A political scandal is gathering pace over claims that 11 French submarine engineers were murdered in a bomb attack in Karachi seven years ago to punish France for the non-payment of arms contract "commissions" to senior Pakistani officials.

Lawyers for the French victims' families believe the attack, allegedly carried out by Islamist terrorists, was in fact part of a web of financial chicanery and political manoeuvring which may yet severely embarrass senior figures, including the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari.

Two French magistrates investigating the bombing of the engineers' bus in May 2002 have ruled out the possibility that it was an attack by al-Qa'ida on Western interests. They have told the victims' families there is "cruel logic" to an alternative explanation. They believe unknown figures in the Pakistani establishment may have fomented the attack in retaliation for the non-payment of part of the €80m (£68m) in sweeteners promised to senior officials when Lahore bought three Agosta 90B submarines from France in 1994.

EUOBSERVER / ASTANA - The remote capital of post-Soviet petro-state Kazakhstan hosted this year's security forum of Nato's partner countries, the first time the event took place outside Europe in a bid to secure more support for the alliance's mission in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Barely 12 years old and still largely a construction site, Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, is a strange blend of Soviet-style apartment blocks, modern skyscrapers and artsy projects bearing the signature of famous architects such as Norman Foster.

Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, wants to keep close ties with Nato, but also Russia and China

In his keynote address on Thursday (25 June) during Nato's security forum with its partner countries (EAPC), secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer praised the city as a "haven for contemporary architecture in the vast steppes of Kazakhstan."

The new capital, built from scratch in the middle of the deserted landscape of central Kazakhstan mirrors the ambitions of the country's perennial president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, who just celebrated 20 years of uninterrupted leadership.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European Union environment ministers have cobbled together an agreement on plans to reduce industrial pollution, combining together a patchwork of previous anti-emissions legislation in a new piece of legislation that is expected to prevent thousands of deaths in the bloc every year.

Rules on industrial emissions will be tightened but the schedule for adhering to them has been extended

Environmentalists however say they were disappointed that the final compromise amongst EU member states was considerably weaker than what had originally been proposed.

Targeting heavy industry, oil refineries and power plants, the deal agreed by ministers from the different member states meeting in Luxembourg on Thursday (25 June) tightens sulphur and nitrogen emissions as well as the release of dust particles, asbestos and heavy metals into the environment.

Installations must meet the fresh emissions standards set by the member states by 2016, although countries may choose to apply the restrictions as late as the end of 2020.

New plants must adhere to the rules by 2012, however.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has arrived for two days of talks with European Union officials in Brussels to try to revive his country's stalled EU membership bid in the face of renewed hostility from some member states.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in Brussels on Friday to revive stalled European Union membership talks. Turkey has been urging the European Union not to leave its accession bid adrift and has said its membership would help the EU's relationship with Muslims.

 

Erdogan deplored the slow pace of movement on accession "No other candidate nation has been submitted to this kind of treatment," said Erdogan, who travelled to Brussels with two senior colleagues for talks with European Union officials.
  
"Some countries have adopted a political attitude in the negotiation process and their efforts to slow things down upsets us," he told reporters. Erdogan did not specifically mention Cyprus, France or Germany, the three EU nations harbouring the most doubts about Turkish membership.

For more than a decade, a drab, beige building in central Madrid has been the global destination of choice for anyone wanting to file allegations of genocide, torture and crimes against humanity.

The Audiencia Nacional - National Criminal Court - has heard complaints of human-rights abuses as far afield as Guatemala, Rwanda, Chile, Tibet, Gaza and Guantanamo Bay.

Currently, 10 cases from five continents are being investigated by Spanish judges, under the principle of "universal jurisdiction," which holds that some crimes are so grave that they can be tried anywhere, regardless of where the offences were committed.

In a recent statement, almost 100 organisations collectively praised Spain's "pioneering approach," gushing that the country "should feel proud of itself" for becoming a reference point for other nations.

Except, Spain's left-leaning government sees things rather differently.

One pair of sunglasses. That is what everyone in The Hague is getting worked up about. It seems Finance Minister Wouter Bos lost his Ray Bans during a trip to Brussels last year. No one would have noticed, except that he then declared them as an official expense and charged the Dutch taxpayer 113 euros for a new pair.

This is just one of the expenses declared by cabinet ministers since they took office over two years ago, published in the best-selling Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf. On the heels of the expenses affair in the UK, some see a similar scandal brewing here in the Netherlands.

Besides Mr Bos and his sunglasses, various other ministers also turned in expense claims.

Taxi receipt
Another Labour Party cabinet member, Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Frank Heemskerk, declared 90 euros for a tuxedo rental. The President of Ghana would have been surprised to see Mr Heemskerk show up at a state banquet in his regular suit.

Complete records of the shadow cabinet's expenses claims have been published for the first time by Telegraph.co.uk.

The documents and receipts, which were submitted to the Commons by members of David Cameron's front bench team, contain crucial details that were covered up in official data released by Parliament.

• The shadow cabinet's expenses in full

Information in the documents - especially the identity of the properties for which the MPs claimed expenses - was key in exposing their abuses of the system, including:

France is to be taken to the European Court of Justice for failing to protect the Alsace hamster, a cuddly rodent threatened with extension in its native eastern France.

The European Commission had long warned France it could face a multi-million pound fine if it failed to do more to save its hamsters from extinction.

But French authorities refused all attempts by the commission to protect the diminutive mammal, also known as the European hamster, according to an official linked to the proceedings.

According to the EU's executive body, the rodent requires around 600,000 acres of protected land to thrive, but now has less than 8,500 acres in eastern France in which to roam and feed.

Once considered vermin, the Alsace hamster (Cricetus cricetus) has been all but wiped out by rat poison, traps and farmers flooding its burrows.

Silvio Berlusconi faced mounting pressure to come clean about his private life yesterday after revelations that he entertained about 20 women, including two lesbian escort girls, until dawn during a private party at his house in Rome.

Patrizia D'Addario, the Bari prostitute who claims to have recorded footage that proves her encounters with the Prime Minister, gave more details of her first meeting with Mr Berlusconi, saying: "It felt like a harem. And there was only one sheikh. Him."

She also spoke of the "strange burglary" in which her underwear, computer and the dress she wore to the party were allegedly stolen from her home days after she told a friend of the secret recordings.

It is understood that the video recordings, taken on her mobile phone, show Ms D'Addario in the Prime Minister's bedroom. She claims that the four-poster bed with white drapes and duvets were given to him as a present by his friend Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister. A Kremlin spokesman denied that Mr Putin had ever given the Italian leader a bed.

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Under the headline "Rivers of Cocaine" La Repubblica also reported yesterday that prosecutors had found evidence of frequent drug use at parties held by Mr Tarantini, 34.

Mr Berlusconi has dismissed the allegations surrounding the sex scandal as rubbish, and insisted during an interview earlier this week that he had nothing to be ashamed of. There is no suggestion that he knew of drug use at the parties in question. At least five parties at Palazzo Grazioli, his residence in Rome, and two at Villa Certosa, his luxury villa on the Sardinia coast, are under investigation.

PARIS -- As the global economic crisis heads into the summer vacation season, Westerners have some advice for their political leaders: Keep on working.

Even people in Spain, Italy and France, famous for jealously guarding their vacation time, strongly agreed with that sentiment in a new survey conducted by Harris Interactive for the International Herald Tribune and the cable news channel France 24.

By a ratio of two to one, people in those countries as well as the United States and Britain said their leaders should reduce or eliminate their vacation time this year in response to the economy. Germans were split on whether Chancellor Angela Merkel should take her normal time off.

The opinions about national leaders reflected sentiments within each country. In Germany, for instance, about half of those surveyed said the economy would have no impact on their vacation plans. In the other five countries, one-third of the respondents or fewer said so.

The European Commission said on Thursday (25 June) it was taking Luxembourg to court over concerns the Grand Duchy is breaching EU rules on savings revenues and using a so-called non-domiciled status for tax avoidance.

The commission is accusing Luxembourg of using the status in order to get around the EU Savings Tax Directive on savings interest payments.

Luxembourg has repeatedly been criticised for its bank secrecy rules

Under the EU directive, member states must exchange information on non-resident savings revenues. Those countries who have not signed up to it - namely Belgium, Luxembourg and Austria - can tax the income at source.

But the commission considers Luxembourg to be breaching that rule as well by not applying the directive to people who benefit from the "non-domiciled resident" status in their country of residence.

Ford is ahead thanks to stronger design and government programs that pay cash for gas guzzlers. Now, that stimulus may be about to dry up.

 Ford has benefitted from Europe stimulus programs. There's little doubt that Ford Motor's European unit is coming through the global auto slump better than most rivals. But even Ford of Europe boss John Fleming concedes that luck has played a role in that success. Four years ago, Ford scheduled an autumn 2008 launch for redesigned versions of its Fiesta and Ka small cars. That, as it turns out, was exactly when governments from Germany to Serbia started showering cash on citizens who trade in older gas-guzzlers for new, fuel-efficient vehicles. "We knew there was huge pressure on fuel economy and CO2 emissions," Fleming says. "But to get the Fiesta and Ka out right at the bottom of the recession-we didn't plan that."

The happy combination of government stimulus and spiffy new compacts has sheltered Ford from the worst of the industry's woes in Europe. As rival General Motors tries to sell beleaguered Opel to a consortium backed by the Kremlin, Ford is gaining market share. Ford models accounted for 9 percent of the Western European market in the first five months of 2009. That was up from 8.5 percent the year before and second only to Volkswagen, with 11.7 percent. True, Ford of Europe lost $550 million in the first quarter, vs. a profit of $739 million in the year-earlier period, and Ford sales were down 6.7 percent through May. But the European auto market slumped by nearly twice that. "Fundamentally, Ford is bearing up well," says Neil King, an auto analyst at IHS Global Insight in London.

Saying they have gone as far as they can, agricultural ministers from the EU and France say they will not make any more concessions to reach a deal at the WTO talks. 

Using language that does not allow for much negotiation, France and the European Commission said that they would not make any more concessions in order to reach a deal at the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Doha talks.

"We have tried our very best and we don't move," said the European Union Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel.

"We went to the absolute limit of what was acceptable to the agricultural community. We won't go any further," echoed French farm minister Bruno Le Maire.

State and local governments have been forced into draconian budget cuts, firing workers who are among the most reliable in making their mortgage payments-when they have jobs: firemen, policemen, teachers, civil servants. Yet the Obama administration won't spend even a small fraction of what it has wasted on the banks to cover state shortfalls. The guarantee of $5.5bn in short term notes for California was deemed to be fiscally irresponsible, yet hundreds of billions have already been allocated to the likes of Citigroup, AIG, and Goldman Sachs, all of whom have already beefed up salaries and bonuses as they emerge from the embrace of the federal government.

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In one sense, it is pointless blaming Wall Street for exploiting a system heavily rigged in its favour. They know that the game is stacked in their favour, so they are rationally taking advantage. But the sickest part about the whole episode is that the casino rule makers, Obama, Geithner and Summers, are perpetuating a flawed game that they had in their power the chance to end..... It's almost as if this was planned deliberately so as to provide the anti-government folks with a cudgel with which to beat back supporters of activist government. My issue with Obama and his fiscal package is the same as Rob Johnson's: taxpayer money is being deployed in hugely inefficient ways like Citi, BofA, AIG, and GM and discrediting fiscal policy in the process.  

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Bank bonanza must end

...the current bonanza for banks is neither economically efficient, nor politically sustainable.
What is driving the change in portfolio preference shifts is not only a misguided paradigm, but also an inability for the Obama administration to make a sensible, coherent case in what they are doing and why they are doing it. Their actions, in fact, seem to suggest that everything is ad hoc and that they are operating out of their depth, in effect continuing the same policies of the Bush/Paulson period, but on a much greater scale.

Ironically, this ultimately will also prove highly inimical to the interests of finance itself. When most of the home owning voters cannot pay their major debt or have no incentive to pay their mortgage debt, there will either be a debtors revolt that society will sanction or there will be a bailout of such a magnitude that mega moral hazard will affect private lending forever. Once these things happen, you will no longer have the social rules for private risk based lending. In other words, financial markets will be unlike anything ever seen before in private economies. Is this really what Wall Street wants, let alone American society as a whole?

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The current crisis could have been mitigated if increased household consumption had been financed through wage increases and if financial institutions had used their earnings to augment bank capital rather than employee bonuses. The current system has failed because it was built on an incentive system that did just the opposite.

H/T to Yves Smith for the link.  Yves titles her blog Will America's Besieged Middle Class Snap? with a quote from Amitai Etzioni's, The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics:

A paradox arises to the extent that it is true that the market is dependent on normative underpinning (to provide the pre-contractural foundations such as trust, cooperation, and honesty) which all contractural relations require: The more people accept the neoclasical paradigm as a guide for their behavior, the more the ability to sustain a market economy is undermined. This holds for all those who engage in transactions without ever-present inspectors, auditors, lawyers, and police: if they do not limit themselves to legitimate (i.e. normative) means of competition out of internlized values, the system will collapse, because the transaction costs of a fully or even highly "policed" system are prohibitive. This holds even more so for the regulators that every market requires. If those whose duty it is to set and to enforce the rules of the game are out to maximize their own profits, a-la-Public Choice, there is no hope for the system.

I predicted over 2 years ago that the Chinese stock markets would implode dramatically, much to everybody's disbelief and skepticism. It began a few months sooner than I thought, but, that is exactly what has happened. Now for the last year or so, I have predicted that things will get VERY bad in the Chinese real estate markets over the next several years. Again, most people I have talked to about this (especially Chinese) have almost universally dismissed this notion as absurd.

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The news here is actually worse than I realized. One very alarming thing is that the Chinese banks have avoided writing down bad debt. I should have assumed this would happen, since it is hard to see how it could be avoided, given the nature of the Chinese culture. This is NOT a good idea. It is like pretending that defaults and bad debt simply don't exist, and this is very bad for the financial sector in the long run.

This is exactly what the Japanese banks have done, and it is partly because of this that their stock markets have imploded over the last 20 years, and their economy has been stagnant for many years---the Nikkei collapsed in late 1989 after peaking at about 39,000. Now, a full 20 years later, it is only trading at around 8800, and would have to rise another 450% just to equal the old highs, and that would not even consider the effects of the reduced buying power of the yen today vs. 1989. When you take that and inflation into consideration, the Nikkei would probably have to rise more like 700% or 800% or more from current levels to equal the equivalent of 1989 values. This is actually not very atypical for an imploded bubble. And that is exactly what the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets are looking at, since you have the exact same lethal combination in 1989 Japan as you do now in China: dual bubbles in real estate and stocks (one has imploded), and a decided reluctance to face facts and write down bad debt and defaults. In contrast, in the US in March 2000, we had a bubble in the stock market but not the real estate sector. And even though 7 trillion dollars in stock equity disappeared after March 2000, there was an increase in value of the real estate markets of 8 trillion dollars that more than offset those losses. That is a major factor that allowed the economy to expand in subsequent years, but that is not possible in China, just as it was not possible in 1989 Japan.

This is a singularly ominous combination that makes China's economic future outlook over the next 25 years very grim. And that, in turn, will lead to acceleration of civil unrest. In fact, that has already happened: incidents of violent civil unrest have accelerated markedly all across China over the past year or two. But I think this could well get far more noticeable and disruptive. Some economists have said that in order to avoid disruptive amounts of civil unrest (as opposed to the more manageable baseline levels of unrest that are a constant), China's economy must grow by 8.5% per year or more, just to keep enough people quiet. I suspect that is probably more or less approximately true in principle, although I don't know where they came up with that number. But regardless of what that magic number might be, when that economy gets really bad---watch out. That's the seeds of civil war, if you ask me. If you have a very large group of desperate people coupled with an extreme polarization of wealth, you have a classic "haves" vs. "have nots" Marxian confrontation that is the underpinning of most if not all major revolutions. Then, the only missing ingredient is a charismatic leader (like Mao, for example.....).

Taibbi nails what they did with one of the best descriptions I've read of the sub prime mortgage toxic assets mess.

Imagine a meat company that bred ten billion rats, fattened them on trash and sewage, ground their bodies into chuck, and then sold it all as grade-A ground beef to McDonald's and Burger King, right under the noses of the USDA: this is exactly the same thing, only with debt instead of food. We're eating it, they're counting the money.

100% right! and they've already got the next bubble cooking with carbon credits...

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

Iran's political crisis continues to blaze. It's still impossible to say which leaders or factions will emerge victorious. However, one thing seems certain: the earthquake in the Islamic Republic that is shaking the Mideast and deeply confusing everyone, including the US government, is hardly the black and white morality drama between democracy and repression breathlessly portrayed by Western media.

A prime indicator of the complexity of the Iranian crisis was provided by the head of Israel's intelligence agency, Meir Dagan. The Mossad director reportedly expressed his hope that Iran's embattled president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would remain in office.

On the surface, that sounds absurd, since Ahmadinejad is Israel's Great Satan, the man that supporters of Israel claim intends to inflict a second Holocaust on the Jewish people.

According to Dagan, if Ahmadinejad's supposedly "moderate" rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, came to power, it would be harder for Israel to keep up its intense propaganda war against Iran over its nuclear program even when prime minister, Mousavi championed Iran's nuclear development.

The Israeli army has deployed its Mirkava tanks and personnel-carriers along the Lebanese border, Lebanon's National News Agency says.

The deployment took place on Thursday along the barb-wired fence which separates the Shebaa Farms from other parts of Lebanese territories.

Israeli tanks were also gathering along a 5-km area, stretching from the Tallat Sobaih army post to Mount Hermon while sporadic gunfire was also heard throughout the day, the agency reported.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was in Washington Thursday evening to receive an award for her contributions to trans-Atlantic relations. But with few politicians in attendance, she might have gotten the feeling that Germany no longer carries its former weight in the US capital.

For a brief moment, the American-German relationship looked just as Germans like to imagine it. Chancellor Angela Merkel was on the stage on Thursday evening at the Library of Congress in the heart of the United States capital, where she had just received the Warburg Prize handed out by the Atlantik Brücke, an important trans-Atlantic organization. The chancellor was clearly moved, her voice full of emotion. And she spoke of a senior US politician.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was at the Library of Congress on Thursday night. He is, she said, "the personification of the partnership" between Germany and America. He took time out to meet her, she told the audience, before anyone could imagine that she might one day become chancellor, back when she was just the head of the conservative Christian Democrats. "Who takes the time these days? Who is so inquisitive?" she asked, her voice full of praise.

It was a touching scene, but the man she was speaking of is not, as one might have thought, a high-ranking member of President Barack Obama's administration. Rather, it was the Republican Chuck Hagel.

With Congressional elections set for Sunday, Argentineans will pass judgment on their government's crisis management this weekend. President Cristina Kirchner has been campaigning on doctored statistics, but with the economy tanking, it is unlikely that voters will be fooled.

Business is not good in El Calafate. Everything is on sale in the shops, and young locals spend their days killing time in tourist cafés. The weather is overcast, and the constant drizzle has deterred all but a few Brazilian backpackers. "The crisis has arrived in Patagonia," says Cristiano Romero, 28.

 Argentinian President Cristina Kirchner hugs her husband Nestor, who is running for Congress, at a campaign rally in Buenos Aires. Four years ago, Romero moved from Buenos Aires to El Calafate, deep in the south of Patagonia. He is a tour guide whose business consists of chauffeuring tourists to the Perito Moreno, the country's most famous glacier, 70 kilometers (44 miles) away. The tourists normally provide a good source of income; since the government sharply devalued the peso seven years ago, visitors from around the world have been coming in droves to the southern tip of South America. But those days are gone with European tourists now staying home. Argentina has become too expensive for them, now that inflation has wiped out the benefits of a favorable exchange rate.

Peru's prime minister has said he will resign in the coming weeks as the government of President Alan Garcia struggles to overcome deadly clashes between police and indigenous groups.

Yehude Simon has been at the centre of a confrontation between state and indigenous leaders over the government's plans to open the Amazon rain forest to foreign development.

Mr Simon's announcement came after opposition leaders called for Mr Garcia to fire the prime minister for failing to avert deadly clashes between police and indigenous groups.

The latest installment in the Obama administration's tendency to mimic the Bushies on war on terror tactics:

The Washington Post and Pro Publica report:

The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close Guantanamo, has drafted an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

Just because the bullies on talk radio or national "public" radio frame this discussion or that discussion or all discussion as if it were the eleventh hour doesn't mean we have to submit to it.  The fact that we're asked to decide frenetically on content rather than carefully on form--think fast rapist in room whatareyou gonna do?oops too late--doesn't mean we have to accept the form. 

The form of the empire is to pretend there's no form and it's all content.  As if the broadcasting bullies--the form--didn't get there in the first place from their willingness to suck at the right teat.  As if there's no back story on the lips giving us the content.

No One asks (and we're with No One on this one): which is easier, to give a piece of silver to the children of Ishmael or to stop giving the ten pieces of silver to the children of Israel who are forcing Ishmael to strip and be searched every day to get to his olive grove?  To give money to bankers and Detroit or cut them adrift?  To have expensive transportation bureaus and plans and bike lanes, or just stop paying car welfare?  To have seven hundred Battle-Star-Galactica-sized military installations around the world antagonizing everybody and his brother and then pay for the backturn of charity to try to undo the damage, or just stop antagonizing people in the first place?

The history of the empire's attacks is complex but we should reserve the right to remain skeptical when The Economist or NPR tell us that the solutions are complex.  Kicking a man repeatedly and in a manner deft enough to keep him alive may be complex.  But getting out is as simple as falling forward and, just before you tip over, thrusting one leg forward.  Then doing that over and over till it becomes a habit.

The Germans may have given the world the Audi and the autobahn, but they have banished everything with four wheels and an engine from the streets of Vauban - a model brave new world of a community in the country's south-west, next to the borders with Switzerland and France.

In Vauban, a suburb of the university town of Freiburg, luxuriant beds of brilliant flowers replace what would normally be parking outside its neat, middle- class homes. Instead of the roar of traffic, the residents listen to birdsong, children playing and the occasional jingle of a bicycle bell.

"If you want to have a car here, you have to pay about €20,000 for a space in one of our garages on the outskirts of the district," says Andreas Delleske one of the founders and now a promoter of the Vauban project, "but about 57 per cent of the residents sold a car to enjoy the privilege of living here." As a result, most residents travel by bike or use the ultra-efficient tram service that connects the suburb with the centre of Freiburg, 15 minutes away. If they want a car to go on holiday or to shift things, they hire one or join one of the town's car-sharing schemes.

Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard is set to unveil a prototype of the solar-powered plane he hopes eventually to fly around the world.

The initial version, spanning 61m but weighing just 1,500kg, will undergo trials to prove it can fly at night.

Dr Piccard, who made history in 1999 by circling the globe non-stop in a balloon, says he wants to demonstrate the potential of renewable energies.

He expects initially to make a crossing of the Atlantic in 2012.

The flight would be a risky endeavour. Only now is solar and battery technology becoming mature enough to sustain flight through the night - and then only in unmanned planes.

It's hard to believe that Dr. Sidney Holt is attending his 50th meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) here in Madeira. From that very first meeting he attended in Cambridge in 1959 until this very strange and weird and wacky whaling commission meeting today, he has seen a lifetime of frustrations, blatant greed, hysteria, hypocrisy, profound stupidity, awesome arrogance and incredible ignorance. He has also observed the threads of consistency that has tied every IWC gathering together - ineffectiveness, posturing, bureaucratic nonsense and confusion laid down on a patchwork foundation of grisly slaughter, greed and self-interest.

The IWC has always been and continues to be an insane cruel joke, certainly cruel to the whales and if not for the agonizing suffering of these intelligent and gentle creatures, these annual affairs would be hilarious. Most of these clowns posing as delegates share the same macabre character traits of the infamous Joker. They talk with casual insensitivity about the murder of sentient beings whose brains are larger and more complex than their own. It's like what an annual conference of Nazi concentration camp guards would have been like if Hitler had been victorious.

Concentration camp brothels remain a hushed-up chapter of the Nazi-era horrors. Now a German researcher has probed the dark subject -- and has revealed the meticulous cruelty of the so-called "special buildings."

Kicking them with his boots, the SS soldier drove Margarete W. and the other women prisoners out of the train and onto a truck. "Move the tarpaulin, put the flap down. Everyone get in," he yelled. Through the plastic window in the truck's canvas side, she watched as they drove into a men's camp and stopped in front of a barracks with a wooden fence.

 The women were taken into a furnished room. The barracks were different from the ones Margarete W., then 25, knew from her time at the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. There were tables, chairs, benches, windows, and even curtains. The female overseer informed the new arrivals that they were "now in a prisoners' brothel." They would live well there, the woman said, with good food and drink, and if they did as they were told, nothing would happen to them. Then each woman was assigned a room. Margarete W. moved into No. 13.

The Treaty of Versailles between Germany and the victorious Entente powers was signed 90 years ago this weekend. Can the details of the settlement at the end of a war almost now beyond living memory still have any relevance for us?

Without the events of 11/9 (the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989) and 9/11 (the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001), it might have been easier to suggest that the results of the Paris Peace Conference and the subsequent gatherings that formally concluded the First World War had indeed faded into the background.

Even then, however, the widely held view that Versailles, and the other treaties signed in palaces in the Parisian suburbs in 1919 and 1920, held a key responsibility for the outbreak of a new major war in 1939 and hence for its consequences, might still have offered important reasons for reconsidering their negotiation and results.

Tipped with a sewing machine needle and finished with a tail made from a drinking straw, they looked more like a schoolboy's toy than a terrifying weapon. For Britain's wartime scientists, however, these tiny projectiles were the sharp end of a chilling project to secure victory over the Nazis by bombarding German troops with poisoned darts.

A secret file that details British research to develop the lethal anti-personnel darts, carrying a toxin likely to have been anthrax or ricin, casts rare light on the work that was carried out by the Allies during the Second World War into chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed against Hitler's forces.

The document, released at the National Archives in Kew, London, reveals how scientists at Porton Down in Wiltshire, the site of Britain's top secret weapons laboratory, worked between 1941 and 1944 to perfect the projectiles to ensure the maximum number of casualties and the quickest death for enemy soldiers.

There is new evidence in the debate regarding the 1908 Tunguska event that destroyed 80 million trees in Siberia.

Researchers say that clouds that form at the poles after shuttle launches are due to the turbulent transport of water from shuttle exhaust.

Similar clouds were visible at night long after the Tunguska event.

The Geophysical Research Letters study suggests that an icy comet, rather than a meteor, must have been responsible for the event.

Pop legend Michael Jackson, 50, died in Los Angeles hospital after suffering a suspected cardiac arrest. The singer was rushed to hospital after collapsing in his Holmby Hills home in Los Angeles.

AFP - Michael Jackson died Thursday after suffering a cardiac arrest, sending shockwaves sweeping across the world and tributes pouring in for the tortured music icon revered as the "King of Pop."

Jackson, 50, collapsed at his rented mansion in the exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood of Holmby Hills and was rushed to hospital by paramedics before being pronounced dead at 2:26 pm (2126 GMT).