The European Union failed Tuesday to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East, preferring instead to demand an "immediate cessation of hostilities," the bloc's presidency said.

In a carefully worded joint declaration agreed after more than three hours of haggling at this rare August crisis meeting of the 25-member block, foreign ministers said a "sustainable ceasefire" should follow the cessation of hostilities, without elaborating on the difference between the two.

The failure came after Britain and Germany, backed by The Netherlands, rejected a draft compromise by the EU's Finnish presidency calling for an "immediate ceasefire" between Israel and Hezbelloh, according to diplomats.

"The Council (of EU ministers) calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities to be followed by a sustainable ceasefire," said Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency.

....
The Finnish EU president also said the bloc does not intend on adding Hezbollah to its list of terrorist organizations at the present time.

"Given the sensitive situation, I don't think this is something we will be acting on now, Tuomioja told the news conference after the meeting.

His remarks were in response to a letter signed by 213 members of the United States Congress, which was sent to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. It asked that the EU add Hezbollah to its terrorist list.

So why didn't the UK, Germany and Czechia block this one? Must be because nobody cares what the CoE says...

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman

Did Yukos cheat on its taxes?

(The fact that tax cheating is a national sport has no impact on the legitimacy of the tax authority to go after any frauder it chooses.)

Yeah, what's the point of saying anything other people don't want to hear? And this coming from the Foreign minister?

Note how the article first says "Israel and Lebanon don't necessarily want a ceasefire" (false: Lebanon wants one), and this paraphrasing Steinmeyer's "the main participants". The journalist is identifying Hezbollah and Lebanon as usual.

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman

Though Steinmeier and his boss, German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, seem to be speaking in tandem on the Middle East violence, the latest escalation has shed light on party divisions in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the junior coalition partner in the federal government.

As I said...

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

"we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us".

how about taking a deep breath and for a moment stop the insane insistance ""they" are "threatening us"? You know, starting any dialog by insisting "they" are "threatening us" stops any dialog dead in it's tracks and by the wayside only reveals how patethic your position really is.

Mr Blair said it was necessary "to change dramatically the focus of our policy", admitting: "In the short term we are not winning."

You know Tony, any "win" by "us" can only be short term anyway. To have a long term solution it must be a win-win and you'll never get to a win-win position by constantly crying foul that "they" are "threatening us".

Now, go back to bed Tony. The monsters aren't under your bed, they're in your head.

"I really can't give him advice," said Austria-born "Arnie" following their discussions with industry leaders at British oil giant BP's Port of Long Beach facility.

"Maybe head of the United Nations, maybe something that is a step up. Who knows what it is because it is a big job that he has right now," he added.

"I think whatever job he wants he will get because he's got such a good success rate at home and he's done such a remarkable job in Europe and England and in the world as a leader.

"If he wants a job in Hollywood I could get him to play Terminator 4."

...

To Schwarzenegger's offer, he said: "That's definitely the best offer I've had.

"Actually, the sad thing is, it's the only offer I've had."

That's just what we need, Blair at the UN. <eeek>

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman

How about accepting that the wanton massacre of innocent people in bombings, raids, pacifications are massively counter-productive ? You don't enforce democracy, especially by destroying everything in sight.

They never defined their goals. The exercise of military strength is not an end in itself. It must be in service to political aims, and their practice must be consistent with those aims. Smashing a country to powder is not a political end-point and is unlikely to pacify a population.

Yet these cold-war warriors just can't understand and our world is being unmade because we allow these fools to play in our sandpit.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Raul Castro, for nearly half a century Cuba's second-in-command, is now in the top post.
His older brother, the long-time Cuban leader Fidel Castro, has announced he is - temporarily at least - handing over the leadership as he undergoes gastro-intestinal surgery.

Raul, now 75, has always lurked in his brother's shadow - a head shorter than Fidel, and without his brother's charisma or oratorical verve.

As head of Cuba's armed forces, Raul has played a central role in Cuba's recent history, and yet opinion is divided over the role he might play as Cuban leader.
Raul was officially designated Fidel's successor at a Communist Party congress in October 1997, when Fidel said: "Raul is younger than I, more energetic than I. He can count on much more time."

But the two have worked together since the 1950s, when they plotted the Cuban Revolution.

Raul can claim an earlier commitment to socialism than his brother, whose early defining political characteristic was nationalism.

Of all the curious things that have been written about Israel's assault on Lebanon, surely the oddest is contained in Paddy Ashdown's article on these pages last Saturday. "There is only one solution to this crisis, and it is the same solution we have to find in Iraq: to go for a wider Middle East settlement and to do it urgently. The US cannot do this. But Europe can."

The US cannot do this? What on earth does he mean? At first sight his contention seems plain wrong. While Israel intends to sustain its occupation of Palestinian territory, a wider settlement is impossible. It surely follows that the country that has the greatest potential leverage over Israel is the country with the greatest power to broker peace. Israel's foreign policy and military strategy is dependent on the approval of the United States.

....
Many of these weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians and are being used in Lebanon today. The US arms export control act states that "no defence article or defence service shall be sold or leased by the United States government" unless its provision "will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace". Weapons may be sold "to friendly countries solely for internal security, for legitimate self-defence [or for] maintaining or restoring international peace and security".
By giving these weapons to Israel, the US government is, in effect, stating that all its military actions are being pursued in the cause of legitimate self-defence, American interests and world peace. The US also becomes morally complicit in Israel's murder of civilians. The diplomatic cover this provides is indispensable.

Since 1972 the US has used its veto in the UN security council on 40 occasions to prevent the passage of resolutions that sought either to defend the rights of the Palestinians or to condemn the excesses of Israel's government. This is a greater number of vetoes than all the other permanent members have deployed in the same period. The most recent instance, on July 13, was the squashing of a motion condemning both the Israeli assault on Gaza and the firing of rockets and abduction of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian groups. Over the past few days, the United States, supported by Britain, has blocked all international attempts to introduce an immediate ceasefire, giving Israel the clear impression that it has a mandate to continue its assault on Lebanon.

Joshua Landis Interviewed by John Dagge
Saturday, July 29, 2006

What role does Syria have to play in the resolution of this conflict?

Syria has a big role to play. Trying to shut it out of any agreement will only guarantee that future cease-fires are temporary and fragile.

The Lebanese root cause of this problem is that the Shi'ites are terribly under-represented in parliament. They have been kept at the bottom of the Lebanese political heap despite being the largest sectarian community in Lebanon. They accepted this position in the 1989 Taif Accords, largely because Syria allowed them to keep their weapons. Since Syria left Lebanon in 2005 the other Lebanese communities - Sunnis, Druze, and Christian - have been demanding that Hezbollah give up its military weapons. At the same time, they have refused to allow the Shiites their proper constitutional role in government. They can't have it both ways. If a deal to disarm Hizbullah is to be made in Lebanon, the Shi'ites, who represent 40 per cent of the population, will have to get close to 40 percent representation in parliament. This is going to be a major headache.

America professes that it wants a democratic solution to the Middle East, but it is refusing to promote true democracy in Lebanon. This is an analogy to the Hamas problem in Palestine and it is one of the reasons why Hezbollah and Hamas find themselves on the same side and why Arabs throughout the Middle East are rooting for them. So long as there is no solution to this fundamental injustice, there will be no peace in the Middle East. American and Israeli military might is no replacement for equity, justice and democracy.

The way Hezbollah has justified maintaining its arms is by focusing on its resistance role. If you want to eliminate that role of resistance, Hezbollah is going to have to be brought into the political center of Lebanon's government so it becomes an established power, not an outsider throwing stones at a government dominated by others.

Syria helped broker the Taif accord, along with Saudi Arabia and America. The Americans were interested in maintaining Christian power in Lebanon, which they succeeded in doing by making sure that the Christian seats in the Lebanese parliament were not reduced below 50 per cent even though they constitute roughly 40% of the Lebanese population. The Saudis were interested in maintaining Sunni power in Lebanon which they succeeded in doing by making the Sunnis the most over-represented community in Lebanon - they were allotted the same number of seats as the Shi'ites even though the Sunnis are half as numerous. So in effect, a Sunni Lebanese is worth two Shi'a Lebanese in political terms. The Syrians went along with the deal because they wanted to look like good actors and, most importantly, because they were going to disarm the Sunnis and Christians and allow the Shi'ites to maintain their military weapons to act as a resistance to Israel. This allows Syria to maintain pressure on Israel to give back the Golan Heights.

SOUTH LEBANON - "The resistance [Hezbollah] protects the country, but the country is the victim of the resistance." So read Arabic-language pamphlets dropped by air all over south Lebanon.
"The purpose behind the message is to ask people to leave southern Lebanon so that Israel and Hezbollah can be left to fight face-to-face against each other," Abbas Hussain told Asia Times Online. Members of his family were among the more than 50 killed in an Israeli air strike on the town of Qana on Sunday.

"A few days before the bombing, flyers were dropped which clearly warned the people to leave Qana at once, otherwise they would be victims," Abbas said. Tragically, though, many people either did not heed the warning or did not have the time or means
 to leave.

Israel declared a 48-hour cessation of aerial strikes (only partially followed) as a result of widespread international condemnation of the Qana debacle, and people have now taken the opportunity to flee to safer areas.

Roads across the south are clogged with traffic as long lines of refugees leave southern towns.

"I have been operating this hospital for many years and have provided aid to the victims of Israeli raids since the mid-1990s, but the way Israel came up with the latest attacks, people now have to leave their places at all costs," Dr Jawad Mahmood Najam told Asia Times Online. Najam is a surgeon and qualified from a university of Egypt. He runs the 80-bed Najam Hospital near Qana.

· Special forces target Hizbullah official as troops plan push in south
· Deadlock at UN and EU

Israeli special forces were last night engaged deep within Lebanon as the army geared up for an expected major ground invasion. Troops were involved in fierce clashes and artillery pounded targets across southern Lebanon. The military also called in air strikes despite a previous commitment to a "partial" halt in air bombardments.

Israeli commanders said that six brigades - several thousand soldiers - were now deployed inside Lebanon. At least 15,000 reserve troops, called up late last week, would be ready for combat from today, army sources said.

Last night Israeli commandos were reported to be in action against Hizbullah fighters 40 miles across the Lebanese border in the Beka'a valley, after landing by helicopter. Witnesses reported gunfire around a hospital to the west of the town of Baalbek, a Hizbullah stronghold.

According to the Lebanese army, the target of the raid was Sheikh Mohammed Yazbek, a member of the Hizbullah High Council, and representative in Lebanon of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was reported to have been at the hospital earlier in the day.

The operation began with at least five rapid air strikes three hours before the end of Israel's self-imposed two-day pause in air attacks.

For two Israeli generations, Lebanon is the mythological ex, the beautiful and rich neighbour with whom relations once grew from cold to cordial and then from warm to intimate, only to ultimately collapse amid recrimination, loss and trauma.

Israel's Lebanese illusions go back to the late 1950s, when David Ben-Gurion concluded that the Jewish state must court all those in the broader Middle East who do not naturally fall in the Arab-Muslim fold.

Consequently, Israel developed special ties with Christian Ethiopia and non-Arab Iran and Turkey, and sought ties with a slew of minorities.

While some of this vision was far-fetched, warm relations indeed emerged in those years with the Shah's Iran, Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, and Iraq's Kurdish rebels. Yet all these paled in comparison with Israel's Lebanese experience.

In typically Middle Eastern unpredictability, even Israel's peace pact with Egypt did not alter its need in new alliances, since the rest of the Arab world rejected that deal while Iran was lost at the time to Islamism and Ethiopia to communism.

A year ago he seemed a rebel without a cause. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah, was an important figure in Lebanon but seemed destined to remain on the sidelines of Middle East politics. He was the most important leader of the 1.4 million-strong Shia community in Lebanon and nobody doubted the efficiency of Hizbollah as a paramilitary organisation. He was intelligent, charismatic and experienced but he seemed to have reached the peak of his influence.

Nasrallah's great moment had apparently come and gone in May 2000 when Israel had unilaterally withdrawn its troops from southern Lebanon after years of harassment by Hizbollah guerrillas. He returned in triumph to reconquered Lebanese territory and, if the military victory over Israel was small in scale, it was still an accomplishment not enjoyed by many Arab leaders over the past half century. But the departure of the Israelis from Lebanon also robbed Hizbollah of its raison d'être and excuse for forming a state within a state. No doubt its leader, Nasrallah, would remain a power within Lebanon but it seemed increasingly unlikely that he would be anything more.

It was Israel that decided otherwise. By launching a massive military campaign in retaliation for the kidnapping of two of its soldiers on 12 July it made Nasrallah into a symbol of resistance to Israel in the Muslim world. Arabs conscious of their own leaders' inertia, corruption and incompetence hailed the resolution of Hizbollah's fighters. Nasrallah's blend of nationalism and religion was shown to be as potent in Lebanon as it had been against the Americans in Iraq.

His spokesmen admitted that Hizbollah had miscalculated the ferocity of the Israeli response to the kidnapping, but then few in the world forecast that Israel would play so directly to Hizbollah's strengths as a guerrilla organisation capable of surviving an Israeli military attack. Nor had it seemed likely that Israel, after extricating with such difficulty from the Lebanese morass after 18 years, would plunge back into it with such enthusiasm.

' "The government formed after the fall of the regime hasn't been able to do anything, just make many promises. And people are fed up with the promises," said Sheik Bashir al Najafi, one of the top four Shiite leaders and one of several who suggested there could be a revolt. "One day we will not be able to stop a popular revolution." '

Ehud Olmert said today that Israel's three-week-old offensive in Lebanon will stop only once a robust international peacekeeping force is in place in southern Lebanon.

In an interview in his Jerusalem office, Israel's Prime Minister also said the release of two Israeli soldiers captured by Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas must be unconditional - signalling Israel does not favour a prisoner swap.

He also predicted that the outcome of the Lebanon fighting will create "new momentum" for Israel's plan to separate from the Palestinians by withdrawing from much of the West Bank.

slashing the half-life of an alpha emitter by embedding it in a metal and cooling the metal to a few degrees kelvin

Sounds somewhat energy intensive...

No doubt Red Mercury will raise its head again.

keep to the Fen Causeway

A group of physicists in Germany claims to have discovered a way of speeding up radioactive decay that could render nuclear waste harmless on timescales of just a few tens of years. Their proposed technique - which involves slashing the half-life of an alpha emitter by embedding it in a metal and cooling the metal to a few degrees kelvin - could therefore avoid the need to bury nuclear waste in deep repositories, a hugely expensive and politically difficult process. But other researchers are sceptical and believe that the technique contradicts well-established theory as well as experiment.

The leader of the German-based group, Claus Rolfs of Ruhr University in Bochum, is an astrophysicist and made the discovery about alpha decay after replicating the fusion reactions that take place in the centre of stars. Using the university's particle accelerator he fired protons and deuterons (nuclei containing a proton and a neutron) at various light nuclei. He noticed that the rate of fusion reactions was significantly greater when the nuclei were encased in metals than when they were inserted into insulators. He also observed that the effect is enhanced at lower temperatures (J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 32 489).

...

But Rolfs realized that the reverse reaction might also occur and that free electrons could enhance the ejection of positively charged particles from a nucleus. This would reduce the half-lives of α-decay or β+-decay, and increase half-lives for processes involving electrons (which are repelled by the free electrons within the metal), i.e. β--decay and electron capture.

The group has investigated this hypothesis by embedding a number of radioactive nuclei inside metals and then cooling the metal to a few degrees kelvin. As expected, they observed a longer half-life for the electron capture of beryllium-7 and shorter half-lives for β+-decay in sodium-22 (Eur. Phys. J. A 28 251) and α-decay in polonium-210. They are now investigating the α-decay of radium-226, a hazardous component of spent nuclear fuel with a half-life of 1600 years. Rolfs calculates that this half-life could be reduced to as little as a year and at the very least to 100 years, and believes that the half-lives of all other hazardous alpha emitters within nuclear waste could be shortened by similar amounts.

...

Meanwhile, Hubert Flocard, director of the CSNSM nuclear-physics lab near Paris, believes that Rolfs' model contradicts standard solid-state physics, although he admits that he cannot explain the group's data himself. Rolfs concedes that he needs a more sophisticated theory, but stands by his results. "Nature decides what is right," he says.

Bullshit !!! Double-bullshit !!!

It's the O-word. O-V-E-R-S-I-G-H-T . They get to be in charge of all the committees, they get to examine all the records, they get to vote against stuff and win.

And its not just about Congressional oversight of the President. Billmon is correct that the Dems have hardly set the world alight with their quisling tactics, but if Lieberman goes down they know that the voters will have called time on their cosy little lifestyle and will be breathing down their necks as well. It'll be "hit the ball out of the park or get the hell out of the club".

Billmon remains a compulsory read, but on this one he's plain flat wrong.

keep to the Fen Causeway