A NEVER-ENDING flow of information is the lot of most professionals. Whether it comes in the form of lawyers’ cases, doctors’ patients or even journalists’ stories, this information naturally gets broken up into pieces that can be tackled one at a time during the course of a given day. In theory, a decision made when handling one of these pieces should not have much, if any, impact on similar but unrelated subsequent decisions. Yet Uri Simonsohn of the University of Pennsylvania and Francesca Gino at Harvard report in Psychological Science that this is not how things work out in practice.

Dr Simonsohn and Dr Gino knew from studies done in other laboratories that people are, on the whole, poor at considering background information when making individual decisions. At first glance this might seem like a strength that grants the ability to make judgments which are unbiased by external factors. But in a world of quotas and limits—in other words, the world in which most professional people operate—the two researchers suspected that it was actually a weakness. They speculated that an inability to consider the big picture was leading decision-makers to be biased by the daily samples of information they were working with. For example, they theorised that a judge fearful of appearing too soft on crime might be more likely to send someone to prison if he had already sentenced five or six other defendants only to probation on that day.

To test this idea, they turned their attention to the university-admissions process. Admissions officers interview hundreds of applicants every year, at a rate of 4½ a day, and can offer entry to about 40% of them. In theory, the success of an applicant should not depend on the few others chosen randomly for interview during the same day, but Dr Simonsohn and Dr Gino suspected the truth was otherwise.

They studied the results of 9,323 MBA interviews conducted by 31 admissions officers. The interviewers had rated applicants on a scale of one to five. This scale took numerous factors, including communication skills, personal drive, team-working ability and personal accomplishments, into consideration. The scores from this rating were then used in conjunction with an applicant’s score on the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, a standardised exam which is marked out of 800 points, to make a decision on whether to accept him or her.

Dr Simonsohn and Dr Gino discovered that their hunch was right. If the score of the previous candidate in a daily series of interviewees was 0.75 points or more higher than that of the one before that, then the score for the next applicant would drop by an average of 0.075 points. This might sound small, but to undo the effects of such a decrease a candidate would need 30 more GMAT points than would otherwise have been necessary.

As for why people behave this way, Dr Simonsohn proposes that after accepting a number of strong candidates, interviewers might form the illogical expectation that a weaker candidate “is due”. Alternatively, he suggests that interviewers may be engaging in mental accounting that simplifies the task of maintaining a given long-term acceptance rate, by trying to apply this rate to each daily group of candidates. Regardless of the reason, if this sort of thinking proves to have a similar effect on the judgments of those in other fields, such as law and medicine, it could be responsible for far worse things than the rejection of qualified business-school candidates.

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THE International Cancer Genome Consortium, an alliance of laboratories that is trying to produce a definitive list of the genetic mutations that cause cancer, is accumulating data at an astonishing rate. About 3,000 individual breast tumours, for example, have now had their genotypes published. But these data will not, by themselves, help patients. For that, they have to be collected in the context of a drug trial. And this is just what Matthew Ellis and his colleagues at Washington University in St Louis have done for women suffering from breast cancer. Their methods, if they prove to work for other cancers too, may revolutionise treatment.

Dr Ellis and his team sequenced the whole genomes of both cancerous and normal tissue from 46 women with tumours of a type called oestrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer. They also sequenced just the gene-containing regions of the genome—about 1% of total DNA—from an additional 31 women, and parts of the sequences of 240 more. They then compared the healthy and tumorous genomes of each patient, in order to discover which genes had mutated in the cancer.

In this, they were following the normal protocol of the cancer genome consortium. The novelty of their approach was that the women in question had each been involved in one of two clinical trials of a drug called letrozole. These trials established letrozole as a standard treatment for people with this type of breast cancer, but not all patients benefit equally from the drug. Dr Ellis hoped to find out why.

As they report in Nature, he and his team discovered 18 genes that were often mutated. Some were the usual suspects of cancer genetics. These included p53, a gene that, when working properly, suppresses cancer by regulating DNA repair, cell division and cellular suicide, and MAP3K1 and MAP2K4, which both promote cell growth. Others, though, were a surprise. At the top of that list were five which had previously been linked to leukaemia, but were not thought to affect solid tumours.

By combining their newly acquired genetic data with clinical data from the participants, Dr Ellis and his colleagues showed that those whose tumours carried mutations in p53 (16% of the total) were less likely to have responded to letrozole than women whose tumours had normal p53. Conversely, those whose tumours had changes in either MAP3K1 or MAP2K4 (another 16%) had better than average responses to the drug.

This sort of information has obvious implications for treatment. And the cheapness of modern gene-sequencing methods, particularly those that are looking for specific mutations suspected in advance, means that a tumour’s mutational complement can be worked out easily in an appropriately equipped pathology laboratory. In the case of oestrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer, the genetic analysis has not yet gone so far as to be able to say with certainty which drug will produce the best result for a given individual, but Dr Ellis’s result lays a foundation on which such an edifice might be built for breast cancer and perhaps for other types of tumour, too.

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PULL a spring, let it go, and it will snap back into shape. Pull it further and yet further and it will go on springing back until, quite suddenly, it won’t. What was once a spring has become a useless piece of curly wire. And that, in a nutshell, is what many scientists worry may happen to the Earth if its systems are overstretched like those of an abused spring.

One result of this worry, in the autumn of 2009, was the idea of planetary boundaries. In the run-up to that year’s climate conference in Copenhagen a group of concerned scientists working under the auspices of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in Sweden, defined, in a paper in Nature, what they thought of as a safe operating space for human development—a set of nine limits beyond which people should not push their planet.

The nine areas of concern were: climate change; ocean acidification; the thinning of the ozone layer; intervention in the nitrogen and phosphate cycles (crucial to plant growth); the conversion of wilderness to farms and cities; extinctions; the build up of chemical pollutants; and the level of particulate pollutants in the atmosphere. For seven of these areas the paper’s authors felt confident enough to put numbers on where the boundaries actually lay. For chemicals and particulates, they deferred judgment.

Since then, the idea of planetary boundaries has taken root. It crops up repeatedly in GEO-5, the United Nations Environment Programme’s new assessment of the world. The High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability, which reported recently to Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s secretary-general, gave the idea pride of place. And Planet Under Pressure, a big scientific conference held recently in London, made boundaries central to the message it sent to Rio+20, the UN environmental summit that opens in Brazil on June 20th.

Don’t fence me in

Planetary boundaries provide a useful way of thinking about environmental change, because in many cases they give scope for further change that has not already happened. That has brought the concept friends who are not normally persuaded by environmental thinking, as well as green enemies who will brook no compromise. But the concept has numerous drawbacks. The actual location of the boundaries is, as their proponents acknowledge, somewhat arbitrary. That is partly because of the incomplete state of current knowledge, but it may remain so however much anyone knows. Some boundaries might be transgressed without irreversible harm occurring. Some may have been drawn around the wrong things altogether. And some academic opinion holds that spectacular global change could come about without breaking through any of them.

The latest criticism comes from the Breakthrough Institute, a determinedly heterodox American think-tank that focuses on energy and the environment. Among the points made in a report it published on June 11th, two stand out. The first is that the idea of boundaries does not focus enough on the distinction between things with truly global effects and those that matter primarily at a local or regional level. The second is that the planetary-boundaries group derives most of its limits by looking at conditions during the Holocene—the epoch since the end of the most recent ice age, in which human civilisations have grown up. Both of these criticisms have merit.

For things that clearly do have the springlike quality of shifting irreversibly if pulled (or pushed) too far, like the collapse of ice sheets or the melting of permafrost, a boundary system that seeks to stop you getting too close to the threshold seems as sensible as a safety rail is on a parapet. There is good reason to believe that parts of the climate do behave this way, and thus need railing off. But of the nine boundaries, only three apply to systems where the boundary setters really believe there is a global threshold: the climate; the acidity of the oceans; and the ozone layer. Some of the other six may have local thresholds, but for the most part their global effects are simply the aggregate of the local ones.

Confusing the two might, in the Breakthrough Institute’s view, result in poor policy. Concern over a planet-wide nitrogen limit, for example, could lead to people forgoing the benefits that fertilisers offer the poor soils of Africa on account of harm done by their over-application in China.

The institute’s other criticism is the implicit assumption that because mankind came of age in the Holocene, therefore Holocene conditions are optimal for the species now. There are indeed reasons to believe some aspects of the Holocene were optimal. It was a time of climatic stability and, in the temperate regions of the Earth, clemency. The Breakthrough criticism agrees that climate stability is a good thing. It points out, though, that there is little evidence things like the behaviour of the nitrogen cycle or the phosphate cycle in the Holocene were particularly well-suited to humans. The fact that people have used industrial chemistry to short-circuit the nitrogen cycle, by making fertilisers out of nitrogen in the air at a rate which greatly exceeds what natural systems can manage, has real environmental effects. Nitrate-rich run-off, for example, can wreck the ecology of lakes. But if these effects could be managed, then it is not clear that the amount of nitrogen being drawn out of the air would, of itself, be a problem.

This is, at bottom, an argument about the nature of the Anthropocene—the age of man. Many scientists feel that human interference in the way the Earth works is now so great that the Holocene is history and a truly separate Anthropocene has dawned. The planetary-boundaries idea seeks to constrain the Anthropocene within the norms of the Holocene. The Breakthrough Institute, by contrast, argues for ordering things according to a calculation of the needs of human welfare, rather than just aping what has happened in the past. There is no doubt as to which of the two approaches is more prudent, and prudence always has a constituency. There is plenty of room for debate as to which is more plausible, or practical.

Independence declaration

Another problem for the idea of planetary boundaries is the assumption that they are independent of each other. That seems unlikely, and if they are not then a crisis might arise even if no single boundary were transgressed. On June 7th Nature, which likes to get its oar in before big international powwows like the ones in Copenhagen and Rio, published a review of evidence that this may be happening. It suggested that the Earth may be approaching a “tipping point” past which simultaneous changes—to land use, climate and more—driven by an ever larger, ever richer human population, push the system into a very different state from its present one, with climate zones changed permanently, ecosystems functioning differently, and so on.

A sudden shift is plausible. Small ecological systems, such as lakes, often switch states in this way and there is no obvious reason why a large system like the Earth should not do likewise. And according to Anthony Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the Nature review’s main authors, a combination of changes, each itself within the planetary boundaries, could still trigger such a change of state.

That would be a bad thing. Even if the ultimate result were an Earth that is still hospitable to mankind, the transition could be catastrophic. But the existence of plausible bad futures within the boundaries raises the obverse question: are there good futures outside them? In particular, might it be possible to finesse the most famous boundary of all, the one governing greenhouse warming and climate change?

The planetary-boundaries team, slightly confusingly, defines this boundary in two different ways. One is a limit on carbon dioxide, the main long-lived greenhouse gas, of 350 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere. The other is a limit on “radiative forcing”—the increase in energy delivered to the surface of the Earth over time, largely as a consequence of extra greenhouse gases—of 1 watt per square metre above pre-industrial levels. Either way, the climate boundary is one that already lies squarely in humanity’s rear-view mirror. This reflects the view of some on the planetary-boundaries team, such as James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, that today’s climate is already beyond the point which can guarantee long-term survival for things like the Greenland ice sheet, the demise of which would raise sea levels by seven metres.

If the planetary-boundaries scientists really have got their sums right, the greenhouse-gas situation looks hopeless. From today’s position of carbon-dioxide levels pushing 400ppm and going up about 2ppm a year, a carbon-dioxide level of 350ppm can be reached only by going to zero emissions and then spending a long time—centuries, in all likelihood—sucking CO₂ out of the atmosphere and putting it back underground by various means.

Force majeure

Greenhouse gases are, however, only a problem because of their effect on radiative forcing. If that could be reined back inside the boundary by other means, then the CO₂ limit would no longer pertain. And that might be possible by spraying reflective particles into the upper atmosphere, to bounce sunlight back into space.

Such a radical scheme would have all sorts of disturbing side effects, with political ones quite possibly outweighing environmental ones. It is by no means clearly the right thing to do. But it might be. And it certainly serves to show that, although the Earth may have boundaries, thinking about how to help it should not.

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Stacy Keibler
I'm NOT Pregnant
with Handsome Baby

The world will continue to wait for a baby Clooney ... because Stacy Keibler is NOT with child.

The rumor mill began to churn after photos surfaced showing Stacy on a boat in Lake Como this weekend ... sporting what people have interpreted as a baby bump.

But sources connected to The Keib tell us ... the rumors are "100% FALSE."

Plus, we're told Stacy was drinking wine with friends last night -- not concrete proof ... but a pretty good sign there's no baby on board.

A rep for Stacy had no comment on the situation.

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Greece's victorious conservative leader sought a new coalition government after elections, pledging on Monday to soften the debt-laden country's punishing austerity programe despite opposition from Germany.

A brief relief rally on international financial markets after Sunday's Greek vote quickly fizzled out as it became clear that Antonis Samaras's New Democracy had failed to win a convincing popular mandate to implement the deep spending cuts and tax increases demanded by the European Union and the IMF.

Radical left-wing bloc Syriza and a host of smaller parties opposed to the punishing conditions attached to the $164.12 bn bailout won around half the votes cast, though fewer seats because the electoral system rewards the
first placed party disproportionately.

Samaras received a mandate to form a coalition government from the president on Monday, and said the country would meet its bailout commitments.

But he added: "We will simultaneously have to make some necessary amendments to the bailout agreement, in order to relieve the people of crippling unemployment and huge hardships."

Al Jazeera's Andrew Simmons reported from Athens, where he compared the atmosphere to that of a "tinderbox", and that any new government would have to contend with deep-seated political and demographic divisions.

"The real worry is that if there's a weak government, Syriza is going to weigh in and bring it down," he said.
He said that a government would likely be formed and that there was unlikely to be a repeat of the standoff that followed the May elections.

'Broad coalition'

Greece's caretaker government says the state has enough cash to last a few weeks [AFP]

PASOK head Evangelos Venizelos, a former finance minister, finished in the election behind Syriza. But his 33 seats in the 300-member Parliament mean he could form a government with New Democracy, which gained 129 seats.

Syriza has refused to join the other two parties in a government, saying it will not cooperate with any group that insists on implementing the harsh austerity measures taken in return for Greece's two international bailout
agreements.

Venizelos, however, insisted on a broad coalition.

"The most crucial thing for us right now is to achieve the greatest possible range of consensus, and this must happen by tomorrow night at the latest," he said after meeting with New Democracy head Antonis Samaras, who
as election winner has the first go at trying to form a government.

Venizelos criticized Syriza chief Alexis Tsipras for his refusal to join in governing Greece, which has been wracked by a financial crisis that has left it dependent on international loans since May 2010.

"You can't have some people choosing the easy position of being in opposition and lying in wait for the government to fail - or rather trying to create the conditions for the government, that is the country, to fail," Venizelos said.

On the streets of Athens, the mood was mixed, with many saying party leaders must get their act together.

"The election result isn't strong enough to put people's minds at ease," said sandwich shop owner Mary Moutafidis, 57. "They still have to agree to form a government."

Click here to follow our Greece elections live blog

Greece's economy is forecast to contract 5 per cent this year after shrinking 7 per cent last year. Protests regularly choke the centre of Athens, some hospitals are running short of medicines, thousands of businesses have closed and beggars and rough sleepers are multiplying.

During the election campaign, Samaras called for cuts in taxes, hikes in unemployment benefits, pension rises and two more years to meet fiscal targets.

But Germany, already irritated at what it sees as the slow pace of Greek reform, ruled out more than minor delays to some targets in the rescue package - Greece's second since 2010.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a meeting of G20 leaders in Mexico, said any loosening of Greece's agreed reform pledges would be unacceptable and reiterated that Athens had to stick to the commitments it had already made.

Samaras voted in 2010 against the first 110 billion euro rescue because he thought it was too harsh. He now says Greece should have until 2016, not 2014, to meet fiscal targets set by under the bailout. His most likely ally, Socialist PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos, wants a further year to reform.

The small Democratic Left party indicated it would also be ready to support Samaras if the bailout deal could be softened. Samaras and Venizelos began talks at 15:00 GMT.

818

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Egypt has plunged deeper into political uncertainty as both presidential candidates claim victory following a runoff election and the country's ruling generals move to further assert their power.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) repeated on Monday its pledge to hand over authority to a civilian government by the end of the month.

Mohammed al-Assar, one of the generals, said during a lengthy press conference in Cairo that there would be a "grand ceremony" to mark the transition.

"We'll never tire or be bored from assuring everyone that we will hand over power before the end of June," he said.

Yet the council has moved in the last 24 hours to sharply curtail the powers of the incoming president. SCAF will retain authority over the budget and the legislative process until a new parliament is elected, according to a decree issued on Sunday night.

The decree even limits the new president's powers as commander-in-chief, stating that he can only declare war "with the approval of the military council."

Sameh Ashour, the head of SCAF's advisory council, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the incoming president would likely have a short term, and would be replaced after a new constitution was drafted.

"The upcoming president will occupy the office for a short period of time, whether or not he agrees," Ashour said. "His office term will be short despite the huge efforts exerted in the election campaigns."

Both sides claim victory

It still was not clear, nearly 24 hours after polls closed, who that next president will be.

Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate, claimed victory in the early hours of Monday morning.

The Brotherhood's unofficial tally had Morsi leading with about 12.7 million votes, or 52.5 per cent of the total. Several other counts from media organisations, including Al Jazeera, also showed Morsi with a narrow lead.

Egyptians elect first new president in post-Mubarak era

"Thank God, who guided the people of Egypt to this right path, the path of freedom and democracy," Morsi said during his victory speech, vowing to work for a "civil, democratic, constitutional and modern state".

The Brotherhood said it was confident in its figures, and indeed their unofficial counts have been accurate in past elections. "Our official numbers in round one matched exactly the [presidential election commission's] final numbers," the group said in a statement.

But his opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, the final prime minister under deposed president Hosni Mubarak, rejected Morsi's claim of victory and accused him of trying to "usurp" the presidency.

"What the other candidate has done threatens Egypt's future and stability," he said in a statement.

Shafiq's campaign said their own internal figures showed their candidate leading with about 52 per cent of the vote, and accused Morsi's camp of miscounting millions of ballots.

Separation of powers

The generals did not address the electoral confusion during Monday's press conference. They instead tried to rebut criticism of their decree, a so-called "constitutional annex" which will govern the country until a new constitution is drafted.

Mamdouh Shahin, another of the generals, said that the president would still have the authority to ratify or reject any laws approved by SCAF.

SCAF dissolved parliament last week following a ruling by the supreme court, which found the legislature unconstitutional. The court ruled that provisions of the electoral law - which allowed political parties to compete for seats reserved for independent candidates - violated the constitution.

With the legislature gone, the generals reasserted control over the legislative process, and over the country's budget.

"The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces shall exercise the powers referred to under the first clause of article 56 [the article on legislative power]... until the election of a new People's Assembly," the decree states.

The decree promises fresh legislative elections, but not until a new constitution has been drafted.

Before it was dissolved, the parliament appointed a 100-member assembly to draft that constitution; it will be allowed to continue its work, though if it runs into "obstacles", SCAF will appoint a replacement.

The Muslim Brotherhood was quick to condemn the decree, calling it "null and unconstitutional" in a brief statement on Twitter.

Asked about the decree during the group's press conference, Ahmed Abdel-Atti, Morsi's campaign co-ordinator, said he expected "popular action" against it in the near future.

873

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The conservative organization Judicial Watch announced Monday that it was suing the ATF for Fast and Furious records of communications between the agency and the White House.

Specifically, the group said that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, seeking Fast and Furious records showing conversations between ATF officials and Kevin O’Reilly, the former White House Director of North American Affairs at the U.S. National Security Council.

In previous congressional testimony, ATF special agent in charge of the Phoenix office Bill Newell - who played a leading role in the Fast and Furious gun-walking operation - said he had shared information about the operation with O’Reilly, but did not go into further detail about their interactions.

“The Obama administration has clammed up on Fast and Furious. We’re having trouble getting almost anything out of them. No wonder, as the Fast and Furious lies and killings makes it one of the worst scandals in recent American history. The American people deserve to know what White House officials knew and when they knew it,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, in a press release Monday detailing the lawsuit, which was filed June 6

The outside group’s latest move – part of its work as a conservative public interest group and government watchdog – comes as Attorney General Eric Holder and Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are negotiating a way to postpone a House vote censuring Holder. At issue are documents being withheld from House Republican investigating the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal despite a Congressional subpoena. The Justice Department claims that internal deliberations are not subject to subpoena – consistent with the practices of previous administrations.

The Fast and Furious operation involved a practice called “gun-walking,” in which hundreds of guns were allowed to cross the border into Mexico. ATF officials had hoped to track the weapons to drug cartels and weapons smugglers, but ended up supplying them with firearms instead – including one gun that was linked to the scene of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s December 2010 shooting death.

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Meek Mill
I Saw GIRLS Hurling Bottles
... Not Drake or Chris

Breaking News

Meek Mill says he didn't throw a single bottle during the W.i.P. nightclub brawl ... neither did Drake nor Chris Brown. Instead, Meek says the real culprits are FEMALE.

Meek finally broke his silence with XXL.com ... saying, "Chris and Drake, them two was there, but it's other people that be around that take sh*t to the next level."

Meek continued, “Things just happen in the club. I seen girls in there throwing bottles, all types of sh*t. All types of people. I never seen Chris Brown or Drake throw a bottle and I was there.”

When asked if he threw a bottle, Meek replied, "F*ck no."

As we previously reported witnesses say Meek -- who was hanging at Drake's table during the June 13 incident -- was one of the instigators in the fight. He's also rumored to have slept with Rihanna.

Meek claims he spoke with Chris Brown on the phone directly after the brawl ... and both sides agreed they had no problem with the other.  

Mill concluded, "Chris Brown be in clubs. He be around situations like this. Things get out of hand ... that don’t mean it’s out of hand with me and him or whoever, not even him and Drake.”

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Wikileaks is at it again, this time releasing more than 2 million “embarrassing” emails from Syrian government and business officials.

The emails, which date from August 2006 to March 2012, are coming to light as Syria remains embroiled in 16-month violent rebellion.

“The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents. It helps us not merely to criticize one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said in a statement on the group’s website.

Assange is holed up at the Ecuadorean embassy in London fighting extradition to Sweden on rape charges.

The hacked emails, dubbed “The Syria Files, are “more than eight times the size of ’Cablegate’ in terms of number of documents, and more than 100 times the size in terms of data,” he said, referring to the 250,000 confidential U.S. diplomatic cables that Wikileaks released in 2010.

“The Syria Files shine a light on the inner workings of the Syrian government and economy, but they also reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another,” Assange said. “The range of information extends from the intimate correspondence of the most senior Baath party figures to records of financial transfers sent from Syrian ministries to other nations.”

To read The Syria Files, click here.

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Abell was I

THE Higgs boson (see article) is not the only curious form of matter whose nature has been probed this week. A paper by Jörg Dietrich, of the University of Michigan, and his colleagues, just published by Nature, illuminates—if that is the appropriate word—a substance known as dark matter.

Dark matter, the theory goes, is composed of particles that cannot interact with the electromagnetic force, and thus have no dealings with light. But they do interact gravitationally. In fact, it is the gravitational pull of dark matter that stops galaxies flying apart as they rotate. Moreover, calculations suggest there is five times as much dark matter in the universe as there is ordinary matter. But what is rarely observed is dark matter by itself. Since both the dark and the visible forms of matter are affected by gravity, they tend to cluster together.

Models of the evolution of the universe suggest, though, that this clustering is secondary. The young universe was first filled with a lattice of threads of dark matter, then the visible stuff gathered around these threads and formed the galaxies familiar today.

What Dr Dietrich and his colleagues have done is to detect the part of a thread that runs between two groups of galaxies called Abell 222 and Abell 223. They were able to do so by looking at the distorting effect the thread’s gravity has on light emitted by galaxies behind it. Measuring these distortions allowed the researchers to work out both the thread’s shape and its mass (about 60 trillion times the mass of the sun). Meanwhile, down on Earth, researchers at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva that has just found the Higgs, will now turn their attention to making individual particles of dark matter. Thus do the largest and the smallest scales of science complement each other.

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Tim Tebow
Hardcore MMA Training
with Fighting LEGENDS

Breaking News

Tim Tebow has begun training with some of the baddest men on the planet ... men who revolutionized the art of hand-to-hand combat ... the legendary Gracie family.

In case you're unaware, the Gracie family basically built the UFC -- and badasses like Royce Gracie have destroyed countless opponents by using a special form of Brazilian jiu-jitsu created by his  father, Helio Gracie.

Now, the New York Jets quarterback has joined up with the Gracie family at their headquarters in Torrance, CA -- where he was training with Royce's nephew Ryron Gracie and UFC heavyweight Brendan Schaub (in the grey shirt).

After the training session, the Gracie brother's tweeted about their newest pupil, "Everyone please give a warm welcome to the newest member of the Gracie Family."

Ryron also tweeted to Tim ... saying, "Your athleticism/intelligence makes teaching Jiu jitsu even easier!"

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'16 & Pregnant' Baby Daddy
Popped for DUI
Mug Shot's a SNOOZE

Exclusive

"16 & Pregnant" baby daddy Weston Gosa -- father of Whitney Purvis' kid -- was arrested for DUI in Georgia yesterday ... after allegedly crashing his car ... but the real reason we're posting this story ... dude's mug shot is legendary.

According to the Floyd County Police Department, 23-year-old Gosa smashed his car, and was placed under arrest when cops decided he had been driving under the influence. Police say Gosa was under the influence of prescription drugs at the time of his arrest.

Police also say Gosa was in possession of Xanax and Lorcet without a prescription, as well as a pipe with some kind of residue in it.

Gosa has been charged with felony possession of controlled substances, misdemeanor possession of drug-related objects, and DUI.

He's still in custody. He may or may not be aware of this.

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Justin & Selena
ON THE ROCKS

Exclusive

He loves her ... he loves her not -- TMZ has learned, Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez have broken up multiple times in the last few months.

Sources in a position to know tell us, Biebs and Selena most recently ended things last week -- but have since decided to give their relationship another try ... kinda.

We're told Justin and Selena's current situation is tenuous ... they're not "solid"  ...  they're just figuring things out. 

They've been dating for roughly a year and a half.

Teenagers.

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Jane / X17 Online:

FIRST PHOTOS – JUSTIN BIEBER PULLED OVER FOR SPEEDING  —  Justin Bieber was just pulled over for speeding in his $110,000 chrome-plated Fisker Karma, X17Online has learned.  —  The pop star was traveling south on the 101 freeway from Calabasas when cops stopped him for exceeding the speed limit by a significant amount.

TMZ.com:

George Clooney & Stacy Keibler — Food Poisoned in Italy  —  FOOD POISONED  —  EXCLUSIVE  —  George Clooney and his girlfriend Stacy Keibler got to enjoy a meal they ate in Italy this week … twice — because hours after eating it … they both got a bad case of food poisoning.

Is France's embittered former president trying to hide from prosecution or quietly laying the groundwork for a big comeback?

BY ERIC PAPE | JULY 6, 2012

PARIS – When Nicolas Sarkozy was battling his way toward the presidency in 2007, he often seemed like the Energizer Bunny of French politics: frenetic, relentless, and troublingly ubiquitous. Like that deranged, effervescent, pink rabbit, he broke through barriers and intruded into the darnedest places.

Long before he took office in the Élysée Palace, he had manufactured an image based on tough talk and hard-charging actions that could fill kiosks full of newsweekly covers and thus inspire the relentless dedication of legions of newspaper correspondents. (When he was a government minister under President Jacques Chirac, he would actually brag about his impact on magazine sales and television ratings.) The Sarko Show devolved into a national soap opera: His wife was his chief of staff, then left him for another man, but came back in time for his election to the presidency. Soon after, he gave France its first presidential divorce, speed-wooed former supermodel Carla Bruni, and provided the country with a rare presidential wedding and, better yet, its first presidential birth. In the end, it was hard to tell whether they were France's Camelot, with Bruni as Jackie Kennedy, or its political Brangelina. Sarkozy's jumpy voice seemed to play in a loop for years, accompanying people's café and croissants over the morning radio, or barging in on family dinners during prime-time news broadcasts.

The country was so overwhelmed by his omnipresence (the media actually dubbed him the "omni-president") that it began to suffer from what might be called Sarkozia -- a mental disorder defined by the fraught disorientation of spending so much time around a politician who relishes destabilizing others.

And then, in little more than the time that it took for the electorate to reject him in May, Sarkozy was gone. The man who drove the French media insane for much of the last decade has tried to disappear like Houdini.

In the less than two months since the end of his presidency, France's most notorious media-hound has gone silent. There have been no formal speeches and no comments on Europe's tenuous economic situation (even as his former government has been blamed for a wide array of related problems). He has spent much of his time vacationing overseas, first in Morocco and more recently in Quebec. France hasn't been entirely Sarko-free, but close. He made a silent and stately appearance at a memorial ceremony for four French soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan. His replacement, François Hollande, invited Sarkozy, partly out of respect but perhaps also to highlight who is really responsible for the unpopular war. But it was Hollande who gave the eulogy, as Sarkozy watched like a respectful scarecrow in the breeze. Or a ghost.

Is the notoriously competitive, insecure, and neurotic Frenchman feeling sorry for himself after failing to win reelection? Undoubtedly. Is the disappearing act a premeditated strategy? The answer to that question came when his 25-year-old son, Jean, visited the presidential palace in the waning days of his father's presidency -- just prior to Hollande's inauguration -- to seek his father's benediction. Jean Sarkozy planned to run for a conservative seat in Parliament in June.

Sarkozy père, ever the political calculator, nixed the idea of his son carrying the family's political torch forward. "Bad idea," Nicolas told Jean, according to a brief report of the encounter published in the French daily Le Parisien. "The Sarkozys must make themselves forgotten, and they will make themselves forgotten."

The former president wants to send a Nixonian message: France no longer has Nicolas Sarkozy to kick around anymore. The subtext: Perhaps absence will make the heart grow fonder.

An object of as much public fascination as Sarkozy is can never completely escape the limelight, though. Paparazzi crews have repeatedly tracked the former president down on his regular jogs. For years, he harvested such moments for their dynamic communications impact. But on one recent occasion, which was broadcast on French television, the dejected former president asked his media stalkers if they ever planned to leave him alone.

Plenty of French people would be glad to oblige. Much of the country just wants to move on from the Sarkozy years, but if the Energizer Bunny presidency is over, the French can be forgiven for feeling like that rascal rabbit has left an improbably long trail of fecal pellets behind him. That sense has been growing since his presidential immunity from prosecution lapsed on June 16, a month after he left the presidential palace. French courts have a notable tradition of engaging in lengthy legal pursuit of former presidents in corruption cases, including Sarkozy's predecessor, Chirac, who was found guilty of corruption in December of last year.

Sarkozy's new chief antagonist may be Judge Jean-Michel Gentil, who is in the midst of a multiyear investigation that started out looking into whether people around the aging billionaire heiress Liliane Bettencourt, of the L'Oréal empire, manipulated the dementia-stricken octogenarian for their own financial gain and to buy political influence from Sarkozy's political party. Charges have already been filed against 11 people, including Bettencourt's former money manager, who spent 88 days in preliminary detention as the investigating judge sought to figure out what he did with a total of about $7 million of the old lady's money.

In an offshoot of that investigation, Gentil, backed by police investigators, carried out a series of raids on Tuesday, July 3, on Sarkozy's office, the home owned by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy where the couple live in the posh 16th arrondissement, and a law firm in which Sarkozy is a partner.

The judge is particularly focused on what was done with $1 million that was withdrawn from Bettencourt's Swiss bank accounts on two separate occasions. The initial withdrawal came on February 5, 2007, days before Bettencourt's money manager met with Éric Woerth, then the treasurer of Sarkozy's first presidential campaign. Bettencourt's former accountant (who is not the same person as her money manager) has told investigators that she gave $185,000 to Woerth. (Political donations in France are limited to $5,660 per person during campaigns.) The second withdrawal came days into the brief two-week runoff campaign later that year. Woerth, who went on to become Sarkozy's minister of budget, and then of labor, resigned as the burgeoning scandal targeted him. He insists that he was the victim of a politicized witch-hunt whose real target was President Sarkozy. (His case is ongoing.)

Several of Bettencourt's former employees have also asserted that Sarkozy quietly dropped by the billionaire's mansion in person on at least two occasions, in February and in April of 2007, to pick up cash.

Days after moving out of the presidential palace in May, citizen Sarkozy's attorney sent the former president's scheduling journal to the judge to show that he only made a brief "courtesy call" to Bettencourt on Feb. 24, 2007. The lawyer insists that the booklet proved that Sarkozy could not have been present on the specific days mentioned by Bettencourt's former employees -- as though a politician would naturally leave a paper trail in his datebook if he was clearly breaking finance law during a political campaign.

An array of other court cases is moving forward that could eventually trip up the former Energizer Bunny. One investigation aims to figure out who ordered French intelligence services to spy on journalist Gérard Davet, at the respected daily Le Monde, in an attempt to ascertain who his sources were in 2010 on a particularly sensitive story. Davet was writing about the Bettencourt saga and her entourage's alleged interactions with Woerth (then a prominent minister under Sarkozy). Le Monde obtained copies of letters written from spy-service figures loyal to President Sarkozy, to Davet's cell-phone provider, in order to obtain the reporter's call records.

A more complex, and sinister, case involves an investigation into a complex kickbacks scheme, known as the Karachi Affair, that may have helped fund the presidential candidacy of Édouard Balladur, Sarkozy's political mentor, in the mid-1990s.

Yet another case is moving forward on Sarkozy's own initiation. He is suing the French investigative website Mediapart over its publication during the recent presidential campaign of a document suggesting that Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi agreed to provide $62.5 million to Sarkozy's successful 2007 presidential campaign. Sarkozy's lawyers argue that the document, provided by a former Libyan diplomat, is obviously false and that Mediapart knew as much.

Beyond the many court cases, plenty of politicians -- on the new ruling left and on the opposition right -- have a clear interest in highlighting Sarkozy's leadership failings. The current French government, which has promised to hack $50 billion from France's budget deficit over the next two years, suggests that the Energizer President sapped the country's coffers with tax cuts for well-connected corporations and his rich supporters (like Bettencourt) at the very moment when France should have been leveling out the amount of its long-term debt.

Conservatives back their standard-bearer's tax policies -- and they highlight three decades of overspending by governments on both sides of the political aisle -- but Sarkozy's defeat and disappearance have left a political leadership chasm that various prominent political figures are jockeying to fill ahead of a party congress in the fall. There are fears of political divisions -- or even a split -- that could leave his UMP party weak, divided, and largely irrelevant since the left controls all areas of government.

Should that scenario play out, Sarkozy, ever the tactician, knows the party might need a rejuvenated white knight who could ride in, once again, as the hero. Indeed, it seems he might not be disappearing so much as playing a waiting game. He is only 57, after all, and he remains a voracious political animal of nearly limitless ambition. He also knows that if the Socialists raise taxes and cut spending as much as they have promised, they will be far less popular in five years than they were on the day that Hollande defeated him at the ballot box.

If this pathway to a political restoration seems stunningly improbable today, it is worth remembering that Sarkozy has pulled plenty of surprising rabbits out of a hat in the past to resurrect himself. But the real trick this time may involve finding that damned bunny amid all of the merde.

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As a divided Libya heads toward a historic vote, an Islamic "frame of reference" unites the country's political neophytes.

BY MARY FITZGERALD | JULY 6, 2012

BENGHAZI, Libya – On a recent evening in Benghazi, as the sun dipped low over the Mediterranean, a stout, bespectacled man in a suit stepped, to wild applause, onto a stage erected on the city's Kish Square. The man was Mohammed Sawan, a long-standing member of Libya's Muslim Brotherhood, who is from Misrata, and who, after spending years in Muammar al-Qaddafi's jails, is now leader of its affiliated Justice and Construction Party (JCP). JCP is fielding the largest number of candidates in Libya's national assembly elections to be held on July 7. "Our revolution started from here," Sawan began, going on to pay tribute to the martyrs of Benghazi.

The location and timing of the rally -- attended by more than 2,000 people -- were rich in symbolism. From where Sawan stood, he could see the military compound that was stormed by protesters in February last year as anti-regime demonstrations in Libya's second largest city tipped into an armed revolt against Qaddafi's 42-year experiment in tyranny. And just hours before Sawan's address, Libya's Islamists had cheered when Mohammed Morsi was declared winner of Egypt's presidential election. The mood at the JCP rally was buoyant, though there was no mention of Morsi in any of the speeches -- Libya's Muslim Brotherhood is sensitive to any accusations of external support or foreign affiliation. Sentimental patriotic songs blared from loudspeakers as the JCP candidates for Benghazi -- a mix of men and women, among them engineers, doctors, and teachers -- filed across the stage to read from the party's manifesto. They included Amal Sallabi, the sister of Ali Sallabi, a prominent Qatar-based Islamist who is considered ideologically close to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Last year, Ali Sallabi, while railing against "extremist secularists," told me he believed an explicitly Islamist political party would not fare well in Libya. Instead, he argued, parties with a nationalist agenda that respect faith and tradition would have the broadest appeal. That sums up the platform of the majority of groupings competing for votes in tomorrow's ballot for seats in a 200-strong assembly that will appoint a new interim government, which will rule until a constitution is drafted and approved in a national referendum. (The assembly was supposed to elect a committee to draft the constitution, but it was announced this week that members of the committee will be directly elected by voters.)

Almost all parties, including those considered more liberal, have adopted variations on the "Islamic frame of reference" line used by the JCP since it was established as one of Libya's first political entities in March.

Many within Libya's Islamist firmament talk of Benghazi, a conservative city with a long history of religious-tinged dissent before it became the cradle of Libya's revolution last year, as something of a bellwether. Its recent local council elections, in which Islamists won a high percentage of the vote, are viewed as a possible indicator as to how tomorrow's poll may play out. Benghazi is also considered the main contest for the Islamists. The JCP rally here on the day Morsi's victory was announced was the party's biggest and most lavish, featuring live horses (the party's campaign symbol is a rearing stallion) on stage.

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a former leader of the now defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) who stepped down as head of the Tripoli Military Council earlier this year to join another new political body, the Homeland Party, has appeared at several campaign events in Benghazi -- even though he is running for election some 500 miles away in his home neighborhood of Souq al Jumaa, in Tripoli. "Much depends on Benghazi. It's a natural base for the Islamists," he says. The city is also home to a number of much smaller Islamist parties, some of whom have a more rigid agenda, that are fielding candidates only in Benghazi or across eastern Libya.

I met Sawan a few days before his Benghazi speech at an airy Tripoli villa which serves as a temporary headquarters for the JCP. He was between meetings with party apparatchiks who were finalizing an election campaign that would see him criss-cross the country several times.

Sawan told me that he predicts those candidates -- whether running on party lists or as independents -- that belong to what he calls the "Islamic current" will take at least 60 percent of the seats in the new national assembly. Belhaj and other leading Islamists echo Sawan's forecast. The performance of independent candidates is considered key. Under Libya's new electoral system, 120 seats are allocated for individual candidates with the remaining 80 going to those on party lists. As a result, several parties are fielding party members or affiliates -- particularly those considered high profile or popular enough to win without the support of the party machine -- as independent candidates.

On a recent canvas through a lower-middle class Tripoli district, one such candidate, Nizar Kawan, an Amazigh (or Berber) member of the Muslim Brotherhood, introduced himself to prospective voters as an independent candidate, though also a member of the JCP. Accompanied by a small army of male and female JCP activists wearing t-shirts and sashes emblazoned with the slogan "Libya will flourish with our will," Kawan strode through the area, shaking hands and distributing pamphlets as a young JCP activist filmed it all on an iPad. Dressed casually in a polo shirt and jeans, Kawan, a clean-shaven professional in his thirties, said his Muslim Brotherhood background is rarely an issue. "People ask about your program and what you are going to do for Libya, not your ideology."

One of the JCP canvassers, however, griped about attempts to demonize the Muslim Brotherhood and, by extension, the JCP. "There's lots of propaganda on the Internet trying to portray us as extremists. When we tell people who have suspicions about the [Muslim Brotherhood] that Nizar Kawan is a member, they are surprised and their minds change."

Sawan admits the Muslim Brotherhood, which he claims does not constitute the majority of the JCP membership, has an image problem in Libya. Qaddafi sought to portray the Muslim Brotherhood as dangerous radicals and because of his regime's severe repression -- members were referred to as "wayward dogs" and many were executed, jailed, or forced into exile -- the movement never managed to gain a social foothold in Libya, as it did in Egypt and other parts of the region.

"Some people here think the Muslim Brotherhood is something to be frightened of. This is based on misunderstanding -- they don't know what it is and they confuse us with extreme factions," Sawan says. "I am confident that gradually, as people get to know us, the real image of the Muslim Brotherhood will emerge and people will change their views like they did in Tunisia and Egypt."

Belhaj is also engaged in a battle of perceptions. Homeland Party officials acknowledge that while Belhaj has impeccable credentials within a particular milieu, his presence in the party has prompted questions from many other potential voters who have doubts about his evolution from a jihadist who led an insurgency against Qaddafi in the 1990s and spent time in Afghanistan to that of a fully paid-up democrat. Some also suspect him of being too close to Qatar -- the party's purple livery has prompted someto jokingly compare it to the maroon flag of the Gulf state.

The Homeland Party is leaderless for now, though Belhaj is its most recognizable face. Within its ranks are affluent business people with no Islamist background, Muslim Brotherhood members who did not join the JCP, and Libyans who were heavily involved in civil society efforts during last year's revolution, including Lamia Busidra, a British-educated engineer in her late thirties. Busidra's candidacy in Benghazi -- she is top of the party list there and the most prominent figure in a glossy billboard campaign -- has drawn criticism because she does not wear the hijab. But other party members, including Belhaj, say it demonstrates the diverse nature of the party -- whose slogan reads "All partners for the homeland" -- that sets it apart from others. "Our program is for all Libya so backgrounds are not very important. We are all contributing, whether Islamist or not," says Belhaj. Several other party members, including another Benghazi candidate, Mohammed Bayou, stress Homeland's nationalist nature over any religious tones. "We are not an Islamic or religious party," he says. "We are a nationalist party with an Islamic frame of reference that values active citizenship as the main base."

While Belhaj has a tiny cohort of former LIFG members in the Homeland Party, far more of the former LIFG forces have joined a smaller, more conservative party, Hizb al Umma al Wasat, founded by the LIFG's former deputy leader Sami al-Saadi. Its members include once prominent LIFG figures such as Khalid Sharif, who now heads Libya's National Guard, and Abdulwahab al-Ghayed, brother of Abu Yahya al Libi, who was recently killed by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. Al-Ghayed, who played a leading role in the revolution following his release from prison in February last year, is running for election in his hometown of Morzug in southern Libya.

At a recent rally in Tripoli, al-Saadi talked of building a moderate state rooted in Islam. "Freedom is a great thing, and we paid a heavy price for it, but it also requires responsibility," he told the modest crowd. Members describe Hizb al Umma al Wasat, which is running around 20 candidates, as more religious than the other, bigger parties, but say it is open to working with other Islamists once elected.

For months, Libya's Islamists have wondered if the country, which has a sizable Salafi current, would witness an equivalent to Egypt's Salafi al-Nour party which surprised analysts and pollsters with its performance in parliamentary elections last year. A number of small Salafi political groupings have sprung up, the largest of which is Asala. A senior figure from the party stressed that Asala, whose campaign posters feature women candidates wearing the niqab, is not a party per se and that it would only contest elections for the national assembly to ensure the Salafi perspective is heard in any constitutional deliberations.

Already the main parties within Libya's Islamist spectrum are discussing how they might cooperate with each other within the national assembly. "We will try to make arrangements to work together in the future as a bloc," says Abdel-latif Karmous, deputy leader of Libya's Muslim Brotherhood. "We are not really far from each other in terms of ideas."

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Cristina Everett / NY Daily News:

Rihanna on Chris Brown relationship: ‘I never thought I’d feel that pain in my life’  —  The singer doesn’t name anyone in particular, but says she fell ‘so hard’ for an ex she was ‘really, really, really’ in love with  —  Rihanna admits in the August issue of Harper’s Bazaar that she’s …

Why is the U.S. afraid to lead the global economic recovery?

BY KATI SUOMINEN | JULY 6, 2012

The release of another weak U.S. jobs report this Friday, July 6 -- which showed the economy adding only 80,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate holding steady at 8.2 percent -- raises some serious red flags. It's just one of many signs these days that the world economy is once again on the brink of an abyss. Nearly four years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, U.S. growth is flailing, central banks are racing to cut interest rates, and several European nations have plunged back into recession. Instead of powering the 21st-century world economy, export-dependent emerging markets remain hostage to the transatlantic economic morass. We should be out of this by now. The missing ingredient? U.S. leadership.

In the 20th century, beginning with the creation of the Bretton Woods system in 1944, America's great contribution was to champion an economic paradigm and set of institutions that promoted open markets and economic stability around the world. The successive Groups of Five, Seven, and Eight, first formed in the early 1970s, helped coordinate macroeconomic policies among the world's leading economies and combat global financial imbalances that burdened U.S. trade politics. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) spread the Washington Consensus across Asia and Latin America, and shepherded economies in transition toward capitalism. Eight multilateral trade rounds brought down barriers to global commerce, culminating in the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.

Meanwhile, a wave of bank deregulation and financial liberalization began in the United States and proliferated around the world, making credit more available and affordable while propelling consumption and entrepreneurship the world over. The U.S. dollar, the world's venerable reserve currency, economized global transactions and fueled international trade. Central bank independence spread from Washington to the world and helped usher in the Great Moderation, which has produced a quarter-century of low and steady inflation around the world.

Globalization was not wished into being: It was the U.S.-led order that generated prosperity unimaginable only a few decades ago. Since 1980, global GDP has quadrupled, world trade has grown more than sixfold, the stock of foreign direct investment has shot up by 20 times, and portfolio capital flows have surged to almost $200 trillion annually, roughly four times the size of the global economy. Economic reforms and global economic integration helped vibrant emerging markets emerge: The "Asian Tigers" (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) that boomed in the 1980s were joined in the 1990s by the awakening giants of Brazil, China, and India.

It was the United States that quarterbacked the play, brokering differences among nations and providing the right mix of global public goods: a universal reserve currency, an open-trade regime, deep financial markets, and vigorous economic growth. Trade liberalization alone paid off handsomely, adding $1 trillion annually to the postwar U.S. economy.

Talk about American decline notwithstanding, the economic order created by the United States persists. In fact, at first blush, it appears to have only been reinforced in the past few years. New institutions such as the G-20, a forum for the world's leading economies, and the Financial Stability Board, a watchdog for the international financial system, are but sequels to U.S.-created entities: the Group of Five and the Financial Stability Forum. Investors still view America as a financial safe haven, and the dollar remains the world's lead currency. Open markets have survived, and 1930s-style protectionism has not materialized. The WTO continues to resolve trade disputes and recently welcomed Russia as its 154th member, while the mission and resources of the Bretton Woods twins -- the World Bank and IMF -- have only expanded. No country has pulled out of these institutions; instead, emerging nations such as China and India are demanding greater power at the table. Countries have opted in, not out, of the American-led order, reflecting a reality of global governance: There are no rival orders that can yet match this one's promise of mutual economic gains.

Still, while the American order is peerless, it is also imperiled. The deepening European debt crisis, discord over national policies to restore growth, and the all-but-dead Doha Development Round of WTO negotiations speak to the failures of the global economy's existing instruments to manage 21st-century challenges. Instead of coordinating policies, leading countries are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma, elbowing for an edge in world trade and jockeying for power on the world stage. Tensions simmer over issues such as exchange-rate manipulation, capital controls, creeping protectionism, and financial nationalism.

Right at the moment when we most need to shore up the troubled global economic order, America -- the architect of this very order -- is failing to lead. Even as the United States remains pivotal to global growth, U.S. corporations -- the engines of the American economy -- are stifled by taxes, regulations, and policy uncertainty. Gaping fiscal deficits in the United States are undermining the dollar, exacerbating trade deficits, and undercutting U.S. economic dynamism and credibility in world affairs, but political posturing has obstructed the country's path to solvency. Earlier this week, the IMF warned that if political deadlock takes America to the so-called fiscal cliff of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts in January 2013, it could have a devastating impact on the U.S. and world economies. No wonder America's image as the global economic superpower is receding around the world.

Europe's travails, meanwhile, are reducing U.S. companies' exports and overseas profits, threatening America's recovery. And yet Congress has balked at boosting the IMF's resources to fight the eurozone crisis while the Obama administration has deflected responsibility, framing the crisis as Europe's to manage. It has fallen to countries such as Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and Russia to instead build the firewall that will shield the rest of the world from Europe.

The welcome momentum in negotiations between the United States and Pacific Rim countries on the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement does not undo over three years of drift in U.S. trade policy that has jeopardized the very global trading system that the United States built and powered in the postwar era. The only trade deals that the Obama administration has passed -- with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea -- were launched and negotiated by the Bush administration.

The world is now facing a triple threat of global economic instability, divisions among top powers, and a global leadership vacuum. This perfect storm could produce a world disorder of mercurial financial markets, widening global imbalances, spreading state capitalism, and beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism -- a scenario with a sorry past and few safe exits.

In the late 1940s, a new world order arose because of American strength, vision, and leadership, not because global governance was in vogue. Leadership was never easy: Resistance from allies, protectionist pressures at home, and resource-draining wars all stood in the way. But capitalism spread, trade and financial markets were liberalized, and emerging-market crises were defeated. Global economic integration forged ahead.

Today, American leadership is again essential. China prioritizes mercantilism over multilateralism, and emerging nations have yet to fully step up to the plate when it comes to global governance, while Europe and Japan are neither able nor willing to lead. In placing their faith in multilateralism, liberal institutionalists often fail to realize that the world economic order is built on American primacy and power, and Washington's willingness to project it.

To lead abroad, the United States must reform at home by imposing ironclad fiscal discipline, cutting taxes and red tape for businesses, and locking in long-term policies -- summoning the private sector to reform schools and rebuild infrastructure, for instance -- that harness the productivity of America's future generations.

Abroad, the United States needs to focus on pre-empting instability and integrating the global economy. It should push the IMF to address financial risks before they mushroom into catastrophes, revise the multilateral trade regime to allow for fast deals among a critical mass of members rather than agonizing, decade-long talks requiring the consent of the full membership, and work toward unfettered global financial markets -- all the while deepening access to U.S. goods, services, and investment around the world. A Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and a transatlantic free trade pact are low-hanging fruits that can jump-start global growth without any new stimulus dollars.

The quintessential challenge facing U.S. policymakers is to convince other nations to buy into a rules-based order rather than respond to the siren calls of currency wars and capital controls. For example, with most emerging economies uneasy about Beijing's trade and foreign policies, Washington must incentivize others to take the high ground and strengthen investor protections, enforce intellectual property rights, and adhere to trade rules. With others playing by the rules of the game, a misbehaving China would be turned into a pariah.

A stable, integrated, and growing world economy serves our national interests. But such a world is America's to make.

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TMZ.com:

Natalie Wood Death Certificate Changed — Cause of Death Now “Undetermined”  —  Death Certificate Changed  —  “UNDETERMINED”  —  EXCLUSIVE  —  Natalie Wood’s death certificate has been changed from “Accident” to “Undetermined” … TMZ has learned.  —  Law enforcement sources tell TMZ …