MADRID, Jan 13: Spain protested on Friday that its sale of 12 military planes to Venezuela must go ahead despite being blocked by the United States because of Washington's concerns about President Hugo Chavez.

The US veto to the deal is the latest move in a period of stormy relations between Spain and the United States.

The number two in the Spanish government, Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, told a press conference: "The Bush administration decided to refuse licenses for planes that Spain sold to Venezuela and it did so for reasons that the Spanish government does not share.

"That said, the contracts were signed with another country, Venezuela, and must be respected."

The US ambassador to Spain, Eduardo Aguirre, had informed Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos on Thursday of Washington's decision to refuse a license for the deal.

A ministry spokesman said the US decision was "intended to block this commercial contract involving planes equipped with American parts".

The spokesman denied Washington was acting politically in halting the two-billion-dollar deal for the transport and surveillance planes, but a statement from the US embassy in Madrid indicated otherwise.

"Despite being democratically elected, the government of President Hugo Chavez has systematically undermined democratic institutions, pressured and harassed independent media and the political opposition, and grown progressively more autocratic and anti-democratic," it charged.

The Dutch cabinet yesterday agreed to let MPs vote on a plan to send 1,400 soldiers to Afghanistan after weeks of haggling that have threatened the county's government.

The move was welcomed at Nato, which is responsible for the peacekeeping operation, but Dutch MPs warned they could still withhold support from the plan and provoke a fresh crisis.

In the Netherlands, the row has evoked painful memories of 1995, when lightly armed Dutch UN peacekeepers failed to prevent the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in Bosnia.

Nato and EU officials have warned that their credibility is at stake and that if the Dutch refuse to deploy, Washington will conclude that most European nations are unwilling to tackle difficult missions. The stakes are particularly high for Nato since its secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, is Dutch, and has said he expects the mission to go ahead.

The Dutch parliament will start debating the issue in the next two weeks, and a vote against or a slim majority in favour would make it politically impossible for the centre-right coalition government to continue.

BERLIN, Jan 13: German intelligence agents gathered information in Iraq in 2003 and shared it with their US counterparts, a government spokesman said on Friday amid a furore over reports that Berlin secretly helped the war effort.

"There was a decision from the German government that two agents would remain in Iraq to gather information. There was a regular exchange of information with the US side," foreign ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said.

Deputy government spokesman Thomas Steg said that the aim of the exchange was to prevent attacks on civilian targets and save lives.

"Agents of the BND (the German intelligence services abroad) passed on information to prevent civilian institutions like schools, hospitals and embassies mistakenly becoming the target of attacks," he said.

"This information was passed on between friendly nations in a bid to achieve this aim," Steg added.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday at first denied then confirmed that the BND had kept agents in Iraq after the story was broken by ARD public television and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

The newspaper reported that the secret services' aim was to prevent the bombing of civilian targets.

But ARD quoted a former US defence department official as saying that the German secret services also provided "direct help" in identifying targets that should be bombed.

BUCHAREST: Theodor's mother abandoned him in hospital soon after giving birth. Three years later, the dark-haired boy with a shy smile is living with a foster mother in a bare apartment in Bucharest, still waiting to be adopted.

Theodor's story, and the tales of tens of thousands of other Romanian orphans, pull at the heart-strings in a country where adoption and child care were crippled and corrupted by years of dictatorship and the graft-tainted society it spawned.

Romania, which hopes to join the European Union next year, has taken radical steps to clean up its act, eager to banish the haunting images of vast, filthy orphanages that were exposed to the world after the 1989 fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

But a 2005 ban on foreign adoptions has drawn criticism as well as praise. More heartache ensued as hopeful couples found their efforts to adopt cut off during a three-year moratorium that preceded last year's ban.

And while Theodor faces no risk of being sold to the highest bidder as was the case in the adoption industry for years after Ceausescu's fall, he is unlikely to find a permanent home.

Many Romanians are too poor to adopt a child, and Theodor is also a Gypsy, who often face discrimination.

"I would prefer for him to be adopted by a good family, and if he isn't, I will raise him as my own," says Maria Moise, Theodor's foster mother who is paid around $130 a month to look after him, plus money for food and toiletries.

"But I can't adopt him, I can't afford it.

Chechnya has lost so many men to war that survivors should be legally allowed to take several wives, acting Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov has said.

Speaking on Russian radio, the pro-Moscow leader said this was "necessary for Chechnya because we have war - we have more women than men".

He was backed by Russian parliamentary deputy speaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Russian law restricts citizens to one marriage, but Islamic custom allows a man to take up to four wives.

'No interference

Mr Kadyrov told Ekho Moskvy radio that women in the Russian republic outnumbered men by 10%, and that a man should be able to choose how many wives he had without the state getting involved.

"Every man decides for himself how he should live. He is the boss, he decides, I am sure that his personal life will not be interfered with," he said.

Mr Zhirinovsky, who is the leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), said polygamy should be applied across Russia "because we have 10 million unmarried women".

WHERE?

On France's eastern border, Strasbourg came into being as a Roman military outpost located on a small island between two branches of the Ill river, a couple of miles from the wider Rhine. Over the centuries, the region was shunted back and forth between French and German control. Strasbourg's architecture and cultural life now display an intriguing mix of modern French influence and traditional Alsatian roots, overlaid with a certain international flavour.

This elegant city prides itself on its post-war vocation as home to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, and on its well-deserved status as a World Heritage site. Its wines and hearty dishes have a distinctive place in the patchwork of French regional cuisine.

...
WHY?

Quite simply, the Alsatian capital is a superb place to spend a weekend. The island at its heart is surrounded by a shimmering labyrinth of canals, linked by a variety of camel-back stone bridges, and shelters dozens of well-preserved medieval and Renaissance buildings. Away from the centre, the student hangouts of the Krutenau area and the neo-classical Prussian architecture of the "German district" have their own attractions. Predictably enough for the capital of a renowned wine-growing region, the city's restaurants set themselves high gastronomic standards.

...
WHAT?

No visit to this city is complete without popping into the Cathédrale Notre-Dame: a red-stone Gothic masterpiece, its unmistakable single spire towers over the roofs of the Old Town, while its stark silhouette, visible from miles around, is softened by lace-like stonework, leering gargoyles and dozens of statues depicting historical and Biblical characters. On sunny days, the stained-glass windows gleam with colour.

An elaborate astronomical clock chimes "noon" at 12.30pm each day, when figurines of the 12 apostles appear in parade. The 330 steps to the platform are not for the faint-hearted, but on a clear day the views across to the Black Forest and Vosges are their own reward. Also on the cathedral square, the Maison Kammerzell's ornately carved wooden façade hides painted stone arches under which merchants once sold their goods.

VIENNA: European ministers moved on Friday to harmonise asylum laws to reduce the number of refugees trying to enter the EU and pledged to strengthen cooperation on deporting illegal immigrants.

The justice and interior ministers, meeting informally for two days in Vienna, studied forward-looking ways to discourage would-be immigrants and asylum seekers from leaving their home countries. But they refused to back away from more controversial and repressive measures in use like the forced repatriation of illegal immigrants on charter flights.

One of the flaws in the current system is the vast differences between the bloc's 25 member states on who deserves to be granted refugee status.

According to the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), Austria, hosting the talks as the current EU president, recognised more than 50 per cent of asylum seekers as refugees in 2004 compared to only 0.3 per cent in Greece.

"It is absurd and counter-productive if asylum seekers can get a different answer depending on what country of the Union they are in," French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told his counterparts.

"It's not only illogical; this difference can create migratory movements between our countries."

EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini said the lack of common standards had sparked "asylum shopping, due to the huge differences in member states and we should absolutely overcome this situation."

US President George Bush says he and German Chancellor Angela Merkel want to resolve the issue of Iran's nuclear intentions by diplomatic means.

Their joint stance follows earlier comments by the Iranian President that Iran will not back down over its decision to restart its nuclear program.

Mrs Merkel is making her first official visit to Washington.

Mr Bush has repeated the American belief Iran wants to use what it says is a civilian energy program to build nuclear weapons.

"Countries such as ours have an obligation to step up, working together sending a common message to the Iranians that their behaviour - trying to clandestinely develop a nuclear weapon or using the guise of the civilian nuclear weapon program to get the know-how to develop a nuclear weapon - is unacceptable," he said.

He says united action on Iran is essential.

"We've got an important job ahead of us to work on key issues like Iran," he said.

"We spent some time talking about the Iranian issue and the desire to solve this issue diplomatically by working together."

Mrs Merkel says says recent comments by Mr Ahmadinejad questioning Israel's right to exist and saying the Holocaust never happened are totally unacceptable.

"It's essential, we feel, that the EU [European Union], together with the United States, take a common position here, become active that we try to persuade as many countries as possible to align themselves with us," she said.

"We will certainly not be intimidated by any country such as Iran."

Earlier, Mrs Merkel said she felt Iran had crossed "the red line" by resuming its nuclear activities.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack says he hopes the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and UN Security Council will take action against Iran.

THE six governments responsible for nearly half the world's greenhouse gas emissions will rely on industry to shoulder most of the burden of offsetting global warming.

Ministers from Australia, the United States, Japan, China, South Korea and India yesterday formed eight groups to research ways to reduce emissions but will not report back for at least a year on exactly how that will be done.

No targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions were set and no timetable for how quickly emissions need to be lowered was acknowledged at the end of the first meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate.

Instead, a communique emphasised the need to continue using fossil fuels such as coal for the bulk of their countries' energy requirements.

"We recognise that fossil fuels underpin our economies and will be an enduring reality for our lifetimes and beyond," the communique said. "It is therefore critical that we work together to develop, demonstrate and implement cleaner and lower emissions technologies that allow for the continued economic use of fossil fuels while addressing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions."

Business will be expected to do most of the work, with the Australian Government promising to spend $100 million over five years and the US setting aside a one-off amount of $US52 million ($69 million).

Counting up the numbers of boys and girls in a country has never been so troublesome. On Monday the medical journal the Lancet published a report estimating that prenatal selection and selective abortion in India was likely to be causing half a million girls to be culled every year. Within 24 hours, the Indian medical association weighed in to dispute the Lancet's figures as out-of-date and exaggerated. The Indian government has made no formal statement, but is said to be incandescent with rage.

There are good reasons for all this sensitivity. The abnormally unbalanced gender ratios of some Asian countries - either due to abortion, sex-selective technologies such as ultrasound or old-fashioned infanticide - have been the subject of academic controversy since the late 1980s. Just recently, however, they come to be cloaked in a more sinister hue. One of the latest growth areas in the academy is in "security demographics", where scholars are invited to predict the potentially dire implications of demographic change, and one of the most gloomy prognostications is rooted in what could happen when sex ratios spin out of kilter.

"Bare branches" is the Chinese term for the poor young men who are left with no prospect of finding a partner or starting a family. In their influential 2004 book of the same name, the American political scientists Valerie M Hudson and Andrea M den Boer argued that these men were an accident waiting to happen. The pair found evidence of a huge number of "missing females" in eight different Asian countries, but the vast majority were from India and China, where two-fifths of the world's population now live. In 1999, they noted, the Chinese academy of social sciences admitted that the birth-sex ratio in that country had reached 120 boys for every 100 girls, and that the number of surplus Chinese males was now 111 million.

These legions of surplus males, according to Hudson and Den Boer, are often poor or unemployed, and lack bargaining power in the market for marriage. The consequences of this vast demographic shift, according to the authors, could be dire. As economies turn bad, those surplus males are likely to generate crime and violence. The only way for countries to absorb the growing surfeit of young males, they argue, might be to amass huge armies and go to war to use up the excess men.

BUDAPEST (Reuters) -- Hungary's Fidesz opposition party pledged it would protect ordinary people from the excesses of 'wild capitalism' if it was elected in a poll expected in Aprill or May.

Viktor Orban, leader of the right-of-center Fidesz Party and a former dissident, is promising more jobs and lower taxes to boost economic growth.

"We must put a brake on the wild capitalist thinking, which gathered new strength after 2002 (the last election)," Orban told a press conference on Thursday.

Orban says that the economy under the ruling Socialists favors the rich and is "immoral".

"In today's Hungary, the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer," he said.

The leader of Fidesz has pushed his party from its radical liberal roots to the right-of-centre and based its policies on family values and national identity.

Unemployment in Hungary is 7.2 percent, low compared with more than 17 percent in Poland, but there are huge variations across the country and the figure is 22 percent for 15-24 year olds, a key voter base for Fidesz.

Clothes and toys on sale in Britain's high streets are made by Chinese workers forced to endure illegal, exhausting and dangerous conditions, according to a new study. It will increase the pressure on retailers to monitor the conditions in which their products are made.

A three-year investigation into booming export factories for companies such as Marks & Spencer and Ikea discovered the human cost of China's "economic miracle". It found an army of powerless rural migrants toiling up to 14 hours a day, almost every day. Many were allowed just one day off a month and paid less than £50 a month for shifts that breached Chinese law and International Labour Organisation rules. Despite evidence of the shocking working conditions, cheap clothes, toys and increasingly electronic goods from the sweatshops are on sale in British shops with household names, including those with ethical buying policies.

Ethical trading consultants for Impactt, which works with businesses to improve their social impact around the world, were allowed into 100 factories supplying 11 British retailers.

They found that "ethical audits" - the conventional method of checking conditions - were ineffective because of falsification of records. Instead, working hours were cut by improving efficiency, said their report, Changing Over Time, sponsored by the Co-operative Insurance Society. But even these reduced working hours still exceeded Chinese labour limits, said Rosey Hurst, Impactt's director. She added: "What has surprised and depressed us since 1998 when we started working in China is that all the efforts of the ... companies have made very little difference to the working standards. The response by Chinese factories is to work out how better to cook the books."

Ayman Zawahiri, the second-ranking al Qaeda leader and chief deputy to Osama bin Laden, was targeted by a deadly U.S. missile strike on a compound inside Pakistan yesterday, but U.S. intelligence could not confirm whether he was killed, according to U.S. sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Acting on sensitive intelligence describing the whereabouts of Zawahiri and other top al Qaeda figures, the CIA ordered the airstrike by a Predator drone that fired an air-to-ground missile at the compound, nestled on the border with Afghanistan. The sources said more than a dozen people may have died in the attack. It was too early to confirm the identities of the dead, but U.S. military officials said Zawahiri may be among them.

bold added by me.

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - The chief judge in the trial of     Saddam Hussein plans to step down, a source close to the judge told Reuters on Friday, in a development that could throw an already turbulent process into further disarray.

"He wants to withdraw," the source said of Rizgar Amin, who is to preside over the next hearing on January 24. "He will oversee the next sitting and then announce his reasons for withdrawing."

Asked why the Kurdish judge, based in the northern city of Sulaimaniya, wanted to pull out of a trial that has made his face familiar around the world during long days of television coverage, he would say only: "It is too difficult."

The killing of two defense lawyers has already highlighted problems with the process in a country mired in a virtual civil war that pits Saddam's fellow minority Sunni Arabs against a U.S.-backed government run by Shi'ite Muslims and ethnic Kurds intent on hanging a man they say massacred their peoples.

Kidnapping and murder have become commonplace and human rights groups have questioned the wisdom of pushing ahead with a trial in Baghdad rather than an international process in The Hague or elsewhere.

Not very different from the very different religious justification for the Feudal order in medieval Europe.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

 Your mind/thoughts are originally the input of your

 mom/family/cultural environment and values.

 Non-"humanly"constructed minds
 have been observed:

 I have studied various case histories of children raised by animals especially wolves. They really have no "mind". They have no language etc. They cannot survive in societies. The general background of people
is common;and that is the reason people get along somehow. "Freedom" and "individuality"are very frail trees indeed. The construction of an absolutely original self is impossible. That piece which is not common (owing to the different timelines of each person) is that which gives you your uniqueness.
Does "freedom of the will" exist really?
Do you determine your life path?
Answer: Yes, but in a very specific form.