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Thursday, December 29, 2011
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Strong quake shakes Siberia (AP)
MOSCOW ? Miners in a swath of southwestern Siberia are being told to leave their shafts after a strong earthquake shook the region.
No injuries or damage have been reported from the quake, which had a preliminary magnitude reading of 6.6 and hit late Tuesday.
The epicenter was about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Kyzyl, capital of the Russian republic of Tuva that borders Mongolia, according to the U.S. National Earthquake Information Center and Russian seismologists.
Russian news agencies quoted Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu as saying miners in the coal-producing regions of Kemerovo and Khakassia were being taken out of the mines.
In Kyzyl, residents of multistory buildings who were concerned about aftershocks were being allowed to spend the night in schools, the state news agency RIA Novosti reported.
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Best Holiday Tech Gift: We Have a Winner! [CONTEST] (Mashable)
Last week, we asked our readers to share the story behind their favorite tech-related holiday gift. The best story wins an Xbox Kinect Bundle (pictured below) courtesy of Target, and a pack of games from Activision, featuring DJ Hero, DJ Hero 2 Party Bundle (2 turntables + microphone), Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock (with 2 Xbox 360 wireless Guitars), Cabela?s Big Game Hunter (with Top Shot Elite), and Rapala for Kinect.
[More from Mashable: The Procrastinator?s Guide to Gift Giving: We?ll Get to That Later]
[More from Mashable: Best Buy Stores Offer BoGo Deal on 32GB iPhone 4]
Thank you to all our readers who submitted stories. We loved all of them. Happy Holidays!
Read Also: Open Thread: Show Us Your Favorite Tech Gifts!
Image courtesy of Flickr, www.metaphoricalplatypus.com
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Mena Golf Tour's top three invited to compete in Asian Tour Qualifying School
Dubai: In a ringing endorsement of the Mena Golf Tour, which ended here in October, the top three participants have been invited to compete in the final stages of the Asian Tour Qualifying School.
Presented by the Sports Authority of Thailand, the final stage will be held from January 18 to 21 at the Springfield Royal Country Club and Imperial Lakeview, where the top-40 and ties will earn playing rights for the 2012 Asian Tour season.
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Our tour has the potential to launch the careers of regional and international stars and with time it will contribute to enhancing the overall development of golf in the region. That's the ultimate aim
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MENA Golf Tour chairman Mohammad Juma Bu Amim
Jake Shepherd, Peter Richardson and Sean McNamara, who finished among the top three on the Order of Merit earlier this year, will receive exemptions into the final stage in recognition of their performance on the four-event MENA Golf Tour, which boasted a combined prize fund of $225,000.
Emerging talent
Article continues below
The three professionals, who have also been handed special invitations to play in the 2012 Omega Dubai Desert Classic in February, are excited at the prospects of competing alongside some of the world's best emerging talent in the final stage.
"It will be an honour to play on the Asian Tour and we are grateful to them for the first-stage exemption," said Shepherd, who topped the MENA Golf Tour Order of Merit with total earnings of $17,749 from three of the four events he played on the tour.
"Playing on the MENA Golf Tour has opened up a wide [range of] opportunities which we never dreamed of. The exposure to the final stage competition will also help us fine-tune our game ahead of the European Tour event in Dubai."
The Qualifying School will also enable upcoming players the opportunity to compete on the Asian Development Tour that has grown to eight tournaments since its inception in 2010.
Excitement
Mohammad Juma Bu Amim, chairman of the MENA Golf Tour, thanked the Asia Tour for their gesture, saying it would add more excitement to the tour and reflect the bond the two tours share.
"Our tour events are open to both professionals and amateurs and, therefore, have a unique appeal. Money is one thing. They offer an opportunity to play golf at the highest level (the Omega Dubai Desert Classic) and now this first stage exemption on the Asian Tour Q-School is an added bonus," he said.
"The players won't be short on incentives when they tee it up in the second edition of the MENA Golf Tour, which we are planning to launch some time in March or April next year.
"Our tour has the potential to launch the careers of regional and international stars and with time it will contribute to enhancing the overall development of golf in the region. That's the ultimate aim."
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Monday, December 26, 2011
Economic inequality an issue for US 2012 campaign
President Barack Obama salutes as he steps off of Air Force One at Hickam Air Force Base in Friday, Dec. 23, 2011, in Honolulu. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
President Barack Obama salutes as he steps off of Air Force One at Hickam Air Force Base in Friday, Dec. 23, 2011, in Honolulu. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Fighting to win over unhappy American voters, President Barack Obama and his Republican challengers are seizing on one of the most potent issues this election season: the struggling middle class and the widening gap between rich and poor.
Highlighted by the Occupy movement and fanned by record profits on Wall Street at a time of stubborn unemployment, economic inequality is now taking center stage in the 2012 presidential campaign, emphasized by Obama and offering opportunities and risks for him and his GOP opponents as both sides battle for the allegiance of the angst-ridden electorate.
For Obama, who calls boosting middle-class opportunity "the defining issue of our time," the question is whether he can bring voters along ? while parrying GOP accusations of class warfare ? even though he's failed to solve the country's economic woes during his first term in office.
For Republicans, Obama's potential vulnerability gives them an opening, but they also must battle perceptions that their policies favor the wealthy at a time when voters support Obama's call to raise taxes on the very rich. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has already made clear he'll resist Obama's attempts to capitalize on the issue, adopting the language of Occupy Wall Street in an interview with the Washington Post this month where he called the president "a member of the 1 percent."
For both sides, the question is how to find political advantage in light of a weak economy with unemployment above 8 percent. Since Obama is expected to run for re-election with higher unemployment than any recent president even if the economy continues to show signs of improvement, he must aim to set the terms of the debate in a way that helps him and hurts the GOP ? while Republicans will be working just as hard to deny him any advantage.
The president won a year-end victory Friday with the passage of a two-month extension of a payroll tax cut that had bipartisan support in the Senate.
The measure will keep in place a 2 percentage point cut in the Social Security payroll tax ? worth about $20 a week for a typical worker making $50,000 (?38,293) a year ? and prevent almost 2 million unemployed people from losing jobless benefits averaging $300 a week.
House Republicans had unsuccessfully attempted to push for further negotiations toward a yearlong extension, which allowed Obama to argue for the two-month extension of the tax cuts and prevention of a pending tax increase. The two sides resume discussions on the payroll tax cut early next year.
Obama's campaign pressed its economic argument Friday in an op-ed by Vice President Joe Biden in The Des Moines Register where Biden, taking direct aim at Romney, wrote that the former Massachusetts governor "would actually double down on the policies that caused the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression and accelerated a decades-long assault on the middle class."
Romney, campaigning in New Hampshire, quickly countered that it's Obama who is hurting the country and expressed astonishment that Biden would have the "chutzpah ... the delusion" to write such a piece. "This president and his policies have made it harder on the American people and on the middle class," Romney said.
It was a preview of an argument certain to carry through the 2012 race, as the Obama campaign, viewing Romney as the likely GOP nominee even before any votes have been cast, works vigorously to define him early on, and Romney does everything he can to resist.
And the dispute taps into a striking reality. After-tax income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007 for the top 1 percent of the population, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found in a report this fall. But for the 20 percent of the population making the least money, income growth over the same period was only 18 percent.
Obama "is viewed as more likely to help the middle class than is the GOP, so he can capitalize on this by playing on concerns about inequality and contrasting his positions and the GOP's on issues like tax cuts for the wealthy," John Sides, political science professor at George Washington University, said by email. "However," Sides added, "it's an open question whether that strategy would enable him to overcome a weak economy and win."
Aides say Obama has long been concerned with economic inequality given his background in community organizing. But he brought the issue into much sharper focus in a speech in Osawatomie, Kan., earlier this month, where he reprised a populist message delivered in the same town by Theodore Roosevelt decades ago, and decried a growing inequality between chief executives and their workers.
"This kind of inequality ? a level that we haven't seen since the Great Depression ? hurts us all," Obama said at the time.
"This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that's at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try."
The issue has become a rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street movement that's swept the country, with activists proclaiming "We are the 99 percent" ? as opposed to the "1 percent" at the top. And Obama advisers have identified this sense of inequality as the strongest current running through politics, one that they will be focusing on through Election Day.
But some polling suggests a note of caution for Obama in pressing the inequality argument. Gallup found this month that a majority of Americans don't view the country as divided into haves and have-nots. The polling also found that more people thought it was important for the government to focus on growing and expanding the economy, (82 percent) and increasing equality of opportunity (70 percent) than on reducing the income and wealth gap between the rich and poor (46 percent).
"The middle class certainly believes that it's in trouble and rightly so, because it is," said Bill Galston, a former Clinton administration domestic policy adviser now at the Brookings Institution. "But they are yet to be convinced that going after the rich will go to the heart of the problems that now afflict them."
That may suggest an opening for some GOP attacks against Obama. Romney charged in a speech in New Hampshire this month that Obama is pursuing an "entitlement society," versus the "opportunity society" that the former Massachusetts governor said he wants to offer the country. Newt Gingrich, Romney and other Republicans also regularly accuse Obama of "class warfare."
Obama senior adviser David Axelrod called such criticism the "Republican cartoon" of Obama's argument.
"In some ways the race will be different depending on who the nominee is but in some ways the same because they largely subscribe to the same economic theory" of cutting taxes for the wealthy and paring back regulations, said Axelrod. He added that Obama's speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, "was a very, very good statement of his values and vision and will help frame much of what comes in the next year."
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Friday, December 23, 2011
U.N. assembly holds "minute" of silence for Kim Jong-il (Reuters)
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) ? The U.N. General Assembly granted a request from North Korea and held a few moments of silence on Thursday for Kim Jong-il, the country's former leader who died on Saturday, though Western delegations boycotted it.
Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, president of the 193-nation assembly, called for a "minute of silence" before the start of a routine meeting at 3:00 p.m. EST in the half-empty U.N. General Assembly hall.
"It is my sad duty to pay tribute to the memory of the late Kim Jong-il, Secretary-General of the Workers Party of Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, who passed away on Saturday, December 17," he said.
The minute of silence lasted for 25 seconds before Nasser proceeded with the scheduled meeting. The United States, European Union member states and Japan were among the countries that boycotted the tribute to Kim Jong-il.
North Korea's U.N. mission made a similar request to the Security Council, but Western diplomats said it was rejected.
"We didn't think it would be appropriate," a diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Several Western diplomats said Pyongyang's request for Kim to be honored was highly unusual. They voiced surprise that Nassir had granted it and added that their delegations would most likely boycott the moment of silence in the assembly.
Speaking at a news conference, Nasser cited "protocol" as the reason for agreeing to the request from North Korea, a full U.N. member. One diplomat said the reason for granting the request was probably because Kim was an acting head of state.
Pyongyang is under Security Council sanctions due to Kim Jong-il's nuclear weapons program, which Western officials say ate up huge sums of money that could have been used to help feed North Korea's starving population.
An official at the Czech Republic's U.N. mission said the Czechs did not request a similar moment of silence for Vaclav Havel, the playwright-turned-dissident who died on Sunday.
The former Czech president was the leader of Czechoslovakia's 1989 "Velvet Revolution," in which he oversaw the peaceful transition from communism to democracy.
(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Eric Walsh)
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Friday, December 16, 2011
Celeb birthdays for the week of Dec. 18-24 (AP)
Dec. 18: Actor Roger Smith is 79. Blues guitarist Lonnie Brooks is 78. Actor Roger Mosley ("Magnum, P.I.") is 73. Guitarist Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones is 68. Director Steven Spielberg is 65. Movie critic Leonard Maltin is 61. Guitarist Elliot Easton of The Cars is 58. Actor Ray Liotta is 56. Actor Brad Pitt is 48. Actress Rachel Griffiths ("Brothers and Sisters," "Six Feet Under") is 43. Country singer Cowboy Troy is 41. Rapper DMX is 41. DJ Lethal of Limp Bizkit is 39. Actor Josh Dallas ("Once Upon a Time") is 33. Actress Katie Holmes ("Dawson's Creek") is 33. Singer Christina Aguilera is 31.
Dec. 19: Country singer Little Jimmy Dickens is 91. Actress Cicely Tyson is 78. Singer Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire is 70. Actress Elaine Joyce is 68. Actor Tim Reid is 67. Singer Alvin Lee of Ten Years After is 67. Musician John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band is 66. Country singer Janie Fricke is 64. Actor Mike Lookinland ("The Brady Bunch") is 51. Actress Jennifer Beals is 48. Actor Scott Cohen ("Gilmore Girls") is 47. Actor Robert MacNaughton ("E.T.") is 45. Magician Criss Angel is 44. Actress Kristy Swanson is 42. Model Tyson Beckford is 41. Actress Alyssa Milano is 39. Actor Jake Gyllenhaal ("Brokeback Mountain," "October Sky") is 31. Actress Marla Sokoloff ("The Practice") is 31. Rapper Lady Sovereign is 26.
Dec. 20: Actor John Hillerman ("Magnum P.I.") is 79. Drummer Bobby Colomby of Blood, Sweat and Tears is 67. Drummer Peter Criss (Kiss) is 66. Musician Alan Parsons is 63. Actress Jenny Agutter is 59. Actor Michael Badalucco ("The Practice") is 57. Actress Blanche Baker ("Shakedown," "Holocaust") is 55. Singer Billy Bragg is 54. Singer-bassist Mike Watt (The Minutemen, fIREHOSE) is 54. Actor Joel Gretsch ("V") is 48. Country singer Kris Tyler is 47. Singer Chris Robinson of Black Crowes is 45. Singer David Cook ("American Idol") is 29. Actor Jonah Hill ("Accepted") is 28. Singer JoJo is 21.
Dec. 21: Country singer Freddie Hart is 85. Actor Ed Nelson ("Peyton Place") is 83. Talk-show host Phil Donahue is 76. Actress Jane Fonda is 74. Singer Carla Thomas is 69. Guitarist Albert Lee is 68. Actor Samuel L. Jackson is 63. Singer Betty Wright is 58. Actress Jane Kaczmarek ("Malcolm in the Middle") is 56. Country singer Lee Roy Parnell is 55. Entertainer Jim Rose of The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow is 55. Actor-comedian Ray Romano ("Everybody Loves Raymond") is 54. Country singer Christy Forester of the Forester Sisters is 49. Drummer Murph of Dinosaur Jr. is 47. Guitarist Gabrielle Glaser (Luscious Jackson) is 46. Actor-comedian Andy Dick ("Less Than Perfect," "Newsradio") is 46. Actor Kiefer Sutherland is 45. Actress Karri Turner ("JAG") is 45. Actress Khrystyne Haje ("Head of the Class") is 43. Country singer Brad Warren of The Warren Brothers is 43. Actress Julie Delpy is 42. Singer-guitarist Brett Scallions (Fuel) is 40. Singer Lukas Rossi of Rock Star Supernova ("Rock Star: Supernova") is 35. Keyboardist Anna Bulbrook of Airborne Toxic Event is 29.
Dec. 22: Actor Hector Elizondo is 75. TV anchor Diane Sawyer is 66. Guitarist Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick is 65. Singer Robin Gibb of The Bee Gees is 62. Rapper Luther Campbell is 51. Guitarist Chuck Mead (BR549) is 51. Actor Ralph Fiennes is 49. Actress Lauralee Bell ("The Young and the Restless") is 43. Actress Heather Donahue ("The Blair Witch Project") is 38. Actor Chris Carmack ("The O.C.") is 31. Singer Jordin Sparks ("American Idol") is 22.
Dec. 23: Actor Frederic Forrest ("Lonesome Dove") is 75. Actor James Stacy ("Lancer") is 75. Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna) is 71. Drummer Ron Bushy of Iron Butterfly is 70. Actor-comedian Harry Shearer ("The Simpsons") is 68. Actress Susan Lucci ("All My Children") is 65. Guitarist Dave Murray of Iron Maiden is 55. Singer Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam is 47.
Dec. 24: Songwriter-bandleader-producer Dave Bartholomew is 91. Singer-bassist Lemmy of Motorhead is 66. Actor Clarence Gilyard ("Walker, Texas Ranger") is 56. Actress Stephanie Hodge ("Unhappily Ever After") is 55. Bassist-synthesizer player Ian Burden of Human League is 54. Actor Anil Kapoor ("Slumdog Millionaire") is 52. Singer Mary Ramsey of 10,000 Maniacs is 48. Actor Mark Valley ("Boston Legal") is 47. Actor Diedrich Bader ("The Drew Carey Show") is 45. Singer Ricky Martin is 40. "Twilight" series author Stephenie Meyer is 38. "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest is 37.
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Monday, November 28, 2011
Books: `Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science' by Michael Nielsen
We knew for quite some time that Michael Nielsen (blog, Twitter) was writing a book about the future of science. He said so on his blog a few times, and wrote some posts as early, preliminary thoughts on the topics he?d like to cover in it, back in 2008 and in 2009 (those two posts are especially worth re-visiting ? still current and thought-provoking).
The book is now out, and I have read the galley proofs sent to me by the publisher early on (bloggers get lots of free books, with no strings attached ? it is up to us to review positively, review negatively, or not review at all). I was just too busy to sit down and write the review until now?
For those of you who do not have the patience to read the whole review, but are interested in the way new technologies, especially the Internet, are changing the way science is done, I can say ? go now and buy yourself a copy of Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science. It is excellent. Worth your investment in time and money.
It is almost easier to describe this book by stating what it is not?
It is not an utopian, hyper-optimistic manifesto for all things Open Science (though the tone is generally optimistic and positive).
It is not an encyclopedia listing thousands of Open Science projects that people have started over the years, so your favourites (including perhaps a project of your own) are unlikely to be mentioned there.
What it is, is a careful examination of the potential for new ways of producing new knowledge. Note that it is not titled ?Reinventing Science? or ?Reinventing Research? but ?Reinventing Discovery?, a much broader concept than just science. It is about various ways in which groups of people, by finding each other online and working together (either cooperatively or competitively), can make new discoveries about the world.
What Michael Nielsen did was carefully choose just a few projects, each using different technology, each having a different goal, and each having a different method, and analyzed how and why they were successful. What small differences made these projects successful while many similar ones were failures? What aspects of the method were key to its success, what were the strengths and what were the weaknesses? Why are some methods better for some specific goals than other methods? Why were some ? initially exciting and heavily touted ? projects failures in the long run? What did they do wrong?
His most thoroughly described and analyzed examples include the Polymath Project, Galaxy Zoo, Linux, and the Kasparov vs. World chess match. Where needed, he also introduced other projects or classes of projects, e.g., Open Notebook Science, Open Access Publishing (e.g,.PLoS), Wikipedia, arXiv, GenBank, InnoCentive, Open Dinosaur Project, eBird and Fold-It. Some notable failed projects are also mentioned and analyzed (e.g., Qwiki).
As you can see, that is quite a breadth of projects with some very different histories, and very different goals. What ties them together is the crowdsourcing element ? how large groups of people can solve problems that a handful of experts cannot solve alone, either due to lack of brain power, or lack of computing power, or lack of time. Some of these projects require that the crowd consists of people with high level of expertise on the subject ? after all, non-mathematicians could not be of much help in the Polymath Project, or non-coders for developing Linux. But for other projects, literally anyone can contribute ? one only needs to have a source of electricity, online access, and an instrument (e.g., computer, or smartphone) to get online to participate. The former are highly informal networks of experts working on a problem, the latter are what we now call ?citizen science? projects.
What is notably missing from the book are lengthy discourses about science communication. There is nothing about the way the Web is disrupting and changing science journalism (and actually very little about scientific publishing). Science blogging is covered in a single subheading about one page long (though pros and cons of the blogging software for discovery are carefully dissected in the discussion of the Polymath Project). There is almost nothing about the use of the Web in science education.
And this is fine ? covering all of those topics would make the book twice as long and would dilute its message (if I was not so busy and so ADHD, I?d relent to the hounding publisher/agent who wants me to write a book about those other areas ? perhaps one day I?ll say yes to that idea so Amazon.com can suggest that people who like my book should also buy Michael?s and vice versa). The book is about the way knowledge is made, not how it is disseminated once it is made ? there is an unstated undertone that the open online activity of the discovery, especially when it involves thousands of non-experts, will inevitably result in the spread of the information, coupled with the excitement of watching ? and sometimes participating in ? the way the information is wrestled from Nature.
The world Nielsen describes is quite reminiscent of the way science is done in ?Rainbows End? by Vernor Vinge:
?How does one get answers to scientific questions, or get new technologies developed? By using the hive-mind. There are online boards and forums. You go there, offer virtual money, and the collective effort of the people on there provides you the answer in a timely fashion. It is so powerful that you can rely on the people to design you a new technology according to your specifications, and do it in time for you to go ahead with your plans, certain that the technology will be available to you at the time when you need it?
Just like in the fictional world of Vinge, the projected future world of Nielsen has in it a place for scientists trained in a traditional way, employed by traditional institutions, funded in traditional ways. After all, much of research is expensive, requires large investment in infrastructure and generally cannot be done at home in one?s garage. But, like Vinge, Nielsen imagines a world in which those scientists are not isolated from the rest of the world ? they are dependent on the broad participation of many other people, with varying degrees of expertise: some collect data, some are good thinkers, some lend their computers to it, others provide a little extra funding for particular small projects. This is a vision of a world in which science is just one integral part of the general process of discovery of knowledge, which is one integral part of what the world normally does every day anyway.
But unlike pure speculative fiction, Nielsen?s ideas are built on a careful analysis of the past ? from the anagrams of Galileo and Newton, to Henry Oldenburg and the invention of the scientific journal, to the invention of peer-review in mid-20th century, to the developments of the past couple of decades since the invention of the World Wide Web. It takes into account people and how they, being human, resist or accept new ways of doing old stuff. It points out the obstacles, and errors one can make in pushing for a more open and more collaborative research. But it also provides a blueprint for how to do it right. And this last thing is why YOU should buy this book and read it carefully ? it gives you a cool-headed, calm, thoughtful analysis of the things that work. Use them.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=75a402f74c0cd96b13439b5f90105fe0
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World stocks rise from 7-week low on Europe hopes (Reuters)
LONDON (Reuters) ? World stocks rose from last week's 7-week low on Monday as hopes grew euro zone leaders would unveil fresh measures to resolve the two-year-old debt crisis, while caution ahead of next week's key summit kept the euro and German yields under pressure.
An unsourced report in Italian daily La Stampa suggested the International Monetary Fund was preparing a rescue plan for Italy worth up to 600 billion euros ($796 billion), later dismissed by an IMF spokesperson.
But a downgrade in Belgium's sovereign rating late on Friday and a warning by Moody's that the rapid escalation of the region's sovereign and banking crisis threatens the rating of all European government bonds kept top-rated German debt supported.
"The bears out there will know that markets do not go down in a straight line and this could be just a relief rally in what will prove to be a prolonged bear market," said Stan Shamu, strategist at IG Markets.
MSCI world equity index (.MIWD00000PUS) gained 0.9 percent, rising for the first time after ten consecutive days of losses. The index is down nearly 15 percent since January and more than 22 percent since hitting a three-year high in May.
European stocks (.FTEU3) and emerging stocks (.MSCIEF) both rose around 1.5 percent.
U.S. stock futures were up more than 2 percent, pointing to a firmer open on Wall Street later.
The market was also expected to get some support from news that U.S. retailers racked up a record $52.4 billion in sales over the Thanksgiving weekend, a 16.4 percent jump.
U.S. crude oil gained 2.2 percent to $98.92 a barrel.
Bund futures were steady on the day.
After the Italian aid report, Italian/German 10-year government bond yield spread tightened 10 basis points to 496 bps.
The premium investors pay to hold Belgium's 10-year government bonds rather than German debt was largely unchanged from Friday at 368 basis points.
Belgian borrowing costs have increased sharply in past weeks as the country has struggled to set up a government, with the country's benchmark 10-year yield rising near the 6 percent level on Friday, beyond which financing costs could become unsustainable.
A sustained rise in yields is likely to scare some of the long-term euro bond buyers. Kokusai Asset Management, Japan's biggest mutual fund, said it had sold all its Italian, Spanish and Belgian bond holdings, spooked by a jump in Italian bond yields to above 7 percent and other signs that the crisis in Europe was deepening [ID:nL4E7MS152].
Investors will keep a close eye on developments in the euro zone. Documents showed detailed operational rules for the region's bailout fund were ready for approval and will clear the way for the 440 billion euro facility to attract cash from private and public investors in coming weeks.
Officials say Germany and France are exploring ways for rapid fiscal integration among euro zone countries. Germany's original plan was to get all 27 countries on board, but officials have been looking at alternatives such as an agreement among just the euro zone countries or a separate agreement outside the EU treaty that could involve a core of around 8-10 euro zone countries.
The euro fell 0.1 percent to $1.3301.
The dollar (.DXY) fell 0.6 percent against a basket of major currencies.
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