EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki announced on Wednesday (16 April) their intention to develop an energy security partnership between Iraq and the European Union.

"We want to establish an energy security partnership, which will benefit both European consumers and Iraq's economy," president Barroso told reporters in Brussels after a meeting with Mr al-Maliki

Mr Barroso said that negotiations on a trade and cooperation agreement were also "progressing very well". The EU and Iraq would sign a memorandum of understanding on energy security in the coming weeks, he added.

In return, the Iraqi prime minister had his own requests of Europe: "We need more effort to reconstruct our country and for this reconstruction. We need the aid of our European friends."

"We want to promote these relations based on mutual interest - be they in energy or other areas," he said.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - As the European Union fine-tunes a negotiating mandate for its long-delayed partnership talks with Russia, Moscow has urged the 27-nation bloc to grow up and avoid sacrificing mutually-beneficial ties in favour of individual states' interests.

"We are not pushing, we are not pressing, we are not in a hurry. If the EU needs to mature, as it obviously does, then so be it. We want the treaty as much, or as little, as the EU does," Russian ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov said on Tuesday (15 April).

Speaking to Brussels-based journalists, Mr Chizhov warned against the negotiation process becoming "hostage to certain interests of individual member states of the EU, pursuing their own agenda that have little or nothing to do with the EU-Russia relations".

The 27-nation bloc is in the final phase of drafting the negotiating mandate - something that outlines precisely what the European Commission's manoeuvring space will be during the EU-Russia talks.

An internal French report on how Paris is performing in implementing economic reforms, included the EU's Lisbon agenda, shows France is lagging behind but also claims that the whole policy package should be radically revised, French media reported on Wednesday (16 April).

The author of the report, economist and lawyer Laurent Cohen-Tanugi was appointed in October 2007 by the country's economy minister Christine Lagarde to look into the issue of Europe and its economic development in the context of globalisation.

The Lisbon agenda dates back to 2000 when it was adopted by EU leaders, also partially as a response to globalisation. It aims to make the European economy the most competitive in the world. The ambitious goal was originally set for 2010 but at the half-way stage, the deadline was dropped.

Aimed at boosting Europe's economic performance, the Lisbon agenda includes a list of concrete policy objectives, mainly focusing on more jobs as well as higher investment in education and research.

The EU's foreign policy chief expressed concern after Russia decided to intensify its links to two separatist regions in Georgia. NATO's secretary general called on Moscow to reverse the measures.

"We are concerned about these unilateral decisions, we have always supported Georgia's territorial integrity," said Christina Gallach, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana's spokeswoman, on Wednesday, April 16.

 

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer went further, calling on Russia to roll back its plans.

 

"I am deeply concerned by the actions Russia has taken to establish legal links with the Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia," de Hoop Scheffer said in a statement. "I urge the Russian Federation to reverse these measures, and call on the Georgian authorities to continue to show restraint," he added.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU candidate country Croatia has not been doing enough to bring to justice all those who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1991 - 1995 war that pitted the newly independent country against the Yugoslav People's Army, leading human rights NGO Amnesty International has said.

On Tuesday (15 April) the organisation called on the EU to play a more active role to ensure that this issue is tackled and that all war criminals are brought to justice, regardless of their ethnicity.

Among other things, Amnesty is calling on the EU to press Croatia's government "to actively pursue the investigation and prosecution of war crimes, provide assistance for the necessary judicial reforms and continue to monitor the situation beyond the conclusion of accession talks."

During the four-year long war - known as the Croatian war of independence - ethnic-based war crimes were committed by both Serbs and Croats in the country.

In Germany, Islam is often equated with fundamentalism and fanaticism, a perception that imposes a heavy burden on the country's 3 million Muslims. Their relationship to Western society is divided between integration and sometimes self-imposed exclusion.

 Friday prayers: Hamburg's central mosque in the St. Georg neighborhood is the most important gathering place for the city's estimated 130,000 Muslims.

The name of the salon is German -- Goldene Finger (Golden Fingers) -- but the services it offers are listed in the window in Arabic and Turkish. In the front of the shop, 40-year-old Palestinian Toufic al-Rifae gives men haircuts and trims their beards. Veiled women disappear into a back section behind a curtain, where female hairdressers do their hair and, using thick lines of the traditional Middle Eastern cosmetic preparation known as kohl, apply their makeup in the Arab style.

BERLIN: Germany will appeal to other European Union countries this week to take in more Christians from Iraq and attempt to reach a common policy toward Iraqi refugees, officials said Wednesday.

The government here is already considering granting Christians preferential treatment over other religions and groups. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble stated his intention to open Germany's doors to Iraqi Christians during interviews last weekend and expects full agreement Thursday when interior ministers from the 16 states meet near Berlin.

The issue will also be discussed Friday by EU interior ministers at a meeting in Luxembourg.

Schäuble's position has been welcomed by Christian churches, which have expressed alarm at sectarian violence, the bombing of churches and execution of clergymen.

But the opposition Green Party has criticized Schäuble's plan. Though it partly endorsed it, the Greens said it would be hypocritical to open the doors to one group at the expense of another because so many civilians are suffering.

The price of farmland is rising at its fastest rate for more than 30 years as wealthy city dwellers and overseas buyers seek a slice of idyllic rural England and jittery investors rush to move their money out of stocks and shares because of the global credit crunch.

In contrast to falling residential and commercial property values, the average price of farmland rose by more than 10 per cent in the first quarter of 2008, according to a study of agricultural property sales which will be published this month. Arable land, in particular, has become so profitable that its average price has soared from £4,000 an acre in January last year to £5,500 an acre today.

"So far this year, we have seen some of the same trends we saw last year but at an even more accelerated pace," said Andrew Shirley, head of rural land research at the Knight Frank estate agency, which conducted the study. "We have seen farms in Kent and Dorset sell for more than £6,000 an acre and another batch in the North-west go for £5,000. This time last year, the same farms might have fetched £3,500 per acre - that is nearly a 75 per cent increase in some areas."

According to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the value of farmland rose by 28 per cent during the second half of 2007. The last time agricultural property prices increased at such a rate was during the late 1970s, when annual increases of 40 per cent were common. Knight Frank believes prices will continue to rise by between 10 and 20 per cent this year.

The human rights organization Amnesty International denounced the European Union's policies on asylum-seekers, calling them a lottery for the right to stay in what it has described as Fortress Europe.

"Fortress Europe ... is a reality," Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary general, said during a press conference in Brussels after talks with EU officials on Tuesday, April 15.

 

"Access to Europe is very difficult and the initial border of the European Union is being pushed further and further away," she said, pointing to the rescue operations of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, patrols in Senegal and increasing EU cooperation with transit countries.

The Middle East's famous Fertile Crescent was the birthplace of agriculture, the first settlements and civilization. But a new study shows that climate change will dry up the area's rivers and destroy its agriculture -- with devasting effects for the region.

The region known as the Fertile Crescent forms a 3,000- kilometer (1,900-mile), sickle-shaped corridor at the northern end of the Arabian Peninsula. Embedded in desert and barren mountains, it extends in a giant arc from the Nile valley in Egypt to the east coast of the Mediterranean and up to the Persian Gulf. It runs right through Israel, Lebanon and western Syria, touches southern Anatolia, then Iran and finally descends into the area between the Euphrates and Tigris, in modern-day Iraq.

It is a landscape of truly epic importance. It is the cradle of agriculture and livestock farming, where 10,000 years ago the Neolithic Revolution began -- the transformation from Stone Age nomads to settled populations, combined with the rise of the first towns and civilizations. There, the Sumerians scratched wedge-shaped symbols into clay tablets and created the world's first script.

 But the area known as the cradle of civilization is now under serious threat. Before the end of this century, the Middle East's legendary bread basket could dry up as a result of global warming, to the extent that it is no longer suitable for traditional rain-fed agriculture -- destroying its existence as an agrarian landscape.

WASHINGTON: The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Kentucky's method of putting criminals to death by lethal injection, clearing the way for not only Kentucky but also other states to resume executions. Still, one justice predicted that the ruling would not end disputes over lethal injection and could reignite the debate over capital punishment itself.

By a vote of 7 to 2, the court rejected challenges to the Kentucky execution procedure brought by two death-row inmates, holding that they had failed to show that the risks of pain from mistakes in an otherwise "humane lethal execution protocol" amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned by the Constitution.

The prisoners had contended that the three-drug procedure used on death row - one drug each to sedate, paralyze and end life - was unconstitutional, and that in any event there were strong indications that Kentucky had bungled some executions, creating unnecessary pain for the condemned. Through their lawyers, they maintained that problems could be largely solved by administering a single overwhelming dose of a barbiturate, as opposed to the three-drug procedure.

The prisoners' challenge had implications far beyond Kentucky.

Sen. Barack Obama on Wednesday criticized former President Jimmy Carter for meeting with leaders of the Islamic terrorist group Hamas as he tried to reassure Jewish voters that his candidacy isn't a threat to them or U.S. support for Israel.

The Democratic presidential candidate's comments, made to a group of Jewish leaders here, were his first on Carter's controversial meeting scheduled this week in Egypt.

Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting John McCain called on Obama to repudiate Carter in a speech to The Associated Press Monday.

Obama told the Jewish group he had a "fundamental disagreement" with Carter, who was rebuffed by Israeli leaders during a peace mission to the Middle East this week.

"We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel's destruction," Obama said.

Fifteen British sailors and Marines were seized by Iran in internationally disputed waters and not in Iraq's maritime territory as Parliament was told, according to new official documents released to The Times.

The Britons were seized because the US-led coalition designated a sea boundary for Iran's territorial waters without telling the Iranians where it was, internal Ministry of Defence briefing papers reveal.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act detail for the first time the blunders last spring that led to what an all-party committee of MPs came to describe as a "national embarrassment".

The captured 14 men and one woman were paraded on Iranian TV for a fortnight before being freed a year ago by a smiling President Ahmadinejad, who gave them new suits and bags of presents.

Beijing -  A violent storm of nationalist indignation is roiling the Chinese internet, as bloggers vent their anger at perceived Western insults in the wake of the Tibetan uprising last month.

In an opinion piece published in the same paper, China's ambassador to London, Fu Ying, complained of "the media's attempt to demonize China" and warned that "we all know that demonization feeds a counter-reaction.

"I am concerned that mutual perceptions between the people of China and the West are quickly drifting in opposite directions," she wrote.

"In his memo, Yoo argued that the 9/11 attacks "triggered" America's "right to self-defense." Therefore, he wrote: "If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

"In that case, we believe that he could argue that the Executive Branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."

Yoo further argued that even abuses that would "shock the conscience" -- one of Bush's standards for what might be considered torture -- could be mitigated by a subjective evaluation of the circumstances.

In other words, if the President or a subordinate judged the detainee to represent some imminent threat or to be particularly odious, they would have an even freer hand to act as they saw fit. Those judgments about shocking the conscience would be left, again, to the Executive to decide unilaterally."

In the face of such nonsense, one must stand up. Somehow.

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.

Gibraltar is to cull 25 of the monkeys that form arguably the Rock's biggest tourist attraction, because they are becoming a public nuisance and carry a health risk for tourists.

The decision, described by Gibraltar's tourism minister, Ernest Britto, as a "last resort", has prompted opposition from the International Primate Protection League, which is considering urging tourists to boycott the British colony.

For centuries a symbol of Britain's presence in Gibraltar, the Barbary macaques have lived on the Rock's upper reaches where they roam free, but are fed and looked after. But recently, around two dozen have come down to the tourist areas of Catalan Bay and Sandy Bay and caused disruption there.

"Children are frightened. People cannot leave their windows open for fear of the monkeys stealing. Monkeys can bite, and contact with them runs the risk of salmonella or hepatitis," Mr Britto said.

The Paris Metro has become a cavern of ephemeral but beautiful underground art, discovered one month and destroyed the next. Renovations in two-thirds of the underground stations in the French capital have exposed a cornucopia of old, torn advertising posters or paintings. Some appear to date back to the earliest days of the Paris Metro a century ago.

At the George V station on the Champs Elysées, there is even the ragged remains of a poster warning, in German, of the dangers of feindagenten (enemy agents) at work on the streets of Paris. A few inches away are the ghostly remnants of a poster advertising Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert - glamorous British actresses of the 1940s - in the movie L'Homme en Gris (The Man in Grey).

The film was made in 1943 but, for obvious reasons, did not reach Paris until late the following year. In 1943, Ms Lockwood and Ms Calvert were still "feindagenten".

Poet and political activist Aime Cesaire has died in Martinique aged 94.

Born on the French Caribbean island in 1913, he became famous for promoting black consciousness and challenging the political establishment.

Cesaire was partly responsible for coining the word "negritude", a term affirming pride in black identity.

His poetry and plays, including a black adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, are regularly performed and studied in France.

Cesaire was educated in Paris, where he co-founded a literary review called The Black Student, along with Leopold Senghor, who went on to become Senegal's first president.

Meet the Zapettes and the Sarkozettes - a new breed of female politician who make our lot look like the first ladies of frump, says Celia Walden

When that master of vitriol Gore Vidal decreed that "politics is showbusiness for ugly people", he was spot on. But today there is a new wave of female politicians who seem intent on demonstrating the exact opposite.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, posed with his glamorous new cabinet this week - the first time a European government has included more women than men.

Add to that the much-lauded French ministerial line-up - so chic they've been dubbed the Sarkozettes - while in Italy, new prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's prospective cabinet could be said to resemble a Hugh Hefner harem.

And here in Britain, well, we have Hapless Harriet, Jacqui "Too Much Home Front" Smith, and Tessa the Trainspotter. Isn't it time that our women politicians got a grip and made for the makeover?

PARIS -- Brigitte Bardot is back on trial in France, facing charges of fanning discrimination and racial hatred against Muslims.

In a Paris court hearing Tuesday, prosecutors said they are seeking a two-month suspended prison sentence and a $23,900 fine against the former screen siren and animal rights campaigner.

Bardot, 73, was not present for the hearing. A verdict is expected June 3.

A leading French anti-racism group known as MRAP filed suit last year over a letter that Bardot sent to then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, and which was published in her foundation's quarterly journal.