· UK is urged to take lead in monitoring agents
· Scathing attack on Bush, 'the King John of USA'

The head of Europe's human rights watchdog yesterday called for monitoring of CIA agents operating in Britain and other European countries, after President George Bush's admission that the US had detained terrorist suspects in secret prisons.

Terry Davis, secretary general of the Council of Europe, said CIA agents operating in Europe should be subject to the same rules as British agents working for MI5 and MI6.

"There is a need to deal with the conduct of allied foreign security services agents active on the territory of a council member state," Terry Davis said. "In the UK there is parliamentary scrutiny of the intelligence services but there is no parliamentary scrutiny of friendly foreign services. The UK should be in the lead on this issue."

The next stage of globalization is in full swing in Prato, once the center of the Italian textile industry. After the city lost jobs to factories in the Far East, now the Chinese and their low-wage workers are encroaching on Old Europe.

Prato's old city wall is wrapped around the city like a tightly cinched belt. The pale brick wall, 15 meters (49 feet) tall and topped with battlements, encloses the city's marble cathedral, baroque churches and palaces while a river gushes beneath ancient bridges built by the Etruscans. Built in the Middle Ages, the wall once protected Prato from outsiders. Today it's little more than a picturesque backdrop.

Outsiders have long since made their way into Prato, Italy's textile-making capital in the heart of Tuscany. Luigi, a 30-year-old man with a boyish face, waits in the shadow of the wall, his black hair gelled into spikes, a constantly ringing mobile phone in his hand. Luigi is a Chinese businessman from Wenzhou. He calls himself Luigi because it's easier for Italians to remember. Practically every pizza maker in Italy is named Luigi, he says. He prefers not to reveal his real, Chinese name. It would be bad for business. The Chinese Luigi wants to keep his story a secret in Prato.

It's Sunday, an ordinary work day for the Chinese. Luigi hurries through a gate in the wall, walks down a narrow street through his neighborhood, passing the Square of the White Stone and the Palace of the Rising Moon. The names are Luigi's inventions and his way of familiarizing himself with the city more quickly. When asked what his goal is, he says: "to get rich as quickly as possible." And when asked what he calls home, he answers: "the whole world, but my heart beats for China."

The new home of 2,000 Chinese entrepreneurs and an army of low-wage workers, 25,000 strong, is growing rapidly in front of the walls of this small city of 180,000. One in five of the workers is undocumented and, officially at least, isn't even here. Meanwhile Prato's citizens look on and curse their new neighbors as sewing machines rattle through the night.

PARIS, France (Reuters) -- France issued an implicit criticism of U.S. foreign policy on Thursday, rejecting talk of a "war on terror."

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, speaking in parliament, expressed these views on global terrorism, while President Jacques Chirac backed France's claims to the international front rank with a fresh defense of his country's nuclear arsenal.

De Villepin noted Chirac's strong opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and said the Arab state had now sunk into violence and was feeding new regional crises.

"Let us not forget that these crises play into the hands of all extremists," the prime minister said in a debate on the Middle East. "We can see this with terrorism, whether it tries to strike inside or outside our frontiers," he added.

"Against terrorism, what's needed is not a war. It is, as France has done for many years, a determined fight based on vigilance at all times and effective cooperation with our partners.

"But we will only end this curse if we also fight against injustice, violence and these crises," he said.
Villepin's remarks, which came a day after U.S. President George Bush admitted that the CIA had interrogated dozens of terrorism suspects in secret foreign locations, did not explicitly mention the United States.

But his rejection of language employed by Bush, who often uses the expression "war on terror" underlined the longstanding differences between Paris and Washington.

BRUSSELS: Britain is breaking European Union law by failing to ensure that workers get required rest periods, the EU's highest court said Thursday in a ruling that called for stricter regulation of British employers.

The case forms part of the debate in Europe over protection of workers. It falls under an EU law governing working time; the law sets minimums for break periods and time off.

The court backed the European Commission, which had sued the British government over guidelines issued to employers on interpretation of the law. The guidelines, which were introduced in 1998, say employers must permit rest but are not required to make sure that workers take the time off.

The British guidelines "endorse and encourage a practice of noncompliance," the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg said in a statement.

Britain will have to make employers responsible for ensuring that workers get the benefit of their rights, said the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.

The court's decision cannot be appealed.

Tony Blair on Thursday bowed to intense pressure from Gordon Brown, his finance minister and likely successor, and other Labour MPs and confirmed that he would stand down as UK prime minister within a year.

Although Mr Blair was still resisting demands to set a precise date for his departure, he and Mr Brown have reached an understanding that the prime minister will resign on May 4.

Signalling the end of Britain's most successful Labour premiership, a period in which he has dominated the political landscape, Mr Blair said his party's annual conference this month would be his last as leader.

His statement came a week after he vowed not to be bounced into saying when he would leave and is a measure of his diminished political authority. It failed to quell the calls from Labour MPs for him to go quickly and it was far from clear that he would be able to hold on that long.

Mr Brown broke weeks of silence to prevent feuding that has paralysed the government from spinning out of control.

Addressing criticism that he was trying to engineer his coronation as leader, Mr Brown said the timing of Mr Blair's departure "should not be about private arrangements but what is in the best interest of our party and most of all the best interest of our country and I will support him in doing exactly that".

The European parliament on Thursday renewed its battle to limit US authorities' access to information on travellers flying to the US from the European Union, as the EU executive began talks with Washington to replace a controversial data-sharing deal.

The EU and US are scrambling to forge a new accord on sharing passenger data after the EU's top court in May struck down the agreement and ordered that it expire on September 30.

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Members of the parliament voted in Strasbourg on Thursday to recommend that EU governments incorporate new privacy safeguards in any fresh deal with the US, to prevent the profiling of passengers, which raises fears of an infringement of civil liberties.

The non-binding vote follows a flurry of fresh security measures in the wake of last month's discovery by British police of an alleged plot to use liquid explosives to blow up transatlantic jets.

The UK followed that alert with a sweeping ban on passengers taking liquids on to aircraft and has sought to persuade other EU countries that new airline security measures are needed.

For the first time in its online history, The New York Times blocked access to an article for readers in the United Kingdom.

In years gone by, they were called radiotelephones. They were in wooden, honey-colored boxes with two rotating buttons on the right side, a cloth cover over the speaker and usually had a kind of tear shape. In those times, a radiotelephone was one of a small number of essential survival items. During the Second World War, every evening in the hours before the bombs would shower over Berlin, the women of the family would congregate in silence to hear the one radio station that guaranteed them credible news (the men were at the front and had little news). At that time in Germany, as in many other countries around the world over innumerable years, the BBC News World Service was - and for many continues to be - the only link to the outside world.

Six decades after World War II, the technology of the airwaves has been dethroned by computers and the Internet. Information today - both good and bad - circulates by the ton over huge distances in seconds and is accessible to audiences that would have been impossible before. Without leaving his native land, a reader (seated in a democratic country) can examine the world's major newspapers and amass different perspectives on the same item of news ... in theory, at least.

Or, at least, such a thing was possible until last Monday [Aug. 28], when for the first time in its online history, The New York Times blocked the access of readers in the United Kingdom to an article RealVideo, and suspended its publication in its print version for sale in Britain (including those destined for subscribers), and in the print edition of the International Herald Tribune, which is also published by The New York Times Company. The article in question gave details about the events leading to the discovery of a plot to explode a series of aircraft destined for the United States, and the suspects who were detained in London in connection with the plot. The disclosure of these details, which took place before the sentencing of the suspects, would have been punishable under British law, which is what prompted lawyers of the North American newspaper to advise that the rules be obeyed.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -- A Swedish state pension group has followed Norway's oil fund in dropping the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart, as an investment, saying the U.S. company had violated human rights in the labor market.

Wal-Mart (up $0.54 to $45.94, Charts) shares were up more than 1 percent during afternoon trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
toys_vs_walmart.03.jpg

Wal-Mart said it did not comment on individual investor decisions, but spokeswoman Amy Wyatt added: "We strive to adhere to the highest standards in the treatment of each and every one of our own associates. These matters are among our highest priorities as a company."

The Swedish Second National Pension Fund said it had sold its small stake of shares in Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Mexico, worth about 300 million Swedish kronor ($9.14 million), out of total funds of 194 billion kronor it has under management.

BELGIAN police claimed yesterday to have foiled a neo-Nazi terrorist plot after arresting 11 soldiers and seizing a large quantity of weapons during raids on five army barracks.

The federal prosectutor's office said that the group had planned to destabilise the country and had apparently infiltrated the military. It had also amassed a sophisticated range of arms and explosives.

Lieve Pellens, a spokeswoman for the office, said: "They were extreme right, with anti-Semitic and xenophobic ideals. They were recruiting in military circles with the aim possibly to move to action."

All the arrests were made in the Dutch-speaking Flanders region, where there has been a steady rise in support for the far-right anti-immigrant Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) Party. The suspects allegedly belonged to a breakaway faction of the far-right Flemish group Blood and Honour. Police also detained six civilians, who are expected to appear in court today.

Prosecutors said that a two-year inquiry into the splinter group Bloed-Bodem-Eer-Trouw (Blood, Soil, Honour, Loyalty) led them to a stockpile of weapons that included a large quantity of ammunition, pistols, rifles and landmine detonators.

...

Laurette Onkelinx, the Belgian Justice Minister, hailed the "exemplary collaboration" between the police, military and judiciary that had enabled the dismantlement of a neo- Nazi group within the army.

Justice Party coup thwarted

There was a massive wave of arrests of opposition leaders in Georgia yesterday. Twenty-nine supporters of former head of Georgian state security and accused terrorist Igor Giorgadze are now in custody. Interior Minister Vano Mirabishvili announced that an attempted coup financed by Russia had been prevented. The opposition says that a new political era has begun in Georgia as "the authorities try to hold on to power through repression alone."

 Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.

A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon.

It was on 25 June that the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was taken captive and two other soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants who used a tunnel to get out of the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of this, writes Gideon Levy in the daily Haaretz, the Israeli army "has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately". Gaza has essentially been reoccupied since Israeli troops and tanks come and go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took over several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time they withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses were destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had been bulldozed.

Mons, Belgium: Nato's top commander of operations, General James Jones, acknowledged yesterday the alliance had been taken aback by the extent of violence in southern Afghanistan and urged allies to provide reinforcements.

"We are talking about modest reinforcements," Jones told a news briefing at Nato's European military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, saying commanders on the ground sought several hundred additional troops, more helicopters and transport aircraft.

Several Nato soldiers have been killed in fierce fighting with Islamist Taliban guerrillas since the alliance extended its peacekeeping mission to the south a month ago.

Jones said he would turn initially to existing contributors to the 37-nation International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), including Germany, which has several thousand troops in the relatively calm north of Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON - The Senate on Wednesday rejected a move by Democrats to stop the
Pentagon from using cluster bombs near civilian targets and to cut off sales unless purchasers abide by the same rules.

On a 70-30 vote, the Senate defeated an amendment to a Pentagon budget bill to block use of the deadly munitions near populated areas. The vote came after the State Department announced last month that it is investigating whether
Israel misused American-made cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon.

Unexploded cluster bombs -- anti-personnel weapons that spray bomblets over a wide area -- litter homes, gardens and highways in south Lebanon after Israel's 34-day war with Hezbollah militants.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have long sought to keep cluster bombs from being used near concentrated areas of civilians. They say that as many as 40 percent of the munitions fail to detonate on impact -- they can still can explode later -- leaving innocent civilians and children vulnerable to injury or death long after hostilities have ceased.

Relief organizations and the
United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center reported finding evidence that Israel used three types of U.S.-made cluster bombs during the war with Hezbollah militants. Israel also manufactures its own cluster munitions.

CAIRO, Egypt -- Al-Jazeera broadcast Thursday a previously unshown video of the preparations for the Sept. 11 attacks, in which al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden is seen meeting with some of the planners in an Afghan mountain camp.

The station said that bin Laden also is shown greeting some of the hijackers, although their faces were not clear and it was not immediately known which are purportedly shown. The video included the last wills and testaments of hijackers Wail al-Shehri and Hamza al-Ghamdi.

Al-Jazeera did not say how it obtained the video, which was produced by As-Sahab, al-Qaida's media branch. Islamic militant Web forums said the entire video would be posted soon on the Internet. Such advertisements in the past have come a day or two before the video appears on the Web.

Thursday's was the fourth in a series of long videos that al-Qaida has put out to memorialize the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, said Ben Venzke, head of IntelCenter, a private U.S. company that monitors militant message traffic and provides counterterrorism intelligence services for the American government.

The previous ones were issued in April and September 2002 and September 2003, each showing video from the planning of the suicide hijackings and farewell statements from some of the hijackers, Venzke said.

In the latest video, bin Laden is shown sitting outside with his former lieutenant Mohammed Atef and Ramzi Binalshibh, another suspected planner of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Venzke said the scenes had not been previously broadcast.

Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001. Binalshibh was captured four years ago in Pakistan and is in U.S. custody. President Bush announced plans to put him on military trial.

The video shows bin Laden in a dark robe and white headgear, strolling through the camp and greeting dozens of followers, some masked, and many carrying automatic weapons. A voice-over narration praises the fighters and refers to the camp being "on the soil of Kandahar" -- a city in southern Afghanistan.

The footage shows scenes of training at the camp. Masked militants perform martial-arts kicks or learn how to break the hold of someone who grabs them from behind. Several militants are shown practicing with fold-out knives.

Venzke said the footage was part of a video he expected would be more than an hour long, based on previous releases.

He said the full version of the video was believed to include a message from Azzam al-Amriki, the nom de guerre of Adam Yehiye Gadahn, an American who the FBI says has associated with al-Qaida. Gadahn appeared in an al-Qaida video released last week, in which he called on Americans to convert to Islam.

The full video also likely includes messages from bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, though they may not be new, Venzke said, without elaborating on why he believed that.

"They produce long videos like these not just for 9/11, but for any significant events they feel warrant their attention," Venzke said.

One aim is to boost recruitment, but such videos have other purposes -- "to speak to their supporters, to raise morale within their own group, to facilitate fundraising, and to serve as a psychological attack," he said.

The footage also shows glimpses of daily life in the camp, with men chopping wood and cutting up vegetables for dinner.

Al-Shehri and al-Ghamdi are each shown speaking to the camera, their images superimposed over pictures of the crumbling World Trade Center towers and the burning Pentagon, as well as a model of a passenger jet.

They both say Muslims must stand up and fight the West.

"If jihad now is not an obligation (on Muslims), when will it be?" said al-Shehri, pointing to attacks on Muslims in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya.

"If we are content with being humiliated and inclined to comfort, the tooth of the enemy will stretch from Jerusalem to Mecca, and then everyone will regret on a day when regret is of no use," al-Ghamdi said.

Natascha Kampusch -- the 18-year-old kidnapping victim whose fate has riveted Europe since she escaped after eight years of captivity -- made her first public appearance Wednesday.

Austrian teenager Natascha Kampusch showed both fragility and strength in her first interview since fleeing captivity last month.

The TV interview garnered massive ratings -- and not a little criticism.

She told an Austrian interviewer that she had never abandoned dreams of freedom, saying:  "I only thought about fleeing."

Kampusch, who appeared poised in the interview, was snatched off a Vienna street in 1998 when she was 10. She spent eight years in a dungeon-like cell in the basement of the home of her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil. Priklopil committed suicide after Kampusch escaped on Aug. 23.

Media frenzy

Kampusch's escape set off a media feeding frenzy. The interest in her case is so intense in Europe that even the bidding war for the interview became a subject of intense speculation. In the end Kampusch -- whose team of aides now includes a media representative as well as psychologists -- chose the news program on Austrian public broadcaster ORF to make her first public appearance.

BBC News: Methane bubbles climate trouble

Thawing Siberian bogs are releasing more of the greenhouse gas methane than previously believed, according to new scientific research.

Scientists from Russia and the US measured methane bubbling from a number of thawing lakes. Writing in the journal Nature, they suggest the methane release is hastened by warmer temperatures, positively feeding back into global warming.

Methane's contribution to present-day global warming is second only to CO2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that atmospheric concentrations are about two and a half times those seen in pre-industrial times.

Methane flux from thaw lakes in our study region may be five times greater than previously estimated
Katey Walker and colleagues
"Thaw lakes in north Siberia are known to emit methane, but the magnitude of these emissions remains uncertain," the scientists write. "We show that methane flux from thaw lakes in our study region may be five times greater than previously estimated."

The lakes are produced in summers when land which is usually permanently frozen - permafrost - melts.

Although I could offer some reassurance, I personally find the thawing permafrost (and a melting Greenland) the most troubling aspects of the warming earth myself...

Volkswagen on Thursday attacked biofuels made from food crops as unsustainable, setting the German carmaker at odds with President Bush, US carmakers and European governments, which have all been touting ethanol as an environmentally friendly alternative to petrol in cars.

Bernd Pischetsrieder, chief executive, called on politicians to lower tax breaks for current "first-generation" fuels - made in the US and Europe from corn, wheat, rape seed and sugar beet - and instead provide financial support for new second-generation technologies that promise big cuts in carbon dioxide.

Mr Pischetsrieder said some of the current biofuels were "totally pointless" and "like a wolf in sheep's clothing". He criticised tax benefits that were not linked to carbon dioxide, since some methods of refining biofuel actually led to higher carbon emissions than from petrol.

"The current situation is totally unsatisfactory, both from the environmental and economic standpoint," he said.

(...)

The handful of opponents of the fuel in the environmental movement have mostly been concerned about increased leakage of carcinogenic fumes, development of monoculture farms and the danger to rainforests from new palm plantations in developing countries, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia.

(Article worth reading in full)


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

The Economist: The heat is on

The uncertainty surrounding climate change argues for action, not inaction. America should lead the way

The United States is the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases, though not for long. Every year China is building power-generating capacity almost equivalent to Britain's entire stock, almost all of it burning coal--the dirtiest fuel. It will shortly overtake America, and India is not far behind. Developing countries argue, quite reasonably, that, since the rich world created the problem, it must take the lead in solving it. So, if America continues to refuse to do anything to control its emissions, developing countries won't do anything about theirs. If America takes action, they just might.
    ...
Although George Bush now argues that America needs to wean itself off its dependency on oil, his administration still refuses to take serious action. But other Americans are moving. California's state assembly has just passed tough Kyoto-style targets. Many businesses, fearing that they will end up having to deal with a patchwork of state-level measures, now want federal controls. And conservative America, once solidly sceptical, is now split over the issue, as Christians concerned about mankind's stewardship of the Earth, neo-cons keen to reduce America's dependency on the Middle East and farmers who see alternative energy as a new potential source of energy come round to the idea of cutting down on carbon.

Mr Bush has got two years left in the job. He would like to be remembered as a straightshooter who did the right thing. Tackling climate change would be one way to do that.

(I tried posting this directly to the diary, but for some reason it did not go through.)

Out of the Dark Age came the most magnificent thing we have in our society: the recognition that people can have a society without having a state.