French president Nicolas Sarkozy is to press ahead with the "fiscal shock" plans for his country despite strong reservations from several other eurozone countries.

In an unusual move, the energetic new leader invited himself to a meeting of euro finance ministers last night (9 July) to personally sell his plans for the French economy, amid mounting criticism over the past weeks.

The heated meeting, which saw Germany among the countries opposed to his tax-cutting measures, resulted in Mr Sarkozy presenting a softer line on his plans but not abandoning them.

At a press conference after the meeting, the French president called for an "intelligent and dynamic application" of the stability and growth pact, the rules underpinning the euro.

Referring to his plans to postpone balancing the country's books from 2010 to 2012 - he said he is not asking for the euro rules to be bent specifically for France.

Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski won a reprieve Tuesday when a disgruntled coalition partner backpedaled on a threat to leave the government -- a move that would have likely brought down the administration.

Leaders of the Samoobrona (Self-Defense) party had threatened to pull out of the governing coalition as retribution for Kaczynski's decision Monday to dismiss party head Andrzej Lepper from his posts of deputy premier and agriculture minister in the wake of a corruption scandal.

But Samoobrona's parliamentary group, which hold 46 seats crucial to Kaczynski's majority, gave the prime minister its support Tuesday -- though the part did set a number of conditions.

"Samoobrona is staying in the coalition, conditionally, as a parliamentary group," Lepper told reporters on Tuesday.

Only a few months after France's new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, hurried to Germany for a show of friendship, Paris and Berlin are again battling for dominance over European aerospace giant EADS. A showdown may be on the agenda for next week.

 Airbus production in Toulouse: A bitter tug-of-war between Germany and France

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was unexpectedly frank in a chat last week with her predecessor, ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Sipping a glass of white wine at an event on Tuesday, Merkel told Schröder that Germany might soon have trouble with the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Schröder, a glass of red wine in his hand, nodded and listened, having navigated troubles of his own with France. Merkel said Sarkozy had played a constructive role at the European Union summit in Brussels last month because his interests coincided with Berlin's. But it was only a matter of time, she said, before the Germans and French would be at odds again.

FROM THE MAGAZINE Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your publication. A date for the showdown may already be set. Merkel will meet Sarkozy in Toulouse on July 16. Scheduled as a routine meeting, the mini-summit could flare into something else. Schröder and former French President Jacques Chirac (Sarkozy's predecessor) exploited every chance to show that the two countries enjoyed a harmonious friendship. But the meeting in Toulouse will be anything but a chummy get-together. Sarkozy will try to cement French dominance in the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), the massive public-private parent company of aircraft manufacturer Airbus. The Sarkozy team's plans include nothing less than an assumption of power in the complex French-German company -- which, so far, has been organized to give equal say to Paris and Berlin.

Buyers are being forced to borrow record amounts of money to finance their property purchases
Number of people defaulting on their payments this year has doubled to 77,000 each month
Fears are growing of a dramatic increase in the number of houses that are repossessed By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent Published: 11 July 2007

Britain faces a mortgage crisis with payment arrears rising sharply as 18 million homeowners struggle to meet the fifth rise in interest rates in less than a year.

It is being predicted that high earners who have stretched themselves to buy a home will join less prosperous social groups in experiencing problems as they juggle finances to adjust to rises in monthly payments.

Research suggests that twice as many borrowers as last year have missed mortgage payments in the past six months. A website, MoneyExpert.com said that, while 36,000 borrowers a month fell into arrears last year, this year that figure will be 77,000.

Fears that homeowners are vulnerable to rate rises intensified when the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) said yesterday that first-time buyers were borrowing a record 3.37 times their income and other buyers just over three times.

European Union finance ministers agreed Tuesday to back French candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn as new head of the international Monetary Fund, the EU's Portuguese presidency said.

"Ecofin agrees to support Dominique Strauss-Kahn for IMF director," the presidency said, using EU shorthand for the meeting of finance ministers in Brussels Tuesday.

 

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative, had named Strauss-Kahn, a Social Democrat, who failed to win his party's presidential nomination in the 2007 election, as his favorite candidate. Strauss-Kahn served as French finance minister in the past.

 

The nomination means that Strauss-Kahn is likely to get the job since under an informal agreement, Europe chooses the head of the IMF while the US picks the leader of the World Bank.

  

In a surprise announcement late last month, current IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato said that he would step down in October.

About 390 CIA-run flights through German airspace were in violation of German law, and Berlin could have collected millions of euros in fines. Now internal investigations could make things embarrassing for Gerhard Schröder's government as well as the United States.

 Buffed clean: The German government stands accused of ignoring illegal "renditions" flights by the CIA.

When air traffic controllers hear the code words "ATFM exempt," they know to expect something drastic. Airlines use the code to report a flight when it has sick or severely injured passengers -- or heads of state -- on board. The code is the air-traffic equivalent of flashing blue lights on a city street.

On July 19, 2002, a Gulfstream business jet took off from Frankfurt am Main bound for Amman, Jordan. The flight received an ATFM exempt, although it carried neither patients nor politicians. Instead, the jet was carrying a CIA team that took a Mauritanian terrorism suspect into custody a short time later and eventually flew him to Guántánamo.

This camouflaging of an illegal kidnapping as a rescue flight was no isolated incident. SPIEGEL has obtained complete lists of the flight plans of secret CIA flights in German airspace, which reveal 390 takeoffs and landings of CIA aircraft at airports in Germany between 2002 and 2006. The documents also show that mis-identifying the flights was part of a system designed to dodge compliance with complicated approval regulations.

The Vatican has described the Protestant and Orthodox faiths as "not proper Churches" in a document issued with the full authority of the Pope.

Anglican leaders reacted with dismay, accusing the Roman Catholic Church of paradoxical behaviour. They said that the new 16-page document outling the "defects" of non-Catholic churches constituted a major obstacle to ecumenism.

The document said that the Orthodox church suffered from a "wound" because it did not recognise the primacy of the Pope. The wound was "still more profound" in Protestant denominations, it added.

It was "difficult to see how the title of `Church' could possibly be attributed to them", said the statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Roman Catholicism was "the one true Church of Christ".

Fresh from "relaunching" Europe, President Sarkozy took his deal-making skills to Algeria today to promote an ambitious plan for a Mediterranean Union.

Mr Sarkozy's scheme for a cross-Mediterranean tie-up similar to the European Union's common market has hit a wall of scepticism on both sides of the sea and put up backs in Ankara, Beirut and Brussels in particular.

Morocco cancelled Mr Sarkozy's planned stop in Rabat on Thursday. The official reason was a "scheduling problem" but officials said King Mohammed VI was offended that the French leader planned to stay only a couple of hours and only after first visiting Algiers and Tunis.

The President's first trip beyond Europe is being staged in the whirlwind style that he has applied to fixing French problems and to brokering a treaty to salvage the defunct EU constitution. With his trademark salesmanship, Mr Sarkozy claims personal credit for putting the EU back on the rails at last month's Brussels summit.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission has called on EU member states to cooperate more with Brussels on fighting abnormalities with EU funds. A new report shows that over €1 billion of EU money was affected by irregularities and suspected fraud across the bloc in 2006.

EU anti-fraud commissioner Siim Kallas on Monday (9 July) presented the annual commission report on the issue, calling for more timely, precise and complete information from the EU states when they suspect fraud cases.

Without cooperation, the bloc cannot successfully fight cases of fraud and other irregularities, which damage the reputation of the EU, he said.

Under EU law, member states must report suspected fraud or other abnormalities concerning EU cash. But Mr Kallas said the EU capitals were not all taking fraud seriously, while others were too slow in reporting cases.

The Gaddafi Foundation says it has reached a compensation deal with the families of Libyan children infected with the Aids virus that would resolve the case of six foreign medics sentenced to death.   Salah Abdessalem, director of the foundation, on Tuesday said: "This accord satisfied all the parties and puts an end to this crisis." He said the deal was reached between the families and the special aid fund for victims set up by Tripoli and Sofia in 2005 under the aegis of the European Union.   Details would be announced in the coming hours, Abdessalem said. There was no immediate comment from representatives of the families.

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The announcement came hours before Libya's supreme court was due to deliver a verdict on Wednesday on an appeal by the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted of infecting the children.   Stalled negotiations   Snezhana Dimitrova, Nasya Nenova, Valya Cherveniashka, Valentina Siropulo and Kristiana Valcheva have been imprisoned along with doctor Ashraf Ahmed Juma since February 1999.  Negotiations had been stalled over financial compensation for the victims' families in an out-of-court settlement that could allow the medics to escape execution.

President George Bush was set for a collision with his own Republican party yesterday after ignoring demands for a new Iraq strategy that would bring US troops home.

In a speech on a visit to Cleveland, Ohio, Mr Bush shrugged aside Republican criticism over the last fortnight that his "surge" strategy is not working. He refused to offer any concessions to disenchanted Republicans and insisted it was too early to judge the "surge", his deployment of an extra 30,000 US troops.

Article continues He said: "You have got all the troops there a couple of weeks ago... They have just showed up and are beginning operations in full and you have people in Washington saying 'Stop'." He added: "I believe it is in this nation's interest to give the commander a chance to fully implement [the strategy] and Congress should wait."

In a direct rebuff to his critics in Congress, he said: "Troop levels will be decided by our commanders on the ground, not by political figures in Washington DC." But the Republican revolt continued to grow, with new senators going public to express their scepticism with the "surge".

One of the few boosts for Mr Bush came from senator John McCain, fresh from a visit to Iraq, who expressed support for the president and said he had seen signs that the "surge" was working. "From what I saw and heard while there, I believe that our military, in co-operation with the Iraqi security forces, is making progress in a number of areas," he said.

• LA Times - "U.S. forces so far have been unable to establish security, even for themselves. Iraqis continue to flee their homes, leaving mixed areas and seeking safety in religiously segregated neighborhoods. Some 32,000 families fled in June, alone, according to the figures compiled by the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations and the Iraqi government that are due to be released next week. U.S. forces have staged offensives to push insurgents out of some safe havens. But many of the insurgents have escaped to new areas of the country, launching attacks where the U.S. presence is lighter. And there has been no sign of any of the crucial political progress the administration had hoped to see in Iraq."

• WaPo - "Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin said... that despite growing Republican discontent with the Iraq war, convincing [Republican] members to support withdrawal legislation remains a daunting challenge that so far has netted few results."

  "Obviously there are folks who want the war to end today, and all the troops to be home tomorrow. And even though I think that is a worthy goal, it is not a realistic goal," said Durbin. A major redeployment of troops will have to be done gradually and in a responsible manner, he noted. "We also understand that just leaving cold turkey, with everything gone, could have the whole region descend into chaos," Durbin said.

• Reuters - "U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced a new firestorm on Tuesday sparked by a report he... misled lawmakers in 2005 about civil liberty violations by the FBI. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, responded by promising that Gonzales would face tough questions about this and other matters at a hearing planned by his panel later this month. And Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat who chairs a House Judiciary subcommittee, renewed calls for Gonzales to resign and called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to determine if he had misled Congress, 'a serious crime.'"

• The Hill - "Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) has not ruled out selling a disputed piece of land back to the organization that he and two investment partners bought it from, even though a grand jury last week found that it was sold illegally."

• NY Times - Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona "said White House officials would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues because of political concerns. Top administration officials delayed for years and attempted to 'water down' a landmark report on secondhand tobacco smoke... He was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of every speech he gave, Dr. Carmona said. He was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings, at least one of which included Karl Rove"."

• NY Times - "Two senior advisers to Senator John McCain... announced today they were leaving his presidential campaign... This latest news from the McCain campaign... came at the same moment... McCain took the floor of the Senate to speak about his latest trip to Baghdad." "I'd describe the campaign as going well. I'm very happy with it," McCain said.

• The Hill - "Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) was Capitol Hill's invisible man yesterday, lying low even as his ties to the notorious "D.C. Madam" threatened to become a political crisis for the conservative lawmaker... Vitter was nowhere to be found yesterday, and most sources believed the freshman senator remained in Louisiana to avoid the press onslaught."

• Globe and Mail - "The jury in the Conrad Black trial told the judge today that it cannot reach a unanimous verdict on 'one or more counts.' ...Black and three other former executives of Hollinger International Inc. -- John Boultbee, Peter Atkinson and Mark Kipnis --face charges relating to allegations they took more than $60-million (U.S.) from Hollinger by skimming off payments related to non-competition agreements signed when the company sold newspaper titles."

• Star Tribune - "An antiwar surge targeting Sen. Norm Coleman continued Tuesday as [Democratic] hopefuls Al Franken and Mike Ciresi pressed the Republican to break with President Bush on the war in Iraq... The candidates' statements and letters come as two separate ad campaigns attacking Coleman's continued support of the war hit the Minnesota airwaves, part of a Democratic effort nationwide to turn up the heat on pro-war Republicans."

• Reuters - "The number of people in California, already the most populous U.S. state, will rise to 60 million by 2050 from 36 million now, and Hispanics will be in the majority by 2042, a state report released on Monday forecast."

• WaPo - "Doug Marlette, 57, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, comic strip artist and outspoken defender of free speech, died July 10 in northern Mississippi when a car in which he was riding skidded off a rain-slicked road and struck a tree."

• Oregonian - "With temperatures today expected to break 100 degrees for the first time in almost a year, officials are advising people to stay out of the heat and also are bracing for a surge of activity on local rivers. The forecast high of 101 degrees at Portland International Airport would shatter the record for the date -- 91 degrees in 1990."

• BBC News - "A mortar and rocket attack on Baghdad's heavily-protected Green Zone has killed three people, Iraqi police said. Two Iraqis and one Filipino were killed and about 25 people wounded, Iraqi officials said. Police said up to 30 rockets and mortars were fired into the zone which houses the government and parliament and many foreign embassies."

• IHT - "Lebanese are being squeezed today, no longer by the fear of bombs, but by the realities of checkpoints and roving patrols of soldiers. At nearly every step, civilian life intersects with the martial: Brides must pass through metal detectors at hotels on the way to their own weddings; parking attendants search car trunks for bombs; mall security guards examine the contents of pocketbooks... After the war with Israel a year ago, United Nations officials marveled at how quickly this city, and this country, got back up and running. But now optimism is in short supply. Lebanon is grappling with a massive political crisis, the rise of Al Qaeda-style militancy and a seemingly endless stream of bombings and assassinations."

• BBC News - "Pakistan's army says an operation to flush out militants from a mosque in Islamabad is in its final stages - 24 hours after troops stormed the complex. During a day of heavy fighting, the Red Mosque's militant cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi and some 50 of his supporters were killed, the army said. It said eight soldiers also died, and some 50 women and children were freed."

• NY Times - "Shootings, beheadings, burnings and bombings: these are all tools of intimidation used by the Taliban and others to shut down hundreds of Afghanistan's public schools. To take aim at education is to make war on the government... The Ministry of Education claims that 6.2 million children are now enrolled... there is no doubt that attendance has multiplied far beyond that of any earlier time... In the southern provinces where the Taliban are most aggressively combating American and NATO troops, education has virtually come to a halt in large swaths of the contested regions... By the ministry's estimate, there have been 444 attacks since last August."

• Reuters - "China executed a former drug and food safety chief on Tuesday for corruption in an unusually swift sentence which will serve as a warning amid a series of health scandals that have stained the "made in China" brand. The Supreme People's Court approved the death sentence against Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, who was convicted of taking bribes worth some 6.5 million yuan ($850,000) from eight companies and dereliction of duty".

• SMH - "The effectiveness of Australia's $1 billion law and order operation in the Solomon Islands was undermined yesterday by the swearing-in of the fugitive lawyer Julian Moti as the country's Attorney-General."

• WaPo - "The Aral Sea, its sustaining rivers diverted to the irrigation of cotton fields, was for decades on an irrevocable course to death and desert... But now the sea, or at least a rump part of it, is coming back... because an eight mile-long dam now blocks a narrow channel through which water drained freely from the northern sea to the southern. Water that the Syr Darya River delivers into the northern sea is building up, slowly expanding its shores... The much larger southern parts of the Aral are still dying".

• SMH - "Zimbabwe's economy is nearing paralysis as petrol stations across the country run dry. President Robert Mugabe's regime has ordered all retailers to cut fuel prices by 60 per cent, a move which forces them to sell petrol at a loss. As a result, service stations across the nation have stopped selling altogether and petrol is only available on the blackmarket - at five times the official price."

• BBC News - "African nations have taken the biggest steps in reducing corruption over the past 10 years, the World Bank has said. A report measuring the quality of government in 212 countries from 1996 to 2006 found Africa had shown the greatest improvement. The report judged whether countries had free media, political stability, the rule of law and control of corruption."

• Independent - " The bus carrying 50 tired and grimy miners had just left La Loma mine when gunmen forced it to stop and dragged two union leaders off. One was shot dead on the spot, the gunmen pumping four bullets into his head. The other was tortured and then killed. Six months later another union leader who had come to the mine was also assassinated."

  The men, members of the Sintramienergetica union, had been trying to improve the appalling and unsafe working conditions at a United States-owned mine, which sends huge amounts of coal from Colombia to Europe and North America.

  Six years later, a federal court in Birmingham, Alabama, is trying the privately owned coal company, Drummond, for war crimes. This week it heard evidence that the company ordered those killings in March 2001.

• LA Times - In Baja, Mexico, "population growth in the Los Cabos region is placing the rich marsh under assault, environmentalists say. To build the newest big tourist project, a marina called Puerto Los Cabos, developers carved out a huge chunk of the estuary... Environmentalists are fighting to stop the project, which is to eventually include hotels and golf courses. They argue that the excavation of the marina probably has already contaminated the area's freshwater aquifer, a charge the developers dispute. The full project could further affect the wildlife habitat."

• Spiegel - "About 390 CIA-run flights through German airspace were in violation of German law, and Berlin could have collected millions of euros in fines. Now internal investigations could make things embarrassing for Gerhard Schröder's government as well as the United States."

• Independent - "Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, has warned that the disappointment of Kosovo's hopes for imminent independence could provoke fresh violence in the province and elsewhere in the Balkans. 'Any further delay will have a very negative impact on peace and security, not only in Kosovo,' he said. The Serbian province with an overwhelmingly Albanian population had been promised "supervised" independence under a UN plan... after lengthy consultations with leaders in Serbia and Kosovo."

• Guardian - "Protestant churches yesterday reacted with dismay to a new declaration approved by Pope Benedict XVI insisting they were mere 'ecclesial communities' and their ministers effectively phonies with no right to give communion."

• DW - "Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski won a reprieve Tuesday when a disgruntled coalition partner backpedaled on a threat to leave the government -- a move that would have likely brought down the administration. Leaders of the Samoobrona (Self-Defense) party had threatened to pull out of the governing coalition as retribution for Kaczynski's decision Monday to dismiss party head Andrzej Lepper from his posts of deputy premier and agriculture minister in the wake of a corruption scandal."

• Guardian - "It has been one of the central claims of those who challenge the idea that human activities are to blame for global warming. The planet's climate has long fluctuated, say the climate sceptics, and current warming is just part of that natural cycle - the result of variation in the sun's output and not carbon dioxide emissions. But a new analysis of data on the sun's output in the last 25 years of the 20th century has firmly put the notion to rest. The data shows that even though the sun's activity has been decreasing since 1985, global temperatures have continued to rise at an accelerating rate."

• Oregonian - "Rep. Earl Blumenauer may work on Capitol Hill, but he has a virtual office in the blogosphere. The Portland Democrat checks his BlackBerry for e-mails that alert him automatically when his name is mentioned on a blog. He carries a digital recorder so he can dictate entries for his staff to post on prominent political blogs. He's speaking at a national convention of bloggers next month".

  "So much of what happens in this business, you are actually insulated from people's reactions," said Blumenauer. "You're in structured meetings on particular subjects. I have found that this is an extraordinarily interesting way to have interaction."

  [...]

  Blumenauer said he reads both the positive and, well, not-so-positive blog entries about himself. "I have been flamed on occasion where people just have some scathing entries," he said. "It's pretty unvarnished. It's real time reaction."

• Bush has 558 days left. 3,607 U.S. confirmed deaths in Iraq. Over $442,100,000,000 spent on the Iraq war.

A 28-mile stretch of the Sonoran desert that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border west of the city of Nogales, Arizona, is a sun-baked battleground. Pronghorn antelope, javelina, rattlers, a few pigmy owls, and even jaguars compete for scarce resources amidst the saguaro, mesquite, and prickly pear.

Also struggling for survival in the parched landscape are hundreds of migrants who hike the miles of uncharted northbound trails and roads pursued by border patrol officers, security contractors, and law enforcement agents. Many of the would-be immigrants are captured, processed and deported; some are identified as criminal aliens and detained; others make it into the U.S. to take low-wage jobs; and hundreds more die every year in the searing desert heat.

A new predator is on the horizon. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued task orders to physically and electronically seal this stretch of the desert under a multi-billion dollar contract named the Secure Border Initiative Net (SBInet) to curb the flow of undocumented immigrants, drugs, and potential terrorists by 2013. This first $20 million pilot phase, which is named Project 28 after the length of this part of the desert that it is supposed to cover, was to be completed by mid-June 2007.

The SBInet contract was awarded in September 2006 to Boeing of Seattle, the company best known for its wide-bodied aircraft that dominate the world's airline fleets. The company is also a major military contractor, manufacturing warplanes like the F-18 Hornet, the F-22 Raptor and the Joint Strike Fighter/F-35 as well as the Brimstone, Hellfire and Tomahawk missiles.

i.e., "43rd  Regime Missed All Targets", self-created targets, at that!
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/07/09/ap3896748.html  

A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.
...
The "pivot point" for addressing the matter will no longer be Sept. 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush's so-called "surge" plan is due, but instead will come this week when the interim mid-July assessment is released, the official said.

"The facts are not in question," the official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because the draft is still under discussion. "The real question is how the White House proceeds with a post-surge strategy in light of the report."

The report, required by law, is expected to be delivered to Capitol Hill by Thursday or Friday, as the Senate takes up a $649 billion defense policy bill and votes on a Democratic amendment ordering troop withdrawals to begin in 120 days.
...
White House Press Secretary Tony Snow on Monday tried to lower expectations on the report, contending that all of the additional troops had just gotten in place and it would be unrealistic to expect major progress by now.

http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_6328941  

But Rove expressed no regret about the widely unpopular war in Iraq.
...
Another member of the audience asked Rove about the controversial detention camp the United States keeps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"The president would like to close Gitmo," said Rove, who also declined to give a timetable for the camp's closure, saying it is holding "bad people" who will have to be detained elsewhere.

He downplayed the poor treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo that has been widely publicized.

"Our principal health problem down there is gain of weight, we feed them so well," he said as many in the audience shook their heads and groaned in unison.

Dammed Isaacson probably enjoyed it.  Now the Aspen Institute is just another deadly tank think.


Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.

For those who grind their ideological axes on these numbers, the increase in measured inequality since the 1970s is proof that the new, more competitive, more entrepreneurial economy of recent decades (which also happens to be less taxed and less unionized) has somehow failed to provide widespread prosperity. According to left-wing doom-and-gloomers, only an "oligarchy" at the very top is benefiting from the current system.

Hogwash. This argument can be disposed of with a simple thought experiment. First, picture the material standard of living you could have afforded back in 1979 with the median household income then of $16,461. Now picture the mix of goods and services you could buy in 2004 with the median income of $44,389. Which is the better deal? Only the most blinkered ideologue could fail to see the dramatic expansion of comforts, conveniences and opportunities that the contemporary family enjoys.

Much of the increase in measured inequality has nothing to do with the economic system at all. Rather, it is a product of demographic changes. Rising numbers of both single-parent households and affluent dual-earner couples have stretched the income distribution; so, too, has the big influx of low-skilled Hispanic immigrants. Meanwhile, in a 2006 paper published in the American Economic Review, economist Thomas Lemieux calculated that roughly three-quarters of the rise in wage inequality among workers with similar skills is due simply to the fact that the population is both older and better educated today than it was in the 1970s.

It is true that superstars in sports, entertainment and business now earn stratospheric incomes. But what is that to you and me? If the egalitarian left has been reduced to complaining that people in the 99th income percentile in a given year (and they're not the same people from year to year) are leaving behind those in the 90th percentile, it has truly arrived at the most farcical of intellectual dead ends. <...>

The problem is not lack of opportunity. If it were, the country wouldn't be a magnet for illegal immigrants. The problem is a lack of elementary self-discipline: failing to stay in school, failing to live within the law, failing to get and stay married to the mother or father of your children. The prevalence of all these pathologies reflects a dysfunctional culture that fails to invest in human capital.

Other, less acute deficits distinguish working-class culture from that of the middle and upper classes. According to sociologist Annette Lareau, working-class parents continue to follow the traditional, laissez-faire child-rearing philosophy that she calls "the accomplishment of natural growth." But at the upper end of the socioeconomic scale, parents now engage in what she refers to as "concerted cultivation" -- intensively overseeing kids' schoolwork and stuffing their after-school hours and weekends with organized enrichment activities.

This new kind of family life is often hectic and stressful, but it inculcates in children the intellectual, organizational and networking skills needed to thrive in today's knowledge-based economy. In other words, it makes unprecedented, heavy investments in developing children's human capital.

To not paraphrase Marie Antoinette: "Let them send their kids to Montessori schools."

This was in the Wall Street Journal.  This is what the upper-middle class to rich will tell themselves to assuage any potential sense of guilt over the growing inequality in the U.S.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change.

It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun's output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.

It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun's effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.

Writing in the Royal Society's journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.

"This should settle the debate," said Mike Lockwood from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.

Cows are methane-making machines, with their inefficient digestion producing hundreds of liters of the greenhouse gas every day. Now scientists are looking at ways to make things go down a little more gently for the ruminanting grass-munchers.

Cows are burping too much methane for the world's good. While people are being asked to reduce the amounts of flights they take and make their homes more energy efficient, what they put on their plates could be having as big an impact on climate change. Gas-guzzling SUVs and badly insulated buildings are partly to blame for the earth's greenhouse gas emissions, but it seems the humble grass-munching cow is also a major culprit.

Agriculture is responsible for producing 37 percent of global methane emissions, a gas that is 23 times more potent than CO2 when it comes to global warming. And much of this gas comes from the burps of ruminating animals such as cows and sheep. If a cow's manners could be improved a bit, then the world might just stop warming quite so fast. And it could be as simple as getting them to graze on different types of plants. Scientists at the University of Aberystwyth are now working on using plant-breeding methods to develop new diets for livestock.

Its tail is lopsided. Close up, it looks suspiciously like a small, and unremarkable, Asian elephant.

But scientists were yesterday hailing the sensational discovery of a perfectly preserved baby woolly mammoth, which died around 10,000 years ago and was found in the frozen tundra of northern Russia. Experts said the six-month-old female calf was a rare complete specimen. The animal's trunk and eyes are intact. It even has fur.

A reindeer herder, Yuri Khudi, stumbled across the carcass in May near the Yuribei river in Russia's Yamal-Nenents autonomous district, in a virtually inaccessible part of north-western Siberia.

Extinct woolly mammoths - and giant tusks - have turned up in Siberia for centuries. But it is unusual for a complete example to be recovered. The last major find was in 1997 when a family in the neighbouring Taymyr Peninsula came across a tusk attached to what turned out to be a 20,380-year-old mammoth carcass.

The latest 130cm tall, 50kg Siberian specimen appears to have died just as the species was heading for extinction during the last ice age. It is being sent to Japan for further tests.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2123314,00.html

One troubling sign is that Washington rumour has it that Bob Shrum, the political consultant who advised Michael Dukakis, Gore and Kerry, and who boasts a staggering record of eight defeats in eight US presidential elections, is set to move to London - to advise his old pal, Brown

Campbell's failing was the opposite of the one usually laid at his door, that he used the power of government to corrupt the press. From the moment he entered Downing Street he used the power of the press to corrupt government. To him a good decision was anything that next day's Murdoch or Rothermere editors would applaud. If Campbell declared a policy unacceptable to the media (such as drugs reform), it was dead. Since he operated with the authority of the prime minister, ministers had to take his word as gospel. Soon government was operating on a strict 24-hour cycle, measured not in policy outcomes but in headlines, news snatches, soundbites. Success was a good picture that edged out a bad one, an "initiative", however vacuous, that smothered bad news.

Yesterday I was out of town, and experienced a few hours of sunshine in Stuttgart. But back home it is gray and rainy again.

In return, if anyone wants to know about carbon fiber in blades or windpower in China, check these:

http://www.compositesworld.com/hpc/issues/2007/July/111703/2

http://www.compositesworld.com/hpc/issues/2007/July/111758

Danke, Fran, und viel Erfolg ET.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin