The US and Poland have reached an agreement that will see sections of the American missile defence system based in the former Eastern Bloc nation, according to officials from both countries.

Poland's deputy foreign minister, Witold Waszcykowski has said that he had completed negotiations with US negotiator John Rood on the matter on Tuesday (1 July), according to the AP.

The US defence system looks set to have 10 interceptor missiles based in Poland

Officials from the Bush administration confirmed the conclusion of the deal, but remained nameless as the deal must still be approved by the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk.

The US wants 10 interceptor missiles to be based on Polish territory. Washington says the system is necessary for defence against possible nuclear attacks from Iran. Russia however, which is steadfastly opposed to a US missile defence being based in EU countries, argues that the system is targeted at itself, and diminishes its nuclear deterrent.

UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Wednesday (2 July) backed French plans to boost European defence, saying they were not incompatible with NATO and stressing they did not mean creating a European army.

"The countries of Europe need to be better at using hard power. That is why I strongly welcome President Sarkozy's proposals to reintegrate France into NATO's military structure and support his call for the EU to play a greater role in crisis management," Mr Miliband told Progress, an independent organisation of Labour Party members, Reuters reports.

Mr Miliband backed France's plans to boost European defence - but reiterated his opposition to creating a "European army."

Paris has said that strengthening Europe's defence policy would be one of the main priorities of its six-month EU presidency, which started on 1 July, and securing the backing of the UK as another military heavyweight in the EU was seen as essential in that respect.

Mr Miliband's statements are the first to openly support Mr Sarkozy's defence plans coming from a UK politician of this rank. Britain has traditionally been wary of such ideas - fearing they could undermine NATO, or pose a threat to its national sovereignty.

PARIS: A housing market in shambles, inflation at the highest level in years and signs that the economy is headed for, or already in, recession. Sound familiar?

The British economy, like its counterpart across the Atlantic, has fallen on hard times, and in many ways the experience appears to be mirroring that in the United States. Indeed, the run last September on a British mortgage lender, Northern Rock, was one of the events that helped to embed the terms "credit crisis" firmly into the global consciousness.

"A recession is more likely than not by the end of the year," Peter Newland, who covers the British economy for Lehman Brothers in London, said Thursday, summarizing a recent string of dismal economic data that have led economists to revise their growth forecasts downward. "Activity seems to be declining across the economy," he said.

The FTSE 100, the benchmark London stock index, has fallen about 19 percent from the high of 6,732.4 that it hit in June 2007 - just short of the 20 percent decline that is commonly said to define a bear market. It gained 50.3 points, or 0.93 percent, to close at 5,476.9 on Thursday.

President Dmitry Medvedev acknowledged Thursday that domestic political competition was critical for Russia's development but said it must be "rational" and overseen by a strong executive leader.

In an interview with media outlets from G8 countries, the new Russia leader also called for creation of a "multi-currency" world economic system relying less heavily on the United States and its dollar.

"To ensure that our country remains competitive on a global scale, we must have political competition" at home, Medvedev said in the wide-ranging interview ahead of next week's G8 summit in Japan.

"But it must be rational," he added. "It must be competition built on the law."

Environment ministers from the EU's 27 member states meet in Paris for a two-day meeting starting July 3 with the aim of clearing some of the many obstacles besetting their goal of slashing carbon emissions by 2020.

Taking charge of the first top-level environmental debate of the French EU Presidency, French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo was expected to ask his counterparts to identify two key areas of national concern to help spur the negotiation process.

"I find the mood is good, there's no posturing, no-one's playing games, but at the same time we are dealing with a question that's tough, there are very tough things here," Borloo told reporters.

"To put things in perspective, the economies of 27 countries with a variety of backgrounds in energy and industry are being asked to make a somewhat radical shift using everyday budgets," he said. "At the moment, no other region in the world is attempting something on this scale."

MPs today bowed to Government demands for restraint and awarded themselves a 2.25 per cent pay rise for this year.

But they also voted by a majority of 28 to keep the so-called John Lewis list, which allows MPs to use taxpayers' money to buy furniture and household goods for their second homes.

Voting was 172 to 144 for an amendment by Labour former minister Don Touhig that will retain the Additional Costs Allowance (ACA) and subject it only to internal audit - rather than external audit.

The pay decision was taken without a vote after a backbench move to raise salaries by up to 2.3 per cent this year and about 4.7 per cent next year was rejected by 196 votes to 155, majority 41.

A move to boost salaries with £650 a year "catch-up" payments over the next three years was also rejected by 224 to 123, majority 101.

Germany this week recorded a significant drop in its unemployment rate. But such figures tend to reflect recent history rather than the near future. And most experts see clouds forming on the horizon.

 An estimated 1,000 jobs are being created in Germany each day. Germany this week announced its lowest number of unemployed in 15 years. The boom in the labor market led to a drop in the number of jobless in June by 528,000 compared to the same time last year, with the total number of unemployed at 3.16 million and a jobless rate of 7.5 percent (down from 8.8 percent one year ago).

The country's Federal Labor Agency says those figures may improve even further in autumn, and German Labor Minister Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats said Berlin is moving toward its goal of steering Germans toward full employment.

Modern economists today describe full employment as a situation in which fewer than between three and five percent of a country's working-age residents are jobless. According to the German financial daily Handelsblatt, only a dozen labor offices (out of 180 nationwide) are reporting full employment, in the relatively prosperous southern German states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Central Bank (ECB) on Thursday (3 July) raised its key interest rate - from 4 to 4.25 percent - for the first time in more than a year in response to soaring inflation in the euro area.

The ECB's chief, Jean-Claude Trichet, said the bank's decision was motivated by its assessment of the ever increasing risk to price stability in the past few months.

Rising prices - an important concern to citizens

"Against this background, it is imperative to ensure that medium to longer-term inflation expectations remain firmly anchored at levels in line with price stability," he told a press conference in Frankfurt.

Earlier this week, EU figures showed that consumer prices in the 15 countries using the euro had climbed to four percent in June - which is twice the rate of the ECB's inflation goal of "below, but close" to two percent.

These inflations rates are also the highest since 1999.

"Inflation is now the number one concern of our fellow citizens. There are 320 million of them [in the eurozone] and they are counting on us to be the anchor of price stability," the bank's chief said.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Stars from the realms of pop, rock, opera, and cinema - including Bee Gee Robin Gibb and soundtrack composer Patrick Doyle - came to Brussels on Thursday to try to convince the European Commission's competition tsars that there is such a thing as too much competition when it comes to changing the rules about who collects royalties on musicians' behalf.

Musicians are worried that changes to the system of collecting societies will have a negative impact on songs in minority languages

The commission is currently considering whether to put an end to the national monopolies held by collecting societies.

These are the agencies that collect payments for the right to play tunes. They gather these royalties from entities as big as commercial radio stations and as small as the corner hairdressing salons that puts on a steady rotation of Julio Iglesias hits on the stereo for its customers to enjoy.

Currently, there is one such society for each national jurisdiction. The commission however, according to a series of leaks, is believed to be favouring a decision that will open up this process so that the different collecting agencies will be able to compete for each others' business.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Although nuclear energy continues to be a "strongly" divisive subject in the European Union, support for the controversial source of electricity generation has grown "significantly" over the last three years, a new European Commission survey suggests.

A "permanent, safe solution" to managing radioactive waste seems to be the decisive factor when it comes to a possible shift in opinion about nuclear energy.

In total 15 EU states have nuclear power plants, accounting for nearly a third of electricity generated in the EU

Should such a solution be found to safely storing the waste, some 39 percent of people say they would change their mind about nuclear energy, according to the poll released by the commission on Thursday (3 July).

Dutch, Belgians, Lithuanians, Britons, the French, Slovenians and Finns are the most open to new arguments. Half the opponents in these countries would change their view regarding nuclear energy should a solution to waste be developed.

However, 48 percent of Europeans - mainly in Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, Portugal and Germany - would stick to a firm No irrespective of any solution to waste. Eight percent are convinced there is no solution to be found.

EUOBSERVER / FOCUS - As more and more young Europeans study in member states other than their own, this has serious implications for how governments manage their social assistance for students.

Next month, in a keenly awaited opinion, the European Court of Justice, will give a preliminary answer to a key question: To what extent do foreign students have the right to be treated equally to national students.

The ruling will have implications for the EU member states' grant systems for education

The answer - the Advocate General's opinion is generally followed in the final judgement by the court - is set to a large extent to determine whether member states can continue with generous educational grants and whether they can prevent what is known as scholarship tourism.

The particular case concerns a German student Jaqueline Foerster who went to study in the Netherlands in 2000.

Ms Foerster did the minimum number of hours of work in order to be eligible for a Dutch grant - one of the criteria in the Netherlands is that foreign students need to work. But the Dutch scholarship board, which initially granted the student aid to her, in 2005 demanded a partial refund because Ms Foerster had not worked in the second half of 2003.

Brussels, 3 July 2008 - Green campaigners today urged the European Union to 'push for fuel efficiency' and agree tough targets for reducing the fuel consumption of cars.

As European officials come under mounting pressure from car manufacturers to weaken proposed legislation, Friends of the Earth Europe and other environment groups pushed vehicles around European capital cities and called on environment ministers meeting at the informal Environment and Energy Council in Paris to push ahead with targets to reduce the fuel consumption of new cars by 25 per cent by 2012.

In Brussels, a symbolic 'race' for fuel efficiency was staged outside the European Parliament in which activists pushed a vehicle round a track, each lap representing a year between now and 2012 when rules governing new vehicles will come into force. Similar stunts were also staged in Berlin, Madrid and Paris.

The EU is discussing regulation to reduce the CO2 emissions of new cars by 25 per cent to 120g/km by 2012, but according to environmental organisations manufacturers are attempting to delay and weaken the targets. Friends of the Earth Europe points to the wealth of evidence that 120g CO2/km by 2012 is easily achievable, and that a majority of EU citizens would be prepared to pay more for a car which consumes less, although more efficient cars do not have to be more expensive

Bradford & Bingley has confirmed that its plan to raise £400m has been rescued after an investor pulled out of a deal to buy a stake in the UK bank.

US private equity firm Texas Pacific Group (TPG) walked out on a deal to pay £179m for a 23% stake in B&B.

The sudden move prompted Bradford & Bingley to increase the amount it needs to raise from its investors in a rights issue from £258m to £400m.

The Telecom letters saying you are sacked are arriving. 5000 straight away and 10,000 to follow. An office worker has sent us his letter. It's subject is "Dismissal to reduce personnel - art.24 of law n.223/1991". The letter specifies that Telecom "intends to start the "mobility procedures" for 5,000 workers that are in excess of its technical-organisational needs".
The letter is a showcase of bureaucracy, sub-articles, articles, laws, and arrangements that have a single meaning: "You are sacked. Your family can no longer count on your salary."
Telecom gives 3 reasons for your sacking:
1 "on the technological side, from the simplification of the production processes that have had an impact on the functions of specialist support, as well as on the provisioning activities of the network and of services, with the consequent need to rationalize the address and government structures and the territorial ones."
2 "for the market structures, from the recomposition of the activities and the responsibilities of the positions in the functions of the company (for example the pre- and post-sales, and the commercial programming), the significant reduction in the profitability in the more traditional business, of the progressive defocalisation of the outbound activities and in the simplification of back end activities."
3 "for the Staff functions, from the need to rationalize the company structures connected to the completion of the company and organizational merging of Telecom Italia S.p.A and TIM S.p.A., as well as the integration of the central staff with the staff of the former Operations and Corporate".
The former Telecom employee will thus be able to explain to his children that he has been sacked for "progressive defocalisation of the outbound activities and in the simplification of back end activities." Or alternatively for "simplification of the production processes that have had an impact on the provisioning activities of the network and of services".
The children will be able to ask if these are the only reasons or whether the company has been plundered with the sale of the productive parts of the company, of buildings, of foreign investment to give dividends to Tronchetti and stock options to Buora, and Ruggiero and salaries among the highest in Europe to the trusted directors and to the members of the Board of Directors. The children could ask why the one who has put their family out into the streets has been rewarded with millions of euro as a golden handshake instead of being taken to court by Telecom.

a little KY jelly should help simplify those 'back end utilities'

Peace is not the absence of war -- peace is the absence of fear. Ursula Franklin

THE Israeli parliament has passed a law banning any citizen who has visited an "enemy" country in the previous seven years from standing for election, triggering the anger of Israeli Arab MPs.

Fifty-two members of the 120-seat parliament approved the law at a third and last reading today while 24 MPs voted against it, parliamentary sources said.

The legislation states that anyone who has visited "an enemy country" over the past seven years cannot stand for parliament.

It is aimed particularly at MPs from Arab-led parties, some of whom have travelled to Lebanon and Syria, neighbouring countries officially at war with Israel.

"From now on, any Israeli who visits an enemy country without permission will not be elected to the Knesset for (a period of) seven years," said Zvulon Orlev, an MP from the far-right National Religious Party.

WASHINGTON: Warning that rising food and oil prices pose a crisis for the world's poor, Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, is calling on President George W. Bush and other leaders convening in Japan next week in an economic summit meeting to make new aid commitments to avert starvation and instability in dozens of countries.

"What we are witnessing is not a natural disaster -- a silent tsunami or a perfect storm," Zoellick said in a letter sent Tuesday evening to the major leaders of the West. "It is a man-made catastrophe, and as such must be fixed by people."

Zoellick's letter, obtained by The New York Times, came with a lengthy study of the impact of rising prices for food, fuel and commodities on the world's poor. He sent the letter as Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda prepares to host Bush and six other world leaders in the Group of 8 economic summit meeting on the northern island of Hokkaido.

In recent weeks, the United States and some other countries have stepped up their pledges to get food to the poor in the 50 hardest-hit countries. But Zoellick said in his letter that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Food Program had short-term needs of $10 billion.

DW-WORLD.DE spoke with Carsten Wieland, head of the Colombian branch of the Konrad Adenauer foundation about the dramatic rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages from their FARC captors.

DW-WORLD.DE: What is known about the state of Ingrid Betancourt's health?

 

Carsten Wieland: Her health was the subject of much speculation over the past few weeks, and we don't know much more as of yet. Colombian journalists have been invited to the scene of the rescue by Defence Minister Santos, and I'm sure that we'll soon see images on screens everywhere. The last pictures of Ingrid Betancourt were very depressing; we heard from a fellow hostage that she was suffering from depression and various diseases, and she looked very thin.

 

Was the rescue expected? Why did it happen now?

 

I think the rescue was expected. As we know, in the last few weeks and months, FARC suffered a series of blows and has been broken down into different factions which weren't able to move about within the country. That's a huge hindrance if you have a large number of hostages. Aside from the 15 hostages that have been freed, there are 42 other political hostages and several hundred more Colombians being held by FARC -- that's a significant burden for a guerrilla force that is in crisis. It probably wasn't possible for FARC to move the hostages quickly or hide their tracks from the army. I think that's why the location of the hostages was known, and government agents were able to observe the hostages for a longer time.

Denmark is the happiest country in the world, according to the latest World Values Survey published by the United States National Science Foundation.

The annual study surveyed people in 97 countries to discover who is happiest.

The survey asked people two simple questions about their happiness and their level of satisfaction with life.

Puerto Rico and Colombia completed the top three happiest nations. Zimbabwe was found to be the least happy, with Russia and Iraq also in the bottom 10.

BERLIN -- The U.S. has done the least among the world's eight largest economies to address global warming, a study released Thursday found.

The G-8 Climate Scorecards 2008, released Thursday ahead of next week's gathering of the Group of Eight on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, also found that none of the eight countries are making improvements large enough to prevent temperature increases that scientists think would cause catastrophic climate changes.

The gathering includes the heads of states of the U.S., Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Russia.

Regine Guenther, director of the World Wildlife Fund Climate Change Program in Germany, told reporters in the German capital that G-8 leaders should commit to reducing emissions in their countries 40 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% -- far more than previously estimated -- according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian. The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush. "It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House," said one yesterday.

The news comes at a critical point in the world's negotiations on biofuels policy. Leaders of the G8 industrialised countries meet next week in Hokkaido, Japan, where they will discuss the food crisis and come under intense lobbying from campaigners calling for a moratorium on the use of plant-derived fuels.

Google is to be forced to release the records of every video watched on YouTube, including user names and web addresses, to entertainment company Viacom after a US federal court ruling.

Viacom, which is pursuing a $1bn (£500m) copyright infringement lawsuit against Google, wants the information to determine the amount of copyright material on YouTube. The disclosure could increase Google's liability if Viacom wins the court case.

Google had argued that turning over the YouTube data would invade users' privacy. However, US district judge Louis Stanton ordered the internet company to hand over video records and information including login names and internet protocol addresses.

Viacom failed, however, in a bid to also secure access to the search engine giant's source code, on the grounds that doing so would threaten Google's business.

On the face of it, China might not seem the obvious place to invest at the moment. The local stock market has collapsed, property markets are weak and the interest rate on bank deposits is about half the rate of inflation.

Yet that has not prevented a record flood of capital inflows even higher than China's huge accumulation of reserves in recent years. In the first quarter, foreign exchange reserves rose by $154bn (€98bn, £78bn). On top of that, according to usually reliable figures leaked to Reuters, reserves jumped by $75bn in April and $40bn in May to a total of $1,800bn.

Given that the inflows far outstrip trade and direct foreign investment, China appears to be receiving vast amounts of speculative "hot money".

Yet some economists believe the official numbers might actually understate the hot money inflows.

Logan Wright at Stone & McCarthy analysts in Beijing estimates that hot money entering in the first five months could be as high as $150bn-$170bn.

China's central bank has faced huge capital inflows for several years and has so far managed to limit the impact on the domestic economy by draining the excess liquidity in the financial system through bonds issues and obliging commercial banks to deposit more money in reserves.

However, there are some signs that the system for sterilising inflows is reaching its limit. The higher reserve requirements are putting heavy pressure on some cash-poor, smaller banks.

Moreover, the difference between Chinese and US interest rates means that the central bank is making a loss on its bond issues, which have been rare in recent months.

If the system of sterilising inflows is becoming hard to operate, then the Chinese authorities could find themselves in a trap. Facing inflation at home, the obvious response is to appreciate the currency or raise interest rates. But both those options attract more hot money that will feed inflation.

WASHINGTON, July 1 (UPI) -- Officials say Nelson Mandela will be removed from U.S. terrorism watch lists under a new law waiving travel restrictions on the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

The measure signed by President George Bush Tuesday authorizes the U.S. State Department to waive travel restrictions on Mandela and other members of the African National Congress who were listed for activities they carried out against South Africa's apartheid regime decades ago, said Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass.; Bob Corker, R-Tenn.; and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., in a news release.

The senators sponsored legislation to remove the former South African president and others ANC leaders from the lists.

China's may have the better view, and Finland's the better architecture, but America's is the biggest. DW-WORLD.DE sent Jefferson Chase to check out the much-maligned new US embassy in Berlin.

For some reason, I found myself humming Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" as I cycled up to the back entrance. Perhaps I was nervous. After all I was bringing a camera and Dictaphone into what was sure to be a high-security area.

Two days ahead of the opening ceremony, workers were indeed already shifting security fences around the site near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. But the fencing, a local policewoman informed me, was largely being carted off from the fan mile of the Euro 2008 soccer championship.

Nor did the two American guards at the entrance seem particularly uptight, although they asked only be identified as "John" and "Tom," and said it was against regulations to photograph them.

Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain in 55BC could not have occurred on the dates stated in most history books, a team of astronomers has claimed.

The traditional view is that Caesar landed in Britain on 26-27 August, but researchers from Texas State University say this cannot be right.

Dr Donald Olson, an expert on tides, says that the English Channel was flowing the wrong way on these dates.

An invasion of the south coast at Deal on August 22-23 is favoured instead.

The claims appear in the latest issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.

Lithuania has paid 40,000 euros ($63,000) for a citizen to undergo a full sex change operation because the government missed a July 1 deadline to adopt a domestic gender reassignment law.

The transsexual, born female in 1978, won a case last year against Lithuania in the European Court of Human Rights. The court ruled that the country had to enact a gender reassignment law, or pay 40,000 euros for the surgery to take place abroad.

A spokesperson from the country's justice ministry said that the whole sum had transferred, as no law was adopted.

Lithuania's government drafted a law to allow gender reassignment surgery and presented it to parliament in 2003, but the bill has not been passed.

They've been to Rwanda, Kosovo and other disaster areas. Now, a group of crisis psychologists is on its way to Naples. It's all part of Silvio Berlusconi's army of volunteers known as the "Angels of Garbage."

Few would deny that living side-by-side with stinking, oozing piles of garbage for months on end makes life more difficult. Even in the normally chaotic southern Italian city of Naples, garbage-induced temper tantrums have periodically resulted in trash piles being set on fire -- and the firemen who respond to the call are then pelted with detritus.

 Help is on the way. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi not only pledged on Tuesday that the problem would be solved within two weeks, he also is sending a thousand volunteers to Naples to teach the city about the importance of separating recyclables out of their garbage. Among those volunteers will be dozens of psychologists from an organization specially trained for missions in disaster areas.

"We're not talking about psychology in the way that many people understand it," Luigi Ranzato, president of the group Psicologi per i Popoli, which is sending the psychologists, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Instead, we will be there to try to help introduce a sensibility about garbage disposal to, for example, the old and the young. They need to learn how to separate the garbage so that it doesn't become an inconvenience for their daily life."

The pregnant man who conceived a child after a sex-change operation has given birth to a healthy baby girl.

Thomas Beatie, 34, had the baby in a natural birth at a hospital in Bend, Oregon on Sunday, ABC News reported.

"She's really cute, really pretty," a source told the network.

The bearded Mr Beatie was born a female named Tracy Lagondino, but had sex-change surgery and is now legally male and married to a woman.

Two French students tied up and tortured in a horrific attack in London suffered up to 250 injuries, it was revealed today.

Laurent Bonomo, 23, was stabbed almost 200 times with up to 100 injuries inflicted after he was already dead, sources said.

His close friend, Gabriel Ferez, 23, suffered around 50 injuries during a long ordeal at his friend's bedsit in south-east London.

Sources said both men were unable to move after being bound and gagged some time before 10pm on Sunday.

Investigators believe a flammable liquid was poured on or near their bodies, possibly in an attempt to destroy evidence.

A Jewish school has been cleared of an accusation that its entry criteria racially discriminated against an 11-year-old boy it refused to admit.

The JFS in north-west London rejected him because his mother was not regarded as Jewish, the High Court heard.

The boy - named in court only as M - has a Jewish father. His mother converted to the Jewish faith before he was born but had been a Roman Catholic.

The judge said a decision against the school could have rendered unlawful "the admission arrangements in a very large number of faith schools of many different faiths and denominations".

Oh, well.  That's obviously an excellent reason to deprive the boy of his human rights...gah...

President Sarkozy's habit of picking fights landed him at war yesterday with three mighty institutions: the European Commission, the French armed forces and state television.

Mr Sarkozy's slanging match with Peter Mandelson soured his second day of France's EU presidency after the British commissioner accused him of undermining Europe in world trade negotiations.

The squabble, in which Mr Sarkozy cast Mr Mandelson as a bogeyman, was overshadowed at home by unrest among army generals and mutiny by the boss of France Télévisions.

The military, which is not fond of the reformist President, felt humiliated when Bruno Cuche, the army chief, resigned after a presidential tongue-lashing. After a dressing-down by the President on one of his own channels, Patrick de Carolis, chief of France Télévisions, called Mr Sarkozy's ideas stupid and ignorant. He is not expected to survive long.

PARIS: As it meticulously planned and executed its daring rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages, French officials in Paris say, Colombia kept one person out of the loop: President Nicolas Sarkozy.

That was extraordinary because Betancourt is a dual French-Colombian national, her captivity was a cause célèbre in France and Sarkozy had maintained a drumbeat of diplomatic pressure to try to spring her from the hands of Colombian rebels.

And yet, when word of Betancourt's long-awaited freedom reached Paris on Wednesday, Sarkozy was out of the office, at his wife's residence in a posh part of town, his office said. He had to scramble back to the presidential Élysée Palace.

France learned of the release just 15 minutes before the Colombian media broke the news, said Sarkozy's closest aide, the Élysée chief of staff, Claude Guéant.

Guéant explained on French television that while Colombia had told France months before that a military operation was being contemplated, "it is true that we weren't expecting it at that precise moment."