EUOBSERVER / BUCHAREST - Washington continues to support the EU-backed Nabucco gas pipeline, but this project is "only a piece of the puzzle" when it comes to reducing Europe's reliance on Russian gas, US special envoy for Eurasian energy Richard Morningstar has said.

"We support Nabucco. We support the Southern Corridor. It's an important part of the puzzle, but it's only one piece," Mr Morningstar told EUobserver on Wednesday (30 September) in an interview on the margins of a Black Sea energy forum organised in Bucharest by the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

Russia will continue to be a 'major player' in the gas field, says the US.

Alternative technologies and energy efficiency were also important in Europe's bid to reduce its reliance on Russian gas, he said.

"More interconnections between the countries in Europe, more storage facilities, terminals for liquified natural gas (LNG) - all will help reduce dependence on a sole supplier."

But at the same time, Russia will be a "major player over the coming years. That's a reality," he noted, while making clear that the US energy policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia was not 'anti-Russia.'

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The body responsible for managing the development of the internet, Icann, has cut its umbilical cord to the US government, a move the European Union has been demanding for four years.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees domain names - the .com, .eu, .org and so on at the end of a web address - as of 30 September will no longer be subject to review by the US Department of Commerce.

Brussels gave a qualified welcome to the US decision

Instead, independent review panels appointed by Icann Governmental Advisory Committee (Gac) and Icann itself with the involvement of governments around the world. will perform this task.

Since 2005, the EU has been calling for reform of the governance of the internet, saying that the internet is a global resource and should not be tied to one national government - a position echoed by many other countries and a number of companies.

Indicted war criminal and former Serb general Ratko Mladic has brazenly eluded capture for 13 years, living the comfortable life of a pensioner in Belgrade. Politicians, the army and -- it now appears -- Western intelligence services have been helping him the whole time.

The Luda Kuca café is located on Yuri Gagarin Street in New Belgrade, a satellite town of concrete high-rise apartment blocks. Luda Kuca means "crazy house" -- a fitting name for the café. Until recently, one of its regulars was a bearded faith-healer with a penchant for singing Serb hymns late at night as he sat at one of the café's three tables. The singer's name was Radovan Karadzic. Today the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs is in jail in The Hague facing trial for war crimes.

Nothing has changed in Luda Kuca since Karadzic stopped coming. His picture still hangs on the wall alongside portraits of Serbian ex-president Slobodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military chief who has been on the run since 1995, when an international warrant was issued for his arrest. Mladic stands accused of crimes against humanity for the slaughter of thousands of Muslims during the Bosnian War. The stocky former general was once hailed as a hero. Today most Serbs would rather see him in the dock alongside Karadzic and all the others.

With coalition negotiations set to begin on Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats have made it clear that their new coalition partners, the Free Democrats under Guido Westerwelle, will have to scale back their demands.

It was a sentence that Guido Westerwelle, head of the pro-business Free Democrats and soon to be the junior coalition partner in Germany's next government, couldn't repeat often enough.

"I won't sign any coalition agreement that doesn't include a simple, low and fair tax system," he would say whenever he got the chance. It was a cornerstone of his campaign -- and it seems to have worked. His FDP raked in 14.6 percent of the vote, the party's best result ever.

But when asked to repeat the promise on Monday, the day after the general elections that secured a second term for Chancellor Angela Merkel, Westerwelle suddenly got cold feet. He said only, "I am not going to repeat that sentence again. I have said it often enough."

Not Up for Debate

The cat that suddenly got Westerwelle's tongue has a name: Angela Merkel. The two will meet on Monday to begin the process of hammering out a coalition agreement that will guide the next four years of German governance -- and Westerwelle knows that Merkel's Christian Democrats, which got 33.8 percent of the vote on Sunday, will not accept many of the policy proposals that his party holds dear. Radical tax cuts are among them.

Romania's coalition government has collapsed after the Social Democrat Party (PSD) resigned, officials say.

The leftist coalition partner said it had pulled out in protest against the sacking of the interior minister.

The PSD's Dan Nica was this week fired by centrist PM Emil Boc after he made comments about the potential for fraud in presidential elections next month.

Party leader Mircea Geoana said all PSD ministers in government were resigning to protest against his dismissal.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Lithuanian foreign minister Vyguadas Usackas has said the EU made a mistake in setting up the enquiry into the Georgia war, amid Russian claims that the investigation has proved it right.

"If I had been in the [EU] Council at the time, I would not have supported this idea," Mr Usackas said in a phone interview with EUobserver on Wednesday (30 September).

A statue of the early Georgian king, Vakhtang I, in Tbilisi. Mr Usackas' trip is designed to show "solidarity"

"The wounds are too sensitive to open. I don't think it's useful from a pragmatic point of view, just one year after the conflict, to engage in a not very helpful debate about who should be blamed."

The minister made the remarks on the eve of a trip to Tbilisi for meetings with President Mikheil Saakashvili and opposition figures, designed "to show solidarity with the Georgian people."

The judges of the UK's new Supreme Court, designed to replace the Law Lords (pictured), were sworn in on Thursday. The court's creation is a key step in reforming the UK's unwritten constitution, a process launched under former PM Tony Blair.

AFP - British constitutional history was made Thursday as judges in a new Supreme Court were sworn in, replacing the House of Lords as Britain's highest appeal tribunal.

Ending an ancient judicial quirk, 11 new Justices took their oaths of office in the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, housed in a gothic building just across from the Houses of Parliament.

"This is the last step in the separation of powers in this country," said Lord Nicholas Phillips, president of the new court which will also break ground by allowing live television coverage for the first time.

The French government has distanced itself from film director Roman Polanski. It had originally protested the arrest of the Oscar winning film director, but following a backlash the government has changed its tune.

Reuters - France's government changed its tone on Wednesday on the arrest of Roman Polanski for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, describing the charges as serious after initially rushing to the film director's defence. 

France and Poland, where the 76-year-old Oscar-winning director spent his childhood, at first loudly protested against Polanski's arrest last weekend.  

But U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that it was for judges, not diplomats, to handle the  case which dates back to 1977. 

After French politicians across the spectrum initially voiced strong unease over the arrest, a government spokesman modified the official line on Wednesday, saying that Polanski was "neither above nor below the law". 

The Dutch military presence in Afghanistan will almost certainly end next year. Coalition partners Labour and ChristenUnie will block any move to extend the mission.

The surprise motion by coalition partners Labour and the orthodox Christian ChristenUnie was tabled late on Wednesday night at the end of a debate in parliament about the Dutch participation in the Nato mission in Afghanistan. A vote will follow later this week.

Prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende (Christian Democrats) had come to parliament together with foreign minister Maxime Verhagen (Labour) and defence minister Eimert van Middelkoop (ChristenUnie) to explain the government position about Afghanistan. The Netherlands currently has around 1,450 troops in Uruzgan province in Afghanistan. Confusion had risen in the past months over the future of the Uruzgan mission. The Netherlands joined the Nato mission in Afghanistan in 2006 for what was supposed to be a two-year operation. When the mission was extended for another two years the government said Dutch troops would definitely be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2010.

More than two hundred female Dutch professionals have signed a manifesto demanding a quota for women in top positions.

It was with mixed feelings, Bercan Günel admits, that she and 214 other female professionals decided to sign a manifesto demanding a quota for women in top positions in both private companies and public institutions. "It is after all a desperate measure," says the director of the headhunting agency Woman Capital.

For years the women's lobby has opposed legislation to enforce equal opportunities in the top echelons of the private and public sector. Günel: "We thought voluntary initiatives would be enough to bring about the cultural shift." But despite all the promises the percentage of women hired for top jobs remained disappointing. According to Woman Capital it is currently at 6 percent, and it is not expected to rise above 12 percent for 25 years.

France and Germany are planning a new treaty of friendship and an array of other joint schemes that could push Britain to the sidelines in Europe, according to sources close to President Sarkozy.

The plan to put Paris and Berlin back at the heart of the stalled European Union covers defence, immigration, a new industrial policy and a drive to loosen what the pair see as Britain's grip on the European Commission.

The revamped Franco-German axis may include the permanent assignment of ministers in each other's Cabinets. The initiative would exploit Britain's situation, with Gordon Brown weakened and distracted by next year's general election and the decision by the Conservatives to quit Europe's main centre-right grouping, the European People's Party.

Paris and Berlin, reverting to the old idea of a two-speed Europe, aim to push ahead with a separate headquarters for European defence and the promotion of industrial champions. Britain wants none of that. The scheme, already far advanced, will follow this week's repeat referendum in the Irish Republic on the Lisbon treaty, whether the vote is "yes" or "no".

September 28, 2009:

October 1, 2009:

More than 300 families were warned last night that they may never know whether their children fell prey to a female nursery worker who sexually abused babies in her care and swapped sickening images of the acts with two other paedophiles she met on Facebook. <...>

Many of the images were classified at the most serious level and showed terrible sexual assaults on the victims, most of whom were Little Ted's pupils under 18 months old. Blanchard, a businessman from Smallbridge, Rochdale, and Allen, of Nottingham, also admitted to using text messages and the internet to share and create images with George who, until her arrest in June, was regarded as a "warm and bubbly" nursery worker.

Their confessions have shocked the communities of Efford and Laira - two quiet Plymouth suburbs whose working families relied on Little Ted's nursery, where George was employed without suspicion for three years. ...

A second credit squeeze and a £200bn national "funding gap" threatens to sabotage the recovery in the British economy, the IMF warned yesterday.

In its latest Global Financial Stability Report, the fund said that a combination of a soaring government deficit and the borrowing needs of British companies and consumers - coupled with a still broken banking system - would leave the UK with a national "funding gap" of 15 per cent of GDP, or around £200bn next year, much higher than in either the US or the euro area.

The IMF also pointed out that the UK's continuing need to borrow from abroad to plug this gap leaves the nation exposed to sharp changes in investment sentiment. Should such a change occur, says the IMF, then sterling could fall even further and interest rates would have to rise before the recovery had been fully secured. UK banks are also exposed to relatively large foreign loan books.

There was clearly a danger that the dispute could have been diverted into a chauvinistic blind alley, but it didn't happen. Union activists gave short shrift to far-right British National Party infiltrators. The strikers didn't scapegoat the foreign workers; they blamed the government and the employers. And the real nature of the strikes was driven home by the hundreds of Polish migrant workers who joined the walkouts at Langage power station in Plymouth: this was a campaign not for privileges for indigenous over foreign workers, but against the use of foreign-based contract Labor to exclude or undercut all workers in Britain.

But the narratives of a protectionist threat and working class racism are so ingrained in the mainstream British media that news reports simply adjusted reality accordingly. In the BBC's main evening TV news bulletin, one striker was shown saying, "we can't work alongside of them", in a reference to Italian and Portuguese workers. The second part of the sentence - "we're segregated from them" - was cut, turning the meaning of what the man was saying on its head and giving the false impression that local workers were refusing to work with foreigners. Meanwhile, tabloid newspaper journalists tried to convince picketing workers to be photographed with Union Jack flags.

"The reporting of the strikes was based on a massive misconception," Paul McDowall, Unite shop steward at the Lindsey site, insists. "The real purpose of our action was quite simply to protect the terms and conditions, pay, welfare and health and safety that we've built up over many years - and that remains the case. It had nothing to do with xenophobia."