Tens of thousands of unexploded Allied aerial bombs from World War II are still lurking underground in German cities. The treacherous delay-action bombs in particular pose a growing threat because their detonators have corroded to the point where they have become too dangerous to defuse.

A good three hours after he took off from England, Henry Chandler had a beautiful view of the Brandenburg region of Germany. From the cockpit of his Boeing B-17, he could see the Havel River in front of him and, to his right behind the aircraft, a light haze over Berlin. Within a few minutes, the 25-year-old pilot was gazing down at the town of Oranienburg from an altitude of some 6,000 meters (20,000 feet).

OAS_RICH('Middle2'); Chandler gave the order to open the bomb bays.

This was on Thursday, March 15, 1945. The pilot was commanding one of the 612 aircraft of the US Eighth Air Force, which was flying a mission against Oranienburg that day. He dropped 11 bombs on the small town, each weighing 500 kilos (1,100 pounds). In the 45 minutes between 2:51 and 3:36 p.m., a total of 4,977 explosive bombs and 713 incendiary bombs rained down from the sky.

But it was fun, 2 pints of a 5.8% brew tends to mellow your view of the world in general. I spoke to a home brewing guy, who'd helped design the beer, and it sounded interesting.

Earlier, I'd been to some pubs in a very smart part of town, basically an area absolutely perfect for having serious real ale pubs. But these weren't. Oh, they sold "real ale", but it was obvious that they had no real understanding or appreciation of beer as anything other than a niche product to put on the bar. It was poorly kept and I was left wondering why they bothered.

Real Ale need attention and care, but if you look after it your pub will be full. As was evidenced by the pub where the beer was launched, pretty full from early on a tuesday. But if you don't, then your pub will be unloved, as were the others. It's very sad, cos these bars are a great opportunity going to waste.

however I had to leave early after just two pints cos I had another brewery experience this morning. Just a "getting to know you" trip to a place just down the road from me, but hopefully it'll be worthwhile down the road

keep to the Fen Causeway

Next week Nato defence ministers meet in Brussels, reportedly to start planning an Afghan army "retraining mission" next year. Start planning? What have they been doing for over a decade? When will spades be called spades and retreats retreats?

Afghanistan has become another war of the Spanish succession, its cause long forgotten by the opponents but an unending parade of pride, money, heroism and national prestige. It is no longer a war of retribution for 9/11, no longer a war of democratic nation building. It is merely a place where soldiers are sent by politicians to pretend to win, even as they die.

The one straw at which ministers and generals will grasp is that as long as the war lasts, it helps them lobby for money. Ever since Nato lost its reason for existing, its task has been to find a purpose. It has dragged out the insane Afghan conflict for 11 years. Why stop now? In the one battle that matters to a modern army - the battle for resources - the Taliban is not an enemy but an ally.

Guardian - Seamus Milne - Ed Miliband must move further and faster from New Labour

Miliband's attack on corporate predators and a broken model of neoliberal capitalism has of course been richly vindicated in the past year, as the Libor rate-rigging scandal followed the exposure of banks' mis-selling of financial products - even if his "responsible capitalism" slogan is scarcely going to inspire and Labour's opportunity for using G4S's spectacular failure at the Olympics to expose the outrage of outsourcing was undermined by the fact that security in Manchester this week is being run by none other than G4S.

But plenty of other senior Labour figures don't agree with him, either about the failure of the neoliberal model or the need to break with New Labour politics that depended on it. The Blairite diehards grouped around the Lord Sainsbury-financed Progress faction, for instance, may be in retreat and are ostensibly loyal to "our leader, Ed Miliband".
[....]
The journey away from New Labour is in fact in its early stages. As this week in Manchester has showed, Britain's main opposition party remains hollowed out, its conference stage-managed, its policymaking procedures opaque and its internal democracy limited. The professional mannequins who run the party machine still dominate the working-class voices that have been all but squeezed out of political life outside the trade unions. However, when it comes to the central economic choices, Ed Balls remains sceptical about Miliband's call for a new economic model and resistant to anything that might threaten the interests of the City of London.

John Harris reveals the callous hypocrisy in Labour's stance on welfare, effectively abandoning the poor.

So, there you go. Vote Tory, and you get a social security crackdown with a budgetary target. Vote Labour and you get a social security crackdown without a target.

Makes you feel better, doesn't it ?

Liam Byrne always was one of Blair's most gleefully cruel  right wing putzes, that he's in the Shadow cabinet reveals much about Labour's failure to shake off the mistakes of the past

keep to the Fen Causeway

To make matters worse, the father of German unity and the ardent advocate of the single currency now stands accused of causing the deepening euro crisis, while his tumultuous private life is likely to be the subject of an upcoming book.

"Reunification is not only one of the underlying causes of the euro crisis, it is also one of the reasons behind our inability to solve it," Wolfgang Münchau, one of Germany's leading economic analysts, said this week. "This is exactly the tragedy of Helmut Kohl: with his great political coup of German unity, he sowed the seeds for the destruction of his greatest political dream of European unity."

Some analysts argue forcibly that Mr Kohl was so blinded by his political obsession with European unity that he pressed ahead with an ill-advised single currency that has plunged the Continent into crisis.

Considering the alleged "bravery" of our tabloid press in exposing the sexual shenanigans of minor celebrities, their willingness to back down shows them as the bullying cowards they are.

The BBC, his employer, has not covered itself with glory. Its cancelling of a programme revealing his proclivities, its denial of any knowledge of his behaviour, its protestations that no such behaviour happened on its premises; all have been revealed to have short-sighted self interest and are unravelling. It'll be interesting if anyone gets blamed.

Anyway, there are a lot of articles about this, a lot of them refreshingly mentioning Jimmy Page's own preference for children; this is a good 'un.

Guardian - Suzanne Moore - Liking young girls is not a preference, it's a perversion

Jimmy Savile, laid out in state in Leeds, revered as a great eccentric, gave a lot of us the creeps for decades. Women are now telling us how he raped them when they were children. We say in our jaded way: "Well, really, who knew?" Lots of people, as far back as 1973. Either the rumours could not be printed as "the girls" would not identify themselves, or he scuppered them by threatening to pull his work for "charidee". What if a few "girls" got a quick one from a superstar DJ? That's a small price to pay for the amount of money Savile raised for Stoke Mandeville, isn't it?

Anyway it's just what happened at the time. Not all of it was that glamorous, "I'm with the band" stuff. Jimmy Page was teaching a 14-year-old the tricks of the trade. The late, great John Peel was getting married for the first time to "an underage girl" he claimed had lied about her age. And I was being groped in the store cupboard by a wheezing shop owner. It was the price you paid for a Saturday job and we mostly avoided him. It was probably our own fault anyway for being vaguely female and wearing those sexy supermarket overalls. When I did meet Pamela Des Barres, top Led Zeppelin groupie, I found hers a sad ambition and was glad to be of another generation. She had to kid herself she was a muse, until, of course, Page replaced her with an actual kid.

Liking "young girls", never "children", was just a preference in a "gentlemen prefer blondes" way. I say no: this is not a preference, it is a perversion. It was in the 70s, and it is now, and I don't know what men my age are playing at defending this behaviour. Would they want their daughters marrying a Bill Wyman? I sat aghast as Michael Grade and David Hepworth were interviewed on Channel 4 News. Wasn't it all so louche then, what with Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13-year-old bride, and didn't every "girl" dream of being on Top of the Pops? You just couldn't move for "groupies". Savile is accused among other things of abusing children in an approved school in Staines. Rock'n'roll?

I knew you'd want to read it here first...

You can't be me, I'm taken

All other gatherings planned for Saturday have also been banned. The Interior Ministry (MUP) made its decision based on security assessments.

Earlier in the day Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Irinej urged the authorities to ban the parade, and an exhibition, deemed to be insulting to Christians.

The exhibition, dubbed "Ecce Homo", and the gay parade were planned as part of the week-long Belgrade Pride 2012.

ECB president Mario Draghi famously deemed the euro "irreversible"; he would do whatever is necessary to preserve it. But what Draghi sees as necessary will eventually be seen as intolerable in creditor countries like Germany. Once Draghi starts monetizing Spanish debt, Germany and other wealthy countries will view the euro's costs as greater than its benefits.

...

Do you think many investors would hold Spanish bonds while whole regions were threatening to secede, fighting a central government that might morph into a military dictatorship? Or that in this scenario Germany would tolerate staying in a euro collateralized by Spanish bonds? I don't think so.

Germany will watch as all of this unfolds and realize that Spain's austerity promises will be broken. The ECB will be left holding hundreds of billions of Spanish debt, with no possible exit and constant pressure to continue monetizing Spanish debt. It will be then that the drive to exit the euro will pick up speed.

US coal exports to Europe soar

US coal exports rose 24 per cent - hitting a record of 66.2m short tons - in the first half of the year, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Sales of US coal have been booming in Europe as power generators there ditch more expensive natural gas in favour of coal.

More than half the US exports, which represented about 13 per cent of US production, went to Europe.

End of the line for cheap labour

The rows of rectangular capsules lined up in a factory in Dongguan in southern China look like sleeping compartments for astronauts. The 24 Japanese-made knitting machines in the factory of Hong Kong-based Milo's Knitwear will soon be joined by four more. In total, the machines cost the family-owned company $1.8m.

A factory with neat rows of machines and just two workers is the antithesis of the typical image of Chinese manufacturing. At other facilities in the industrial province of Guangdong, just across the border from Hong Kong, thousands of workers are typically hunched over their work stations making everything from iPhones to running shoes.

But the automation on display at this factory is emblematic of a new industrial revolution in China driven by the changing nature of the labour force: the three-decade old one-child policy has led to a shortage of labour; competition for workers is so fierce that employers have had to dole out raises in the high teens annually to retain them; and many youngsters increasingly prefer working in China's restaurants and stores to the tedium of making widgets. The labour shortage is likely to worsen because China is ageing fast. Less than 20 per cent of the population is under 14, down from almost a quarter a decade ago, according to the World Bank.

Four years late, but I'll take it.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

Maybe it is not evident to non-Americans what a travesty that proposal is. Every single kid in the country either grew up on Sesame Street or "remembers" that they did. And it's not little kids, either--the show started in 1969, so the start of the Sesame Street generation is now in their forties, which is well into the voting population.

The angry old white guys in the GOP have really done it now...

It won't air here in Finland until later this evening, but it appears both the political pundits and the polls have given Round 1 to Mittens as the clear favorite. Hard to believe. And surely disappointing news.

Could we now hear something contrary to this, and more encouraging from our stateside posters? Please.