After a day of high tension, Italy's prime minister-elect, Romano Prodi, faced a major setback last night as a vote for the president of the Senate was annulled after his candidate, Franco Marini, appeared to have won.

The victory for the 73-year-old union leader, which came after the first round of voting ended without result, was contested by the centre right.

The initial count gave Mr Marini a one-vote victory for the prestigious post. However, centre-right politicians complained that Mr Marini's first name was given as Francesco on two of the ballots, making them invalid.

The election was a first crucial test of Mr Prodi's ability to govern after winning a general election earlier this month by the slimmest of margins.

Italy's election system gives the winning coalition in the Chamber of Deputies a premium of seats and a healthy majority, but in the Senate, which has equal powers to the Chamber, the majority is roughly two.

Missile deals with the 'axis of evil' are just the latest sign that Moscow is sick of kowtowing to the US and Europe, writes Tom Parfitt

Moscow could be on the verge of clinching an arms deal with Syria or Iran that would send the US and Israel into pop-eyed rage.

A few days ago a Russian arms manufacturer let slip at an arms fair in Kuala Lumpur that his state-run weapons design bureau was close to sealing a foreign sale of Iskander-E missiles. The destination of the hardware was secret, he said, but the most obvious market is clear: the Middle East.

Last year, Israel was furious when it emerged that Moscow was planning to sell the Iskander to Damascus. The Iskander is like the Scuds that Iraq used during the Gulf war but many times more accurate and better equipped to avoid defensive weapons such as the Patriot missile. Syria - part of George Bush's "axis of evil" - would love to be able to trundle some of these short-range ballistic missiles (range: 180 miles) down to its southern border to point at Israel in the event of a conflict.

No doubt the Iranian regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also itching to get its hands on some of these weapons - whose sale is not restricted by any treaty. Earlier this month Iran tested an underwater missile that looked suspiciously like a Russian Shkval.

Are Germany and Russia still friends. After the Thursday meeting between Merkel and Putin, some aren't so sure. And Russia continues to pine for superpower status.

On Thursday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Siberian town of Tomsk for what she has described as "open and intensive" discussions -- a diplomatic way of saying that the warm and fuzzy relationship the two countries enjoyed under ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder have become slightly cooler and more prickly. Moscow has departed from the policies of Germany and other EU nations by speaking out in defense of Hamas -- which it has recognized as the legitimate Palestinian government at a moment when the USA and the EU are deeply concerned over its anti-Israel policies -- and by avoiding a firm stance on Iran's nuclear development program.

Most importantly for Germany, however, concern is growing over recent developments in natural gas trade, with Russian energy giant Gazprom stating that it wants to diversify its markets by trading with China and Canada. Gazprom has also mentioned it would like natural gas prices to rise for Germany and other EU nations, who are strongly dependent on Russian energy resources.

But where, exactly are German-Russian relations heading? On Friday, German commentators are split.

After struggling for years, the German economy finally appears to be on the upswing again. So why is the government in Berlin so annoyed?

It's a clear sign that something odd is afoot when a government gets peeved when told the economy is improving. But that's just what happened in Berlin this week.

Germany's leading economic institutes  on Thursday raised their growth forecast for this year, which you'd think would be cause for celebration for Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition of Christian and Social Democrats. But instead of being giddy with glee that the German economy seems to be shaking off its torpor, officials from the Finance Ministry have attacked the institutes' assessment of 1.8 percent growth in 2006 as far too optimistic.

"We find the quality of our own experts more convincing, we'd rather trust their expertise," pooh-poohed a ministry spokesman in the economic equivalent of a professional wrestling smackdown.

Huh? Such a dismissive response might be expected were the institutes overly pessimistic in their outlook, but what interest could the government possibly have in talking down its own economy? Plenty, it seems.

Twice a year, the Germany's six top economic institutes release their highly anticipated fall and spring surveys, essentially taking the temperature of the world's third largest economy. Their growth forecasts are taken very seriously in the financial markets and in the business community. If the institutes revise their economic outlook -- as they did on Thursday -- the government is normally all but certain to follow suit and tinker with its own growth forecasts.

European lawmakers probing allegations that CIA planes secretly transported prisoners through European countries are in are in Macedonia to investigate the role of the Balkan nation.

On a two-day visit that began Thursday, five members of the European Parliament committee in charge of the probe are looking into the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin. He has accused the CIA of kidnapping him in late 2003 from Macedonia and interrogating him in Afghanistan.

Skopje has denied any involvement in the alleged operation by the US spy agency.Upon arrival, the delegation met Macedonian President Branko Crvenkovski and were due to meet Deputy Prime Minister Radmila Secerinska and former foreign minister Slobodan Casule, the EU spokesman Andrea Angeli told AFP news agency.

"The target is the truth, just the truth," the EU lawmaker leading the probe, Claudio Fava, told reporters after the meeting with Crvenkovski.

During a press conference with Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek earlier this month, U.S.

Ambassador William Cabaniss said the contentious Czech visa issue was on the agenda of the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C.

He spoke of a significant lobby made up of various groups, including Czechs already living in the United States. He said a major think tank has "drawn up recommendations" on how the Czech Republic could gain so-called visa waiver status.

But Czech politicians and lobbyists in Washington say this is not the case, and it appears that any concerted campaign to change the United States' visa policy toward the Czech Republic is at most fledgling, according to interviews.

"It's not getting the attention it needs in the right places yet," says Michael G. Rokos, president of the Washington-based American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFCR).

Several Jewish- and Cuban-interest organizations based in the United States want to end requiring visas for visiting Czechs, according to the Czech Embassy in Washington. But any organized lobby in Congress is months away, Rokos says.

A Congressional delegation of eight U.S. representatives visiting Prague April 21 and 22, including two from Texas, a state with a large Czech population, did not seem eager to discuss the visa issue in depth. The leader of the delegation told Czech media they were aware of and working on the issue, but several lawmakers did not respond to numerous interview requests from The Prague Post.

Currently, U.S. citizens are allowed to enter the Czech Republic and stay up to 90 days without a visa, while Czechs entering the United States must go through a lengthy and expensive visa application process that often leads to rejection.

The specter of Anglo-American market capitalism dominated France's student unrest in March and April, and motivated popular rejection in France a year ago of the proposed new European Union constitution.
 
The election that has just given Italy a fragile center- left coalition, and recent conflict in German industry, involved the same question: how to remodel national economies, or whether to remodel them at all.
 
Advocates of the new model capitalism, and the globalization project that goes with it, like to present it as an expression of historical necessity, rooted in classical economics and embodying irrefutable laws. It is progress itself, they say. Those who do not conform to the rules of modern market capitalism, and do not offer the human sacrifices of lost employment and diminished living standards that the market demands, will fall by the wayside of history.
 
This is simply untrue, although most of those who say it undoubtedly believe it.
 
The new American and British market capitalist model, which dictated deregulation of industry and privatization of state enterprises in the 1970s, and globalization of international markets in the 1990s, exists as a result of free political decisions and ideological choices that were anything but inevitable. History may one day describe them as having been perverse and socially destructive.
 
Two of the most important influences on the new capitalism were academic in origin, and the third, improbably, was an instance of romanticized egoism.

Russian writer and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn has castigated Nato, accusing it of trying to bring Russia under its control.
In a rare interview, the 87-year-old author accused Nato of "preparing to completely encircle Russia and deprive if of its sovereignty".

Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR in 1974 after having exposed the Soviet labour camp system.
He returned to Russia in 1994. He has been a stern critic of Western values.

'Thoughtless imitation'

In the interview published on Friday in the Moscow News, he lamented that "Western democracy is in a serious state of crisis".

He pointed to the pro-Western opposition victories in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine as evidence that Nato's influence was spreading closer to Russia.
"This involves open material and ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia," he said.

Scotland Yard will consider investigating a claim that Peter Law, the rebel MP who defeated Labour in one of its safest parliamentary seats, was offered a peerage as an inducement to stand aside. Mr Law, who died last week, ran as an independent at the last general election in Blaenau Gwent, previously the safest Labour seat in Wales.

The allegation by his widow that a "high-ranking politician" had tried to buy him off with a seat in the Lords has been emphatically denied by the Labour Party. But suspicious Tories queried how the Labour Party could be in a position to be so sure the allegation was false, so soon after it was aired.

The shadow Welsh Secretary, Cheryl Gillan, wrote to Tony Blair demanding a "full and independent investigation" into the allegation made by Trish Law. In a letter, delivered to Downing Street, Mrs Gillan said: "Given the limited time scale between the interview and the denial, which 'senior Labour politicians' were contacted last night about the allegation, which government minister authorised the denial, and what inquiries did he or she make before issuing it?"

Mrs Law had told BBC Wales's Dragon's Eye programme that Labour politicians pleaded with her husband not to run against the official Labour candidate in Blaenau Gwent.

"There was pressure put on him. He had quite a number of phone calls from high-ranking politicians not to do it, he would be silly to do it, there was no way that he would win," she said. "I believe even a peerage at one time was thrown in the air because I laughed about it, 'Oh, Lady Trish am I'?"

France's slow-burning scandal, known as the Clearstream affair, yesterday exploded into a full-scale political controversy. Both President Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, prime minister, were forced to deny accusations published in Le Monde newspaper that they were behind a smear campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister.

But their extraordinary intervention seems unlikely to quell the political frenzy in Paris with less than a year to go before the next presidential elections.

The saga, which began 15 years ago, has more twists than a corkscrew, but in essence it concerns several interrelated investigations into allegations of corruption. The first concerns accusations that French officials received kickbacks from the sale of six frigates to Taiwan in 1991. The second turns on allegations suggesting prominent politicians, industrialists, and security officials had channelled illicit money through Clearstream, a Luxembourg-based clearing house.

These latter allegations, which became public in 2004, subsequently proved to be false, sparked another judicial investigation into who was behind this defamatory manipulation.

Yesterday, Le Monde published statements by General Philippe Rondot, a former secret service agent, claiming that Mr de Villepin - acting on instructions from Mr Chirac - had in 2004 asked him to investigate the possible involvement of Mr Sarkozy in these affairs. Le Monde said Gen Rondot had made these statements in a 20-page legal deposition it had obtained.

KIEV, April 28 (RIA Novosti) - President Viktor Yushchenko will take local authorities to court over their decision to give Russian and Ukrainian equal status in their respective communities, a senior presidential administration official said Friday.

Presidential Chancellery head Anatoliy Matvyyenko said his office would lodge a complaint with the prosecutor general's office next week, and slammed prosecutors for inaction over what the central government sees as unlawful decisions.

The president has the right to repeal local executive resolutions that contradict the Constitution and national legislation, Matvyyenko said.

On April 26, the city government of Sebastopol, on the Crimean peninsula, adopted a resolution granting regional status to the Russian language on the grounds that the community's ethnic makeup is mainly Russian.

Authorities in the predominantly Russian provinces of Kharkiv and Luhansk, in the country's east, approved similar resolutions in March.

Chinese President Hu Jintao said Thursday his government will seek closer ties with Africa - a resource-rich frontier for the world's fastest growing economy - after signing a series of major business deals with oil-rich Nigeria.

Hu, on the second and final day visiting Africa's largest oil producer before heading to Kenya, said China is seeking "a strategic partnership" with the continent that would improve living standards for Africa.

Hu and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo signed an agreement Wednesday that requires Nigeria's petroleum ministry to give China's state oil firm preferential access to four blocks of oil exploration rights in return for China taking over a money-losing refinery in the northern city of Kaduna.

China also agreed to build a hydroelectric power station in the northeastern Mambilla plateau and a fast-rail system linking the capital, Abuja, with the economic capital, Lagos.

And two Chinese telecommunication firms will install rural telephone service across large swathes of Nigeria with the help of Chinese government loans worth more than $200 million.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev urged the world's biggest industrialized nations to set up a 50-billion-dollar (44-billion-euro) fund to support solar power, warning that oil or nuclear energy were not viable energy sources for the future.

Gorbachev -- who chairs an environmental thinktank, Green Cross International -- called on leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations to invest in renewable energy sources, in a statement marking the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

As leader of the Soviet Union in 1986, Gorbachev led the immediate response to the world's worst nuclear disaster, which led to at least 4,000 deaths and sent a radioactive cloud over parts of Europe.

The Green Cross proposals were contained in a letter sent to the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations who are due to meet in Russia in July. Some of the proposals were reported last week in the Financial Times.

"This idea reflects our vision of a way of helping the energy-impoverished in the developing world, while creating concentrations of solar energy in cities that could be used to prevent blackouts," Gorbachev said.
Solar energy would also "lower electricity bills, and would provide a source in the future for generating renewable hydrogen fuels," he added.

"The fund could easily be raised by cutting subsidies for fossil fuels like oil and coal."

Rising oil prices and supply concerns, as well as the growing need to combat global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, have raised the profile and economic viability of some renewable energy sources.
Those concerns have also sparked renewed interest in nuclear power as a source of climate-friendly energy.

ESCALATING the threats between Washington and Tehran, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has warned that his country would strike US targets worldwide if it were attacked over its refusals to curb its nuclear program.

"If the US ventured into any aggression on Iran, Iran will retaliate by damaging US interests worldwide twice as much as the US may inflict on Iran," the ayatollah said in a speech to a workers' assembly.

His statement adds to a campaign of defiance by Iranian leaders in the lead-up to a report early tomorrow, Melbourne time, by the UN atomic watchdog agency, which analysts predict will cite Iran for defying UN Security Council demands to halt uranium enrichment.

Iran's nuclear energy head, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, held talks with International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei in Vienna yesterday.

"The talks were encouraging," Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, said, without giving details.

The heightened tension between the US and Iran has helped drive oil prices to record highs and has set in motion intense diplomatic meetings aimed at heading off greater turmoil in the Middle East.

In a spate of statements this week, Iranian officials have also threatened to cut oil production, export nuclear technology, bar nuclear monitors, make their nuclear program entirely secret and withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

WASHINGTON, 28 April 2006 -- Three years after a US-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein's regime, only one major US building project in Iraq is on schedule and within budget: The massive new American Embassy compound.

The fortress-like compound rising beside the Tigris River will be the largest of its kind in the world -- the size of Vatican City, or 80 football fields, or six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York -- on about 104 acres. With the population of a small town, it is designed to be entirely self-sufficient; it will have its own defense force and self-contained power and water plants.

The high-tech compound will have 21 buildings reinforced to 2.5 times usual standards. Some walls as said to be 15 feet thick or more. Scheduled for completion by June 2007, the installation is touted as not only the largest, but the most secure diplomatic embassy in the world.

The $592 million facility is being built inside the heavily fortified Green Zone by 900 non-Iraqi foreign workers who are housed nearby and under the supervision of a Kuwaiti contractor, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report.

Besides two major diplomatic office buildings, homes for the ambassador and his deputy, and the six apartment buildings for staff, the compound will offer a swimming pool, gym, commissary, food court and American Club, all housed in a recreation building.

'Peace grannies' part of growing anti-war network Elderly women tried to enlist in place of young

Three years after the start of the Iraq war, one thing New York police do not lack is experience in dealing with protesters - so when they were called to a disturbance at the military recruitment centre in Times Square last October, it sounded like just another routine demonstration.

Instead, they found 18 elderly women, many in their 80s and one aged 90, blocking the entrance and demanding to enlist in place of young men.

They called themselves Grandmothers Against The War, and after they ignored polite requests to move on, police had no option but to arrest them, making sure the handcuffs weren't too tight, and cart them off - complete with canes and walking frames - to the holding cells.
They were finally acquitted yesterday, after a trial that caught New Yorkers' imagination, even as it seemed to agonise the prosecutors saddled with the job of arguing that the "peace grannies", as they became known, should be jailed.

At the height of the proceedings, Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist who became a celebrity for camping for months outside George Bush's Texas ranch after her son was killed in Iraq, showed up to lend her support.

The women are part of a growing network of American anti-war groups made up of senior citizens, including the Raging Grannies of Tucson, Arizona, and Grandmothers for Peace International, who use the positive social stereotype attaching to grandmothers - and the reluctance of the authorities to come down too hard on them - to further their cause.

KHARTOUM, Sudan, April 28 -- The World Food Program, the United Nations agency responsible for feeding three million people affected by the conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, announced Friday that it would cut in half the amount of food it distributed there because it was short of money.

The food program said it had received just a third of the $746 million it had requested from donor nations for all of its operations in Sudan. As a result, individual rations that include grain, blended foods, beans, oil, sugar and salt for people in Darfur, where a brutal ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003, will be reduced from 2,100 calories a day to 1,050 calories -- about half the level the agency recommends.

A crocodile in northern Australia has chased a storm-clearance worker up a tree and made off with his chainsaw.

The 4.4m (14.5ft) saltwater crocodile called Brutus apparently took exception to the noise of the saw.

The worker was clearing a tree that fell on the crocodile enclosure at the Corroboree Park Tavern, 80km (50 miles) east of the northern city of Darwin.

Brutus chewed on the chainsaw for 90 minutes, reducing it to pieces. Neither man nor beast was injured.
Northern Australia has an estimated 100,000 saltwater crocodiles.

Et chew Brutus

Worker Freddy Buckland was cutting a tree that had fallen as a result of a recent tropical cyclone.
Peter Shappert, the tavern's owner, said the crocodile jumped from the water and sped 20ft to the tree.

"It must have been the noise... I don't think he was actually trying to grab Freddy, but I'm not sure. He had a fair go at him... I think he just grabbed the first thing he could and it happened to be the chainsaw."

Click on the maps to find out more about the people, land and infrastructure of Iran.

To you it is a bag of salad, dropped into the supermarket trolley with the weekly groceries. But to farmers in Kenya starved of the water extracted by large scale agriculture to grow it, it may spell destitution. The world is running out of water and British supermarket shoppers are contributing to global drought, according to environmental pressure groups.

Customers who scour the aisles of Tesco, Sainsbury and Waitrose for Spanish tomatoes, Egyptian potatoes and Kenyan roses, are intensifying the worldwide shortage of our most precious resource.

In Kenya, the food items grown for export include lettuce, rocket, baby leaf salad, mangetout, peas and broccoli. Even producing a small 50g salad bag wastes almost 50 litres of water in the countries where the commodity is at its most precious. A mixed salad containing tomatoes, celery and cucumber, as well as lettuce, would require more than 300 litres. Washing, processing and packaging adds to that total.

The international trade in out-of-season vegetables and flowers brings employment for some and wealth for a few.

But for those who find the water for their land has been extracted by larger enterprises upstream, it means increasing hardship and even permanent environmental damage.

Munich native Bruno Baumann was searching for the Buddhist Shangri-la and happened upon the true cradle of Tibetan culture -- the silver palace of the Shang Shung kings. Fierce warriors and bloodthirsty shamans ruled this remote mountain realm more than 2,000 years ago.

The region, in the southwestern Tibetan plateau, doesn't look particularly spectacular at first glance. The only human settlement shown on satellite maps of the area is the tiny village of Kyunglung, embedded in a valley.

Bruno Baumann carefully guides his canoe through the raging waters of the Sutlej River. Suddenly he can hardly believe his eyes: a huge labyrinth of caves appears behind a gate-like formation in the middle of the rock face of the cliffs. Along a stretch of the river extending for several kilometers, a lost city of crumbled monasteries, temples and walls, glinting in reds and silvers in the afternoon sun, rises up to 400 meters (1,312 feet) above the river valley.

Baumann, an Austrian living in Munich, is considered one of the foremost experts on Tibet in German-speaking countries. He has written about a dozen books and produced several films on the icy region in southwestern China. After Beijing reopened Tibet to foreigners in the mid-1980s, Baumann, an ethnologist by profession, began spending months at a time on the rooftop of the world.

But what he now sees in the valley near Kyunglung outshines everything he has seen so far. "This is what it must look like, the paradise of Shangri-la, that dream world where time stood still," Baumann says. Could it be that he has found the holy grail of Tibetans?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Coffee futures may spike next year because of a looming shortage of green coffee beans caused by growing consumer demand coupled with an off year in Brazil's biennial crop cycle.

Still, coffee traders have not yet priced in the risk of a deficit, reducing the probability that roasters will soon raise their list prices, which are used as a measure for setting prices for coffee shipped to supermarkets and store chains.

"I expect a supply problem, maybe even a supply crisis will hit us in the course of 2007, and it will not be over with for two years beyond," said Roland Veit, president of Paragon Coffee Trading Co. in New York.
"While I, and almost everyone else I know in the coffee business kind of agrees with this scenario, it is too early for the market to react," said Veit, who started his coffee career in 1972 as a commodities buyer for Nestle in Switzerland.

The International Coffee Organization expects world production in the 2006/07 season to reach 120 million 60-kg bags, up from about 107 million bags the previous season, thanks in large part to top coffee grower Brazil.

That's the good news. The trouble is that carryover stocks are low, consumption is rising and the coffee harvest in Brazil, which annually produces between 30-40 percent of world output, is based on a biennial cycle.

Hundreds of dead dolphins washed up today along the shore of a popular tourist destination on Zanzibar's northern coast, and scientists ruled out poisoning.

It was not immediately clear what killed the 400 dolphins, whose carcasses were strewn along a two and a half mile stretch of Nungwi, said Narriman Jidawi, a marine biologist at the Institute of Marine Science in Zanzibar.

But the bottleneck dolphins, which live in deep offshore waters, had empty stomachs, meaning that they could have been disoriented and were swimming for some time to reorient themselves. They did not starve to death and were not poisoned, Jidawi said.

In the US, experts were investigating the possibility that sonar from US submarines could have been responsible for a similar incident in Marathon, Florida, where 68 deep-water dolphins stranded themselves in March 2005.

A US Navy task force patrols the East Africa coast as part of counterterrorism operations. A Navy official was not immediately available for comment, but the service rarely comments on the location of submarines at sea.