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¿Hispano, latino o ambos? ¿Blanco o de color? El debate sobre la identidad se desató después de que algunos declararan a Banderas como "persona de color" cuando se anunciaron las nominaciones de los Oscars de actuación abrumadoramente blanca.

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An overview of the Climate Change Conference (also known as COP 17), held in Durban, South Africa in December 2011.

Predictably and sadly, the same issues have resurfaced: lack of media coverage, West stalling on doing anything trying to blame India and China instead, lack of funding, disagreement on how to address it, etc.

Geopolitical threats (real and imaginary) quickly focus a lot of political will and money is easily found to mobilize military forces when needed.

The economy also takes center stage as the current pressing issue, while climate change is easily deferred, in the hopes that the West can let China and India pick up the burden of addressing emissions even though they have not contributed to the historical build up of emissions that have started the recent changes in the climate.

This page is an overview of the Durban conference.

Read full article: COP17 - Durban Climate Conference

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Đài BBC chọn cách phát thanh các chương trình hài hước châm biếm Đức Quốc Xã vào lãnh thổ Đức trong nỗ lực đối trọng cỗ máy tuyên truyền của Hitler.

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You might have noticed that my mind (and body) have been away from the day job. But I am so gobsmacked by the comprehensive defeat of the banks in the PPI case that my fingers felt compelled to tap on smartphone keys.

What probably matters most is that the judge has ruled against the banks on all important issues.

And two really mattered: first that the Financial Services Authority's principles governing the behaviour of financial firms are a proper basis for compensation awards; and that FSA rules based on those principles are necessary but not sufficient for judging whether financial firms engaged in mis-selling.

Frankly if the banks had succeeded in proving otherwise, it would have been utterly disastrous for the whole system of consumer protection in the UK, both the existing system and the new one being erected by the government.

As it turns out, it is the implications of today's ruling for the banks that are serious.

Unless they appeal (and I will come back to that question) they face having to make compensation payments of around £4bn to around two and a half million people (around a quarter of all PPI policies were allegedly mis-sold).

The damage is greatest for the two banks in which we as taxpayers have big stakes, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland (which is just dandy for all of us) - largely because they have the largest shares of the retail banking market.

Lloyds faces the biggest bill: both it and RBS look as though they will have to pay compensation in excess of £1bn each.

That Lloyds and RBS appear to have done the most mis-selling in this instance will be seen by some as further evidence that their particularly powerful positions in retail banking is bad for the welfare of consumers - it will be taken as strengthening the argument of the Independent Commission on Banking that reinforcing competition is a priority (see my recent posts Banking Commission wants firewall around retail banking and Banking Commission: Retail banking must be ring-fenced).

The tab for Barclays and HSBC will also be pretty steep - some hundreds of millions of pounds each.

Given that few lawyers in my acquaintance rated the banks' chances of winning the case terribly highly, it is slightly odd that they used the courts to minimise or delay making restitution - especially at a time when they are not exactly the most popular institutions in the UK.

It is even more curious that they have fought and fought to limit their liability in the light of the two main examples of mis-selling identified by the FSA.

First there were all those refusals to make payouts under the loan insurance plans to those who had a pre-existing medical condition - when it is clear that relevant customers had no idea that pre-existing medical conditions were grounds for non-payment.

Second, it is a logical absurdity that the policies should have been sold by the banks to the self-employed, given that is impossible for a self-employed person to be made redundant.

So what next? Well the banks could make those two and a half million victims of mis-selling wait another couple of years to be made whole by appealing to the Supreme Court.

Or they could take the view that the prospects of winning in any court are too slim to outweigh the potential for further damage to their respective public images from being seen to defy an unambiguous legal judgement that they let down millions of their customers.

Unless of course they regard their reputations as so impaired that there's nothing left to lose from prevarication.

The big lesson for the banks from today's decision by the British Bankers Association not to appeal against the high court ruling on Payment Protection Insurance is - funnily enough - very similar to the big lesson from the Great Crash of 2007-8.

In the case of PPI, much of what the banks have now acknowledged to be mis-selling seemed consistent with rules laid down by the regulator, the Financial Services Authority, in its handbook and its source book on the selling of insurance.

But the FSA argued that following the letter of these rules was a necessary but not sufficient guarantee that the banks were behaving property. The FSA argued that the big banks should have been more mindful of its over-arching principles, notably the imperative of paying due regard to the interests of customers and treating them fairly.

The banks appear to have been so seduced by the apparently huge profits available from insuring personal loans, mortgages and credit card debt that they pushed the insurance to all manner of unsuitable customers (the self-employed who could never make a claim for being made redundant, or those with pre-existing health conditions, that would invalidate claims, to name just two common examples).

"It is very difficult to justify how we behaved" said one senior banker. "You can't imagine supermarkets treating their customers in the way we treated ours. I know my colleagues think that so long as we followed what was in the FSA's handbook, we shouldn't be blamed. But my view is that we forgot the cardinal rule, which is that we're there to serve customers, not to shove something down their throats which they don't need".

This departure from the very basics of retailing is costing the banks very dearly indeed. Last week Lloyds - the market leader in PPI and the first of the big banks to say it would provide comprehensive restitution - said that the settlement would lead to a £3.2bn expense.

Today, Barclays has quantified the compensation and related costs at £1bn. There will be a similar charge for Royal Bank of Scotland. And HSBC has just said it is setting aside £274m to meet these costs.

In total for all the big banks, the costs are heading towards £6bn or so - and that's to ignore the compensation bill for hundreds of smaller firms which joined in the PPI mis-selling frenzy.

Now what's striking is that the PPI debacle shares strong cultural characteristics with the behaviour that took many of the world's banks to the brink of bankruptcy less than three years ago. During the boom years before the crisis of 2007-8, you won't need telling that banks lent and invested recklessly - to subprime borrowers, to commercial property, to each other, through off-balance sheet vehicles, in the form of "structured" products which delivered the illusion of quality (inter alia).

And much of this reckless lending and investing took advantage of the global Basel rules that give the official regulators' view of how much risk the banks were taking - and, as we now know, were catastrophically wrong.

But - many bankers belatedly concede - banks should have known better than to make their judgments on how to lend on the basis of the regulators' rules. They should have done what other commercial businesses do, which was to lend and invest on the basis of what would be sustainable and prudent for the long term.

Gaming or playing the Basel rules, and forgetting commercial common sense, led to disaster. It meant that Royal Bank of Scotland, in the autumn of 2008, looked like a sound bank as measured by the Basel rules, when to all intents and purposes it was bust.

Of course it is reasonable to blame the regulators for framing the rules badly. But many would say that the banks were more at fault for mindlessly running their businesses on the basis of what the rules allowed.

So what's the big lesson of both PPI and the 2007-8 crash? Well, it is probably that banks need to base everything they do on what is good for customers, shareholders and creditors in a fundamental sense - and not on what the rules allow them to do.

PS Apart from the banks, another group of firms - the claims management firms - look set to be burned by the banks' decision to chuck in the towel and pay compensation to 2.75m or so individuals who were mis-sold PPI insurance.

The banks will now set up operations to speedily process claims for compensation. So they would argue that there is no point in their customers using the services of claims management firms, because in doing so those customers would not gain any additional compensation but would have to pay commission to the claims handler.

For all HSBC's mutterings that it's fed up with having the UK as its home base - because of the incremental tax it pays here and what it perceives as an anti-bank climate - there is no evidence from today's strategy review that it is growing any cooler on having a big presence in the UK.

In fact, if anything, the opposite is implied by its assessment of where best to allocate its capital and expertise over the coming decade. The UK is categorised by HSBC as a "strategic market", which is HSBC's highest accolade, partly because it has a massive presence in retail banking here and partly because it wants to be "the UK's leading bank for international businesses".

Interestingly, and in spite of the superior growth rates of emerging economies, HSBC expects the UK to still be the sixth largest economy in the world in 2050, only a fraction smaller than Germany, but bigger than Brazil, Mexico and France.

The British economy is expected by HSBC to grow faster than the US, Japan, and France over the coming 40 years - and a bit slower than Germany (but, of course, massively slower than China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Turkey). Some of that British momentum, compared to the eurozone and Japan for example, is presumably due to an expected faster rate of population growth in the UK - which is not universally popular.

But even so, income per capita in the UK in 2050 is predicted to be $49,000, 6.5% below German income per head and almost 20% greater than French per capita income.

For HSBC, the important trends are expected annual growth of world trade of 8.9% in the coming 10 years and the persistence of huge financial imbalances between the saving and exporting nations (China, India, Germany, and so on) and the consuming and borrowing nations (the US and much of Europe).

Interestingly, HSBC expects the UK to be a rare example of a country moving from deficit into surplus, by 2020 (or rather it buys into the analysis of the consultants McKinsey and the World Economic Forum to that effect - although there is a bit of a mystery here, because HSBC attributes the forecast to McKinsey, but it's not in the relevant McKinsey document).

The point, for HSBC, of analysing the world in these terms is that it wants to be the leader in financing those swelling trade flows between emerging economies and developed ones, and also in the related businesses of shipping China's and India's and Taiwan's surplus capital to the US and Europe.

Which means that what it calls Global Banking and Markets (and others call investment banking) together with its Commercial Banking arm will be the focus of future expansion.

That looks rational for one of the world's genuinely global banks. But it is slightly disturbing for the rest of us, perhaps, because the bank is assuming that the leaders of the G20 most powerful economies will fail in their avowed aim of stabilising the global economy by reducing China's funding surplus and America's funding deficit, the imbalances that were a fundamental cause of the great crash of 2007-8.

HSBC's success in that sense seems in part to be predicated on the idea that the global financial economy won't become a much safer place.

Like all sensible businesses, HSBC say it will reallocate capital to where it sees superior growth or where it has substantial market shares. So it will only stay in retail banking in places, like the UK for example, where it is big enough to be a price leader, rather than a follower.

The new chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, recognises that current returns are too low, partly because the bank's running costs are too high. So it plans to reduce annual costs by between $2.5bn and $3.5bn over the next three years - though it hasn't said how.

There is one cost that particularly rankles with HSBC - the special banking levy imposed by the British government. What it finds particularly galling, I am told, is that it pays the levy on uninsured deposits outside the UK, which most would see as a stable form of funding that contributes to the perception of HSBC as being a relatively safe bank.

Given that Treasury said the levy was designed in part to encourage banks to finance themselves in a more prudent way, it is a bit odd that the levy is costing HSBC around £370m this year, almost exactly the same as Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays, and £110m more than Lloyds, in spite of HSBC's funding arrangements being widely seen to be much more prudent and stable than those of the other UK banks.

It is perhaps understandable therefore that HSBC hopes the Treasury will look again at the structure of the levy. Although - as I've said and elucidated before - HSBC's not-very-veiled threat to leave the UK if the levy isn't reformed doesn't look credible.

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