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Campaigners fighting the expansion of London’s Heathrow airport opened a new front on Tuesday when they announced they had bought land earmarked for the construction of a third runway.

Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson is among those involved in the purchase, which environmental group Greenpeace said threw a “massive spanner” into the nine-billion-pound expansion plan.

They said they would fight any attempts to buy the land by compulsory purchase, and Thompson added: “We’ll stop this from happening even if we have to move in and plant vegetables.”

The government’s decision on whether to expand Heathrow, the world’s biggest international passenger air hub, is expected within weeks.

It has been delayed as ministers thrash out the pros and cons of the project, which has pitted business groups and airlines against environmental groups and local residents.

More than 40 MPs from the ruling Labour party and London mayor Boris Johnson, a member of the main opposition Conservatives, are opposed, arguing there is no economic need for a third runway and it will increase pollution.

But business and trades union leaders believe the project is vital to the economy, and would create at least 50,000 new jobs.

“Only modernisation at Heathrow will keep Britain on the global transport map and stop our cities and industries losing out to our competitors in Europe,” said Derek Simpson, joint leader of trades union Unite.

About 250 anti-expansion protesters gathered at Heathrow on Monday, police said, dressed in clothes in the style of the early 1900s.

Some dressed as suffragettes, the activists who campaigned to get women the vote and whose peaceful tactics they sought to emulate.

With a string quartet playing in the background, the activists chatted, sang and sipped from champagne glasses.

“We are trying to emulate what our ancestors did for us to make a positive change, in a civilised fashion, for future generations,” said campaigner Dan Glass, who was dressed as a chimney sweep.

“We have got to do something now because if we don’t, the situation will get so much worse.”

A simultaneous protest attended by about 50 people took place at Manchester airport.

Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley agreed Tuesday to combine their brokerages in a deal that shows how much Citigroup wants to slim down and build up cash.

Morgan Stanley is paying Citigroup $2.7 billion for a 51 percent stake in the joint venture. Citigroup will have a 49 percent stake.

Citigroup’s retail brokerage, Smith Barney, was once the crown jewel in its wealth management business.

The new unit, to be called Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, will have more than 20,000 advisors, $1.7 trillion in client assets; and serve 6.8 million households around the world, the companies said.

Citigroup will recognize a pretax gain of about $9.5 billion because of the deal, or about $5.8 billion after taxes, the companies said. The joint venture is expected to achieve total cost savings for the two companies of around $1.1 billion.

The deal was announced after the market closed. Shares of Citigroup rose 30 cents, or 5.4 percent, to $5.90 on Tuesday, and Morgan Stanley shares rose 7 cents to $18.86.

CEO Vikram Pandit has been saying for months that he plans to sell assets to raise cash, but the executive, according to media reports, is getting ready to announce that Citigroup is abandoning the financial “supermarket” model. That term described the aim of Citigroup — created over the last couple decades by former CEO Sandy Weill — to service all of individuals’ and businesses’ financial needs, from saving to borrowing to investing to deal-making.

Citigroup has fared worse than other banks in recent years, particularly during the recent credit crisis. The New York-based company is expected to post a fifth straight quarterly loss next week. The government has already lent it $45 billion — more than other large banks received — and agreed to absorb losses on a huge pool of Citigroup’s mortgages and other soured assets.

Some investors believe Citigroup is headed for a larger-scale breakup now that the government is involved and that President-elect Barack Obama is rethinking how to dole out the remaining $350 billion of bailout money.

The new administration could “come to the realization that the whole economy does not hinge on the banks,” said Octavio Marenzi, head of financial consultancy Celent. “Banking is important. The banks themselves are not.”

William Smith of Smith Asset Management, who still owns shares of Citigroup, has been calling for a breakup of Citigroup for years and believes the government will force that fate, in piecemeal fashion, over the coming year.

“I think within 12 months, Citigroup no longer exists,” Smith said. “The new CEO of this company is the government.”

The original construction plans believed used for a major expansion of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in 1941 have been found in a Berlin flat, Germany’s Bild newspaper reported on Saturday.

The daily printed three architect’s drawings on yellowing paper from the batch of 28 pages of blueprints it obtained. One has an 11.66 meter by 11.20 meter room marked “Gaskammer” (gas chamber) that was part of a “delousing facility.”

No one from the federal government’s archives was immediately available for comment on the authenticity or importance of the documents.

The plans, published ahead of the 70th anniversary of the “Kristallnacht” or the Nazi pogrom that was a harbinger of the Holocaust, also include a crematorium and a “L. Keller” — an abbreviation for “Leichenkeller” or corpse cellar.

A drawing of the building for Auschwitz’s main gate was also found in the documents that Bild said were believed to have been discovered when a Berlin flat was cleaned out.

The mass-circulation newspaper quoted Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, head of the federal archives office in Berlin, as saying the blueprints offered “authentic evidence of the systematically planned genocide of European Jews.”

There were mass killings of about one million Jews before the Nazi’s “Final Solution” was formulated in late 1941. The decision to kill Europe’s 11 million Jews was made at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.

A copy of the minutes, known as the “Wannsee Protocol,” is one of the most important documents from the war.

The newly found Auschwitz blueprints are dated October 23 1941 and could offer historians earlier evidence of Nazi plans to kill Jews on a mass scale, Bild said.

“These documents reveal that everyone who had even anything remotely to do with the planning and construction of the concentration camp must have know that people were to be gassed to death in assembly-line fashion,” Bild wrote.

“The documents refute once and for all claims by those who deny the Holocaust even took place,” it added.

The concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland was the largest — at least 1.1 million Jews were killed there.

Auschwitz I was set up in May 1940 in an old Polish army barracks. The first victims were gassed in September 1941. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, opened in October 1941. Four large gas chambers were added to the camp in January 1942.

Hokkaido has decided to show its appreciation to Feng Xiaogang, director of Chinese movie “If You Are the One” (Fei Cheng Wu Rao), which helped the northmost Japanese prefecture attract a huge influx of Chinese tourists, local media reported Thursday.

A certificate of appreciation will be presented to Feng by Yoji Takahara, deputy governor of Hokkaido prefecture, and the mayors of Kushiro and Abashiri, when they visit Beijing and Shanghai in April 20-24.

“If You Are the One”, Feng’s New Year Celebration Film of 2009,relates a love story involving two young Chinese and their romance that was spawned while they were sightseeing in Hokkaido. It became a blockbuster in China and has turned the Japanese island of Hokkaido into a new tourism spot for Chinese travelers.