...what one does for honour one does for free.

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder has caused an uproar by accepting a job with Russian-German consortium building a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea. The deal was only signed in September -- two weeks before the elections that led to Schröder's retirement from politics -- giving the whole affair an aura of unsavory favoritism.

Gerhard Schröder may no longer have the lead role on Germany's political stage, but it didn't take long for the ex-chancellor to once again ruffle feathers in Berlin. On Friday, Schröder confirmed he would head an advisory committee of a massive undersea Russian-German gas project, sparking a storm of protest about a potential conflict of interest.

Schröder, along with his old chum Russian President Vladimir Putin, signed off on the €4-billion gas pipeline less than a fortnight before he lost Germany's general election in September. Now only weeks after leaving office he has agreed to take a plum job in a project headed by partially state-owned Russian energy giant Gazprom. Not surprisingly, the move has eyebrows raised across Germany.

Regardless of his true intentions, Schröder should know better. His decision to head the advisory board of the North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) appears as if he is being rewarded for pushing through the politically sensitive project that will stretch from western Siberia to Germany's Baltic Sea coast. Although not yet official, Schröder will reportedly earn €1 million a year from the consortium that belongs 51 percent to Gazprom. The remaining 49 percent is controlled by German energy firm Eon and a subsidiary of BASF.

The deal is set to help secure Germany's strategic energy needs from 2010, but it has annoyed both Poland and Ukraine since the pipeline's sea route will bypass both of those Kremlin-critical countries -- denying them transit fees and potentially exposing them to greater Russian pressure over energy supplies.

You single handidly and on totally peaceful terms achieved a mutually beneficial accord between what were once considered arch enemy nations in order to provide the EU Member States with a secure and sustainable flow of environmently friendly energy were our Anglo-Saxon partners to the far, far East (far beyond the right of Siberia and the Stalin gulags of Kamchatka) failed spectacularly although they even engaged in starting new wars of agression and in the criminal killing of thousands of their own soldiers and many more innocent citizens.

And what I like still more: Gerd, you did this and you are not even an Ivy League alumni, you were not trained by the American Free Enterprise Institute and you don't hold a Harvard MBA degree.

Gerd, you rock! Big time.

"The USA appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty." Simon Bolivar, Caracas, 1819

Tony Blair is preparing to give ground to Jacques Chirac later this week over the EU budget by offering to make further - and permanent - cuts to its rebate.

As France threatened to block EU enlargement unless Britain slashed its rebate by £9.3bn, Mr Blair was putting the finishing touches to a series of concessions yesterday.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, will make the first move in the House of Commons tomorrow when he outlines proposals to offer money to the new EU member countries in eastern and central Europe.

Protests from countries such as Poland, which has threatened to veto the budget negotiations after Britain proposed a £9.3bn cut in structural funds for the east, has persuaded Britain that it will have to offer extra funds. This may be achieved by increasing the planned £564bn budget from 1.03% of the EU's overall income to 1.04%. The budget will be for 2007-13.

Britain hopes that sweeteners to the EU's new recruits will persuade Poland not to use its veto and make it more difficult for Mr Chirac to accuse Britain of abandoning the east.

Downing Street will wait until the European summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday before wooing Mr Chirac with an offer to cut the rebate by more than the £5.3bn offered last week.

France warned the UK yesterday that expansion of the European Union could be hit if EU leaders fail to agree a new budget this week.

Speaking at a Brussels meeting of foreign ministers, Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister, said the EU needed to think hard about beginning a new wave of enlargement. He added that further expansion of the 25-nation bloc could be open to question if the EU failed to finance last year's entry of 10 new member states with a budget this week.

"Should we go on with a new wave of enlargement?" he asked. "Is this the right moment . . . when the EU has yet to find the institutional or financial solutions to the challÃ,­enges of the enlargement we have already carried out?"

At the centre of the debate is the former Yugoslav RepÃ,­ublic of Macedonia, which the European Commission believes should be formally declared a candidate for membership. But Brussels has not yet named a date for the start of talks and privately officials say there is no chance of negotiations next year.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has written to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair asking for more cuts to the UK rebate.

The UK has offered to cut 8bn euros (£5bn) from the rebate between 2007 and 2013 but Mr Barroso called for "a further effort from the UK".

He said this could unlock agreement on the budget at a summit later this week.

The UK is currently working on a new budget proposal after its first one was rejected by the other states last week.

The UK's first proposal set the overall level of expenditure at 1.03% of the EU's gross national income, and envisaged a significant cut in the amount of development aid for the 10 new member states, which joined the EU in 2004.

"New member states need to be offered significantly higher levels of investment than in the current proposals," Mr Barroso said.

As EU foreign ministers met for the final time before their make-or-break summit this week, the fractious bloc looked no closer to coming up with a proposal for the EU budget which would satisfy everyone.

For those who brought even a modicum of hope with them to the meeting in Brussels, the possibility of current European Union president Britain presenting new proposals to ease the impasse died quickly as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announced as way of introduction the fact that there would be nothing to discuss.

Diplomats at the meeting said the foreign ministers spent less than a minute on the 2007-2013 budget since there were no new British proposals on offer. "It lasted 45 seconds," one said. Straw merely said London would put forward revised proposals during the week but added that London would not pay any price for an agreement.

"We're not in for a deal at any price," Straw told reporters, referring to the pressure Britain has been under to relinquish more of its annual rebate to fund aid to new east European members in the budget.

Straw's stance makes it look increasingly unlikely that that there would be any concessions on the long-term EU budget when the ministers of the 25-nation bloc convene on Wednesday. When pressed on whether there was a chance of an accord being agreed upon on Thursday and Friday, Straw told reporters: "I can't say."

The EU's new former Communist countries are to be offered further concessions tomorrow under new plans designed to isolate France and clinch a deal in a tense negotiation over the EU's budget.

Are they totally stupid, or really, really devious??

Until the budget proposal, France was supposedly isolated. Then the proposal came, were somewhat nice to France, but very nasty to supposed friends in Eastern Europe, thus triggering notes the Blair was isolated. Now, the new proposals will allow for a reconciliation with the new members, and leave France as the lone hold out?

Even if true, how is that progress, as we bump up again on the initial problems, still unresolved? Do they really think that we should think the world of Blair for solving a problem he created in the first place with his proposal?

Was the problem created just to show that Blair can "solve" problems with the new members, who are reasonable, but not with unreasonable France? Seriously?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Now in paragraph above replace "Blair's/his budget" with "the CAP".

The Polish government is launching an inquiry into whether the country hosted Central Intelligence Agency prisons on its territory, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the prime minister, announced on Monday.

The charge by US-based Human Rights Watch that the US intelligence agency kept prisoners accused of terrorism in Poland has been consistently rejected by Aleksander Kwasniewski, the Polish president.

However, local media have uncovered evidence that US aircraft were stopping at Szymany, an obscure airport in northern Poland.

On Saturday, the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper quoted airport workers saying a US Gulfstream executive jet used the airport in December 2002, and three times more in 2003, when a Boeing 737 also landed at the airport.

The workers said that the aircraft did not refuel and were met on the tarmac by buses with darkened windows, apparently from a nearby military base at Stare Kielkuty, which is used for intelligence training.

According to the Polish edition of Newsweek, a senior official in the office of Mr Marcinkiewicz refused to deny press reports about a secret prison.

Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi is accused by the US government of planning a dirty bomb attack in America. He says he was tortured until he admitted the crime.

He was arrested at Karachi airport in April 2002, with a passport under the name of Fouad Zouawi, a friend, and with a ticket to Zurich and then on to London.

In documents compiled by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, he describes an encounter with someone he believes to be an MI6 officer and details the horror of his torture. Mr Habashi says the officer told him 'I'll see what we can do with the Americans'. "They gave me a cup of tea with a lot of sugar in it. He said 'Where you're going you need a lot of sugar'."

He was taken to Morocco and questioned, then tortured after refusing to admit links al-Qa'ida links.

"They took the scalpel to my right chest. One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times in maybe two hours. They would do it to me about once a month."

Bush and Company: Shooting Western World in the Foot?The terrorism against Western societies cannot result in victory for the perpetrators, but the so-called war on terror can be lost offhandedly by the West itself. To no small degree, this prospect has been helped by U.S. President George W. Bush's decision to declare war on Islamist terror on the one hand and the decision to makes the laws of war inapplicable to terrorists on the other.

Never before has an American administration cut such a swathe in the field of international law - an unlawful war of aggression was legitimized and confessions extracted through torture were deemed admissible in courts of law. And never before has an American administration fought a no-holds-barred battle, one without any rules - for democracy - that has turned so many democracies into accomplices.

But instead of openly declaring their complicity, European governments have silently aided and abetted. This does not refer to tolerating secret CIA-agent flights in European airspace - though it is good to know that CIA agents are still unbridled in their movements. Rather, the complicity began with the knowledge that these agents were accompanying suspected terrorists on their way to European and non-European torture chambers. The justifiable suspicion exists that European governments not only knew of the torture, but that they also benefited from the coerced testimony so gathered.

...
The War on Terror cannot be waged with terrorism. Not until European governments have grasped this, not until the next President of the United States of America also understands this, can accomplices once more become allies.

There is good reason to take the words of an important member of the American Government seriously. Earlier this week, Condoleezza Rice told an audience in Kiev that the United States has obligations with regard to the U.N. charter against torture. It does not allow cruel, inhumane and humiliating treatment of suspects; "and American personnel, wherever they are, inside or outside the U.S., are bound by these obligations." Rice elaborated on her speech at NATO headquarters in Brussels, clearing up the issues of treatment of terror suspects, secretive detention facilities and secret CIA flight - issues that divided Europe and America - in one fell swoop.

But there is also reason to be cautiously reserved about what Rice had to say. However, caution was not what we heard from Brussels yesterday. It is remarkable how quickly skepticism can turn into benevolence and obedience. Dutch Secretary of State Ben Bot, who earlier this week stated in the Dutch Congress that American statements regarding the existence of CIA prisons were "unsatisfactory," said that he was "very satisfied" with Rice's explanation. However, there was no detailed explanation, or further proof, or in other words: real arguments that would put the long running rumors to bed. In the same way as Rice was unwilling to give specifics, Bot was unable to elaborate. The implicit message: we have to trust the words of the American Secretary.

Leg Irons and Hand Cuffs at Guantanamo Bay.

But the recent unpleasant experiences with American actions do not justify trust. Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib provide facts that no one can ignore. Until there is real evidence that the abuse of terror suspects at the American naval base in Cuba have stopped can there be any reason for satisfaction. That is not the case today, in the same way that there are still too many questions swirling around the alleged CIA prisons, and ditto for the [secret] flights. Not only does the American government have to come up with additional specific information, so does Bot (and with him the Dutch Government). He will also have to elaborate in a much more detailed and precise manner than the vague terminology used by Secretary Rice.  

It is important to keep a very close eye on Washington over this matter. Vice President Cheney (and by extension President Bush) doesn't want a legally binding prohibition against the cruel treatment of terror suspects. On the other hand, Republican Senator and "expert-by-experience" McCain - POW in Vietnam - is pushing for just such a clause through an amendment to the defense budget bill. McCain is on the right track: there is a lot of wiggle room between verbal policy rhetoric and legislation, and not until McCain's amendment is signed into law will Condoleezza Rice's solemn policy proposals be legally binding.

The Foreign Secretary admitted for the first time that he had agreed to two rendition requests made by the US authorities under the Clinton administration while he was Home Secretary. Both were for landings in the UK related to rendition - or delivery of prisoner - flights to the United States. "This could be regarded as rendition," he said.

Mr Straw said he approved the requests for stop-overs in the UK because the prisoners were due to be put on trial in the United States. But another, where a suspect was being taken to a third country, was refused by Mr Straw because he was "not satisfied" about the circumstances.

The Foreign Secretary said the Home Office and the Foreign Office had checked their records carefully and found that no such requests had been made by the Bush Administration.

• confuse the issue by admitting to doing renditions - but under Clinton. See, Clinton did the same

• remind us of the civilised standards of that time (renditions for trials in the USA) to make us infer that such are still the standards now

• and deny that anything is happening today.

Discuss intelligence as in renditions? more secret gulags?

Since Israel's Mossad is working with the Kurdish parties in Northern Iraq, it will be interesting if there will be a real or staged conflict with the
American CIA.

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within." Cicero

Soccer, its detractors would have it, is just 22 sweaty men chasing a ball around a field.

Australia was last night in the grip of its worst race clashes since independence, with youths battering cars and shattering shop windows as violence spread through Sydney's suburbs for a second day.

The attacks came in retaliation for Sunday's violence, in which 5,000 people rampaged across Cronulla beach chanting racist slogans, leaving more than 40 police officers injured. Members of the crowd had wrapped themselves in the Australian flag and chanted: "No more Lebs [Lebanese]", attacking men and women of Middle Eastern appearance. Several victims were evacuated in police vans.

Last night police made several arrests after more than 50 carloads of Middle Eastern men armed with baseball bats sought revenge in the southern Sydney suburb of Cronulla.

More than 500 mainly Muslim men also gathered outside a mosque at Lakemba, in the city's south-west, after rumours that surf gangs were planning to attack the building. They later dispersed, throwing rocks and flares at police protecting the building.

Television images of the fighting shocked Australians, whose pride in their country's tolerance was shaken by the level of popular support for Pauline Hanson's anti-immigration One Nation party in the late 90s. More recently, the prime minister, John Howard, won the 2001 election on a hardline anti-immigration platform.

That because he is so hated everywhere he goes. When he leaves the US he brings his own Mini Air Force so that his "visit" to other lands is more of an invasion.

Live in a "Bubble" oh yeah! As the Democratic Leader of the House of Representatives said a couple of months ago, delusional, disconnected and dangerous!!!

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within." Cicero