IF THIS finally sees the light, it can't come soon enough:

A new kind of portable electrochemical battery that can produce thousands of hours of power - and soon replace the expensive regular or rechargeable batteries in hearing aids and sensors and eventually in cellphones, laptop computers and even electric cars - has been developed at Haifa's Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

The unique battery is based on silicon as a fuel that reverts to its original sand. The battery can also be left on the shelf for years and inserted into a device to provide immediate power.

BARACK CLINTON?

During his first nine months in office, President Obama has quietly rewarded scores of top Democratic donors with VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings.

High-dollar fundraisers have been promised access to senior White House officials in exchange for pledges to donate $30,400 personally or to bundle $300,000 in contributions ahead of the 2010 midterm elections, according to internal Democratic National Committee documents obtained by The Washington Times.

I wonder who slept in the Lincold Bedroom...

ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT: Obama's self-portrait (click to enlarge)

OBAMA, the conservatives' best friend: according to Gallup, he's "manufacturing" them at full speed.

HELEN THOMAS' 5 lessons for Obama.

LOL: How to censor a porn movie:

THIS ISN'T GOOD:

Spain's unemployment rate remained practically unchanged at an EU-high of 17.9 percent in the third quarter after rising for eight consecutive quarters. Officials warned the rate will probably rise again.
The number of jobless now stands at 4,123,300, the National Statistics Institute said.

That figure is down slightly from the second quarter, by 14,100, but this had a negligible impact on the unemployment rate because the workforce also decreased.

WANNA SAVE THE PLANET? Then eat your dog:...

The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.

Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their provocative new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living.

The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created bypopular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.

See? Korean do it for the sake of Humankind!

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL has very harsh words about Spain's foreign policy:

Havana's man in Europe is returning from Cuba with a simple request: For his EU partners to drop their focus on human rights. After a two-day visit with the Cuban government, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos will press his Continental counterparts to scrap their 1996 "Common Position" on Cuba in order to fully normalize ties with Raul Castro's dictatorship.

Keep reading.

MUST READ: Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, rightfully criticizes the organization for its anti-Israel bias.

BUMMERS: "Catalonia says no to happy hour"

THE 10 COUNTRIES most at risk of a meltdown. Guess which is first.

UPDATE. Spanish banking crises, then and now.

THE FIRST EURO DOMINO may be about to fall: "Latvia threatens foreign banks with huge losses. Crisis-hit Baltic state proposes emergency law to slash mortgage holders' liabilities to lenders."

Which will be the next one? Well, considering this, and this, and this... Don't even want to think about it.

A PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED picture of the 1989 Tinanamen massacre, from Italy's paper L'Unità. Let's give China another Olympic games! (click to enlarge)

 (via El País)

IF THIS IS TRUE, it's utterly shameful:

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is due to hold talks with the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, in Moscow today amid claims that Washington has agreed to stop criticising Russia's human rights record in return for improved relations.

According to today's Kommersant newspaper, the White House will no longer issue public criticisms of Russia's democratic failings. Clinton will propose that the US and Russia co-operate on a missile defence shield against a possible Iranian attack, the paper said.

The reported plan is likely to dismay both international rights groups and Russia's opposition. Barack Obama's predecessors, Bill Clinton and George Bush, regularly criticised the Kremlin over its war in Chechnya and the rollback of democracy under the former president Vladimir Putin.

MR. ZAPATERO GOES TO WASHINGTON: Spain's primer minister begins his -believe it or not- first official visit to the US. Gone are the days when Zapatero sounded more like Ciara than a country's leader.

UPDATE. More at the Examiner, where by the way they refer to Zapatero as head of state. He's not: he's the prime minister, that is, the chief of the executive branch (Kin Juan Carlos is Spain's head of state). The confusion may stem from the fact that the official name of his position is "presidente del gobierno"which is sometimes translated as "president of the government" and thus made equivalent to head of state. But the accurate translation for "presidente del gobierno", if you need one, would be "chairman of the cabinet". But you don't really need that; it's better to simply "prime minister".

SMALL CHANGE: "Billions of dollars and a Nobel Prize later, it looks like ‘microlending’ doesn’t actually do much to fight poverty."

GOT A KINDLE? Then you can now read Barcepunditon it!

OBAMA fails to win the Nobel prize in Economics:

While few observers think Obama has done anything for world peace in the nearly nine months he's been in office, the same clearly can't be said for economics.

The president has worked tirelessly since even before his inauguration to wrest control of the U.S. economy from failed free markets, and the evil CEOs who profit from them, and to turn it over to wise, fair and benevolent bureaucrats.

A bit surprised to see this on CBS...

HOW IRANIAN NUKES would reshape the Middle East.

10 FAMOUS QUOTES that were cut short. LOL.

HOW SHOULD HONDURAS woo the Obama administration...

EVEN THE BBC wonders 'What happened to global warming?':

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Keep reading.

[Updated 4 times] SOMEHOW I suspect nobody asked the Afghans their opinion: Obama wins the 2009 Nobel Peace prize.

UPDATE. Great one by Spanish cartoonist Forges.

UPDATE II. I'm wondering: if in a few months yet a third secret nuclear plant is discovered and we need to attack, will he give the Nobel back? I mean, they could have at least waited until the end of his presidency, just in case...

UPDATE III. Fixed typo, sorry about that.

UPDATE IV. Further proving what a joke this all is: "The deadline for nominations is February 1, meaning Obama would've been nominated after being in office for just 11 days."

SOME scientific consensus, eh?:

A noted geologist who coauthored the New York Times bestseller Sugar Busters has turned his attention to convincing Congress that carbon dioxide emissions are good for Earth and don't cause global warming. Leighton Steward is on Capitol Hill this week armed with studies and his book Fire, Ice and Paradise in a bid to show senators working on the energy bill that the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade scheme could actually hurt the environment by reducing CO2 levels.

"I'm trying to kill the whole thing," he says. "We are tilting at windmills." He is meeting with several GOP lawmakers and has plans to meet with some Democrats later this week.

Much of the global warming debate has focused on reducing CO2 emissions because it is thought that the greenhouse gas produced mostly from fossil fuels is warming the planet. But Steward, who once believed CO2 caused global warming, is trying to fight that with a mountain of studies and scientific evidence that suggest CO2 is not the cause for warming. What's more, he says CO2 levels are so low that more, not less, is needed to sustain and expand plant growth.

Trying to debunk theories that higher CO2 levels cause warming, he cites studies that show CO2 levels following temperature spikes, prompting him to back other scientists who say that global warming is caused by solar activity.

ARE THE SPANISH BANKS hiding their losses? A look at the American data:

Whether the Spanish banks are hiding their losses is a major debate going on in the blogosphere and has been detailed at length in  the Financial Times.  The stakes are very high – this is a debate about the stability of the Eurozone and possibly of Europe itself.

Read it in full.

THIS SPANISH-LANGUAGE DirectTV ad is hilarious (non-Spanish speakers can perfectly enjoy it):

LOL:

THE ONLY KNOWN FOOTAGE of Anne Frank, never yet released, has been made public; it shows her looking at a wedding from a window.

AT BIRTH, Ahmadinejad was... Jewish?

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.

Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him.

"Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.

"By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society."

A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that "jian" ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews.

"He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents had," said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. "Sabourjian is well known Jewish name in Iran."

UPDATE. Mark Steyn: "Next thing you know he'll turn out to be one of those homosexuals he says Iran doesn't have." (via)

UPDATE II. That Ahmadinejad has Jewish roots is false, says Mair Javedanfar.

I THOUGHT Democrats were always telling Bush that he had to listen to the generals...

THIS IS JUST CREEPY, if true:

Head of Ted Williams was abused by employees at Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., whistleblower says.

Workers at an Arizona cryonics facility mutilated the frozen head of baseball legend Ted Williams - even using it for a bizarre batting practice, a new tell-all book claims.

RIO.

SESAME STREET meets Mad Men.

(via)

THE GREATEST AFGHAN WAR: Michael Yon's latest dispatch is worrisome.

VERY GOOD POINT:

What would the liberal take on this be if he had been Father Polanski instead of a film director? They’d be pounding their chests in righteous anger and demanding his liver on a stick instead of signing petitions for his release, that’s what.

At the same time, I also thought that no one would say that drugging an adult woman and then having sex with here taking advantage that she's not entirely conscious is something other than criminal rape. Why are some people saying it's fine and dandy doing it to a 13-year-old kid?