A top official in Peter Mandelson's European Union trade department has leaked highly sensitive commercial information in return for the promise of financial benefit.

In a six-month investigation, The Sunday Times tape-recorded Fritz-Harald Wenig, a trade director, passing secrets to undercover reporters posing as lobbyists for a Chinese businessman seeking insider information.

Wenig discussed the possibility of payment or taking a lucrative job with the businessman. He said he would decide further once he had provided "results".

He leaked the names of two Chinese companies likely to get special status if the EU imposes a protective tariff barrier against Chinese candle-makers. The information is potentially worth millions to those trading with these companies.

Even as EU border patrols search for some 70 migrants who went missing near Malta on Aug. 27, the people of the smallest EU state are becoming fed up with rising illegal immigration.

The 70 disappeared when they were swept off a flimsy craft which capsized after it left Libya, according to eight fellow travelers who managed to cling onto the vessel long enough to be rescued. It is one of the worst tragedies involving would-be immigrants in the Mediterranean -- yet the Maltese newspaper's online readers' forum offered little, if any, compassion.

Instead, anger was directed at the thousands of Africans who attempt to cross the waters to Europe. Readers' rage was also aimed at neighboring Libya, from where most of the would-be immigrants depart, and the European Union, which is perceived as turning a blind eye towards a mounting problem.

In the past eight months 2,200 would-be illegal immigrants landed on Malta, the smallest and most densely-populated European Union state. In contrast less than 1,700 arrivals were recorded for the whole of 2007. Given Malta's population of 400,000, it is as if 45,000 people had landed in Germany, Maltese government officials have said.

Rumors that the powerful ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) was splitting were confirmed when its acting leader, Tomislav Nikolic, resigned all his party posts.

Nikolic resigned Saturday, Sept. 6, as the deputy of the party chief Vojislav Seselj, who has been on trial for war crimes at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) since early  2003, as well as the SRS floor leader in the Serbian parliament.

SRS said in a statement that Nikolic stepped down at the party leadership meeting Friday night. The outcome indicates that the extreme hardline wing within SRS, loyal to Seselj, overcame the moderates led by Nikolic.

Nikolic has led the SRS with apparently comprehensive loyalty since Seselj left Serbia to face trial in early 2003 -- yet under his leadership, the party toned down its belligerent rhetoric, softening its image slightly.

The EU must open the door to a rapprochement with Belarus and support reconstruction and peace in Georgia and Moldova if it is to counter Russia's growing assertiveness in eastern Europe, EU foreign ministers said.

"We should encourage Belarus to improve the way they conduct their elections and we should give them incentives. We need a process of rebuilding trust," Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski told DPA news agency from the ministers' informal meeting in Avignon, France, on Saturday, Sept. 6.

"It is a very good time to rethink our relations with Belarus. Belarus is sending desperate signals to the West," Lithuanian Foreign Minister Petras Vaitiekunas said.

Officially, Saturday's talks were set to focus on the EU's relationship with Russia and Georgia following their war in August.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has enlisted some of Britain's leading architects for one of his most daring projects. He wants to make Paris more like London.

Proposals now emerging reflect the French leader's admiration for Anglo-Saxon dynamism. They are likely to horrify Parisians.

As part of the master plan architects are proposing high-rise suburbs modelled on Croydon, south London, and an orbital railway to link them. They will encourage the middle classes to move out of the centre of Paris and ordinary working people to move in.

Professor Richard Burdett, design chief for the London Olympics and one of the experts working on the "Greater Paris" project with the Richard Rogers architecture practice, said: "The notion of mixing different types of people and activity, so that people are cheek by jowl, makes a city over time much more tolerant and resilient to change.

Germany's Social Democrats meet Sunday amidst a deep leadership crisis. But the party has agreed to announce Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier as its candidate for chancellor next year, say media reports.

Senior leaders in the Social Democratic Pary (SPD) have decided that Steinmeier will run against incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel in next year's federal elections, according to reports on Saturday, Sept. 6, by the Berliner Zeitung and Spiegel Online.

The two Web sites reported, without citing sources, that Steinmeier's candidacy would be announced at Sunday's party conference.

Though the Social Democrats appear to have reached one important decision in selecting Steinmeier, their meeting comes at a time of deep internal divisions.

A row has broken out in France after a court postponed a trial, apparently because it was to take place during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

Critics say the decision is a breach of France's strict separation of religion and state.

The trial of seven men for armed robbery was due to start on 16 September in Rennes.

But last week the court agreed to a request from a lawyer for one of the accused to put it off until January.

There were warnings today that the taxpayer may face a multi-million pound bill after the loss of a computer disk carrying personal details of thousands of employees of the National Offender Management Service - many of whom are prison officers and probation workers.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, ordered an urgent inquiry after it was revealed that the hard drive was reported missing in July. He has also demanded to be told why he was not informed immediately of the loss.

EDS, a private contractor brought in to to overhaul IT infrastructure seven years ago, told the Prison Service in July this year that the hard drive had gone astray - a year after the missing disk had last been seen.

In a statement, Mr Straw said: "I am extremely concerned about this missing data. I was informed of its loss at lunchtime today (Saturday) and have ordered an urgent inquiry into the circumstances and the implications of the data loss and the level of risk involved.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, an outspoken EU critic, once warned that his nation would dissolve in the European Union like a sugar cube in a cup of coffee.

Now that the Czechs are about to chair the European Union, the government has turned the cube into a sweetly subversive symbol of its scepticism toward the European Union.

The 30-second video, unveiled by Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek and his deputy for European affairs Alexandr Vondra, is meant to draw the public's attention to the six-month Czech presidency starting Jan. 1.

The clip, airing on nationwide television since Thursday, says nothing about Prague's agenda for the 27-nation bloc.

The European Union wants to work closely with the United States on resolving the crisis in Georgia, Italy's foreign minister said after meeting with US Vice President Dick Cheney.

"This Caucasian crisis won't be resolved if there is not an intense collaboration -- that Europe wishes for, that the United States wishes for, and we will carry out," Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told reporters on Sunday, Sept. 7, following brief talks with Cheney.

 

Frattini also said he had informed the US vice president of the EU's plan to send civilian observers to the disputed territory in the Caucasus region to help enforce the French-brokered peace deal agreed by Tbilisi and Moscow.

 

At an informal meeting in southern France on Saturday, EU foreign ministers laid out plans for the bloc's observer mission, which could begin as early as next month. They also called for an international probe into the cause of the five-day war.

TSKHINVALI, Georgia: It is not easy for Ireya Alborova to root through the events that cracked this city in half, but one small bright memory stands out from 1989, when she glanced at the building across the street from her high school and spotted a flag.

It was a small Georgian flag, fixed in an attic window. Alborova was an unruly 15-year-old, preoccupied with her friends and her classes, and she took it in - a small piece of information - and kept walking. But now she thinks of it as the first signal of what was coming.

Most of the world now knows what happened: South Ossetians and Georgians began a drawn-out struggle to control this sleepy valley, where the main feature is a road that cuts through the Caucasian ridge into Russia. That flared into a global standoff last month, when Georgia pounded Tskhinvali, the capital of the enclave of South Ossetia, with rocket fire. Russian troops poured across the border in response.

But for Alborova's family, which is partly Georgian but wound up on the Ossetian side of the conflict, the crucial event took place during the last months of the Soviet Union, when the fabric of a multiethnic society tore apart with breathtaking speed. For the past 18 years, in a city encircled by Georgian positions, the family and its neighbors have been reliving the rifts and betrayals of that period.

Russia has won the support of six former Soviet nations over its war in Georgia during a meeting of member countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) in Moscow.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said that the leaders of CSTO nations signed a declaration on Friday condemning an attack by Georgia which was aimed at regaining control of its breakaway province of South Ossetia.

Members of the group said they were "deeply concerned about an attempt by Georgia to solve the conflict in South Ossetia by force, which has led to numerous casualties among the civilian population and peacekeepers and entailed grave humanitarian consequences," the declaration said.

They hold down demanding jobs but still manage to have at least two children and enjoy the highest life expectancy in Europe. Meet the so-called "Super-Frenchies", the Gallic wonder women behind France's "bébé boom".

Its economy may not be much of a model, but the country is the envy of Europe when it comes to making babies. The latest statistics show that France's population went up by 300,000 in 2006 to 63.3m, the best birth rate in three decades.

With a fertility rate of two children per woman, France is approaching the level needed to replenish the population, compared with 1.91 children in Britain and 1.37 for Germany.

The numbers show the extent to which policies to promote childbirth, including cash payments and subsidised nannies, have paid off.

Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president, has been greeted by protests after arriving in Armenia to attend a football match in an attempt to improve relations between the two countries.

Gul's arrival on Saturday in Yerevan, the Armenian capital,  marked the first visit to the country by a Turkish head of state since Armenian independence in 1991.

The two countries have long argued over Armenia's attempt to have recognised as genocide a massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during the First World War.

Hundreds of Armenians lined the route of Gul's motorcade to protest against Ankara's refusal to consider the 1915-1917 atrocities as crimes against humanity.

Bardasar Akhpar, a demonstrator, said: "We are here because we want to tell the entire world that we do not forget the genocide of 1915.

"We will not welcome Gul nor any other Turk until they have recognised the genocide."

An unbridled building boom, which first turned much of Spain's once captivating coastline into a mile-wide belt of shopping malls, vacation homes and sunburned foreigners, has more recently spread deep into the country's heartland, endangered some of the most precious and diverse flora and fauna in Europe and sucked an already arid region dry of water.

Nearly 30% of Spain is in the process of becoming desert, according to a report by Adena, Spain's branch of the World Wildlife Fund...

Fueled by corruption, speculation and a hot market that only recently cooled, vast patches of regions such as Castilla-La Mancha are being swallowed up by enormous housing developments, often on land designated as national parks or as protected zones because of delicate ecosystems and near-extinct wildlife.

Trading on the London Stock Exchange was suspended for more than four hours on Monday after a computer fault led to the longest halt in cash equity trading for more than eight years.

A spokeswoman for the exchange said it was investigating "connectivity issues" and that the connection would be brought back in a controlled way. She gave no details on what had caused the problem.

The LSE - the world's second largest stock exchange - published a website offering live tracking of the problem.

Venezuela says it plans to hold joint naval exercises in its territorial waters with Russian forces in November.

A senior Venezuelan naval officer said four Russian ships would take part in the exercises, which would also involve Venezuelan aircraft and submarines.

Correspondents say the move is likely to raise concern in the US, whose relations with Russia have been soured by Moscow's recent conflict in Georgia.

Washington already has rocky relations with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez.

People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN's top climate scientist.

Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will make the call at a speech in London on Monday evening.

UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.

But a spokeswoman for the UK's National Farmers' Union (NFU) said methane emissions from farms were declining.

WE all must think anew about Russia. But this process will prove harder for some of us than for others. When I grew up in the late 1960s and early '70s, the Soviet Union had already begun to look like the Ottoman Empire on its last legs; the face of Soviet Communism belonged to Leonid Brezhnev, with his drooping cheeks and beetle brows and thick, square glasses.

What was there to fear from this pitiful giant? In my left-wing, antiwar, social democratic hothouse world, anti-Communism seemed almost as absurd as Communism. John Kennedy's call in 1961 to "bear any burden" in the struggle between two world systems was as remote to us as the sectarian debates of the 1930s between Trotskyites, Shachtmanites and so on.

We were, unlike an older generation of "cold war liberals," anti-anti-Communists. Fear of the spread of Communism had gotten us into Vietnam, and rationalized American support for right-wing dictators across the third world. That fear, to us, was thus a far more dangerous force in the world than the thing that we as a country were afraid of -- Soviet and Chinese expansionism.

"The war against Communism is over," declared George McGovern, our tribune, in 1972. Several years later, a much more centrist figure, President Jimmy Carter, would lament the "inordinate fear of Communism" that he said dominated public discussion of foreign policy. (That remark looked slightly less sage after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.)

Actually this is about the story that the US has been spying on Maliki [dog bites man]

HARRISBURG, Penn. -- Sen. Barack Obama made his first appearance on Fox News's conservative talk show "The O'Reilly Factor" and was pressed on his foreign policy views.

According to excerpts released by Fox, host Bill O'Reilly questioned Obama on two issues that Republicans view as vulnerabilities, his opposition to the troop surge in Iraq and his willingness to talk even with U.S. adversaries.

"I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated," Obama told O'Reilly of President Bush's decision last year to increase troop levels. "It's succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

But he added, "The Iraqis still haven't taken responsibility. And we still don't have that kind of political reconciliation."

Obama May Delay Rescinding Giveaways for Super Rich

Honestly I didn't think I read this right, but....I did.

Obama said:

he would delay rescinding President Bush's tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy.

and even further:

Even if we're still in a recession, I'm going to go through with my tax cuts

This is trickle upon economics, a supply-side Reagan philosophy that is not proven to work.    Where is it written that running these budget deficits and giving tax cuts to the super rich helps the economy?

Their own Congressional Budget Office has said these tax cuts failed to stimulate the economy.  

The short-term effects of EGTRRA and JGTRRA in stimulating aggregate demand in the economy have largely dissipated by now, and the supply-side effects of those policies are uncertain but are probably small