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In combative mood the US Vice-President stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the besieged Georgian President Dick Cheney delivered a bellicose warning to Russia yesterday during a brief visit to war-torn Georgia, promising that America's small Caucasus ally would one day join the Nato alliance . In combative mood, the US Vice-President stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian President, and bluntly reinforced Russia's worst fears — that Washington would not stop pushing for Georgian membership in Nato. He also attacked Moscow for trying to redraw the country's borders by force. “Georgia will be in our alliance,” he said, in defiance of the...

The European Union has wobbled woefully, yet Russia too will pay dearly for its Georgian adventure IT IS now close to a month since the reckless Georgian effort to retake breakaway South Ossetia by force sparked off what Russia is now calling its August war. There is no new iron curtain descending across Europe, no ideologically based “new cold war”; but there is a deep, wounding division that stretches far beyond wrecked Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, from Tallinn on the Baltic to Tbilisi and beyond, the violence of the past month, along with Russia’s assertions...

Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, grabbed European headlines on Thursday with the focus either on her ideology or her gender. “The Republicans hope to have found their Obama,” opined Le Monde, the left-of-centre French daily, following the mother of five’s rousing speech to the Republican convention on Wednesday. In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung greeted ”the rage from Wasilla [her home town]” as a woman who presented ”herself as a ”herself as a pugnacious and self-confident politician” The French media provided full coverage of the pregnancy of her teenage daughter (treatment they would be reluctant to apply to their...

The good news has just been rolling in for the past two days. Just yesterday I reported that Israel is going to host a 30 nation anti-jihad conference, and now today we see that another conference is going to be held in Colonge Germany for three days, September 19-21.

The eurozone economy has contracted in the three months to June due to lower private spending and falling exports, adding to fears of a lasting slowdown. The 15-nation area saw its economy shrink by 0.2% in the quarter compared with the previous three months, statistical office Eurostat said. High fuel and food prices have dented consumer spending across Europe - one of the key drivers of the economy. The euro fell to its lowest in eight months at $1.4386 after the data. 'Weakness' There are increasing fears across Europe that the region could be entering a recession and the latest...

The senator may have traveled widely, but the critically important subcommittee on Europe has languished under his leadership. Doubts about Barack Obama's presidential credentials have crystallized during the past two weeks over his stewardship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on European Affairs, which has convened no policy hearings since he took over as its chairman last January. That startling fact, first uncovered by Steve Clemons, who blogs on the Washington Note, prompted acid comment in Europe about the Illinois senator's failure to visit the continent since assuming the committee post, and even speculation that he had never traveled...

Is poverty defined by what you can afford? ___ Seebohm Rowntree was the son of wealthy Quaker businessman Joseph Rowntree but was acutely aware of the poverty that surrounded him in late-Victorian York, England. In 1899 he set himself the task of defining a "poverty line" by working out how much it would cost to supply basic food, housing, and clothes. Anyone who couldn't afford to buy those basics—including a helping of pease pudding with bacon on Sunday—was below the poverty line. The idea of a poverty line has stayed with us, but the candidates have multiplied. The World Bank...

BRUSSELS, August 29, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Population statistics and projections were released yesterday showing that European countries are dying out, even with immigration, their populations aging and shrinking.  A report released this week by Eurostat, the European Union's statistical service, showed that by 2015, the number of deaths in Europe will have outstripped the number of births.  By 2060, the ratio of people of working age to those over age 65 will be two to one. None of the countries of Europe currently have a general fertility rate above replacement level and it is predicted that what is being called...

"The policy and practice of the Russian Government has always been to push forward its encroachments as fast and as far as the apathy or want of firmness of other Governments would allow it to go, but always to stop and retire when it met with decided resistance." So said Lord Palmerston during the Crimean crisis 150 years ago. If the United States and Europe are not careful we may end up with a new Crimean War in the not-too-distant future. European Union leaders, meeting in emergency session in Brussels tomorrow, therefore have an awesome responsibility when deciding on future...

Russia's propaganda warfare By William Horsley European affairs analyst Western leaders face two fronts in their stand-off with Russia over its use of force to re-draw borders in Europe: one is the Russian army on the ground. The other is a propaganda war. Russia's defence of its intervention has not always been convincing So far, the West has failed to spell out a common response, to get Russia to end its occupation of large parts of Georgia and undo its recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Meanwhile, Russia has unleashed a propaganda barrage against an "aggressive"...

An Italian museum has defied Pope Benedict by refusing to remove a statue of a crucified green frog clutching a beer mug and an egg. The Vatican had condemned the modern art sculpture as blasphemous. The board of the Museion museum in the northern city of Bolzano voted it was a work of art, however. The board decreed it would stay in place for the remainder of an exhibition. The wooden sculpture by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger depicts a frog about 1 metre 30 cm (4 feet) high nailed to brown cross and holding a beer mug in...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Russian oil companies are reportedly under orders from the Kremlin to prepare for a supply cut to Germany and Poland through the Druzhba pipeline, the Daily Telegraph reported Friday citing an anonymous source. The Telegraph reported that it's believed that executives from oil major Lukoil have been put on weekend alert. "They have been told to be ready to cut off supplies as soon as Monday," an unnamed, high-level business source told the Telegraph.

Miliband launches strongest attack on Kremlin since Georgia invasion Britain yesterday raised the stakes in the scramble to contain Russia, pledging support for Moscow's regional rival, Ukraine, and calling on the international community to stand up to Russia's campaign to redraw the map of Europe and make it pay a higher price for its actions in Georgia. David Miliband, the foreign secretary tipped as a future Labour party leader and potential prime minister, went to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, to deliver a speech aimed at flying the flag of western democracy on Russia's doorstep, while seeking to avert a new...

BRUSSELS, Belgium - Deaths are expected to outnumber births in the European Union from 2015 when migration will become the only source of population growth, according to an EU report released Tuesday.

A prognosis by the European statistics agency Eurostat concludes that Europe is an aging continent. It says that by 2060 almost a third of the population of the present EU countries will be aged over 65. The current proportion is one in six.

Today, Russia is the only industrialized nation that believes geo-politics and other sorts of Neanderthal aggressiveness to be the way forward. Naturally, this stance leaves other nations, especially those neighboring Russia, with no other option but chosing between the West and Russia. This might be one of the worst mistakes the Kreml has ever comitted - and it would not be the first of failures. Today, Russia is seeking "revenge". However, Russia is presently very vulnerable and therefore there is no reason why truly freedom loving nations should hesitate to join the NATO. The NATO is not the UN.

While the Russians burn and pillage Georgian towns and villages, strangling Georgia’s economy to the point of collapse, the free world dithers. As one American analyst bitterly remarked, “The Europeans have telegraphed their total capitulation to Russia, and Moscow knows it. The Kremlin has looked into the soul of Europe and found – there is none.”

Europe has been the cause and battleground for all three World Wars of the 20th century. For that reason there has been one supreme question in world affairs since Hitler and Stalin: Can Europe ever learn to avoid repeating its own suicidal history?   For many years the answer seemed to be "Yes." Every German chancellor since Konrad Adenauer voiced the Western consensus that the civilized world had to support democracy and liberty, for its own sake. That meant opposing totalitarian dangers before they became lethal to the civilized world. The Europeans were pretty sober about that, because they could see...

- YES! To begin with, let's try and fully understand what Renaissance Florence actually has accomplished, apart from making tourists feel like this: "I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear...

Come back! We were just kidding! We don’t hate you, really! So will come the supplications from the once-proud democracies of Europe. Turns out America as the world’s lone superpower might not be so bad after all. As Russian fascism re-emerges, transmogrified into what one might euphemistically call a “Corporate State,” and China’s leaders show no signs of taking their boots off of their citizens’ faces, the brave soldiers for democracy of the traditional European states are ready once again to hide behind America’s broad back. Of course, the nascent republics that budded off of the USSR sought shelter with...

Will Poland Split EU Over Russia Policy? By Andrew Curry No European leader has been more outspoken in his criticism of Russia's actions in Georgia than Poland's Lech Kaczynski. Are his provocative words a sure way to marginalize Poland -- or a sign of a larger split in the European Union? The sight gave hope to Georgians and credibility to their embattled president, Mikhail Saakashvili. On Tuesday, five heads of state from nations once controlled by the Soviet Union -- Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine and Poland -- arrived at a rally in Tbilisi to rebuke Russia for its invasion of...

Biologists have constructed a genetic map of Europe showing the degree of relatedness between its various populations. All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. The map shows, at right, the location in Europe where each of the sampled populations live and, at left, the genetic relationship between these 23 populations. The map was constructed by Dr. Kayser, Dr. Oscar Lao and...

Don’t give Moscow the power to switch our lights off After Russian tanks rolled with impunity through the streets of Georgia, scattering that country’s army into humiliating retreat, comparisons were inevitably drawn with the cold war. The difference is that most of the time during the cold war the West knew how to respond to Moscow’s aggression. Nobody could say that this time. What are the new rules of the game? The ceasefire plan drawn up by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and endorsed by Condoleezza Rice, America’s secretary of state, is a triumph for Vladimir Putin, who is still...

WASHINGTON - It was surely not lost on Russia's bully in chief, Vladimir Putin, that the oil giant BP decided to shut down the pipeline that runs through parts of Georgia controlled by Russian troops. Indeed, that was one of the aims of the cross-border incursion. Putin understands better than anyone that oil and natural gas are the source of Russia's resurgence as a military and economic power and his own control over the Russian government and key sectors of its economy. It is oil and gas that provide the money to maintain Russia's powerful military, along with a vast...

RUSSIA is considering arming its Baltic fleet with nuclear warheads for the first time since the cold war, senior military sources warned last night. The move, in response to American plans for a missile defence shield in Europe, would heighten tensions raised by the advance of Russian forces to within 20 miles of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, yesterday. Under the Russian plans, nuclear warheads could be supplied to submarines, cruisers and fighter bombers of the Baltic fleet based in Kalinin-grad, a Russian enclave between the European Union countries of Poland and Lithu-ania. A senior military source in Moscow said the...

There may yet be hope for Olde Europe. The Frances and Germanys (Left Europe) still look down their snoots at the poorer, grittier Eastern cousins (Right Europe) whom they grudgingly let into their club as junior partners. But the Polands, Romanias, and Baltic States may end up being their salvation. One immediate benefit of the East's reintegration is that Europe no longer has a testosterone deficiency, although there is still an east (mucho) - west (nada) imbalance.Poland and the Baltic States do not share France and Germany's conciliatory attitude towards Vlad the Impaler. Here's what Polish President Lech Kaczynski had...

A contentious theory that the first Americans came here from Europe - not Asia - is challenging a century-old consensus among archaeologists, and a dig in Kenosha County is part of the evidence. The two leading proponents of the Europe theory admit that many scientists reject their contention, instead holding fast to the long-established belief that the first Americans arrived from Siberia via a now-submerged land bridge across the Bering Sea to Alaska. The first of the Europe-to-North America treks probably took place at the height of the last Ice Age more than 18,000 years ago, said Dennis Stanford, ...

M oscow’s blitzkrieg in Georgia is more than a military campaign. It is designed to empower Russia’s diplomatic strategy, which seeks to make the European Union (EU) the West’s chief representative in future negotiations with Russia. Quite naturally the Kremlin wants to escape the logic of U.S. and NATO policy, which is to contain Russia within her national borders. Meanwhile, the European Union is an entirely different animal: toothless, utopian and ready to please.

With all due respect, I'm pretty sure Dubya & Co will continue being the laughing stock of international affairs over here in Europe for a long time (- Hey, I'm aware you Americans have invested him with the highest of US offices, but I wrote "With all due respect" initially, so I won't drone on about how much many of us Europeans actually admire America, our common interests etc, out of sheer courtesy:D). Europe and the US will remain best friends and just like my (personal) best friend since 30 years and I squabble from time to time (I'm 39),...

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...

Russia has approved a plan intended to end fighting with Georgia, brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Mr Sarkozy, whose country holds the EU presidency, is now in Tbilisi trying to persuade Georgians to accept the deal. Under the plan, both sides would agree not to use force, and all troops would return to the positions they were in before the conflict began last week. Earlier, Russia announced its military activity in the area was completed and witnesses reported troops pulling back. But despite the diplomacy and apparent withdrawal, rhetoric on both sides has remained fiery and analysts predicted a...

From The TimesAugust 15, 2008 Georgia: Europe wins a gold medal for defeatism Sarkozy's ‘peace in our time' deal is a reminder of what could happen if the EU wins more clout Gerard Baker To some, China's muscular domination of the Olympic medal table is a powerful allegory of the shifting balance of global power. A far better and more literal testimony to the collapse of the West may be seen in the distinctly weak-kneed response to Russian aggression in Georgia by what is still amusingly called the transatlantic alliance. Once again, the Europeans, and their friends in the pusillanimous...

Poland and US finalise antimissile deal Created: 14.08.2008 19:49  Polish and US negotiators have signed a preliminary agreement on placing an antimissile shield in northern Poland, after nearly two years of negotiations. The announcement on Thursday evening involves the condition demanded by Warsaw that an additional arsenal of Patriot missiles be stationed in Poland without time limits. Washington, it is believed, had been offering Patriots for a limited time period, even as short as one year. American troops will jointly run the antimissile base and there will be a US garrison in Poland by 2012. After long, protracted talks between the...

With just a few exceptions, birth rates across the European Union have been declining steadily for decades. Economists warn of the consequences - a dwindling workforce bankrolling a growing elderly population. But from Paris, Lisa Bryant reports for VOA that European governments are awakening to their reproduction problems - and scrambling to put pro-baby policies in place. French university professor Nathalie Martiniere gave birth to her son Francois six months ago, and has been on a combination of maternity leave and summer vacation ever since. In September, she will return to her job as university professor in the city of...

US and Poland agree shield deal Breaking News The US and Poland have agreed a preliminary deal on plans for the controversial US defence shield, Warsaw has announced. The plan would see the US base 10 missile interceptors in Poland in exchange for help strengthening Polish defences, said PM Donald Tusk. The scheme is highly controversial and has been opposed by Russia. Poland is reported to have demanded security help after Moscow threatened to target its missiles at the bases. The Polish Foreign Ministry told the PAP news agency that the deal would be signed at 1800 GMT. The US...

BRUSSELS) - Europe has swung towards recession, with the eurozone economy shrinking for the first time and inflation hovering at a record high as the sharp global downturn takes hold, new figures showed Thursday. The 15-nation eurozone economy contracted by 0.2 percent in the second quarter, the EU's official Eurostat agency reported. That figure heightened analysts' fears that recession -- two consecutive quarters of contraction -- is on the way, a prospect now pushing down the euro. "Today's releases suggest that this probability has risen, probably to over 50 percent now," said Sunil Kapadia, European Economist for UBS Investment Research....

TRONDHEIM, Norway, August 13, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A recently published Norwegian study of prenatal detection of trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) reveals that 84% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome in the country are aborted. The study also concludes with the observation that "based solely on maternal age and second-trimester ultrasound imaging, the prenatal detection rate of trisomy 21 cases was poor and remained unchanged throughout the 18-year study period."The study was conducted by the Norwegian National Center for Fetal Medicine and published in the August 2008 issue of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology.The research was based on data obtained from...

BRUSSELS, Belgium – The European Parliament says that part of the roof of its Strasbourg chamber has collapsed.

TBILISI, Georgia - Georgia's president said early Wednesday that he agreed to the "general principals" [sic] of a plan for ending fighting with Russian troops in his country. The cease-fire plan brokered by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France calls for both Russian and Georgian troops to return to their positions before fighting erupted around the breakaway province of South Ossetia last week.

South Ossetia is not, as some have suggested, tit-for-tat payback for American and European recognition, over Russian objections, of Kosovo's independence from Serbia. Russia has been "at war" with democratic Georgia for some time. Driven to distraction by Mr. Saakashvili's assertiveness and Georgia's desire to join NATO, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin first tried to bring the country to its knees through economic warfare beginning in 2005. He cut off access to Russian markets, expelled Georgians from Russia, quadrupled the price of Russian energy to Georgia, and severed transport links. Georgia failed to collapse. ... Unable to bend Tbilisi to...

WE have just had a lesson in how the next president of the US would react to a real menace to the world's peace. Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain were set a test with Russia's invasion of Georgia. The results? Be terrified that Obama leads in the polls. Russia has driven deep into Georgia on the excuse of defending separatists in the Georgian territory of South Ossetia - a pro-Russian statelet that Georgia has tried to bring back under its control. But the truth is Georgia is being punished for its sins against Russian pride and power. Those...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

With its invasion of Georgia, Russia has announced to the world that its superpower status is back. The Kremlin is once more flexing its military muscles -- the same way it did between 1945 and 1991, and the results are turning out to be just as bloody. There are already hundreds of dead and thousands of wounded and refugees. The tiny region of South Ossetia, located in the Caucuses mountains of southern Russia, is at the center of these tensions. It is a complicated conflict within conflicts. Georgia, which broke away from the Soviet Union after its collapse in 1991,...

Georgia’s army was in complete disarray tonight after troops and tanks fled the city of Gori in panic and abandoned it to the Russians without firing a shot. As Russian armoured columns rolled deep into central and western Georgia, seizing several towns and a military base, President Saakashvili said his country had been cut in half. For the first time since the crisis erupted last Thursday, Russia admitted that its troops had moved out of Abkhazia, the other breakaway region under Moscow’s protection, and seized the town of Senaki in Georgia proper.

Vanity

Olde Europe, like the rest of the world, has been focusing on megalomaniac George Bush and his dictator destroying (or oil grabbing) dreams. The US is the biggest threat to world peace, these angry lambs bleat. Well, Russia want a piece of that, and not for the peace and democracy reasons President Bush cites as his motives. No, this is classic Russian brute-force on the move in Georgia. This is the brutish thug in a vodka stained wifebeater grabbing his woman by the hair and dragging her back in the house because she dared talk to the mailman. Russia is...

VIENNA, Austria: Russian and Georgian officials at a leading European security organized sparred Friday over who is to blame for the bloodshed in the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia. Georgia's ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Victor Dolidze, accused Russia of "clear, open, military aggression from one OSCE country to another — its neighbor, unfortunately."But Vladimir Voronkov, Russia's top delegate to the Vienna-based body, denied any Russian military involvement, saying that just 500 Russian peacekeepers were in the province. "I can't speak about any Russian forces present: This is a very obvious trick of the Georgian side to...

"J'aime l'Europe." "Ich liebe Europa." Whether you say it in French or German, many on the American left harbor a not-so-secret sentiment: "I love Europe." Maybe their trans-Atlantic love affair stems from affection for the Enlightenment, an affinity for secularism or a secret hope for socialism. Regardless, liberals have longed to clone the Old Country. Or at least make America a little more like France. During presidential candidate Barack Obama's supposedly senatorial visit to Europe, the crowd of 200,000 in Berlin made it clear: "Deutschland liebt Barack" and "Barack loves Germany." Interestingly, though, in his meetings with heads of state,...

Obama continues to dominate the old media, with 24/7 coverage of his every utterance. Talking heads ruminate endlessly and in depth, on the 'historic' tour just completed by their new president in waiting. With the appropriate oohs and aahs, our old media elites expound on Obama's gravitas, his presidential appearance, his new foreign experience which, coincidentally, Obama states, has confirmed all his preconceptions about Iraq and Afghanistan. How utterly prescient! ... There are even those on the right that dare question the Obama camp's estimate of the reported 200,000 that gathered to hear his Berlin speech. The attendance figures reported...

Not so long ago, Poland was said to be America's Trojan horse in Europe and its 51st state. Indeed, America was our shield and our unattainable ideal. Did we suddenly stop liking it? Did the American dream recede in the minds of the Poles? Studies of the Polish public's favorable attitudes toward foreign countries show that America has lost 20 percentage points over the last four years. It is not fully clear when this happened, but let us recall two warning bells. In October 2006, [Foreign Minister] Radoslaw Sikorski, who was then defense minister in the Law and Justice [PiS]...