President Obama, Boehner meet on ‘fiscal cliff’

President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) met Sunday afternoon at the White House to continue discussions over how to avert the “fiscal cliff,” their first in-person gathering in nearly a month as the deadline to avert a massive tax hike is fast approaching.

Aides to Boehner confirmed the meeting took place, but declined to provide further details. “We’re not reading out details of the conversation, but the lines of communication remain open,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said.

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Italy faces vote as Monti leaves, Berlusconi returns

ROME: Italian officials on Sunday readied for early elections after Prime Minister Mario Monti said he would soon resign and his predecessor Silvio Berlusconi announced he would run for the top job for the sixth time in two decades.

Monti on Saturday said he would step down as soon as parliament approved next year's budget, which means elections could now be held as early as February -- well before the government's mandate runs out in late April.

"I have matured in my conviction that we could not continue like this any longer," Monti was quoted as saying in an interview with top-selling daily Corriere della Sera, a day after his dramatic move.

Monti said he made his decision after Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) party withdrew its support for him last week.

Party chief Angelino Alfano told parliament on Friday that Italy's debt, unemployment and tax rates had risen, while the economy had plunged since Monti had taken over in November 2011. Monti leads a non-elected cabinet of technocrats.

Alfano went back on the offensive Sunday, saying Monti's government had made "grave errors" and that the PDL was a "responsible force" for Italy.

"We wanted to signal Italians' unease with his economic policies," Alfano said.

Asked about several items of legislation still before parliament, Alfano said his party would only back the budget and a decree to keep open a troubled steel mill in southern Italy that employs thousands of people.

Investors have reacted nervously since the PDL abstained from two confidence votes on the government on Thursday: the stock market plunged and the differential, or "spread", between Italian and benchmark German bonds widened.

Following talks between Monti and President Giorgio Napolitano on Saturday, the president's office said Monti "does not think it possible to continue his mandate and consequently made clear his intention to present his resignation".

Analysts said Monti's decision to speed up the election could also be a way for him to prepare his own entry into politics after three-time prime minister Berlusconi announced his dramatic return.

Berlusconi's decision comes despite a tax fraud conviction earlier this year and an ongoing trial for having sex with an underage 17-year-old prostitute and abusing his powers when premier.

"I am running to win," he said on Saturday, after declaring in October that he would not run.

Most recent polls suggest Berlusconi's party is running in second or even third place, with the main centre-left Democratic Party led by Pier Luigi Bersani expected to win the elections.

Erik Nielsen, chief economist at UniCredit, said he was "not seriously worried" about the prospects for Italy and predicted either a Bersani-led coalition or a new Monti government after the election.

More than three million centre-left voters took to the polls earlier this month to nominate Bersani as their candidate, a former communist with liberal reformist credentials and experience in government.

Some polls put in second place the Five Star Movement, an Internet-based group led by former comedian and populist blogger Beppe Grillo.

In a blog post on Sunday, Grillo criticised Monti saying he was "leaving a country on its knees".

"Watch out for the anger of Italians," he warned.

Primaries held by the movement this month picked dozens of mostly young parliamentary candidates in their 20s and 30s who are campaigning on a series of grassroots issues and environmental causes.

The PDL party had also been due to hold primaries later this month but was forced to cancel them after Berlusconi announced his surprise return.

The party has been riven by infighting ever since Berlusconi stepped down. It has also been hit by a series of scandals over abuse of public funds.

Experts say a campaign against some of Monti's budget cuts and austerity measures could nevertheless play well, as many Italians are feeling the pinch.

Monti's supporters say his administration pulled Italy back from bankruptcy and launched crucial liberal economic reforms, implementing tough but necessary austerity to sort out the public finances after years of mismanagement.

In an interview with Il Sole 24 Ore business daily on Sunday, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso cautioned Italy against turning back the clock.

Barroso praised Monti for "putting public finances back in order and reforming the economy and for his role in the European debate.

"Italians should not fall under the illusion that there are quick or magic solutions," he told the paper.

"The next elections should not become a pretext to put in doubt the necessity of the measures approved until now."

On the sidelines of an economic conference in Cannes, Monti said on Saturday: "I am convinced that whatever government succeeds me, the wisdom of the men and women in Italian politics will prevail.

"I am sure there will not be an attempt to destroy what we have been able to do to secure Italy's public finances," he added. There was still an "enormous amount to do for growth."

-AFP/ac

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India misguided, paranoid over China: Guha

Shreya Roy Chowdhury, TNN Dec 8, 2012, 06.12AM IST

MUMBAI: A good half-hour into the discussion on 'India, China and the World', historian Ramachandra Guha issued a disclaimer—all the three members on the panel had been to China only once. "We should learn their language, promote quality research, and have a panel on China driven by Chinese scholars," he said. And that was the general tenor of the debate—that the Indian attitude to China was influenced by a mix of ignorance, cautious optimism about partnerships and a whole lot of misguided paranoia. "Don't demonise the Chinese, please," Guha finally said in response to a question.

"China has existed in our imaginations," observed Sunil Khilnani, professor of politics and author of The Idea Of India. "There's been very little sustained engagement with the reality of China and very little of our own produced knowledge about China." It was after the events of 1962 ('war' in the popular imagination, 'skirmish' to the scholars participating in the discussion), explained Khilnani, that a miffed India "withdrew". It's the 50th anniversary of that exchange this year, and "what we haven't been able to do is learn from the defeat", observed Khilnani. Both could have benefited from greater engagement. "China has had a very clear focus on primary education and achieved high levels of literacy before its economic rise. It has also addressed the issue of land reform," said Khilnani. Guha added that China could learn from the "religious, cultural and linguistic pluralism" in India.

But China and India weren't always so out of sync with each other. Srinath Raghavan, a scholar of military history, got both Guha and Khilnani to talk about pre-1962 relations between the two when the picture was rosier. Tagore was interested in China and so was Gandhi. Both were very large countries with large populations and shared what Guha calls a "lack of cultural inferiority". "They were both," he continued, "also heavily dependent on peasant communities." Nehru was appreciative of China's will to modernize and industrialize and its adoption of technology to achieve those ends. In turn, Chinese politicians argued for Indian independence.

Things soured more, feel both Khilnani and Guha, after the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959. "He was welcomed here as a spiritual leader but the intensification of the conflict dates to the Dalai Lama's flight," said Guha. Both Guha and Khilnani argued that Nehru's decision to not react aggressively to China's occupation of Tibet was, in the long run, the right one and prevented further "militarization" of the region. An audience member wondered if that didn't make India "China's puppet". Guha disagreed. "If there's a Tibetan culture alive today," he said, "it's not because of Richard Gere. Don't believe in the hypocrisy of the Western countries. Will they give them land, employment, dignified refuge? The Tibetans is one of the few cases in which our record is honorable."

But the difference in levels of development and the lopsided trade relations between the two countries have only fuelled the suspicions many Indians seem to harbour about China. People were worried, said Guha, even about cricket balls made in China. Audience questions reflected those worries. A member asked about China's "strategy to conquer the world" and its likely impact on India. Guha cautioned against stereotypes; Khilnani explained, "History is littered with the debris of states that have tried to dominate the world. What we're doing may be more long-lasting."

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Plants Grow Fine Without Gravity

When researchers sent plants to the International Space Station in 2010, the flora wasn't meant to be decorative. Instead, the seeds of these small, white flowers—called Arabidopsis thaliana—were the subject of an experiment to study how plant roots developed in a weightless environment.

Gravity is an important influence on root growth, but the scientists found that their space plants didn't need it to flourish. The research team from the University of Florida in Gainesville thinks this ability is related to a plant's inherent ability to orient itself as it grows. Seeds germinated on the International Space Station sprouted roots that behaved like they would on Earth—growing away from the seed to seek nutrients and water in exactly the same pattern observed with gravity. (Related: "Beyond Gravity.")

Since the flowers were orbiting some 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the Earth at the time, the NASA-funded experiment suggests that plants still retain an earthy instinct when they don't have gravity as a guide.

"The role of gravity in plant growth and development in terrestrial environments is well understood," said plant geneticist and study co-author Anna-Lisa Paul, with the University of Florida in Gainesville. "What is less well understood is how plants respond when you remove gravity." (See a video about plant growth.)

The new study revealed that "features of plant growth we thought were a result of gravity acting on plant cells and organs do not actually require gravity," she added.

Paul and her collaborator Robert Ferl, a plant biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, monitored their plants from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using images sent from the space station every six hours.

Root Growth

Grown on a nutrient-rich gel in clear petri plates, the space flowers showed familiar root growth patterns such as "skewing," where roots slant progressively as they branch out.

"When we saw the first pictures come back from orbit and saw that we had most of the skewing phenomenon we were quite surprised," Paul said.

Researchers have always thought that skewing was the result of gravity's effects on how the root tip interacts with the surfaces it encounters as it grows, she added. But Paul and Ferl suspect that in the absence of gravity, other cues take over that enable the plant to direct its roots away from the seed and light-seeking shoot. Those cues could include moisture, nutrients, and light avoidance.

"Bottom line is that although plants 'know' that they are in a novel environment, they ultimately do just fine," Paul said.

The finding further boosts the prospect of cultivating food plants in space and, eventually, on other planets.

"There's really no impediment to growing plants in microgravity, such as on a long-term mission to Mars, or in reduced-gravity environments such as in specialized greenhouses on Mars or the moon," Paul said. (Related: "Alien Trees Would Bloom Black on Worlds With Double Stars.")

The study findings appear in the latest issue of the journal BMC Plant Biology.

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Obama’s second-term agenda will be shadowed by budget woes

Even if President Obama succeeds in getting Republicans to agree to tax hikes on the wealthy as part of a “fiscal cliff” deal, the country’s grim budget realities will still cast a long shadow — limiting his ambitions as he begins plotting a second-term agenda.

Any agreement is likely to result in less than the $1.6 trillion in new taxes over the next decade that Obama requested in his initial offer to House Republicans, and White House aides are signaling to allies that any new money from taxes would be used almost entirely for deficit reduction — not for ambitious, new spending programs or government expansions.

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Italy's Monti to resign as premier

ROME: Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti is stepping down, the president's office announced Saturday, just hours after the man he replaced, Silvio Berlusconi, said he would run again for head of government.

Monti "does not think it possible to continue his mandate and consequently made clear his intention to present his resignation," said the statement from President Giorgio Napolitano's office.

The announcement came after Monti met with the president at the presidential palace for more than an hour. Already Friday, Monti had held talks with parliamentary political leaders, including Angelino Alfano, of Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) party.

Monti would check to see if the various political parties were ready to approve the budget his government had advanced as soon as possible. But once that had been done, he would step down, said the statement.

Comments Alfano has made in parliament amounted to a declaration of no confidence in Monti's government and its policies, the statement added.

"We believe the experience of the Monti government is over, Alfano told parliament earlier this week. But he added that as the PDL wanted an "orderly conclusion" to the legislature, it would not try to bring down the government.

Monti's government had in any case been due to step down in spring next year. A general election had been expected in March or April, though the precise date has not been set.

But Berlusconi's right-wing PDL fired a shot across the government's bows on Thursday, twice abstaining from confidence votes in the government to protest Monti's policies.

Recent polls have suggested that the centre-left Democratic Party would win an election poll -- but not with an outright majority, forcing it to seek coalition partners. The party is now led by Luigi Bersani, who was voted into the post only last weekend.

Berlusconi meanwhile said in his statement earlier Saturday that he had opened talks with former coalition allies the Northern League to try to agree on backing a single candidate.

- AFP/fa

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India misguided, paranoid over China: Guha

MUMBAI: A good half-hour into the discussion on 'India, China and the World', historian Ramachandra Guha issued a disclaimer—all the three members on the panel had been to China only once. "We should learn their language, promote quality research, and have a panel on China driven by Chinese scholars," he said. And that was the general tenor of the debate—that the Indian attitude to China was influenced by a mix of ignorance, cautious optimism about partnerships and a whole lot of misguided paranoia. "Don't demonise the Chinese, please," Guha finally said in response to a question.

"China has existed in our imaginations," observed Sunil Khilnani, professor of politics and author of The Idea Of India. "There's been very little sustained engagement with the reality of China and very little of our own produced knowledge about China." It was after the events of 1962 ('war' in the popular imagination, 'skirmish' to the scholars participating in the discussion), explained Khilnani, that a miffed India "withdrew". It's the 50th anniversary of that exchange this year, and "what we haven't been able to do is learn from the defeat", observed Khilnani. Both could have benefited from greater engagement. "China has had a very clear focus on primary education and achieved high levels of literacy before its economic rise. It has also addressed the issue of land reform," said Khilnani. Guha added that China could learn from the "religious, cultural and linguistic pluralism" in India.

But China and India weren't always so out of sync with each other. Srinath Raghavan, a scholar of military history, got both Guha and Khilnani to talk about pre-1962 relations between the two when the picture was rosier. Tagore was interested in China and so was Gandhi. Both were very large countries with large populations and shared what Guha calls a "lack of cultural inferiority". "They were both," he continued, "also heavily dependent on peasant communities." Nehru was appreciative of China's will to modernize and industrialize and its adoption of technology to achieve those ends. In turn, Chinese politicians argued for Indian independence.

Things soured more, feel both Khilnani and Guha, after the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959. "He was welcomed here as a spiritual leader but the intensification of the conflict dates to the Dalai Lama's flight," said Guha. Both Guha and Khilnani argued that Nehru's decision to not react aggressively to China's occupation of Tibet was, in the long run, the right one and prevented further "militarization" of the region. An audience member wondered if that didn't make India "China's puppet". Guha disagreed. "If there's a Tibetan culture alive today," he said, "it's not because of Richard Gere. Don't believe in the hypocrisy of the Western countries. Will they give them land, employment, dignified refuge? The Tibetans is one of the few cases in which our record is honorable."

But the difference in levels of development and the lopsided trade relations between the two countries have only fuelled the suspicions many Indians seem to harbour about China. People were worried, said Guha, even about cricket balls made in China. Audience questions reflected those worries. A member asked about China's "strategy to conquer the world" and its likely impact on India. Guha cautioned against stereotypes; Khilnani explained, "History is littered with the debris of states that have tried to dominate the world. What we're doing may be more long-lasting."

Read More..

Plants Grow Fine Without Gravity

When researchers sent plants to the International Space Station in 2010, the flora wasn't meant to be decorative. Instead, the seeds of these small, white flowers—called Arabidopsis thaliana—were the subject of an experiment to study how plant roots developed in a weightless environment.

Gravity is an important influence on root growth, but the scientists found that their space plants didn't need it to flourish. The research team from the University of Florida in Gainesville thinks this ability is related to a plant's inherent ability to orient itself as it grows. Seeds germinated on the International Space Station sprouted roots that behaved like they would on Earth—growing away from the seed to seek nutrients and water in exactly the same pattern observed with gravity. (Related: "Beyond Gravity.")

Since the flowers were orbiting some 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the Earth at the time, the NASA-funded experiment suggests that plants still retain an earthy instinct when they don't have gravity as a guide.

"The role of gravity in plant growth and development in terrestrial environments is well understood," said plant geneticist and study co-author Anna-Lisa Paul, with the University of Florida in Gainesville. "What is less well understood is how plants respond when you remove gravity." (See a video about plant growth.)

The new study revealed that "features of plant growth we thought were a result of gravity acting on plant cells and organs do not actually require gravity," she added.

Paul and her collaborator Robert Ferl, a plant biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, monitored their plants from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using images sent from the space station every six hours.

Root Growth

Grown on a nutrient-rich gel in clear petri plates, the space flowers showed familiar root growth patterns such as "skewing," where roots slant progressively as they branch out.

"When we saw the first pictures come back from orbit and saw that we had most of the skewing phenomenon we were quite surprised," Paul said.

Researchers have always thought that skewing was the result of gravity's effects on how the root tip interacts with the surfaces it encounters as it grows, she added. But Paul and Ferl suspect that in the absence of gravity, other cues take over that enable the plant to direct its roots away from the seed and light-seeking shoot. Those cues could include moisture, nutrients, and light avoidance.

"Bottom line is that although plants 'know' that they are in a novel environment, they ultimately do just fine," Paul said.

The finding further boosts the prospect of cultivating food plants in space and, eventually, on other planets.

"There's really no impediment to growing plants in microgravity, such as on a long-term mission to Mars, or in reduced-gravity environments such as in specialized greenhouses on Mars or the moon," Paul said. (Related: "Alien Trees Would Bloom Black on Worlds With Double Stars.")

The study findings appear in the latest issue of the journal BMC Plant Biology.

Read More..

Egypt Terror Leader Possibly Linked to Benghazi Attack Arrested

Dec 8, 2012 2:16pm

Mohammad Hannon/AP Photo

The leader of an Egyptian terrorist cell that planned attacks in Egypt and may be linked with the storming of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11 has been arrested by Egyptian intelligence officers, according to an official close to Egypt’s intelligence agency and a senior U.S. official.

Mohammad Jamal Abdo Ahmed had become one of Egypt’s most dangerous terrorists and led a small cell of Egyptians that collected suicide vests, bombs and grenades before their Cairo safe house was raided by intelligence officials in late October, according to the U.S. official.

PHOTOS: Benghazi: US Consulate Attack Aftermath

Most of the cell’s targets were Egyptian, but both the U.S. and Egyptian officials said Ahmed admitted to traveling to Libya and assisting Ansar al Sharia, which U.S. officials suspect organized the attack on the consulate that killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

READ: More on the Political Fallout From the Benghazi Attack

Until now, neither the United States nor Egypt has determined exactly what role Ahmed played in the attack in eastern Libya, according to both officials.

Ahmed may have also been planning attacks on U.S. targets in Egypt and neighboring countries, the U.S. official said, and had aspirations to join al Qaeda.

Ahmed, who is Egyptian, was arrested two weeks ago in eastern Egypt in the Sharqiyah province, the Egyptian official said.

Egyptian officials continue to question him and he will remain in custody for another 15 days, according to the Egyptian official.

His arrest was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

READ: Four Americans Slain in Libya ‘Come Home’

SHOWS: World News

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Oil slips amid concerns about demand for crude

NEW YORK: Oil prices slipped Friday as a dip in the US unemployment rate failed to allay skepticism about economic recovery in the United States and Europe and the strength of crude demand.

New York's main contract, West Texas Intermediate for delivery in January, finished at $85.93 a barrel, down 33 cents from Thursday's closing level.

In London trade, Brent North Sea crude for January fell one cent to $107.02

Oil prices were up initially following the release of US government data showing a surprise fall in the nation's unemployment rate to 7.7 per cent in November, its lowest level since December 2008.

"Of course the job report this morning was better than expected," said independent analyst Andy Lipow.

However, he added, there was some amount of skepticism about the impact of Superstorm Sandy, which hit the East Coast in late October and early November. In releasing its statistics, the Labour Department said the hurricane "did not substantively impact" the data.

"Other than that, there (is) still concern with some of the economic news that came out of Europe, notably regarding growth in Germany," he added.

"Those type of headlines continue to weigh on market sentiment."

Also dulling the economic outlook was the release of the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index, which declined to 74.5 from November's 82.7 -- the best level in five years.

The data is crucial for the oil market because the United States is the world's largest consumer of crude.

Market sentiment was also dampened somewhat after Germany's Bundesbank warned that the eurozone powerhouse could sink into recession early next year, but was well placed to rebound strongly.

The German central bank, in its latest updated twice-yearly forecasts, said there were "indications that economic activity may actually fall in the final quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013."

- AFP/fa

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