Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hasn’t been quite so cocky lately.

He knows a lot of his countrymen don’t like him and now, just 4 months from a national election, a strong challenger for his job has popped up.

Muhammad Khatami, the soft spoken reformist cleric and former 2-term president of Iran has thrown his turban into the ring!

Back in 1997, Khatami’s election was thought to herald a departure from the hard-core ideologues who’d ruled the roost ever since the Revolution.

But Khatami couldn’t reign in the fractious reformists that swept into power with him, the movement was eaten alive by an entrenched conservative bloc, and next thing you know, Ahmadinejad –exasperatingly flaky, populist rants and all—was the new game in town.

But that’s old news. Nowadays, oil prices have fallen through the floor and Iran’s economy has followed suit. Plus that nasty inflationary spiral’s got the middle class up in arms and those cockamamie crackdowns on dissent are just so yesterday for the secularized citizens of the nation.

It’s gotten to a point where Ahmadinejad might not even get the fist bump from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, OKing him to seek a second term.

Meanwhile the centrifuges-are-a-spinnin’, so the Big O can’t just sit on his hands until the election plays out.

“The Iranian nation is ready for talks, but in a fair atmosphere with mutual respect,” Ahmadinejad informed a crowd during celebrations commemorating 30 years of the Revolution.

He knew Obama was dialed in.

Later in the speech, the man said Iran was a superpower with nuclear and rocket technology to boot. Oy vey!

Earlier this month physicians at a clinic in Udine, Italy withdrew nutritional support from Eluana Englaro, a 38 year-old woman that had been in an irreversible coma for 17 years. She died 3 days later.

Sad though it may be, such an event isn’t particularly newsworthy in most of Europe, but it was huge in Italy.

Pro-choice and pro-life protestors came to blows outside the clinic.

TV programming was interrupted to report the woman’s demise.

And at the time Ms. Englaro passed away, parliament was haggling over a bill to keep her alive.

“Eluana has been killed,” declared a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling coalition.

After trying for 9 years, the woman’s father had secured a ruling from the nation’s highest appeals court that his daughter had a right to die because she had stated a preference not to be kept alive by artificial means before her auto accident.

The Vatican saw the ruling as licensing euthanasia, and since the women had been receiving care at a church-run facility, she had to be transferred.

And Berlusconi himself stepped into the fray. The prime minister, who thinks noblesse oblige is an Italian expression, directed his cabinet to issue a decree forcing the woman’s physicians to keep her alive.

Forget the political process and the polls showing most Italians favored the woman’s right to die. All that had to happen was for President Giorgio Napolitano to sign the decree and it was done.

But he didn’t.

Fallout from the tragedy is that Berlusconi and Napolitano won’t be sipping cappuccinos by the Spanish Steps any time soon, and parliament is making progress on a bill enabling people to draw up living wills.

That’s not something 21 year-olds are prone to do but it’s a start.

Normally, getting Europeans to agree on anything is dicey but right now just about everybody over there is delighted the Big O made it all the way.

His strip-whitened smile blankets TV screens, celebrity magazines and newspapers all over Europe, and large majorities of people in the 5 largest EU countries, ranging from 77% in the UK to an otherworldly 92% in France believe he will have a favorable global impact.

Funny though, the Big O didn’t even mention the word “Europe” in his inaugural address.

And sacre-bleu! It took 3 days before he so much as pinged a European leader, placing every one of them behind those of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Jordan, to name a few.

And then of all things he called Gordon Brown first.

Uh-oh! Did Obama catch Anglophilia from Bush when they shook hands at the swearing-in?

Come to think of it, the Big O dodged a chance to meet the top 5 EU leaders when they rolled in last November for the G20.

And we can only guess how many times he’s turned down requests to visit Germany’s beleaguered Angela Merckel, who is up for re-election and would love to catch some stardust from the man who drew 200K in Berlin last summer.

 “Everybody wants the first visit of the Messiah,” a French official wryly remarked to the Economist.

Alas the Big O probably already knows the Europeans will get jiggy when he starts asking for help.

They’re not exactly lining up to take Guantanamo Bay detainees off his hands, are they?  They’re not exactly rushing to outfit troops for a summer tour in Afghanistan, are they?

And as for cooperation on the economic crisis, Josef Braml, an officer in Germany’s Council on Foreign Relations managed to splutter that the matter will trigger a “heavy burden-sharing debate” between America and its European allies.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement there, either.

It’s a debate whether the Big O’s trillion-dollar economic Hail Mary will work and how well, but no one can argue that the man instantly put America back in the stem cell business.

Just 3 days after the inauguration, the FDA green-lighted Geron to carry out the nation’s first clinical trial of stem cell technology.

We can’t even get a pizza delivered in 3 days! 

Geron was free to seek approval and the FDA free to grant it before the election since the Bush Administration’s ban did not impact privately funded research.  But Bush appointees at the FDA weren’t going to give the light of day to any stem cell proposals.

And when Bush banned federal funding for stem cell research, the firestorm frightened off private investors too. Hopefully when the Big O waves the magic wand these investors come back.

In the Geron trial, scientists will recruit 8-10 people with recent severe spinal-cord injuries to assess whether it’s safe to administer oligodendrocytes into the injured tissue one to 2 weeks after the injury. 

Of course everything will be scoured for signs the underlying condition has changed. A successful outcome would beget larger safety trials and on we go. 

Geron’s scientists can transform embryonic stem cells into oligodendrocytes which are not nerves but rather nearby cells that produce myelin, which in turn is a gummy substance that forms a sheath around neurons. Myelin is essential to the neurons’ ability to transmit electrical signals down their length.

In rats, oligodendrocytes administered this way help repair native myelin sheaths and yes, restore to some extent the neuron’s ability to transmit signals.

But since neurons themselves are not being replaced, the treatment proposed by Geron will have limited applications. Still, it’s a critical step towards eventually reconnecting the brain and extremities of people with spinal cord injuries.

al-Qaeda has been in a rut lately. It hasn’t been able to strike the West since London, 2005. Its top dogs are pinned down by Predator drones in Pakistan, and the Pushtun are pretty much fed up with their guests.

All that leaves bin Laden and al Zawahiri trying to exploit the news rather than making it.

bin Laden’s most recent diatribe for example claims his jihad caused America’s economic collapse and that’s funny because we thought it was bad real estate bets in Las Vegas and Stockton.

And the Big O can’t win according to bin Laden, because if he pulls out of Bush War I and Bush War II, he loses militarily and if he fights on it worsens our economy.

bin Laden thought he could get his mojo back when the Israelis ransacked Gaza but that’s probably not going to work, either.

Israel’s brutal march has surely radicalized thousands more Muslims, but when they look around for someone or something to follow they see plenty of groups that have fought harder against Israel than al-Qaeda.

Hamas and Hezbollah, for example.

Foolishly, al-Qaeda dismisses these groups. They’ve participated in elections meaning they’ve put human laws above God’s. And the Hez and Hamas are Shia meaning they’re apostates.

Oh really? Even former al-Qaeda members are nailing bin Laden and al Zawahiri for these gaffes. For example, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, an al-Qaeda founder who left the organization after a spat with Zawahiri, has launched a blistering ideological attack against al-Qaeda using a pen-name, Dr. Fadl.

The good doctor says al-Qaeda does “not offer Palestine anything except words,” and that Zawahiri is a yellow-bellied sapsucker who incites others to die for the cause while he enjoys soup with his buddies in a mountain getaway.

Graveyards and prisons overflow with jihadists, writes Dr. Fadl, but al-Qaeda leaders headed for the hills.

Asian stock markets dropped faster than those in the G7 countries during 2008. Taiwan’s exports plummeted 42% during the year and South Korea’s fell by 17%. Even China’s dipped a bit.

Do we take these to be signs the Great Economic Crisis will end the Asian emerging markets boom once and for all?

Probably not, according to the Economist. In fact many Asian economies are likely to recover faster than ours.

Economists who predict long term trouble for emerging Asian economies argue that the boom was  fueled by three things—exports to American consumers, easy access to cheap capital and high commodity prices—and all 3 have collapsed. 

But claims that Asian economies rely on consumption in G7 countries are exaggerated. The Asian export surge since 2000 is almost totally explained by exports to the developing world. Exports to G7 countries has barely budged from 20% of the pan-Asian GDP since 2000.

And Asian companies are net importers of commodities, so they stand to benefit from the collapse in their prices.

Meanwhile Gerard Lyons, the senior economist at Standard Chartered, emphasizes that many emerging Asian economies do not face the structural problems confronting America’s economy.

He mentions in particular our overwhelming domestic debt, which might forestall growth for years and blunt the impact of fiscal stimulus programs like the one the Big O is about to unveil.

This is especially true of China. Many expect that nation’s GDP will drop to 7% in 2009, down from 12% in 2007 and its lowest growth in 20 years.

Thousands of factories have already closed in China, and the government rolled-out a major fiscal stimulus package just last month.

But China has debts amounting to only 18% of GDP, so its government can throw several more stimulus packages together if necessary. And these programs would help build domestic demand, thereby sheltering its economy once and for all from our capricious ways.

Remember when the CEOs of GM, Ford and Chrysler flew corporate jets to Washington to beg for a bailout?

After receiving a righteous whuppin’ by politicians, bloggers and YouTubers, the group returned for a second go a month later in cars.

The fiasco was a killer for business-jet industry which had hoped the CEOs would defend the craft as time-savers.

They “didn’t have the guts to defend their actions,” Michael Boyd told the Economist.

No seriously, the aviation consultant does know the jets are a smidge unpopular these days. 

“Right up there with Saddam Hussein,” was the way Boyd put it.

In fact, many companies appear to have decided to rid themselves of their jets altogether. The US automakers, Time Warner, AT&T and Citigroup have put their jets up for sale and other companies cancelled orders for new ones. 

As a result, UBS reports a 62% increase year-over-year in the number of second-hand corporate jets on the market—that’s the highest number since the statistic was introduced.

“The market is dead,” states the UBS report in one particularly gloomy passage. Elsewhere, the report describes current affairs as “possibly the worst market since 1970.”

Surprisingly, not everyone agrees. The Economist cites a JPMorgan analysis of asking prices for used jets—they actually rose 3.4% in November.

To Jonathan Breeze, Jet Republic’s CEO, that means some firms don’t really want to sell their jets at all. They put their jets on the block for an unreasonably high price, assuring there will be no buyers. This way they appear to be in touch with the times while the top dogs gallivant around as usual.

The key component of solar panels is silicon, but the stuff is expensive so producers are always tempted to utilize less of it.

In fact the latest generation of panels features silicon layers no more than 2 microns thick. Earlier generations were 100 times thicker.

The problem is that thinner cells are less efficient, and these new ones produce 20% less electricity per unit area than the older ones.

But Kylie Catchpole, from Canberra’s Australian National University and Albert Polman, from the Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam might have solved the problem.

All they did was add a few silver atoms to those thin silicon panels.

When sunlight strikes the silver atoms, it excites their electrons. A moment later, they fall back to an unexcited state and release light of their own.

If the silver atoms are arrayed correctly along the silicon layers of a solar panel, that light runs along the surface of the layer rather than penetrating through it.

This has the effect of maximizing the photoelectric effects of whatever small amounts of silicon may be present in the cell.

The scientists write in Optics Express that their silver bullet increases the efficiency of the thin silicon cells to a point where they produce approximately as much electricity as the more expensive, earlier generation panels.

And yes silver is itself expensive, but the new technique uses so little of it, it adds only a few pennies to the price.

The First Annual Bernie Madoff Award for Global Business Chutzpah goes to Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering firm which just copped a plea to bribery and corruption charges involving public officials and politicians on 4 continents.

The multinational agreed to pay $800 million worth of fines in America and another $540 million in Germany. That was in addition to the $280 million it coughed up to settle an earlier, similar charge.

But the size of the fines wouldn’t have, by itself, put Siemens over the top for the Madoff Award. It was the perverse sense of openness with which the process unfolded, as if people throughout the organization knew and accepted this was the way to do business.

According to the Economist, Siemens set up in full view 3 “cash desks” in its offices. Everyone knew employees could tote empty suitcases there and have them filled with cash to be used in paying off public officials for awarding contracts to Siemens.

Managers could pull out as much as $1.3 million at a time in support of efforts to secure contracts for the company’s telecoms-equipment division, according to the US Department of Justice.

Between 2001 and 2004, nearly $67 million was withdrawn in those suitcases, and all tolled according to Justice, Siemens paid foreign officials $805 million over a 6-year period.

No questions were asked, little documentation was required and managers needing money could approve their own requests.

Until 1999 Siemens actually claimed tax deductions for the bribes, booking them as “useful expenditure.”

“There was no complex financial structuring such as you would find among drug smugglers or money launderers,” Mark Pieth, chairman of OECD’s working group on bribery told the Economist. “People felt confident they were doing nothing wrong.”

Now that’s chutzpah!

Every winter it seems, Russia and Ukraine get into a spat about Russian gas supplies, but this year the squabble ballooned into an energy emergency for the entire European Union. 

The EU receives 25% of its gas from Russian gas conglomerate Gazprom via a pipeline coursing through Ukraine.

Ukraine is itself a Gazprom customer and for years it paid less than half the market price for gas. In the fall, the 2 countries agreed that Ukraine would transition slowly to market prices but Ukraine wanted to increase is transit fees on gas headed for the EU in return.

Gazprom made an insulting offer in this regard. Ukraine responded with an outlandish counter. The parties then stopped talks just as Vlad the Impaler sniffed for the umpteenth time that his feelings got hurt when the Ukrainians supplied arms to the Georgians during last summer’s dance party in Tbilisi.

Who knows what happened over the holidays but just after new year a shady court ruling in Kiev voided the pricing agreement and hours later the Impaler ordered Gazprom to cut supplies to Europe through Ukraine by an amount it accused Ukraine of siphoning off for internal use.

“Ukraine had neither the need nor the intention to steal Russian gas,” Hryhory Nemyria, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister told the Economist. And he added that Russia’s crass act in the dead of winter exposes it as an energy bully.

To which Gazprom’s Alexander Medvedev retorted that Ukraine “is responsible for everything that has happened.”

The squabble has hit Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Slovakia the hardest. It has impacted France, Germany and Italy as well.

Then over the weekend, Russia noticed its gas reservoirs were topped off meaning if it didn’t resume pumping soon, it would have to start burning gas.

Seeing the folly in that, the sides just agreed to get the gas flowing again and have neutral observers monitor the pipeline. There are also plans to have both boys stand in a corner for 5 minutes.