Poland and the US have reached an agreement on a controversial US missile shield in the European nation, the Polish prime minister has said.

Donald Tusk said the US had agreed to a key Polish demand that it improve Poland's defences in exchange for placing 10 missile defence intercepters in the country.

"We have achieved ... an agreement with the Americans... The negotiators are finalising the deal now," he told Polish media on Thursday.

The agreement follows 18 months of negotiations and comes at a time of tension between the US and Russia over the conflict in Georgia.

The US says the shield is to prevent potential missile attacks by "rogue states", including, it says, Iran, and is not directed against Russia.

Germany's foreign minister Thursday urged the EU to take a balanced approach to the Caucasus conflict. The EU has to keep channels of communication open with Russia if it hopes to help stabilize the region, he said.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Thursday, Aug. 14, the European Union should maintain an even-handed approach to the conflict between Russia and Georgia if it wanted to play a constructive role in forging long-lasting peace in the Caucasus.

 

"It remains the case that a level-headed policy is the one that most helps people in the region," Steinmeier told reporters after a meeting of the German parliament's foreign affairs committee.

 

"We must criticize what needs to be criticized and we have done this in the past, including with clear words when necessary towards Russia ... with regard to Russian bombing of Georgia and the presence of Russian troops in Georgia-proper," Steinmeier said.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU foreign ministers on Wednesday (13 August) agreed to send peacekeepers to help supervise the fragile Russia-Georgia ceasefire, putting off discussions on potential diplomatic sanctions against Russia until next month.

"The European Union must be prepared to commit itself, including on the ground," the EU joint statement said, asking EU top diplomat Javier Solana to draft more detailed proposals for the ministers' next meeting on 5 September.

EU police in Bosnia - it is unclear what the EU peacekeeping mission in Georgia would consist of

"Many countries have said that they are ready to join in," French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said, adding that any EU move would require a UN mandate. "We are encouraged by what we saw this morning, but we have to go through the United Nations."

Ministers did not specify if the EU mission will compose EU-badge wearing soldiers, policemen or civilian monitors. It also remains unclear if it would be part of a wider force involving the UN and the OSCE, or when deployment might start.

Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic was heading to New York to seek UN support for his country's plan to challenge Kosovo's independence at the International Court of Justice.

A foreign ministry statement on Thursday, Aug. 14, said Jeremic will submit a resolution to the UN General Assembly seeking an opinion from the Netherlands-based court about the legality of Kosovo's secession from Serbia.

 

Jeremic, who was set to travel to New York on Thursday will "submit Serbia's official draft of the resolution for a procedure before the UN general assembly," the foreign ministry statement said. "A draft calls for the UN General Assembly to seek ICJ advisory opinion on a legality of the unilaterally proclaimed independence of Kosovo."

MOSCOW: President Dmitri Medvedev said Thursday that Russia would guarantee the security of the two pro-Russian enclaves at the center of the crisis with Georgia, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Georgia could "forget about" territorial integrity because of the war.

The comments did not stake out a new position, but they offered a sharp retort to President George W. Bush's insistence a day earlier that "the sovereign and territorial integrity of Georgia be respected." The Russian rebuke came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice headed to Georgia to work for a settlement and to show support for President Mikheil Saakashvili.

Speaking in France after meeting with President Nicolas Sarkozy, she urged Russia to honor the truce and withdraw all of its troops. (Page 3)

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking in Washington, said that "the entire premise" of relations between Washington and Moscow had been called into question by Russia's conduct in Georgia, and that the relationship could be affected "for years to come" if it did not quickly withdraw its forces.

The Vatican today distanced itself from a series of blistering attacks on the centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi by the mass-circulation Roman Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana, which in its latest issue gives warning that Italy is in danger of returning to Fascism.

The magazine, owned by the Paulist Fathers, has repeatedly attacked the Berlusconi Government since it came to power in May on a law-and-order platform, arguing that the Right's targeting of immigrants and Gypsies as part of a crackdown on crime is racist and xenophobic. In June it compared the Government's "security decree" to the racial laws imposed by Benito Mussolini, Italy's Fascist dictator, in the 1930s.

In its latest editorial it says: "We hope that the suspicion that Fascism is being reborn in a different form proves to be untrue." Drawing on an analysis in the French Catholic publication Esprit, it compared the fingerprinting of Roma children in Italian Gypsy camps to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis before and during the Second World War.

Government ministers rounded in fury on Famiglia Cristiana, with one saying that the magazine was itself displaying a Fascist mentality by making intemperate attacks on a democratically elected government.

NATO has barred a Russian ship from joining its multinational anti-terrorism patrol in the Mediterranean in apparent retaliation for Moscow's military action against Georgia, a NATO diplomat said.

The Black Sea patrol ship Ladny had been due to take part in NATO's Operation Active Endeavour in August and September involving anti-terrorism exercises and practising search and rescue operations at sea, Russia's navy command said last month.

It had already arrived off the coast of Turkey to take part in the operation.

But the diplomat said that following the fighting in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia, Washington had withheld its agreement for the Russian ship to join the mission, launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

NATO diplomats said the US administration had also blocked so far a Russian request for an emergency meeting of the NATO-Russia Council to discuss the crisis in the Caucasus.

TBILISI, Georgia: On Monday, President Mikheil Saakashvili, his army in retreat and his Western allies still surprised by the intensity of the Russian attack, was the very picture of vulnerability, dodging Russian military jets.

By Wednesday he seemed an almost preternaturally reinvigorated man, once again raising the temperature in Georgia's bitter disagreements with Russia, and invoking special ties with American democracy and freedom.

Moments after President George W. Bush appeared at the Rose Garden to say that the Pentagon would begin a humanitarian aid mission to support Georgia, Saakashvili was on the phone with a Western reporter, talking fast. "This is a turning point," he said. Soon he appeared on national television, his tousled hair combed back flat and wearing a freshly pressed suit, assuring his country that the worst had passed.

No matter that Russian troops were 30 miles away, milling on the road outside the capital, meeting no resistance. Saakashvili was in cocky form in an interview later in the evening with reporters, expounding on Nazi propaganda, Orwell and the film "Dr. Strangelove."

A new row broke out in Germany's Social Democratic party on Thursday after its officials in the state of Hesse agreed to work with the radical Left party in order to form a government in the state parliament.

Meeting in Wiesbaden on Tuesday night, SPD officials in Hesse approved the formation of a minority government by its regional leader Andrea Ypsilanti with the backing of the Left.

Although Left ministers would not be offered jobs in the cabinet, a deal would mark the first time SPD and Left party worked together in a large western state.

Merrill Lynch is unlikely to pay corporation tax in the UK for several decades after $29bn (£16bn) of losses suffered by the US investment bank were charged to its London-based subsidiary.

The figures, published in Merrill's regulatory filings, emphasise how the meltdown in the US subprime mortgage market is undermining tax receipts for governments far beyond America's borders. They also offer a rare glimpse into the tax management policies of a global financial institution.

Published in Estonia's largest paper today.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

WASHINGTON -- John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser and his business partner lobbied the senator or his staff on 49 occasions in a 3 1/2-year span while being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the government of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

The payments raise ethical questions about the intersection of Randy Scheunemann's personal financial interests and his advice to the Republican presidential candidate who is seizing on Russian aggression in Georgia as a campaign issue.

McCain warned Russian leaders Tuesday that their assault in Georgia risks "the benefits they enjoy from being part of the civilized world."

White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2042, according to new US government projections. That's eight years sooner than previous estimates, made in 2004.

The United States has been growing more diverse for decades, but the process has sped up through immigration and higher birth rates among minority residents, especially Hispanics.

It is also growing older.

"The white population is older and very much centered around the aging baby boomers who are well past their high fertility years," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

"The future of America is epitomised by the young people today. They are basically the melting pot we are going to see in the future."

NEW YORK/BANGALORE (Reuters) - Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan predicts U.S. house prices will begin to stabilize in the first half of next year, even as he faulted the government's rescue of mortgage market giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

"They should have wiped out the shareholders, nationalized the institutions with legislation that they are to be reconstituted... as five or 10 individual privately held units," which the government would eventually auction off to private investors, Greenspan said in an interview with the Journal.

In a high-profile rescue orchestrated in mid-July, the federal government offered to buttress Freddie and Fannie, the two largest providers of U.S. home mortgage funding, with billions of dollars of capital if the companies were on the verge of collapse.

Greenspan acknowledged that a government backstop for the shareholder-owned government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, was unavoidable, the paper said.

Thursday's news of a 0.8 per cent jump in the US consumer price index in July, coupled with a 0.3 per cent increase in the same measure excluding food and energy, could damage - or at least delay - the emerging optimism on inflation.

The recent drop in the price of oil had stoked hopes that inflationary forces could abate more rapidly than previously expected.

This would potentially remove one of the two main threats to economic stability that the Federal Reserve has been trying to balance, along with growth risks, and reduce the pressure from more hawkish members within the US central bank to begin raising interest rates from their current level of 2 per cent.

However, the July data on US consumer prices - which were worse than expected on both the headline and the core measures - suggest inflation will remain a significant source of concern for the foreseeable future.

Recent economic, financial and geopolitical events suggest that the decline of the American Empire has started. After the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a brief period where the world switched from a bipolar balance of two superpowers to a unipolar world with one economic, financial, geostrategic superpower, or better, hyperpower, i.e the United States. But by now three factors suggest that the US has squandered its unipolar moment and that the decline of the American Empire - as the US was in effect a global empire - has started.

Let us explain how and why...First, the US squandered its power by relying excessively on its hard military power in the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan and in its unilateralist foreign policy - including economic issues such as global warming - rather than relying more on its soft power of diplomacy and multilateralist approaches to global policy issues.

Second, regardless of mistaken US policies the rise of other economic and financial powers - the rise of China, the recent resurgence of Russia, the process of economic and political integration in the European Union, the emergence of India, and the rise of other regional powers such as Brazil, South Africa and Iran - implies that the relative economic, financial and geopolitical power of the US will be reduced over time. We are indeed slowly moving towards a multipolar world where there will be a balance of Great Powers rather than the hegemony of a single hyperpower.

(snip)

Third, and more important, the US squandered its economic and financial power by running reckless economic policies, especially its twin fiscal and current account deficits.

(snip)

And while the weak dollar is now inducing a modest improvement of the external deficit the looming sharp increase in fiscal deficits - that the current recession and financial crisis is inducing - will cause a return of twin deficits in the coming years. By now the US is the biggest net borrower in the world - running current account deficits still in the 700 billion dollars range - and the biggest net debtor in the world with its foreign liabilities now over 2.5 trillion dollars.

The trouble with these twin deficits is multi-fold. First, superpowers and empires - like the British Empire at its peak - tend to be net lenders - i.e run current account surpluses - and be net creditors, not net debtors; The decline of the British Empire started in World War II when the British fiscal deficits in the war and the current account deficits turned that empire into a net borrower and a net debtor both in its public debt and external debt. That financial switch into an external debtor and borrower position was also the reason for the decline of the British pound as the leading reserve currency.

(snip)

Second... the economic powers financing the US twin deficits are the strategic rivals of the US - China and Russia - and unstable petro-states

(snip)

Third,... the foreign financing of the US current account deficits has also become more risky: less FDI and equity, more debt, more short term debt, more debt held by official political actors - central banks and sovereign wealth funds - , less debt held by foreign private investors, and more debt held by politicals rivals rather than allies of the US.

(snip)

Fourth, the foreign creditors of the US are getting tired of financing the US in the form of low-yielding US Treasuries. Thus the switch of such reserve holdings to SWFs that are planning to make large equity investments possibly with actual control of corporate firms and financial institutions that are desperate for capital to recapitalize themselves.

(snip)

The ensuing decline of the US dollar as the main reserve currency will take time and will not occur overnight; but it is inexorable given the relative fall in US economic, financial and geopolitical power.

(snip)

But the trend is clear: the brief period of unipolar power of the American hyperpower is now over and a new age of balance of great powers is starting in the world. Also, the rise of non governmental actors - multinational corporations, NGOs, terrorist groups, non-nation state powers, failed and unstable states, non-traditional global players - will radically change the traditional balance of power as the power of nation states will shrink relative to that of other global players.

(snip)

But it is certain that the decline of the American Empire has started.

And because NATO has mainly become a tool for maintaining Europe under US control, I think the decline of NATO has started, too...

"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

The plans of the US and Western oil companies for expanded pipelines in the Caspian region may well be a casualty of Russia's attack.

 If Russia clamps down on pipelines, oil from these platforms in Azerbaijan may not make it to the West. Long-term U.S. efforts to access Caspian oil free of Russian influence may come to naught. The sudden war in the Caucasus brought Georgia to heel, reasserted Russia's claim as the dominant force in the region, and dealt a blow to U.S. prestige. But in this part of the world, diplomacy and war are about oil and gas as much as they are about hegemony and the tragic loss of human life. Victory in Georgia now gives Russia the edge in the struggle over access to the Caspian's 35 billion barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas. The probable losers: the U.S. and those Western oil companies that have bet heavily on the Caspian as one of the few regions where they could still operate with relative freedom.

At the core of the struggle is a vast network of actual and planned pipelines for shipping Caspian Sea oil to the world market from countries that were once part of the Soviet empire. American policymakers working with a BP-led consortium had already helped build oil and natural gas pipelines across Georgia to the Turkish coast. Next on the drawing board: another pipeline through Georgia to carry natural gas from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea to Austria -- offering an alternate supply to Western Europe, which now depends on Russia for a third of its energy.

But after the mauling Georgia got, "any chance of a new non-Russian pipeline out of Central Asia and into Europe is pretty much dead," says Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Execution, a brokerage in Greenwich, Conn. The risk of building a pipeline through countries vulnerable to the wrath of Russia is just too high.

LONDON: Prince Charles of Britain said Wednesday that the widespread use of genetically modified crops would be the biggest environmental disaster of all time.

The 59-year-old heir to the British throne is well known for supporting organic farming, but his comments published in an interview with The Daily Telegraph were his most outspoken yet on GMO foods.

His views will strike a chord in Britain where biotech crops - widely grown in North and South America - have faced significant opposition with concerns centered on food safety and possible environmental impacts.

Charles said multinational food companies were conducting a "gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong."

If large companies took over the mass production of food, it would hurt small farmers and the environment, while "excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture" had damaged water supplies in India's Punjab and in Western Australia, he said.

Since the introduction of stringent congestion fees, London traffic has loosened up and cleaned up. Britons are now increasingly cruising their capital in cars running on alternative energy to avoid the charge.

Formerly a traffic nightmare, London city center has become a playground for drivers of alternative energy cars. Since the British capital introduced a congestion charge of 8 pounds sterling for each conventional car between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., Londoners have begun trying out new models that discharge less CO2, freeing drivers from the fee.

"The congestion charge is a great success," says John Mason, head of enforcement at Transport for London's Congestion Charge. "Every day there are 100,000 fewer cars in the city than before the introduction of the fee." That's a 25-percent reduction, and the vehicles that do venture into the city center have become cleaner. "In February 2003 there were only 90 electric cars in London, in June 2008 it was more than 1600," says Mason. Tallies of other eco-friendly cars, including gas and hybrid models, also rose sharply, from 1,000 vehicles in 2003 to more than 20,000 by the last count. "The British buy about twice as many hybrid cars as Germans, and most of those who do drive in London," explains Debbie Fox of market monitor Jato Dynamics.

Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free.

"Copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted materials," Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his 15-page decision.

"Open source licensing has become a widely used method of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in a manner and at a pace few could have imagined just a few decades ago," Judge White said.

The ruling has implications for the Creative Commons licence which offers ways for work to go into the public domain and still be protected. These licenses are widely used by academic organisations like MIT for distributing coursework, scientific groups, artists, movie makers and Wikipedia among others.

"This opinion demonstrates a strong understanding of a basic economic principle of the internet; that even though money doesn't change hands, attribution is a valuable economic right in the information economy."

This is my last Salon until September 1st. Tomorrow night after my yoga class I am taking the night train to Prague and the meetup.

Hope you have lots of fun while I am gone. !

U.S. down 1 to 2 in games, winning 4th game 20-18.

looks like it wil be an incredible showdown in the 5th if the USA can take the 4th.

Cynicism is intellectual treason.