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IOWA CITY, Iowa – Iowa starting guard Anthony Tucker has been suspended after Iowa City Police said he was arrested for public intoxication.
Iowa athletic director Gary Barta said Sunday that the 20-year-old Tucker, the team's second-leading scorer with 11.9 points per game, would be suspended indefinitely. Officials at the Johnson County Jail said Tucker pleaded not guilty to one count of public intoxication and was released Sunday on $325 bond.
Barta says he was "disappointed because this is not the first legal incident involving alcohol."
The sophomore pleaded guilty to public intoxication in December 2008. In January, Tucker was ruled academically ineligible to play.
Tucker scored 17 points in Iowa's 71-67 win over Drake on Saturday.

In many human societies, the act of mutually exchanging money, goods, etc. may contribute to social cohesion. Economists have elaborated the economics of gift-giving into the notion of a gift economy.

Although baskets were traditionally created to serve a utilitarian rather than an aesthetic purpose, the practice of basket making has evolved into an art. Artistic freedom allows basket makers a wide choice of colors, materials, sizes, patterns, and details.

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WASHINGTON – Outnumbered Republicans are vowing to delay passage of historic health care legislation as long as possible after jubilant Democrats locked in Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson as the 60th and decisive vote.
Nelson's backing puts President Barack Obama's signature issue firmly on a path for Christmas Eve passage. Democrats will need to show 60 votes on two additional occasions, with the next — and most critical — test vote set for about 1 a.m. Monday.
"This bill is a legislative train wreck of historic proportions," the Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said at a Saturday news conference. He pointed to cuts to Medicare that CBO said totaled more than $470 billion over a decade, with reductions in planned payments to home health care agencies and hospices. He also said the bill includes "massive tax increases" at a time of double-digit unemployment.
Republicans also noted that CBO concluded that under the bill, "federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010-2019 period, as would the federal budgetary commitment to health care."
To get Nelson's vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., agreed to a series of concessions on abortion and other issues demanded by Nelson, a Democrat, then informed Obama of the agreement as the president flew home from climate talks in Copenhagen.
Obama welcomed the breakthrough, saying, "After a nearly centurylong struggle, we are on the cusp of making health care reform a reality in the United States of America."
The Congressional Budget Office said the Senate bill would extend coverage to more than 30 million Americans who lack it. It also imposes new regulations to curb abuses of the insurance industry, and the president noted one last-minute addition would impose penalties on companies that "arbitrarily jack up prices" in advance of the legislation taking effect.
CBO analysts also said the legislation would cut federal deficits by $132 billion over 10 years and possibly much more in the subsequent decade.
At its core, the legislation would create a new insurance exchange where consumers could shop for affordable coverage that complied with new federal guidelines. Most Americans would be required to purchase insurance, with federal subsidies available to help defray the cost for lower and middle income individuals and families.
In a concession to Nelson and other moderates, the bill lacks a government-run insurance option of the type that House Democrats inserted into theirs. In a final defeat for liberals, a proposed Medicare expansion was also jettisoned in the past several days as Reid and the White House maneuvered for 60 votes.

OL PEJETA CONSERVANCY, Kenya – Four of the world's last known eight northern white rhinos landed in Kenya on Sunday and were transported to a game park where officials hope the endangered mammals will reproduce and save their subspecies.
No white rhinos are known to remain in the wild, and the animals transported on Sunday have produced no offspring after nearly 24 years in a Czech zoo. So wildlife workers hoping to save the subspecies loaded two males and two females into wooden crates and began the effort to return them to what was once their savannah homeland.
When teams of Kenyan wildlife workers opened the crates on Sunday, two of the rhinos lingered several minutes before moving to a larger pen as Czech animals handlers coaxed them out with soothing words and treats. The other two exited immediately.
The rhinos' handlers and park officials said they hoped the two females will bear as many young as possible for several years, but all those involved acknowledged it was not a sure bet that the rhinos would reproduce.
The northern white rhino is the world's rarest large mammal, making the international effort to save the subspecies all the more important.
"Objective No. 1 is to get as many offspring as you can from the females — at least one calf out of each within two years," said Rob Brett, the director of Fauna and Flora International, which helped arrange and finance the move.
The rhinos were transported in large wooden crates by the international shipping company DHL on two flatbed trucks. On the side of the crates was written: "Last Chance to Survive."
The four were flown from a zoo in the Czech Republic to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy — about 180 miles (300 kilometers) north of the capital, Kenya — where a black rhino population has made strong gains and the rhinos will be protected from poachers.
The rhinos have not reproduced in the Czech Republic since 1985, the reason for the move to Kenya. Two northern whites remain behind; two others are in San Diego. The females could be mated with southern white rhinos — a different subspecies — to keep the gene pool alive.
The aim of the project — years down the line — is to reintroduce the northern white rhino back to southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, said Patrick Omondi, head of species conservation and management for the Kenya Wildlife Service.
Alastair Lucas, the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs in Australia, helped finance the rhinos' move to Kenya, a project he became involved with earlier this year after visiting Uganda and being told parks there no longer have rhinos. He declined to say how much he donated or the cost of moving the animals.
"Shipping rhinos across the world is not cheap. They don't fit in economy seats," Lucas said. "I had to fly them business class."
The rhinos will remain penned in the Kenyan park as they acclimate to the climate and vegetation. They will be given more room to roam in coming weeks and eventually released to the entire park.

BLANTYRE, Malawi – A strong earthquake destroyed several buildings in Malawi on Sunday, killing at least three people and injuring about 200, a government official said.
The quake struck the southeast African country at 1:19 a.m., and the victims included students who were sleeping in a dormitory at a government school, said Gasten Macheka, the commissioner of Karonga district.
Macheka said about 270,000 people have been urged to leave their homes for their safety, and that the hard-hit district in northern Malawi urgently needs at least 48,000 tents and medical supplies.
"This is a crisis," he said. "We are asking everyone in Karonga not to be in houses or near houses because the situation is unstable. We are appealing to the government and the international community to help us as a matter of urgency."
Macheka said at least three people were killed and 200 injured. Many of the victims were treated for injuries such as broken bones and skin lacerations at Karonga District Hospital, but dozens of others were hospitalized there or evacuated to a hospital in Mzuzu city, about 140 miles (230 kilometers) from the epicenter, he said.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a magnitude of 6.0, making it strong enough to cause severe damage.
Officials from Malawi's Department of Relief and Disaster Management Affairs were flying to the area to survey the damage, and the Malawi Red Cross was taking tents from the capital, Lilongwe, to the displaced in Karonga district.
The district has been hit by a series of earthquakes and aftershocks since the beginning of December.
Leonard Kalindekafe, the director of Malawi's Department of Geological Surveys, said Sunday's quake was worse than any other. However, earlier this month an earthquake nearly as strong — a 5.9-magnitude — demolished several houses in Karonga district, killing a child and injuring six people.
Kalindekafe said the area had been expecting aftershocks, "but we are surprised at the massive one" that hit Sunday. "It's now really chaotic. We can't tell what's going to happen," he said.
The district lies on the Great Rift Valley fault line, which may now be realigning itself, making it more unstable than it has been for a long time, said Kalindekafe.
"This is being caused by what we call the rejuvenation of the fault lines, or new faults are being formed," he said.

BEIJING – China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, lauded Sunday the outcome of a historic U.N. climate conference that ended with a nonbinding agreement that urges major polluters to make deeper emissions cuts — but does not require it.
The international climate talks that brought more than 110 leaders together in Copenhagen produced "significant and positive" results, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said.
Disputes between rich and poor countries and between the world's biggest carbon polluters — China and the United States — dominated the two-week conference. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand action to cool an overheating planet.
The meeting ended Saturday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, with delegates accepting a U.S.-brokered compromise. The so-called Copenhagen Accord gives billions of dollars in climate aid to poor nations but does not require the world's major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the much-criticized outcome as a first step that paves the way for action. Merkel was quoted Sunday as telling the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that "Copenhagen is a first step toward a new world climate order — no more, but also no less."
Merkel said that "anyone who just badmouths Copenhagen now is engaging in the business of those who are applying the brakes rather than moving forward."
Yang said the positive outcomes of the conference were that it upheld the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" recognized by the Kyoto Protocol, and made a step forward in promoting binding emissions cuts for developed countries and voluntary mitigating actions by developing countries.
"Developing and developed countries are very different in their historical emissions responsibilities and current emissions levels, and in their basic national characteristics and development stages," Yang said in a statement. "Therefore, they should shoulder different responsibilities and obligations in fighting climate change."
He said the conference also created a consensus on key issues such as long-term global emissions reduction targets, funding and technology support to developing countries, and transparency. He did not go into details.
"The Copenhagen conference is not a destination but a new beginning," Yang said.
China has said it will rein in its greenhouse gas output, pledging to reduce its carbon intensity — its use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output — by 40 to 45 percent.
The Copenhagen Accord emerged principally from President Barack Obama's meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and the leaders of India, Brazil and South Africa. But the agreement was protested by several nations that demanded deeper emissions cuts by the industrialized world.
Its key elements, with no legal obligation, were that richer nations will finance a $10 billion-a-year, three-year program to fund poorer nations' projects to deal with drought and other impacts of climate change, and to develop clean energy.
A goal was also set to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 for the same adaptation and mitigation purposes.
In a U.S. concession to China and other developing nations, text was dropped from the declaration that would have set a goal of reducing global emissions by 50 percent by 2050. Developing nations thought that would hamper efforts to raise their people from poverty.

New Haven, Conn. –
“The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists,” William F. Buckley, Jr., observed. His point was that free markets are underwritten by public opinion, not divine right. Bad behavior by the business elite can provoke the public to demand that the terms of free enterprise be rewritten or, in dire times, revoked.Does the leadership at Goldman Sachs get this? The firm’s recent announcement that its top 30 executives will receive long-term stock instead of cash as year-end bonuses suggests they have heeded, however belatedly, Buckley’s warning. Yet such “sacrifice” is hardly sufficient when capitalism itself is increasingly the target of public wrath.
Take AIG. In March, the insurance giant said it had to pay some $450 million in bonuses to its disgraced financial products unit, ostensibly for the long hours it put in losing 90 times that amount the previous fall. This, after taxpayers hadbailed out the firm to the tune of $173 billion.
Public outrage prompted Congress to grill the firm’s then-CEO, Edward Liddy, who subsequently asked top bonus-getters to “do the right thing” and return at least half their bounty. This may appear like justice half-done, though since actual returns have fallen far short of pledges, it seems more like justice half-baked. Still, it illustrates Buckley’s point. Outrageous behavior by business executives undermines the public’s faith in capitalism, leading people to call upon the guiding hand of government to supplant the invisible hand of the marketplace. By June, the Obama administration had appointed a “pay czar,” Kenneth Feinberg. This week, he proposed a $500,000 salary limit for hundreds of executives at firms bailed out by the federal government.
In hindsight, the AIG bonus debacle had all the subtlety of a medieval morality play. Goldman Sachs is a far more intriguing case.
By any measure, the storied firm is having a banner year. Its revenue and stock price have rebounded handsomely from a year ago, so the $16.7 billion it has reserved for year-end bonuses seems like a just reward – at least to Goldman’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, who recently replaced AIG’s Liddy as Wall Street’s Public Enemy No. 1.
“Everybody should be, frankly, happy,” Mr. Blankfein said of Goldman’s success in the now infamous interview with the Times of London in which he claimed he was “doing God’s work.” These are the kind of cringe-worthy comments that Buckley had in mind when he warned capitalists that they could be their own worst enemy. They certainly have guaranteed that Goldman will remain ground zero for populist outrage, notwithstanding the firm’s bonus modification and a $500 million program to aid small businesses.
Yet Blankfein went even further. “The financial system led us into this crisis,” he declared, “and it will lead us out.”
In light of what happened to the financial system just a year ago, this is an astonishing statement. It shows the same fundamental faith in free markets as Buckley’s wry aperçu. There is nothing essentially wrong with capitalism, just a few errant capitalists who, because of bad faith or simply bad manners, spoil the party for the rest of us. The vices of capitalism – greed, reckless ambition, ill-considered risk-taking – are merely the defects of its virtues. This does not obviate the need for the occasional acts of public contrition. Blankfein himself admitted that Goldman’s bankers “participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret.” But the implication is clear: Give capitalism some time, and it will work these problems out.
The public doesn’t share this faith. In a Time Magazine poll conducted shortly before Goldman announced its blockbuster bonuses, only 18 percent of respondents thought “large Wall Street financial institutions learned from their mistakes,” while a whopping 75 percent believed that “business as usual” would prevail. More ominously for Goldman, 62 percent of respondents said the government should strictly limit pay at Wall Street firms, “regardless of whether or not they’ve paid back the government.”
A year after Wall Street nearly took down the world economy, most Americans cannot understand how any firm that stood at the center of the crisis could be doing so well, even one as venerable as Goldman Sachs. Conspiracy theories worthy of Dan Brown seem to better explain Goldman’s success than elbow grease and old-fashioned hustle. It doesn’t help that the fingerprints of its alumni are all over the decisions that saw its competitors fail last fall shortly before it received nearly $13 billion in bailout money (which has since been repaid).
This is dangerous territory for Goldman, or for anyone who champions free markets. The invisible hand describes an economic world where winners and losers are chosen by the public – individually, anonymously, and without coordination – not by any one person or secret cabal. It is an elegant vision that provides a powerful moral justification for the kind of economic inequality that year-end bonuses highlight. Individuals, this vision implies, rise and fall by hard work, not elite favor.
Last fall, the invisible hand was pulling the big banks into financial quicksand. Without the strong arm of the federal government, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner recently affirmed, “none of them would have survived.” For free-market evangelists, this is an inconvenient fact, one that ought to lead to the kind of soul searching about capitalism’s shortcomings. It certainly should give second thoughts to Wall Street about the wisdom of handing out blockbuster bonuses when the health of the larger economy remains in doubt.
For now, however, it looks as if the bonuses will go forward, the outrage will grow, and Americans will continue to demand that the government fix a financial system that seems incapable of fixing itself. When Washington heeds that call, it is unlikely to conclude that the problem with capitalism is merely capitalists. They, and their year-end bonuses, will only be the most obvious defects in a system that will seem deeply, perhaps even inherently, flawed.
John Paul Rollert teaches business ethics and leadership at Harvard Summer School. He is pursuing a JD at Yale Law School and a PhD at The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

WASHINGTON – Congressional budget scorekeepers say the latest Democratic health care bill would cover 94 percent of eligible Americans while reducing the federal deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office said Saturday the changes announced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would cut the deficit by an additional $2 billion, bringing the 10-year total reduction to $132 billion.
The nearly $900 billion bill would be paid for by $483 billion in cuts to Medicare and other federal health programs, as well as tax increases.
The number of people covered by employers would decline slightly from projected levels, as workers at small businesses take advantage of federal subsidies to purchase their own plans.
It would leave 23 million people still uninsured in 2019.

BEIJING – China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, lauded Sunday the outcome of a historic U.N. climate conference that ended with a nonbinding agreement that urges major polluters to make deeper emissions cuts — but does not require it.
The international climate talks that brought more than 110 leaders together in Copenhagen produced "significant and positive" results, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said.
Disputes between rich and poor countries and between the world's biggest carbon polluters — China and the United States — dominated the two-week conference. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand action to cool an overheating planet.
The meeting ended Saturday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, with delegates accepting a U.S.-brokered compromise. The so-called Copenhagen Accord gives billions of dollars in climate aid to poor nations but does not require the world's major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.
Yang said the positive outcomes of the conference were that it upheld the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" recognized by the Kyoto Protocol, and made a step forward in promoting binding emissions cuts for developed countries and voluntary mitigating actions by developing countries.
"Developing and developed countries are very different in their historical emissions responsibilities and current emissions levels, and in their basic national characteristics and development stages," Yang said in a statement. "Therefore, they should shoulder different responsibilities and obligations in fighting climate change."
He said the conference also created a consensus on key issues such as long-term global emissions reduction targets, funding and technology support to developing countries, and transparency. He did not go into details.
"The Copenhagen conference is not a destination but a new beginning," Yang said.
China has said it will rein in its greenhouse gas output, pledging to reduce its carbon intensity — its use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output — by 40 to 45 percent.
The Copenhagen Accord emerged principally from President Barack Obama's meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and the leaders of India, Brazil and South Africa. But the agreement was protested by several nations that demanded deeper emissions cuts by the industrialized world.
Its key elements, with no legal obligation, were that richer nations will finance a $10 billion-a-year, three-year program to fund poorer nations' projects to deal with drought and other impacts of climate change, and to develop clean energy.
A goal was also set to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 for the same adaptation and mitigation purposes.
In a U.S. concession to China and other developing nations, text was dropped from the declaration that would have set a goal of reducing global emissions by 50 percent by 2050. Developing nations thought that would hamper efforts to raise their people from poverty.

LEGASPI, Philippines (Reuters) –
The Philippines raised the alert level around the country's most active volcano on Sunday, warning of a possible hazardous eruption within days and extending a "no-go zone" up to 10 km (6 miles).

Mayon Volcano, known for its near-perfect cone shape in the coconut-growing central Bicol region, has been spewing ash and burning mud and rocks since Monday, chief vulcanologist Renato Solidum said.

"We raised the alert level to 4 ... meaning an eruption is within days," Solidum told Reuters after aerial inspection and other observations of the volcano showed increased activity in the past 24 hours.

Level 4 indicates an eruption is imminent and the maximum alert level of 5 means an eruption is underway, he said.

Solidum said more than 450 volcanic tremors were monitored in the past 12 hours and rumbling sounds had been heard at the base of the volcano.

More than 40,000 people -- about 85 percent of the population in the area -- have already been moved to temporary shelters, where food and water stations have been set up. About 50,000 masks were distributed on Sunday to displaced people.

Joey Salceda, governor of Albay province where Mayon is located, said he had ordered the deployment of more troops around the expanded no-go zone to forcibly evacuate more people and to stop others who wanted to return to their homes and farms.

"We're preparing to evacuate more people before the actual big eruption," Salceda told reporters.

The Philippines lies on the "Ring of Fire," a belt of volcanoes circling the Pacific Ocean that is also prone to earthquakes.

Mayon is the most active of 22 volcanoes in the country, having erupted more than 50 times in the past four centuries. The most destructive eruption was in February 1841, when lava flows buried a town and killed 1,200 people.

The last time Mayon erupted was in 2006.

(Reporting by Manny Mogato; Editing by Paul Tait)

WASHINGTON (AFP) –
Nobel-winning environmental crusader Al Gore weighed in on "Climategate" Wednesday, saying the emails at the center of the row were being taken out of context.

"Well, they took a few phrases out of context. These are private e-mails, more than 10 years old, and they've tried to blow it up into something that it's really not," Gore, a former US vice president told CNN.

The emails, intercepted from scientists at Britain's University of East Anglia, a top center for climate research, have been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the experts twisted data in order to dramatize global warming.

Some of the thousands of messages expressed frustration at the scientists' inability to explain what they described as a temporary slowdown in warming and discussed ways to counter the campaigns of climate change naysayers.

Gore firmly took the side of the authors, who say their private emails were sometimes flippant or ironic and were being distorted to suit climate change denialists.

"If you take one little thing from 10 years ago out of context and describe it inaccurately, then it becomes a controversy without any real substance," Gore said.

"Is there any substantive reason to worry about them? No. Does the noise machine of the climate deniers blow them out of proportion and fool some people into thinking they have substance? Well, that's another matter," he said.

"This was an open process in which the studies that were being argued about actually were fully included and openly discussed and analyzed. So this was an example of people who don't want to do anything about the climate crisis taking things out of context and misrepresenting them."

Gore, whose counsel was sought Monday by Barack Obama ahead of the president's trip to the Copenhagen climate change conference next week, said the emails were also outdated as evidence of global warming was now obvious.

"There's an air of unreality about the discussion of arcane points from emails from long ago," he said.

"The north polar ice-cap is melting before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for most of the last three million years and now suddenly 40 percent of it is gone and the rest of it is expected to disappear within five, 10, 15 years."

Gore, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was upbeat about the ongoing climate conference in Copenhagen.

"They're close to getting a final agreement. It will probably be finalized next year after the political agreement that's expected next week," he said.

NEW YORK – R. Kelly is writing more chapters, only this time, it's not for his "Trapped" saga, but for a new memoir.
The 42-year-old singer, writer and producer says in a statement issued Wednesday that he is working on an autobiography with David Ritz that will "tell it like it is."
He has a lot to talk about. He's one of the best-selling recording artists in history but also one of the most controversial.
The book promises to go through all his drama, including child pornography charges that ended with an acquittal.
The autobiography is untitled right now, just like his new CD. It's scheduled for release by Tavis Smiley's SmileyBooks in 2011.
___
On the Net:
http://www.r-kelly.com

NEW YORK – AT&T says wireless data hogs who jam up the airwaves by watching video on their iPhones will be put on tighter leashes.
The carrier has had trouble keeping up with wireless data usage, leading to slow load times and dropped connections. It is upgrading its network to cope, but AT&T's head of consumer services, Ralph de la Vega, told investors at a UBS conference in New York that it will also give high-bandwidth users incentives to "reduce or modify their usage."
De la Vega didn't say exactly how or when the carrier would change its policies. But he said some form of usage-based pricing for data is inevitable.

Between 1817 and 1822, the German physician and poet Justinus Kerner described botulinum toxin as a "sausage poison" and "fatty poison",, as this bacterium often caused poisoning by growing in improperly handled or prepared meat products. It was Kerner who first conceived a possible therapeutic use of botulinum toxin. In 1870, Müller, another German physician, coined the name botulism. (In Latin, botulus means "sausage.") In 1897, Emile van Ermengem identified the bacterium Clostridium botulinum to be the producer of botulinum toxin. In 1928, P. Tessmer Snipe and Hermann Sommer for the first time purified the toxin. In 1949, Burgen's group discovered that botulinium toxin blocks neuromuscular transmission. In the late 1960s Allan Scott and Edward Schantz were the first to work on a standardized botulinum toxin preparation for therapeutic purposes.

Food-borne botulism usually results from ingestion of food that has become contaminated with spores (such as a perforated can) in an anaerobic environment, allowing the spores to germinate and grow. The growing (vegetative) bacteria produce toxin. It is the ingestion of preformed toxin that causes botulism, not the ingestion of the spores or the vegetative bacteria. Infant and wound botulism both result from infection with spores which subsequently germinate, resulting in production of toxin and the symptoms of botulism.

South Florida Botox

THE HAGUE (AFP) –
The legality of Kosovo's secession from Serbia takes centre stage on Tuesday as the International Court of Justice opens hearings into Pristina's controversial decision to break away.

Serbia, Kosovo and 29 nations, including Russia and the United States, will unveil so far confidential arguments to The Hague-based ICJ, which will then hand down an opinion on whether Kosovo's actions were legal.

The hearings, to run until December 11, will address the question of the "accordance with international law of the unilateral declaration of independence by the provisional institutions of self-government of Kosovo."

Kosovo's decision to break away from Serbia on February 17, 2008, sparked an outcry from Belgrade, which still considers the ethnic Albanian majority southern territory to be an integral part of its history and culture.

Russia warned the move would set a dangerous precedent for separatists around the world, and its echoes resonated in Moscow's backing for two rebel regions in Georgia last August.

More than 60 nations have recognised Kosovo's statehood, including 22 of the 27 members of the European Union, which launched a massive justice and police mission to help chaperone the poverty-stricken region to independence.

Serbia, which has strong backing from its ally Russia, won agreement on October 8, 2008 from the United Nations General Assembly for Kosovo's actions to be heard by the court in the Netherlands.

Neither side has made public their planned arguments, but Belgrade does hope the hearings will provide it with enough leverage to force open negotiations once again with Kosovo on its status.

Frustration over that long and apparently unreconcilable process led the United States and most of the European Union to commit to backing Kosovo, which is home to some two million people, 90 percent of them of Albanian origin.

Serbia and others who refuse to recognise Kosovo are likely to underline to the judges the fact that international law does not allow a country's borders to be modified, as Pristina did by breaking away, said Steven Blockmans, from the Asser Institute, which specialises in international law.

Kosovo's suppoers are likely to argue that "people in Kosovo were so oppressed by the Serbian government -- which did not respect their right for self determination, which did not respect their human rights -- that you can not have this situation of internal colonisation," he said.

Until last year, Kosovo had been under UN supervision, following a NATO bombing campaign in 1999 against former Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic to stop his crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.

The ICJ was set up to rule on disputes between sovereign states, but can also be asked by the UN to give an advisory opinion on legal questions.

It has issued 25 such advisory opinions since it started work in April 1946, but such opinions are not binding.

A Celtic cross (Irish: cros Cheilteach, Welsh croes Celtaidd) is a symbol that combines a cross with a ring surrounding the intersection. The early Celtic stone high cross is generally in the form of a normal cross with a ring joining the arms for structural strength, often with an extended rectangular or cubic base that is mounted on the ground. Early groups have broad undecorated front faces with many animal scenes in relief. Later groups have narratives upon them.

The Celtic Revival of the mid-19th century led to an increased use and creation of Celtic crosses in Ireland. In 1853 casts of several historical high crosses were exhibited to interested crowds at the Dublin Industrial Exhibition. In 1857, Henry O'Neill published Illustrations of the Most Interesting of the Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland. These two events stimulated interest in the Christian and non-Christian Celtic crosses as a symbol for a renewed sense of heritage within Ireland.

Celtic Rings

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Til death do us part? The vow would really hold true in California if a Sacramento Web designer gets his way.
In a movement that seems ripped from the pages of Comedy Channel writers, John Marcotte wants to put a measure on the ballot next year to ban divorce in California.
The effort is meant to be a satirical statement after California voters outlawed gay marriage in 2008, largely on the argument that a ban is needed to protect the sanctity of traditional marriage. If that's the case, then Marcotte reasons voters should have no problem banning divorce.
"Since California has decided to protect traditional marriage, I think it would be hypocritical of us not to sacrifice some of our own rights to protect traditional marriage even more," the 38-year-old married father of two said.
Marcotte said he has collected dozens of signatures, including one from his wife of seven years. The initiative's Facebook fans have swelled to more than 11,000. Volunteers that include gay activists and members of a local comedy troupe have signed on to help.
Marcotte is looking into whether he can gather signatures online, as proponents are doing for another proposed 2010 initiative to repeal the gay marriage ban. But the odds are stacked against a campaign funded primarily by the sale of $12 T-shirts featuring bride and groom stick figures chained at the wrists.
Marcotte needs 694,354 valid signatures by March 22, a high hurdle in a state where the typical petition drive costs millions of dollars. Even if his proposed constitutional amendment made next year's ballot, it's not clear how voters would react.
Nationwide, about half of all marriages end in divorce.
Not surprisingly, Marcotte's campaign to make divorce in California illegal has divided those involved in last year's campaign for and against Proposition 8.
As much as everyone would like to see fewer divorces, making it illegal would be "impractical," said Ron Prentice, the executive director of the California Family Council who led a coalition of religious and conservative groups to qualify Proposition 8.
No other state bans divorce, and only a few countries, including the Philippines and Malta, do. The Roman Catholic Church also prohibits divorce but allows annulments. The California proposal would amend the state constitution to eliminate the ability of married couples to get divorced while allowing married couples to seek an annulment.
Prentice said proponents of traditional marriage only seek to strengthen the one man-one woman union.
"That's where our intention begins and ends," he said.
Jeffrey Taylor, a spokesman for Restore Equality 2010, a coalition of same-sex marriage activists seeking to repeal Proposition 8, said the coalition supports Marcotte's message but has no plans to join forces with him.
"We find it quite hilarious," Taylor said of the initiative.
Marcotte, who runs the comedy site BadMouth.net in his spare time, said he has received support from across the political spectrum. In addition to encouragement from gay marriage advocates, he has been interviewed by American Family Association, a Mississippi-based organization that contributed to last year's Yes on 8 campaign.
He was mentioned by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's "Countdown" during his "World's Best Persons" segment for giving supporters of Proposition 8 their "comeuppance in California."
Marcotte, who is Catholic and voted against Proposition 8, views himself as an accidental activist. A registered Democrat, he led a "ban divorce" rally recently at the state Capitol in Sacramento to launch his effort and was pleasantly surprised at the turnout. About 50 people showed up, some holding signs that read, "You too can vote to take away civil rights from someone."

Marcotte stopped dozens of people during another signature drive in downtown Sacramento. Among them was Ryan Platt, 32, who said he signed the petition in support of his lesbian sister, even though he thinks it would be overturned if voters approved it.

"Even if by some miracle this did pass, it would never stand up to the federal government," Platt said. "And if it did, there's something really wrong with America."

Other petition signers said they were motivated by a sincere interest to preserve marriages. One was Ervin Hulton, a 47-year-old dishwasher who said he believes in making it harder for couples to separate.

"The way I feel, why go out and spend all these tons of money for marriage, the photography and all that? And along down the line, it's going to shatter," said Hulton, who is single.

The U.S. divorce rate is 47.9 percent, according to data provided by the National Center for Health Statistics reports. That figure, however, does not include California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana and Minnesota because those six states no longer report their divorce rates to the center.

California stopped because of budget problems, said Ralph Montano, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health.

While most people would not support banning divorce, it does make sense for couples to be educated about the financial and emotional commitments of marriage, said Dan Couvrette, chief executive and publisher of Toronto-based Divorce Magazine. The publication has a circulation of 140,000, including a regional edition in Southern California.

"It's a worthwhile conversation to have," said Couvrette, who started the magazine in 1996 after going through his own divorce. "I don't think it's just a frivolous thought."

___

On the Web:

2010 California Marriage Protection Act: http://www.rescuemarriage.org

Fences can be the source of bitter arguments between neighbours, and there are often special laws to deal with these problems. Common disagreements include what kind of fence is required, what kind of repairs are needed, and how to share the costs.

Distinctly different land ownership and fencing patterns arose in the eastern and western United States. Original fence laws on the east coast were based on the British common law system, and rapidly increasing population quickly resulted in laws requiring livestock to be fenced in. In the west, land ownership patterns and policies reflected a strong influence of Spanish law and tradition, plus the vast land area involved made extensive fencing impractical until mandated by a growing population and conflicts between landowners.

Series 2 Gate Lokk Latch LLAA

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Shelton Carter scored 20 points and grabbed 10 boards to lead Winston-Salem in an 85-59 rout of Milligan College on Monday night.
Brian Fisher added 17 points and Andrew Jackson chipped in with 11 for the Rams (2-4), who have won two of three after dropping the season's first three contests.
Carter went 6-for-8 from beyond the arc in the win, as the Rams shot 12-for-25 from 3-point range (48 percent). The Buffaloes (1-7) shot just 4-for-21 on 3-pointers (19 percent).
Milligan trailed just 27-22 with 5:35 left before halftime, but a Fisher layup started a 9-3 run to put the Rams up by nine points at the break. The Rams opened the second half on an 11-6 run and cruised from there.
The Rams outscored the Buffaloes 36-20 in the paint and capitalized on 20 turnovers by Milligan.
Cordero Seymour paced the Buffaloes, an NAIA school, with 16 points.

It’s become something of an article of faith within the lay punditry that high unemployment and a weak recovery will seriously weigh down the Democrats’ performance in the 2010 midterm elections. People vote with their pocketbooks, the adage goes, and their pocketbooks are likely to be awfully thin in November of 2010.

On the other hand, pundits with technical backgrounds have noted that predictive modeling shows a weak correlation at best between almost every measure of the performance of the economy and midterm gain. Seth Masket, a professor of political science at University of Denver, notes that neither the unemployment rate nor the change in the unemployment rate (in other words, how much unemployment has increased or decreased from the previous year) correlate with seat loss. Masket does note a statistically significant relationship between real disposable income growth and midterm loss, but observes that even this relationship is weak.

Karl Rove has approached this from a slightly different perspective. He notes that neither the April unemployment rate nor the September unemployment rate correlates heavily with seats lost. Rove also looks at GDP growth for the second and third quarters of each midterm election year, and finds onlya weak correlation there as well.

Common sense neverthelesstells us that when the economy is pinching people, they’ll take it out on the party controlling the levers of government. One can argue, then, that we’re really seeing are the limitations of regression analysis more so than a weakness in the relationship between midterm elections and economic performance. Let me illustrate what I mean using unemployment as an example (though the same argument could be applied to various economic data).

First, consider the fact that we have only had 15 midterm elections since 1950. This is barely data; it’s more of a good collection of anecdotes. This is compounded by the fact that if a relationship between unemployment and midterm election results exists, it is almost certainly exponential. In other words, below a certain point, voters probably don’t delineate that much among different unemployment rates. But once you cross a certain threshold, people start to worry increasingly about each point increase in unemployment. For example, I’m guessing if unemployment jumps from 4% to 8%, people get concerned. But when it goes from 8% to 12%, people start to freak the heck out (for what it’s worth, this is also a technical problem for most regressions you will read about, which generally assume variables have linear relationships to one another).

This severely limits our analysis in other ways. As it happens, we don’t have any observations where unemployment is above 10 percent (which seems at least possible in November 2010), and have only one observation where unemployment is above seven percent. In ten of these fifteen midterms, the unemployment rate is between 3.8 and 5.8 percent. In other words, almost all of our midterm elections took place at unemployment levels where people probably aren’t distinguishing much between different employment rates. A regression analysis isn’t going to reveal any relationship there, even if some type of relationship becomes evident at higher rates of unemployment. We just don't have the data to say "yes" or "no."

The one "high unemployment" midterm we've experienced since 1950 suggests that high and rising unemployment hurts the party in power significantly. In 1982, unemployment was at 9.6 percent and rising. The Republicans managed to “only” lose 26 seats. But they only had 192 seats to begin with; this represented 14 percent of their caucus. If the Democrats lose 14 percent of their caucus in 2010, they will lose 35 seats.

And at the end of the day, there are an awful lot of things that affect an election. Is the President pursuing an unpopular war and controversial policies at home (1966, 2006)? Then it probably doesn’t matter that the economy is blazing ahead. Is the President waging a successful war and getting ready to take out a longtime nemesis (2002)? The public is going to be more forgiving of the sluggish growth in real disposable income and rising unemployment. The bottom line is that every election becomes something of an explainable, unique event – in other words, they’re almost all outliers.

The truth is, you’re not going to find a particularly good variable to explain the influence (or lack thereof) of perceptions of the economy on peoples’ voting choices. Just because it’s hard to define this relationship, however, doesn’t mean the relationship doesn’t exist. Common sense, and a more qualitative look at the data imply a correlation.

Consider the worst midterm drubbings since we started to compile good economic data (around the Great Depression), defined as those elections where the President’s party lost more than 10 percent of its seats. Those years are: 1974 (25% seat loss), 1958 (24%), 1946 (22%), 1938 (22%), 1994 (21%), 1930 (19%), 1942 (17%), 1966 (16%), 1982 (14%), and 2006 (13%). The bolded elections are those that immediately followed a recession, or occurred within a recession("immeditately followed" is defined as those midterms held after a recession that ended in the third quarter of the year before the election or later). Most really bad midterm election years do, in fact, follow recessions or depressions.

But does the inverse relationship exist? Are bad recessions inevitably followed by rough midterm elections? Look at the data from a slightly different angle. If we examine recessions since 1929 from most severe to least severe (in terms of GDP decline; we see a similar relationship with peak unemployment), we get Aug1929-Mar1933, Feb1945-Oct1945, the present recession, May1937-June1938, Nov1973-Mar1975, Aug1957-Apr1958, and July1981-Nov1982. Every substantial recession here results in the President’s party losing 10 percent of its seats or more. If we follow the dataset further, we find two recessions that weren’t followed by rough midterm elections for the President’s party: the Recession of 1953-54 and the early 2000s recession. But these were relatively mild recessions; it is understandable why they may not have had the same results for the President’s party.

The economic data become more problematic before the 1930s. Nevertheless, the great contractions in American history that also occur close to midterm elections – 1920-1921, 1893-94, 1839-1843, 1873-1879, 1913-1914, 1857-58 – all of them involve disastrous results for the party in power (respectively, -25%, -57% (not a typo), -49%, -48%, -21%, -37%).

In other words, a bad recession occurring close to a midterm election isn’t a necessary condition for a disastrous midterm election, but it seems to be sufficient. Because of the problems described above, regression analysis is going to have a hard time picking up on this, especially since we don’t have a good, all-encompassing variable for “the public perceives a bad economy.” But the relationship is pretty obvious nevertheless.

To be fair, there arereasons why this year’s Democrats might avoid blame for unemployment this time. The most obvious reason is that this recession didn’t begin on Barack Obama’s watch. Even if unemployment still is marching upwards, it started going up on his predecessor’s watch, and his party will probably be given at least some credit for this. Additionally, if unemployment begins to decline precipitously – which is possible – people may perceive that the economy is improving. But the latter appears increasingly unlikely, while the former argument is weakened by polls showing the public increasingly places the blame for the state of the economy on the Democrats.

The bottom line is that I don’t think Democrats can find much solace in the lack of a statistically significant relationship between various measures of the health of the economy and midterm election results. If voters think the economy stinks in 2010, common sense and a review of the historical record point toward substantial seat losses for the Democrats. Combined with a President whose numbers are drifting below 50%, and a Democratic party that is dramatically overextended into red territory, these factors increasingly point toward a Republican wave of some magnitude in 2010.

The Nation --

Jeremy Scahill's important investigation into how Blackwater is working in Pakistan for the US military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made waves all over the world. From a base in Karachi, an elite division of the private security contractor plans targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives. According to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus and a former senior executive at Blackwater, the company's operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and hep run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes.

According to Scahill's sources, Blackwater's Pakistan JSOC contracts are secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight.

Scahill's piece was widely-reported in the Middle East; our most-trafficked piece of the month; and drew coverage everywhere from ABCNews.com and HuffingtonPost to MSNBC (see Scahill's interview on Morning Joe here) and Pakistani television. At the Pentagon? Not so much. As Scahill reports here, the Department of Defense referred the question to the State Department (even though it concerns operations under their jurisdiction). General Stanley McChrystal, the top US Commander in Afghanistan, was the head of JSOC from 2003-2008.

Scahill will continue to report on the role of Blackwater and other contractors and their links to the US military in sensitive special operations in the Af-Pak arena in the weeks to come. As President Obama prepares to announce his Afghan strategy, Scahill's reporting--along with Aram Roston's investigation from earlier in November--continues to raise serious doubts about the integrity and viability of our mission in the region.

Also, check back at TheNation.com this week for continuing coverage of President Obama's decision on Afghanistan. We will be laying out alternatives to the likely Afghan strategy, and also providing organizing tools--in the magazine at TheNation.com--for those seeking a more responsible exit strategy.

Three other items of note this week:

- The Nation has a great team heading to Copenhagen for the climate talks the week of December 7th. Naomi Klein, Mark Hertsgaard, Naomi and Rob Eshelman will be reporting live daily from the gathering, and we'll be collaborating with Mother Jones and Grist.org for some of the most comprehensive coverage on the web.

In advance of the Copenhagen talks, we went to an unlikely but compelling voice for his view on climate change: playwright Tony Kushner. Angels in America, of course, is a play (and later a film) which raised concerns about global warming and the hole in the ozone. In this brief VideoNation feature, Kushner explains why it's so difficult for artists and writers to tackle the topic of climate change, and gives his view on why change has been so slow, decades after the hole in the ozone layer captured the public's attention:

The next issue of The Nation will also feature a package on Seattle at 10 with trade & globalization activist Lori Wallach.

- How hard has the recession hit young people? You told us. In response to Lizzy Ratner's essay, "Generation Recession," young readers told us about their struggles in this economy, and their fight to hold on to hope and idealism. The reader responses are both poignant and surprising.

- Finally, if you want to support important investigative work like Jeremy Scahill's and Aram Roston's, The Nation Institute's Annual Gala Dinner is a great way to do it. In New York on December 7th, the dinner features a menu designed by the legendary Alice Waters, and remarks from Tony Award-Winning playwright Sarah Jones; Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky; and writer, activist and humorist Jim Hightower. It should be a great night; you can buy tickets here.

Like this article? Try 4 issues of The Nation at home (and online) FREE.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- For someone who looks and sounds far different from any previous American president, Barack Obama sure invites a lot of comparisons with his predecessors.

First the Illinois senator announced his candidacy at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his "House Divided" speech in 1858. He has drawn on Lincoln comparisons and -- not a surprise for the first black president -- installed Lincolniana throughout his White House.

Then Time magazine portrayed Obama on its cover as a modern-day Franklin Delano Roosevelt, complete with hat and cigarette holder at jaunty angles. Last month the conservative Weekly Standard's cover showed the president, in classical pose, contemplating a bust of Jimmy Carter. Not long ago The Wall Street Journal carried a lengthy piece comparing the (scant) foreign-policy experience of Obama and Harry S Truman.

And all along we were told this was a presidency beyond compare.

What is it about this president that invites so many allusions to other presidents? Nobody did that when John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan entered office, although both were widely imitated after they left the White House. Is it an extension of the way that so many voters last fall projected their own yearnings onto a relatively unknown figure, believing that their perspectives were his perspectives and their hopes were his hopes? Is it a lack of imagination, or flawed historical literacy, among commentators?

The truth is that all of these comparisons have limited utility. There have been only 43 presidents (we won't count Grover Cleveland twice) and each has governed in a decidedly different time.

What Lincoln faced as the Union was tumbling apart is a lot different from what Obama is facing at a time of partisan tension. What FDR faced as capitalism itself was under siege in the Great Depression is a lot different from what Obama is facing at a time when, despite the terrible toil of what we might call the Great Recession, most Americans still are reasonably well-off and have at least moderately bright prospects. By the same token, what Obama is facing, with economic distress and two wars raging, is far more perilous than what William Howard Taft faced exactly a century ago.

It is a mistake to reach for the familiar to try to explain the present. "American presidents are different, this one especially," former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said in a conversation the other day. "His pure existence changes not only the way the world views the United States, but the way we view the American presidency."

Indeed, there are flaws with all of these comparisons -- flaws that exaggerate the president's failings, or overstate the president's challenges, or warp our notions of past presidents. Let's examine the most prominent ones:

The Lincoln comparison

The 16th president faced the gravest peril presented to any chief executive in history. (George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt arguably tie for second place.) The survival of the nation was at stake; indeed, the nation had split apart by the time Lincoln took his oath of office, with seven states departed by the time the Lincoln era began. Huge economic, social and cultural questions required instant resolution, with the result that the United States instantly became an industrial nation committed to racial equality, though it would take decades for the country to reach full industrialization or to approach full equality.

Today we are in interesting, vital and important times. But, at least so far, the stakes are not nearly as high as they were between 1861 and 1865.

The FDR comparison

The 32nd president faced an economic crisis that was deeper and two wars (one in Asia, the other in Europe and North Africa) that held far more peril for the future of the United States than the current economic crisis and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan -- although the advent of a nuclear al-Qaida could change that balance. When the Roosevelt years ended, the nation was comprehensively changed, in economic policy, in global profile and in political philosophy. For all the promise of the Obama era, nothing quite so profound seems likely now, even in health care.

The Truman comparison

Like Obama, Truman came to office from the Senate and with little experience. Like Obama, he acquired strife in stereo -- a war that still required mopping up in Europe and one that required difficult practical and moral questions in the Pacific. Then, in an instant, he had to face the threat from the Communist ascendancy in Europe and Asia.

Truman possessed less formal education and perhaps more native smarts than Obama, though the same could be said about any president since Truman and sometimes is. The big difference between these two eras is the confidence factor. Though engaged in a bipolar struggle with the Soviet Union, the United States was strong and bold in the Truman era. Though the single superpower in the Obama years, the nation is tentative and wary today.

The Carter comparison

It is hard to remember this, but the 1976 election, which brought to power the first Southern president since the Civil War (Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the White House after Kennedy's death, doesn't count), was regarded as a dramatic turning point in American history. So, too, for racial reasons, was the election of Obama a year ago this month.

Though the country faced a crisis of spirit in both administrations, the challenges Obama faces are far graver than the ones Carter inherited, and his willingness to project strength is greater than that of Carter, who possessed military bona fides that Obama lacks. At his Notre Dame commencement address in 1977, Carter spoke of an "inordinate fear of communism." At a Notre Dame commencement a third of a century later, Obama did not speak of an inordinate fear of terrorism but instead talked of the threat from "those who will stop at nothing to do us harm" and warned of what might happen "when weapons in the hands of a few can destroy the many."

The truth is that while his critics might not consider Obama to be his own man, in history he will be regarded that way -- a unique president for a unique time. He may be considered uniquely weak, or uniquely masterly, or uniquely unsuccessful, or uniquely visionary. But critics and supporters alike should recognize this about Obama, or any other president: There's nobody quite like him.

NASHVILLE (Billboard) –
It's a cool, crisp November evening in Nashville, and yes, Bruce Springsteen knows exactly where he is.

It's a few days after Springsteen committed what he called "every frontman's nightmare" by confusing Michigan with Ohio during an onstage call-out. But if Springsteen gets mixed up occasionally as to which city or state he's about to rock, it's understandable.

Springsteen and his E Street Band have been on a global tour since 2007, through two album cycles, performances at the Super Bowl and presidential inauguration and first-time appearances at several major festivals. Even for an artist who has largely built his career on epic shows, Springsteen and the E Streeters have shifted into a higher gear.

Springsteen has been unusually prolific in the studio as well, releasing albums of new material in 2007 ("Magic") and this year ("Working on a Dream"). At the same time, he's acknowledging his beloved albums of the past by playing full sets of classic recordings in concert. On this night in Nashville his 1975 breakthrough album, "Born to Run," will get the live treatment, to stunning effect.

"This last year, in my point of view, was as great a year as we've ever had," longtime Springsteen manager Jon Landau says backstage at Nashville's Sommet Center. "It's fair to say I've never spent a year with him where he's just been so consistently enthusiastic, energetic. And Bruce is one of those guys who leads by example. When you're working with him, if you're a collaborator, a manager or in the band, you can't be doing less than 1,000 percent. You wouldn't like yourself if you didn't dig as deep as he's digging."

Springsteen is indeed digging deep, but in his dressing room before the show, he laughs it off. "We were talking about it the other day -- we said, 'I don't know if we've been this busy since 1985, or ever,'" he says. "It's just the way things worked out. Some of those things we planned and some of them just happened."

Four nights before this marathon trek is set to end in Buffalo, N.Y., Springsteen isn't fatigued, but excited about his future and that of the E Street Band. What the Boss is most concerned about is his pending show, during which he repeatedly assures the ecstatic crowd that he knows he's in Nashville, Tenn. -- and is thrilled to be there.

Billboard: The last couple of years for you have been pretty exceptional in terms of productivity, both live and in the studio.

Bruce Springsteen: I've been prolific with my songwriting, so I've been able to just get more music out there, which is something I always wanted to do. I found my 50s to be very, very fruitful. The songs came -- I don't want to say easy -- but they came in a continuous flow. I had a lot of things I wanted to write about, so it allowed us to record quite a bit, and then back it up with the touring.

Really, with the end of these shows, we're coming to the end of a decade-long project with the band that really was a tremendous renewal of the power, the strength and the service that our band hopefully provides. It's just been a great 10 years, not just the past couple. A decade ago I wasn't quite sure if I wrote in a style that was suited to the band anymore. I wasn't quite sure how we functioned as a unit. And to sort of see the whole thing just have so much vitality and power and strength, it's just one of the sweetest chapters in our entire time together.

Billboard: I remember as a kid waiting three years for the release of "Darkness on the Edge of Town" in 1978. Why so prolific now?

Springsteen: Looking back, when you look at "Tracks" (1999's boxed set of unreleased songs) I guess I always wrote them. For every record we released there was a record I didn't release. I think at the time I was very interested in shaping what I was about, what I wanted to be. I was very cautious in my releases and I wanted my records to have very strong identities and be about a very particular thing.

The nice thing about where we are now, the rules are much fewer and far between. You can really record anything you like. This past decade I had this huge folk band that I toured and recorded with, and that was a wonderful experience. I toured solo and I loved that, and then to have the (E Street Band) at full power, I can do all these things now and I can really record whatever kind of music comes into my mind. Who you are and what you do is already established, so you don't have those identity concerns that you had back in the day.

Billboard: So you were less cautious about it and just turned it loose?

Springsteen: You become better at discerning your good songs from your not-as-good songs. The writing process is shorter, because you refine what you leave in and what you leave out. You're able to do more work in a compressed amount of time without the quality suffering in any way.

Billboard: Why work the road so hard for so long? Isn't it a grind?

Springsteen: I can't say I experience it as a grind. Of course, you're flying in, you're flying out, you're driving, but I really like the people that I do this with, I like being with them onstage and off, I enjoy the time we spend traveling together, and I enjoy the work that we do.

If you're a sports figure, your prime passes at such a young age. There's no ceiling here. I believe if you come and see us now, you're seeing the best E Street Band that's ever played; it just continues to improve. Not that you don't get tired or fatigued, but no matter how tired you are, when you're onstage during the night there's always this point that you go, "Oh, my God, this is just wonderful."

Billboard: How many songs are in your arsenal?

Springsteen: Since the Magic tour, I think we've done upwards of 150-160 songs, maybe more, because we do a lot of things just once.

Billboard: I was told you played 43 different songs at the Spectrum in Philadelphia over the four nights.

Springsteen: Yeah, we did a different show every night, and a third to half of it was different. If you see us two or three nights in a row at some of these stands that we do, you may hear 35-50 different songs. That's just something we're able to do. It's a combination of the old bar band experience and something I just ask the guys to do. We have a little bit of a set list, and I follow the end of it and I follow the beginning of it. Then there's a little section in there where it just slips and slides.

It depends on what's going on with the audience on any given night and what I think the band can pull off. It allows the fans to have input into the show in a way that just pumps the blood into everything and enlivens the evening. We've done stuff by the Ramones, the Clash and Tommy James.

Billboard: No one in your camp has said anything about it, but this tour has felt really celebratory, with so many milestones. Does this feel like it might be the last run for the E Street Band?

Springsteen: No. We don't even really think of it. The only thing that came into my mind was a decade ago, when I hit 50, I was onstage in Philadelphia, and you realize, "OK, this is exactly where I want to be right now. I wouldn't want to be any place else." You realize there is a finiteness to it.

We're playing to an audience now that will outlive us. There will be a seed of an audience out there tonight that's just going to outlive the band. But at the same time, the band is very, very powerful right now. And part of the reason it's powerful is that it's carrying a lot of very strong cumulative history. You come and you see 35 years of a speeding train going down the track and you're going to get to be on the front end of it. We look forward to many, many more years of touring and playing and enjoying it.

Billboard: It has to be very instinctive now after all these years.

Springsteen: They're paying for you to be live, present in full, right tonight at this moment. I think there's always this sense of, if you're 15, 19, 24 or 60, you come and you say, "There's Clarence Clemons and I get to stand next to him like I did 35 years ago." That's the continuity of just still being there, and for us and for the audience that's a powerful thing. It threads your life together and that's what we wanted to do -- we wanted to make music that threaded through your life as well as ours.

Billboard: Some bands crumble under that sort of weight of common experience.

Springsteen: It depends on who you are and how you see it. Some of it is just DNA, your personality and how you were built. This was just something that we were built to do in a particular way. The difficult parts of it took its toll on different people. Every band has had personal difficulties, ups and downs, people fell into bad things, got out of bad things, maybe not as much as some other bands, but we've had our share. We spent a decade apart, and so all of those things are a part of our experience, too.

But I think, particularly when we got back together in the late '90s, everyone realized, "This has been a special part of my life and I want it to continue to be so." And all of the incidental baggage completely sort of got left behind.

I think the band has a sort of unspoken code where people looked out for the other guy. We lost one member through illness (longtime organ and accordion player Danny Federici died of melanoma in 2008), but, hey, that's something that happens to you around a certain age. What I was most proud of was my guys were alive 35 years down the road, in good shape. Clarence struggled with some physical things for carrying around all that "Big Man" for all these years, but he's done great on this tour. That was something I was very, very proud of -- the band was intact.

Billboard: What haven't you done that you'd still like to do?

Springsteen: What I want to do is what I'm doing, except I want to do it a little better tonight than I did last night. I want to write some better songs, some more good songs, some songs that feel vital to mine and my audience's life today. We've made records over the past 10 years that have found as integral a place in my fans' lives as any of the records from my past days. You come out and a lot of those young kids don't start singing along until they hear "The Rising." I'm just looking forward to doing what I'm doing, looking forward to going out there in an hour and looking into those faces like I've done over the past 35 years.

(please visit our entertainment blog via www.reuters.com or on http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare/)

Children who bully at school are likely to also bully their siblings at home, a new European study finds.

While the results may not sound surprising, they do help give the matter some perspective.

The study involved 195 children age 10 to 12. Each had a sibling no
more than four years older or younger than them. Children were given
questionnaires that asked whether they were a victim of bullying, or bullied their peers at school, and whether they were a victim of bullying by a sibling or bullied a sibling at home.

"Children with older male siblings were the most victimized group,"
said Ersilia Menesini of the Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Italy.

Significantly more boys than girls said they bullied their sibling -
who was most likely to be younger than them. It's likely that this form
of sibling bullying is all about maintaining a position of dominance,
the researchers figure.

"However, for girls, bullying is mainly related to a poor quality of
sibling relationship and not to birth order," Menesini said in a
statement. "In fact, high levels of conflict and low levels of empathy
were significantly related to sibling bullying and sibling
victimization."

Children who bullied siblings were likely to bully their peers,
while victims at home were likely to also be victimized at school.

"It is not possible to tell from our study which behavior comes
first, but it is likely that if children behave in a certain way at
home, bullying a sibling for instance, if this behavior goes unchecked
they may take this behavior into school," Menesini said.

The behavior doesn't necessarily end with growing up. Other studies have documented significant bullying in the workplace.

The results are detailed online by the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

8 Tactics to Bust the Office Bully
Study Reveals Widespread Office Bully Problem
The Evolution of Human Aggression
Original Story: School Bullies Bully at Home, TooLiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our community to debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.