Since the emergence of digital technology and global networks, forgetting has become an exception, Mayer-Schonberger writes in “Delete”.

“Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making,” he argues. “It lets us act in time, cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events.”

Mayer-Schonberger shared his theory on how to fight back against the digital panopticon with Reuters before giving a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.

Disappointed, but not surprised, was my first response to hearing President Barack Obama’s announcement on Wednesday that he would not make the January 22 deadline for closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay.

During attorney visits over the past few weeks, Reprieve’s clients in Guantanamo have expressed their doubts regarding whether President Obama can live up to his promise to close the prison within a year of assuming office. ‘What is he going to do,’ one man asked, “put 200 people on a plane on the 22nd?”

And it is true – the maths doesn’t work.  Around 245 prisoners were being held in Guantánamo when Obama was inaugurated in January of this year and only around 30 men have left since then. If releases continue at this snail’s pace, the prison won’t close until at least 2017.

Who are the people who are left in the prison and why is it proving so hard to close? First there are the 90 or so prisoners from Yemen who the United States will not repatriate because of the country’s instability.  Another 65 people are considered prosecutable in federal courts or military commissions, the details of which are still being hammered out (the latest development being the recent announcement of the future transfer of five men, accused of involvement in Sept. 11 to U.S. Federal Courts for prosecution).

Then there is a group of around 60 men - Guantanamo’s refugees - 18 of whom are represented by Reprieve. Many of these people have been “cleared for release” by United States authorities, meaning they have been deemed to present no threat whatsoever.  These men would be free to leave Guantanamo tomorrow but they remain stranded there because they cannot return to their countries of origin for fear of torture.

They are from places like Uzbekistan, Syria, China, Algeria and Tunisia, countries where their being branded “terrorists” - despite them having been cleared - will make them sitting ducks for authorities with Kafka-esque human rights records.

In June, there was optimism that European states would offer homes to these men, but only a few countries have moved from talk to action. France, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium and the United Kingdom have accepted former prisoners, as well as the unlikely resettlement locations of Bermuda and Palau.  Why has Europe been so reluctant to assist?

Congress’s refusal – stoked by a scaremongering media - to accept any former prisoners onto American soil, has presented a huge stumbling block that Obama is struggling to scale. It is much more difficult for the U.S. (and Reprieve) to persuade European countries to take former prisoners when the U.S. refuses to do so.  In addition, governments have been hugely wary of the reactions of their political rivals and publics in determining whether to take former prisoners.

It has not helped that Obama himself persists in talking about “The Terrorists” and does not differentiate between the men held in the prison, the bulk of whom were sold for bounties and are far from being the hardened “worst of the worst” some paint them to be. It is worth making the point that the U.S. government has lost 30 of 37 habeas cases – that means that, in 30 instances, a judge, on reviewing the evidence against a prisoner, has found him not to be a threat to the U.S.

It is also worth mentioning the splendid Amherst, Massachusetts, which passed a resolution stating that that the town would welcome ex-Gitmo-prisoners.  This has not and will not happen, but the town’s spirit is commendable.

If European States want Guantánamo to be closed they must do more than continue to shake their collective heads and mutter about Obama’s naivety and optimism in setting so short a deadline.  It is true that it was a meet-able deadline.  But Obama not only needed support from Congress but also from his European allies.  Europe needs to step up and offer a home to the cleared prisoners and perhaps then the U.S. will follow its lead.  Only then can Obama’s promise of change really begin.

The proposals contained within the much anticipated Digital Economy Bill have prompted lively debate among politicians, industry and consumer groups. Unfortunately, some have characterised the debate as industry versus consumer, when in fact both industry and the consumer have an interest in reducing copyright theft.

The proposals will benefit millions of people, and significant consensus exists about the need to tackle the issue by first warning and ultimately taking action against those who distribute other people’s content online without permission.

Whilst some have criticised the Government’s proposals on temporary broadband account suspension this is one of a number of potential measures, implemented only after due process and a robust appeals process, which may be used as a last resort against those who have ignored multiple warnings and continue to persist in illegal file-sharing. Research also shows the important role the existence of such a deterrent has to play in changing people’s behaviour.

Equally, most parents would surely welcome a warning that alerted them to the fact that the activities of their children were exposing the whole family to security breaches. That is what happens when people file-share – the software they download to access illicit music or film files, for example, also provides access to other users to all the files on their computer, some of which may contain very personal and private information and it’s a great propagator of malware and viruses.

Many internet users find broadband speeds unsatisfactory, particularly during the heaviest use of bandwidth by file-sharers between the hours of 6pm and midnight, so consumers who use legitimate services will probably welcome the fall in illegal traffic, which significantly contributes towards congestion on the networks.

Those who rely on the creative economy for their livelihood, including musicians, directors, software developers, lighting and camera operators, make-up artists, costumiers, designers, producers, grips, writers and sound engineers to name just a few deserve to have their creativity protected. They are consumers too. If they are not properly rewarded for their work, our creative economy will suffer. This is not something our country can afford to risk. This is one of the fastest growing industries in the UK, 8 percent of GDP, and in many parts of the sector we justifiably lead the world.

We must not fall into the trap of accepting that an illegal and damaging practice has to continue just because it has become normalised among certain groups. Quite the reverse is true. It is the job of Government and Parliament to make sure that the public has access to and can enjoy the opportunities presented by a Digital Britain, that no section of our society is excluded from those opportunities, and that those who make it possible are properly rewarded for their innovation.

The protocol set targets aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which are believed to be responsible for the gradual rise in the Earth’s average temperature. Many scientists say that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is key to preventing climate change.

But authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner argue in their new book SuperFreakonomics that humanity can take an alternative route to try and save the planet.

“If the goal is to stop warming then geo-engineering solutions are worth considering because they are far cheaper, probably much more do-able and easily reversible,” Dubner told Reuters before a talk at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.

Related vlog: How to become a freakonomist

Are we now getting blasé about the latest crisis? Not so long ago, perfectly respectable economists and financial analysts were talking about a new Great Depression. The world was on the brink, it was said. Now, though, consensus appears to be that it is all over bar the shouting. The world is safe.

Wealth managers at Barclays have gone as far as telling their clients to get over it.

Move past the crisis .... The past year's events were deeply traumatic for most investors, but now is the time to move on, and take a more "business as usual" approach ...."

Such bullishness may not be comforting to the record numbers of jobless in parts of the world, but it is bordering on consensus. It is left to the likes of perma-bears such as  Nouriel Roubini to try to burst the bubble of optimism on which many are floating. The economist began one of his latest articles bluntly:

Think the worst is over? Wrong.

Roubini's main point is that unemployment is likely to get worse rather than better and that many U.S. jobs that have been lost will not come back.

Now, there can obviously be a disconnect between markets and economics, but the former tends to be based on assumptions about the latter. So which is right? Are we out of the woods? Or should Supertramp be firing up their keyboards again?

A month or so ago, there was a lot of talk that risk appetite would be pared back over the coming months. This talk was built around relatively cautious expectations for economic growth in most of the G-10 next year.

These cautious projections still stand. However, it is interesting that the risk trade suffered only a brief decline following the shock rise in the U.S. unemployment rate to 10.2 percent and the surprisingly strong fall in the University of Michigan confidence index.

Comments this week from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warning about “headwinds” that still face the U.S. economy have led to some paring back of risk but with poor economic data unable to cause a reversal of the uptrend in equities it seems that the risk trade is yet to exhibit many signs of tiredness.

The ability of markets to cast aside weak U.S. economic data centres on the outlook for Fed rates. Weak data is feeding the notion that Fed rates will stay lower for longer and this, it seems, is feeding appetite for risk.

The ability of the risk trade to remain undeterred by weak U.S. data feeds the accusation that the Fed is facilitating the risk trade and the dollar remains a preferred funding currency.

While the USD may be acting as the preferred funding currency, low interest rates are affecting investment decisions everywhere. Latest data from the UK’s Investment Management Association (IMA) confirm a bias away from cash into higher yielding assets.

In each of the 6 months to September 2009, private investors have ploughed more than 2 billion pounds into funds. Not only that, but in September this year equity fund purchases overtook corporate bond fund purchases for the first time since 2007.

This highlights that despite fears that economic growth rates in the US, UK and Eurozone will remain below trend for the next couple of years, that the lack of return on cash is spurring savers to take more risk.

Savings rates in the U.S., UK and the Eurozone are on the rise. Individuals are saving more in response to fear of unemployment and also to make up for wealth lost during the economic crisis. While bond markets have benefitted a great deal this year from flows diverted from cash due to lack of return, the data from the IMA suggests that a trend that favours equities could be emerging.

The healthy recovery this year in major stock markets and gains in some commodity prices is no guarantee of future performance. Even so, it is feasible that these rises could be contributing to the decisions of many savers to increase the amount of risk in their portfolios (the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has rallied 61 percent in dollar terms from its March low).

If this is correct, then it is right to consider at what stage persistent low rates by the Fed and other central banks can be linked with the beginnings of asset price bubbles.

researchEMEA@forex.com

With just a few short weeks until the end of the year, look for many fund managers to take on more risk in an effort to salvage their annual return figures.

This is not about fundamentals, this is about something far more important: career risk.

Hedge Fund Research's Global Hedge Fund index, which is broadly representative of the industry, is up just 11.9 percent year to date, while its Equity Hedge index is scarcely doing better, up 12.6 percent. The HFR Macro Fund index is actually down 8 percent, indicating the best paid minds in the business did not see the astounding emerging markets rally and dollar fall coming.

Given that global emerging markets are up something on the order of 60 percent this year, that all global shares are up 30 percent and even the S&P 500 is up 22 percent, we can conclude that a lot of managers are heading into the year-end reporting season with a lot of ground to make up.

There are also lifeboats full of institutional fund managers and mutual fund managers in the same position.

What all who have missed the rally have in common is not a common failure of analysis -- there are lots of different ways to get it wrong -- but a collective vulnerability to finding themselves waving their clients goodbye. Letters detailing 2009 performance will have to be posted, ranking lists of funds will be published and there will be consequences.

It must be hugely tempting for managers who are behind -- and remember a lot of these people are not committed bears -- to pile in and hope the momentum trade can bring their returns back to respectability.

It all adds up to a supportive background for risky assets through the new year. There can be no assurances that fundamentals, which are pretty poor, won't reassert themselves. There is no telling too that policy makers might put a foot wrong and scare the markets, though I doubt it. They have a very large interest in a merry year end. Even if they didn't, inflation is not an issue and unemployment is, so don't look for any telegraphs from Washington, London or Frankfurt bearing tidings of rising rates.

COME BACK CHUCK PRINCE, ALL IS FORGIVEN
Individual investors who missed the rally are less likely to pile in right now. Their temptation will be to pass over the business headlines and go straight to sports. And besides, the holidays provide distractions of their own and you are highly unlikely to be fired by yourself as your own investment manager, now matter how richly you deserve the boot.

Professionals however are usually not so lucky as to be related to the client.

Of course, there must be many managers who are ahead of the market. Why won't they trim their sails and protect their gains? I don't know the answer to that but in my experience it just doesn't work that way. People tend to think of gifts as entitlements and it's a rare, and valuable, manager who having been aggressive when most were timid now gives up the habits of a lifetime.

It is all very reminiscent of good old Charles Prince, the former Citigroup chief who said about the leveraged buyout market, "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance," just as the world began to unravel. Prince wasn't a fool, he was expressing a core truth. If you are head of a bank or a mutual fund and you sit out a boom which you see as too risky you are taking on another, perhaps more persuasive risk; that the very clients you seek to protect will call you a stick-in-the-mud and take their business elsewhere.

This is not a specious argument about "cash on the sidelines" or money market funds. Numbers showing huge cash in money market funds are misleading; most of it will never end up in equity markets. This is simply about the self-fulfilling psychology and mechanics of rallies, especially rallies with official support.

The authorities, in their wisdom, have broken the circuit of a crash by flooding the market with enough money to drive up asset prices. This is intended to bring money out from under mattresses and force people to take risks again, to make them dance even if they feel like a fool.

That is unlikely to last forever or to work forever, but a reversal is less likely before January 1 than after.

(At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.)

(Editing by James Dalgleish)

- John Kemp is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own --

As hopes for reaching a binding agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions at the Copenhagen summit die, climate negotiators could learn useful lessons on how to structure the negotiations from the multiple rounds of trade talks within the GATT/WTO framework.

Climate negotiations are about limiting carbon dioxide emissions, but the negotiators are also hammering out a complex economic instrument that will define the distribution of production, energy use and income in the next few decades. It is the agreement's profound economic effects that are making it so hard to reach a final deal.

While the stalled negotiations on the Doha Round might make it seem likely an unlikely role model, the GATT/WTO process has successfully created a legal framework for liberalising world trade through eight successive rounds of increasingly complex negotiations, as well as a dispute settlement system accepted by all major countries.

In the process, negotiators have already had to resolve many of the difficult issues bedevilling attempts to reach an emissions deal:

* How to obtain treaty commitments from a huge range of countries at different stages of economic development.

* How to handle negotiations with the United States, given the peculiar nature of that country's constitutional arrangements.

* How to ensure countries live up to their commitments and resolve subsequent disputes about treaty implementation.

Climate negotiators could usefully apply many of these lessons to their own agreement. As Copenhagen falters, they may need to rethink the "road map" for talks to improve the chance of bringing them to a successful conclusion.

FRAMEWORK AND DETAILED SCHEDULES

The 1947 General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) established a legal framework and general principles for trade liberalisation. But detailed tariff reductions as well as commitments on subsidies, dumping and technical barriers were left to a later series of trade rounds. These commitments were then turned into schedules of concessions for each member country and incorporated by reference into the central treaty.

Negotiations started with a series of limited tariff reductions that were gradually made more ambitious. Part IV of the GATT, added in 1966, guaranteed developing countries "special and differential treatment" to encourage them to become involved in the tariff-reduction process and make their own binding commitments.

For each round, political leaders set broad objectives at the outset, but the detailed exchange of "concessions" was handled by lower-level officials in a Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC).

Something similar is needed for the climate talks. President Barack Obama has already backed a "two-step" process. Political leaders would aim for an "operational agreement" at next month's summit while leaving a legally binding agreement until 2010 or later. [ID:nSP280582] The aim is to ensure agreement on the big issues is not held hostage to myriad disputes over the details.

It might make sense to separate an agreement on the broad framework (including establishment and review of targets, trading emissions allowances, technology transfer, funding, and dispute settlement) from the details (including specific reduction targets and how much developed countries pay their developing counterparts to help mitigate the costs of technology upgrades).

It might also make sense to agree fairly easy reductions in the first round, then hold further negotiations in coming years to make targets more ambitious, using salami-slicing tactics rather than a big-bang approach. This would also allow developing countries to adopt modest emissions cuts in round one, with the aim of toughening them further in subsequent talks.

But for a two-step process to work, political leaders must give clear instructions to lower-level officials responsible for detailed negotiations (including clear scope for eventual concessions). If not agreement will become bogged down over relatively small differences in percentage reductions, as the Doha Round has become stalled over farm subsidies and tariff cuts for developing countries.

THE PROBLEM OF SENATE RATIFICATION

Trade negotiators are already used to the idea that an agreement is subject to a "double lock." Deals require approval at international level and by the U.S. Congress (either by a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate if the deal is presented as a treaty, or a simple majority in both houses if the deal is presented as ordinary legislation).

The existence of this double lock confers an advantage on the United States since other countries have to negotiate twice -- once with the administration and then again with Congress. Having given one set of concessions to the president's officials to secure a deal, other countries may have to make even more concessions to get the deal approved by U.S. legislators.

To encourage countries to make meaningful concessions without fear the final deal will be re-opened, U.S. presidents have often been required to obtain "fast-track" negotiating authority binding Congress to a straight up-or-down vote within a set time on the results of a trade round.

Negotiations are usually structured as a "single undertaking" in which every commitment or concession is part of a whole and indivisible package and cannot be agreed separately: "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed."

In terms of sequencing, trade negotiators have usually sought to reach an international agreement first and then presented the deal for congressional approval.

Until now, the climate negotiations have been using the opposite approach. The Obama administration has sought to obtain an ambitious climate bill including cap-and-trade from Congress (HR 2454, S 1733) and then use this to persuade developing countries such as China to offer significant emissions reductions at the international level.

But experience with trade negotiations suggests that an international deal precedes U.S. action, and does not come after it. It is unlikely Congress will agree to stringent targets without some assurance other countries will follow suit, including large future emitters such as China and India. So the international track may need to move first, or at least in parallel.

The Obama administration needs to harvest a number of provisional commitments from its international partners to have any hope of getting a climate bill through the Senate. If it is structured as a single undertaking, the various parties would offer tentative commitments. Once a deal is done, it would be taken back to the Senate to be incorporated into U.S. law.

The only question is whether the president would need to obtain some sort of fast-track authority. This is probably not necessary as long as the president's Democratic Party controls both houses of Congress with comfortable majorities.

But it does set a deadline for a deal. Negotiators would need to reach agreement by next summer, well ahead of the 2010 mid-term elections, unless the Democratic Party appears on course to retain comfortable majorities, in which case negotiations could take longer and still reach a successful conclusion.

DISPUTES, NULLIFICATION, IMPAIRMENT

U.S. lawmakers are already suspicious that other countries will not adopt meaningful targets or will cheat on those they do agree. So any climate deal will need a mechanism for settling disputes. If not, countries are likely to retaliate unilaterally against partners they believe are not living up to their commitments, which could unravel the whole system.

From the beginning, GATT Article XXIII allowed a country to request formal consultations with another treaty member if it believed expected benefits under the agreement were being "nullified or impaired," and this has been worked up into an increasingly formal and effective dispute settlement system.

If emission targets and aid packages are structured as part of a mutual exchange of concessions among treaty signatories, so one country's targets are conditioned on other countries meeting their own, the climate treaty will need a similar dispute mechanism.

Rather than attempt to create one from scratch, it would probably be better to use the WTO system as a template and modify it to take account of the climate accord's unique characteristics.

Ahead of elections in Britain, which must be held before June 2010, Dave Timms of Friends of the Earth shared his thoughts with Reuters on what the group thinks the next government needs to do in order to build a low-carbon economy.

(Photo: Portrait of Charles Darwin, 12 Feb 2009/Gordon Jack)

There are too many recent articles about Islamic creationism out there now to discuss each one separately, so I'll have to just link to them in the ... New York Times ... Washington Post ... Boston Globe ... Slate ... Guardian ... National ... Beliefnet ... ... Many of these articles highlight the role of Harun Yahya, the once secretive Istanbul preacher and publisher who has gone on a PR offensive in recent years and turned very media-friendly (as Steve Paulson describes in that Slate article). But as Michael Reiss, a London education professor and Anglican priest told the Guardian, "what the Turks believe today is what the Germans and British believe tomorrow. It is because of the mass movement of people between countries. These things can no longer be thought of as occurring in other countries."

(Photo: Harun Yahya, 21 May 2008/Osman Orsal)

Over the weekend, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt hosted a conference on “Darwin's Living Legacy: An International Conference on Evolution and Society” with the British Council. The simple fact of holding a conference on Darwin in the heart of the Middle East, where his theory of evolution is widely rejected, is already noteworthy. According to the Guardian's Riazat Butt, Nidhal Guessoum, professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah, told the conference that only three Muslim or Muslim-majority countries out of a possible 22 taught evolution. Another participant, astronomer Salman Hameed, who is professor of integrated science & humanities from Hampshire College in Massachusetts, wrote on his informative science-and-religion blog Irtiqa: "It is incredible that this conference is taking place in Egypt. I don't know what will be the reaction here. Simply by its location, it may remove some of the stigma regarding evolution in the Muslim world, or it may end up generating a backlash. Frankly, I have no idea about the reaction."

In an update on Sunday, Hameed wrote: "There have been some anti-evolutionary comments made in the sessions that dealt with religion and evolution - but overall, the reception seems to have been quite positive - both in Egyptian newspapers and among the local participants."

(Photo: Salman Hameed/Irtiqa)

As a example of what they're up against, another participant was Zaghloul El-Naggar, a leading proponent of the theory that the Koran foresaw scientific theories and discoveries, including the Big Bang and a possible cure for AIDS. He was quoted prominently in a recent Al-Jazeera report on the discovery of the 4.4 million year old skeleton known as Ardipithicus or "Ardi." The report claimed that the find disproved Darwinian evolution -- the opposite of what scientists said about the spectacular discovery of the most complete early hominid specimen we have.  The report only appeared in Al-Jazeera's Arabic-language television channel, which is very popular in the Middle East, and not in its English-language broadcast. "The presence of El-Naggar totally polarized the debate and evoked an equally polarizing reaction from the audience," wrote Hameed, who promised further posts from the conference ending today.

Last month, Hameed's Hampshire College hosted a conference on Darwin and Evolution in the Muslim World. Webcasts of presentations there can be found on the conference website.

What do you think? Is the spread of creationism among Muslims a matter for concern? Is it the same as the battle between creationism and science in Christianity?

Here's the video of the Al-Jazeera report, with subtitles in English added by critics of its presentation:

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld