PARIS: Seven European countries including France and Italy were threatened with legal action over lax fisheries controls Wednesday as part of new efforts to prevent the collapse of bluefin tuna from overfishing.

Driven by the high prices from the Japanese sushi market, European fishermen have already caught their entire quota of 16,779.5 tons of bluefin tuna for 2007 and last week were ordered to stop fishing until next year.

The European Commission said Wednesday that it intended to get tough with the countries that fail to police their national fishing fleets. In a statement it said that "high rates of undeclared overfishing have been singled out as a key cause of the decline of the stock."

Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain were sent legal letters for failing to send official data on catches to the commission. France and Italy received the same warning though theirs also referred to shortcomings in their controls. If their answers fail to satisfy the European Commission, the countries can be taken to the European Court of Justice, the European Union's highest court.

The French government on Wednesday unveiled a budget for 2008 that does little towards balancing public finances only days after the prime minister warned the country was "bankrupt".

The first budget under Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency puts on hold France's efforts to trim its public deficit and debt in spite of the protests of its eurozone partners, who want Paris to stick to promises made by the previous government.

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The European Commission, which declined to comment on the budget, is considering issuing a formal notice to France telling it to stick to its undertaking to balance its budget by 2010.

It would be the first use of the "early advice notice" procedure under the European Union's revised fiscal rules. However, France is likely to brush off any such intervention that has no legal or political consequences.

Spain's leading family of wine-makers are heading for the hills to keep ahead of the global warming that threatens their Catalan vineyards.

The Torres family have been making wine in the north-eastern Penedes region for four generations, but are now buying plots near the foothills of the Pyrenees as conditions in their traditional vineyards become increasingly dry.

"We are moving into cooler areas of northern Catalonia, towards the Pyrenees," said the company's chairman, Miguel Torres. "We have already planted vineyards successfully that we can use in the future." The company has planted 104 hectares of vines 1,000m above sea level in the foothills near Tremp - four times higher than their main winery near Penedes, west of Barcelona.

The company said: "Climate change is unfortunately a reality not only established by scientists; we ourselves, who work with the fruit of the land, are aware of the problems."

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A group of European lawmakers has thrown its support behind a campaign calling on EU capitals to grant asylum to 45 men wrongly-imprisoned in the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

"Innocent civilians continue to languish in Guantanamo despite being cleared for release...EU governments should step in and offer this group of persecuted individuals some hope", Dutch green MEP Kathalijne Buitenweg told EUobserver on Wednesday (26 September).

"By not acting the European Union will become responsible for their misery", Ms Buitenweg added.

The campaign, suggesting the relocation of Guantanamo prisoners from right-abusing regimes such as Algeria or Sudan to the EU territory, has been launched by the International Federation for Human Rights along with the Centre for Constitutional Rights.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev warned Russians on Wednesday of the risk of a rebirth of Stalinism, saying their country was in danger of forgetting its tragic past.0

"We should remember those who suffered, because this a lesson for all of us," Gorbachev told a conference marking 70 years since the start of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's Great Terror.

"We must squeeze Stalinism out of ourselves, not in single drops but by the glass or bucket," Gorbachev added. "There are those saying Stalin's rule was the Golden Age, while (Nikita) Khrushchev's thaw was sheer utopia and (Leonid) Brezhnev's neo-Stalinism was the continuation of the Golden Age."

During the Great Terror, 1.7 million Soviet citizens were arrested between August 1937 and November 1938, of whom 818,000 were executed, the human rights group Memorial said.

The two chambers of the federal parliament are at odds over whether English should be made the first foreign language taught at schools.

The country's cantons traditionally have far-reaching autonomy over language and education, which has led to some choosing English over one of Switzerland's national languages.

 

The Senate on Tuesday decided against a clause in a new language law forcing schools to teach a second national language - German, French, Italian, Romansh - before English.

 

This goes against the House of Representatives, which last June gave national languages priority. The proposal will now go back to the house to be debated at a later stage.

 

A clear majority in the Senate said setting a mandatory nationwide priority went against the constitution and was irresponsible.

Google's $3.1 billion (£1.5 billion) acquisition of DoubleClick, the largest broker of online banner advertising, is likely to be delayed for months by the European Commission, advisors close to the internet search giant believe.

The European competition watchdog will decide by October 26 whether to launch a full investigation into the takeover, which would hold up the deal for at least four months. The Commission could block it altogether if the investigation reveals significant competition issues.

A full-blown inquiry would be construed as an interim victory for Microsoft, which is lobbying fiercely against the DoubleClick deal on competition and privacy grounds.

Microsoft, which is fighting to reinvent itself as a force in online advertising, was beaten in an auction for DoubleClick this year. It is thought that Microsoft matched Google's bid but was snubbed by Helman & Friedman, DoubleClick's private equity owner.

A former senior Polish intelligence official is suing a Swiss investigator over a report accusing him of direct knowledge of secret CIA operations in Poland.

Marek Siwiec, who is now vice-president of the European Parliament, has filed a libel suit against Swiss senator Dick Marty in the district court of Poznan, Siwiec's office said.

 

Marty identified Siwiec as one of several local officials privy to the United States secret detention programme in Europe after the 2001 attacks.

 

The former Swiss prosecutor had conducted an 18-month inquiry on behalf of the Council of Europe into allegations that the US intelligence interrogated key terror suspects at secret prisons in Poland and Romania.

 

Citing unidentified CIA sources and other contacts, Marty accused four high-ranking Poles and five Romanians - including former presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski and Ion Iliescu - as being politically accountable for the clandestine jails, where he said prisoners were shackled and handcuffed, kept naked and in isolation.

This week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was thoroughly trashed by the Western media over its recent agreement with Iran, an agreement that, ironically, was warmly embraced by the majority of nations that are members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The North-South gap has turned ballistic, and there is no bridge over this troubled water.

"NAM respects the recent report by the IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, on Iran," the Cuban foreign minister and  current head of NAM, Felipe Perez Roque, told the press after the conclusion of a two-day NAM summit in Tehran.

The ministerial meeting was a timely shot in the arm for Tehran, which hopes to avoid a new round of United Nations sanctions come this autumn, even though British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has warned that new sanctions are inevitable if Iran continues to defy UN Security Council resolutions on its nuclear program.

Not surprisingly, little if any of the praise for the IAEA heard at the NAM summit has been echoed in the United States, which is keen on maintaining the delicate coalition at the UN that brought the first two anti-Tehran resolutions and yet is concerned that the IAEA's agreement with Iran could, in the words of a Washington Post editorial, give China and Russia "a pretext to resist another UN sanctions resolution".

Iran and the IAEA agreed last month on a plan of action that is supposed to remove all technical ambiguities surrounding Iran's nuclear projects and serve as the basis for a political settlement between Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and European Union foreign-policy chief Javier Solana.

The inevitable happened sometime before noon.

Close to the Shwedagon pagoda, the golden gleaming monument in central Rangoon that has been the focus of protest for nine days, at least 10 monks were beaten up by police as thousands once again defied the authorities and tried to enter the holy shrine. Next, the police fired tear gas at them, and scores of the men in saffron robes were arrested and dragged away. From then on things only got worse.

By last night up to eight monks and civilians had, according to differing reports, been killed as the military regime finally resorted to violence to put down the soaring challenge to its rule.

Reuters reported that hospital and monastery sources claimed two monks and a civilian had been killed, while Burmese media operating outside of the country said the death toll was higher. Up to 300 monks and other demonstrators were reportedly arrested before the police again imposed a curfew and the streets of Rangoon cleared.

The Kyl-Lieberman Iran amendment -- which ratchets up the confrontation with Iran by calling for the designation of its Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization responsible for killing U.S. troops -- just passed overwhelmingly, 76-22.

Of the Dem Presidential candidates, Hillary voted for the measure, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd opposed it, and Barack Obama missed the vote. On the GOP side, John McCain missed the vote.

The bill's backers had tried to mollify its critics by taking out some of its most incendiary language, particularly the idea that "it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies."

Also removed from the measure was a provision "to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments" in support of the above.

One leading critic, Jim Webb, however, still opposed the bill because it designates the Iran guard a terrorist organization. Nonetheless, it was able to pass overwhelmingly.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, accused U.S. President George W. Bush of "rank hypocrisy" on Wednesday for lecturing him on human rights and likened the U.S. Guantanamo Bay prison to a concentration camp.

"His hands drip with innocent blood of many nationalities," Mugabe said in a typically fiery speech to the U.N. General Assembly. "He kills in Iraq. He kills in Afghanistan. And this is supposed to be our master on human rights?"

Mugabe, 83, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, was speaking the day after Bush scolded the governments of Belarus, Syria, Iran and North Korea as "brutal regimes" in his speech to the General Assembly.

New Zealanders have been given the chance to write their own laws, with a new online tool launched by police.

The "wiki" will allow the public to suggest the wording of a new police act, as part of a government review of the current law, written in 1958.

Police say they hope to gain a range of views from the public on the new law before presenting it to parliament.

The wiki, one of the first of its kind in the world, is open to any internet user, police say.

Last year, a team of researchers added a novel twist to something known as a time-use survey. Instead of simply asking people what they had done over the course of their day, as pollsters have been doing since the 1960s, the researchers also asked how people felt during each activity. Were they happy? Interested? Tired? Stressed?
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Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.
Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work -- and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don't enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

A team of researchers led by Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen has found that growing and using biofuels emits up to 70 percent more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. They are warning that the cure could end up being worse than the disease.

 Are biofuels a potential climate killler? Biofuels, once championed as the great hope for fighting climate change, could end up being more damaging to the environment than oil or gasoline. A new study has found that the growth and use of crops to make biofuels produces more damaging greenhouse gases than previously thought.

German Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen and his team of researchers have calculated the emissions released by the growth and burning of crops such as maize, rapeseed and cane sugar to produce biofuels. The team of American, British and German scientists has found that the process releases twice as much nitrous oxide (N2O) as previously thought. They estimate that 3 to 5 percent of nitrogen in fertilizer is converted and emitted, as opposed to the 2 percent used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its calculations.