MALIA, Greece: Even in a sea of tourists, it is easy to spot the Britons here on the northeast coast of Crete, and not just from the telltale pallor of their sun-deprived northern skin.

They are the ones, the locals say, who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases. They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan: drinking themselves into oblivion.

"They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit," the mayor of Malia, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview. "It is only the British people - not the Germans or the French."

PRAGUE, Aug 23 (IPS) - The coinciding of military confrontation between Russia and Georgia and the 40th anniversary of the brutal crushing of the 'Prague Spring' in 1968 in what was Czechoslovakia has triggered a debate on whether a comparison between the two events is justified.

As Czech and Slovak leaders held solemn ceremonies in Prague and Bratislava to mark the historic Aug. 21, 1968, the Czech leaders were conspicuously divided in their views on the conflict between the great power Russia and its tiny neighbour Georgia.

Czechoslovakia split peacefully in 1993 into the Czech and Slovak republics, on the heels of the fall of the Berlin Wall that paved the way for parliamentary democracy in the country.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus has strongly criticised Georgia. Klaus, together with eminent writer Vaclav Havel and his Social Democrat counterpart Milos Zeman is recognised as one of the three most important Czech politicians of the 1990s, and the last of them to remain active.

Klaus argues that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's "fatal" actions against the separatist region of South Ossetia were to blame for the conflict.

The German military attache in Moscow described the Russian military response in Georgia as "appropriate" in an internal document, according to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

"The extent of the use of military force by the Russian side appears -- seen from here and despite reports to the contrary from Georgia and the picture conveyed by the media -- not inappropriately high," Brigadier General Heinz G Wagner wrote on Aug. 11.

 

The German Foreign Ministry said it did not comment on internal documents.

  

According to the FAZ report, the general said some three days after the outbreak of hostilities that Russia had no choice but to react to the Georgian military action in South Ossetia.

  

The Russian peacekeeping forces stationed in the breakaway Georgian region "were not in a position, given their weapons and equipment, to defend themselves effectively or even to resist," the general wrote.

A fire started at 8:45 has forced a shut down at the plant and the activation of the Nuclear Emergency Plan in Tarragona, according to the CSN.  A problem in the electric generator appears to be the cause of the fire. The alert was cancelled at 10:30.  "All security systems have performed according to plan and have not been affected.  Right now the plant is off and stable", says the report.

The Asociación Nuclear Ascó - Vandellòs (ANAV), [i.e. Endesa] which runs the plant is working to determine the origin and evaluate the damage.  ...

...CSN explained that the fire was produced by the "heating of some component in the electric generator".

However, Greenpeace and Ecologistas en Accion .... have asked for the cancellation of the exploitation permit and the paralization of the plants
Asco I, Asco II and Vandellos II run by ANAV, due to the cummulative number of accidents they have.

A plant with diverse incidents
Last July....
Last April... a level 2 escape that forced a local evacuation.

In May 2007, CSN president call Endesa executives to demand explanations about the triple number of incidents than in other nuclear plants.  That same year, the plant was shut down for four months due to a severe malfunction in the refrigeration system.

There are drawings and location map here: http://tinyurl.com/5rkvqy  

http://www.foronuclear.org/ is the big nuclear players PR page and has good info about who they are.

P.S.  The CSN is at least ineffective and always late to take appropriate measures, but the courts have ordered a fine between €9-22 million against Endesa for the previous Asco incidents.

How can these companies be relied upon to provide ´base load´, with this performance?


Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

Italy's Northern League, the populist, xenophobic, sometimes separatist movement that is a key component of Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition, has proposed new legislation which would effectively halt construction of new Islamic mosques.

The bill, which the League's chief of deputies Roberto Cota is expected to send to parliament next week, would require regional approval for the building of mosques. It would also require that a local referendum be held, that there be no minaret or loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer, and sermons must be in Italian, not Arabic.

What has made global economic events so compelling in the past year has been the pace at which perceptions have changed. The eurozone is no exception. After a growth sprint at the start of the year, the region's economic fortunes appeared to deteriorate as fast as those of Liu Xiang, China's hobbled Olympic hurdler. Growth contracted in the second quarter for the first time since the euro's launch in 1999, while the US expanded.

But has the eurozone's outlook really worsened so dramatically? Change is usually incremental in the bloc's economy, reflecting cultural and structural differences with more dynamic parts of the world. The latest evidence - August's purchasing managers' indices released last week - suggested prospects had stabilised in the third quarter, albeit with the eurozone still dicing with recession. So here, at the risk of making my job less exciting, are a dozen reasons why the eurozone economic malaise might have been exaggerated and why we could even see positive signs in the coming months.

Employment lawyers and legal helplines are reporting a sharp rise in businesses seeking advice on how to sack staff, suggesting a further surge in redundancies may be on the way.

Allianz, the insurance group, says its legal helpline Lawphone last month received a record number of calls seeking advice on redundancy issues.

More than a third of calls received by the helpline were about employment issues, compared with just 2.4 per cent in the same month last year, it said.

Employment lawyers have also reported a rise in businesses seeking advice on redundancies as trading conditions have deteriorated over the summer.

The government is poised to radically expand the academies programme to include children as young as four by announcing that it has given the go-ahead for the takeover of three struggling local primaries.

Lord Adonis, the schools minister, told the Guardian that he had sanctioned the first so-called "matrix" academy, where three primaries on separate sites will feed into a secondary under a central management system to serve a total of 2,200 children.

The plan to involve privately sponsored academies in turning round primary schools comes amid increasing concern that the government's focus on improving struggling secondaries has not addressed fundamental flaws in primary schools.

An increasing number of children are being criminalised by the justice system, it was claimed yesterday, as new figures showed that more than 1,000 youngsters have been jailed for an average of six months each for breaching anti-social behaviour orders.

Penal reformers and children's groups warned last night that the heavy-handed use of Asbos against youngsters risked turning them into criminals in adult life. And new figures showed that 986 children aged 10 to 17 were jailed for breaking Asbos between 2000, when they were launched, and the end of 2006. Another 300 to 400 youngsters are thought to have joined the total in 2007 and 2008.

The figures emerged as a report warned that the move towards instant justice has fuelled a huge rise in the number of children and others brought into the criminal justice system.

A takeover of British Energy by Electricité de France is still the UK government's preferred option for the nuclear generator, the energy minister has told the Financial Times.

Malcolm Wicks described a deal with EDF as "the most sensible option", adding: "We think that's the natural link."

His comments show the government has not given up hope on EDF taking control of most of Britain's nuclear power stations, in spite of the failure of its attempt to agree a £12bn deal with British Energy at the end of last month.

However, speaking on a visit to Lagos last week, Mr Wicks said that while the UK government was "very intimately involved" in the negotiations - it owns about 35 per cent of British Energy's equity - the group's future was "very much in its own hands".