Britain's first Muslim minister has attacked the growing culture of hostility against Muslims in the United Kingdom, saying that many feel targeted like "the Jews of Europe".

Shahid Malik, who was appointed as a minister in the Department for International Development (Dfid) by Gordon Brown last summer, said it has become legitimate to target Muslims in the media and society at large in a way that would be unacceptable for any other minority.

Mr Malik made clear that he was not equating the situation with the Holocaust but warned that many British Muslims now felt like "aliens in their own country". He said he himself had been the target of a string of racist incidents, including the firebombing of his family car and an attempt to run him down at a petrol station.

"I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe," he said. "I don't mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost - and still is in some parts - to target Jews, many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way.

Knife crime has overtaken terrorism as the top priority for the Metropolitan Police as one of Britain's most senior officers admitted that the fight to stop teenagers carrying weapons was not working.

Deputy Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson said today that the battle against knife crime has become "the No 1 priority" for the Met as the 18th teenager to die a violent death in the capital this year was named.

To try and stem the rising tide of young deaths he has ordered all senior officers to look at their current operations and see if any personnel can be diverted to help tackle the rise in stabbings.

In May the Metropolitan Police launched the high-profile Operation Blunt 2 - involving taking airport style metal detectors onto the streets and instituting Section 60 powers, allowing officers to search youths within a certain geographical area.

MOSCOW: A bomb exploded during an outdoor concert in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, early Friday, injuring dozens of people.

The blast, believed to have been caused by a homemade explosive device, occurred about 1:00 a.m. as revelers were celebrating Belarus's Independence day, said Aleksandr Lastovsky, a spokesman for the Minsk police department. More than 20 people were injured, he said, describing the bombing as "an act of hooliganism." Belarus's interior minister said up to 40 had been injured, Interfax news reported. There were no immediate reports of fatalities.

No suspects have been identified

"Very shortly we will determine whether this was a terrorist act of something else," Vladimir Naumov, the interior minister, said.

In the West, the 1968 generation is generally seen in a postive light. But the heroes of the 1968 uprising in Prague see themselves as historical failures.

 The uprising known as the "Prague Spring" was crushed by the Soviets in August 1968. No one remembers now exactly which office the new employee from Prague moved into, that summer day in 1970. He is said to have been very nice, tall and with a friendly smile, and he took up quarters in the second story of a gray administrative building on the outskirts of Bratislava. The communist government had sent him there to oversee forestry equipment maintenance in the Slovak capital.

The nice new employee was a man named Alexander Dubcek, and one year previous he had still been first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Party leaders had stripped him of power in April 1969, and later demoted him to a forestry job. Now Dubcek rode the tram to work; sometimes he would generously offer his seat to the secret service men who followed him conspicuously.

Alexander Dubcek was the hero of the so-called "Prague Spring," the 1968 uprising crushed by the Soviets almost exactly four decades ago. Dubcek was a reformer who wanted to give communism a "human face" -- and he became a Czechoslovak icon as well as the hope of reformers in other socialist and communist countries. But Czechoslovakia's experiment became its tragedy on the night of August 21, 1968, when the armies of fellow Warsaw Pact countries invaded. Students in Prague graffitied on a building wall, "Lenin, wake up, they've gone mad." Images of desperate people standing up defenseless against the tanks drew worldwide attention and widespread sympathy for the rebellion of little Czechoslovakia against the huge Soviet Union.

The European Union and Russia said on Friday they had agreed on what areas should be covered by a wide-ranging partnership treaty without setting a deadline for it.

Speaking after a first round of talks in Brussels on Friday, July 4, the two sides said negotiations on a new pact to replace an agreement signed in 1997 had been "positive" and fruitful but declined to set a timeframe to conclude the deal despite pressure from countries such as Germany.

 

"There is nothing more harmful for any negotiating process than a deadline," Russian envoy to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov told a news conference with his EU counterpart, EU Commission Director General Eneko Landaburu.

 

Landaburu said he shared Chizhov's assessment. The two sides have agreed to meet again in September.

A plan by the Italian government to fingerprint undocumented Roma and Sinti has sparked outrage among human rights groups and the EU who warn identifying people based on ethnicity can set a dangerous precedent

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's plan to take a census of all Roma and Sinti people living in some 700 camps in Italy as part of a broader crackdown on crime was slammed by rights groups on Thursday, July 3.

"We are very worried about discrimination according to race or religion," Marco Impagliazzo, president the Community of Sant'Egidio, said at a press conference in Rome on Thursday. "This approach violates Italian and European law and calls to mind painful memories, such as the Vichy regime of (Nazi-collaborating, World War II) France," Impagliazzo said.

He handed out a copy of one camp dweller's form, which contained his photograph, his fingerprint, and the words "Roma from Serbia" and "Orthodox" filled in under the headings "ethnic origin" and "religion."

BERLIN: The upper house of the German Parliament on Friday passed into law new measures aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions by agreeing to double the amount of power from renewable energy sources and changing methods for generating electricity.

The measures pushed through by the Bundesrat, which represents the premiers of Germany's 16 states, was a victory for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Merkel, a conservative who has been in power since late 2005 and is a former environment minister, has made climate change a cornerstone of her domestic and foreign policy.

But she has come under immense pressure from industry, particularly the automobile sector. It has lobbied hard, and so far successfully, against linking the cost of registering new cars with the amount of carbon dioxide they emit.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission will next week offer €1 billion from the EU's unspent agriculture funds to help farmers from poorest countries boost their food production.

The move was announced by EU agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel at a Brussels international conference entitled "Who will feed the world?" on Thursday (3 July), organised by the European Parliament and France, currently holding the bloc's rotating chairmanship.

Net food importers are in serious trouble, says the EU's agriculture commissioner. (

Mrs Fischer Boel argued that while the EU had taken "immediate action" to support higher agriculture outputs in Europe, it must now concentrate on helping the poorest countries which are facing deadly consequences from the current food price hikes across the globe.

"I think there are two sides of the coin: there are those who are food exporters and can take advantage of food exports to improve the economy on their own country. But those who are net food importers are in serious trouble," she told journalists.

"Within the European Union, we will come forward ... with a package to make possible for the net food importing developing countries to get money for seeds and for fertilisers to improve their own production facilities," the commissioner added.

SKOPJE: Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski began negotiations on Monday to form a new coalition government that will try to get the country's EU and NATO ambitions back on track.

A row with Greece over the Balkan country's name, coupled with a June 1 election marred by violence and fraud, have stalled Macedonia's bid to join NATO and cast doubt over its chances of opening accession talks with the EU this year.

Gruevski's conservative VMRO-DPMNE won the healthiest parliamentary majority in over a decade, but will seek to join forces with at least one of the two main ethnic Albanian parties for the sake of stability.

Since splitting from Yugoslavia in 1991, Macedonia has sought ruling coalitions that include an Albanian party. This has taken on greater significance since a 2001 Albanian insurgency fought for greater rights and representation for the country's 500,000 Albanians.

Gruevski was handed the mandate by President Branko Crvenkovski on Monday.

They are the forgotten victims of the Berlin Wall. The East Germans who were killed attempting to flee through Bulgaria. At least 18 were shot by border guards, mowed down with as few scruples as those murdered along the death strip that was Germany's inner border.

 Gunter Pschera was killed by a Bulgarian border guard in 1967. It starts with the smell, the cloying odor of decay, growing behind the brown steel doors, its dull impact becoming more penetrating in the semidarkness. Finally, the next steel door reveals the source of the smell, the bodies of three men, shockingly naked, ready to be autopsied. The walls and floor of the basement room, the size of a large kitchen, are tiled. This is Sofia, and this is the old autopsy chamber at the city's Military Medical Academy. The room is still in use today.

He was lying in this room, on one of these tables: 19-year-old Michael Weber, 1.70 meters (5' 6") tall, a muscular young man with a normal build and little body fat. Weber's body was brought in discreetly through an access tunnel and removed just as inconspicuously. His parents came to Sofia to see their son one last time, before the body was incinerated and the remains flown back to Leipzig via Berlin. According to the report filed by Bulgaria's notorious State Security Agency on July 14, 1989, both parents behaved "very reasonably." They gazed at their dead son. They were shown the body from the side that had remained relatively recognizable.

What they couldn't see is detailed in the autopsy report, prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Slatko Nikolov Kolev, the head of the forensic medicine division of the Bulgarian People's Army. The Webers' son was killed by a bullet fired at close range, perhaps 1.5 to 2 meters (5 to 7 feet). It crashed through the left side of his face, his neck and his chest, before coming to rest in the back, just below the right armpit. It shattered his cheekbone, upper jaw and two cervical vertebrae, crushed his spinal cord and ripped apart his chest aorta and his right lung. Michael Weber bled to death in the foothills of the Pirin Mountains in southern Bulgaria, 150 meters (492 feet) from the Greek border. The autopsy report states that he died quickly.

London's deputy mayor has resigned two months into his post amid claims of financial irregularities.

Ray Lewis faced allegations relating to his time as a vicar in east London in the late 1990s and head of a youth academy scheme in 2003.

He was placed under Church of England disciplinary measures in 1999.

BRUSSELS: The European Commission delivered a sharp response Friday to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France over his recent comments on interest rates and trade policy, underlining European economic policy divisions before the coming Group of 8 summit meeting.

Sarkozy has alarmed Britain and the Nordic nations, which traditionally embrace a liberal, free-market economic philosophy, by starting his country's six-month presidency of the EU with a call for greater protection for European voters from the effects of globalization. On Monday, he took issue with the inflation-busting mandate of the European Central Bank, or ECB, saying that the causes of inflation had changed significantly from 20 to 30 years ago and that a big increase in interest rates would have no effect on the price of barrel of oil.

Nonetheless, the central bank for the 15-nation euro zone raised its rates Thursday to a seven-year high of 4.25 percent. And before leaving for the G-8 meeting of leaders of top industrialized nations in Japan, the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, endorsed the Frankfurt-based bank's decision.

"When it comes to inflation," Barroso said, "I have more confidence in the position of central bankers than politicians. Central bankers are not moved by short-term political pressure." The comment appeared to be a direct reference to Sarkozy.

The former Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt returned to what she called her "other family" in France today as doubt was cast on the apparently daring rescue that won her freedom.

Arriving to a warm embrace from Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni, the 46-year-old, who was largely brought up in France as the daughter of a Colombian diplomat and also has French nationality, was welcomed at the Villacoublay military air base near Paris, where she flew in on the French presidential Airbus.

But while she was still in the air, the Swiss radio station RSR broadcast a report questioning the official version of the operation to free Ms Betancourt and 14 other hostages - saying that money, not cunning, had clinched their freedom.

According to Bogota, the hostages were freed in an elaborate ruse by Colombian intelligence agents who had infiltrated the Marxist Farc rebels holding them.

Bernd Pfaffenbach, German Chancellor Merkel's point man for next week's G8 summit, spoke with DW about the pressing issues on the agenda as the world's leading industrialized powers meet in Japan.

There will be plenty of topics on the agenda at the G8 summit in Japan. Which issues do you think stand out?

Bernd Pfaffenbach: G8 summits are always marked by a large variety of topics. The skill lies in structuring the topics in such a way that they are easy to manage. But I think climate change will be a huge issue at this year's summit. We Germans are satisfied with the agenda because it strongly reflects, draws upon and continues with our program from last year's G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany.

You said climate change was a big topic at last year's summit. However the Japanese hosts have played down expectations this year. Do you think the summit declaration will fall far short of the goals issued by last year's G8 summit?

I don't think so; we wouldn't like that at all. I don't think the Japanese can afford to rein in their ambitions so much as to create a setback compared to last year's summit. Of course, talks will be difficult. But I think we've prepared ourselves quite well. In the end, it will all depend on the deftness of the G8 heads of state and government leaders to draw the emerging economies into the process.

As the head of the World Bank warns world leaders that the planet is entering the "danger zone" with millions thrown into extreme poverty by the twin food and fuel crises, a leaked report from his organisation shows that biofuels have pushed up global food prices by 75 percent - a much bigger role in the disaster than previously thought.

Biofuels are responsible for 75 percent of recent food price rises, according to a secret World Bank report.

In a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, ahead of next week's G8 summit, and copied to other G8 leaders, World Bank president Robert Zoellick has called on them to act immediately to address the "man-made catastrophe" of soaring food and oil prices.

"What we are witnessing is not a natural disaster - a silent tsunami or a perfect storm. It is a man-made catastrophe and as such must be fixed by people," he said in the letter.

There has been an 82 percent rise in food commodity prices since 2006, with the crisis worsening since April, Mr Zoellick warned.

Everyone is upset at gas prices. But if you really want to see a radical cost shift, look at the real price of diesel fuel.

No wonder Walmart has suddenly discovered the virtues of local produce.

KUMAGAYA, Japan -- With its towering furnaces and clanging conveyer belts carrying crushed rock, Taiheiyo Cement's factory looks like an Industrial Revolution relic. But it is actually a model of modern energy efficiency, harnessing its waste heat to generate much of its own electricity.

Engineers from China and elsewhere in Asia come to study its design, which has allowed the company to slash the amount of power it buys from the grid.

The plant is just one example of Japan's single-minded dedication to reducing energy use, a commitment that dates back to the oil shocks of the 1970s that shook this resource-poor nation.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which makes the waste heat generator at the cement factory in Kumagaya, started developing the technology in 1979. But the generators were too expensive to sell outside Japan while energy prices were low. But overseas orders took off three years ago, after energy prices began rising.

Since then, the company has sold 64 units, mainly through a joint venture in China.

"Japan rushed to embrace these technologies back in the 1980s," said Katsushi Sorida, head of the waste heat plant department at Kawasaki Plant Systems, a subsidiary that markets and installs the units. "Now the rest of the world is finally catching up."

Despite their gains industrially, the Japanese housing market seems completely unregulated.  Un-insulated plastic boxes with no heating system are the norm, and people rely on kerosene heaters in the distinctly cold winters.

July 3 (Bloomberg) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she's ``proud'' of the U.S. decision to wage the Iraq war and insisted that the world is not more dangerous than it was when George W. Bush took office.

``We're now beginning to see that perhaps it's not so popular to be a suicide bomber. We're beginning to see that perhaps people are questioning whether Osama Bin Laden ought to really be the face of Islam,'' Rice, 53, said in an interview to be broadcast this weekend on Bloomberg Television's ``Conversations with Judy Woodruff.''

``And I am proud of the decision of this administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein,'' said Rice, who was Bush's national security adviser at the time of the March 2003 invasion. As of yesterday, 4,107 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq and more than 30,000 were wounded. She said the Iraq war has been ``tougher than any of us really dreamed.''

TAIPEI: The first regular weekend flights between China and Taiwan took place on Friday, in the latest breakthrough in bilateral relations that are rapidly warming under the island's new president, Ma Ying-jeou.

The first batch of nonstop weekend flights from the mainland carried 662 tourists on package tours from five cities. The number of tourists is expected to expand gradually to as many as 3,000 per day.

Several nonstop flights also carried passengers from Taiwan to the mainland on Friday.

The Chinese tourists were greeted with a warm welcome that included traditional Chinese lion dances and performances by Taiwanese Aboriginal groups.

"We're all one family," said Liu Shao-yong, in remarks at Taipei's Taoyuan international airport. Liu, the president of China's Southern Airlines, was one of the pilots on the first flight, from Guangzhou to Taiwan.

As she put the finishing touch to a watercolour outside the gated community of Oyster Harbours, Nancy Walton wrinkled her nose at the thought of America's first offshore wind farm popping up on the horizon of Nantucket Sound. "I believe in wind power," she said, "but these will be higher than the Statue of Liberty. There are so precious few places on earth as unspoilt as this. Why can't they just put them somewhere else?"

Oyster Harbours is ground zero in a very uncivil war in which some of the wealthiest and most famous people in the country have joined forces with one of America's dirtiest businesses - the coal industry - to block an ambitious clean-energy project.

As Hyannis filled up with traffic ahead of the Independence Day holiday today, there was a whiff of cordite rather than fireworks in the air as both sides blasted away at each other.

So far, the opponents have spent more than $20m trying to kill off the project, which is known as Cape Wind and is planned for a location widely deemed ideal for offshore wind turbines.

The Spanish port of Cadiz is waging war on gulls that have taken command of the skies around Spain's south-western tip. An emergency plan adopted by the Andalusian regional government has seen the destruction of 15,000 gulls' eggs, removal of nests and shooting the troublesome invaders where necessary.

The thousands of yellow-legged gulls, whose numbers have risen sharply in the past five years, damage buildings and dive-bomb people on beaches and in food markets, officials say.

Although it is the most common southern European gull, the yellow-legged variety (Larus michahellis) was rare along the Cadiz coast until recently. However, its strong survival instinct has enabled it to colonise a new habitat. The voracious bird eats almost anything, finding its food on the marshy shores of the Bay of Cadiz Natural Park, around fishing ports and at two rubbish disposal plants. It preys on other birds such as stilts, avocets and terns, and destroys the nests of others. It carries microbes, damages vegetation and poisons water. This, officials claim, justifies their extreme eradication measures.

One of the most vivid symbols of global warming is the torrents of melt water that drain from the lakes that form each summer on Greenland's ice sheet.

Recent studies have shown that this water, which flows deep into the ice through natural drainpipes called moulins, allows the ice to slide faster over bedrock toward the ocean. And the faster the ice flows, the faster sea levels rise. But a Dutch study using 17 years of satellite measurements in western Greenland suggests that the movement associated with the meltwater is not as rapid as had been feared. The acceleration appears to be a transient summer phenomenon, the researchers said, with the yearly movement actually dropping slightly in some places.

"The positive-feedback mechanism between melt rate and ice velocity," says the report, published Friday in the journal Science, "appears to be a seasonal process that may have only a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the next decades."

Greenland is still losing more ice through melting than it gains through snowfall, other measurements show.

Clothing made from seal fur is to be banned throughout the European Union.

Although white pelts from baby seals were banned in 1986, fashion houses still use skins from older animals to make boots, coats, gloves and accessories.

Stavros Dimas, the EU's environment commissioner, told national ministers in France yesterday that an import embargo will be drawn up within weeks.

Paris - Some endangered species may face an extinction risk that is up to a hundred times greater than previously thought, according to a study released on Wednesday.

By overlooking random differences between individuals in a given population, researchers may have badly underestimated the perils confronting threatened wildlife, it said.

"Many larger populations previously considered relatively safe would actually be at risk," Brett Melbourne, a professor at the University of Colorado and the study's lead author, told AFP.

There are more than 16 000 species worldwide threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

One in four mammals, one in eight birds and one in three amphibians are on the IUCN's endangered species "Red List".

In a study released on Wednesday by the journal Nature, Melbourne said the current models used draw up such lists typically look only at two risk factors.

One is the individual deaths within a small population, such as Indian tigers or rare whales.

When a species dwindles beyond a certain point, even the loss of a handful of individuals can have devastating long-term consequences, Melbourne explained.

There are less than 400 specimens of several species of whale, for example, and probably no more than 4 000 tigers roaming in the wild.

Their appearance at Wimbledon, Henley and Harrods has sparked conspiracy rumours and wild speculation as to their true identity - but now it seems the masked "Faceless people" who have caused such a stir this summer are in fact... car salesmen.

Faceless figures cause a stir at Wimbledon, Harrods and Elton John's ball

Pringles are not crisps, says High Court

It appears the publicity stunt is part of a viral marketing campaign by manufacturers The Lotus Group, to drum up interest in its forthcoming new car, the Eagle.

Lost scenes from the classic sci-fi film Metropolis have been shown for the first time in decades.

The long-lost original cut of Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film was discovered in the archives of the Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires earlier this year.

The museum's Paula Felix-Didier said it was the only copy of the complete film.

At the Aspen Ideas Festival Thursday, New York Times columnist and The World Is Flat author Thomas Friedman gave a preview of his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It Can Renew America, which comes out in September. The book's main argument is that the convergence of global warming, global flattening (the rise of middle classes all over the world), and global crowding (the population boom) is driving five key trends that will define the 21st century.

Friedman argues that those five trends -- energy and resource supply and demand, petro-dictatorship, biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy poverty -- have all been driven past a tipping point such that they have created a new era of history: the energy climate era.

"We're not post-something anymore," Friedman said. "We're not post-war, we're not post-Cold War, we're not post-post Cold War. We're pre-something. And what we're pre-...is the energy climate era, defined by these five problems going over a tipping point. And how we manage these five problems, I believe, is really gonna define the stability or instability of the 21st century."