A German initiative to strengthen European ties to resource-rich Central Asia begins to bear fruit. Representatives from the two regions will meet to discuss possible cooperation on energy security.

A main aim of the Paris meeting on Thursday, Sept. 18, is to establish lasting partnerships on security issues between the EU and the five Central Asian states Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.

 

Against the background of the situation in the Caucasus and Afghanistan the two sides will hold consultations on combating terror, the fight against human and drug trafficking, as well as on energy and environmental security.

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has criticised the EU for proceeding too slowly with Ankara's accession talks and called on the bloc to play fair with his country.

"Before our membership process started, opening and closing chapters was not an issue. Chapters were opened and closed. But now we are struggling for this," Mr Erdogan said at a dinner with ambassadors and heads of foreign missions in Ankara, Turkish media report.

Turkey's PM Erdogan - "If you see us as a burden, then say so."

Turkey has been an EU candidate country since 1999 and started accession talks in October 2005.

It has so far opened just six out of the 35 negotiation chapters that have to be concluded before it becomes an EU member, with the French EU presidency planning to open two more before the end of the year.

The Turkish premier said the EU "is not as fast as Turkey in regards with negotiation chapters," calling on the EU to proceed in the same way with all candidate countries.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU policies applied to the Western Balkans - such as a regional free trade area - are inspiring the "Eastern Partnership" with Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and "hopefully" Belarus, participants at a conference organized Wednesday (17 September) by the German Konrad Adenauer think-tank learned.

Free trade should be the way to Europe for eastern countries, as in the Balkans

Initially a Polish-Swedish proposal endorsed in June by all member states, the Eastern Partnership is designed to deepen ties with the "European neighbours" to the east, balancing the 'Mediterranean Union' with the southern "neighbours of Europe," as Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski put it.

The Georgian conflict sped up the process of drafting the eastern policy by the European Commission, with president Jose Manuel Barroso scheduled to sketch out the main features already at the EU summit on 15 October.

"We might be inspired by the experience with the Western Balkans that countries which perhaps didn't work so well together in the past, will do so in specific areas like energy or transport. We should put forward the idea of creating a free trade area between these countries - something which worked quite well in the Balkans," Gunnar Wiegand, director for Eastern Europe, Southern Caucasus and Central Asia within the European Commission, explained.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Europeans remain strongly religious but like to keep faith out of politics while cultivating an open mind to various forms of spirituality, according to a new survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation.

Seventy four percent of people in Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Austria, Poland and Switzerland said they were "religious." Italy (89%) and Poland (87%) topped the German NGO's "Religion Monitor" chart, with France at the lower end on 54 percent.

Christian faith still has a strong influence in Europe

More than half of Europeans regularly practice their faith and 61 percent pray, with church attendance higher in Poland than in Italy and with Roman Catholics describing themselves as more highly religious than Protestants.

"The Christian faith still has a strong influence in Europe," the survey said. "The role which [religion] plays in tying together the countries of the European Union should not be underestimated."

MOSCOW: Russia deepened its relations with Georgia's two breakaway regions on Wednesday, even as the Bush administration was intensifying its warnings that Russia was "on a one-way path to self-imposed isolation and international irrelevance."

Brushing aside international protests, President Dmitri Medvedev signed separate treaties with the regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, guaranteeing them protection in case of attack.

The treaties also allow Russia to build military bases and station additional troops in the territories. Those steps, if put into effect, would violate the European-brokered cease-fire that ended Russia's war with Georgia last month.

In Washington, the administration's criticism of Russia is reaching new intensity in remarks prepared for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In a speech she is to deliver before the German Marshall Fund on Thursday, Rice will challenge Russia in some of the most stinging language she has used in office.

A series of shocks, including fears of a new Cold War, caused share prices to fall even before this week's turmoil. Foreign investors may not return soon.

Traders work in the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (MICEX) in Moscow. Is history repeating itself? That's surely a question many Russians must be asking themselves. Almost exactly 10 years after the financial crash of 1998, Russian markets are once again in turmoil. On Sept. 16, Moscow's largest stock exchange, MICEX, fell by a jaw-dropping 17.5 percent, the largest one-day loss in a decade, while the rival RTS exchange was down by 11.5 percent.

The free fall continued on Sept. 17, causing Russia's stock market regulator to suspend trading on both exchanges. The Russian central bank pumped a record $14.1 billion into the financial system, while the Finance Ministry said it would provide $44.9 billion in short-term loans to the country's biggest banks.

Compared with the gyrations in Moscow, the 5 percent declines in other global markets look pretty mild. What's more, the collapse in Russia is not simply a knee-jerk response to bad news elsewhere. Well before this week's chaos on Wall Street, the Russian stock market was imploding. Since the beginning of July, the RTS has lost 64 percent of its value, equivalent to some three-quarters of a trillion dollars.

Amid growing outrage over the planned bailout of a subsidiary and a mistaken money transfer, pressure is mounting on Germany's KfW development bank.

Amid the damaging fallout from the US banking crisis, German state development bank KfW has come under increased criticism from several of its own supervisory board members.

One lawmaker has called for the "total reform" of KfW in the wake of a major payment error, while another has raised doubts about the costly bailout of crippled subsidiary IKB.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Could the IKB bailout be less than certain?

Late Thursday, Sept. 18, the KfW board is slated to meet in Berlin for a formal vote to approve the sale of IKB Deutsche Industriebank, a subsidiary of KfW that was hit hard in by subprime mortgage exposure in the US, to US financial investor Lone Sta

Angelino Alfano, the Italian Minister of Justice, yesterday Thursday said he had refused a request by the public prosecutor in Rome for permission to charge the comedienne and satirist Sabina Guzzanti with insulting Pope Benedict XVI.

Ms Guzzanti had said during a left wing rally in Rome in July that because of the Church's stand on homosexuality the Pope would go to Hell, where he would be tormented by "very active poofter devils".

Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing an ambitious challenge from her deputy.

A new poll shows that Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, is Germany's most popular politician at a time when the country's two leaders are at each other's throats.

Their protracted face-off risks emulating the US election for sheer duration. But whereas John McCain and Barack Obama are opponents, Mr Steinmeier and Mrs Merkel are supposed to be allies, leading the so-called grand coalition government of the Left-wing Social Democrats and Right-wing Christian Democratic Union.

Mr Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister, even has the official title of vice-chancellor, Mrs Merkel's number two.

But the façade of co-operation in the grand coalition has been crumbling fast, ever since Mr Steinmeier orchestrated a putsch earlier this month within his own party to claim the role of its official candidate for the chancellorship.

The strained relationship between Poland's president and government is set to come come under further pressure after the Polish defence ministry said it would decorate an air force pilot for defying the country's president, Lech Kaczynski.

Defence minister, Bogdan Klich, said that the pilot, who was in command of the presidential flight at the time, would receive the Silver Cross for the Defence of Homeland after he refused to obey an order from President Kaczynski to land at the Georgian capital of Tbilisi at the height of August's Georgian-Russian conflict.

The Polish Air Force airliner, carrying the presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and the Latvian prime minister, was on its way to an airfield in Azerbaijan, from which the passengers would travel to Tbilisi by car, when President Kaczynski told the pilot to divert to Georgia.

"The pilot was determined to stick to arrangements made earlier and uphold his duties for the safety of his passengers," said Mr Klich. "You have to remember that he was responsible for not only 40 people but three presidents and one prime minister.

"We had no idea whether an aircraft could fly to Tbilisi, and whether it could land there," he continued.

"There was a risk it could have been shot down."

By donning nuns' black and white habits street walkers hope to make the tough new legislation so confusing that it becomes unworkable...

"We'll dress as nuns so that the police will arrest scantily dressed girls outside discos or other women with their cleavage on show," said Pia Covre, of the Committee for the Rights of Prostitutes.

"The idea of wearing gowns or habits down to the feet is to confront the decrees which limit even the freedom of what you can wear," she told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

"In Florence, for example, the mayor has forbidden girls from walking up and down and we are thinking of going around on bicycles instead." Meanwhile police in Rome have issued more than 100 prostitutes and 40 of their clients with spot fines of 200 euros (£158) since the new decree was introduced on Tuesday.

PARIS: The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and other central banks massively escalated the assistance offered to global money markets on Thursday, coordinating efforts to ease funding constraints stemming from the financial turmoil emanating from Wall Street.

The Fed said in a statement that it had authorized a $180 billion expansion of its temporary reciprocal currency arrangements, known as swap lines, to allow banks to borrow more dollars in markets at a lower rates.

"This is clearly a very significant help and central banks are showing decisive leadership here as risk aversion is hitting the private sector," said Julian Callow, chief European economist at Barclays Capital in London.

The Fed also authorized increases in the existing swap lines with the European Central Bank, up to $110 billion from $55 billion, and the Swiss National Bank, up to $27 billion from $15 billion.

Panic is the word of the hour on Wall Street. Now even Morgan Stanley is fighting for survival. The commercial bank Wachovia and China's Bank Citic are being discussed as possible rescuers. The crisis has led President Bush to cancel a trip.

 For traders, now might just be the worst of times. The original plan actually called for humor. On Wednesday evening, actress Christy Carlson Romano was supposed to ring the closing bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to mark her debut in the Broadway musical "Avenue Q." She plays two roles on stage -- a romantic kindergarten teaching assistant, and a slutty nightclub singer.

After that day on the floor, the stock traders could have used a bit of comic relief. But it was not to be. Instead of Christy Carlson Romano, a NYSE employee in a joyless gray suit stood on the balcony and silently pressed a button. The bell rang and he disappeared. No waving, no clapping, none of the usual jubilation.

By the end of Wednesday, no one here was in the mood for laughter. The bad news on Wall Street was coming thick and fast. All the US indexes were crashing again after Tuesday's brief and deceptive breather. In its wild, rollercoaster ride, the Dow Jones lost about 450 points, which was almost as much as it lost on Monday, the most catastrophic day on US markets since 2001.

More than 200 mafia suspects were arrested in an international operation conducted by authorities in Italy, the United States, Mexico, Panama and Guatemala, Italy's anti-mafia department said.

The bust on Wednesday, Sept. 17, included the arrests -- six in the US and 10 in Italy's southern Calabria region -- of 16 alleged members of a notorious crime family of the 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian version of the mafia, the Rome-based National Anti-Mafia Directorate said in a statement.

Authorities also seized more than 15 tons of cocaine and $57 million in cash, the statement said.

The operation was led by the Italy's Carabinieri paramilitary police's special anti-organized crime unit ROS with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Australia should not sell uranium to Russia, a parliamentary committee says.

It said the $800 million deal should not go ahead until Russia assuaged doubts about the separation of its civilian and military uses of uranium.

The deal was signed by former Prime Minister John Howard and Russian leader Vladimir Putin last year.

The committee said assurances were needed on Russia's compliance with, and long-term commitment to, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Opposition members of parliament supported the uranium sales. They argued Australia would benefit from the trade, and said safeguards against any future military use of the uranium were adequate.

Russia snubbed its nose at the United States today by announcing plans to sell military equipment to both Iran and Venezuela.

The head of the state arms exporter said that Russia was negotiating to sell new anti-aircraft systems to Iran despite American objections.

"Contacts between our countries are continuing and we do not see any reason to suspend them," Anatoly Isaikin, general director of Rosoboronexport, told Ria-Novosti at an arms fair in South Africa.

Reports have circulated for some time that Russia is preparing to sell its S-300 surface-to-air missile system to Iran, offering greater protection against a possible US or Israeli attack on the Islamic republic's nuclear facilities. The missiles have a range of more than 150 kilometres and can intercept jets approaching at low altitudes

Frustrated by the US government's rescue of AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a group of 100 conservative congressmen today urged the Bush administration to stop keeping Wall Street afloat.

In a letter to the treasury secretary and Federal Reserve chairman, members of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) lamented the abandonment of free-market principles.

Rescuing failing financial firms has "set a dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions," the RSC members wrote.

Though the RSC has carried significant influence with Republican leaders in recent years, this week's economic implosion has stoked longstanding tension between conservatives and the Bush administration into a full-blown ideological rift.

The government takeover of private businesses under a Republican president's watch has left conservatives reeling.

Bright Side of a Total Financial Market Collapse: Michael Lewis
...A lot of attractive office space seems to be opening up in midtown Manhattan, for instance, and the U.S. government is now getting paid to borrow money. (And with T-bills yielding 0 percent, they really ought to borrow a lot more of it, and quickly.)
...1) We finally get to see what's inside these big Wall Street firms.
...2) We are creating the financial leaders of tomorrow.
...3) Ordinary Americans get a lesson in low finance.
...4) We have lots of new houses.
...5) Huge numbers of Wall Street executives will have the time to raise their children.
...

By Alex Nicholson and William Mauldin
     Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Russia poured $44 billion into its three largest banks and halted stock trading for a second day in a bid to stem the most severe financial crisis since its devaluation and debt default a decade ago.     The Finance Ministry extended the repayment period on loans available to OAO Sberbank, VTB Group and OAO Gazprombank to three months from one week. The benchmark Micex stock index plunged as much as 10 percent, taking its three-day decline to 25 percent, and brokerage KIT Finance said it's in talks with investors to sell a stake after failing to meet some obligations.
     Russia's markets are facing the biggest test since the government defaulted in 1998. The decade-long economic boom is fading, foreign investors have pulled at least $35 billion from the nation's stocks and bonds since the five-day war in Georgia last month, and the collapse this week of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and American International Group Inc. prompted a flight from emerging markets.
     ``I will tell my clients today to continue to abstain from buying Russian assets'' until economic problems are solved, said Zina Psiola, who manages a $1 billion Russian equities fund at Clariden Leu AG in Zurich.
     The cost of lending has soared to a record, with the MosPrime overnight rate reaching 11.1 percent today, deterring speculative bets in equities. Russian stocks have lost more than $425 billion in value since reaching an all-time high May 17.

                        `Effectively Closed'

     ``The bond market remains effectively closed and banks are reluctant to lend to one another,'' said Julian Rimmer, head of sales trading at UralSib Financial Corp. in London. ``The problems experienced by KIT Finance have heightened counterparty risk and reduced liquidity further.''
      Moscow-based KIT today said it is seeking to sell a stake after failing to meet some financial obligations related to repurchase agreements.
      ``Every day Russia falls due to people not being able to meet margin calls,'' said Marina Akopian manager of the Hexam EMEA Absolute Return Fund in London.
     The cost of protecting bonds sold by Sberbank from default jumped 60 basis points to 3.55 percentage points, according to CMA Datavision prices at 3 p.m. in London. Credit-default swaps on OAO Gazprom, the gas export monopoly, fell 38 basis points to 421.
Contracts on VTB Group declined 35 basis points from an all-time high to 6.53 percentage points, according to CMA.

                        Necessary Measures

     Credit-default swaps, contracts conceived to protect bondholders against default, pay the buyer face value in exchange for the underlying securities or the cash equivalent should a company fail to adhere to its debt agreements. A rise indicates deterioration in the perception of credit quality; a decline signals the opposite.
     A basis point on a credit-default swap contract protecting $10 million of debt from default for five years is equivalent to $1,000 a year.
     President Dmitry Medvedev met Prime Minister Vladimir Putin today to discuss developments surrounding the economy.
     ``The situation is being followed very closely,'' Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said in a phone interview. ``Necessary measures are being taken.''
     The ruble has lost 4.8 percent against the dollar since Aug.
8, when Russia sent troops and warplanes into Georgia for a military campaign that led to the worst relations with NATO since the Cold War. Investors have pulled at least $35 billion out of the country since the war, according to BNP Paribas SA estimates.

                           Economic Woes

     Oil production, the government's biggest source of revenue, and accelerating inflation are adding to concerns for investors.
Crude output is falling for the first time since 1998 and the inflation rate advanced more than expected in August, to near a five year high of 15 percent.
     Industrial output grew more slowly than economists expected in August and economic growth in the second quarter slowed to an annual 7.5 percent from 8.5 percent in the previous period.
     Still, unlike 1998, Russia is ``pretty well prepared'' to weather the turmoil, the World Bank's chief representative in Russia, Klaus Rohland, said today. The economy has grown every year for a decade and its international reserves have surged in the period by almost 50 times to $574 billion, more than any other country except China and Japan.     International banks have entered the Russian market in recent years. Societe Generale, France's second-largest bank, owns OAO Rosbank, a top 10 retail bank. Commerzbank AG, Germany's second- biggest lender by assets, owns a 15 percent stake in Promsvyazbank and Unicredit SpA, Europe's fourth-biggest bank, recently purchased Moscow International Bank. Raiffeisen International Bank-Holding AG is the largest foreign bank by assets in Russia.

                        `Calm Nervousness'

     The Finance Ministry yesterday's added $20 billion to the interbank lending market.     Sberbank, VTB and Gazprombank ``are market-making banks capable of insuring the liquidity of the banking system,'' the ministry said in a statement today. The government and central bank will take more measures to improve liquidity this week, the ministry said.
     Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said the measures should ``smooth over the shock changes'' in the markets. ``With foreign borrowing stopping, we must soften the impact with additional funds, then the situation will stabilize,'' he said on state television.
     The ruble-denominated Micex Stock Exchange suspended trading indefinitely at 12:10 p.m. after its index erased a 7.6 percent gain and plunged as much as 10 percent within an hour. The benchmark fell 17 percent yesterday, the biggest decline of the 88 indexes tracked by Bloomberg. The dollar-denominated RTS halted trading after similar declines.
     Sberbank is down 32 percent and VTB Group 47 percent this week.
     ``The primary objective of these measures is to inject liquidity to calm nervousness,'' Alexander Morozov, chief economist at HSBC Bank in Moscow, said by telephone. ``Hopefully other banks will be able to get this money via the interbank market and this should prevent the rise of rates,'' he said.

--With reporting by Torrey Clark, Denis Maternovsky, Greg Walters and Maria Levitov in Moscow. Editors: Brad Cook, Chris Kirkham.

 

The US is seeking $20bn from its allies to help stabilise Afghanistan as it plans to send thousands more of its own troops to confront the growing insurgency in the country, American officials disclosed yesterday.

Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, said the US was considering a fundamental review of its strategy. But his message was clear - the US expected countries which did not contribute troops to Afghanistan to contribute money instead.

That idea of scutage again. Would someone like to tell the US that we are not their fucking vassals?

As family-owned Porsche continues to up its stake in VW, a nasty feud has broken out between Volkswagen Board Chairman Ferdinand Piech and his cousins at Porsche over the future of Europe's biggest carmaker.

Ferdinand Piech is 71, a billionaire and a brilliant technocrat who has reached the pinnacle of the automobile industry as supervisory board chairman of Volkswagen, Europe's biggest automaker. And he's also having some family problems.

 

Wolfgang Porsche, who in addition to being the chairman of the German luxury carmaker that bears his name also happens to be one of Piech's cousins, is trying to unseat Piech by buying up VW stock through Porsche's holding company. The company currently owns 35 percent of VW ordinary stock and has plans to increase its share to over 50 percent in November.

 

Unwilling to relinquish control to Porsche without a fight, Piech decided, unexpectedly, not to show up for a board meeting over technical cooperation between Porsche and VW's upscale Audi division last week.

GRAFENHAUSEN, Germany: A country girl from the Black Forest has conquered the hearts of hipsters across big-city Berlin.

Her name is Birgit Kraft, a play on words in her local dialect for "beer gives strength," and she can be found, smiling in her traditional garb and holding a pair of beers, on the labels of Rothaus beer bottles. The cartoon maiden has not changed a bit since 1972, which is one of the secrets of her success.

Beer from the state-owned brewery here deep in the Black Forest, founded as part of the St. Blasien monastery in 1791, has grown into a surprise hit in big cities around the country, and nowhere more so than in Berlin. Rothaus has managed to thrive in an era dominated by multinational beverage concerns, on little more than crisp beer and its quaint, old-fashioned image.

When the first Oktoberfest keg is tapped in neighboring Bavaria at noon on Saturday, the tourist spectacle of the world's largest beer festival will likely produce fresh records for visitors and consumption that will obscure the woes of a domestic beer industry that has been in slow decline for decades.

Italian police have uncovered a scam in which traffic lights in 30 towns throughout Italy were rigged to ensure that drivers were fined for failing to stop at red lights.

Prosecutors in Milan said that the company that provided and maintained the traffic lights had manipulated them so that the amber signal lasted for only "a few seconds". This meant that motorists who thought that they had time to pass through the junction were inevitably fined for going through a red stop light.

Police said that 30 local councils were involved in the scheme, in collusion with the company that provided and maintained the lights. Most of the councils were in the North Milan area, but some in southern Italy also took part.

La Stampa said that the councils had accumulated "huge amounts" in fines, with the company also receiving a rake off. Four men who ran the company that supplied both the traffic lights and the cameras recording the number plates of "transgressors" are under arrest. Seventeen council officials are also under investigation for corruption and fraud.

Shackle, who was saved from a local zoo as the storm struck, is holed up in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church in Crystal Beach, lounging across the altar and being fed roast pork by local residents.

The lion and her owner, Michael Ray Kujawa, waded into the church after roads out of the area were blocked by flooding. People who were sheltering inside the building helped lock the lion in the sanctuary - and then stayed well away.

"They worked pretty well together, actually. When you have to swim, the lion doesn't care about eating nobody," said Mr Kujawa.

Jim Yarbrough, a Galveston County judge, said the authorities were working out a way of evacuating the big cat. "When you think you've seen everything, you find something else," he said.

Locals did - when they discovered that a tiger is also on the loose.

Scientists studying voters in the US say our political views may be an integral part of our physical makeup.

Their research, published in the journal Science, indicates that people who are sensitive to fear or threat are likely to support a right wing agenda.

Those who perceived less danger in a series of images and sounds were more inclined to support liberal policies.

The authors believe their findings may help to explain why voters' minds are so hard to change.

Two unknown fragments of music by Mozart are believed to have turned up in a library in Nantes in western France.

If authenticated by musical scholars, at least one of the pieces may be performed in a festival in the city next year.

A yellowing sheet of paper, held in the library since the 19th century, contains two or three lines of music, and a separate jumble of notes, signed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The music had previously been assumed to be a rough draft, or copy, of extracts from two of the 626 known pieces by the 18th century Austrian composer.

A German expert concluded, after examining the sheet last year, that the Mozart signature is genuine and - more importantly - that the sonata and the religious music on the yellowing paper are unknown.

Employees of bankrupt investment bank Lehman Bros have been offered free theatre tickets by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.(Advertisement)

An estimated 5,000 London staff lost their jobs on Monday but they now have until October 15 to view some of the biggest shows on the West End.

Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

A good little film to start the day off.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2008) -- Vital components of modern medicine such as major surgery, organ transplantation, and cancer chemotherapy will be threatened if antibiotic resistance is not tackled urgently, warn experts on bmj.com.

A concerted global response is needed to address rising rates of bacterial resistance caused by the use and abuse of antibiotics or "we will return to the pre-antibiotic era", write Professor Otto Cars and colleagues in an editorial.

All antibiotic use "uses up" some of the effectiveness of that antibiotic, diminishing the ability to use it in the future, write the authors, and antibiotics can no longer be considered as a renewable source.

They point out that existing antibiotics are losing their effect at an alarming pace, while the development of new antibiotics is declining. More than a dozen new classes of antibiotics were developed between 1930 and 1970, but only two new classes have been developed since then.

According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the most important disease threat in Europe is from micro-organisms that have become resistant to antibiotics. As far back as 2000, the World Health Organisation was calling for a massive effort to address the problem of antimicrobial resistance to prevent the "health catastrophe of tomorrow".

Okay, a moment to take stock on the embarrassing McCain gaffe. As noted earlier, despite the fact that McCain repeatedly suggests that Spain is a country in Latin America, McCain's foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann, insists that McCain wasn't confused, knew exactly who Zapatero was and meant every word of what he said. So with the McCain campaign sticking to its guns, let's review the possibilities of what happened here.

Option #1: McCain is so addled he not only doesn't know who Zapatero is but doesn't even know where Spain is located.

Option #2: McCain was not confused but actually meant his very belligerent comments about Spain and the Zapatero government (Scheunemann's line).

Option #3: Through some mixture of confusion and inability to understand the interviewer's accent, McCain was confused about who he was talking about and decided to wing it, assuming that the person he was being asked about was some other left-wing strong man from Latin America and answering with the standard boilerplate about standing up to America's enemies.

Oh, and no fighting, no playing with matches, etc.... while I am gone. :-)