LONDON: With his brooding aspect and sagging poll numbers, Prime Minister Gordon Brown had seemed to personify the bleak mood of a world traumatized by collapsing house prices, lost jobs and banks that would not lend.

But that was last week.

After devising a bank rescue plan that has now been endorsed by European and American officials -- and sent global stocks soaring immediately afterward -- he is being celebrated worldwide and has revived a political career that the "commentariat," as Brown disdainfully refers to the chattering classes, had predicted would soon be at an end.

While Brown, 57, has moved up in the polls, he still trails his younger conservative rival, the fresh-faced David Cameron, 42, whose months of deft parliamentary jabs helped define Brown as a leaden, out of touch leader.

Nearly 10,000 jobs are to be lost and up to 100 courts could close as budget cuts hit the public sector.

The Timeshas learnt that more than £900 million must be saved at the Ministry of Justice in the next two years, threatening initiatives that include Gordon Brown's programme to tackle knife crime. The news comes as figures revealed that inflation hit a 16-year high of 5.2 per cent last month, driven by soaring gas and electricity bills.

Analysts predict that the spike will also blow a £3 billion hole in Britain's welfare budget because the annual increase in pensions and benefits is pegged to the September figures. With most experts forecasting that unemployment will exceed government estimates, the bill for welfare payments is almost certain to rise further.

A confidential presentation made to officials by Suma Chakrabarti, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, detailed the savings required from the department 18 months after it was set up. They include the loss of 9,891 jobs in the prison, probation and court services - more than a tenth of the workforce - with one in three coming through redundancies. These cuts, along with a freeze on new recruits or the use of agency staff, could lead to the closure of up to 100 courts.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Europe has breathed a sigh of relief after markets reacted positively to its coordinated rescue of the banking sector. But the Brussels summit of EU leaders (15 to 16 October) is expected to see criticism of the strategy, as well as scepticism over ambitious climate change goals in the uncertain economic times.

Back to the family photo - for some EU leaders the fourth time since September at the invitation of French presidency

Almost completely overshadowed by the financial crisis, the Lisbon treaty part of the summit agenda will boil down to Ireland's report on reasons why the Irish voters rejected the document, with answers on if and when Dublin could repeat the referendum due in December at the earliest.

For several leaders, it is the fourth time in less than two months that they are gathering under the initiative of France - currently holding the EU's six-month rotating presidency - following an extraordinary session on Georgia and two previous gatherings on the financial crisis.

Paris is hoping that the October summit will give a definite, EU-wide stamp of approval to the bank rescue and lay the groundwork for a grand finale at the end of the year - a December summit that would put both climate change and the Lisbon treaty solution on the list of French presidency achievements.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - As EU leaders in Brussels meet to debate Russia relations and diplomats in Geneva discuss Georgian security, one Polish aid worker aims to remind politicians of the stark realities of the conflict via a vandalised flag.

Henryk Wlaszczyk - who did not want EUobserver to name the organisation he works for in case it is denied access to future war zones - arrived in Georgia at the height of the conflict on 11 August. He was based in Gori and travelled in the South Ossetia border region.

Gori - the birthplace of Stalin - after Russian troops left in late August

"The Russians attacked the university in Gori, which was shelled with high-calibre ordnance," he said. "When we entered we saw fires, books scattered everywhere. Then we noticed how the Russian soldiers had attacked the university flag and the EU flag, which was full of holes from bullets and bayonets. This symbol of the EU countries and of Georgian aspirations was an object of direct physical hatred."

The medical worker picked up the flag and aims to pass it on to European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering in the coming days, to show the war was not just a scrap over bits of Georgian land, but a clash between two bordering ideologies and "empires" - the EU and Russia.

Georgian and Russian officials have begun their first direct talks since the conflict over Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia in August.

The talks in Geneva - which are be mediated by the UN, the EU and the OSCE - are aimed at encouraging stability and security in the Caucasus.

But they are unlikely to provide a solution to the dispute, diplomats say.

In August, Russia fought a brief war to repel Georgian troops trying to regain control of South Ossetia.

Moscow later recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia - another Georgia's rebel region - as independent states, drawing condemnation from Tbilisi and Western leaders.

Spanish Prime Minister Jorge Luis Zapatero has received an invitation to visit President Raoul Castro in Cuba next year, but has not yet decided to go, AFP writes. Spain has led the EU in normalising relations with the authoritarian Communist state, seeing EU sanctions scrapped earlier this year.

Euroshareholders, a pan-European club of shareholder groups, on Wednesday asked the board of Fortis bank to step down without any compensation. The move follows the bank's near collapse, with shareholders worried directors will now spend more energy defending their actions than running the business.

ROME: A decision by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France not to extradite a former member of the Red Brigades, the group that terrorized Italy throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, has provoked outrage in Italy and stirred dormant tensions between the two countries.

The decision also raised questions about the role played by the first lady of France, Carla Sarkozy, who had visited the former member, Marina Petrella, last week and personally assured her that she would not be extradited.

Petrella was convicted of involvement in murder and other crimes in Italy, and in 1993 fled to France, where President François Mitterrand had a policy of granting asylum to leftist Italian militants if they renounced violence. But later French governments moved away from that policy, and Petrella was jailed in August 2007.

Last August, she was released after her health deteriorated because of severe depression. She had stopped eating, her lawyer, Irène Terrel, said by telephone on Tuesday. "She just wanted to die," Terrel said.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Union - with some eight million undocumented migrants on its soil, but short of high-skilled migrants - is set to give a new boost to its ambition to establish common immigration and asylum policy.

However, organisations active in the area have expressed "strong reservations", claiming that the security approach is getting the upper hand.

Brussels officials estimate that some eight million undocumented migrants are currently in the EU

At this week's top-level summit in Brussels (15-16 October), EU leaders are expected to formally back the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum, a set of political commitments in five areas - regular and irregular immigration, border controls, asylum policies and co-operation with countries of origin and of transit.

The pact states that the 27-nation bloc "does not have the resources to decently receive all the migrants hoping to find a better life" within its territory.

The International Monetary Fund is sending a team to Ukraine after the former Soviet country requested assistance to help stem a growing economic crisis.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko dodged the question of whether Ukraine was seeking IMF help, instead offering broad assurances that there was no need for panic.

But a spokesman for the IMF said a delegation is due in Ukraine on Wednesday "to discuss economic policies."

Banana importers Dole and Del Monte have been fined 60 million euros ($82 million) for running an illegal price-fixing cartel, the European Commission said.

The importers, along with the Chiquita company, are accused of discussing prices and their pricing intentions in weekly phone calls between 2000 and 2002.

Europe's top antitrust watchdog on Wednesday, Oct. 15, ordered Dole to pay 45.6 million euros for its role while Del Monte/Weichert has been fined 14.7 million euros. Chiquita escaped a penalty because it tipped off authorities about the cartel.

Politician Cem Özdemir is set to soon become Germany's first national party leader of Turkish descent. As head of the Green Party, he will break through a glass ceiling that still persists for most of the country's estimated 2.5 million ethnic Turks.

 Green Party chairman-designee Cem Özdemir: "The number of German voters with migrant backgrounds is increasing -- not only Turks, but other communities as well."

Cem Özdemir raises his vodka-orange and winks.

"Serefe ."

He seems to relax. There was a crowd outside the bar, packed into Berlin's KulturBrauerei for the mid-September Radio Multikulti festival, and the way to the small upstairs table had been full of random greetings and handshakes.

The war in Georgia has provoked unprecedented levels of patriosm in Russia. The majority of the population supported their army's actions in the Caucasus. And even the fiercest critics of the Kremlin have now become proud Russians.

 Members of the Kremlin-loyal youth organisation "Nashi" wave flags and hold a banner during a protest in front of the US embassy in Moscow during the Georgia war. I never thought I'd see the day when regular Russians, without any prompting, would voluntarily and passionately defend the actions of the Kremlin in conversations with a foreign friend.

But at a garden party in a Moscow suburb one evening at the height of Russia's flash war with Georgia in August, I was accosted by several old friends who were bursting to explain to me why Moscow had no choice but to send the 58th Army into Georgia, that it in no way constituted "aggression," and that Russia was clearly acting according to humanitarian concerns.

"Why do you [Westerners] always paint Russia black, even when we're just trying to save our own citizens from genocide?," Sasha, a professor of political science asked me. "We've been facing a creeping invasion of our country by NATO for years, but thank God our leaders are finally taking action to stop it," said Andrei, an executive with a big Western-based multinational corporation. I was astounded. I personally believe that Russia had a half-way decent case for its actions, and I've argued as much in print. But I'd never before heard, or ever expected to hear, any of my friends -- a fairly broad spectrum of intellectuals, businesspeople, a couple of diplomats -- sounding like a news broadcast on Russian state TV. Nowadays, virtually all of them do. These are people who, in the past like most educated Russians, would automatically assume that a Kremlin official was lying if his lips were moving. Things have definitely changed.

The Greek islands are facing a Spanish-style development disaster under plans that would demolish building regulations and encourage a construction boom on some of Europe's last undisturbed coastline.

Just as other European countries are counting the cost of overdevelopment in coastal areas, Greece's government is seeking to redraw planning regulations and open the islands up to high-density summer homes, from Skopelos to Santorini.

Opposition parties have been joined by conservation groups, architects, hoteliers and planning experts in condemning the changes which could come into practice by the end of next month. "We are about to see an explosion of summer house construction along the Spanish coast development model," said Kriton Arsenis, from the Hellenic Society for the Protection of the Environment.

Meanwhile, the PM and the leader started a (for them) unprecedented joint campaign in the EU in Brussels. They advocate an EU-level regulation body for financial markets (Barroso voiced support) and
an explicit strenghtening of the state and the EU in the face of the crisis (heh).

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

The 1989 Romanian Revolution was kicked off by events in Timişoara (Hungarian: Temesvár, German: Temeschwar). The authorities wanted to evict László Tőkés, an ethic-Hungarian pastor [and later ever-more-insane nationalist politician], but were prevented by his flock forming a 'human shield'. Within days, this showing grew into a mass protest of citizens of all backgrounds. The regime reacted with a bloody clampdown -- the (as we later learnt, exaggerated) news of which ignited the events in the capital Bucharest.

Legal persecution of the two generals ordering the massacre at Timişoara was first hampered by the foul power compromise of the new powers-that-be (who in effect benefitted from the revolution by staging a long-planned coup under its mantle), and later, legal troubles (the two generals were first sentenced in 2000).

Now, the High Court issued its final ruling: 15 years in prison.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Russia's leading human rights lawyer is at the centre of an investigation by French police after claiming she had been poisoned by a suspicious substance found hidden in her car.

Detectives in the town of Strasbourg were examining whether Karinna Moskalenko - the country's most prominent defender of Kremlin opponents - had been deliberately poisoned.

Moskalenko said on Monday her husband discovered "large" quantities of a mercury-like substance hidden under her car seat. Moskalenko had been due yesterday to attend the Moscow trial of three men accused of involvement in the murder of the crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, was shot dead two years ago outside her Moscow flat. Two Chechen brothers, Dzhanrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, have been charged with carrying out surveillance on Politkovskaya. A former police officer, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, is accused of giving them technical help.

But the trial was overshadowed by Moskalenko's non-appearance. A champion of victims of torture in Chechnya, she represents many of Putin's most high-profile enemies. These include Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch Putin jailed in 2003, and the opposition leader and former chess champion Garry Kasparov.

Moskalenko said her husband, a chemist, stumbled across the deadly substance while cleaning the family car. She and her family had been suffering from severe headaches, giddiness and nausea. The illness prevented her from flying back to Russia for yesterday's trial, she said.

Civic leaders have been branded mad in a crackpot scheme to float an entire city's assets on the Stock Exchange - just as world money markets are collapsing.

Krakow council leaders want to list all the Polish city's utilities on the money market as a way of raising extra cash for repairs.

But critics say the plan will ruin the medieval city.

"We have just watched millions and millions of pounds disappear into thin air on the world's stock markets. They must be out of their minds," said one.

A rejuvenated Gordon Brown travels early to a European Union summit today after receiving generous praise for his leadership role in Europe's response to the financial crisis.

The Prime Minister will arrive in Brussels the day after the EU's leading official admitted that the multi-billion programme under which banks across Europe are being bailed out by their governments is the "Brown plan".

The man who successfully fought Tony Blair to keep Britain out of the euro is enjoying as friendly relations with the leading members of the eurozone as his predecessor.

He was even invited into the inner sanctum of the club last weekend to urge them to follow the British solution.

While countries around Europe are snapping up financial institutions, "the Swiss government says it doesn't need to", said Mr Nason.

On the contrary. Rather than folding, Credit Suisse is at the heart of the recovery plan that has delighted stock markets over the past couple of days.

Gordon Brown may be taking the credit for the scheme, but it has emerged that it was Credit Suisse's economic boffins who came up with it in the first place, bivouacking in the corridors of the Treasury last week while spinning a safety net for the world's financial institutions.

Despite appearances, Switzerland is certainly not immune from the coming recession.

Figures released last week estimate growth for next year down to 1*3 per cent.

But economy secretary Jean Daniel Gerber has more to be cheery about than most of his colleagues around Europe, and indeed the world.

With Iceland's economy frozen by the global financial crisis, the tiny Nordic country continues to explore options for recovery, turning to the IMF, Russia and the EU for help.

Under a currency swap agreement, Iceland on Tuesday, Oct. 14, secured 200 million euros ($270 million) from each of the central banks in neighboring Norway and Denmark, but talks to secure a much larger loan from Russia continued. Icelandic officials arrived in Moscow on Tuesday for talks, though Geir Haarde, Iceland's prime minister said the size of any loan from Russia had not been decided.

"We look at this as a non-political deal, if there is to be a deal," he said. "I don't know of any particular political strings that the Russians would want to attach to this."

On a third front, Iceland is also in discussions with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), though Haarde said the country has not formally requested a loan. If it does, it would become the first western European country to turn to the IMF since 1976.

The European Commission has proposed lifting the minimum state guarantee on bank deposits to 100,000 euros ($136,760; £77,760) within a year.

The proposal is one of several due to be tabled at a summit in Brussels where EU leaders are to discuss a multi-billion-euro financial rescue scheme.

EU ministers already committed last week to raising the guarantee level to 50,000 euros.

But the cost of the latest proposal is likely to concern smaller EU countries.

EU Internal Markets and Services Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said increasing the minimum protection by next year would "strengthen Europeans' confidence in the safety of their deposits".

PARIS: Stocks fell Wednesday in Europe following a mixed session in Asia, as investors began to face the likelihood that serious dislocations will plague the global economy even if the coordinated bailouts announced this week succeed in restoring confidence to credit markets.

Investors were also watching a meeting in Brussels of leaders of the 27 European Union countries, who were meeting Wednesday to decide the details of the big bank rescues announced Sunday and Monday.

Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, has called for the overhaul of the global financial system and the creation of "a new Bretton Woods," the agreement that established the financial institutions of the post-World War II era.

Espen Furnes, a fund manager at Storebrand Asset Management in Oslo, said that there was concern about European economies softening. But despite the weak showing Wednesday, the market mood remained fundamentally one of relief, as "people are hopeful that the bailouts are going to make a big difference," Furnes said.

In a speech before parliament, German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday made the case for a planned €500 billion financial system bailout. Meanwhile, the EU moved to ease accounting rules for banks and German politicians sought to cut a deal with Iceland over frozen deposits.

Chancellor Angela Merkel sought the support of parliament on Wednesday for her government's €500 billion ($683 billion) rescue plan for the German financial system. In a speech before the Bundestag, Merkel said the global economy is currently experiencing its most serious test since the worldwide financial crisis of the 1920s and 30s. In recent weeks, interbank lending markets have been practically paralyzed and sinking stock prices have threatened to plunge into a "calamitous downward spiral," Merkel said.

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right): "If the world financial markets are burning, the fire must be put out."

Merkel, who heads the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), said that urgently needed trust between players in the financial markets continues to erode and that few institutions are prepared to lend each other money. The mutual distrust, she said, "has almost completely paralyzed all the actors, with incalculable consequences for economic growth and jobs."

In a situation like this, she said, the international community must come up with a joint response, and that this had happened. On Monday, she noted, several governments agreed to a coordinated response with comprehensive measures.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for more "just" rates of interest as he blamed greed for the global financial crisis.

Dr Rowan Williams said Christians and Muslims should work together to decide what might constitute a fairer system of borrowing, and suggested an alternative to the current banking system.

It comes just weeks after he called for tighter regulation of the stock markets to prevent a repeat of the excesses of recent years, and claimed Karl Marx was correct to warn of the power of "unbridled capitalism" over workers.

Speaking at the end of the biggest ever conference in Britain devoted to improving understanding between the two faiths, Dr Williams acknowledged that while Islam still forbids the charging of interest, Christian leaders watered down their opposition to the practice centuries ago.

The leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India today blamed Western "speculators" for creating the financial crisis that endangered the development of the world's emerging economies - and called for reform of the institutions of global governance to reflect their growing economic clout.

At a summit in the Indian capital, the three countries said they were reeling from the credit crunch - which they blamed on the mistakes and greed of the wealthier world. "We run the risk of being victims of a financial crisis generated by rich countries. This is unjust," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

"It is inadmissible that we'll pay for the irresponsibility of speculators that transformed the world into a gigantic casino. At the same time they gave us lessons on how we should govern our countries."

The chief executives of the nine largest banks in the United States trooped into a gilded conference room at the Treasury Department at 3 p.m. Monday. To their astonishment, they were each handed a one-page document that said they agreed to sell shares to the government, then Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said they must sign it before they left.

The chairman of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, was receptive, saying he thought the deal looked pretty good once he ran the numbers through his head. The chairman of Wells Fargo, Richard M. Kovacevich, protested strongly that, unlike his New York rivals, his bank was not in trouble because of investments in exotic mortgages, and did not need a bailout, according to people briefed on the meeting.

But by 6:30, all nine chief executives had signed -- setting in motion the largest government intervention in the American banking system since the Depression and retreating from the rescue plan Mr. Paulson had fought so hard to get through Congress only two weeks earlier.

What happened during those three and a half hours is a story of high drama and brief conflict, followed by acquiescence by the bankers, who felt they had little choice but to go along with the Treasury plan to inject $250 billion of capital into thousands of banks -- starting with theirs.

A few other choice quotes:

The terms, officials said, were devised so as not to be punitive. The rising dividend and the warrants are meant to give banks an incentive to raise private capital and buy out the government after a few years. Still, it took some cajoling...

If we let executive compensation block this, "we are out of our minds," he said, according to a person briefed on the meeting...

As they heard more of the details, some of the bankers began to realize how attractive the program was for them.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s Lloyd Blankfein, whose $70.3 million paycheck made him Wall Street's most highly compensated chief executive officer last year, could still earn tens of millions annually under the bank-rescue plan run by his former boss, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Executive-pay packages will be restricted for the nine banks receiving a $125 billion infusion of U.S. funds to restart lending, said Paulson, who earned $37.8 million in 2005, his last full year as Goldman's CEO. The investment is part of a $700 billion bailout plan approved by Congress this month.

Blankfein, 54, was Wall Street's best-paid CEO in 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. He ``could still make tens of millions of dollars if he continues to receive stock grants and Goldman's stock rises,'' said David Schmidt, a senior consultant for New York-based compensation firm James F. Reda & Associates.

Ka-ching on the tax payers dime.

The Federal Reserve may subsidize U.S. companies by buying their short-term debt at rates below those demanded by private investors in the $1.6 trillion commercial-paper market.

Fed officials yesterday set the yield they will pay for commercial paper at about 1.1 percentage points less than the average cost for financial companies, weekly central bank data show. Policy makers last week announced emergency plans to buy the securities after the market shrank to a three-year low.

The discount cuts the cost of cash to 2.1 percent from 3.85 percent for General Electric Co.'s financing arm and from 4.6 percent for Citigroup Inc., data compiled by Bloomberg show. One possible unintended consequence: private buyers are shut out.

``The Fed can drive everybody else out of the market'' for buying commercial paper unless market yields drop, said Robert Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at hedge fund Cumberland Advisors Inc. in Vineland, New Jersey, who used to work at the Atlanta Fed. That could end up ``assuring that markets won't restart,'' he said.

A global financial crisis of the current magnitude is unique. But two historic events offer lessons for a way out, say economists.

First, move with alacrity. During the Great Depression a protracted delay in aiding banks proved fatal - a lesson Britain and now, this week, the United States have taken on. Second, coordinate globally. The Bretton Woods agreement near the end of World War II became an effective tool for reworking a shattered world economy. Calls for a second Bretton Woods are now being sounded by such figures as Britain's Prime Minster Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and World Bank president Robert Zoellick.

Central to European leaders discussions Wednesday and Thursday in Brussels is this motto: A global crisis requires a global solution. The subtext is that much tougher regulation is required. As Mr. Brown put it Monday, "Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to agree that what is obvious and should have been done years ago can no longer be postponed. We must create a new international financial architecture for the global age."

The storied 1944 Bretton Woods conference - where some 700 delegates from 44 nations gathered at a hotel in New Hampshire - was a bold move to create the first negotiated monetary system among industrial states. The World Bank and the 185-nation International Monetary Fund emerged from that pact. The IMF has become a major source of loans for developing nations in financial trouble.

The legacy of Bretton Woods, said Mr. Zoellick in a speech this week, was that the crisis of a ravaged world created a commitment to remake institutions, to "turn the problems of an era into an opportunity."

When neocons use the word "opportunity", I immediate think of shock doctrine.

Oslo/Reykjavik - Iceland should consider replacing its currency with that of neighbouring Norway, an Icelandic economics professor suggested in an interview published Wednesday. The move was necessary since confidence in the Icelandic central bank has withered in the wake of the recent financial turmoil, Professor Thorolfur Matthiasson of the economics faculty at the University of Iceland told the Bergens Tidende newspaper.

"To get room to maneuver we need a plan A and a plan B," Matthiasson said, noting that one option was to consider joining the European Union and adopting the joint European currency, the euro. "In the short-term, it may be more realistic to pursue a monetary union with Norway," he added.

Both Norway and Iceland are members of the European Economic Area (EEA) that cooperates with the 27-nation bloc, and have sizeable energy resources and fisheries, Matthiasson noted.

(...)

The Icelandic central bank on Tuesday opted to draw on swap facilities with the central banks of Denmark and Norway, totalling 400 million euros (543 million dollars).

The loans were under the auspices of a May agreement secured with the central banks of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.  

A number of military men have voiced concern recently about the progress of the war in Afghanistan. German Major General Hans-Lothar Domröse has joined the chorus. The NATO third in command in Afghanistan says the West was "perhaps a bit naïve."

 German troops have been in Afghanistan since the beginning. On Thursday, Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, is set to extend the country's mandate in Afghanistan by an additional 14 months and up its troop contingent by 1,000 to 4,500. Given that Chancellor Angela Merkel's government is a coalition of Germany's two largest parties -- the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats -- the vote is seen as a sure thing.

Increasingly, though, the mission in Afghanistan is not. The voices of doubt about the mission have been multiplying as the death toll of NATO troops and Afghan civilians continues to rise and the Taliban shows no sign of disappearing. Earlier this month, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the departing commander of British forces in Afghanistan, added gravitas to the pessimism, saying "we're not going to win this war."

On Wednesday, the highest ranking German commander in Afghanistan, Major General Hans-Lothar Domröse, voiced his concerns in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Domröse is the chief of staff of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and thus third in command of the 50,000 soldiers under NATO command in Afghanistan. He said in the interview that the West has gotten more than it bargained for in Afghanistan.

The final accounting for fiscal 2008 produced a larger shortfall than had been projected, reflecting the start of federal efforts to address the economic emergency...

The deficit is likely to be even bigger next year as the country copes with the worst financial crisis since the Depression.

The new figure breaks the previous record deficit of $413 billion in 2004 and more than doubles the 2007 deficit of $162 billion. It has focused new attention on government spending, coming just days after the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits to record the overall national debt, which passed $10 trillion.

The LA Times thinks this will become a "key issue as the presidential race winds down", but I doubt it. Neither candidate will say the obvious, the U.S. must raise taxes and only McCain has hinted at cutting defense spending.

SINGAPORE - Oil prices fell below US$78 a barrel today in Asia on concern a massive bank bailout by the US and Europe won't keep the global economy from slipping into a severe slowdown that would erode crude demand.

Light, sweet crude for next month's delivery was down 98 cents to US$77,65 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by midafternoon in Singapore. The contract fell overnight US$2,56 to settle at US$78,63. Oil prices have fallen by 47% since peaking near US$150 a barrel in mid-July.

"People are worried that the world economy is heading for recession," said Gerard Rigby, an energy analyst at Fuel First Consulting in Sydney. "The bailout may save the banks, but companies are still laying off workers and demand is going to suffer."

MOSCOW: A high-level delegation from the Russian energy company Gazprom met in Anchorage with state officials on Monday to talk about investing in Alaskan energy projects. The meeting came nearly three weeks after Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska talked in a television interview about her expertise in energy matters and took a hard line with Russia.

Senior officials of Gazprom said at a shareholder meeting in Moscow in June that the company was seeking to take part in a consortium that is building a natural gas pipeline from Alaska to Canada. The company is also interested in investing in other energy initiatives in the state, according to a statement released by Gazprom on Tuesday about the meeting in Anchorage.

"Gazprom has accumulated great experience in exploring hydrocarbon deposits, building and using gas pipelines in the far north environment," the company said in the statement. "Gazprom's experience will be relevant in realization of similar projects in Alaska."

Apple has launched a new-look range of MacBook laptops that do away with a conventional mouse in favour of the multi-touch technology found on the iPhone.

The changes include the introduction of a new entry-level MacBook computer with a glass screen and metal casing, that also features a LED backlit display. The mousepad has been replaced by a glass multi-touch trackpad, similar to the touchscreen found on Apple's iPhone, which allows users to sweep their fingers across the pad to switch between programs and zoom in and out of documents and web pages. Prices for the new MacBook will start at $1,299 (£750).

Speaking at the launch in San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, said he thought the new laptops would be "a huge success".

Apple also announced that it would be using a super-powerful graphics card from Nvidia in its new machines, in place of one made by Intel. Jobs said the graphics card was "a stunner", and said that it promised five-times faster graphics than previous MacBooks.

The world's photojournalists have been doing their best to find original ways to illustrate the global financial crisis. Some of their efforts have been commendable -- others, not. SPIEGEL ONLINE has collected the best of the best, and some of the worst.

First things first: It would be difficult to pin the blame on the current financial crisis on the traders on the floor of the world's stock markets. It's not their fault.

But seriously. How many more images of contorted, exasperated, horrified and desperate traders can we take? For the last two weeks, as the financial markets have remained frozen and the stock markets -- at least until this week -- plummeted to ever lower depths, newspapers, Web sites and television news have offered up a parade of faces buried in hands, mouths agape in dismay and arms flailing in the air as traders watch stock prices fall off a cliff.

There are plans to build several hundred new and often magnificent mosques throughout Europe -- particularly in Germany. Architecture has become the field of a fierce ideological battle about the visibility of Europe's 16 million Muslims.

Just a few minutes ago, Mubashra Ilyas was still standing on her dusty construction site. Now the 30-year-old architect is striding through a gallery in the back courtyard of a building in Berlin's Mitte district in elegant black boots. As the room slowly fills up, Ilyas continues to stand out: She's the only woman wearing a headscarf.

The party of deceased Austrian far-right populist politician Jörg Haider has confirmed that he was drunk when he took his last drive.

Austrian prosecutors have remained silent on the issue, but Jörg Haider's political party confirmed Wednesday that the far-right populist politician was driving drunk prior to his deadly crash in Klagenfurt last weekend.

Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (14 Photos)

Stefan Petzner, who replaced Haider this week as the new head of the Alliance for Austria's Future (BZÖ) party said an autopsy had determined that Haider's blood-alcohol level was more than three times the legal limit. "It is true that Governor Jörg Haider was intoxicated at the time of the accident," Petzner said. "I can and must confirm that."

Just prior to Petzner's statement, the Austrian weekly News reported on its Web site that the coroner concluded Haider had been drunk behind the wheel. The politician had been "very drunk and incapable of driving."

Normally, the Frankfurt Book Fair tries to showcase writing from a given country. This year the focus is on Turkey, hence the presence of Orhan Pamuk and Turkish President Abdullah Gül. But the real talk, say German commentators, is about the future of the book itself.

AP

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk addressed the Frankfurt Book Fair this year. This year's Frankfurt Book Fair, by accident or design, has set publishing types chattering about the fate of the book as we know it. "When the fair opens for business today, many publishers may stop for a moment to marvel, or to shudder, at the stands displaying the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader," according to the Associated Press.

The abrupt focus on books in digital form -- which some 60 percent of Frankfurt attendees admit they've never used, at least according to an informal poll by the fair's organizers -- may strike some people as artificial. The bulky and expensive Kindle (an "e-book reader") hasn't, after all, turned the publishing world upside-down. But in September an American company called Plastic Logic announced plans to start selling a lightweight electronic paper -- a sort of flexible plastic display screen that will store books, magazines, newspapers and business documents -- in early 2009. The devices will be manufactured in Dresden, Germany.

In the Alpine town of Sevelen, two brothers have transformed one of Switzerland's nuclear bunkers into a "zero-star hotel." The outside world is visible only through monitors, and a wheel of fortune determines who gets to shower with warm water. The buzz, needless to say, is huge.

The future of Swiss tourism. "Less is more" was the motto selected by the twin Riklin brothers when they set up their "zero-star hotel" in an abandoned nuclear bunker. The beds were bought at bargain prices from a condemned hotel in the region; the walls they left unpainted. "Decorating is out of the question," says Patrik Riklin, who devised the project along with his brother Frank. But he insists the hotel's stark Cold War atmosphere is "damned comfortable."

The town of Sevelen, located in the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, was at first just looking for a way to lodge musicians invited to play at a planned cultural center. But Sevelen had no room for a new hotel. So the town council decided to look more closely at one of the local "civil defense bunkers."

"No one will ever want to sleep there," declared town council leader Roman Zogg, when he and fellow council members emerged from the bunker after a first inspection. The Riklin brothers and their "Studio for Special Projects" nevertheless received a commission. The bunker looked like creative challenge, so the two artists took it on personally, thinking maybe they could forge something new out of the concrete block.

Merkel announced the formation of an economic adviser group to help the government in dealing with the banks. Without consulting the coalition partner, she even dropped the name of her choice of the head of the group: former Bundesbank boss Tietenmeyer.

But the SPD parliamentary faction declared they flat-out reject Tietenmeyer. Beyond the lack of consultation, they say it's unacceptable that Tietenmeyer sits on the oversight board of Germany's crisis-hit bank, HypoRealEstate...

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

A French court has rejected an attempt by a group of people with the surname, Bougon, which means "grumpy", to change the title of a new TV comedy series.

The 60 claimants were upset at the way their name was being associated with a family of scroungers, fraudsters and alcoholics in the series, Les Bougon.

A lawyer for the real-life Bougons said they would appeal against the ruling.

Andre Meillassoux said if the title was not changed, "little Bougons will go through hell in their... playgrounds".

Les Bougon, adapted from a hugely popular French-Canadian series for the channel M6, portrays a dysfunctional family living on the margins of society, committing benefit fraud and shop lifting.

A businesswoman has won the right to claim compensation after a slip at Stansted Airport left her unable to wear any of the shoes in her collection of 200 high heels.

Tina Knight, 66, was flying back from northern Cyprus where she planned to set up a business selling studio apartments when the accident happened in July 2005.

She claimed that as well as suffering injuries to her knee, hip and thumb, she fractured her right little toe, forcing her to permanently swap high heels for flat shoes.

At Cambridge County Court earlier this year, she expressed her distress that her injuries meant she was unable to wear "normal court shoes".

"I love to wear high-heeled shoes," she added in a witness statement. "I have about 200 pairs of shoes, but I can no longer wear them."

WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 -- Vice President Dick Cheney underwent successful cardioversion for atrial fibrillation as an outpatient at George Washington University Hospital here today.

Cheney has already been treated several times for the condition, which affects millions. A Cheney spokesperson said the cardioversion was without complication. He had the same procedure last November.

Why they bother with the medical cover-up I don't know.

The Illuminati take him in for his annual recharge, any fool knows that.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind