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Salon debunks today’s Telegraph panic-piece by noted hysteriac Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, where it is claimed that the Chinese government are about to dump the greenback, causing the US economy serious problems.

The odd website planningdisaster.co.uk is campaigning against the new Planning Bill, and specifically the idea that NIMBYs won’t be able to stand in the way of developments like places for disabled servicemen’s families to stay in. OK, like wind farms, roads and airports.

The website is supported among others by Friends of the Earth, the National Trust, and an organisation called EnoughIsEnough that seems (from its campaign material) to be a sockpuppet for the Green Party. It’s a Google Maps mash-up that allows you to see where new developments covered by the Planning Bill might go, from nuclear power plants to wind farms.

So FotE, Greenpeace and others are all supporting a website that gets people riled about new wind farms and tidal barrages. Either this is counter-productive campaigning (from their point of view) or they are assuming that wind farms do not face opposition from NIMBYs, which I think most people know is not the case.

The new EU treaty draft has been published – pdf available here.

This American-sounding statement caught my eye on page 5:

“The Union shall act only within the limits of the competences conferred upon it by the Member States in the Treaties to attain the objectives set out therein. Competences not conferred upon the Union in the Treaties remain with the Member States. […] In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Union shall act only if and insofar as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at Union level.”