US President George W. Bush rejected Sunday the idea of an "endless dialogue" on the future status of Kosovo, saying the time was ripe to move towards independence for the Albanian-majority Serbian province.

"I happen to believe that it's important to move the process along," Bush told reporters in Tirana, during the first ever visit to Albania by a US president.

"Independence is the goal," he said during a joint press conference with Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha. "The time is now."

EU transportation ministers have approved the use of billions of euros in public funds to finance the ailing satellite-navigation system Galileo.

Ministers on Friday gave the green-light to plans by the European Commission after the collapse of talks last month to undertake the ambitious project in partnership with private industry

"We need the expertise in this technology and we need the jobs which the sector will generate," said German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee, whose country is current president of the EU.

All 27 ministers approved the plan, which will require an initial outlay of 2.4 billion euros ($3.2 billion) of public money towards the project's total cost of about 4 billion euros.

This would come on top of the 1.3 billion euros national governments have already committed to Galileo, seen as Europe's answer to the US-operated global positioning system GPS.

Producers of cut flowers in developing countries are notorious for providing low wages, toxic working conditions and using child labor. In Germany, fair trade flowers are an increasingly popular way to change that.

Child labor, skin disease and miscarriage are three things that German consumers most certainly don't associate with flowers. But these are part of the daily life at greenhouse operations in equatorial areas.

Many flowers, especially roses and carnations, are imported from lands like Colombia, Kenya and Zimbabwe. During winter, when flower production in Central Europe is nonexistent, foreign exports kick into high gear.

MOSCOW (Reuters) -- Vladimir Putin, whose term as Russian president ends next year, does not rule out running again in 2012, a leading Russian daily reported on Saturday.

The future plans of the 54-year-old Putin, by far Russia's most powerful and popular politician, are the hottest topic of the Russian presidential succession.

The constitution limits him to two successive four-year terms in power, though further terms are possible after a break.

Putin has said he will not change the constitution to get a third consecutive term and has already made clear he will not retire altogether after the March 2008 election.

But he has not yet given any details about what he will do. Asked by reporters in the German town of Heiligendamm, where leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations met on Friday, whether he could run again in 2012, Putin replied: "In theory it's possible and the constitution doesn't forbid it."

The first high-speed rail link between France and Germany began scheduled services Sunday, slashing travel times and marking a major step towards a truly pan-European rapid transit network.

The service, offering fast connections to Luxembourg and Switzerland, cuts the Paris-Frankfurt journey by two and a half hours to three hours 50 minutes and brings Munich within six hours
of the French capital.

The first scheduled passenger train to whizz along the state-of-the-art new tracks was an Inter-City Express (ICE) train, operated by Germany's Deutsche Bahn, that left Paris at 6:43 a.m. headed to Frankfurt.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and its allies scored a resounding victory in Sunday's first round of the general elections.

Early estimates by several institutes, based on a partial vote count, show the UMP and its right-wing allies gaining 45.6 to 46.4 per cent of the vote Sunday, putting it in a position to grab an overwhelming majority of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament, in next Sunday's second round.

 

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift:  Socialist Segolene Royal hopes to lead her party after the election

According to the same estimates, the opposition Socialist Party and its left-wing allies look set to take 35.7 per cent of the vote, while the centrist Democratic Movement of Francois Bayrou was seen to draw only 7.3 per cent.

 

In terms of seats, forecasts based on the first round show the UMP and allied parties poised to win 383 to 501 of the 577 seats on June 17.

 

Estimates give the opposition Socialist Party and its allies only 69 to 185 seats next Sunday, with the Democratic Movement credited with 1 to 4 seats.

A convinced "European" at ease in the globalised world of internet banking, Mark has just returned from Budapest and Bratislava and is preparing to travel to Prague.

The 38-year-old expert in IT security for a Brussels bank loves his work and the varied places it takes him, and prizes his cosmopolitanism. "I'm a world traveller," he smiles. But most of all he loves his home of Bazel in Belgian Flanders, a tidy, prosperous red-brick village outside Antwerp. He wouldn't live anywhere else - even though he believes his taxes are being frittered away on poorer parts of Belgium to the south, rather than being spent locally.

Article continues "It would be better to separate into two parts, Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia," he argues. "It's two completely different economies. All our money is just flowing into the south all the time. It's not fair."

Mark's grievance is widespread in Flanders, sustaining the extreme-right nationalists of the Vlaams Belang - Flemish Interest - party, which is campaigning to break up Belgium.

Identical disputes over public money and how to spread it fairly are rife across large tracts of Europe, eroding national solidarity, feeding separatism, encouraging populism, and generating friction between Europe's wealthy centres of excellence and their less fortunate national hinterlands.

GORDON Brown's premiership could begin with an explosive row over a European treaty set to be agreed by Tony Blair next week.

In the very last days of his term as Prime Minister, Mr Blair will try to sign Britain up to a stripped-down form of the European Constitution that was emphatically rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2004.

The British government has promised that any constitution would be put to UK voters in a referendum. But Mr Blair will argue that the new treaty will not have constitutional implications, merely consolidating and amending existing European rules and not fundamentally altering Britain's relationship with the EU.

Mr Blair is due to discuss the new treaty in Brussels on 21 and 22 June. Mr Brown will be formally declared Labour's new leader on 24 June, and sworn in as prime minister on 27 June.

The Conservatives have now served notice that they will demand a referendum from Mr Brown once he is in No 10. "Any treaty that is about the transfer of powers to the EU must be put to the country in a referendum," David Cameron, the Conservative leader, said yesterday.

George Bush used the first visit by a serving American president to Albania yesterday to make the clearest call yet for independence for neighbouring Kosovo. In a move that will add to the tension between Washington and Moscow - which supports Serbia's claims to the troubled province - Mr Bush said the UN Security Council should quickly decide Kosovo's fate.

"At some point in time, sooner rather than later, you've got to say 'Enough is enough. Kosovo is independent', and that's the position we've taken," Mr Bush told a press conference in the Albanian capital, Tirana.

Kosovo, a province of two million people, more than 90 percent of whom are ethnic Albanians, has been governed by the UN since a Nato-led bombing campaign drove out Serb forces in the mid-1990s. Political leaders in Kosovo are warning that patience is wearing thin among ethnic Albanians and they will unilaterally declare the enclave independent if the UN stalls.

But Russia has split the Security Council by backing fellow Orthodox Christian Serbia in its opposition to Kosovo's statehood, claiming it would set a dangerous precedent for breakaway regions. Serbia strongly opposes the loss of Kosovo, its spiritual heartland dating back 1,000 years, and Russia's President Vladimir Putin told the visiting Serb premier Vojislav Kostunica "with pleasure" at the weekend that he had thwarted Western plans.

Union attacks Mittal over Kazakh safety

Arcelor Mittal's safety performance at its Kazakhstan coalmines is a stain on the UK, one of Britain's leading trade unions said yesterday after revelations over the weekend that 90 miners had been killed in the company's operations in Kazakhstan since 2004.

Unite said that the safety record and working conditions at the steel group's Kazakh operations were shameful because of the close links that Lakshmi Mittal, its chief executive, has with the UK. Britain's richest man, with a personal fortune of £19 billion, he has his office and home in London and has given millions of pounds to the Labour Party.

Arcelor Mittal defended its record amid criticism from Kazakh miners that they are treated like slaves and enjoyed better conditions in the Soviet era.

The wasted talents of unemployed disabled people are costing the economy billions of pounds, a leading think tank has warned.  Improving the skills of the 6.8 million working age disabled could give Britain a £35 billion boost over the next three decades, according to a Social Market Foundation (SMF) study.  

Only half of disabled people - whose most common ailments are back pain, blood pressure or breathing problems - are currently in work.  The report said that raising the disabled employment rate to 75% - the same as able-bodied people - would benefit the UK to the tune of £13 billion. And ensuring disabled people have "world class" skills by 2020 would raise £35 billion over 30 years, it added.

http://www.ccc.de/press/releases/2007/20070609/EPROM_Tausch.mp4

Dozens of Jewish worshippers desecrated a Muslim cemetery in a Palestinian village near Arial on Friday.

 The worshippers broke some tombstones, and wrote "Death to Arabs" on others. Noaf, a resident of a nearby village, said that the worshippers arrived at the cemetery escorted by soldiers.

 "Several of them entered a nearby Muslim cemetery, broke tombstones, and wrote things on them such as "Death to Arabs". I don't know exactly how many tombstones were desecrated. We were under curfew during their worship time, and they came and did this," he said.

 Rabbi Arik Asherman, head of Rabbis for Human Rights, denounced the incident. "As rabbis, we protest this desecration and are reminded of our pain when such acts are committed against us."

 According to an official IDF response, the entry of Jewish worshippers into the cemetery was authorized in order to allow them to visit the Yeshua Ben Nun tomb nearby.

 

• "America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still." "While some of this year's dry weather is cyclical... some of it portends more permanent changes."

• "The Bush administration increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws that preclude such considerations... At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law".

• The U.S. military is making plans to be an ongoing "post-occupation" occupying force in Iraq.

  The centerpiece would be a reinforced mechanized infantry division of around 20,000 soldiers assigned to guarantee the security of the Iraqi government and to assist Iraqi forces or their U.S. advisers if they get into fights they can't handle. Second, a training and advisory force of close to 10,000 troops would work with Iraqi military and police units.

  Translation: 20,000 soldiers "assigned to guarantee the security of the Iraqi" oil. Interestingly -- "with only one major route from the country -- through southern Iraq to Kuwait -- it would take at least 3,000 large convoys some 10 months to remove U.S. military gear and personnel alone, not including the several thousand combat vehicles that would be needed to protect such an operation."

• Gov. Bill Richardson would leave no U.S. troops in Iraq. "I would leave no troops in Iraq whatsoever... The difference between me and the other candidates is, they would leave troops there indefinitely, and I would not," he said.

• Massachusetts' Gov. Deval Patrick "became the first governor to march in Boston's gay pride parade, days before an anticipated vote on a ballot question that could bar same-sex marriages."

• Colin Powell now believes Guantánamo Bay should be closed:

  If it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo. Not tomorrow, but this afternoon. I'd close it... And I would not let any of those people go... I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well then they'll have access to lawyers, then they'll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn't that what our system is all about?

  The only way to save yourself Powell, is to give evidence against the Bush junta. Powell has also twice given foreign policy advice to Sen. Barak Obama.

• With Nevada's early primary, the state's gambling and entertainment industries are fundraising like never before. Since 2000, the gambling industry alone contributed $50 million since 2000. Small potatoes compared to other industries, but still...

• "More than 26 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's disease, and a new forecast says the number will quadruple by 2050. At that rate, one in 85 people will have the brain-destroying disease in 40 years, researchers from Johns Hopkins University conclude."

• Cindy Sheehan sold Camp Casey for $87,000 "to Los Angeles radio talk show host Bree Walker, who will preserve it as a peace memorial and keep it open to protesters."

• "In choosing to recommend an admiral as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has for the second time given a high-profile job to someone from the Navy -- a service that has, for the most part, worked only on the fringes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." "The decision has caused some consternation within the other services, particularly the Army, which is doing the bulk of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. There also have been grumblings within the Air Force, whose only current regional command is in North America."

• Sen. Mel Martinez, general chairman of the Republican Party, "criticized" his party's "presidential contenders Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney... saying their opposition to the Senate immigration plan he and President Bush have championed is 'wrong.'":

  I have to say, on this issue they are falling short... I think it's been too easy for too many people in the Senate and outside the Senate to simply criticize and find fault. No doubt that this is an imperfect product, but at the end of the day, what is your solution? What is your answer? ...The status quo is not good enough... And so whether a presidential candidate or a senator, they need to take the step beyond criticizing and offering a solution.

• Sen. Joe Lieberman (CT-Warmonger) wants to "strike" Iran.

• Alaska's congressional delegation will propose a seven-mile road easement through the 315,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in exchange for adding "61,720 acres of protected wildlife habitat". The exchange "could become the nation's next big environmental showdown".

• "The Hadzabe are believed to be the second-oldest people on Earth" and "one of the last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers on the planet". They "number fewer than 1,500" and are on the "verge of vanishing" -- "unduly hastened by a United Arab Emirates royal family, which plans to use the tribal hunting land as a personal safari playground. The deal between the Tanzanian government and Tanzania UAE Safaris Ltd. leases nearly 2,500 square miles of this sprawling, yellow-green valley near the storied Serengeti Plain to members of the [Abu Dhabi] royal family, who chose it after a helicopter tour."

  "We want them to go to school," said Philip Marmo, who is Tanzania's minister for good governance and represents the valley in parliament. "We want them to wear clothes. We want them to be decent."

• "Police in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, have defended their operations against the banned Mungiki sect, amid accusation they used excessive force."

• "Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi urged the U.N. Security Council on Saturday to finance an African Union (AU) peacekeeping deployment to Somalia, so his troops can withdraw."

• "President Idriss Deby appeared... to tone down Chad's resistance to deployment of an international military force on its volatile eastern border with Sudan's Darfur region."

• "Two drunken soldiers shot dead six civilians, including a nine-year-old boy, after arguing with guests at a party in southern Colombia".

• In Greenland, "the Jakobshavn Glacier... has doubled its speed in five years and every day dumps enough ice into the sea to supply 20 to 30 New York Cities with water." "Only in recent years did scientists conclude that sea levels are rising twice as fast as they had estimated, said H. Jay Zwally, a senior research scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md."

  "We are seeing things taking place in the ice now that weren't expected, that five years ago we didn't even know about," said Zwally, who will spend his 14th summer on the Greenland ice cap this year. "I think eventually Greenland will reach a point that the change is irreversible in the current climate."

• "An estimated 3 million gays, lesbians, and transvestites paraded down the main avenue of Brazil's business capital Sao Paulo".

• "More than one-quarter of... Rondônia [State, Brazil] has been deforested the highest rate in the Amazon. Over the years, ranchers, miners and loggers have routinely invaded nature reserves and Indian reservations. Now a proposal to build an $11 billion hydroelectric project" on the Madeira River, which "may have the world's most diverse fish stocks, has set off a new controversy."

• "Mexican and American officials are talking about how the U.S. government can do more to help Mexico battle drug trafficking" including training and intelligence information.

• Admiral Sir Alan West, the former head of the British Royal Navy, " at the time of the Iraq invasion was so worried about the legality of the conflict that he sought his own private legal advice on justification for the war." He "approached lawyers to ask whether Navy and Royal Marines personnel might end up facing war crimes charges in relation to their duties in Iraq."

• George W. Bush is welcomed by Albania. And, Albania is welcome to keep him.

• Preliminary estimates give France's President Nicolas Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement "41.3 percent of the vote... a score that is expected to give the party between 360 and 470 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly... The main opposition camp, the Socialist Party, received an estimated 27.2 percent, putting it on course for 60 to 170 seats".

• "Gordon Brown is preparing a radical shake-up of the Labour party designed to give members a say over policy and put them in the vanguard of community projects".

• "The watchdog for teaching in England... call[ed] for all national school tests before the age of 16 to be scrapped."

• "A gold-encrusted sword that Napoleon wore into battle in Italy was sold on Sunday for more than $6.4-million at an auction south of Paris."

• "Floods and landslides triggered by torrential rains in southern China have killed at least 66 people, left 12 others missing and forced nearly 600,000 from their homes... Four days of heavy rains have battered Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, Hunan, Fujian and Jiangxi provinces, affecting nearly nine million people".

• Parti Islam se-Malaysia, "Malaysia's hardline Islamist party is reshaping its image ahead of widely expected early elections, trying to reach beyond its northeastern stronghold, but skeptics are looking for a true change of heart." The party is "banking on the younger leaders to lure back Muslim Malay support, but they still want "to turn multireligious Malaysia into an Islamic state".

• "Suspected Islamic insurgents opened fire on a school bus... wounding nine people, including eight Muslim teenagers in Thailand's restive south".

• "Southeast Asian nations are battling a surge in dengue cases, amid signs that climate change could make 2007 the worst year on record for a disease that often gets less attention than some higher-profile health risks."

• "Research inside China found widespread abuse of workers producing licensed goods carrying the logo of the 2008 Beijing games." "Children and adult workers are being grossly exploited so that unscrupulous employers can make more profit," said Brendan Barber, general secretary of Britain's Trades Union Congress.

• "House values across New Zealand grew 11.1 per cent more in the three months to May 31 than in the same quarter last year, ignoring efforts by the Reserve Bank to take the steam out of the property market."

• "Dam levels are unlikely to rise significantly, despite up to 200 millimetres of rain falling on parts of Sydney and the Central Coast since Thursday. In a familiar refrain, the Sydney Catchment Authority said too little of it had fallen over the catchment area."

• Taliban "militants fired rockets on a district town... as President Hamid Karzai was giving an address to elders and residents during a visit to Ghazni Province," Afghanistan. "Afghan and NATO forces... killed 27 Taliban fighters in the Shinkay district of Zabul Province".

• The number of tigers in India's Melghat reserve "are dropping steadily due to" human interference. "Villages inside the park are being relocated to avert further adverse impact."

• "With a thunderous rumble and cloud of dust and smoke, an apparent suicide vehicle bomb brought down a section of highway bridge south of Baghdad on Sunday, wounding several U.S. soldiers guarding the crossing and blocking traffic on Iraq's main north-south artery."

• A "relative lull followed a day of heavy fighting" between the Lebanese Army and "the militant group Fatah al Islam" in the Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp.

• "Masked gunmen from rival Palestinian factions streamed onto the streets to fight their most intense battles in weeks on Sunday in the Gaza Strip, with the weekend toll rising to six dead and 59 wounded. Among the victims was a pro-Hamas Islamic cleric pulled from his home and shot several times in the street after a guard from the rival Fatah movement was shot and thrown to his death from a high building in Gaza City".

• The space shuttle Atlantis docked with the International Space Station. "A decision likely will be made in the next day or two" if "a peeled-back thermal blanket should be fixed" and if it should " done during one of three scheduled spacewalks or during an extra, unplanned one."

• "The most massive star known in the universe has been discovered and 'weighed'... The star, part of a binary system, topped the scales at 114 times the mass of the sun."

• A new "theory of how dinosaurs may have perceived sound" suggested "large dinosaurs' hearing was more sensitive to booms and thuds than squeaks and whistles... Brachiosaurus and Allosaurus probably could hear the deep-toned sounds of other dinosaurs' footfalls from miles away". But, "may have had little or no hearing at higher sound frequencies". Dinosaurs liked to crank the bass.

• A "comet blast and firestorm could have dealt that death blow to the mammoth and more than 15 other species of large mammals" claimed scientists.

  "The shock wave would have spread across the whole continent," said Richard B. Firestone, a nuclear chemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California who helped do the research. "This event was large enough to directly kill most everything instantly. Those that survived would have found their food sources devastated, their water polluted, all kinds of things that would have made it difficult to go on much longer."

  Yes, yesterday's OND claimed the woolly mammoths went extinct from inbreeding due to climate stresses.

• Bush has 588 days left. 3,501 U.S. confirmed deaths in Iraq. Over $433,470,000,000 spent on the Iraq war.

America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.

From the mountains and desert of the West, now into an eighth consecutive dry year, to the wheat farms of Alabama, where crops are failing because of rainfall levels 12 inches lower than usual, to the vast soupy expanse of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, which has become so dry it actually caught fire a couple of weeks ago, a continent is crying out for water.

In the south-east, usually a lush, humid region, it is the driest few months since records began in 1895. California and Nevada, where burgeoning population centres co-exist with an often harsh, barren landscape, have seen less rain over the past year than at any time since 1924. The Sierra Nevada range, which straddles the two states, received only 27 per cent of its usual snowfall in winter, with immediate knock-on effects on water supplies for the populations of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

The human impact, for the moment, has been limited, certainly nothing compared to the great westward migration of Okies in the 1930 - the desperate march described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.

Big farmers are now well protected by government subsidies and emergency funds, and small farmers, some of whom are indeed struggling, have been slowly moving off the land for decades anyway. The most common inconvenience, for the moment, are restrictions on hosepipes and garden sprinklers in eastern cities.

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Sunday for the creation of a new world economic order that gives greater clout to fast-growing emerging nations.

Days after attending a Group of Eight summit in Germany, Putin suggested that club was outdated and failed to reflect a shift in economic power away from the industrialised West to countries like his own.

"If 50 years ago, 60 pct of the world's gross domestic product came from the G7, now it's the other way round, and 60 percent of the world's GDP is produced outside," Putin said in a speech to a major economic conference.

He also took aim at financial organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, saying they were created in "a completely different reality" and had lost relevance in the fast-changing global economy.

Russia is enjoying an unprecedented spell of economic growth that has enabled it to pay down its foreign debts and accumulate foreign exchange reserves of over $400 billion -- the world's third largest.

The Bush administration increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws that preclude such considerations, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

At least one-third of the immigration judges appointed by the Justice Department since 2004 have had Republican connections or have been administration insiders, and half lacked experience in immigration law, Justice Department, immigration court and other records show.

Two newly appointed immigration judges were failed candidates for the U.S. Tax Court nominated by President Bush; one fudged his taxes and the other was deemed unqualified to be a tax judge by the nation's largest association of lawyers. Both were Republican loyalists.

Justice officials also gave immigration judgeships to a New Jersey election law specialist who represented GOP candidates, a former treasurer of the Louisiana Republican Party, a White House domestic policy adviser and a conservative crusader against pornography.

These appointments, all made by the attorney general, have begun to reshape a system of courts in which judges, ruling alone, exercise broad powers -- deporting each year nearly a quarter-million immigrants, who have limited rights to appeal and no right to an attorney. The judges do not serve fixed terms.

U.S. Arming Sunnis in Iraq to Battle Old Qaeda Allies - New York Times

BAGHDAD, June 10 -- With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.

American commanders say they have successfully tested the strategy in Anbar Province west of Baghdad and have held talks with Sunni groups in at least four areas of central and north-central Iraq where the insurgency has been strong. In some cases, the American commanders say, the Sunni groups are suspected of involvement in past attacks on American troops or of having links to such groups. Some of these groups, they say, have been provided, usually through Iraqi military units allied with the Americans, with arms, ammunition, cash, fuel and supplies.

American officers who have engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups say many of them have had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but grew disillusioned with the Islamic militants' extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. In exchange for American backing, these officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American units. Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations say that in some cases, Sunni groups have agreed to alert American troops to the location of roadside bombs and other lethal booby traps.

But critics of the strategy, including some American officers, say it could amount to the Americans' arming both sides in a future civil war. The United States has spent more than $15 billion in building up Iraq's army and police force, whose manpower of 350,000 is heavily Shiite. With an American troop drawdown increasingly likely in the next year, and little sign of a political accommodation between Shiite and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, the critics say, there is a risk that any weapons given to Sunni groups will eventually be used against Shiites. There is also the possibility the weapons could be used against the Americans themselves.

THURSDAY, June 7 (HealthDay News) -- Yoga's postures, controlled breathing and meditation may work together to help ease brains plagued by anxiety or depression, a new study shows.

Brain scans of yoga practitioners showed a healthy boost in levels of the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric (GABA) immediately after a one-hour yoga session. Low brain levels of GABA are associated with anxiety and depression, the researchers said.

"I am quite sure that this is the first study that's shown that there's a real, measurable change in a major neurotransmitter with a behavioral intervention such as yoga," said lead researcher Dr. Chris Streeter, assistant professor of psychiatry and neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine.

She believes yoga could prove a useful tool to help people battling depression and anxiety disorders. "We're not advocating that they chuck their medication, but I would advise that they could use it as an adjunct and see how they are doing," Streeter said.

Her team published its findings in the May issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

Todd Gitlin, TPM Cafe: Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

When I started reading Richard Rorty and listening to him lecture in the `80s, I was both refreshed and exasperated. I hadn't read much philosophy since college, and he give me a swift shove out of my dogmatic slumbers.

To be awakened, though, did not mean converted. When he argued that we were against torture not because it violated a universal human right but simply because torture was not what our tribe did (those were the days), I was not convinced. In the mid-`90s, when I was writing about political correctness and the Enlightenment, I was pleased to find evidence (worked up by Norman Geras) that Rorty was mistaken when he thought that Gentiles saved Jews during the Nazi years out of particularist motives (they are coreligionists, fellow members of soccer clubs, etc.), and not universalist ones (they are fellow human beings).

Patricia Cohen, New York Times: Richard Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75

Richard Rorty, whose inventive work on philosophy, politics, literary theory and more made him one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers, died Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 75

The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Mary Varney Rorty.

Raised in a home where "The Case for Leon Trotsky" was viewed with the same reverence as the Bible might be elsewhere, Mr. Rorty pondered the nature of reality as well as its everyday struggles. "At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice," he wrote in an autobiographical sketch.

Adam Berstein, Washington Post: Richard Rorty, 75; Leading U.S. Pragmatist Philosopher

Richard Rorty, 75, an intellectual whose often deeply unconventional approach to mainstream philosophic thought brought him wide public recognition as one of the leading thinkers of his era, died June 8 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He had pancreatic cancer.

During Dr. Rorty's long teaching career -- at Princeton University, the University of Virginia and, most recently, Stanford University -- he championed the application of philosophy beyond academic corridors and hoped to influence public discussions of democracy and liberalism. In 1981, he received one of the first MacArthur Foundation "genius grants."

Such books as "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity" brought Dr. Rorty broad recognition in his field, and his essays for mainstream newspapers and magazines added to his stature.

http://www.infoclimat.fr/multimedia/photolive.php?photoid=35238&d=&dept=&region=&mot cle=&start=&auteur=&ord=

Vagues successives d'orages

Celui-ci, précédé d'un vent violent, a donné une forte averse de pluie.

More french thunder pictures here:

http://www.infoclimat.fr/multimedia/photolive.php?d=&s=