Russian President Dmitry Medvedev delivered a major foreign policy speech on Tuesday July 15, singling out US and European policies on missile defense and Kosovo for criticism in a style reminiscent of his predecessor.

In the speech given to Russia's diplomatic corps in Moscow, Medvedev said that US plans to site a missile defense system in Eastern Europe threatens the demise of the decades-old balance of power in Europe and added that Russia was prepared to execute "an adequate response" should the plans advance.

"This common (security) heritage cannot survive if one of the sides destroys isolated elements of the strategic construction," Medvedev said in the sharply-worded speech which had echoes of Vladimir Putin at his most beligerent. "We are unsatisfied...National security cannot be based on spoken promises.

"These installations ... only worsen the situation," he added. "We will be forced to respond to this adequately. The EU and US have been warned."

Belgium woke up to a new political crisis Tuesday when it became clear that its five-party coalition government led by Prime Minister Yves Leterme had broken down after only four months in office.

Flemish Christian Democrat Leterme handed in his resignation to Belgian King Albert II late Monday night after it became clear he would not be unable to broker an agreement on the basis of constitutional reform or a power-sharing deal that has split the country in two.

But after a four-hour meeting with his prime minister, Albert rejected the resignation of the government, instead favoring a deliberation period where he would consider whether to accept the move. The royal palace said the king would begin consulting political leaders from both sides of the linguistic divide this week.

Leterme's government apparently crumbled after failing to find common ground on a reform plan before the prime minister's self-imposed July 15 deadline. A contributing factor was the ongoing cultural differences between the Dutch-speaking Flemish people and the French-speaking Walloons.

Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has urged his ministers to boycott EU meetings where no documentation is provided in Italian in a bid to promote the language of Dante.

They should walk out of those meetings where they are forced to speak a language other than their own, Mr Berlusconi wrote in a letter to his colleagues, the Guardian reports.

Mr Berlusconi has called for respect of "the dignity" of all EU languages

It is essential that the EU also guarantees "the dignity" of those languages which are less spoken in the Union, the prime minister wrote.

He said Italian officials should "counteract the practice, begun by the European commission... [of] introducing the ambiguous notion of 'working' or 'procedural' languages, with the effect of creating a trilingual hierarchy" with English, French and German as the main beneficiaries.

The 27 member state bloc has 23 official languages, while English, French and German are the three working languages used for day-to-day business.

EU- trade commissioner Peter Mandelson has called on member states to present a united front in crucial world trade talks next week as national governments divide into neo-liberal and protectionist camps ahead of the negotiations.

The commissioner's call comes after French President Nicolas Sarkozy in an unusually direct attack earlier this month accused Mr Mandelson of contributing to the Irish rejection of EU Lisbon treaty through his trade stance and of making too many promises on reducing subsidies for EU farmers.

"If, after seven years, you cannot complete a trade round, what does that say for your prospects of reaching a deal on climate change?"

According to the International Herald Tribune, he told a gathering of journalists on Monday (14 July) that the 27 member states should make a "show of unity" and noted that France is "very mindful of its responsibilities as the presidency of the EU."

New data shows industrial production in Europe recorded its biggest fall in nearly 16 years in May, fuelling fears the continent's economy is weakening as it's buffeted by a string of global financial crises.

Seasonally adjusted industrial production fell month on month by 1.9 per cent in the 15-member euro zone and by 1.4 per cent in the 27-member European Union, the EU statistic office, Eurostat said on Monday, July 14.

 

It was the biggest fall in industrial production since December 1992. The slide comes against a backdrop of soaring inflation, surging oil prices and the fallout from a weakening global economy and credit crisis.

 

Adding to the pressure on the 15 countries sharing the euro has been the strength of the common currency, which last week edged back up towards it all-time high of just over $1.60.

MADRID, Spain: The Spanish government filed a lawsuit Tuesday with the Constitutional Court to block plans by the Basque region to hold a referendum that many see as a move toward independence.

State lawyers acted after the Basque regional government on Tuesday published its plan to hold the referendum Oct. 25, the Justice Ministry said in a statement.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialist government says the referendum is unconstitutional because only the central government, not a regional administration, can authorize such a vote.

The lawsuit automatically suspends plans for the vote while the court deliberates.

The Basque government insists the nonbinding vote is a popular consultation, and not a referendum. With it, the regional government seeks the views of Basque residents on the separatist group ETA's armed conflict and the region's future political status.

A LETTER writer to the London Times put his finger on it. "Can anybody explain to me," he asked, "what is the difference between democracy in Zimbabwe and democracy in the European Union?"

In Zimbabwe, back in March, Robert Mugabe called an election which he was sure he would win. But despite widespread intimidation and vote rigging, he lost. His Zanu-PF party lost its majority in parliament, and Mugabe himself was defeated by Morgan Tsvangirai in the presidential race.

But Mugabe refused to accept the result and organised a rerun. This time he made sure the result would be the right one.

The point the letter writer was making is that something similar keeps happening in European Union referendums. Whenever voters reject a proposal put forward by Europe's political elite, they either get ignored, or they are told to vote again until they get it right. It happened to the Danes in 2000 when they rejected the Maastricht Treaty and a second referendum was called. The Irish then rejected the Nice Treaty in 2001 and had to have a rerun. And now it's happening again after French, Dutch and Irish voters have rejected the Lisbon Treaty.

This latest democratic charade began in 2005, when the European Commission published plans for a new constitution creating the structure for a European federal superstate.

Lithuania has stepped up pressure on the European Commission by deciding to hold a referendum on whether to extend the lifespan of the Ignalina nuclear power plant, despite having agreed - as a condition of entry into the EU - to shut the station down at the end of 2009.

On Monday (14 July), 88 out of 141 Lithuanian parliamentarians supported a call for a non-binding plebiscite on the issue, while five MPs were against and eleven abstained. The referendum is due on 12 October, the same day as the general parliamentary elections.

The signing of Lithuania's EU accession treaty, which lays out a timetable for closure of Ignalina

"Our motive is the difficult situation facing Lithuania," Vytautas Bogusis, who tabled the referendum idea, told AFP. He added that the situation after Ignalina is closed was likely to be "catastrophic" as electricity prices would "rise fourfold".

The chair of the parliament economic committee, Birute Vesaite, told Reuters that the country "should not remain silent and wait until the others take [its] electricity market share".

Walid Moallem leans forward in the armchair of the Paris Intercontinental Opera. "It's all on the record," he snaps. It usually is. The Syrians can be up- front when you least expect it. Syria's Foreign Minister is one of their top negotiators, a man who knows Israel's diplomats almost as well as they know themselves, who understands all the traps of the Middle East.

Tell me who murdered Rafiq Hariri, I ask him. And Mr Moallem grins bleakly and reaches into his jacket pocket. His beefy hand emerges clutching a wad of pale green Syrian hundred-pound notes. "Tell me the answer and you can take all my money," he says.

He may see evil among Syria's enemies but he will speak no evil, certainly not of the French. "We are building trust with the French," he says. Syria is ready to co-operate on the prevention of illegal immigration, against "what you in the West call 'terrorism'" and opening a developed economic partnership. And Mr Moallem can be a bit preachy into the bargain.

Editorial Comment: That a private corporation is given control and responsibility of the US elections is absurd. The 20 facts reported below are only one of the reasons why U.S. citizens should abstain from voting in the 2008 elections for president and the other national elections.

The second reason to vote not to vote is the fact that the people are offered up choices selected by the corporations meaning that the voter really has no honest choice in the elections. Candidates who truly oppose the system entrenched in Washington have no realistic possibility of winning an election.

The third reason to vote not to vote is the fact that there are no essential differences among the viable candidates running for office. Relative to the presidential elections, all one has to do for confirmation of this fact is to look at the voting records and speeches of John McCain and Barack Obama and his running mate, Hillary Clinton. McCain is spawned by the same warmongering psychopathology that bred George W. Bush. Barack Obama is an African-American face on the white power structure, making him arguably more dangerous than McCain. Why has his campaign been labeled with the theme of "change"? Does the reader seriously think that Barack Obama represents real change in the political and economic structure in Washington? Does the reader seriously believe that he would be permitted to be the Democratic candidate for president were he to go against the system that got him where he is today? With rare, exceptions (mostly face-saving), the presidential, senatorial and house candidates have all consistently voted to fund the Bush policies and the war on Iraq.

OTTAWA: Video recordings released Tuesday showing interrogations of the only Canadian held at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba provide an unprecedented glimpse inside the compound.

The mood of the detainee, Omar Khadr, just 16 years old at the time of the interrogations, in February 2003, swings from calm and indifference to rage and grief in the recordings, which were released by his lawyers.

The video footage, which provides the most extensive videotaped images from inside Guantánamo Bay, shows Khadr pleading with a Canadian intelligence agent for help and, at one point, shows him displaying chest and back wounds that had still not healed months after his capture in Afghanistan.

The poor-quality recordings were made by the U.S. military, and were given to Khadr's lawyers by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service under the terms of a court order.

Barack Obama today ratcheted up the pressure on Pakistan to deal with terrorists within its borders, pledging that the United States would strike at al-Qaeda operatives in this burgeoning "terrorist sanctuary" if Islamabad would not.

In a major foreign policy speech in Washington, the Democratic presidential nominee promised to shift the "single-minded" US focus on Iraq to Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan, where he said any future attack on America would originate.

"It is unacceptable that almost seven years after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on our soil, the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 are still at large," Mr Obama said.

"Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahari are recording messages to their followers and plotting more terror. The Taleban controls parts of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda has an expanding base in Pakistan that is probably no farther from their old Afghan sanctuary than a train ride from Washington to Philadelphia.

General Motors Corp., buffeted by a U.S. sales collapse and three years of losses, will suspend its dividend for the first time since 1922, cut the management payroll by 20 percent and sell assets to raise at least $15 billion in the next 18 months.

What's good for General Motors...

Somewhere in cyberspace, the ghost of de Chardin is smiling.

SEC to limit 'short selling' of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac shares  From the LA Times, July 15,'08 Money & Co. Blog
10:55 AM, July 15, 2008

It's bear-hunting season on Wall Street.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is invoking emergency powers to limit "short selling" in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shares, as well as in stocks of major brokerages, Chairman Christopher Cox told Congress today. And the SEC will consider extending the order to the rest of the market as well.

Short sellers borrow stock and sell it, betting the price will drop. If their bet is correct they can buy new shares later at a lower price, repay the borrowed stock, and pocket the difference between the sale price and the repurchase price.

Christophercox The SEC will require traders to "pre-borrow" shares of Fannie, Freddie and major brokerages before selling them short, Cox said. That then would lock up those shares, preventing them from being borrowed by other short sellers. In effect the SEC is trying to limit so-called naked shorting, which is selling stock without actually having the shares in hand or located. Naked shorting already is illegal, but the rule against it hasn't been widely enforced.

Its one thing to have rules. Quite another to  enforce them, apparently.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

Volkswagen, Europe's biggest car maker, has said it plans to build a 620 million euros ($1billion) factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee in a bid to boost the German automaker's lagging US sales.

The site, one of at least two in the US South that Volkswagen examined, was picked by Volkswagen Group's supervisory board.

The plan calls for the first cars to roll off the assembly line in 2011. Europe's biggest carmaker has failed for years to achieve profits in the United States, where Asian competitors have regularly upstaged its range of mass-produced front-wheel drive cars.

"The United States is an important market for our volume strategy," Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn was quoted as saying.

The reality is, it would take between five to ten years to see any of that oil. Everybody admits this. Everyone knows this. You have to do the exploration, then you have to build the rig, which takes a huge amount of time. So it takes -- we're talking about as long as a decade to see any of this oil.

So when you press people who are selling this drill in ANWR, more offshore oil drilling, also drilling into the shale in places like Montana, what they actually say is that the reason why it will lower prices at the pump, you know, soon, this summer, is because it will send a message to the stock market, it will send a message to the oil speculators that more supply is on the way. So, essentially, what they're saying is, let's play the market, let's collectively play the market.

And that's why it's significant that yesterday, in the face of Bush's announcement -- and it was a significant announcement, because it was a real indication of the seriousness of this administration to really make this their, you know, final push in office, and they could well win, because this media campaign is really bringing public opinion on side, and we know that the Democrats are pretty weak in the face of that public opinion, and the only thing that they could fight this with is with real commitment to green policies. And, you know, don't hold your breath.

Goodman: What does this offshore drilling, lifting the ban -- how would you relate this to what's happening in Iraq right now and what's happening at the Oil Ministry and the pushing through the permanent occupation that the Bush administration is pushing hard for?

Klein: Well, I think we're seeing the Bush administration in its final months just handing out a series of gifts to the oil and gas industry, both at home, pushing for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and then in Iraq, the prize, the biggest prize of all, which is allowing foreign multinationals to gain control of Iraq's oil fields. And we're seeing a two-stage process now, and it isn't over yet, where first there was the service -- the short-term service agreements, no-bid contracts, that were announced. They haven't been signed yet, but they're going to the big oil companies that were kicked out of Iraq in the '70s. They're coming back.

Goodman: Explain how that works, these no-bid contracts, how it is -- who's signing these contracts?

Klein: OK. Well, at the moment, Iraq does not have an oil law, so Iraq can't sign long-term exploration agreements, although they are doing it in Iraqi Kurdistan, and we've heard about this with Hunt Oil. But that's -- those are illegal contracts. They're very precarious. There could be future expropriations. It's really risky to go that route, because there isn't a law. And we know it's been a major push of this administration to get the Iraqi parliament to accept a US-backed oil law. This has been sold as a symbol of Iraqi unity. That's not the way it's seen in Iraq.

In Iraq, the reason why it has been years in resisting this oil law is because nationalizing the oil in Iraq was the centerpiece of the anti-colonial struggle, as it was in neighboring nations throughout the Arab world. And it is not just a pro-Saddam idea. It is not just a Baathist idea. It's the core of Arab nationalism. And that victory is being protected by many political forces in Iraq, and most notably by the oil workers' unions in Iraq, who said, "We don't need these foreign multinationals to get the oil out of the ground. We can do it ourselves. We can bring in technical support without giving away management control, without giving away ownership control."

great interview with amy goodman, read the rest!

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

Britain's restaurants are creaming off millions of pounds of customers' tips to boost their profits, an investigation by The Independent has found.

A series of legal ploys are being used by major companies including Strada, PizzaExpress and Carluccio's to take a slice of the £4bn a year that diners leave for low-paid staff in tips.

Today, The Independent launches a campaign toimprove the treatment of the country's 231,845 waiters and waitresses - and ensure that customers know where their money is going when they leave a tip.

Most restaurant customers believe staff receive the tips or service charge as a reward for good service. But our investigation has discovered that tips left by diners are being regularly used to pay basic wages, or meet costs.

Among the practices, TheIndependent found:

What if "eating local" in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?

Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Despommier's pet project is the "vertical farm," a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.

The idea, which has captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years, just caught the eye of another big city dreamer: Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president in New York.

When Stringer heard about the concept in June, he said he immediately pictured a "food farm" addition to the New York City skyline. "Obviously we don't have vast amounts of vacant land," he said in a phone interview. "But the sky is the limit in Manhattan." Stringer's office is "sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm," and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor's office within the next couple of months, he said.

"I think we can really do this," he added. "We could get the funding."

There are only about 200 white lions in the world, and seven of them were just born at the end of June in a German safari park. The white balls of fluff have been presented to the public for the first time.

It was a surprise even for the zoo directors. At the very end of last month, two rare white lion females at the Stukenbrock Safari Park near Dortmund gave birth at the exact same time. The result? Seven tiny white lion cubs joining a worldwide population of roughly 200.

The babies, four males and three females, were born to five-year-old twin sisters, Kibo and Mawensi, who were also born in the park. Kibo immediately began caring for her offspring, but Mawensi seemed uninterested, forcing zookeepers to step in and raise her four cubs by hand.

Ryanair, Europe's largest low fares airline today (15 July) announced substantial capacity reductions at its Dublin base for the coming winter schedule (08/09).

 Compared to winter 2007, when Ryanair operated 22 aircraft, and over 1,350 weekly flights, Ryanair's schedule at Dublin this winter will be reduced to 18 based aircraft and less than 1,200 weekly flights.

 This represents an 18% reduction in based aircraft, and an approximate 12% reduction in weekly flights. Ryanair estimates that its traffic at Dublin Airport this winter will decline by some 500,000 passengers compared to last winter's schedule.

But the best bit of this press release is at the end, a comment by Ryanair's Chief Executive, Michael O'Leary:

"I have little doubt that Ireland and its tourism industry is facing a catastrophe over the coming year.

Traffic growth at Dublin will be ended by this combination of a rapacious Government monopoly, and an inadequate, useless Aviation Regulator.

The sooner both of these are done away with and replaced with competing facilities at Dublin Airport, then the sooner Dublin can return to traffic growth, lower costs and more efficient passenger friendly facilities".              

5 Random Solar-Related Facts 1. World energy consumption is expected to increase 40% to 50% by the year 2010, and the global mix of fuels--renewables (18%), nuclear (4%), and fossil (78%)--is projected to remain substantially the same as today; thus global carbon dioxide emissions would also increase 50% to 60%.

2. Among industrialized and developing countries, Canada consumes per capita the most energy in the world, the United Sates ranks second, and Italy consumes the least among industrialized countries.

3. Developing countries use 30% of global energy. Rapid population growth, combined with economic growth, will rapidly increase that percentage in the next 10 years.

4. The World Bank estimates that investments of $1 trillion will be needed in this decade and upwards of $4 trillion during the next 30 years to meet developing countries' electricity needs alone.

5. Residential appliances, including heating and cooling equipment and water heaters, consume 90% of all energy used in the U.S. residential sector.

Tony Blair has cancelled a trip to Gaza in his role as Middle East envoy because of security concerns, a spokeswoman for the former Prime Minister said today.

Ruti Winterstein said that Mr Blair's visit was cancelled because of what she called "specific threats" against him. She did not give details.

Mr Blair's visit was to be his first trip to the coastal territory since the Islamic militant group Hamas seized control of Gaza a year ago.

He was expected to meet with traders and inspect a northern Gaza waste water project being built with international funds.

Hamas was to have provided security for Mr Blair's trip.

hat tip to DeA for the turn on to this must-read, bookmarked blog

Blogger: The Archdruid Report - Post a Comment

Today, I scared up the barn swallow at the nursery I work at. It flew into a dead end, as many birds are wont to do, and rather than backing up (not that it could), it did what all swallows do, it turned in a magnificent spinning swoop and dove out past me.

That's progress for you. I will be amazed if politicians and marketeers don't spin just like that swallow and lead us into a "green future powered by sustainable power," rather than going back to the past. It's simply a matter of which semantics are more palatable to which audience. One thing we've got to watch out for in the druid movement is that we Romanticise the past (yes, the capitalization is deliberate), so going backwards isn't scary for us. But in our society, I think a lot of people are like that swallow, and backwards is a scary direction to go for them. They progress forward only. Of course, they spin so much that progress can go backwards, but there you have it.

One thing I would point out is that, under globalization, we've offshored a lot of our more polluting industries. When they come home, we can predict that many of our environmental laws will be gutted in the name of "progress towards an economically sustainable future." Time to start thinking about what we're going to do about this.