspora.

About a tenth of the Philippines' 91 million people live and work abroad and their remittances are vital to domestic spending.

Investors also took heart from Wall Street's truncated losses, raising hopes the flight to less risky assets seemed to be subsiding. U.S. stocks recovered slightly toward close after a slide of more than 2 percent at the open.

"The fall in U.S. stocks wasn't as bad as expected and that has lifted one of the biggest Dubai-related concerns, given that worries about that don't seem to be as bad as they once were," said Masayoshi Okamoto, head of dealing at Jujiya Securities.

BANKS LEAD REBOUND

Leading the recovery were bank and construction shares, which were the big losers last week as investors cut exposure to sectors most vulnerable to economic uncertainty.

HSBC Holdings <0005.HK>, which fell 7.59 percent to close at a three-week low on Friday, climbed over 4 percent. Standard Chartered <2888.HK>, which fell as much as 8.9 percent to a seven-week low last Friday, was also more than 4 percent higher.

Britain's HSBC <HSBA.L>, Europe's biggest bank, has the biggest exposure to the UAE, according to end-2008 estimates by the Emirates Banks Association.

The MSCI index of banking shares in Asia Pacific outside Japan <.MIAPJFN00PUS> was up 3.7 percent while the materials index <.MIAPJMT00PUS> was 3 percent higher.

But stocks with exposure to Dubai continued to suffer.

These included Singapore's DBS Group <DBSM.SI> and City Developments <CTDM.SI>, Indonesian property firm PT Bakrieland Development <ELTY.JK> and Malaysia's LCL Corp <LCLC.KL>.

Japan's Nikkei average <.N225>, which hit a four-month closing low last Friday, gained 2.9 percent as the yen's fall from a 14-year high against the dollar also lifted exporters.

(Additional reporting by Parvathy Ullatil in HONG KONG and Elaine Lies in TOKYO; Editing by Kazunori Takada)

news20091130wp2

[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[World > Asia/Pacific]
U.S. offers new role for Pakistan
A BROADER PARTNERSHIP
Importance of country to Afghan effort recognized
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 30, 2009

President Obama has offered Pakistan an expanded strategic partnership, including additional military and economic cooperation, while warning with unusual bluntness that its use of insurgent groups to pursue policy goals "cannot continue."

The offer, including an effort to help reduce tensions between Pakistan and India, was contained in a two-page letter delivered to President Asif Ali Zardari this month by Obama national security adviser James L. Jones. It was accompanied by assurances from Jones that the United States will increase its military and civilian efforts in Afghanistan and that it plans no early withdrawal.

Obama's speech Tuesday night at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., will address primarily the Afghanistan aspects of the strategy. But despite the public and political attention focused on the number of new troops, Pakistan has been the hot core of the months-long strategy review. The long-term consequences of failure there, the review concluded, far outweigh those in Afghanistan.

"We can't succeed without Pakistan," a senior administration official involved in the White House review said. "You have to differentiate between public statements and reality. There is nobody who is under any illusions about this."

This official and others, all of whom spoke about the closely held details of the new strategy on the condition of anonymity, emphasized that without "changing the nature of U.S.-Pakistan relations in a new direction, you're not going to win in Afghanistan," as one put it. "And if you don't win in Afghanistan, then Pakistan will automatically be imperiled, and that will make Afghanistan look like child's play."

Proffered U.S. carrots, outlined during Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's October visit to Islamabad, center on a far more comprehensive and long-term bilateral relationship. It would feature enhanced development and trade assistance; improved intelligence collaboration and a more secure and upgraded military equipment pipeline; more public praise and less public criticism of Pakistan; and an initiative to build greater regional cooperation among Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.

Obama called for closer collaboration against all extremist groups, and his letter named five: al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Pakistani Taliban organization known as Tehrik-e-Taliban. Using vague diplomatic language, he said that ambiguity in Pakistan's relationship with any of them could no longer be ignored.

Jones, a retired Marine Corps general, was more precise in conversations with top Pakistani government and military leaders, U.S. and foreign officials said, stating that certain things have to happen in Pakistan to ensure Afghanistan's security. If Pakistan cannot deliver, he warned, the United States may be impelled to use any means at its disposal to rout insurgents based along Pakistan's western and southern borders with Afghanistan.

Current U.S. policy includes the use of missiles fired from unmanned drones on insurgent locations limited to roughly 50 miles inside the western border; training in two military camps for the Pakistani Frontier Corps; and intelligence exchanges. It prohibits kinetic, or active, operations by U.S. ground forces inside Pakistan.

While praising Pakistani military offensives against groups that pose a domestic threat -- primarily the alliance of groups known as Tehrik-e-Taliban, in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan -- Jones made it clear that the administration expects more.

The rollout of the new strategy is being coordinated with principal U.S. allies, including Britain, whose prime minister, Gordon Brown, said Sunday, "People are going to ask why, eight years after 2001, Osama bin Laden has never been near to being caught."

"Al-Qaeda has a base in Pakistan," Brown said in an interview with Sky News. "That base is still there -- they are able to recruit from abroad. The Pakistan authorities must convince us that they are taking all the action that is necessary to deal with that threat."

Expansion of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship will require overcoming significant public and political mistrust in both countries. Officials said that they recognize the difficulty in delivering on either U.S. promises or threats, and that "our leverage over Pakistan is very limited," the senior administration official said.

At the same time, although the administration's goal is to demonstrate a new level and steadfastness of support, short-term U.S. demands may threaten Pakistan's already fragile political stability.

"It's going to be a game of cat-and-mouse with them for a while," another official said, adding that "what we're trying to do is to force them to recalculate" where their advantage lies.

The Pakistan strategy is complicated by a number of factors, including the fact that any indication of increased U.S. involvement there generates broad mistrust. Zardari's political weakness is an additional hazard for a new bilateral relationship. He is disliked by the military and is challenged by the political opposition and his own prime minister; he also remains under a cloud of long-standing corruption charges. Less than a third of Pakistan's population voices approval for him in polls. Obama is even less popular there, with approval ratings in the low double digits.

Many of the broad powers that Zardari assumed from his predecessor, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 military coup and was forced to resign last year, are being whittled away. On Friday, Zardari turned over control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, who is held in much higher favor by the military.

Zardari's Musharraf-era powers to fire the elected government and appoint top military officials are also under challenge, and a law protecting government officials from corruption prosecution expired Saturday. On Sunday, the leading political opposition group called for him to give up the additional powers, and Zardari, who had pledged to do so, said he will act "soon." The administration expects Zardari's position to continue to weaken, leaving him as a largely ceremonial president even if he manages to survive in office.

Senior U.S. officers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, have made repeated relationship-building trips to Pakistan, and training programs in this country for Pakistani officers are expanding after being moribund for years.

U.S. officials have long referred to Pakistani military and intelligence officers who are sympathetic to or actively support insurgent groups fighting in Afghanistan as "rogue elements." More recently, they have described those relationships as more direct and institutional within a divided military. "For the things that we care about," a U.S. official said, "the real decision-maker is the military." It has long been hedging its bets in Afghanistan; the military has positioned itself to prevent inroads by India in the event of a U.S. withdrawal, and against a 30-year history of being used and then rejected by shifting U.S. policy aims.

"Our game is to convince them that our commitment to Afghanistan and the region is long-term," the official said of the military. "We're not going to pack up our bags and leave them as soon as we're done. We have to create a situation in which they see a much more positive interest in closer relations with us than they do in trying to play us. But it requires time."

India is skeptical of any U.S. involvement in its relationship with Pakistan. Bilateral attempts to resolve the long-standing border dispute in Kashmir were put on hold after last year's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which were blamed on Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The group has long been active in the Kashmir conflict and is said to have close ties to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh treaded carefully on the issue in public during Singh's state visit to Washington last week. "It is not the place of the United States to try to, from the outside, resolve all those conflicts," Obama said during their news conference here. "On the other hand, we want to be encouraging of ways in which both India and Pakistan can feel secure."

Correspondent Pamela Constable in Islamabad contributed to this report.

news20091130gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Business > Drax]
Renewable energy 'could provide 6% of UK's needs by 2020'
Friends of the Earth says solar panels and wind turbines could proliferate if government improves the incentive
Ashley Seager
guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 November 2009 Article history

Small-scale renewable energy could provide 6% of Britain's electricity needs – equivalent to more than two Sizewell B nuclear stations or the Drax coal-fired plant – by 2020 if the government improves the terms of a new deal for producers due to be launched next April, Friends of the Earth says today.

The environmental campaign group used figures obtained from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and prepared by consultants Poyry and Element Energy to show that introducing a more ambitious scheme than that currently proposed would add only an average £2.37 a year to household electricity bills over the next four years – just £1.20 a year more than the government is already proposing to add to fund the scheme.

The Guardian revealed last week that decisions on the final levels of the "feed-in tariff" (FIT) – which would offer guaranteed, above-market payments for electricity produced from technologies such as solar panels or wind turbines – have been delayed until January by wrangling between DECC, the Treasury and the regulator Ofgem.

Britain lags other countries in introducing FITs which have proved successful in kick-starting renewable energy sectors around Europe.

But the Treasury and Ofgem are worried about the potential cost and have also been lobbied by the nuclear industry which dislikes renewable energy because it sees it as a direct competitor.

FoE and other critics, such as the Renewable Energy Association (REA), worry that the government's proposed return on investment of 5-8% is far too low to stimulate mass take-up of the technologies by the public and businesses.

Indeed, the government is only aiming for 2% of the country's electricity to be generated from small-scale renewables by 2020. FoE says that if the return on investment were raised to 10%, that share would treble to 6% and lower the average cost of the electricity generated.

"Small-scale green energy systems such as solar panels on homes and businesses and community-owned wind turbines could play a crucial role in cutting UK emissions and speeding us towards the development of a low carbon economy," said FoE energy campaigner Dave Timms.

"A tiny addition to UK electricity bills would kick-start a world class scheme that would allow homes, businesses and communities to play their part in tackling climate change, increasing energy security and creating thousands of new green jobs.

"As the world prepares for crucial climate talks in Copenhagen, the government must show that it is taking this issue seriously."

The DECC figures show that a more ambitious FIT offering a 10% return on investment would lead to the generation of 25 terawatt hours of electricity by 2020 and cut UK carbon emissions by 10 million tonnes a year by then. It would also help reduce the country's dependence on fossil fuels and increase energy security.

The figures are published as 30 organisations and businesses – including FoE, the REA, the TUC, the British Retail Consortium, the Co-operative Group, the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), the Federation of Small Businesses, Unison and WWF – have written to MPs urging them to support an Early Day Motion (EDM 276) tabled by Alan Simpson MP calling for a much greater level of ambition for small-scale renewable electricity generation than the government scheme proposes.


[Environment > Copenhagen climate change congerence 2009]
EU accused of risking Copenhagen climate talks with stance on aid funding
Confidential papers reveal Europeans want assistance for poorer countries to come from existing cash pot
John Vidal and David Adam
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 November 2009 21.30 GMT Article history

The EU was accused of threatening the global climate talks last night after confidential papers showed it wants existing overseas aid funding to be used to help poor countries adapt to global warming, not new and additional funds.

The papers, seen by the Guardian, show that the EU has removed lines in the negotiating text of next month's Copenhagen climate change summit which stress the principle that climate change aid comes on top of existing development aid. The EU negotiating team has written: "Cannot accept reference to 'additional to', and 'separate from' ODA [official development assistance] targets."

Aid agencies said Europe threatened to fatally undermine the talks.

"No developing country will sign up to an agreement that could give them no extra money at all. The EU and other rich countries must provide new and additional finance, otherwise there will be no deal at all," said Rob Bailey, Oxfam's senior policy adviser. Developing nations have been unanimous and implacable on the terms of the finance deal.

Rich countries accept they must pay poor ones to adapt to increasing droughts, floods and rising seas, but Europe is known to be split over whether existing aid should provide the cash.

Britain and Holland have argued strongly that it be largely additional, but Germany, France and most small member states have said they want existing aid to be used. In the latter case, spending on poverty, health, water, and education in some of the poorest countries in the world would be significantly reduced. But in a separate development, Britain was embarrassed when it emerged that all the climate aid money it has so far pledged or provided to poor countries has come from its existing aid budget, despite statements by Gordon Brown that it should be largely additional to existing funds.

In an email seen by the Guardian, an official in the Department for International Development (DfID) states: "All of the money pledged, committed, and/or spent [on climate change] thus far comes from within the UK's 0.7% GNI ODA commitment."

Britain has pledged nearly £1bn, with most of it channelled into global funds run by the World Bank. But it has separately promised nearly £200m to help especially vulnerable countries such as Bangladesh and Nepal. Earlier this year, Brown said: "The government recognises that finance to tackle climate change cannot simply be part of ODA. [It] should not be allowed to divert money from the pledges we have already made to the poorest."


On Friday, Brown proposed a new £10bn global fund to kickstart the post-Copenhagen regime. He promised Britain would contribute £800m, although the contribution is expected to be entirely drawn from existing budgets.

Finance now threatens to become the main obstacle to securing a global climate deal at Copenhagen, following US and Chinese moves last week to provide targets for cuts in their emissions.

Poor countries want a minimum of $400bn (£242bn) a year by 2020 to help them adapt, but rich countries have proposed only €110bn (£100bn) a year.

A history of broken promises has seen poor countries become deeply distrustful of climate pledges by rich countries and they say they want guaranteed funding to address the climate change that rich countries have largely caused. Last week, Oxfam stated that only $128m of the money pledged in the last decade by rich countries for adaptation had been handed out, and the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, accused industrialised countries of failing to keep their promises.

Kit Vaughan, the head of climate adaptation at WWF, said: "Gordon Brown was the first leader to step up and call for a global fund to fight climate change, and insisted this shouldn't come out of existing aid budgets. But so far, all the climate money has come out of the aid budget. Under a Copenhagen deal, it's crucial to find new and additional money that avoids robbing from the poor."

Europe, along with other rich countries, has a poor track record on meeting its commitments on climate finance. At a UN meeting in Bonn in 2001, the EU, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and New Zealand said they would jointly pay developing countries $410m (£200m) a year from 2005 to 2008. Barely a 10th of the promised money has so far been delivered.A DfID spokesman said: "Additional funding for climate change will be made available from 2013, which is when the commitments from the Copenhagen summit will come into effect. Britain will push at Copenhagen for all countries to provide new and additional finance to tackle climate change."

news20091130gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen climate change congerence 2009]
Nick Griffin stands alone over 'dodgy' climate change science
James Meikle
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 November 2009 22.40 GMT Article history

The British National party says its leader Nick Griffin, who denies the existence of global warming, will "be the only politician prepared to say that the science is somewhat dodgy" when joins a European parliament delegation to the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. The BNP said: "It is a global Marxist mantra that is going to be used to beat people around the head, tax us to the hilt, smash nations and impose a one-world government." Griffin would show the BNP was not "a one-trick ponyonly interested in race and immigration", the party said. Political opponents dismissed the power of Griffin, the MEP for north-west England, who sits on the parliament's environment, public health and food safety committee.

Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, said Griffin's views were "irresponsible and wrong." He would not be part of the formal negotiations "and rightly he will not be listened to by anyone with any credibility who is part of the negotiations."

Green party leader and MEP Caroline Lucas told BBC1's Andrew Marr Show: "He is one of a number of members of the European parliament who will go on a delegation. He won't get the right to speak. The parliament sadly doesn't even get the right to really influence the decisions at all. This idea that somehow Nick Griffin is going to have any real influence on what happens at Copenhagen is a myth."

Former MEP Chris Huhne, now the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: "Nick Griffin was always going to get some role in the parliament because jobs are divvied up fairly. The crying shame is that he is representing Europe at a key summit for the future of humanity, when he does not even concede that man-made climate change exists."


[Environment > Copenhagen climate change congerence 2009]
The activists' circus comes to Copenhagen
Peaceful protest and theatrical stunts are welcome, say police. But 500 activists in panda masks would stop the party
Bibi van der Zee and Patrick Barkham
The Guardian, Monday 30 November 2009 Article history

In two weeks' time, seven-year-old Gabriel Anderson will be in the centre of Copenhagen, climbing on to a step to address the crowds at the end of another Performance Family Picnic. Gabriel, his brothers Sid (the family's two-year-old "head of research") and Neal, nine, plus his parents, artists and lecturers Gary Anderson and Lena Simic, make up the Institute of the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, a one-family protest unit from Liverpool who take their picnic rugs and perform at galleries and protest gatherings.

Like countless thousands of other activists from across the globe, the Andersons will converge on the lavish DGI-byen conference centre, next to Copenhagen's Central Station. Replete with banquet rooms, a swim centre, spa, bowling alley, climbing wall and state-of-the art restaurant, this is the HQ for Copenhagen's "other" climate conference, KlimaForum 09. Funded by the Danish government at an estimated cost of 1 million kroner (£122,000) it will offer an official welcome to the thousands of environmentalists, NGOs and grassroots activists from around the world who eager to voice their opposition to the global political failure to tackle climate change.

KlimaForum's slick HQ emphasises the sophistication and scale of the protests pitched against the official United Nations climate change summit, which takes place outside the city at the Bella Centre — Copenhagen's largest conference complex, conveniently located next to the international airport for anxious world leaders keen to make a quick, carbon-laden getaway.

While the world leaders will dine on only the finest fare, soup kitchens are now opening across the city for activists. Many are expected to sleep or find refuge in Christiania, the anarchist commune in the heart of Copenhagen that has been squatted since the 1960s.

While the UN has specifically requested that protesters be allowed near the Bella Centre, demonstrations will, according to the Danish police, be halted on the main street at least 300m from the complex. Denmark has a police force of only 10,500 officers, and while most will be drafted into the capital for summit duties, they are not seeking reinforcements. They will, however, borrow helicopters from Sweden, police vehicles from Germany and police dogs from other countries.

Activists fear a police crackdown on peaceful protests after the right wing Danish government last week rushed through tough new anti-demonstration laws. But a police spokesman, Flemming Steen Munch, maintains they are forging good relationships with the protest groups. "We are spending a lot of time trying to inform them of what their rights and duties are. Masks are banned, but if they are doing something funny — dressing as panda bears has been mentioned — we will try and allow that. If 500 hardcore activists put on panda masks, though, then the party ends."

Munch says Danish police are using intelligence from forces across Europe. "Most of the demonstrators are peaceful, ordinary people but we have to concentrate on the hardcore activists who could cause trouble. We are not concerned but we are prepared."

For the peaceful majority of protesters, Copenhagen offers a unique opportunity to meet like-minded activists from across the globe — carbon footprint concerns having halted the "summit-hopping" from Seattle to Genoa to Geneva of the anti-globalisation era. "Amidst all the depression as we start to doubt whether politicians are really going to come up with anything," says Kevin Smith of Climate Camp, "it's really inspiring to look at what the activists are getting on with."

The most confrontational demonstrations look likely to kick off with two major actions by Climate Justice Action, a global network of activists and groups that aims to shut down Copenhagen Harbour on 13 December. Three days later, once the world leaders have finally arrived, it wants to take over the UN conference itself and turn it into a "people's summit".

"Because the talks are collapsing, people are thinking they might listen to us," says Ed Thompson, a British activist travelling to Copenhagen. "There will be thousands of activists there, and a lot will be willing to commit acts of civil disobedience — we've been pretty honest about it. Will there be any violence? I would be surprised if there wasn't some sort of disorder.

There will also, though, be hundreds of small-scale, peaceful protests such as the Anderson family's. Gary, Lena and the children will be there "to learn, to find out what's going on, and, I hope, to change," he says.

"We all play a part in climate injustice, and if it's really true what they say — if change really can come from the bottom to the top — then we need to be there, we need to look at ourselves."

The Wave – Ripple effect for climate
This Saturday promises the largest ever climate change mobilisation in the UK, known as The Wave. An extraordinarily broad coalition of organisations will march simultaneously through the streets of Belfast, Dublin, Glasgow and London, where protesters plan to surround the Houses of Parliament with a human chain stretching across Westminster Bridge, down the east side of the Thames, and back across Lambeth Bridge.

At 3pm, the marchers will stop and wave (hence the name) blue hands at the Houses of Parliament, demanding politicians finally take serious action in Copenhagen.

Oxfam, Christian Aid, Unicef, WWF, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are among the dozens of NGOs promising to get their supporters out (Surfers Against Sewage have been urging their members to wear wetsuits and paint their faces blue). Campaign Against Climate Change (CCC) is organising the march with Stop Climate Chaos, and predicts that more than 80,000 people may turn out nationwide, half of them in London.

"Politicians have said that they need to see people out on the streets," says Abi Edgar of CCC. "This isn't going to all just tail off after Copenhagen. Things are just going to get bigger from here on." Bibi van der Zee

news20091130gdn3

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Environment > Copenhagen climate change congerence 2009]
Carbon trading could be worth twice that of oil in next decade
Market could be worth $3tn a year but enthusiasm to place it at heart of Copenhagen is matched by growing criticism of concept
Terry Macalister
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 November 2009 21.30 GMT Article history

The carbon market could become double the size of the vast oil market, according to the new breed of City players who trade greenhouse gas emissions through the EU's emissions trading scheme.

The ETS market may see $3tn (£1.8tn) worth of transactions a year in the next decade or two, according to Andrew Ager, head of emissions trading at Bache Commodities in London, with it even being used as a hedge against falling equities or rising inflation. "It is still a relatively new industry with annual trades of around €300bn every year. But this could grow to around $3tn compared to the $1.5tn market there is for oil," says Ager, who used to be a foreign currencies trader.

The speed of that growth will depend on whether the Copenhagen summit gives a go-ahead for a low-carbon economy, but Ager says whatever happens schemes such as the ETS will expand around the globe.

Last week Australia gave its strongest sign yet that it would establish its own trading market, while the US is moving towards a similar scheme in a bid to find market-based ways to accelerate the transition to a lower carbon economy.

Many political leaders, especially in industrialised countries, are enthusiastic: carbon markets hold the promise of cost-efficient emission cuts without the need for taxpayer funding. But their enthusiasm to place carbon markets at the heart of the Copenhagen treaty is matched by growing criticism of the concept, and not just from environmentalists opposed to free market solutions.

Peter Voser, Shell's chief executive, has called on governments to introduce a carbon tax or a minimum price for CO² because – as he told the Guardian – the ETS was failing to deliver sufficient incentives to kickstart expensive technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS).

John Browne, a former boss of BP and an early ETS promoter, has also expressed reservations about such schemes, saying it was "wrong" to place all your faith in them. Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EDF Energy, warned of the dangers of a "sub-prime" crisis inside the ETS if complex financial instruments were created by market participants.

The key problem seems to be that ETS carbon prices have remained resolutely low, thwarting low-carbon, high-cost investment. Carbon is currently trading at around $13 a tonne but many believe it needs to be $30, if not $50, to deliver a decisive boost for clean technologies such as wind, solar, CCS and nuclear power.

The criticisms of environmentalists such as James Lovelock and Friends of the Earth (FoE) are far more fundamental. The basic charge is that the market has put millions of pounds into the pockets of some without making any real impact on carbon emissions.

They accuse governments of being too lenient in the way they drew up the ETS: a cap that was far too loose, too many free permits, too few industries covered and poor monitoring of offset schemes that shift emissions to the developing world. If the carbon price is to rise in the next ETS phase, starting in 2013, much tighter rules will be needed.

Henrik Hasselknippe, senior analyst at consultancy Point Carbon, argues the problems have been overplayed and the market – while not operating perfectly – has nonetheless come along way from a standing start.

"Carbon prices have fallen due to the recession," said Hasselknippe, adding that he was "convinced" that CDMs – clean development mechanism credits created under the Kyoto protocol – have led to real carbon reductions. However, some reports claim that a third to two-thirds of CDMs do not reduce emissions.

Alexandria Galin, a policy manager for the Carbon Markets and Investors Association, dismisses suggestions that the market had been taken over by speculators, as claimed by FoE. "Financial institutions participate in the market largely on behalf of businesses that do not have the capacity or expertise to do it themselves. Furthermore there are no 'complex' instruments creating 'shadow finance'," she said.

Agers agrees, saying his company largely provides advice or trading on behalf of power companies and others who need to hedge their legitimate carbon risks.

He admitted that he is in many ways like any other City trader with a decent salary, nice flat and sports car to prove it. But working in the carbon field has rubbed off a little on his lifestyle: he claims to have energy-efficient lightbulbs in his home and to offset the petrol he uses driving his car to watch West Ham football team on a Saturday.

The arguments
Carbon market

For
> Guarantees specific carbon cut by setting overall cap
> Delivers maximum cuts in carbon emissions at minimum cost
> No taxpayer funding

Against
> Volatile or low price of permits deters investment
> Prone to political interference, complex and provides no incentive for individuals to act

Carbon taxes

For
> Clear, simple, covers everyone
> Relatively low implementation costs

Against
> Hits motoring and flying directly
> Cannot deliver specific emissions cut – depends on consumption levels

Regulation

For
> Cannot be avoided by finding loopholes
> Can drive big changes where markets cannot, such as energy efficiency

Against
> Businesses rail against red tape
> Expensive to implement

news20091130nn

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[naturenews]
Published online 29 November 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1114
News
'Temple of the mind' unlocked
Map of fundamental brain receptor opens doors to treatments.
Daniel Cressey

The full structure of a fiendishly complicated and important brain protein has been determined by researchers, potentially enabling the development of new treatments for a wealth of neurological disorders.

Eric Gouaux and his colleagues undertook the difficult task of mapping the structure of a glutamate receptor, a protein that mediates signalling between neurons in the brain and elsewhere in the nervous system. The receptor is also thought to be crucial to processes such as memory and learning.

The resulting picture "tells us things about the organization of the receptor that were just completely unanticipated" says Gouaux, a protein crystallographer at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. The work appears online today in Nature¹.

The researchers studied a rat glutamate receptor known as GluA2. They grew a crystal of many such proteins, then exposed this to a beam of X-rays. By watching how X-rays scattered from the crystal, they were able to produce an atomic-level picture of a single protein.

In humans, these receptors work as relays for the central nervous system. When the neurotransmitter glutamate binds to the receptor, this opens an 'ion channel' in the neuronal membrane, allowing ions to flow across the membrane. This results in the transmission of an electrical pulse down the nerve.

Inside the temple

Until now, the structure of an intact glutamate receptor has never been seen. Knowing its shape will not only allow scientists to better understand how it works, but should also help those working to develop therapies for conditions in which something goes awry with the system, such as epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease.

The shape of this receptor can now be taken into account when designing molecules that could function as drugs by binding to it. "If you know what the lock looks like then you can better design a key," says Gouaux. "If you don't know you're at a loss."

The GluA2 receptor is shaped like a capital letter Y, and has three main parts. At the top are two prongs, which can enable modification of the receptor. Below this is the area where glutamate binds, triggering the opening of the ion channel. And at the bottom is the channel itself, shaped, say the authors, "like a Mayan temple".

{{“It's hard to overstate its importance.”}
Stephen Traynelis
Emory University}

The receptor comprises four subunits, which are chemically identical but, surprisingly, are folded differently (see picture). "The completely astonishing thing was that two subunits are completely different from the other two," says Gouaux. "That difference was totally unanticipated."

Stephen Traynelis, head of a lab that specializes in glutamate receptors at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, says that the structure will be a huge boon to research into receptor biology. Previous work involved making inferences — now researchers have a complete receptor mapped they can go back and reinterpret their previous research in light of this.

"This will be enormously useful," Traynelis says. "It's hard to overstate its importance. It's probably one of the most important papers that have come out in this field in the last 10 years."

Gouaux's paper presents the structure with the channel closed. Traynelis says a key future goal is to analyse the structure of the receptor when the ion channel is open.

Crystallizing any membrane protein to allow its structure to be determined with X-rays is a major challenge, says Elek Molnar, a neuroscientist who works on glutamate receptors at the University of Bristol, UK. In the case of this "excellent paper", the researchers chemically locked the receptor into one conformation, with the ion channel closed, to assist in crystallization and visualization.

Future work should allow researchers to see how the receptor interacts with other elements of the nervous system, such as auxiliary proteins. "It is kind of like providing a skeleton," says Molnar. "Now future research can attach muscles, tendons and so on."

References
1. Sobolevsky, A. I., Rosconi, M. P. & Gouaux, E. Nature doi:10.1038/nature08624 (2009).

news20091130bbc

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 01:58 GMT, Monday, 30 November 2009
The Royal Society puts historic papers online
{One of the articles describes early experiments in blood transfusion}
One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.

The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is making public manuscripts by figures like Sir Isaac Newton.

Benjamin Franklin's account of his risky kite-flying experiment is also available on the Trailblazing website.

Society president Lord Rees said the papers documented some of the most "thrilling moments" in science history.

The Royal Society grew out of the so-called "Invisible College" of thinkers who began meeting in the mid-1640s to discuss science and philosophy.

Its official foundation date is 28 November 1660 and thereafter it met weekly to debate and witness experiments.

Mozart study

The papers published on the Trailblazing website were first printed in the society's journal, Philosophical Transactions.

They were chosen from 60,000 printed since the journal's foundation in 1665 - a date which makes it the oldest continuously published scientific periodical in the world.

Among the highlights are a gruesome account of a 17th Century blood transfusion and the article in which Sir Isaac showed that white light is a mixture of other colours.

{{The scientific papers represent a ceaseless quest by scientists over the centuries}
Lord Rees
President of the Royal Society}

Also included is Mr Franklin's account of his ill-advised attempt in 1752 to show that lightning was a form of electricity by flying a kite in a storm, and a 1970 paper on black holes co-written by Professor Stephen Hawking.

There is also an entertaining paper about a study of the nine-year-old Mozart in London in 1770 to determine whether he really was a child prodigy.

Suggestions he was in fact a midget adult were dismissed by writer Daines Barrington on the grounds that young Wolfgang was more enthusiastic about playing with his cat than practising his harpsichord.

'Thrilling moments'

Lord Rees said: "The scientific papers on Trailblazing represent a ceaseless quest by scientists over the centuries, many of them Fellows of the Royal Society, to test and build on our knowledge of humankind and the universe.

"Individually, they represent those thrilling moments when science allows us to understand better and to see further."

The Royal Society is holding a series of events during its 350th year to mark the anniversary.

They include a nine-day science and arts festival next summer and a series of public lectures and debates at its London headquarters.


[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 09:57 GMT, Monday, 30 November 2009
Large Hadron Collider sets world energy record
{The LHC is built inside a27km-long circular tunnel}
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment on the French-Swiss border has set a new world record for energy.
By Paul Rincon
BBC Science reporter

The LHC pushed the energy of its particle beams beyond one trillion electron volts, making it the world's highest energy particle accelerator.

The previous record was held by the Tevatron particle accelerator in Chicago.

Officials say it is another milestone in the LHC's drive towards its main scientific tests set for 2010.

The LHC is designed to smash together beams of sub-atomic particles to just under the speed of light. Researchers hope to see signs of new physics in the aftermath of the collisions, helping them unlock the secrets of the Universe.

Operated by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (better known by its French acronym Cern), the LHC is built inside a 27km-long circular tunnel.

'Pilot beam'

"We are still coming to terms with just how smoothly the LHC commissioning is going," said Cern's director general Rolf Heuer.

"It is fantastic. However, we are continuing to take it step-by-step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010. I'm keeping my champagne on ice until then."

Until now the LHC had been operating at a relatively low energy of 450 billion electron volts.

On Sunday, engineers increased the energy of this "pilot beam", reaching 1.18 trillion electron volts at 2344 GMT.

The previous record of 0.98 trillion electron volts has been held by the Tevatron accelerator since 2001.

The LHC is eventually expected to operate at some seven trillion electron volts.

Last week, the machine circulated two beams of protons for the first time and carried out its first low-energy beam collisions.

Researchers working on the collider have said they are delighted with the quick progress made since the machine restarted on 21 November.

The LHC had to be shut down for repairs shortly after its inauguration in September 2008 when an electrical fault cause one tonne of liquid helium to leak into the collider's tunnel.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 08:18 GMT, Sunday, 29 November 2009
India nuclear plant leak under investigation
Indian officials are investigating the leak of a radioactive substance into drinking water at an atomic power plant in the south of the country.

Fifty-five workers at the Kaiga plant needed medical treatment for excessive exposure to radiation after tritium contaminated a water cooler.

Officials said the leak might have been deliberate.

"Mischief is not ruled out. Investigations are on," plant director J P Gupta told Reuters news agency.

The 55 workers had returned to their duties at the plant, Mr Gupta added.

"This incident has in no way affected the public, safety, health and environment."

The highly protected Kaiga plant is on the west coast of India, 450km (280 miles) from Bangalore.

Tritium, also known as Hydrogen-3, is used in research, fusion reactors and neutron generators.


[Business]
Johnston Press starts charging for online local news
Johnston says the introduction of "paywalls" is a trial
One of the UK's biggest newspaper firms is to charge for access to online content from six of its titles.

The Johnston Press websites will either ask users to pay £5 for a three-month subscription to read the full articles, or direct them to buy the newspapers.

Johnston is the first regional publisher in the UK to trial asking readers to pay for its online news.

Sites in the pilot scheme include the Worksop Guardian, the Ripley & Heanor News and the Whitby Gazette.

The Northumberland Gazette is also included in the trial. In Scotland, the Carrick Gazette and Southern Reporter are taking part.

Payment models

The Scotsman, also published by Johnston, operates a similar system for readers wishing to view "premium content" on its site.

Johnston, which owns more than 300 papers across Britain and has suffered from a drop in advertising revenues, says the introduction of "paywalls" is an experiment to assess the impact of charging for content.

"Once you start restricting access on the websites, if you have content that can broadly be found somewhere else, then you really restrict the number of people coming to websites," the Guardian's director of digital content Emily Bell told the BBC.

"I think it's great that people are experimenting with lots of different models because undoubtedly we need to find more money in the market," she added.

The Financial Times charges a subscription for full access to its web content.

Earlier this month, News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch said he would try to block Google from using news content from his companies.

Mr Murdoch has previously said that the websites of his news organisations would begin charging for access.

news20091130cnn1

[Top stories] from [CNN.com]

[Business]
UAE markets open sharply lower
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> Markets in United Arab Emirates open down as fears over defaults in region's business hub of Dubai depress sentiment
> Nakheel, the company at the centre of Dubai's financial woes, asks for three of its listed Islamic bonds worth $5.25B to be suspended
> Global markets were last week shaken by Dubai's request for debt freeze at one of its flagship state conglomerates
> Gulf markets closed since Wednesday's announcement due to Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday
By Robin Wigglesworth in Abu Dhabi and Simeon Kerr in Dubai
November 30, 2009 -- Updated 0844 GMT (1644 HKT)

(FT) -- Stock markets in the United Arab Emirates opened sharply down on Monday, as worries over defaults in the region's business hub of Dubai depressed sentiment and sent local and international investors heading for the exit.

At the Nasdaq Dubai, the emirate's international market, Nakheel, the company at the centre of Dubai's financial woes, said on Monday it had asked for three of its listed Islamic bonds worth $5.25bn to be suspended from trade "until it is in a position to fully inform the market".

While global markets were last week shaken by Dubai's shock request for a debt standstill agreement at one of its flagship state conglomerates, Gulf markets have been closed since Wednesday's late announcement due to the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday.

There was no religious respite when markets reopened on Monday. The Dubai Financial Market, which trades in local currency, slumped nearly 6 per cent as soon as it opened, and the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange, the third bourse in the United Arab Emirates, lost 7.5 per cent in initial heavy trading.

At the Dubai Financial Market, the mood was sombre.

"We are very disappointed -- we had expected the market to drift down. Instead it fell down... just like that," said Muhammed, a private investor, as he looked at a ticker covered in red.

"This is punishment day. Why didn't we sell last week? This is punishment for the unexpected news from Dubai World last week," he added.

The UAE markets limit trade on liquid stocks when they fall 10 per cent. Emaar, a major listed developer in Dubai and an important bellwether for the emirate, slumped 9.9 per cent as soon as the DFM opened.

DP World, the ports operator controlled by Dubai World and one of Dubai's most valuable state assets, tumbled 15 per cent on the Nasdaq Dubai bourse, which does not limit trading.

"It's a short-term panic sell-off," said Emad Mostaque, an emerging markets fund manager at Pictet in London. "There are 100m sell orders on all the higher traded shares. The UAE markets will go limit-down today."

Other Gulf countries remained closed for the religious holiday, but many fund managers and analysts expect them to follow the UAE down when they reopen on Tuesday. The UAE markets close again on Wednesday and Thursday for the country's national day, before reopening on Sunday.

Egypt's bourse had not yet opened, but is also expected to be pummelled as international investors take a more negative view over regional risks.

Investor concern was centred on UAE banks, many of which lent liberally in Dubai during the emirate's boom years. National Bank of Abu Dhabi said on Monday it had a total exposure of $345m to Dubai World, but other banks are believed to be more heavily exposed.

Investors have been dismayed by the lack of communication by Dubai and its state-run companies, exacerbating tensions in the region's capital markets.

The UAE central bank has set up an emergency liquidity facility to shore up the country's financial sector, but analysts said more might need to be done to ease the damage done by the threat of defaults in Dubai.

"Short-term, it's very negative for all the markets. Foreigners consider them more risky now, even the ones that have better fundamentals. [But] there will be excellent buying opportunities amid all this chaos," said Mr Mostaque.


[World > China]
Chinese state media reveal secret, illegal jails
{Government officials have adamantly denied that illegal "black prisons" exist.}
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> Report: Network of jails await petitioners seeking redress, compensation for injustices
> Many are victims of land grabs, physical assault, discrimination and corruption
> Government officials have adamantly denied that such facilities exist
> Human Rights Watch released a report on the jails this month based on interviews with victims
From Jaime FlorCruz
CNN
November 30, 2009 -- Updated 0956 GMT (1756 HKT)

Beijing, China (CNN) -- Secret, illegal "black jails" exist in China, a state-run weekly has confirmed, despite official denials otherwise.

Chinese citizens in search of justice often end up in such detention centers when they file complaints against the government, the state-run weekly magazine Outlook reported last week.

A network of such jails awaits the petitioners when they travel to Beijing and provincial capitals to seek redress or compensation for injustices. Many are victims of land grabs, physical assault, discrimination and corruption, often at the hands of local officials.

"They come to Beijing out of desperation after they hit a dead end in their localities," said a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity, because he is not authorized to speak publicly.

Government officials have adamantly denied that such facilities exist.

The report by Outlook -- detailing a "gray industry" of illegal detention centers -- also was published online by its parent company, the official Xinhua news agency. It was a rare reference to illegal detention centers in official Chinese media.

A staffer at the Ministry of Public Security's information office declined to comment on the Outlook report, saying "this issue and the reports are irrelevant to our duty and work."

Human Rights Watch released a report this month on the jails. The report is based on interviews with victims, the New York-based aid agency said.

In the report, the agency details how government officials or security forces seize petitioners in Beijing and other Chinese cities, strip them of their possessions and imprison them. Human rights activists and petitioners call them black jails because they operate outside the sanctioned institutions.

"The existence of black jails in the heart of Beijing makes a mockery of the Chinese government's rhetoric on improving human rights and respecting the rule of law," said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

Official denials continue.

"I'm not sure what evidence the report of Human Rights Watch is based on," the ministry of foreign affairs said in a statement. "However, I can tell you that there are no such black jails in China."

According to Outlook, local governments send officials to Beijing to set up ad hoc offices to handle the petitioners from their regions.

Once the petitioners file complaints, officials -- worried that they will receive demerits from superiors because of the complaints -- hunt down the petitioners, grab them off the streets and lock them up in rundown hotels, rented houses and nursing homes. Security guards keep petitioners from escaping.

"The aim is for these officials to cajole, pacify or scare the petitioners to return home," the government official said. "Problem is, many of these officials are crude and abusive."

Xinhua referred to a report from an "authoritative department," saying that there are 73 temporary "petitioner-reception offices" in Beijing, among which 57, or 78 percent, are set up by local cities. There are 46 illegal petitioner-reception centers, such as houses rented from farmers.

Yu Jianrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank, worries that the illegal actions against petitioners will weaken the effectiveness of the courts set up to resolve social problems.

"The illegal petitioner-handling measures can create new conflicts and instability," Yu said.

The Outlook report does not mean the government will address the issue, one expert said.

"I don't see it as a sign that the central government is planning to ban them," said Donald Clarke, a lawyer and expert on the Chinese legal system.

"Recall that they are already banned -- there is at present no proper legal basis for petitioners being detained there. It is already kidnapping or unlawful detention, from a legal point of view."

news20091130cnn2

[Top stories] from [CNN.com]

[World]
Report: 'Bin Laden was within our grasp'
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> Report released by Senate panel blames Bush officials for bin Laden escape
> "Bin Laden expected to die," report says, noting that a copy of his will was found
> "Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths," report says
November 29, 2009 -- Updated 1910 GMT (0310 HKT)

Washington (CNN) -- President Obama got some political cover Sunday for his upcoming announcement on sending more troops to Afghanistan.

A report released by the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee blamed the Bush administration for failing to capture or kill Osama bin Laden when the al Qaeda leader was cornered in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountain region in December 2001. The report, released Sunday, said the situation in Afghanistan presented greater problems today because of the failure to nab bin Laden eight years ago.

Bin Laden had written his will, apparently sensing he was trapped, but the lack of sufficient forces to close in for the kill allowed him to escape to tribal areas in Pakistan, according to the report.

It said former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top U.S. commander Gen. Tommy Franks held back the necessary forces for a "classic sweep-and-block maneuver" that could have prevented bin Laden's escape.

"It would have been a dangerous fight across treacherous terrain, and the injection of more U.S. troops and the resulting casualties would have contradicted the risk-averse, 'light footprint' model formulated by Rumsfeld and Franks," the report said.

When criticized later for not zeroing in on bin Laden, administration officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, responded that the al Qaeda leader's location was uncertain.

"But the review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants underlying this report removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora," the report said.

{{Removing the al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat.}
--Report released by Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff}

On Tuesday, Obama will travel to West Point, New York, to announce his decision on a request by his commanding general in Afghanistan for up to 40,000 additional troops.

Obama is expected to send more than 30,000 U.S. troops and seek further troop commitments from NATO allies as part of a counterinsurgency strategy to wipe out al Qaeda elements and stabilize the country while training Afghan forces.

By releasing the report Sunday, Sen. John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, focused attention on the past failure of the Bush administration to take out bin Laden, saying that had created a greater problem today.

"Our inability to finish the job in late 2001 has contributed to a conflict today that endangers not just our troops and those of our allies, but the stability of a volatile and vital region," Kerry, D-Massachusetts, wrote in a letter of transmittal for the report.

When Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, he argued that the Bush administration botched the pursuit of bin Laden and that then-President George W. Bush "took his eye off the ball" in Afghanistan to invade Iraq.

The accusations were hotly disputed by Bush supporters and Franks. However, Gary Berntsen, the CIA operative who led the pursuit of bin Laden at Tora Bora, said in 2005 that his request for up to 800 U.S. troops to cut off the al Qaeda leader's escape route was denied.

Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations committee, told CNN's "State of the Union" that the new report "does serve as a convenient way for, perhaps, Democrats to say once again, there's another failing of the past administration" and that "all the problems have accumulated."

"I think we have to accept that there were many failings," said Lugar, of Indiana. "But the problem right now is, what do we do presently? What will the president's plan be? How much confidence do we have in this president and this plan?"

Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, responding to Lugar's comment, told CNN that Obama faced "the culmination of decisions that were made eight years" earlier, which he said "made the situation much more difficult" today.

According to the report, "removing the al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat."

"But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide," it said.

The report called bin Laden's escape "a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan."

The report also highlighted bin Laden's will, dated December 14, 2001, as an indication of the dire situation he faced.

"Bin Laden expected to die," it said, noting that a copy of the will that surfaced later is regarded as authentic.

"Allah commended to us that when death approaches any of us that we make a bequest to parents and next of kin and to Muslims as a whole," the report quoted bin Laden's will as saying, adding that he "instructed his wives not to remarry and apologized to his children for devoting himself to" holy war.

However, the report said, "fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected."

"Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan," it continued. "The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin Laden and on Pakistan's loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes.

"On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today."