Not quite the presidency agenda Paris wanted

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - On Tuesday 1 July, France takes over the EU presidency armed with a big country's sense of the natural order of things, a hyperactive president and a lengthy list of priorities.

But its six month term will operate under the twin black clouds of Ireland's rejection of the EU Lisbon Treaty as well as rising discontent among European citizens about the recent hikes in food and fuel prices.

The Irish question will simmer throughout Paris' reign of the EU as member states try and pull off the public relations feat of making it look like the Irish vote counts but putting pressure on Dublin to put the document to referendum for a second time.

Whether they achieve this will depend as much on the way Paris conducts the talks as on the actions of Irish prime minister Brian Cowen. However, France's hopes of brokering deals on who would occupy new posts created by the Lisbon treaty - such as the EU president - have been scuppered.

The Czech government has advised the country's Constitutional Court that the EU's Lisbon treaty does not violate the Czech Republic's own constitution, improving the climate for ratification in the most problematic EU state after the Irish No vote.

"Due to its [Lisbon's] ratification, no substantial change in the arrangement of the democratic legal order will occur," the text of a legal opinion submitted by the government to the court late last week states, Czech daily Lidove noviny reported.

Prague - if the EU treaty gets through here, it should spell 26 against one for Ireland

"The government says in its position that...on the basis of legal expert reports the Lisbon treaty complies with the Czech Republic's constitutional order," Europe minister Alexandr Vondra told the CTK news agency on Saturday (28 June).

The court is set to make its ruling on the question in September or October, allowing the Czech parliament to complete the ratification process before Prague takes over the rotating EU presidency on 1 January 2009.

The EU has not ruled out taking action against Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe in the wake of presidential elections marred by extensive violence.

In a statement issued following the elections on Friday (27 June), Slovenia, which currently holds the six-month rotating EU presidency warned "The European Union does not exclude the possibility of taking appropriate measures against those responsible for the tragic events of recent months."

Elections in Zimbabwe are a "sham," said one EU representative

"The people of Zimbabwe were unable to express their will," the statement added. "As a result, these elections cannot be regarded as legitimate and the power of the elected representatives is questionable."

The European Commission equally attacked the validity of the poll, with spokeswoman Krisztina Nagy saying "[Friday's] election is a sham, the election is hollow and its result will be equally hollow and meaningless...The European Commission like the United Nations does not consider this election legitimate or valid."

The noose is steadily tightening around the neck of EU biofuels targets, with France on Monday (30 June) saying that the EU's 10 percent biofuels target may have to be reconsidered, in the latest attack on the renewable energy drive.

"Probably we will be obliged to call into question or postpone the 10 percent objective," said French ecology minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet speaking to reporters in Paris, according to the Reuters news agency.

The renewable energy source has come under attack from all quarters

She added that developing a target for the controversial fuel source was "probably a mistake" and that the EU had proposed things the wrong way round: setting environmental and social criteria for the production of biofuels should have been developed first and then any target should have been drafted to match that.

The EU in 2007 agreed that 10 percent of all transport fuel should come form renewable sources such as biofuels by 2020 as part of a wider overhaul of its energy sector. "On biofuels, we do not rule out in the long-run reconsidering the target," Ms Kosciusko-Morizet said.

Slovenia, the first former communist country to hold the rotating EU presidency, oversaw positive developments in the Balkans over the last six months. But the crisis of the Irish No vote overshadowed Slovenia's term.

At the beginning of the year, Slovenia set out to prove that a small country could successfully take on the European Union presidency.

 

Indeed, the recent EU member showed that "things wouldn't go disastrously wrong and that they could manage it effectively," said Jacki Davis from the European Policy Center, a leading think-tank in Brussels.

 

"I think they've done that and that's really the best one could have asked for," she said.

ROME: President Giorgio Napolitano appealed for calm from Italy's political class on Sunday after friends and foes of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi attacked each other with offensive slurs and name-calling.

Tensions have been rising steadily since the new prime minister announced legislation to grant himself immunity from prosecution, to suspend some trials and to jail journalists who publish wiretapped phone conversations.

With the weakened centre-left potentially unable to stop Berlusconi in parliament, the political climate has turned ugly - devolving into name-calling this weekend. La Stampa newspaper declared on its front-page: "It's Insult Time".

"I hope for a more calm and constructive climate," said Napolitano, who as president acts a neutral arbiter.

But opposition leader Walter Veltroni, who lost April elections to Berlusconi, said the time for dialogue with the billionaire media mogul was over.

PARIS: When Nicolas Sarkozy brings France back into NATO's unified command next year, he will want to celebrate it as a triumph for Europe's own defense identity.

It's a very French spin on a step that more meaningfully signifies that the alliance, so often buried, is alive and kicking, and that Sarkozy, 42 years after Charles de Gaulle's decision to pull out of NATO's integrated military structure, thinks there's no more profit in France being seen as a reflex antagonist of the United States on issues like Iran, the Middle East, Russia and China.

The world ought to notice. Even if Sarkozy, out of domestic political considerations, must write his own Franco-French account of his country's new wisdom.

On France's motivation, Sarkozy states a plain truth: "Our position, outside the military command, sustains mistrust about the object of our European ambition." To that, he adds a very French judgment: "A France taking its full place in NATO would be an alliance that would be giving a greater place to Europe."

FRANKFURT: Inflation in the euro area surged to a record high for the year ending in June, Eurostat reported Monday, fueling a debate about whether the European Central Bank should raise interest rates more than once to keep rising costs from harming the European economy.

The increase, to 4 percent, fed by oil prices that rose above $143 a barrel Monday, is double the level deemed acceptable by the European Central Bank, which tries to keep inflation below, but close to 2 percent.

"This is a bad figure," the European monetary affairs commissioner Joaquín Almunia told the European Parliament on Monday. "We need to avoid an inflationary spiral."

The ECB is widely expected to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point, to 4.25 percent, when it meets Thursday, a sharp reversal in investor sentiment from just a month ago. It hinted at the move last month, surprising observers who said that they expected it to stand pat for much of the year.

The battle for leadership of France's divided Socialist party will intensify this week as the last of the big contenders lay out their plans to bring the left back to the presidential palace after more than a decade.

Ségolène Royal, who led a controversial but unsuccessful challenge for the presidency last year against the right-of-centre Nicolas Sarkozy, this weekend put anti-Sarkozyism at the heart of her renewal programme.

Speaking to a rally of 1,000 supporters in Paris, Ms Royal said that the left needed to "break the grip of the Sarkozy clan" on France and accused the president of favouring friends in the business community - "the France of the Falcon jet" - over the purchasing power of ordinary workers.

She appealed to the extreme left, with references to a political "revolution" and quotations from Friedrich Engels, and to the centre to join her assault on the president's "predatory system".

This

War on Terra

article is based on events that blew up on 27th November last year.

At this time of year, night does not fall in Narvik, a Norwegian town 140 miles north of the Polar Circle. The midnight sun shines over the industrial town and the stunning mountains and fjords surrounding it. But the town has been plunged into a dark financial storm.

This Arctic municipality of 18,000 inhabitants is the surprise victim of the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, an example of how far-reaching its impact has been. Narvik, together with seven other small communities across Norway, have lost tens of millions of pounds in complex investments that went south as a direct result of the global financial squeeze.

This means that Narvik, the site of the second world war battle, faces an uphill struggle to ensure the funding of its public services. "There are going to be cuts in healthcare, schools, elderly care, youth clubs, sport activities," lists opposition local councillor Torgeir Trældal. "People don't understand that the crisis will have such an impact. They have a right to be angry. It's sad."

At the heart of the crisis is the decision by Narvik to invest £24m of its public funds into securities put together by US bank Citigroup. These products were marketed and sold via a Norwegian brokerage firm, Terra Securities. Narvik's leaders say they did not know these products were high-risk, with most thinking that they were investing in domestic companies, rather than outside Norway, as was the case.

When the credit crunch hit last summer, the town lost around £18m, coming on top of other debts Narvik ran up. The city will get back some of the money it lost, but in the end, the total debt could reach as high as £20m - small change to the banks responsible for the credit crunch, but around a fifth of the city's £100m annual budget.

Still, it's much nicer in Narvik at this time of year than in early December when this was news....

The German Bundespräsident, Horst Köhler, will not, for the time being, sign the act permitting the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.

He has been so requested by the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) in order to avoid an injunction, something the court usually frowns upon.

WASHINGTON -- The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement allowing law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information -- like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits -- about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The potential agreement, as outlined in an internal report obtained by The New York Times, would represent a diplomatic breakthrough for American counterterrorism officials, who have clashed with the European Union over demands for personal data. Europe generally has more stringent laws restricting how governments and businesses can collect and transfer such information.

Negotiators, who have been meeting since February 2007, have largely agreed on draft language for 12 major issues central to a "binding international agreement," the report said. The pact would make clear that it is lawful for European governments and companies to transfer personal information to the United States, and vice versa.

Qatari minister joins chorus saying market is oversupplied

A week after failing to deflate record oil prices at a summit in Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest crude producers and consumers will get another chance to tackle the problem at a meeting this week. More than 3,000 international delegates, including leading corporate and political figures, are to meet at the 19th World Petroleum Congress (WPC) in Madrid, which runs from Monday to Thursday.

"It's the Olympics of the oil and gas industry," director of the WPC, Pierce Riemer, told a press conference last week.

The gathering follows a surge in oil prices Friday that took both New York light sweet crude and Brent North Sea crude to record levels beyond $142 a barrel.

The president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the head of the International Energy Agency and ministers from Nigeria, Russia, Venezuela, India, France and the Netherlands are expected to be present.

BASEL, Switzerland: Central bankers issued a stern warning on Sunday against the dangers of surging inflation, saying rising energy costs risk damaging growth in rich and poor countries alike.

Policymakers attending talks at the annual meeting of the Bank for International Settlements said they were on high alert to the dangers posed by rising inflation and slowing growth, but there was no one-size-fits-all solution.

"We see very difficult times for the world economy moving ahead," said Martin Redrado, Argentina's central bank governor.

"In particular in the financial sector we are going to be witnessing the second wave of turbulence now that the slowdown is going to hit consumer credit ... It is uncharted waters that we are testing at this point, and central bankers all over the world are very alert."

TEHRAN: Iran's foreign minister said on Sunday he did not believe Israel was in a position to attack the Islamic Republic over its nuclear programme.

"They know full well what the consequences of such an act would be," Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki told reporters.

He was speaking a day after the head of the elite Revolutionary Guards was quoted as saying Iran would impose controls on shipping in the Gulf oil route if Iran was attacked and warned regional states of reprisals if they took part.

Speculation about a possible attack on Iran has risen since a U.S. newspaper reported this month that Israel had practiced such a strike.

Mottaki said Israel was dealing with the consequences of its 2006 war with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and was suffering a "crisis of deepening illegitimacy" in the Middle East region.

Oh yeah.  9/11 did change everything.

Remember the 90s?  It was the dawn of an era of globalization and easy, instantaneous movement of information.  The hero of this new age was the "road warrior" who jetted around the globe solving problems, selling Infomation Age products and making deals.  And the warrior's chief weapon was the state-of-the-art laptap crammed with all the features and data needed to accomplish the task.

Not any more.  The Patriot Act, zealous U. S. Customs and TSA officials and a Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling giving a green light to warrantless searches and seizures has made traveling with a laptop very difficult.  And if you carry sensitive data on that laptop these days, you're a fool.

John McCain says new plants can help solve the energy crisis and address climate change. It's not that simple.

 A nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania: John McCain has suggested building 100 new nuclear plants. To power America's future, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) has an energy plan with a distinctly French accent. "The French are able to generate 80 percent of their electricity with nuclear power," the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee points out. "There's no reason why America shouldn't."

In a mid-June speech, part of a continuing blitz on energy issues, McCain laid out his vision for 100 new nuclear plants -- 45 of them to be built by 2030. They would help meet America's energy needs, and because nukes don't emit greenhouse gases, they would fight global warming as well. McCain also wants to borrow from the French playbook by reprocessing and reusing spent nuclear fuel and by providing government incentives to get all this done. Nukes now produce 20 percent of US electricity, says McCain senior policy adviser Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin: "To move north of that, we have to be aggressive.

We could do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Barack Obama's most fervent supporters expect much more.

 Centrist or progressive? The real Barack Obama at the moment looks much more like a Bill Clintonesque centrist. It's feeling a lot like 1992 right now. It's also feeling a lot like 1980. But which parallel is closer? Is Barack Obama going to be a Ronald Reagan of the left, a president who fundamentally changes the country's direction? Or will he be just another Bill Clinton?

Current polls -- not horse-race polls, which are notoriously uninformative until later in the campaign, but polls gauging the public mood -- are strikingly similar to those in both 1980 and 1992, years in which an overwhelming majority of Americans were dissatisfied with the country's direction.

So the odds are that this will be a "change" election -- which means that it's very much Mr. Obama's election to lose. But if he wins, how much change will he actually deliver?

Indeed, many Democrats and renewable power advocates are upset that the playing field is tilted so far in favor of nukes. Robert Fishman, a veteran utility executive who is now CEO of solar startup Ausra, says the investment tax credit sought by the solar industry would cost less than 1 percent of the dollars going to nukes and fossil fuels. "I don't think we've done a good job laying out to Senator McCain what the renewable industry can do for the country," Fishman says.

don't blame yourself, robert, is he aware enough to even listen objectively?

There are no blank spots on the map any more, anywhere on earth. You want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind. Jon Krakauer

This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people over the next forty years (9 percent of them in poor cities), and no one--absolutely no one--has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.

If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on agriculture by the later decades of this century. Even in the most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20 percent decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30 percent decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20 percent or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8 percent boost.

An interesting bit, and new to me. May well answer the nagging question of why the Empire's Neocon wing seems to give not a fig for real warming tech or policy.
--just better fence building and more guns.
Imagine a world paying enforced tribute to the Empire. Imagine a mechanism for transporting the plunder of the world to US shores.
Imagine the world allowing such a thing.

Madness.

In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.

History.

Useful talking follows experience, the more experience the better. Talking that precedes experience is known as bullshit.

First, the government suggests that several of the assertions
in the intelligence documents are reliable because they are made
in at least three different documents.  We are not persuaded.
Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has
"said it thrice" does not make an allegation true.  See LEWIS
CARROLL, THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK 3 (1876) ("I have said
it thrice:  What I tell you three times is true.").  In fact, we have
no basis for concluding that there are independent sources for
the documents' thrice-made assertions.  To the contrary, as
noted in Part III, many of those assertions are made in identical
language, suggesting that later documents may merely be citing
earlier ones, and hence that all may ultimately derive from a
single source.  And as we have also noted, Parhat has made a
credible argument that -- at least for some of the assertions -- the
common source is the Chinese government, which may be less
than objective with respect to the Uighurs.  Other assertions in
the documents may ultimately rely on interview reports (not
provided to the Tribunal) of Uighur detainees, who may have
had no first-hand knowledge and whose speculations may have
been transformed into certainties in the course of being repeated
by report writers.

There are no blank spots on the map any more, anywhere on earth. You want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind. Jon Krakauer

S. J. Res. 43: A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to marriage

`Section 1. This article may be cited as the `Marriage Protection Amendment'.

`Section 2. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.'.

Co-sponsors:
Sen. Wayne Allard [R-CO]
Sen. Samuel Brownback [R-KS]
Sen. Larry Craig [R-ID]
Sen. James Inhofe [R-OK]
Sen. Pat Roberts [R-KS]
Sen. Richard Shelby [R-AL]
Sen. John Thune [R-SD]
Sen. David Vitter [R-LA]

Ships containing drinking water are expected to start arriving in Cyprus in an effort to relieve the island's chronic water shortage.

The water is being supplied by Greece, in a project costing the Cypriot government more than 38m euros (£30m).

Every day for the next six months two tankers will leave the port of Elefsina near Athens, bound for Cyprus.

After four years with no substantial winter rainfall, Cypriot water reserves are at their lowest since 1908.

In the town of Killorglin in County Kerry, the reins of power are handed to a wild billy goat once a year. It's an opportunity for the people to let out their inner beast -- and for tourists to party the night away, writes reader Desmond F. Kelly.

The crowning of a king has always been cause for celebration. In the small town of Killorglin in the south-west corner of Ireland, it still is -- with a hitch. The king in question is a goat.

 "King Puck" is one of the last regents of Ireland, though his reign is a short one -- from August 10 to 12 every year. Nevertheless, the small Irish town of Killorglin (about 100 km. from Cork) has been crowing King Puck since (officially) 1610. The goat-fawning fair is one of the oldest of Ireland's traditional rural celebrations -- and one of its better known.

Still, despite the fair's fame, its origins are somewhat unclear. One theory has the fair dating back to pagan times. Puck, as the male goat is called, could have been seen as a symbol of fertility for a late summer harvest festival.

The more modern theory is that King Puck is a celebration of the fact that a herd of goats, which had been grazing in the countryside nearby, were scared up by pillaging "Roundheads," the soldiers of Oliver Cromwell. One goat galloped off towards the town in a state of fear, thus alerting the townspeople to the approaching danger. (A third, and less romantic, version involves legal loopholes, greedy landlords and tax evasion.)

A power plant just outside of Berlin is expected to test carbon sequestration for the first time this week. The technology, which would see coal-fired power plants pumping CO2 underground, could help reverse climate change. But it could also be dangerous.

 The carbon dioxide sequestration project in Ketzin, near Potsdam, Germany: Can CO2s be stored underground safely? For the first time ever in continental Europe, carbon dioxide is set to be pumped underground. Scientists working in the town of Ketzin, just outside of Berlin, want to begin pumping quantities of the greenhouse gas underground this week in order to determine whether it can be stored safely in sandstone deposits during a test phase that will continue through 2009.

Similar projects are underway in Canada, Australia and off the coast of Norway. Scientists are hoping that the efforts to store climate-killer CO2 gases underground will help to reduce emissions of the gases responsible for global warming in the future. Still, scientists are warning against excess optimism.

"Even if it turns out that it works, we will still need to continue looking for alternative energy sources," said the director of the project, Frank Schilling of the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, which is participating in the project. One reason is that the technology won't be ready for the market until 2020 at the very latest. Nor is it certain if the gas can be kept from seeping out of its underground storage area. Capturing carbon dioxide emission from coal-fired power plants and pumping it into underground storage also takes energy. Fully 20 percent more coal would be required to produce the same amount of energy.

Among Scientific Treasures, A Gem  |  NY Times

One thing you can say about the copy of Nicolaus Copernicus's book "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres"), on sale next week at Christie's auction house, is that it looks and feels old.

Its cover is dented and stained. The pages are warped. You could easily imagine that this book had sat out half a dozen revolutions hidden in various dank basements in Europe.

In fact this book, published in 1543, was the revolution. It was here that the Polish astronomer laid out his theory that the Earth and other planets go around the Sun, contravening a millennium of church dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe and launching a frenzy of free thought and scientific inquiry.

The Copernicus is a cornerstone in the collection of a retired physician and amateur astronomer, Richard Green of Long Island, that constitutes pretty much a history of science and Western thought. Among the others in Dr. Green's library are works by Galileo, who was tried for heresy in 1633 and sentenced to house arrest for his admiration of Copernicus and for portraying the pope as a fool, as well as by Darwin, Descartes, Newton, Freud, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Malthus and even Karl Marx.

Pawing through these jaw droppers, I found my attention being drawn again and again to a small white book, barely more than a pamphlet, a time machine that took me back to a more recent revolution. It was the directory for world's first commercial phone system, Volume 1, No. 1, published in New Haven by the Connecticut District Telephone Company in November 1878, future issues to be published "from time to time, as the nature of the service requires."

Two things struck me. As an aging veteran of the current rewiring of the human condition, I wondered whether there might be lessons from that first great rewiring of our collective nervous system.