The rhetoric grew hot ahead of a top Russian official's first visit to Warsaw since the outbreak of the war in Georgia in August. Sergei Lavrov warned Poland it was making a mistake by hosting a US missile shield.

The Polish decision to allow the US to install a missile shield on its territory is a "very dangerous game," which had upset the military balance between Washington and Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a Polish newspaper on Wednesday, Sept. 10.

And earlier in the day, a Russian general threatened to target the planned missile shield sites  with ICBMs.

Warsaw and Washington signed a preliminary deal on Aug. 14 to base part of a US missile shield in Poland, in the face of Moscow's vehement opposition and amid mounting East-West tensions over Georgia.

"Poland appears not to have understood that it has become a party to a very dangerous game," Lavrov said in an interview to the Polska daily newspaper ahead of his visit to Warsaw on Thursday.

Russia has accused the EU of signing a deal with Georgia on the deployment of ceasefire monitors that contradicts one agreed hours earlier with Moscow.

Russia's foreign minister said it would not permit EU monitors in South Ossetia or Abkhazia but that the deal signed by the EU with Georgia allowed this.

Georgia's breakaway regions have been recognised as independent by Russia.

The EU said it was not discussed with Moscow whether the observers could go into the separatist breakaway regions.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Court of Justice needs to be stopped from undermining national jurisdiction, former German President Roman Herzog and Lüder Gerken, the director of the Centre for European Policy, have warned in a comment published by the EUobserver.

The sharp words come in the wake of similar arguments coming from Denmark and Austria accusing the court of stepping beyond its bounds.

Similar arguments coming from Denmark and Austria accusing the court of stepping beyond its bounds.

Several cases analysed by Mr Herzog prove, in his view, that the European Court of Justice "systematically ignores fundamental principles of the Western interpretation of law", that it "ignores the will of the legislator, or even turns it into its opposite" and "invents legal principles serving as grounds for later judgements".

One key judgement, known as the Mangold case, is set to be analysed by the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe and will set the tone for future relations between the ECJ and national courts, writes Mr Herzog.

Mr Mangold, a 56-year-old lawyer, was employed in June 2003 on a permanent contract, in compliance with a temporary provision to the German labour law, which lowered the minimum age for temporary contracts from 58 to 52 years, in an attempt to encourage employers to hire more older workers.

The EU has threatened new legal action against Germany over the VW law that preserves a government veto at Europe's No. 1 carmaker. The row coincides with a power struggle at VW that could come to a head Friday at a board meeting that will be accompanied by a mass demonstration of VW workers.

DPA

VW supervisory board chairman Ferdinand Piech and Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking are locked in a power struggle. The European Union Commission has threatened to take Germany to court for not fully complying with its demand to revise a law protecting the Volkswagen, Europe's largest carmaker, from hostile takeovers.

The European Court of Justice last year ruled that the so-called VW law breaches EU rules on the free flow of capital. The German government responded by amending the law, but the EU believes those revisions don't go far enough.

A spokesman for EU Internal Markets Commissioner Charlie McCreevy said on Tuesday the Commission had no choice but to take renewed legal action against Germany because Berlin evidently did not plan to take any further action in response to its objections.

Following complaints by EU officials about threats to privacy, global search engine giant Google has moved to reduce the amount of time the company holds on to data about what users have searched for.

On Tuesday (9 September), Google announced that it would cut the length of time it retains search data from 18 months to nine.

Google has made the changes to all its search sites worldwide

The announcement is the company's second such reduction. Google originally maintained such records indefinitely, but limited data retention to 18 months in 2007 in the wake of initial privacy concerns.

The latest reduction still does not meet the European Commission's preferences however, although the commission has not yet issued an official reaction.

In March, the European Commission's data protection watchdog recommended that search engines not be permitted to hold on to personal data after the end of six months.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European support for NATO and for closer ties with the US is increasing, while concerns about Russia as an energy provider and in relationship to its neighbours are on the rise, shows a survey released on Wednesday (10 September) by an American think-tank.

Some 57 percent of Europeans agreed that NATO is still essential to their country's security, an increase of four percentage points since 2007, according to the new poll published by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

European attitudes towards NATO are warming up, according to an American survey

The survey marks a halt to an earlier trend of declining support for NATO in Germany and Poland - the first such up-tick since 2002. French support for NATO has climbed back to its 2002 levels, the survey also shows.

Support for strengthening relations with the US rose by four percent among EU member states and Turkey, with the highest rates occuring in Romania (52 percent), Poland (45 percent) and Italy (37 percent).

MOSCOW: Tatarstan is a long way from South Ossetia. Where South Ossetia is a poor border region of Georgia battered by war, Tatarstan is an economic powerhouse in the heart of Russia, boasting both oil reserves and the political stability that is catnip to investors.

But the two places have one thing in common: Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, both have given rise to separatist movements. And when President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia formally recognized the breakaway areas of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations two weeks ago, activists in Kazan, the Tatar capital, took notice.

An association of nationalist groups, the All-Tatar Civic Center, swiftly published an appeal that "for the first time in recent history, Russia has recognized the state independence of its own citizens" and expressed the devout wish that Tatarstan would be next.

The declaration was far-fetched, its authors knew: One of Vladimir Putin's signal achievements as Medvedev's predecessor was to suppress separatism. The Tatar movement was at its lowest ebb in 20 years.

Irish people voted against the Lisbon Treaty in the only referendum to be held on the European Union reform accord because they did not understand it, according to research published by the Irish government.

A total of 42 per cent of those who voted No gave lack of information or understanding as their reason, according to the poll carried out by Millward Brown IMS in the last week of July.

Meanwhile, 33 per cent thought that the introduction of conscription into a pan-European army was part of the Lisbon Treaty while 34 per cent believed that it would strip Ireland of its control over abortion policy.

"An EU knowledge deficit is clearly present which has undoubtedly contributed to the No vote," according to the poll and focus group research.

Article 278 of the criminal code applies to the Italian head of state. However, the law 810 of 1929 extends to the Pope the legal equivalence of the King of Italy, therefore making all laws that now apply to the President of the Republic also applicable to his person. The authorization to proceed against Guzzanti must be granted by the Minister of Justice in this case.

According to some reports the charges in this case are without precedent. It will therefore be an excellent testing ground for the present day ancien régime zeitgeist.

Similar charges were levelled against Beppe Grillo for his criticism of President Napolitano but were archived.

Guzzanti is not new to censorship as is the case with most Italian comedians and many reporters.

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

According to a major survey, Europeans want the Democrats to win back the White House this year. But Barack Obama's positions on Iran's nuclear program and Afghanistan are not widely supported in Europe, and the huge European interest in the election may not translate into closer trans-Atlantic ties.

 Senator Barack Obama greets supporters in Berlin this July. Europeans like him but do they agree with him? Europe's citizens are hoping for a new beginning in trans-Atlantic relations following a victory by the Democratic candidate Barack Obama. According to the latest "Transatlantic Trends," 47 percent of those polled across 12 European countries agree that there would be an improvement in relations between Europe and the US if Obama moved into the White House. By contrast, just 11 percent of those surveyed thought there would be a similar improvement under a President John McCain.

There is also a huge difference in the popularity of the two candidates. While 69 percent of Europeans would like to see a President Obama, only 26 percent say that about McCain. In Germany this sympathy is particular marked with 83 percent of those polled supporting the Democrats.

The "Transatlantic Trends" survey is carried out every year by the German Marshall Fund and is regarded as an important indicator of the state of trans-Atlantic relations.

On Sunday the New York times published a report by Dexter Filkins on the Taliban in Pakistan. I excerpted the gist here.

That report included some information on the Haqqani clan:

In 2006, a senior ISI official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told a New York Times reporter that he regarded Serajuddin Haqqani as one of the ISI's intelligence assets. "We are not apologetic about this," the ISI official said. For a presumed ally of the United States, that was a stunning admission: Haqqani, an Afghan, is currently one of the Taliban's most senior commanders battling the Americans in eastern Afghanistan. His father, Jalaluddin, is a longtime associate of bin Laden's. The Haqqanis are believed to be overseeing operations from a hiding place in the Pakistani tribal agency of North Waziristan.

Two days later the U.S. attacked the residence of the Haqqani clan:

The drones were apparently targeting the house or the madrassa established by former Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani during the 1978-88 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, residents said.

The US has imposed sanctions on an Iranian shipping company and 18 of its affiliates over its alleged support for Tehran's nuclear programme.

The Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) had provided logistical support for the Iranian defence ministry, the US treasury said.

IRISL's US-based assets would be frozen and its transactions banned, it said.

The US has already imposed a number of sanctions on Iran linked to its controversial nuclear programme.

Western nations accuse Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapon. But Tehran says its nuclear activities are aimed solely at peaceful energy development.

At least 12 people are reported to have been killed and 40 others wounded when an armed group hurled grenades into a mosque in northern Pakistan.

 

Police said the mosque, located in Dir district near the border with Afghanistan, was full of people offering special Ramadan prayers on Wednesday.

US intelligence officials increasingly fear that the next terror attack on the United States will be carried out by white Americans or Europeans.

As Barack Obama and John McCain head to New York's Ground Zero seven years after 19 Middle-Eastern hijackers brought devastation to the US mainland, counter-terrorism experts believe that any future attack will be made by terrorists with an "American face".

They point to reports of white faces in terrorism training camps in Pakistan - the so-called "white men of Waziristan", a reference to the remote tribal area where both al-Qaeda and the Taliban have bases.

Experts believe that dozens of westerners have undergone such training as their leaders try to recruit non-Middle Eastern Asians, particularly ethnic Caucasians, who are less likely to attract the attention of security and law enforcement agencies.

Kandahar has traditionally been the city of Afghan royalty, warlords and the center of resistance movements against the British and Russia. It was also the spiritual heartland of the student militia, the Taliban, that emerged in the 1990s to combat the vicious civil war that was tearing the country apart.

The Taliban took over Kabul in 1996 and opened the country to al-Qaeda's training camps, while Osama bin Laden settled in Kandahar. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan a few months later, the Taliban agreed to lose their government but, in the tradition of the Afghan code of honor of Pashtunwali, they refused to hand over their most wanted guests to the Americans.

Seven years after 9/11, the resurgent Taliban movement is

exclusively led by Kandahari clans, which still boast of their sacrifices for the Islamic brotherhood in the name of Pashtunwali, but they maintain that the Taliban have never harbored - and never will - an aggressive agenda towards the world community.

In a interview with Asia Times Online, Mullah Abdul Jalil, a pioneer of the Taliban movement in Kandahar, elaborated. "There is a lot of rhetoric out of anger and frustration against the West because of the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] oppression of the Afghan people, but the Taliban leadership still strictly abides by its code of conduct for the resistance against foreign occupation forces in our country," said Jalil, who served as deputy foreign minister and foreign minister during the Taliban regime (1996-2001) .

Two Russian strategic bombers have landed in Venezuela as part of military manoeuvres, the Interfax news agency reported today, at a time when US-Russian relations are at their most strained since the cold war.

Interfax cited a Russian defence ministry statement as saying the two Tu-160 strategic bombers landed today to carry out training flights over neutral waters in the next few days before returning to Russia.

The arrival of the Russian strategic warplanes in what the US considers its backyard followed a statement at the weekend by the Venezuelan government saying that four Russian ships would participate in joint exercises in the Caribbean this year.

The US sought to make light of that announcement. A US state department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said that if Russia really intended to send ships to the Caribbean, "then they found a few ships that can make it that far".

Here's a curiousity

Warren Buffett has a subsidiary that offers deposit insurance to banks in excess of the $100,000 insurance they receive from the FDIC. It's a handy product that allows the banks to attract wealthy depositors.

Buffett just ordered the company to cancel all of these insurance policies.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSBNG18820320080910 Numerian September 10, 2008

... for all the difficulties facing the Chinese market, the situation is a far cry from the meltdown in many developed countries.

The slowdown in China is largely the result of government design. The authorities have restricted new credit in part to stifle inflation but they have also introduced measures deliberately aimed at limiting property speculation and squeezing out small, poorly capitalised developers.

Chinese banks face a problem of fraudulent mortgage applications. However, given that mortgages for second houses require a 30 per cent upfront payment and a quarter of all house-buyers pay in cash, economists say the potential for a property-led financial crisis is much lower.

"This is not at all the same problem being faced in the US and Europe where there are deep financing problems and slack real demand," says Andy Rothman, an economist at CLSA in Shanghai. "Once the government decides that the measures it adopted have had enough of an impact, they will be removed quite quickly."

Despite the recent weakness in the market - which saw house prices, analysts say, either static or a bit lower in August - the market is a long way from a slump. Prices of new houses are up 7 per cent over the past 12 months in the 70 -biggest cities in the country.

And while there have been property bubbles in individual cities, there is little -evidence of a national -bubble because of rising incomes. Indeed, despite the recent boom in house prices, salary increases have made property more affordable, not less.

The market is also underpinned by an annual influx of about 10m migrants who stream into Chinese -cities, some of whom even-tually become homeowners.

WASHINGTON -- As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal -- including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

Office of the Minerals Management Service outside Denver.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department's inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government's largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

"A culture of ethical failure" pervades the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration's watch.

Haiti in the storms' aftermath.

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

 The housing market is not coming back. Ever. In the form that we knew it. The suburban project is over. That version of the American Dream is over. We'll be a lot better off if we put aside dreaming altogether for a while and start focusing on reality instead -- that part of the day when we're awake and capable of actually doing things. We've got a lot to face and a lot to do.
     The government takeover of Fannie and Freddie is just another papering-over of our fundamental problem -- that until we embark on new ways of being a nation, of living differently and working differently on different things, the other nations of the world will not have confidence in us, or the paper we issue, and we will not really have confidence in ourselves.
     I have believed all along -- and said as much in The Long Emergency -- that we would not get through this crisis without passing through a period of hardship. We're entering it now. Even if the stock markets shoot up five hundred points today on the basis of the Fannie-Freddie deal (and the mistaken belief that our troubles are over), we are only at the beginning of a very painful workout. Personally, I think we're in for financial carnage before the election. The Fannie-Freddie deal may be the place where the wheels really come off.

Europe's Center for Nuclear Research made scientific history when it successfully tested the world's largest particle collider on Wednesday. Some, however, are worried the machine may mean the end of the world.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which was switched on at 09:30 CET on Wednesday, Sept. 10 after nearly two decades of construction to the tune of 6 billion Swiss francs (3.76 billion euros, $5.46 billion), will help scientists understand the material that makes up the universe, according to CERN (Center for Nuclear Research) spokesman and physicist James Gillies.

On Wednesday, a beam of protons was successfully fired all the way around a 17-mile tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, traveling the full length of the LHC.

"We take a couple of particles, we throw them at each other, we see them smash into each other, we observe what happens and that allows us to test the way they interact with each and understand their behavior," he said.

A runaway kangaroo baffled residents of a small German town as it bounded down the main street on Monday night.

The renegade marsupial, which had been kept as a pet by a resident, had boxed its way out of its enclosure and set off through the streets of Siegburg, about 15 miles (25km) from Cologne, in the west of Germany.

It proceeded to lead police and fire officers on a chase through the town, dodging emergency crews who tried to lure the strict herbivore with dog food.

Firefighters were finally able to catch the 70-centimetre (28-inch) tall kangaroo with a net, and took it to a nearby shelter where it was checked by a vet and declared unharmed.

Italians are quite used to feeling "lo stress", looking forward to "il weekend" or trying to look "cool".

But now an influential cultural institute has asked Italians to protect the language and reject "Anglitaliano".

The Dante Alighieri Society asked people for examples of over-used foreign words and "il weekend" emerged as the worst offender.

The society said the results showed that Italians want their language to receive more respect.

For four months, the society asked visitors to its website, 70% of whom were Italians, for inappropriate examples of foreign words being used in everyday Italian, either written or spoken.

Opec oil ministers have decided to curb their collective output by more than 500,000 barrels a day and "strictly comply" with a quota target of 28.8 million barrels per day.

Mamdouh Salameh, an international oil economist and consultant to the World Bank on oil and energy, explains what factors are driving oil price fluctuations.

He predicts how world events might affect oil prices in future, and suggests some action governments can take to counter current trends.

Mamdouh Salameh says the Iraq war was a critical factor in high oil prices

Al Jazeera: Oil prices have fallen to a five-month low after reaching a record high of $147.27 a barrel on July 11. Why did oil prices climb to record levels, and why have they suffered such a steep decline since then?

Salameh: The two biggest reasons for the high price of oil are "peak oil" and the invasion of Iraq.

Global conventional oil production, according to the peak oil theory, peaked in 2006 and has been in decline ever since. The US-led invasion of Iraq is the key reason for oil prices being as high as they are.

With a friend videotaping, 27-year-old Christopher Lenzini of Dallas took a hit of Salvia divinorum, regarded as the world's most potent hallucinogenic herb, and soon began to imagine, he said, that he was in a boat with little green men. Mr. Lenzini quickly collapsed to the floor and dissolved into convulsive laughter.

When he posted the video on YouTube this summer, friends could not get enough. "It's just funny to see a friend act like a total idiot," he said, "so everybody loved it."

Until a decade ago, the use of salvia was largely limited to those seeking revelation under the tutelage of Mazatec shamans in its native Oaxaca, Mexico.

Today, this mind-altering member of the mint family is broadly available for lawful sale online and in head shops across the United States.

I had never heard of salvia, but the amount of videos on YouTube is amazing.  I watched quite a few of them last night.  From a 3rd person perspective, the trips have a lot of things in common: giggling at the beginning or throughout, dazed/glazed look, rolling on the floor, sweating, drooling.  However, one distinction I noticed, though it may be simply the selection of videos I watched, was that bad trips were only had by males: females seem to giggle a lot more.  Which makes me wonder if these drugs have different effects on male and female brains.

How widespread is the use of this drug in other countries?  Is it controlled?

According to a friend of mine who is sort of expert on drugs that come from native American traditions, 'even the shamans are wary of that stuff.'

Here is a student documentary on salvia, including clips of actual trips:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwH1AvKtdcw

Here is a clip of a trip from start to finish:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuM2oREjE6Y

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

Just as John McCain pulls ahead in the US presidential race, Gordon Brown has decided to throw his weight behind Barack Obama.

Or, at least, that's what it looks like for the McCain campaign.

Downing Street hastily denied Tory accusations today that the Prime Minister was taking sides in the race for the White House after he showered praise on Mr Obama, the Democratic candidate, in a magazine article. Traditionally, foreign leaders try to maintain a scrupulous neutrality during election contests.

Writing in the Parliamentary Monitor, a Westminster magazine, Mr Brown said that the Democrats were the party in America who were developing ideas to help people through the current economic difficulties and cited one of Mr Obama's proposals to help families facing repossession.

Apparently these are very popular in Miami.

I have no idea why.

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

THIS is what I meant to post.

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