Inhalt:

I really really hope the ECB staff are huddling right now, nerving themselves up to do some serious quantitative easing. Otherwise Anno Domini 2010 is shaping up to be Anno Domino instead.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of them at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department, even when all is operating A-O.K. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Pettis agreed that losses in some commercial operations are running at 50% or greater.

Below is a table summarizing the funding needs of just the PIIGS.

Most of the decline was in loans denominated in more exotic currencies like the yen, which have all but disappeared from the market. Euro-based loans actually rose in the fourth quarter, according to data from the Hungarian central bank.

Abera is paid £65 a month to mind 270 hives for the Asira Metira monastery, one of a dozen religious centres in an area whose 4th-century rock churches are among the wonders of the world. "We know about bees,'' said honey seller Sheikh Mohamed Ahamedin. He grips a large screwdriver with both hands to ladle a dollop of thick and lumpy white honey out of a plastic bucket. It is snow-white and tastes sweet and more waxy than yellow honey.

"The price is the highest it has ever been this year, because of scarcity,'' said Ahamedin who sells white honey for £7.75 per kilo. Last year he charged £4.50.

Despite that increase and a 240 percent spike in roadside bomb attacks - a major factor in overall violence statistics - and increasing Taliban tactics to discredit President Hamid Karzai's government with shadow governments, some officials said they are seeing encouraging trends.

The highest price bid for the Beijing lot, zoned for residential development, at the April 26 auction was 4,718 yuan ($691) per square meter, exceeding the 4,700 yuan per square meter limit set by the government, the Ministry of Land and Resources said on its Web site today. The ministry's Beijing branch said it began setting limits on the price of land this month on a trial basis.

As of Friday, "one family can only buy one new apartment in the city for the time being," the municipal government said in a statement.

The government also ordered the implementation of central government policies that ban mortgages for purchases of a third or third-plus home.

Prices excluding fresh food slid 1.2 percent from a year earlier, after dropping 1.2 percent in February, the statistics bureau said today in Tokyo. The result matched the median estimate of 28 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
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A separate report showed the unemployment rate climbed to 5 percent in March from 4.9 percent. The ratio of jobs to applicants climbed to 0.49, meaning there are 49 jobs for every 100 candidates, the Labor Ministry said.

“We have to be prepared for just a little bit of inflation six, seven months from now,” Niinami said on Bloomberg Television on April 28.

Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa yesterday said he wants to bolster economic growth by helping private companies nurture technological innovation in such industries as energy and the environment. A reference for the initiative is a 1998- era program that funneled credit to banks making new loans, he said at a press briefing in Tokyo.

The three-month moving average seldom jumps as dramatically from one month to another as it did in Dec09-Feb10 (to 11.4% from 10.8%), but the 0.4ppt rise is almost as bad. Interestingly enough, an even sharper increase (0.6ppt) was observed in the very same period a year ago, as well.

Bank Rossii reduced the refinancing rate a quarter point to 8 percent, effective April 30, it said on its Web site today. It also cut the repurchase rate charged on one- and seven-day central bank loans by the same amount to 7 percent. The decision was expected by 20 of 27 economists in a Bloomberg survey. The bank also cut the overnight deposit rate to 2.5 percent from 2.75 percent. It last cut rates a quarter-point on March 26.

There were 4,612,700 people unemployed in the country at the end of March, the national statistics agency INE said.

The data from the labour ministry shows the total number of those out of work stood at 4,142,000 at the end of last month, the leading daily El Pais reported.

According to the Cadena Ser radio station, the government decided to leak the figure, due to be officially released on Tuesday, to silence criticism sparked by the release on Friday of quarterly figures showing the number out of work had topped 20 percent, the highest rate since 1997.

The quarterly figure from the national statistics institute INE, which uses a different calculator method from the labour ministry, said the average number of unemployed in the first three months of the year jumped by 280,200 to 4.61 million.

Residents of Juba are complaining that Forex Exchange Bureaus do not sell to Dollars them, claiming it’s scarce.
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Edwin said despite the Sudanese pound being the official currency in Sudan, the dollar is used more often by Sudanese than the Sudanese pounds. The Sudanese pound was launched as the official currency in Sudan three years ago.

In its latest Red Flag update, which highlights troubled businesses, the professional services group found a 14pc jump in the number of distressed companies. There were 161,601 red flagged companies in the first quarter of this year compared with the final quarter of 2009.

That groundwater for irrigation comes from the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive underground lake that stretches from southern South Dakota through northern Texas, covering about 174,000 square miles. It is being drained at alarming rates, and some places have already seen what happens when local levels drop below the point where water can no longer be pumped.

"You go to areas where the aquifer has been depleted, [they] look pretty poor now," David Brauer, program manager for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service Ogallala Aquifer Program, told AOL News. "And it only takes a few years.

"The magnitude of this is incredible," he continued. "We're talking about, for the last 20 years, 20 percent of the irrigated acreage of this nation is over the Ogallala."

In fact, they have determined that in many spots industry will run out of useable water (i.e., 30ft of water or less) not by the end of the century, as predicted, but by 2030 – only twenty years from now.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber approved the Chapter 11 plan yesterday in Manhattan, at a hearing in which he also approved a settlement that resolves U.S. government claims for more than $5.5 billion in environmental damage. Lyondell plans to exit court protection by April 30, lawyer George Davis told Gerber. The company’s consolidated debt of $7.2 billion compares with $24 billion before it filed for bankruptcy, Davis said.

The settlement puts $108.4 million into a trust to pay for cleanup costs at various sites. Another $61.6 million will go to U.S. and California government agencies. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also will get a $1.18 billion unsecured claim in Lyondell’s bankruptcy.

They are quietly drawing the line at 99 weeks of aid, a mark that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already reached. In coming months, the number of those who will receive their final government check is projected to top 1 million.

Those numbers will grow, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which projects that more than 400,000 may soon begin losing benefits every month.

With first- and second-year associates charging more than $500 an hour in some of these bankruptcy cases, according to court records, that can amount to some pretty expensive downtime. At several firms, including Weil and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, partners now charge $1,000 an hour or more for their bankruptcy services.

In court documents, the firm responded that it could be tough to find hotel rooms in New York City for $400 or less and that dry-cleaning or laundry bills were appropriate for out-of-town lawyers required to stay in New York for 9 or 10 days.

Industrywide U.S. sales came in just short of 1 million vehicles, up 20% from a year ago, according to sales tracker Autodata, but a bit shy of forecasts of between a 21% to 23% gain. And sales were down 8% from March.

The price: $583,000.
[...]
The 80,300-seat stadium opened in 1975 and has largely remained empty since the Detroit Lions left for Ford Field in 2002. The sale included 127 adjacent acres.

• Net loss of $6.7 billion;
  
• Improvement of $4.8 billion to accumulated other comprehensive income (loss) (AOCI); and
  
• Dividend payment of $1.3 billion to Treasury.
  

The glacier is located at an altitude of 5,109m (16,763ft) in the Rwenzori mountain range, near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Scientists say glaciers in the Rwenzori range could disappear within 20 years.
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According to researchers, the ice cap covered 6 sq km (2 sq miles) 50 years ago. It is now less than 1 sq km.

The procedure had been performed immediately after she gave birth, by doctors who did not ask her consent. On learning she could not bear children, her husband left her.

Activists say mass sterilisation began in 2003, but was eased after two years following an outcry. It is said to have restarted in February this year, when the health ministry ordered doctors to recommend sterilisation as an “effective contraceptive”. Critics claim every doctor was told to persuade “at least two women” a month to have the procedure. Doctors who failed faced reprisals and fines.

“We estimate that since February, about 5,000 women have been sterilised without consent,” said a local human rights campaigner who fears detention if she is named.

In many cases, doctors opt for delivery by caesarean section and then perform a sterilisation without telling the woman. Widespread rumours of the practice have resulted in women opting for home births to avoid the risk.

But when one goes back with his mind to the roots of the problem in these governorates, he finds that these areas are also famous of growing qat trees and at the same time are still expanding the cultivation of the plant which according to experts consumes 60 percent of Yemen's water.

Water and Sanitation Local Authority has 125 wells in Sana'a basin, one third of them are deepened to 1000 meter to supply people of water. Even though, some people in new constructed areas around the city's center do not get access to the public water project and depend on water trucks for supplying with water.
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Minister of Water and Environment Abdul-Rahman al-Iyani said Sana'a basin is in a very critical stage now as people now digging deeper and deeper to get water. He said in the past, people used to dig 100 meters to get water but now they dig deeper to 1000 meters and some times do not get water.