The eleven Romanian MEPs from the Socialist & Democrats group in the European Parliament issued a statement expressing "serious concern" about the draft report, which they claimed is of poor quality. 

"The publication of the report in its present form could create more problems that it can solve," the MEPs state. 

Since December 2008, Romania's PSD (Social Democrats) party have been part of a grand coalition with the EPP-affiliated PDL (Democratic Liberals), who are close to President Traian Basescu (EurActiv 15/12/09). 

"A situation could be reached whereby both the European Parliament and the Romanian government reject the report in its totality as undemocratic and counter-productive in the fight against corruption," the MEPs warned. 

The reports on the state of play in Bulgaria and Romania in the fields of the judicial reform and the fight against corruption under the so-called Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) will be published on 22 July

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
"Mr Barroso was incapable of leading an independent Commission which held its own against the Council,.and that's the problem. You know, Europe is an institutional triangle: a Commission, a Council and a Parliament. If the President of the Commission is simply the Secretary General of the Council, meaning the governments, European democracy cannot work. And that's my biggest problem with Mr Barroso. Mr Barroso, when he needed to take a position... the Commission has the right to take initiatives without going to the Council for permission, the Council should respond to its initiatives, to launch a debate so that real European politics can emerge...and Mr Barroso did not do that."

Kirsten Ripper
"And who would be the best candidate?"

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
"There are lots, there are lots. There isn't just one best candidate. You could turn to the left. You could start with Mr Joscchka Fischer, or the Danish Social Democrat, Mr Rasmussen, or Mr Monti, Mr Verhofstadt. You also have Mrs Mary Robinson or Chris Patten. You have a choice of possibilities who would be very capable peronsalities to lead an independent Commission. I know there'll be a centre-right majority, but there'll also be a lack of personalities of the same stock as the heads of government."

Kirsten Ripper
"Your preference would be Joschka Fisher?"

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
"My preference, I think Mr Joschka Fisher would be a very good president of the Commission, but I know that he wouldn't have a majority, it's not that.... I mean, we're led to believe that there's only one man in Europe today capable of being the Commission President and that's Mr Barroso, and that's absurd."

Renegade Tory kicked out of party and group as Michal Kaminski is elected leader of the ECR group.

The UK Conservatives have lost the leadership of the new political group that they formed in the European Parliament, after a rebellion by one of their EU-friendly members.

The 55-member anti-federalist European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group was formed by 26 MEPs of the UK Conservatives in June, with 15 MEPs from the Polish Justice and Law party, nine Czech Civic Democrats and another five MEPs from five other countries.

But Edward McMillan-Scott, a UK Conservative MEP since 1984 and a vice-president of the Parliament since 2007, defied his party bosses and stood as an independent candidate for vice-president.

As the ECR's candidate for a Parliament vice-presidency, Polish MEP Michal Kamin´ski of the Justice and Law Party had expected to get elected. When he lost out, the Polish members of the ECR sought revenge in the elections for the group leadership. Kamin´ski was elected group leader ahead of Timothy Kirkhope, leader of the UK Conservative delegation.

McMillan-Scott was elected to a vice-presidency because German centre-right MEPs were trying to prevent German Liberal MEP Silvana Koch-Mehrin from being elected and wanted a 15th candidate to stand for the 14 posts of vice-president.

Koch-Mehrin had annoyed them with what they saw as attempts during the European Parliament elections campaign to hide her poor attendance record.

She also upset male MEPs with a magazine interview in which she claimed that prostitutes flocked to Strasbourg during plenary weeks because of the increased business opportunities.

European Union member states must draw up plans to endure a 60-day gas supply disruption in cold weather conditions, according to a directive proposed by the European Commission on Thursday to strengthen the bloc's energy security.

The directive would also lower the threshold for the commission to declare an EU-wide gas emergency and give it greater authority to co-ordinate a response in such instances, including representing the bloc in dealings with outside countries.

The directive was unveiled amid rising fears that another dispute between Russia and Ukraine over gas payments could boil over into a replay of the January crisis that left thousands across Europe without fuel in the height of winter.

The EU relies on Russia for about a quarter of its gas supplies, some 80 per cent of which flow through Ukraine.

A group of British schoolchildren and their teachers have been quarantined in China after four of the students were hospitalised with suspected swine flu, the Foreign Office said today.

The group of 52, who were travelling as part of a wider group of 278, were confined to their hotel in Beijing as part of Chinese efforts to contain the spread of the virus. They are due to return home on 27 July.

The move comes after another British student was quarantined in China for two days this week after screening on arrival showed him to have a temperature. No illness developed.

China has reported 1,537 cases of swine flu, with no fatalities to date. Some of its measures have been criticised as excessive as Beijing tries to recover some credibility after its handling of the Sars outbreak in 2003.

Italy's health ministry has advised it citizens to take "extra precautions" when travelling to the UK due to the sharp increase in swine flu cases in Britain.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for unity among squabbling conservatives in the lead-up to September's elections. Merkel is relying on Bavarian conservative Horst Seehofer to help put her back in office. 

With only a few short months to go before Germany's federal elections, Chancellor Angela Merkel is leaving no stone unturned as she strives to get her party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), returned to government. This time, she wants to rule without having to form a coalition with the left-wing Social Democrats.

Current polls suggest that she will be able to achieve that goal. Yet to do so, the CDU and Christian Social Union (CSU) - the CDU's sister party in the southern state of Bavaria - would then form a coalition with the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP).

Yet relations between the conservative CDU and CSU, which form a single parliamentary bloc in Berlin, have been strained of late. The CSU has challenged Merkel's position on two major issues: the European Union's Lisbon Treaty and taxes.

Merkel wants Germany to ratify the Lisbon Treaty before the election on September 27 but the CSU - traditionally more euro-skeptic than the CDU - wants German law to be changed first, which would likely delay ratification of the treaty until after the election. The CSU is also demanding a timetable for tax cuts.

The Liberal Democrats are within one percentage point of Labour in tomorrow's ComRes poll for The Independent on Sunday.

As Bulgaria's new parliament convenes this week, Boiko Borissov - a flamboyant, populist wrestler-cum-politician with anti-Turkish, anti-Gypsy tendencies - is poised to become the next prime minister of south-east Europe's second-largest country.

Coming just weeks after the European parliamentary elections, the Bulgarian national elections provided the first test of an incumbent central European government since the onset of the global recession. If Bulgaria's experiences are any indication, the combination of rising unemployment, falling social spending and scepticism over the government's ability to address the economic crisis may present a windfall to parties on the edges of the political mainstream.

an interesting article even if the conclusion is laugh out loud stupid

keep to the Fen Causeway

This week, the American premiere of the German film A Woman in Berlin brings new attention to an issue long considered a taboo in Germany: the mass rape of women by Soviet Red Army soldiers after the fall of Hitler's Third Reich

<...>

Dr. Phillip Kuwert, a senior physician at the University of Greifswald's department of psychotherapy and psychiatry, estimates that about 200,000 children were conceived by native German women raped by Russian soldiers.

So far, Kuwert has interviewed 35 elderly German women who were raped in 1945. The study's main goal is not to offer the victims counseling but to document the long-term impact of rape trauma. Kuwert hopes to finally document these women's stories before all the victims die off.

"They found it very touching, most of them, and important that they get a voice. Even a late voice is better than no voice," he says.

Still, Kuwert chooses his words carefully. Germany has struggled with how to process the Nazis' genocide and terror. And until relatively recently, it was hard for researchers and scientists like Kuwert to look at non-Jewish Germans as victims.

"Before the wartime mass rape in Germany, also the German troops committed a lot of rapes mainly in Eastern Europe. And, of course, there was also a lot of sexualized violence in the concentration camps. I find it very important to mention that, not to come into any kind of doubt that I'm not trying somehow to minimalize the suffering of the people under the German Nazi occupation," he says.

WASHINGTON -- President Obama's top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, acknowledged in a speech on Friday that unemployment and job losses were higher than the administration projected and would rise further this year even as the economy showed signs of recovery.

"This is obviously a major area of concern," he said. But Mr. Summers, defending the president's $787 billion stimulus package of last February against recent criticism from Republicans and some analysts, said rising job losses were "not a basis for concluding that the recovery act is falling short of its goals."

The White House adviser said the two-year stimulus plan of tax cuts and new spending was timed to peak during 2010, with 70 percent of its benefits to be distributed to local governments, businesses and families in the first 18 months. "We are on track to meet that timeline," he said.

Mr. Summers, in what the White House billed as "a progress report" on rescuing the economy, pointed out that other independent forecasters also underestimated job losses. He said no one knew for sure why employers had shed so many workers in this downturn. But he suggested several factors: greater productivity that allowed firms to do the same work with fewer workers, bigger financial pressures on companies, and employers' expectations of a prolonged recession.

Unemployment has soared by a record 281,000 in three months to total 2.38 million, the highest since before New Labour came to power.

Some 7.6 per cent of the workforce is jobless, the highest rate since January 1997, and up by three-quarters-of-a-million on this time last year. The increase over the last quarter was the steepest since the severe recession of 1981.

About 1.6 million people are claiming unemployment benefits. Economists called the data "truly horrible". The West Midlands has become the first British region in the current recession to see its unemployment rate reach double figures: 10.3 per cent.

Young people are bearing the brunt of the pain. Gordon Brown made his political reputation in the 1980s and 1990s railing against the waste of human talent during the Conservatives' rule, yet today one in five 18-to-24 year olds is jobless; 726,000 youngsters are looking for work. That toll will jump dramatically as more school leavers and graduates sign on this summer.

Concern about the economic and social costs of supporting a lost generation of "neets" - those not in employment, education or training schemes - continues to grow. Poignantly, those now leaving school aged 16 and trying to find work or in further education to avoid unemployment will have started primary school in 1997.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Leaders of Japan Inc. believe they have learnt a lesson from the global economic crisis -- namely that the U.S. business model with its eye on short-term gains has failed and it's time to return to longer-term strategies.

Recent remarks by corporate chiefs from companies like Suzuki Motor Corp (7269.T) and Chugai Pharmaceutical Co (4519.T) underscore a desire of Japan's corporate leaders to reject pressure from what they see as short-term interests to concentrate on more sustainable returns.

In one of the most public displays of the current corporate zeitgeist, Osamu Suzuki, who has steered Suzuki for the last 30 years published an essay in February rejecting what he saw as short-term interests tied to earnings.

His views often attract attention, as analysts credit him for having turned his company into a globally-competitive carmaker by making inroads into India decades before it boomed, and expanding revenue more than tenfold.

Arguing against calls from some securities analysts to depreciate the company's factories gradually so that near-term earnings would not suffer as much, Suzuki said the automaker's long-term interests were better served by writing down the cost quickly.

SMEs seeking loans to keep them afloat are facing stricter conditions than earlier this year, with banks favouring larger firms, Erik Sonntag, advisor for entrepreneurship and SMEs at BusinessEurope, told EurActiv in an interview.

Is it getting any easier for companies to access credit?

Yes and no. In our last economic outlook in May, we saw an improvement when it comes to the cost of financing - in terms of interest rates. However, access to credit has become even worse, especially for SMEs. Access has worsened compared to earlier this year. Conditions are now stricter, negotiations are taking longer, and the amounts being loaned are smaller.

So are small firms more likely to go out of business than larger, better established companies?

There is a worry that larger companies might crowd out SMEs. Usually, SMEs essentially depend on bank loans - access to financial markets is very limited. The problem is that due to the whole financial crisis, larger companies might be thinking they can't go to the capital markets, so they are going to banks. If you are a bank and you have a larger company and a small company asking for credit, you will probably hand the money to the larger one if you perceive it as less risky.  

Swedbank and SEB - the leading Swedish banks that dominate the tiny banking markets of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - earned big profits as they fuelled the economic boom that followed European Union accession in 2004.

For Swedbank last year, the Baltic states represented 17 per cent of lending and 25 per cent of operating profit, while the respective figures for SEB were 13 per cent and 12 per cent.

But the countries that formerly fuelled profits at the Swedish banks are now dragging them down. Swedbank and SEB are the most exposed to the Baltic economies suffering the worst downturn in the EU. The Bank of International Settlements estimates that Swedish banks have a potential $80bn exposure to the Baltics, representing 16 per cent of Swedish gross domestic product.

New US residential building picked up in June, rising to its highest level in seven months, thanks to low construction costs and government incentives.

Housing starts jumped by 3.6 per cent last month to an adjusted annual rate of construction of 582,000, commerce department figures showed on Friday. The rise was more than economists expected and was fuelled by a sharp increase in construction of single-family homes. EDITOR'S CHOICELex: US home foreclosures - Jul-17US homebuilder confidence hits 10-month high - Jul-16In depth: US downturn - Mar-13

Friday's results continue a sharp turnaround for home building and signal the stricken housing market may be bottoming out. In April, new construction fell to a 50-year low before rebounding by 17.3 per cent in May.

Many economists, however, see the monthly rise as a mixed blessing. Some argue that renewed building activity is a sign of health in the housing market and the wider economy, but others contend that the overhang of housing inventory needs to be slashed for a recovery to occur.

Green shoots!

There's no such thing as original sin - Elvis Costello

Volkswagen is planning to purchase all of sports carmaker Porsche, which has run into massive financial problems linked to its overly ambitious plan to take control of VW. The attempted takeover, which had been financed using loans, ultimately failed because of the credit crunch and ensuing liquidity problems that almost saw Porsche go bankrupt.

SPIEGEL has obtained information that Volkswagen is planning a complete takeover of beleaguered sports carmaker Porsche in a series of two transactions. The company is planning the imminent purchase of 50 percent of Porsche shares and will purchase the remaining shares in the Stuttgart, Germany-based automobile manufacturer in a second step. Once completed, Porsche will become the 10th brand in the stable of Volkswagen, the world's largest carmaker.

DPA

Porsche headquarters in Stuttgart: VW has won the power struggle between the two companies. VW's move to acquire Porsche follows a power struggle between the companies. Porsche had sought to buy VW through complicated loan transactions that collapsed when the sports carmaker's liquidity dried up as a result of the credit crunch. It has already been reported that Wolfsburg-based VW would purchase 49.9 percent of Porsche, but SPIEGEL has learned it is now planning a complete acquisition in a second purchase of shares.

July 17 (Bloomberg) -- Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest U.S. oil company, may be fined more than $1 billion for "malicious" sabotage of wells to prevent other producers from tapping fields it no longer wanted, the Texas General Land Office said.

Jerry Patterson, commissioner of the land office that oversees oil leases that help fund Texas schools, asked the Texas Railroad Commission to conduct hearings into an alleged 1990s program at Exxon Mobil of plugging abandoned wells with trash, sludge, explosives and cement plugs. The barriers made it impossible for other producers to revive the wells, Patterson said in a statement he gave to Bloomberg News yesterday.

Under Railroad Commission rules, Exxon Mobil could face fines of $10,000 a day per well, Patterson said in the statement, which he plans to release on July 20. He said those penalties could add up to more than $1 billion on wells the company abandoned in 1991 after a disagreement over royalties with the owners, the O'Connor family, a Texas oil dynasty.

Patients should be charged £20 to see a GP in a bid to limit demands placed on the health service, a centre-right think-tank says.

The Social Market Foundation said forcing people to pay a fee for an appointment could help the NHS cope in the tight financial times ahead.

The group said it would not breach the values of the NHS as charges already applied to dentistry and prescriptions

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

From a newly minted PhD, via e-mail:

   I ran into another Harvard student who recently had a chat with a senior economics faculty member who is telling students the following anecdote. Apparently the professor is involved in some way with the American Economics Review.

    The AER has a backlog of two to three years between when papers are submitted and when they appear in print. Some of the papers currently in the pipeline, submitted before the crisis broke, predicted that the U.S. or global economy would remain prosperous and stable for many years to come. The professor wrote to all of these authors, asking them if they would like to withdraw their articles or at least modify them. All refused.

    Consequently, for something like the next three years, the AER will interleave articles explaining why the crisis occurred with articles explaining why the crisis could not occur.

Liquidity, as frequent readers know, is a fascinating topic to Zero Hedge. Liquidity black holes, as one would imagine, is doubly so. However, when a firm like State Street, which is at the heart of the multi-trillion dollar stock lending skeleton of the market discusses both of these concepts, one must pay attention. The below report is a State Street presentation from 2003 discussing what happens in those episodes when liquidity disappears and how that impairs all other axes of proper market function.

Of notable attention is the following section of the report:

   The presence of liquidity problems in the largest of markets suggests that liquidity is not about size, but diversity.

    In an illiquid market the same size of sell order will push the market down further than in a liquid market. Imagine a market where there is a large number of market participants, using the exact same information set, in the exact same way, to trade the exact same financial instruments. When one buys they all do and vice versa. Market participants would face volatility and illiquidity when they came to buy or sell. This would not be reduced by having more players, only by increasing the amount of diversity in their actions. (Indeed, on these assumptions it is possible to show that the bigger the market was, the less liquid it would be). Now imagine a market with just two players but with opposite objectives or opposite ways of defining value. When one wants to buy the other wants to sell. This market is small, but the price impact of trading would be low and liquidity would be high.

The referenced diversity is a crucial concept in today's market where an unprecedented amount of market trades occurs in undiverse dark and HFT pools. As Goldman is becoming the primary conduit of trading (whether principal or agency) in virtually all markets, the risk of a massive liquidity drain becomes exponentially larger, and the risk of an exogenous event approaches LTCM and Lehman levels. It is this key risk driver that regulators should be focusing on, instead of chasing and attempting to punish the perpetrators of the most recent market crash (we are not saying they should not, but they should prioritize and now should focus on what is most critical to maintaining a functioning market topology). The Too Big To Fail is a psychological construct which however does not have parallels in the market. Once Goldman reaches a tipping point of eliminating liquidity diversity, the potential fallout escalates. This is precisely the realm in which any x sigma events will occur in the future. And nobody seems to care.

Official "thinking" seems to be: "If Goldman goes down, we are all dead anyway."  That is likely to be true for the existing Wall Street system---at a minimum.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged U.S. support in the global fight on terrorism Saturday, as she met with victims of last year's terror attacks in India's commercial city, Mumbai.

Clinton also said the United States is not pressuring India to improve relations with Pakistan. She said it is up to the two sides to determine how to go forward with peace talks.

The U.S. secretary of state spoke to reporters in Mumbai, where Indian officials believe terrorists linked to Pakistan killed 166 people during an attack in November.

Secretary Clinton indicated that Pakistan has done much more in recent months to deal with home-grown terrorism, and she suggested action may soon be taken to bring those responsible for the Mumbai attacks to justice.

Clinton is on her first trip to India as secretary of state, and is expected to push for deeper ties with the emerging economy during her three-day visit.

Two French security advisers seized in Somalia will be tried under Sharia law, an official from their captors, the Islamic al-Shabab militia, says.

The unnamed spokesman said they would be tried for spying and "conspiracy against Islam".

The two, who were training government troops, were kidnapped by gunmen in a Mogadishu hotel on Tuesday and later handed over to al-Shabab insurgents.

Al-Shabab and its allies control much of southern Somalia.

The al-Shabab official said no date had been set for the trial of the two men.

WASHINGTON, Jul 18 (IPS) - The U.S. should proceed cautiously in its engagement strategy with Iran, while moving quickly toward final-status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, according to a new report by a team of veteran diplomats and Middle East policymakers.

The policy paper, released Wednesday by the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), an organisation that promotes U.S. diplomatic engagement in the Middle East, expresses support for President Barack Obama's ambitious Middle East strategy.

Entitled "After Cairo and Iran: Next Steps for U.S. Diplomacy in the Middle East", it recommends continuing attempts to engage Iran, but shifting primarily to back-channel rather than public talks in response to the recent political turmoil following June's disputed presidential elections.

The report also advocates accelerating the 2002 "road map" for Israeli-Palestinian peace by convening an international conference that would set the stage for final-status negotiations, sponsoring unofficial "Track Two" talks between Israel and the Arab states, and pursuing an Israeli-Syrian agreement at the same time as an Israeli-Palestinian one.

The IPF policy paper was produced by a task force of 15 veteran Middle East hands, including Samuel Lewis and Edward Walker, both former U.S. ambassadors to Israel, former ambassador to Egypt Robert Pelletreau, and former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) executive director Thomas Dine.

Shut out of power across the capital and facing a 60-vote Democratic majority in the Senate, Republican candidates are working to balance the scales in at least one vital category -- campaign cash.

Reports filed last week with the Federal Election Commission showed GOP hopefuls in some key Senate contests posting strong fundraising totals for the second quarter of 2009, putting them in position to try to halt their party's recent losing streak.

Even achieving rough parity in campaign cash would be something of a victory for the GOP, given that Democrats control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. But that Democratic dominance may have motivated Republican donors to open their wallets.

"Democrats are closer to a one-party monopoly in this town than they have been since Lyndon Johnson was president," said Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who is running to succeed retiring Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.). That dynamic "helps in all aspects of the campaign," Blunt said, including fundraising.

A logistical complication persists in the joint peace mission of the United Nations and the African Union in Darfur: the 17,000 troops continue to have to manage in the remote Sudanese region without helicopter support. 

A year and a half ago the United Nations and the African Union deployed troops in Darfur to establish peace and protect the people in the troubled province in western Sudan. Since 2003, the ongoing tribal conflict has taken thousands of lives; according to some sources more than one hundred thousand people have now died in Darfur.

Since its arrival, the UNAMID force has been waiting for twenty four helicopters. In an interview with Deutsche Welle after a recent visit to Khartoum, Susana Malcorra, head of the Department of Field Support at the UN in New York, blamed the high demand of helicopters resulting from the war against terror for the shortage elsewhere: "It seems like the need of helicopters has become a big ticket item in Afghanistan and Iraq", she said. "It's not only UNAMID that is short of helicopters. We are also behind in Chad and now we have a question for additional helicopters in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So it's an overall problem."

Darfur "no priority"

Lauren Gelfand, Africa editor with Jane's Defence Weekly in London, is nevertheless convinced that plenty of helicopters are available around the world. She says Africa is simply not a high enough priority for the UN member states that own them. "I think that there is a misconception about helicopters. They are assets of the individual countries. There is not a big pool of helicopters, like a lending library, where you can just get and keep them then for a couple of months for your operation."

Susana Malcorra stresses that mobility is an essential issue in Darfur: "The helicopters," she says, "give us the possibility to move our forces at a speed that otherwise is not possible. This is critical for the mandate UNAMID has. I always hear the force commander saying: we ware deploying to meet the numbers, but it's not only quantity that matters, it's also quality, what we can do with our forces on the ground."

URUMQI, China -- As this shattered regional capital sorts through the corpses from China's deadliest civil unrest in decades, another loss has become apparent: faith in the government's ability to secure the peace and quell mass disturbances. In many neighborhoods, police officers remained absent for hours as the carnage unfolded, witnesses say.

The bloodletting here on July 5, in which ethnic Uighurs pummeled and stabbed ethnic Han to death, was just the latest episode in a nationwide upswing in large-scale street violence that had already prompted concerned officials in Beijing to look for new ways to defuse such outbursts. In all of the recent cases, not only were officials and security forces unable to contain the violence, but average people clashed with the police en masse -- a sign of the profound distrust of local authority throughout much of China.

"In the last several years, the level of violence and speed with which these incidents can turn violent has increased," said Murray Scot Tanner, an analyst of Chinese security. "It raises a very, very serious question: To what extent are the Chinese people afraid of their police anymore?"

In parts of the Uighur quarter and in poorer, mixed areas of south Urumqi, young Uighur men with sticks, knives and stones went on a bloody rampage for about five hours while police officers remained mostly absent, according to interviews with dozens of residents. In some areas where police officers arrived but were outnumbered by rioters, the officers stood around or fled, witnesses said.

SAN DIEGO -- They move north in rickety fishing boats, often overloaded and barely seaworthy, slipping through the darkness and hidden from the watchful radar of American patrols.

Along beaches north of here, the migrants from Mexico and beyond scramble ashore, in groups of a dozen or two, and dash past stunned beachgoers, sometimes even leaving behind their boats, known as pangas. Drug smugglers, too, take this sea route, including one last month found paddling a surfboard north with a duffel bag full of marijuana on it.

As the land border with Mexico tightens with new fencing and technology, the authorities are seeing a sharp spike in the number of people and drugs being moved into the United States by sea off the San Diego coast.

Law enforcement authorities in the United States said the shift demonstrated the resolve of smugglers to exploit the vastness of the sea, the difficulty in monitoring it, and the desperation of migrants willing to risk crossing it.

"It's like spillover from a dam," said Cmdr. Guy Pearce, who oversees the antismuggling effort for the Coast Guard in San Diego.

The reform movement and its allies among pragmatic conservatives have developed a narrative about Khomeinist Iran. They allege that it is ultimately democratic, and that the will of the people is paramount. It is popular sovereignty that authorizes political change and greater political and cultural openness. Precisely because democracy and popular sovereignty are the key values for this movement, the alleged stealing of the June 12 presidential elections by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei for his candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is intolerable. A crime has been committed, in their eyes. A social contract has been violated. The will of the people has been thwarted.

The hard liners hold a competing and incompatible view of the meaning of Khomeini's 1979 revolution. They discount the element of elections, democracy and popular sovereignty. They view these procedures and institutions as little more than window-dressing. True power and authority lies with the Supreme Leader and ultimately all important decisions are made by him. Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Misbah-Yazdi is an important exponent of this authoritarian view of the Islamic Republic. The Leader in this view is a kind of philosopher-king, who can overrule the people at will. The hard liners do not believe that the election was stolen. But they probably cannot get very excited about the election in the first place. Khamenei and his power and his appointments and his ability to intervene to disqualify candidates, close newspapers, and overrule parliament are what is important. From a hard line point of view, the election is what Khamenei says it is and therefore cannot be stolen.

Rafsanjani desired in his sermon to lay a Khomeinist foundation for the more democratic view. He began by underlining his own role in the revolution and the establishment of the Republic, and his position as a witness to the values of Khomeini. He said Khomeini discouraged the anti-Shah activists of the 1960s and 1970s from terrorism. Instead, he urged a direct appeal to the people in their villages and mosques, and responsiveness to their desires. He represents Khomeini as saying, if the people are with us, we have everything.

he report states that the [breeding] farm has with biosecurity measures in place and its own restocking system [i.e. breeding]; a 4.5-hectares area. There are no other animal species in the farm. The distribution of the animals is as follows: 516 sows, seven hogs, 2,900 castrated pigs, 58 young sows and 2,105 sucking pigs.

The report adds that between 7 and 9 June 2009, two workers of the farm showed flu signs but they did not consult a doctor nor made diagnostic tests. The farm has its own restocking system. The last entry of animals occurred in July 2008.

Argentina declares health emergency | Buenos Aires Herald | 20 July 2009

The flu strain has killed 137 people in the South American country during the Southern Hemisphere winter and the government has closed schools and urged Argentines to avoid crowded places to halt its spread.

"The contingency plan ... allows for an increase in testing in pig farms and in slaughter houses in order to guarantee early detection," the government's Official Gazette said....

Earlier this month, SENASA officials said workers at a pig farm in Buenos Aires province were suspected of having passed the new strain onto the animals. That added weight to the theory that pigs can be infected by humans. Another pig herd later tested positive for the virus although Friday's statement only made mention of the first case.

Argentina on Alert | France24 | 18 July 2009

Earlier, the World Health Organisation said it would stop providing regular updates on the number of people affected worldwide, as the virus continues its march.

The WHO said in an information note on its website Friday that it would focus on regular updates from newly-affected countries, in order to keep track of the global progress of the A(H1N1) virus.

OIE (Organización Mundial de Sanidad Animal / World Organisation for Animal Health), Argentina

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jul 18 (IPS/IFEJ) - The southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, a pioneer in participatory budgets and environmental policies, and habitual host of the enormous World Social Forum, has returned to the international stage.

Chosen as one of the 12 sites for the 2014 football World Cup, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul state, with a population of 1.4 million, faces a dilemma.

In August, local residents will vote on whether to allow the construction of apartment buildings in the Ponta do Melo zone on the banks of the Guaíba River. The referendum will take place in a context of major plans, including sports stadium expansion and road construction, to better receive fans for the football championship.

But some of the projects are facing legal challenges because of their potential for harming the environment. The Porto Alegre Fundamental Law establishes that the areas along the Guaíba River - actually an estuary and also referred to as a lake - are permanent protected zones.

CAPE TOWN, Jul 17 (IPS) - Commercial farmers sometimes fail at organic farming because they switch over too quickly, ditching all chemicals, which is as traumatic for the soil as "a drug addict going cold turkey".

This is how Cornelius Oosthuizen, the head of the South African Biofarm Institute's management team, explains why there are relatively few organic farming success stories in South Africa. The South African Biofarm Institute promotes sustainable and profitable biological and organic farming.

"Failure occurs when a farmer who has been using chemicals on a farm for a long time suddenly switches to 100 percent organic farming. If you have 1,000 ha of land, you cannot start monoculture organic farming on all the land. One first has to farm biologically.

"If you suddenly take away all the chemicals from land that has been chemically farmed, it experiences trauma. It is like a drug addict that goes cold turkey."

The soil has to be primed - the micro and macro minerals have to be brought into balance; the ecological system has to be reinstated (there has to be robust insect and worm activity in the soil); and soil erosion has to be countered in various ways. With biological farming, non-harmful chemicals are used while organic farming does not permit the use of any kind of chemicals.

This is one of the factors that need to be addressed if South African farmers are to make inroads into organic farming which is not only lucrative but will address the African continent's perennial problem with food security.

DURBAN, Jul 17 (IPS) - Nigeria's gas flare-out date has once again been extended - this time to 2011. The decision follows 25 years of political procrastination by the federal government and illegal behaviour on the part of major oil multinationals engaged in flaring associated gas (AG), the byproduct of oil production in the Niger Delta.

Nigeria is famous for its trademark low-sulphur crudes such as Bonny Light; the delta's oil is the source of 80 percent of the federal budget and 95 percent of export earnings. In 2008, Nigeria, the world's eighth largest oil exporter, produced an average of 2.1 million barrels of oil per day.

Forty-four percent of this output was exported to the United States; other importers include Europe (25 percent of Nigeria's output), India (11 percent), Brazil (7 percent), and South Africa (4 percent).

Apart from its status as a seemingly bottomless barrel of oil, Nigeria also has the world's seventh largest reserves of natural gas, possessing proven reserves of 184 trillion cubic feet and estimates suggest the country could possess as much as 600 trillion cubic feet.

Oil has generated billions of dollars in profits, making Nigeria one of Africa's leading economies, but there have been few benefits for the 30 million people who live in the oil-rich Niger Delta.

They lack adequate basic infrastructure like schools, clinics and potable water, and many of the better-paying jobs in the industry are held by foreigners or Nigerians from elsewhere in the country.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy made the call for a global environmental organization after a working lunch at the French consulate in New York City with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, where the two took part in wide-ranging discussions on global issues, with climate change topping the agenda.

Speaking on French television after the meeting, Sarkozy called for new action on environmental issues, which were a major part of discussions at this month's G8 summit in Italy. Sarkozy didn't give any indication of how he thought this new global organization should be laid out.

"We will fight, hand in hand, a battle against the consequences of climate change. We must create a global organization on the environment," he added.

A garden gnome giving the Nazi salute has landed a German artist in trouble with the authorities in Nuremberg.

Prosecutors are investigating whether the gnome, which went on show in one of the city's galleries, breaks the strict law banning Nazi symbols and gestures.

The Bavarian city is particularly sensitive about the Nazi era because Adolf Hitler used it for big rallies and leading Nazis went on trial there.

The artist, Ottmar Hoerl, says his gnomes poke fun at the Nazis.

"I'm astonished that a single garden gnome, in what is for me an obscure gallery in Nuremberg, has unleashed such a public discussion because of an anonymous denunciation by someone," Mr Hoerl said.

CAIRO, Jul 16 (IPS) - Egyptian courts have handed down unprecedented numbers of death sentences in recent months, most of them for violent crime. "Two hundred and thirty death sentences in six months", read the Jun. 24 headline of independent daily Al- Dustour. "Fifty in the last week alone".

The most high-profile case has been that of Hisham Talaat Mustafa, a high- ranking member of the ruling National Democratic Party, convicted of conspiring in the murder of Lebanese pop singer Suzanne Tamim a year ago in Dubai. On Jun. 25 Mustafa and an accomplice were sentenced to death.

The verdict was quickly approved by the Grand Mufti, Ali Gomaa. Under Egyptian law all capital sentences must be approved by the Grand Mufti, a state-appointed religious authority.

On Jun. 13, 24 men were sentenced to death after clashes in a land dispute in the Delta governorate Wadi Natroun last year led to the death of 11 people. On Jun. 17, a metal worker found guilty of murdering two female university students on the outskirts of Cairo last year was given the capital sentence.

The following day, another six people were given the death penalty for the murder of two colleagues in the urban governorate Giza. And on Jun. 21, 11 Bedouin people in the Sinai Peninsula were sentenced to death for killing the head of a rival clan.

Again, on Jun. 30, seven defendants received the death penalty for the killing of 13 people in clashes in a land dispute in the Delta city Benha.

French police say a woman has died after being hit by a Tour de France official on a motorcycle who was helping to supervise the race.

The woman was struck Saturday as she tried to cross the road in Alsace in eastern France during the 14th stage of the Tour, a 199km route from Colmar to Besancon.

Commander Christophe Blanc told France Info radio that the motorcycle driver could not avoid hitting the woman. The driver fell off his bike, which then hit and injured two other people. Their lives are not in danger.

On Friday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that U.S. and Mexican agents nabbed Robert Wainwright living the high life south of the border.  Wainwright, arrested in Zamora this week, was wanted for allegedly dumping steel mill waste in an Indiana wetland while working as a manager for Sterling Material Services in Lake County.

Based on the EPA's Wanted poster, Wainwright is a portly 66-year-old with a scar above his left eye. A convicted child molester who was also found guilty of firearms violations in 2007, Wainwright fled the country while the Northern Indiana Environmental Crimes Task Force was investigating his alleged violations of the Clean Water Act.

Cash machines offer an ever-growing menu of services beyond merely dispensing money. For tampering criminals, this now includes a squirt of pepper spray in the face .

The extreme measure is the latest in South Africa's escalating war against armed robbers who target banks and cash delivery vans. The number of cash machines blown up with explosives has risen from 54 in 2006 to 387 in 2007 and nearly 500 last year.

The technology uses cameras to detect people tampering with the card slots. Another machine then ejects pepper spray to stun the culprit while police response teams race to the scene.

But the mechanism backfired in one incident last week when pepper spray was inadvertently inhaled by three technicians who required treatment from paramedics.

His father was a policeman who could never have afforded the fees. But for a young David Lyscom, winning a scholarship to a private school was the key that unlocked the door to his future success

On leaving Latymer school in London, he joined the Foreign Office, rose to become an ambassador and put his own children through Marlborough public school - and now champions the system as the new head of the Independent Schools Council (ISC).

"If I hadn't had it, I would not be where I am today," he says. "It opened doors that I don't think would have been opened otherwise."

Former U.S. Secretary of State remembers his eminent Soviet counterpart

By Henry Kissinger

Andrei Gromyko and I were sometimes adversaries and sometimes partners. I had enormous respect for his competence, for his dedication. And with the passage of time I developed great affection for him. He was a man who was always prepared, who always knew his subject. I found him totally reliable in his assertions. When he was asked by his government to change a previous position he did so with enormous pain but with extreme ability.

We worked together in a complex period. When the administration in which I served came to office, the crisis in Czechoslovakia - the movement of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia - was six months old. The Cuban missile crisis was still within vivid memory, and so we were in a succession of crises piling one on top of the other.

I'm sure, on the Soviet side there were similar examples of crises that, in the Soviet view, were generated by the United States. We were involved in the Vietnam War at that time and our country was divided on whether the administration was really dedicated to peace.

Clive Davis, who does not allow comments on his brilliant blog, draws attention to this article by Douglas Bailey in The Boston Globe with the self-explanatory heading: "Got a comment? Keep it to yourself."

<snip>

 although I can see why The Guardian did not allow comments on Cherie Booth's article today, which begins:

When the International Criminal Court began in 2002, there was a widespread hope that those guilty of appalling crimes against humanity would finally be brought to justice.

This was made in our garden today with the help of two neighbour's boys. I stayed in the shade. That is what executive producers do.

You can't be me, I'm taken

NEW YORK (Reuters) - French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy sang at a concert in New York to commemorate Nelson Mandela's 91st birthday -- the first time she has sung in public since marrying French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Dressed in black trouser suit, Bruni-Sarkozy strummed guitar alongside former Eurythmics musician Dave Stewart as they performed a duet on Saturday night, singing a slower version of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" while the French president smiled and clapped sitting in the audience.

After several months of focusing on her family, her garden and inspiring young people, Mrs. Obama is stepping into more wonkish terrain. She is toughening her message and talking more openly about influencing public policy as she works to integrate her efforts more closely with those of policy makers in the West Wing.

In June, Mrs. Obama traveled to San Francisco with Melody C. Barnes, the president's domestic policy adviser, for the start of the administration's initiative to promote volunteerism.

A week later, she went to a Washington clinic with the director of the Health Resources and Services Administration to announce the release of stimulus money for clinics. This month, her policy director joined a new interagency working group, including health, agriculture and housing officials, that will develop policy, legislation and public outreach to combat obesity. ...

Mrs. Obama's advisers say this is a natural progression. After settling her family into the White House, the first lady could more easily turn to the garden and then a discussion of obesity, the importance of preventive care and corresponding government policies and legislation, they say.

The shift also coincides with Mrs. Obama's decision in June to choose Ms. Sher, her longtime friend, to replace Jackie Norris as her chief of staff. At the time of that announcement, Ms. Sher, who was Mrs. Obama's boss at the University of Chicago Medical Center, was working on health care issues as an associate counsel to the president.