Amid an ongoing debate on the topic, Germany's conservative Christian Democrats have joined with their Social Democratic coalition partners to propose a mechanism to cap the escalating pay for top managers.

"An essential part of the social market economy is that pay must represent the true value of performance," wrote CDU financial expert Otto Bernhardt in a position paper cited by German business newspaper Handelsblatt.

The debate comes in the wake of an uproar over the paycheck of Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking. In the past fiscal year the head of the luxury carmaker took home some 60 million euros ($93 million) - more than a thousand times the average salary of an auto industry worker. According to recent reports, Wiedeking could take home 100 million euros for the current fiscal year.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The EU's €45 billion a year Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) may be causing thousands of heart disease and stroke-related deaths each year by promoting fatty foods, according to a new British study published by the World Health Organisation.

Direct subsidies to farmers have led to massive overproduction of milk and beef in Europe, with the excess food then disposed of "principally as fats hidden in processed foods," the University of Liverpool research, published in the latest WHO journal, says.

The European cow - is it too fat?

The EU spends some €16 billion a year alone promoting milk production, of which €500 million a year goes on boosting domestic butter consumption, it explains.

"CAP...may now have become a hazard to public health throughout the EU and may be promoting inequalities in health through the types of food consumed. This might controversially be described as 'a system designed to kill Europeans through CHD [Coronary Heart Disease]'."

European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering has called on athletes taking part in the Beijing Olympics to protest against the human rights situation in Tibet.

In an article in German newspaper Bild am Sonntag on Sunday (3 August), the centre-right politician said that love of sports should not be an excuse to overlook human rights issues.

The Beijing Olympics have been surrounded by controversy over human rights issues

"I would like to encourage the athletes, men and women, to look at things as they are, and not to turn away. Each athlete can, in their own way, give a signal," he wrote, with the international sporting event due to start on Friday in the Chinese capital.

"It is our duty not to forget the people of Tibet, who are fighting for their cultural survival."

Mr Poettering's comments come amid general political uproar in Germany over internet censorship for foreign media after Chinese authorities reneged on previous promises to allow unrestricted internet access to the thousands of journalists covering the Games.

China lost its status as the world's cheapest country for manufacturing some time ago. The momentum now seems to be shifting away from outsourcing to the Far East, with one in five Germany companies pulling production out of the country. Chinese workers, they say, are getting too expensive.

Despite massive training efforts, German premium stuffed animal-maker Steiff was unable to yield the quality it demanded from its Chinese plant. With fast-climbing labor costs and pesky production quality problems that they have been unable to get under control, more and more German firms that have outsourced manufacturing to China are pulling out. They're either searching for countries with even lower wages (more...) or returning production to Germany.

The Association of German Engineers (VDI) estimates that one in five of the approximately 1,600 German companies with presences in China is planning to pull out of the market, the Tagesspiegel am Sonntag newspaper reported. "Many, many firms are naïve when they enter into the Chinese market and don't even think about the fact that wages are increasing there," VDI spokesman Sven Renkel told the newspaper.

Rising energy costs, stricter environmental rules, the elimination of many tax incentives, a dearth of skilled workers and the increasing strength of the yuan against the dollar have all pushed production costs up in China. In addition, the country's 8-percent inflation rate has also driven up wages in the past year by as much as 20 percent, Harald Kayer, a partner at the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), told the paper. For some companies and industries, China is already getting to be too expensive. They're now looking to other lower-wage countries, like Bangladesh, India or Kazakhstan, cheaper production locations or they're bringing manufacturing back to Germany, he said.

Italian troops have begun patrolling cities as part of a government campaign to combat crime and boost security.

Some 3,000 soldiers will be deployed over the next week in major cities including Milan, Rome and Naples.

They are patrolling alongside police officers and guarding high-profile tourist sites and embassies, as well as immigrant holding centres.

Critics say the move sends a message that Italy is swamped by crime and that its police are not up to the job.

The deployment is due to last for six months.

The BBC's Mark Duff in Milan says troops made their presence discretely felt from first light, at the city's main railway station and main square, the Piazza Duomo.

LINKEBEEK, Belgium: The other morning Damien Thiéry was in the meeting room of the town hall here, where every month or so, at public council sessions, Flemish nationalists harass him.

The population of this bedroom community outside Brussels is 84 percent French-speaking. More than a year ago it picked Thiéry, a Linkebeek native, as mayor. But Linkebeek is within the Flemish north, and the region's Flemish government has so far declined to ratify his election.

Thiéry is not Flemish.

The German newspaper Die Tageszeitung a few days ago called Belgium the "most successful 'failed state' of all time." The Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme offered to resign last month, saying that the "federal consensus model has reached its limits," and that he couldn't bring harmony to the country's Flemish and French-speaking regions, raising the specter that this nation of 10.4 million might split up for good.

When the European Union expanded in 2004, millions of Eastern Europeans headed west looking for work. Now, with economic realities shifting, many are heading back. Western Europe may be facing a labor shortage as a result.

 Germany too has gotten used to using migrant workers during the harvest season -- like here during the Beelitz asparagus harvest. Ever since 2004, when the European Union suddenly grew by 10 countries, most of them in poor Eastern Europe, a debate has been raging in the United Kingdom as to whether too many immigrants have flooded into the country. Hundreds of thousands of workers, primarily from Poland, took advantage of the fact that the UK, along with Ireland and Sweden, opted to immediately open its borders to citizens of the new EU countries.

Now, though, the debate may be changing. Indeed, should the economic downturn prove shortlived the UK and other Western European countries may eventually be wondering how they can attract more workers from the east. The outflow of laborers from countries like Poland may already be reversing.

According to recent survey conducted by the Public Opinion Research Center (CBOS) in Warsaw, only half as many Poles are willing to work abroad as in 2004. Furthermore, UK government statistics indicate that the numbers of work permits issued to Eastern European immigrants dropped by 10 percent in 2007 against 2006. In the first quarter of this year, the number of permit applicants under the UK's Worker Registration Scheme -- which was set up in 2004 to regulate the inflow of workers from the new member states -- was the lowest it has been since the first quarter of 2005.

Britain has always been more integrated and multicultural than the continent. But there are worrying signs this may be changing

I am worried about Nicolas Sarkozy's call for a European "immigration pact" because it is reminiscent of calls for a fortress Europe.

I know Britain has an opt-out of EU immigration policy; I am just concerned that the tough immigration policies that this government has tried to introduce lately - and that Eastern Eye has fought - smack of the kind of thoughtless treatment of immigrants that I read about on the continent.

Let's not allow our immigration policies to be influenced by continental Europe. The British government's tough immigration stance is in crisis after it was told by high court not to make its points-based immigration system retrospective and to abandon its attempt to limit the number of doctors from the subcontinent who already live in Britain from applying for NHS jobs. It then had to scrap entry English tests for non-EU immigrants because it risked infringing people's human rights, not least the right to marry whoever you want.

It has led to a growing problem over the status of overseas medics, visitor refusal rates for Commonwealth citizens and students, high visa and administration costs and higher education fees, Home Office delays and now the inflexibility of the points-based immigration system, which will lead to the closure of many restaurants, for example.

Once upon a time, when most people in rural Ireland were poor, Irish houses were lovely to look at. They were horrible to live in, which is why when EU subsidies kicked in, everyone who lived in a whitewashed grass-roofed cottage, with a dungheap steaming before the door, knocked it down and built himself a hideous villa. Where the old cottage had been almost windowless and dark, what with the smoke of the peat-fire painting the interior brown as it curled its slow way through the thatch, the new villas had lots of glazing, doors, windows, porches and conservatories, and acres of hardstand. Because over the years he had grown sick of wading through mud and manure, the owner concreted all round the grand new house, and threw up balustrades and gate-posts in all directions.

In Italy, the peasants couldn't wait to move out of their beautiful case coloniche and into the nasty new case popolari in the suburbs of the neighbouring towns. If they were ever aware of their damp stone houses with their heavy chestnut beams and terracotta floors as beautiful, they dumped beauty for comfort and convenience, and sold their old houses to fools like me who struggled for years to stop them falling down.

yup...!

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

Brian May, Rock Legend, Publishes His Thesis Posted by kdawson on Saturday August 02, @06:45PM
from the eyes-just-like-a-laser-beam dept. A year ago we took note when Brian May, guitarist for Queen for the last 30 years, submitted his thesis for a Ph.D. in astrophysics. The news now is that the thesis has been published. You, too, can read all about the population of tiny asteroids and space dust that cause the Zodiacal light. The completed thesis appears as the book "A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud" (Springer and Canopus Publishing Ltd., 2008), available at Amazon for $71.96. May was awarded his Ph.D. last summer and accepted a position as chancellor at a British university in November.

Seriously ill Palestinian patients are being pressured to collaborate with Israeli intelligence by informing on militant and other activities in return for being allowed out of Gaza for medical treatment a report says today.

Israel's domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, is playing an increasingly important role in determining whether patients should be allowed to keep hospital appointments in Israel or the West Bank, Physicians for Human Rights Israel [PHR] will claim.

PHR has collected testimony from more than 30 patients with serious illnesses, including cancer, who describe being pressured by interrogators at the main Erez terminal between Israel and Gaza. They include a 38-year-old man due for treatment at Tel Aviv's Ichilov hospital who says he was told: "You have cancer, and it will spread to your brain. As long as you don't help us, wait for Rafah crossing [the rarely open exit to Egypt]."

NEW YORK: The first wave of Americans to default on their home mortgages appears to be cresting, but a second, far larger one is building with alarming speed.

After two years of upward spiraling defaults, the problems with mortgages made to people with weak, or subprime, credit are showing the first, tentative signs of leveling off.

But with the U.S. economy struggling, homeowners with better credit are now falling behind on their payments in growing numbers. The percentage of mortgages in arrears in the category of loans one rung above subprime, so-called alternative-A, or alt-A, mortgages, quadrupled to 12 percent in April from a year earlier. Delinquencies among prime loans, which account for most of the $12 trillion market, doubled to 2.7 percent in that time.

While it is difficult to draw precise parallels among various segments of the mortgage market, the arc of the crisis in subprime loans suggests that the problems in the broader market may not peak for another year or two, analysts said.

Militant Islam, or what US President George W Bush once called "Islamo-fascism", may look back on the last months of the Bush administration as its moment in the sun. Iran's nuclear program soon may cross the point of no return; Pakistan's ruling coalition may have become the instrument of Muslim revanchism against India; and Turkey may return to Islamist rule in a "silent revolution" that will dismantle the secular institutions that have prevailed for three generations. In the first two cases, the US State Department played Dr Frankenstein to the creation of an Islamist monster, and I believe Turkey will become a third.

America's presidential elections may be the proximate cause of Western enervation, as Washington strives for calm and credibility prior to the November poll. America is stuck to the Iraqi tar baby, and becomes more entrapped the more it struggles. Iran's leverage inside Iraq, as I have warned for years, gives the Islamic republic room to bargain for its broader objectives.

But the West's enfeeblement has deeper sources, in the same sort of squeamishness that paralyzed European diplomacy in the years prior to World War I and World War II.

There simply are too many adherents of militant Islam to deal with the matter conveniently. Any solution today will be messy; a confrontation postponed for another half dozen years might cost eight figures' worth of lives.

The Chinese Communist regime's had planned to stage the 2008 Olympic Games as a triumphant celebration of itself as a model of success. But anyone traveling through the country's provinces will encounter a crumbling realm threatened by forces released by its economic boom.

The man who can explain China is sitting in a private booth in an old teahouse in Beijing, holding court at an antique table with a laptop on it. Black and white photos hang on the walls and silk cushions adorn the benches. In the world outside, the Olympic Torch is making its way through the country and slowly approaching Beijing. The man says that the West is taking the easy route with China, despite its enormous complexity. "In this country, every movement takes place at the edge of an abyss."

KABUL: The Taliban are demonstrating a resilience and ferocity that is sowing alarm here, in Washington and in other NATO capitals, and engendering a fresh round of soul-searching over how a relatively ragtag insurgency has managed to keep the world's most powerful armies at bay.

Six years after being driven from power, the Taliban have once again penetrated Afghanistan to the point that security officials talk of a noose tightening around the capital, Kabul, leaving the Afghan people more despairing than at any time since 2001.

The mounting toll inflicted by the insurgents, including nine American soldiers killed in a single attack last month, has turned Afghanistan into a battlefield more deadly than Iraq and refocused the attention of America's military commanders and its presidential contenders on the Afghan war.

After visiting Afghanistan two weeks ago, Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, described the situation here as "precarious and urgent." His Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, has said, "Security in Afghanistan has deteriorated, and our enemies are on the offensive."

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama today sought to reclaim the energy debate from Republican John McCain with an advert calling for a rebate to aid consumers struggling with high fuel costs and a call to tap America's strategic oil reserves to lessen fuel supply pressure.

In recent weeks, McCain has made repeated calls for an end to the US moratorium on oil drilling in coastal waters, and has portrayed Obama as unwilling to take the steps necessary to reduce the cost of gasoline.

Polls have shown a slim majority of Americans favour drilling in areas currently off limits, a response to gasoline prices that have topped $4 per gallon across the country. Since his tour of Europe and the Middle East last month, Obama has seen McCain erode his slim lead in head-to-head polling.

In a new advertisement unveiled this morning, Obama calls for a $1,000 per family rebate funded by a windfall profits tax on oil companies. The clip also highlights campaign contributions from oil company workers to McCain.

For as long as I've been alive the old Confederacy has been a land without closure, where history keeps coming at you day after day, year after year, decade after decade, as if the past were the present, too, and the future forever. Cities grew and populations changed in the South, but the Civil War lurked somehow in the shadow of mirror-sided skyscrapers; the holocaust of slavery and the sweet-bitter victories of the civil-rights movement lingered deep in the minds of people on both sides of the color line. Yes there was change, progress, prosperity, and a lot of it. Southerners put their faith in money and jobs and God Almighty to get them to a better place and better times--and for a lot of them, white and black, those times came. The South got to be a more complicated place, where rich and poor--which is pretty much all there was before World War II--gave way to a broad-spectrum bourgeoisie with big-time aspirations. But as air conditioning conquered the lethargy-inducing climate and Northerners by the millions abandoned the rust belt for the sun belt, the past wasn't forgotten or forgiven so much as put aside while people got on with their lives and their business.

SPIEGEL: But Russia often finds itself alone. Recently relations between Russia and the West have gotten somewhat colder (more...), and this includes Russian-European relations. What is the reason? What are the West's difficulties in understanding modern Russia?

Solzhenitsyn: I can name many reasons, but the most interesting ones are psychological, i.e. the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel NATO bombings of Serbia. It's fair to say that all layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when NATO started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.

fascinating interview...

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

In an interview, Stiglitz explained further:

"The theories that I (and others) helped develop explained why unfettered markets often not only do not lead to social justice, but do not even produce efficient outcomes. Interestingly, there has been no intellectual challenge to the refutation of Adam Smith's invisible hand: individuals and firms, in the pursuit of their self-interest, are not necessarily, or in general, led as if by an invisible hand, to economic efficiency." ^[8]

[...]

Stiglitz resigned a month before his term expired at the World Bank, and left the Bank on January 2000.^[17] The Bank's president, James Wolfensohn, announced Stiglitz's resignation in November 1999 and also announced that Stiglitz would stay on as "special advisor to the president", and would chair the search committee for a successor.

"Joseph E. Stiglitz said today [Nov. 24, 1999] that he would resign as the World Bank's chief economist after using the position for nearly three years to raise pointed questions about the effectiveness of conventional approaches to helping poor countries".^[18]

In this role, he continued criticism of the IMF, and, by implication, the US Treasury Department. In April 2000, in an article for the New Republic, he wrote on the IMF:

"They'll say the IMF is arrogant. They'll say the IMF doesn't really listen to the developing countries it is supposed to help. They'll say the IMF is secretive and insulated from democratic accountability. They'll say the IMF's economic `remedies' often make things worse - turning slowdowns into recessions and recessions into depressions. And they'll have a point. I was chief economist at the World Bank from 1996 until last November, during the gravest global economic crisis in a half-century. I saw how the IMF, in tandem with the U.S. Treasury Department, responded. And I was appalled".

A tornado has wreaked havoc in a small town in northern France, killing three people and injuring nine.

A woman in her 70s died when her house collapsed late on Sunday in Hautmont. A deputy mayor and his wife were also crushed in their own home.

The storm devastated two streets in Hautmont, which has 16,000 residents.

Roofs were ripped off, trees uprooted and cars overturned. Rescuers are still picking through the rubble in case any more residents were buried alive.

Bärbel Höhn, 56, deputy leader of the German Green Party's parliamentary group, discusses her party's opposition to nuclear energy, the market power of the major energy companies, and why she rejects warnings of a shortfall in energy supplies.

 A 40,000 square meter roof-based solar system in the southern German town of Buerstadt. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Ms. Höhn, how much does a kilowatt-hour of electricity cost in Germany?

Bärbel Höhn: I pay 17 cents net for electricity from renewable sources.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: That was about the national average in late 2007. In France, a country that gets 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, they pay only 10.4 cents. In Italy, which gets by without nuclear power, it was 21.6 cents -- more expensive than anywhere else in Europe.

Höhn: Within Germany, (the state of) Baden-Württemberg derives the largest share of its electricity from nuclear power, and also has among the highest electricity prices.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But the price of electricity is set nationwide at the Leipzig electricity exchange. Other factors are behind the regional differences.

Höhn: Electricity from nuclear power is highly subsidized in France. Besides, the French have done virtually nothing for renewable energy, which means that they also haven't created any jobs in this industry. We, on the other hand, have more than 250,000 jobs in these areas. I don't think that this is a policy that makes sense.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful literary works of the 20th century, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow. His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment.

Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.

Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekov.

Over the next five decades, Solzhenitsyn's fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like "The First Circle" and "The Cancer Ward" and historical works like "The Gulag Archipelago."

Once scientists began studying the impact of global warming on everything from tourism to asthma, it was only a matter of time before they got around to sex. Now two biologists at Spain's Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) have done just that, at least when it comes to fish.

You may have missed it in biology class, but in some finned species, like the Atlantic silverside -- as well as in many reptiles -- sex is determined not by genetics but by temperature: the undifferentiated embryo develops testes or ovaries on the basis of whichever option conveys evolutionary advantages for that particular environment. Now, in a study published in the July 30 edition of the scientific journal Public Library of Science, Natalia Ospina-Alvarez and Francesc Piferrer have gone a little further in explaining how that mechanism works. In laboratory tests, they have demonstrated that higher water temperatures result in more male fish.

"We found that in fish that do have temperature-dependent sex determination [TSD], a rise in water temperature of just 1.5 degrees Celsius can change the male-to-female ratio from 1:1 to 3:1," says Piferrer, the study's co-author. In especially sensitive fish, a greater increase can throw the balance even more out of whack. Ospina-Alvarez and Piferrer have found that in the South American pejerrey, for example, an increase of 4 degrees Celsius can result in a population that is 98% male.

"The airline sector is in trouble. Losses this year could reach US$6.1 billion, more than wiping out the US$5.6 billion that airlines made in 2007.

Falling demand and rising costs are re-shaping the industry," said Bisignani. "To survive the crisis, urgent action is needed. Airports and air navigation service providers must come to the table with efficiencies that deliver cost savings.

Labour must understand that efficiency is the only path to job security.
And governments must stop crazy taxation and give airlines the freedom to merge and consolidate where it makes business sense."

A columnist-cartoonist's comment about President Nicolas Sarkozy's son and his Jewish fiancée has stirred a French intellectual storm.

 Jean, son of Sarkozy, is engaged to a Jewish heiress. It's not quite the Dreyfus Affair, at least not yet. But France is divided again over power and the Jews.

While the United States has been debating The New Yorker's caricature of Barack Obama as a Muslim, France has gone off the deep end over a brief item in the country's leading satirical magazine portraying the relationship between President Nicolas Sarkozy's fast-rising son, Jean, and his Jewish fiancée.

The offending piece in Charlie Hebdo, a pillar of the left-libertarian media establishment, was penned last month by a 79-year-old columnist-cartoonist who goes by the name of Bob Siné. He described the plans -- since denied -- of Jean Sarkozy, 21, to convert to Judaism before marrying Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, an heiress to the fortune of the Darty electrical goods retailing chain.

"He'll go far in life, this little fellow!" Siné wrote of Sarkozy Jr.

He has been nicknamed 'President Bling Bling', but Nicolas Sarkozy left his usual flashy style at home yesterday as he worked up a sweat on the beach.

After a busy year the French president could have been forgiven for taking the rare chance to relax.

But instead he has spent the last few days unwinding with an energetic timetable of cycling, swimming and jogging in the south of France.

Muscles taut and face locked in concentration, this is Rebecca Romero, who will be representing Britain in the Olympic games later this month.

With a carefully placed arm and thigh to protect her modesty, she appears to be in perfect physical condition ahead of what will be a gruelling race in Beijing.

The 28-year-old, who won a sliver medal in rowing at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, only took up cycling seriously in March 2006 after doctors recommended the sport to combat muscle fatigue she was experiencing.