Priced-out Londoners turn to empty homes

London is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet, but it is also home to tens of thousands of empty properties -- and some people are taking matters into their own hands.

Squatters have taken over buildings in some of the most upmarket areas of London, most recently on Leicester Square, where a group of artists have set up a home in a disused office block.

Those seeking a more conventional route have struck short-term residential lets with the owners of prime business space which they have struggled to rent out because of the recession.

"We're a bit spoilt for choice when it comes to properties. In central London there's a plethora of prime real estate that's simply going to waste," said Dan Simon, whose squatter movement took over the Leicester Square block.

His artistic group, called The Oubliettes, is making a habit of occupying top London buildings, where they show their work and hold art classes. Previous 'homes' include the former Mexican embassy in the plush Mayfair district.

Their latest project is an unimpressive office block in a highly impressive location -- right next door to the Odeon West End cinema which regularly hosts glamorous red carpet film premieres.

Simon said "financial constraints" were a big motivation for their movement but insists their presence benefits landlords because empty buildings can attract crime and fall into a state of disrepair.

Across the River Thames in the up-and-coming district of Denmark Hill, David Ireland, chief executive of campaign group Empty Homes Agency, made the same point as he stood outside a row of 18 boarded-up homes in a single street.

"Things like this attract petty crime and attract a feeling of the area in decline," he told AFP.

Ireland said the houses, some of which have been empty for years, could be used for new homes.

"The UK is a country which has got huge housing need and a lot of need for new homes, and yet we've got a million that could be used if only the attention was paid to them instead of always looking at new homes," he said.

Rents in London are among the highest in the world, with a one-bedroom flat in the city centre costing at least 300 pounds a week.

The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, wants to deliver 50,000 more affordable homes across the capital by 2011, and empty homes are part of this strategy.

His housing blueprint published in May puts the number of long-term empty properties in London at about 35,000, and the mayor has vowed to invest 60 million pounds by 2011 to bring them back into use.

Back in Denmark Hill, the hospital trust that owns 12 of the empty houses says they are being sold, and officials elsewhere say many of the homes listed as empty are simply awaiting sale -- a process extended by the housing slump.

For those homes left to languish, local councils have a variety of means to bring them back into use, ranging from providing grants to redevelop them to compulsory purchase orders.

Philippa Roe, the councillor with responsibility for housing in Westminster, which includes Leicester Square, said her local authority is trying to "look creatively" at the problem -- including using so-called property 'guardians'.

Unable to rent out one of its office blocks in the central Soho district, the council turned to an association that found short-term tenants willing to live there for minimal rent -- a win-win solution for both sides. (AFP)

Spain and Greece start swine flu vaccinations

Spain and Greece launched vaccination campaigns against swine flu on Monday, health officials in both countries said.

Swine flu has killed at least 90 people in Spain, while press reports say fewer than 10 people have died in Greece. Athens has for weeks released no official figures on fatalities or on the number of cases.

Spain's health ministry said the government has bought 37 million doses of the A(H1N1) flu vaccine and will start inoculating high-risk groups such as pregnant women, health workers and those with serious illnesses.

Health authorities in Greece said a total of 700,000 doses would be made available on a voluntary basis to doctors, ambulance staff and other high-risk employees. A second vaccination wave will follow next week for pregnant women and people with underlying health concerns, officials said.

The campaign will continue to mid-December with people aged 18-49, children and adolescents, and those over 50, the Greek health ministry said.

The United States began swine flu vaccinations on October 6. In Europe, Britain and France began their own campaigns late last month, after similar actions in Belgium, Italy and Sweden.

In Tunisia, the government announced on Monday the North African country's first two swine flu fatalities.

The two men, a sailor aged 37 and another man aged 40, died in hospital at the weekend, Tunisia's public health ministry said.

The sailor was suffering from serious hepatitis worsened by the flu and the other man had serious heart problems, the ministry added.

According to health officials, 210 people in Tunisia have been infected by the A(H1N1) virus.

In Turkey, health officials said on Monday another 13 people had lost their lives to the virus, bringing the total number of swine flu deaths there to 73.

At least 6,250 people have died of swine flu worldwide, with most of the deaths recorded in the Americas, according to the World Health Organisation. It said the pandemic now stretches across 206 countries or territories worldwide. (AFP)

Vitamin D deficiency linked to strokes, heart disease: study

Insufficient intake of vitamin D, long known to play a key role in bone health, may significantly increase a person's risk of stroke, heart disease and even death, a US study said Monday.

Examining 27,686 Utah patients aged 50 or older with no history of cardiovascular disease, the study found those with very low vitamin D levels were 77 percent more likely to die early than those with normal levels.

They were also found to be 45 percent more likely to develop coronary artery disease and 78 percent were more likely to have a stroke, said the research by the Heart Institute at the Intermountain Medical Center in Salt Lake City.

Those with very low levels of vitamin D were twice as likely to develop heart failure, said the study which was due to be presented later Monday at a conference organized by the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida.

"If increasing levels of vitamin D can decrease some risk associated with these cardiovascular diseases, it could have a significant public health impact," said study co-author Heidi May, noting that vitamin D deficiency is easily treatable.

"When you consider that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in America, you understand how this research can help improve the length and quality of people's lives."

Studies have shown that Vitamin D also helps regulated key body functions such as blood pressure, inflammation and glucose control -- all related to heart disease -- and that deficiency of the vitamin is associated with musculoskeletal disorders.

Brent Muhlestein, another co-author of the study and the director of cardiovascular research at Intermountain, stressed that because the study was only observational, definitive links between vitamin D deficiency and heart disease could not be established.

He called for randomized treatment trials of patients with insufficient levels of the vitamin.

Two thirds of the Utah population does not get enough vitamin D, according to the study.

The researchers chose Utah -- home to the Mormon church -- in part because the population consumes low levels of tobacco and alcohol, thus allowing them to focus the study on vitamin D's effects on the cardiovascular system, explained Muhlestein.

The patients were divided into three groups based on their vitamin D levels -- normal (over 30 nanograms per milliliter), low (15-30 ng/ml) or very low (less than 15 ng/ml) -- and were followed for a year to determine whether they developed some form of heart disease. (AFP)

Where have all the protests gone? US students in limbo

When student Hemnecher Amen joined a protest outside the White House recently, it was the latest visible opposition here to US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hardly anyone took notice.

"There's a lot of apathy and a growing disconnectedness to what's going on in world affairs," the frustrated Howard University junior told AFP as some 200 people, including a handful of students, gathered for the march.

"Students are more interested in trying to get a job and make money. That's essentially the bottom line."

With the US military several years into two faraway wars, American students like Amen are taking to the streets less often -- and to less effect -- than their Vietnam-era predecessors who were the vanguard of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Mounting economic and academic pressures on today's youth, intimidation by authorities, online distractions and conflicted views about the "good" war in Afghanistan, not to mention other causes such as health care and slashed school budgets clawing for attention, have conspired to snuff out anti-war activism on campus, experts and students say.

They acknowledge, too, that US President Barack Obama has paradoxically hampered the movement because many of the largely leftist protest groups haven't wanted to openly oppose him so early in his first term.

"There's this trust that he's going to fix it all," said Shara Esbenshade, 19, a sophomore at Stanford University and member of Stanford Says No To War.

She says there are no anti-war marches on her campus, only vigils, educational events and occasional protests against Condoleezza Rice, who has returned to Stanford after serving as George W. Bush's secretary of state.

"We'd really like to start doing more about Afghanistan," she added. "But students here rising up? I really don't see that happening."

At Kent State University, where in 1970 four unarmed students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard, Andrew Ruminas, 20, a member of the Kent State Anti-War Committee, said "we're not even doing any demonstrations now."

Perhaps, according to 1960s protest icon and political activist Tom Hayden, that's because the single most important act to silence student dissent -- the privatization of conflict -- occurred a generation ago.

"Students were the bulwark of the anti-Vietnam war movement because students were being drafted, full stop," Hayden, a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962, told AFP.

"Ending forced conscription radically diminished the possibilities of future student anti-war protests."

Hayden, one of the "Chicago Seven" charged with inciting to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, said students have "rechanneled" their activism, notably into Internet campaigns including the one last year that helped sweep Obama into the White House.

Many of today's students are marching with their fingers instead of their feet, signing online petitions, reading or writing blogs and planning anti-war agendas on the Web.

Stanley Aronowitz, a Vietnam anti-war organizer, insists online petitions do nothing but entrench users in the "anti-reality" of Internet activism.

"I don't believe petitions do anything," he said. "They are what middle-class people and intellectuals do to convince themselves they're getting somewhere."

Aronowitz, now a sociology professor at City University of New York, acknowledges that new social technologies on the Web -- Facebook, Twitter, YouTube -- have mass mobilization potential.

"But they also privatize people's lives to much more of a degree than when people had to go to meetings and act collectively."

As society has digitized, the American left has splintered, Aronowitz says, losing the confidence to mobilize people as it did in early 2003 when millions protested the looming Iraq invasion.

As a result, "many people have put their faith in electoral politics rather than direct action."

Jonathan Williams, who runs Student Peace Action Network, says it's not just a matter of apathy or a shift to campus issues like soaring student debt; there has been what he calls a "criminalization of dissent."

Williams said he was arrested along with other activists and journalists at a demonstration at last year's Republican National Convention and detained for four days.

In 2007, police used an electro-shock Taser on a student causing a disturbance during an address by Senator John Kerry. Videos of the event have been seen on YouTube more than seven million times.

"After seeing that, are you going to speak out?" Williams asked.

As US support for the Afghan mission retreats -- a CNN poll on Wednesday suggested 58 percent of Americans are now against the war -- Obama is mulling whether to approve a request to send up to 40,000 more troops.

Todd Gitlin, a former SDS president in the 1960s who now teaches at Columbia University, says a "critical mass" of youth against the war has not materialized to bring huge numbers out in protest.

Should Obama approve the Afghan troop request, Gitlin cautions, "that might be the trigger." (AFP)

Calls mount for woman to take a top EU post

Calls mounted Monday for a woman to be appointed to one of the European Union's new top jobs, as the EU presidency struggles to find consensus candidates days before a key summit.

The EU's 27 heads of state and government want to agree Thursday on who should fill the new posts of European president and foreign policy supremo created by the reforming Lisbon Treaty, which was ratified this month.

But no candidate has emerged who seems likely to secure unanimous backing -- the preferred method of decision-making, even if a qualified majority vote will do -- at the working dinner, and few have been women.

"There are very few woman nominated," Sweden's European Affairs Minister Cecilia Malmstroem told reporters, ahead of EU talks in Brussels. "I deplore that because there are a lot of competent women all over Europe."

But with the premier of Sweden, currently presiding over the EU, working with leaders to narrow down the list, Malmstroem said he had to weigh a number of factors when choosing Europe's first president, and top diplomat.

"There are lots of balances that need to be taken into consideration, gender, South-North (EU countries), different political opinions and so on."

Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy is one of the favourites to take up the presidency. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband was well placed for the foreign affairs post, but he has ruled himself out.

Others mentioned for the job of president, with a term of up to five years, include Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, his Luxembourg counterpart Jean-Claude Juncker and former Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga.

Experts say the nominee should be a low-profile technocrat who operates behind the scenes to harmonise the work of the EU's main institutions: the council of nations, the European Commission, and the European parliament.

For the foreign affairs post, former Italian prime minister Massimo D'Alema has been talked about as a strong candidate if Miliband is not available, as has EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn.

Britain's EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton is another possibility.

"She doesn't have any foreign policy experience, but she's a capable woman, she learns quickly," one senior commission official said.

Her chances may be enhanced as calls multiply for more women to be considered, including for the new European Commission to be appointed in coming weeks.

"I'm always in favour of gender equality," EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said. "I think qualified women should be there."

Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb said: "We would look a bit silly were we not able to elect or choose a female."

In a letter to the Financial Times daily, EU commissioners Margot Wallstroem and Neelie Kroes, and the vice president of the European parliament Diana Wallis urged EU leaders to pay more than just lip service to gender balance.

"We need a collective political commitment to ensure political representation of women," they wrote in the business newspaper.

"Women make up a majority of the population, and in the 21st century European democracy cannot afford to use only half of its people's talents, ideas and experiences. When women sit at the table, they can help to ensure that the political decisions reflect the needs of the entire population."

Former Irish president Mary Robinson was one of the few women whose name had been raised, but she too has ruled herself out of the running.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt underlined that the summit was still three days away. "It's a long time. Three days is approaching eternity in politics," he said. (AFP)

Century-old whisky to be retrieved from polar ice

Two crates of Scotch whisky belonging to polar explorer Ernest Shackleton are to be recovered after being buried for a century under the Antarctic ice, officials said Monday.

The two crates of McKinlay (and) Co. whisky were discovered in 2006 by conservators encased in ice under a hut built and used during Shackleton's unsuccessful 1907-09 expedition to reach the South Pole.

The conservators, from the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, plan to use special cutting tools to carefully remove the crates when they return to the hut at Cape Royds over the southern hemisphere summer.

Al Fastier of the trust, which is responsible for conserving three explorers' huts in Antarctica, said he won't be tempted to sample the Scotch, saying he prefers to allow the century-old spirits to retain their mystique.

"It would be terrible to sample it and find that it was off," he told Radio New Zealand.

The crates and bottles are expected to undergo conservation work in New Zealand before being returned to the remote hut, which conservators are trying to leave in the same condition that the explorers left it.

But Scottish distillers Whyte (and) Mackay, owners of the McKinlay brand, are keen to get hold of a bottle, or at least a sample, of the now extinct blend.

"We might even get enough to be able to take a stab at recreating it," said the company's master blender Richard Paterson.

Shackleton's expedition ran short of supplies on their long trek to the South Pole from Cape Royds in 1907-09.

They eventually fell about 100 miles (160 kilometres) short of their goal, although one team did reach the magnetic South Pole and the expedition carried out valuable scientific work.

No lives were lost, vindicating Shackleton's decision to turn back from the pole, first reached in 1911 by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

Shackleton later said to his wife "a live donkey is better than a dead lion, isn't it?"

The expedition's ship left Cape Royds hurriedly in March 2009 as winter ice began forming in the sea, with some equipment and supplies -- including the whisky -- left behind.

"I personally think they must have been left there by mistake, because it's hard to believe two crates would have been left under the hut without drinking them," Fastier said. (AFP)

Fearless kids more likely to be adult criminals: study

Children who lack a normal fear response are more likely to commit crimes when they grow up, a study published Monday in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggested.

Researchers assessed the "fear conditioning" of nearly 1,800 three-year-olds by measuring skin activity such as sweat secretion, which is part of the fear reflex, after the children had been blasted by a short, loud, unpleasant sound or a neutral tone.

Then, 20 years later, the researchers looked at the official court records of the study participants.

They found that, by the age of 23, 137 of the study participants had committed serious crimes. None of the adults with a criminal record had shown a normal fear response at age three.

Participants who had not committed a crime by age 23, on the other hand, had a normal fear reaction to the loud, unpleasant noise when they were toddlers.

The researchers hypothesized that the tendency to take up a life of crime as an adult was due less to social conditioning, ethnicity or gender, and more to certain parts of the brain not working as they should.

"The findings of this study potentially provide some support for a neurodevelopmental theory of antisocial and criminal behavior," they wrote.

"If crime is in part neurodevelopmentally determined, efforts to prevent and treat this worldwide behavior problem will increasingly rely on early health interventions," the study said.

For instance, prenatal programs to reduce maternal smoking, alcohol and drug consumption have been shown to reduce juvenile delinquency 15 years later, the study said.

And children aged three to five years old who have a good diet, get plenty of exercise and are mentally stimulated show better brain functioning six years later -- and their rate of criminal offending as adults was reduced by 35 percent. (AFP)