Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said relations with international forces backing his government have been frayed because of the killing of more than 90 civilians during a recent strike by US-led coalition troops.

Karzai made the remarks Thursday, Sept. 4, during a visit to a village where more than 90 civilians were reported killed in a US air raid on Aug. 22.

 

He traveled to Azizabad village in Shindand district in the western province of Herat on Thursday and met families of the victims who were killed in a US-led coalition air raid, the presidential palace said in a statement.

 

The US military insisted that its operation, which was jointly conducted with Afghan commandos in the area, left 30 to 35 militants and up to seven civilians dead.

 

But an investigation team created by the Afghan government found that more than 90 civilians, including 60 children, were killed in the eight-hour aerial bombardment. A separate probe by UN officials confirmed the Afghan government's figures.

Commodity-market regulators are investigating whether energy-market players are injecting false data into the marketplace to influence perceptions about crude-oil supply and demand, people familiar with the probe say.

Among other things, regulators are concerned that companies may be reporting inventory levels that benefit their own trading positions but that may not be accurate, people familiar with the regulators' thinking say.

Unexpected drops in oil inventories reported each Wednesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration can spark price spikes on the main oil futures benchmark on the New York Mercantile Exchange. A company could theoretically underreport barrels in its tanks, for example, at a key hub to suggest oil is scarcer than it really is, and then sell its physical oil at a premium when oil prices jump on misleading news.

Another concern is whether companies conduct some physical oil sales and purchases solely to influence short-term pricing on oil futures markets.

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned Iran on Thursday it was taking a dangerous gamble in seeking to develop nuclear weapons because one day its arch-foe Israel could strike.

Western powers accuse Iran of seeking the atom bomb under the cover of a civilian nuclear programme but Tehran insists it only wants to master atomic technology to generate electricity.

The United States and Israel have not ruled out military action if the dispute cannot be settled through diplomacy.

"Iran is taking a major risk in continuing the process to obtain a military nuclear capacity," Sarkozy told a meeting in Damascus with the leaders of Syria, Turkey and Qatar.

Joe Biden, Barack Obama's vice-presidential running mate, has indicated that a new Democratic administration could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration over the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo bay.

Mr Biden said at an event in Deerfield Beach, Florida: "If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution, out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no attorney general, no president - no one is above the law."

His statement is the strongest indication yet that an Obama administartion might seek legal redress against the President George W. Bush. It could undermine Mr Obama's message of bipartisanship and moving beyond the battles over Iraq.

In April, Mr Obama struck a similar note when he promised that he would ask his attorney general to review the Bush administration's decisions to differentiate between "genuine crimes" and "really bad policies".

"If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated," he told the Philadelphia Daily News. "You're also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve."

Progressives may bemoan it, but there is no credible left in the US at this point. We may on the verge of a new Zeitgeist (I wrote a dairy on this previously) but the conservative Zeitgeist ushered in by Goldwater and brought to power by Reagan is not yet played out and the left is still having to triangulate, with the Overton window being shifted so far to the right.

However, what is unsustainable cannot continue forever, and the reckoning will come sooner or later, at which point the Zeitgeist will shift again, either lurching further right into fascism or to the left, as progressives get their chance to clean up the mess and launch the country in a fresh direction.

Looming on the horizon, however, is the rise of China. What's in store was foreshadowed by the Chinese determination to beat the US in the Olympics by getting more gold -- which they did handily once they focused their energy and intention (qi, yi) on it. The West, principally the Brits, raped China economically in the past, and the Chinese have not forgotten this. There is payback coming, although it may take a couple of decades.

I bring this up here because the longer the conservative era lasts, and the degree to which eventually change does not completely disavow it, the worse the Chinese reaction against the West will be when they take over the reins of global economic might, hence power. A McCain/Palin administration would be disastrous in this regard. McCain would not be able to restrain himself from attempting to further antagonize and humiliate China, and Palin's pseudo-Christian bluster would be even more offensive to them (and Islam) then Cheney's jingoistic war-mongering and Bush's "moral" posturing. The Chinese really, really do not like being humiliated, and they will repay in kind. Be assured of that.

Palin's appointment underlines how far to the right America's political dialog has shifted. To nominate someone in a similar position to Palin, the Democratic Party would have had to nominate, not Russ Feingold, but Cynthia McKinney, as Vice-President. Someone from deep inside of the Democratic urban core with a penchant for reaching farther than the evidence sometimes permits, and whose constituencies thrive on the reddest of red meat politically. It is not an exageration to say that Sarah Palin is less moderate that Ron Paul, or Bob Barr, among Republicans. No Democratic politician, however, would be allowed close to the national stage being as vicious and vociferous as Palin is.

The important thing to realize about Palin is that she is, and was, and will remain, a defensive play by the Republicans. In attacking her directly the blogosphere made one of the oldest mistakes in online politics: do not feed the trolls. By feeding the troll, all the troll had to do was prove, not competence, but ordinary humanity. Palin has been groomed for years for this moment. She was not an unready pick by McCain, but a calculated choice by backers like The Club for Growth.

As a defensive play she is the creature of the "one acre one vote" constituencies of the Republican Party, of the Christianist extremists, of the NASCAR widow moms. A person from the world of anti-choice women, because in that world a woman being anti-choice publicly is part and parcel of a strategy. It is a way of a woman signaling that she isn't going to drain a man's resources in return for just sex, but that he has a chance of producing offspring, and if there are offspring, they will live. The story of her pregnant daughter underlines how this process works: her boyfriend is now a father to be and husband to be and not just a prop on the way to an ultimate marriage. Sperm competition in action.

As a defensive play her job was to engage, in a way they had not been engaged, the far right wing hinterlands, and the attack dogs of the right. McCain, as a tired old wax candle that is more than half way to melting, excites little love among them. The energy for McCain was in 2000-2004, but as soon as McCain-Feingold was passed, so too was his political moment. His entire campaign now is that he is a successful gambler. That the surge was a gamble that worked. Now Palin adds to it. McCain took a gamble, she paid off last night.

Thus instead of marginalizing Palin, the attacks made her mainstream. Even extremists have children.

During the Olympics we discussed the international monitoring effort as China shut down factories and curtailed automobile travel in an attempt to reduce pollution. Now reader Anti-Globalism sends in a story that reveals that monitoring effort to be ongoing, with a bigger mandate: assessing the impact of China's pollution on the US. In fact the problem is bigger still because, as one researcher put it, "It's one atmosphere." Scientists are finding that pollution from, for example, Europe can travel right around the globe in three weeks. "By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia -- ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone -- reach the US annually. The problem is only expected to worsen: Some Chinese officials have warned that pollution in their country could quadruple in the next 15 years. While some scientists are less certain, others say the Asian pollution could destabilize weather patterns across the North Pacific, mask the effects of global warming, reduce rainfall in the American West and compromise efforts to meet air-pollution standards."

Cool reception for Cheney in Azerbaijan
American Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, appears to be have been unsuccessful for Washington, unlike his visit to Tbilisi.

Cheney received a cool welcome and, according to Russia's Kommersant newspaper, Azerbaijan's President Ilkham Aliyev has implied that Baku is going to play a waiting game concerning the Nabucco gas pipeline, which is set to bypass Russia.

Neither President Ilkham Aliyev nor the Prime Minister, Artur Rasizade, were there to greet Cheney at Baku airport. Instead, he was met by the country's First Deputy PM and the Foreign Minister.

The Kommersant newspaper reports that Cheney was very annoyed by the results of the meeting with President Aliyev and even refused to attend a ceremonial supper in his own honour.

Canberra wants to spike Moscow's uranium guns

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Tatyana Sinitsyna) - Reports from the Associated Press and other sources tell us Australia has not remained immune to the "Georgian incident": Canberra has warned Moscow that it may put on hold agreements on uranium supplies to Russia.

Meanwhile the Kremlin has not received any Australian diplomatic note, oral or written, and nor has Russia's Nuclear Power Agency (Rosatom). And will they? If the agreement in question is heading for cancellation, both partners stand to lose a great deal. Canberra is, of course, aware of that.

The document was signed on September 7, 2007, during President Vladimir Putin's Australian visit. Its terms and provisions are simple: Russia agrees to buy $1 billion worth of uranium every year from a country which has it in surplus (40% of the world's reserves). Russia also guaranteed that the uranium would remain militarily "sterile" and be used only for peaceful purposes.

A point to note: Russia's military programs are supplied in full with its own uranium ore. In its reserves Russia ranks third in the world, as is recorded in the International Atomic Energy Agency's Red Book 2008.

But back to the Australian threat to shelve the agreement. To begin with, how that can be done when there is no agreement to speak of? It seems the Australian politicians simply had no other document at hand - could they really wave a contract for lamb supplies instead?

They are plucked off pizzas and discarded from caesar salads across the country, but somebody, somewhere has been eating too many anchovies. The fish that has divided food fans for years is today named on a list of unsustainable fish and shellfish that ethical consumers should not eat.

I'm going to miss the boquerones en vinagre...

A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith