EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - US plans to build a shield against intercontinental missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic received tacit approval from the 26 NATO member countries at a meeting on Thursday (19 April), despite opposition to the plan inside the EU and from Russia.

"There were no critical comments on the US system," NATO spokesman James Appathurai said after the first meeting of high-level NATO political representatives on the US plan, held at NATO headquarters just a few kilometres outside the EU capital, Brussels.

Out of the 26 NATO members, 22 countries are also EU member states, including Germany (which previously said the US should consult Russia more) as well as Greece and Italy (parts of which are reportedly to be excluded from the US shield coverage for technical reasons).

"There was an agreement that there is a threat to Europe from missiles...Iran was named," Mr Appathurai added, after a presentation by US general, Henry Obering, using Pentagon battle management software to detail European defence scenarios with and without the shield.

A new study has found that large swaths of Germany could be suitable to store highly radioactive nuclear waste. But that doesn't mean the problem is any closer to being solved.

 Europe is still a long way from agreeing on what to do about nuclear waste. It was a headline that likely unnerved a number of anti-nuclear activists in Germany. The Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources on Wednesday released a report indicating that a large chunk of northern Germany, and a bit of the south as well, is geologically suitable for the indefinite storage of highly radioactive nuclear waste.

The study drew no conclusions about the appropriateness of specific locations; rather it focused on those places with layers of clay at least 100 meters (328 feet) thick and at a depth of 300 to 1,000 meters. The report follows two earlier investigations identifying regions of salt-stone and granite which might also lend themselves to storing highly radioactive waste. Germany, it seems -- even as it continues to follow a policy of backing away from nuclear power -- has no shortage of sites suitable to be transformed into radioactive cemeteries.

Nevertheless, the report is sure to add fuel to an ongoing smoldering debate in Germany and across Europe about what to do with highly radioactive nuclear waste. On the one hand, activists hold up waste storage as one of the primary dangers represented by atomic power. After all, used up fuel rods and other waste remain "hot" for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. How can one be sure today, many wonder, that facilities built today won't fall apart in 300,000 years?

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has caused an outcry by suggesting that the principle of "innocent until proven guilty," the foundation of a liberal justice system, should not apply in the fight against terrorists. Media commentators say the hardline crimefighter is moving onto dangerous ground.

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has acquired a reputation for toughness in the fight against terrorism. German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has whipped up controversy by saying that terror suspects should not be presumed innocent until proven guilty, a statement that has outraged civil rights groups and opposition politicians and also sparked a row within Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition.

Schäuble, a senior member of Merkel's Christian Democrats, defended his plans for tighter security laws in Germany after the country narrowly escaped an attack last July when two self-made bombs deposited on trains by Islamic militants failed to detonate.

"Would it be right to say that I would prefer to allow ten attacks to take place rather than try to prevent one person who maybe doesn't want to commit an attack. In my opinion that would be wrong," Schäuble told Stern magazine in an interview published in its Thursday edition.

Gerhart Baum, a former interior minister and member of the opposition liberal Free Democrat Party, said the suggestion was "legally outrageous."

Russia's most prestigious medical institute has told its foreign students to stay indoors for three days because of fears they may be attacked by skinheads celebrating Adolf Hitler's birthday.

The IM Sechenov Medical Academy in Moscow yesterday advised its 2,000 non-Russian students to remain in their dormitories until tomorrow.

The institute's deputy dean said the extraordinary measures were necessary because of the risk of attack by ultra-nationalist thugs, who are traditionally more active around Hitler's birthday - which falls on April 20.

Article continues "We believe that the best form of medicine is prevention," Sergei Baronov, deputy dean in the faculty of foreign students, told the Guardian. "I don't think the problem in Russia is worse than anywhere else. But there are a small group of people who are bent on provocation."

Foreign students are also being taught self-defence and lectures have been cancelled as security has increased. Officially the shutdown is described as a fire drill.

MILAN, Italy: European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, attending Milan's annual international furniture expo, urged Italian manufacturers Thursday not to compete with China "head on" but to use the allure of Italian craftsmanship to capture the higher end of the market in everything from furniture to shoes and machinery to wine.

Mandelson said protectionist measures like tariffs or quotas would not chase away competition from Asia and that manufacturers needed to be innovative in response to competitors from countries with lower labor and production costs.

"The word 'quality' is synonymous with Italy. That's why global market trends are working for, not against, Italy in the long term," Mandelson said.

Industries like furniture manufacturing must accept the realities and move away from mass production and toward high-end craftsmanship, he said.

"The 20th century European furniture industry, like the European textile and shoe industries, was built on mass production, but it will survive on quality and brand identity, which is why Italy's frequently smaller but professional producers have a future if they adapt and follow new market trends and flows," Mandelson said.

The UK prime minister does not intend to hold a referendum on the rules that govern the way in which the EU operates, Downing Street has confirmed.

Tony Blair had promised a referendum on a new EU constitution, but the British government and the Netherlands are now pushing for a less ambitious treaty.

There was no tradition of holding votes on treaties, said the PM.

The Netherlands followed France in voting against a draft constitution in 2005, plunging the EU into crisis.

Mr Blair told the Financial Times his likely successor, Chancellor Gordon Brown, agreed with his view.

In a lengthy interview with the Financial Times, the man who could be Russia's next president is unwaveringly polite in a stiffish way, tough in his defence of the past seven years' achievements and with a steeliness not unlike that of Mr Putin, a long-time friend. The similarities should not surprise. Both men are 54, from St Petersburg and both are former KGB spies.

France has given added significance to the term float-ing voter, with an astonishing 17 million of them still weighing up the four main presidential candidates ahead of Sunday's election.

The "undecided" voters make up more than a third of the electorate, and according to party campaign-ers, they could continue agonising until they reach the polling booths.

In what has been billed as the most important vote in a generation, they are turning out in their thousands to the final rallies of the campaign, which winds up today.

An estimated 17,000 people flocked to a Paris sports hall last night to hear the centrist candidate François Bayrou talk about his "orange revolution" to overcome the old left/right split in the strongly polarised world of French politics.

His consistent poll ratings of around 19 per cent have injected suspense into the campaign which had appeared in recent months to be a two-horse race between Ségolène Royal and the conservative candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, the front-runner who gained the approval of the outgoing President Jacques Chirac, through clenched teeth last month. M. Sarkozy is still tipped to emerge as the winner in the run-off vote on 6 May.

TOULOUSE: The four leading candidates for the French presidency held their last major campaign rallies Thursday as the most hotly contested election in decades drew to a close.

In the southwest city of Toulouse, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate, addressed about 17,000 supporters three days before the first round, vowing to usher in a 21st century-style socialism and exhorting voters to propel her into the runoff.

She called for a "massive mobilization" to avoid a repeat of the party's 2002 humiliation when the Socialists were eliminated in the first round by Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front.

Lashing out at her main rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, she declared to wild cheers: "We will not go down on our knees before George Bush," adding that "in Europe we will defend the emergence of a multipolar world."

Personal Democracy

Of course, like in the U.S., the candidates are desperately trying to use the internet to their advantage. And like in the U.S., even though they seem to think it's important, they also seem to be stumbling in the dark, spending lots of money to leverage the power of the new media without really understanding its nature. This is why the candidates' efforts are interesting, and maybe yield lessons for U.S. campaign watchers.

(...)

Sarko

Overall, the site is impressive. Sarko clearly has pulled no stops. But once you're done watching the videos (and, given the sheer number, a surprising amount are actually worth watching), your hunger isn't quite sated.

There's nothing to do, here. Interaction on the site is token. Sarkozy.fr has no way to get its viewers to connect, with the campaign or with each other. A common charge against Sarko is his arrogance, and this is an example of it. "Watch me! Watch how good I am!" And it's fun for a while, because he is good, but there's not much else to do.

(...)

Sarkozy's website reflects his public persona -- good and bad -- surprisingly well. All of Sarko's bombast is there, and it's a good thing, because you need that in a campaign, but it's hard to identify with a slick website that doesn't seem to give a damn who you are or what you have to say.

Where most sites have a form for people to enter their email, there is a countdown to the election - clearly the only thing on his mind.

Sego

(...)

First of all, her website is the only campaign website with a splash page that asks for your email and post code before you can access the main site. The obligatory splash image is a picture taken by a supporter.

More importantly, it's hard not to notice that the website is abuzz with discussion. One of the top links on the sidebar is "Forums", which takes you to the webpage's 100 (!) bulletin boards, one board per issue. And they're active.

As you scroll further down, you have the e-activists (e-militants) section.

(...)

Another impressive thing is this section, which uses Google Maps to show all the grassroots events that are taking place all over the country. Again, I don't know many campaigns that show such an understanding of how to use the web's features and how to bring people in the campaign by encouraging them to work from the bottom up.

The Blog section is very interesting. Ségoléne has eschewed the idea of most U.S. candidates, which is to have people create their blog trough their campaign website. Instead, the Create your Blog (Créer son blog) link takes you to an page that explains how to quickly set up a blog with a free service. I think this is very smart: instead of asking people to come to her website and stay there when they already have a thousand subscriptions to social networks, she takes the fight to the streets and pushes her supporters to blog out in the open.

(...)

To sum up, while Sarko is impressive and glitzy, he clearly doesn't "get it," Ségo is leaps and bounds ahead of him.

Alberto Gonzales, the US attorney general, is struggling to hang on to his job after a disastrous performance before the Senate judicial committee investigating the sacking of eight federal prosecutors. Yesterday's appearance had been viewed as a make-or-break moment for Mr Gonzales, a member of George Bush's inner circle since his days in Texas, who stands accused of politicising the judiciary.

By late afternoon, it looked as if Mr Gonzales, despite his insistence that he had done nothing wrong, and saw no need to resign, was being dragged towards the exit after two previously supportive Republican senators called for him to stand down.

Article continues "I believe the best way to put this behind us is your resignation," said Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, describing the justice department's handling of the sackings as "incompetent" and "atrocious".

Two other Republican senators came close to calling Mr Gonzales a liar in his justification of the sackings, and in his own role in the actions. He did not help his cause by his faltering testimony, exposing fresh inconsistencies in his description of the process leading to the sackings.

In one low point, Mr Gonzales claimed he could not remember attending a crucial meeting last November 10 days before the dismissals - one of more than 40 occasions yesterday where he uttered the words, "I can't recall".

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/50783/

News outlets in the U.S. combine the totally proper condemnation of killing at home with a notably different affect toward the methodical killing abroad that is funded by the U.S. Treasury....

Everyone who isn't deranged can agree that what happened on April 16, 2007, at the campus of Virginia Tech was an abomination. It came about because of an individual's madness. We must reject it without the slightest equivocation. And we do.

But the media baseline is to glorify the U.S. military -- yesterday, today and tomorrow -- bringing so much bloodshed to Iraq. The social dynamics in our own midst, fueling the war effort, are spared tough scrutiny. We're constantly encouraged to go along, avidly or passively.

Yet George Will has it wrong. The first task of government should not be "to establish a monopoly on violence." Government should work to prevent violence -- including its own.

That last paragraph is reminscent of Jerome's kos diary challenging Hunter about him stating the US should always respond to threats with disproportionate military violence.

keep to the Fen Causeway

+15.5% Power generation
+18.3% Industrial production
+26.2% Rolled steel production
+32.1% Car production
+43.0% Aluminium production

via the FT. And it's not growth from small numbers. Chian is by far the largest steel producer, is now the third (or second) car manufacturer, the second electricity generator.

These are truly staggering numbers.

And the expectation that China will overtake the US in carbon emissions this year or the next (one year earlier than the previous estimate, made only a year ago).

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Australia has warned that it will have to switch off the water supply to the continent's food bowl unless heavy rains break an epic drought - heralding what could be the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation.

The Murray-Darling basin in south-eastern Australia yields 40 per cent of the country's agricultural produce. But the two rivers that feed the region are so pitifully low that there will soon be only enough water for drinking supplies. Australia is in the grip of its worst drought on record, the victim of changing weather patterns attributed to global warming and a government that is only just starting to wake up to the severity of the position.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, a hardened climate-change sceptic, delivered dire tidings to the nation's farmers yesterday. Unless there is significant rainfall in the next six to eight weeks, irrigation will be banned in the principal agricultural area. Crops such as rice, cotton and wine grapes will fail, citrus, olive and almond trees will die, along with livestock.

A ban on irrigation, which would remain in place until May next year, spells possible ruin for thousands of farmers, already debt-laden and in despair after six straight years of drought.

Lovers of the Australian landscape often cite the poet Dorothea Mackellar who in 1904 penned the classic lines: "I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains." But the land that was Mackellar's muse is now cracked and parched, and its mighty rivers have shrivelled to sluggish brown streams. With paddocks reduced to dust bowls, graziers have been forced to sell off sheep and cows at rock-bottom prices or buy in feed at great expense. Some have already given up, abandoning pastoral properties that have been in their families for generations. The rural suicide rate has soared.

Relations between Angela Merkel and Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor have reached a new low point. Merkel has refused to actively promote the European statesman's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

DDP Helmut Kohl has had a bit of a rough time lately. The former German chancellor has long been plagued by pain in his right knee. At the beginning of the year, the discomfort became so serious that doctors had to implant an artificial joint. Kohl canceled all official appointments for weeks. He wasn't even able to attend the glamorous gala celebrating the 50th anniversary of the European Union. Canceling that appointment was especially depressing for Kohl, who is the EU's only living honorary citizen.

That makes it all the more comforting that European Commission President José Manuel Barroso used the celebrations in Berlin as an opportunity to propose an honorary title for Kohl that would crown a politician's life work in a way that no other title could: the Nobel Peace Prize. Kohl is a great statesman and a European by conviction, Barroso said. "Kohl deserves the Nobel prize for peace," he added. In making the statement, the Portuguese friend expressed not only his own opinion, but also that of the former chancellor.

FROM THE MAGAZINE Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your publication. And so Kohl's satisfaction increased with every statement in support of his nomination. The head of Bavaria's Christian Social Union party, Edmund Stoiber, and the governor of the state of Thuringia, Dieter Althaus, were quick to throw in their support. And when Manfred Stolpe, the dyed in the wool Social Democrat and former governor of Brandenburg, had the grandeur to step out of the party political trenches to offer his support, Kohl found the gesture especially touching.

Brussels - A small Belgian brewer won a victory at Europe's top court on Thursday with a ruling that it may be allowed to use terms such as "Brut" or "Reserve" for its champagne-style beer.

De Landtsheer Emmanuel launched a beer in 2001, brewed using the method to make sparkling wine, and proudly described it as the world's first "Brut" beer, upsetting champagne makers.

Veuve-Clicquot Ponsardin, part of LVMH, and the CIVC champagne association took action against De Landtsheer in Belgium for infringement of trade marks and breach of rules on consumer information and comparative advertising.

De Landtsheer dropped "champagne beer" and "Reims-France", the capital of the champagne-growing region, from its labels after a Belgian court ruling in 2002, but was allowed to use the terms "Brut", "Reserve" and "the world's first Brut beer".

LOS ANGELES, April 19 -- The hills and palm trees have turned sepia, the winds crackle and the skin of many Angelenos, with the texture and appearance of unpeeled onions, needs a slathering of cream.

The winter rainy season here has been the driest in well over a century. Much of Southern California and broad swaths of the West are also suffering -- and fearing next a season of virulent fires.

Since last July, it has rained a mere 2.4 inches in downtown Los Angeles, far below the 15-inch average for the same period, the driest it has been since 1877. The already arid Antelope Valley just north of the city has had about 10 percent of its normal rainfall -- less than an inch -- and Burbank is barely better off. The state's overall snow pack is about 40 percent of its normal level, the lowest since 1988.

Throughout the West, a dry winter has parched places like Phoenix and Reno, Nev., where roughly half the normal amount of rain has fallen. But the situation in Southern California is particularly egregious. Every morning brings another grim march toward the lawn sprinklers and twitchy glances toward the ever-flammable hills.

"Southern California has been really hard hit," said Elissa Lynn, a senior meteorologist at the California Department of Water Resources.

Thanks to heavy rains last year, particularly in the north, Ms. Lynn said, the state's reservoirs remain in good shape and a serious drought is not in the offing. But the dry weather, compounded by dry vegetation left by an unusually harsh freeze over the winter and a very windy spring have raised the specter of frequent powerful fires throughout Southern California.

"You have very dry, very dead fuel out there," said Jamie Meier, a meteorologist with the Los Angeles office of the National Weather Service. "It has the potential to be a difficult fire season."

Brush fires, less common in the winter months, have been numerous this year. There have been more than a dozen in Ventura County alone. Last week, three homes burned in Beverly Hills, where flames were whipped by unseasonably high winds.

Ventura County never ended the official fire season that began last spring and now is bracing for a tough summer.

First-time buyers are risking homelessness as they resort to desperate measures to get on the property ladder, a housing charity is warning.

The number of people whose homes have been repossessed or are struggling with mortgage arrears has doubled in the past two years, says Shelter.

Some are falling into debt after signing lifetime mortgages of six or seven times their salary.