EUROPE may be more secular than ever but sales of trees to mark the Christmas holiday are rising on demand from city slickers in Eastern Europe, Danish growers said.
About 70 million Christmas trees will be sold in Europe this season. That is 20 million more than 15 years ago, and the positive trend continues due to urbanisation and prosperity in Eastern Europe, a Danish Christmas tree farming group said.
“When people move from the countryside to the cities it expands the commercial market for Christmas trees because those people can no longer just go out and chop down a tree in the woods,” head of the Danish Christmas tree farmers association Kaj Ostergaard told Reuters this month.

AS if France didn’t have enough problems at the moment with mass protests against pension reforms, now it stands accused of causing The Great Depression.
An academic paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests it may have been gold hoarding by France in the late 1920s that tipped the world into the economic abyss and not the oft-blamed tightening of US monetary policy.
According to the paper, written by economist Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College, France increased its share of world gold reserves from 7 per cent to 27 per cent between 1927 and 1932 and effectively “sterilised” it so as not to have a negative impact domestically.

PRIME Minister Silvio Berlusconi said yesterday he loved life and women and would not apologise for enjoying himself after new reports of young women and parties were splashed across the front pages.
Italian newspapers have reported that a 17 year-old Moroccan girl known as “Ruby” told Milan magistrates she had attended  parties at Berlusconi’s private residence in Arcore near Milan.
The reports have raised more questions over the private life of the prime minister, whose wife Veronica accused him of “consorting with minors” and sought a divorce last year after he was filmed at the 18th birthday party of an aspiring model.

HALLIBURTON Co. used flawed cement in BP Plc’s doomed Gulf of Mexico well, which could have contributed to the blowout that sparked the worst offshore oil spill in US history, a White House panel said yesterday.
Halliburton’s shares tumbled as much as 16 per cent after the National Oil Spill Commission released a letter detailing the panel’s findings, before recovering to close down nearly 8 per cent at $31.68 per share on the New York Stock Exchange.
BP’s US-listed shares closed up 1.3 per cent at $40.60 per share.
While not absolving BP of responsibility, the report heaped criticism on Halliburton’s cement job, raising investor concerns it could be forced to bear some of the clean-up costs.

THE jackal was mangy and hungry, heading towards a small house where two cats were cowering. I am told in the mountains of the Mani and Messenia 30 years ago their night time howls calling from one territorial pack to another would echo across the valleys, but the hunters have left those valleys silent. The chance now of seeing a golden jackal in Greece is so rare, that some believe they are on the verge of extinction.

A CANCER treatment machine meant for the oncology department of the new general hospital remains “missing”, the Green Party said yesterday.
“The machine is considered still missing as its destruction has still not been recorded,” said the Cyprus Green Party MP George Perdikis.
The radiotherapy machine, worth 300,000 euros, went missing from the old general hospital last December, where it was being stored before it was meant to be transferred to the oncology department of the new general hospital, which was not yet complete. Perdikis added that since then there has been no formal investigation into what happened to the machine.
Health Minister Christos Patsalides has said that the machine was most likely destroyed during the demolition of the old hospital.