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A radical form of “offsetting” carbon dioxide emissions to prevent climate change is proposed today – having fewer children. Each new UK citizen less means a lifetime carbon dioxide saving of nearly 750 tonnes, a climate impact equivalent to 620 return flights between London and New York*, the Optimum Population Trust says in a new report. Based on a “social cost” of carbon dioxide of $85 a tonne**, the report estimates the climate cost of each new Briton over their lifetime at roughly £30,000. The lifetime emission costs of the extra 10 million people projected for the UK by 2074...

MEDIA ADVISORY, April 27 /Christian Newswire/ -- Reacting to a resolution passed yesterday by the European Parliament – condemning Poland for "homophobia" – World Congress of Families International Secretary Allan Carlson charged, "The European Union is engaging in Soviet-style mind-control." World Congress of Families IV – the largest international pro-family conference – will convene in Warsaw exactly two weeks from today (May 11-13). The resolution – which passed by a vote of 325 to 124 (with 150 abstentions) – was in response to legislation proposed by Polish Education Minister Roman Giertych to prevent teachers from indoctrinating children on the gay...

Germany's state of parliamentary democracy is under threat from the European Union which is slowly taking away all the national parliament's powers, the country's ex-president has said. In an article for newspaper Welt am Sonntag, Roman Herzog pointed out that between 1999 and 2004, 84 percent of the legal acts in Germany stemmed from Brussels. "EU policies suffer to an alarming degree from a lack of democracy and a de facto suspension of the separation of powers." "By far the biggest part of the current laws in Germany are agreed by the council of ministers [member states representation in Brussels]...

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - France is siding with Poland on complaints the European Commission has not done enough to help break Russia's food trade ban, as Finnish PM Matti Vanhannen attempts to salvage next week's EU-Russia summit. "We have supported Poland on the issue of the embargo. We repeated on Wednesday (15 November) that it falls fully within the commission's competence - it's not a bilateral issue," a French diplomat told EUobserver. "It's not for Russia to decide what the European Commission's competence is in our own interior architecture," he added, with Poland saying Brussels "overslept" on the food trade...

Earlier this year Radek Sikorski, the Polish defence minister, raised a few eyebrows when he compared the current Russo-German project to build a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea to the “Molotov-Ribbentrop pact” – the Nazi-Soviet agreement, which laid the groundwork for the invasion of Poland. The Poles are worried that the new pipeline might allow Russia to keep supplying German energy needs, while submitting the Poles to “energy blackmail” of the sort the Russians tried out on Ukraine, at the turn of the year. Once again, the Poles fear, their biggest neighbours are making an anti-Polish deal over their...

Russia has given Cuba a $355 million loan, hoping for a better future for Cuba without Fidel Castro. Russia also looks forward to settling Cuba’s $26 billion debt to the USSR which has not been discussed for a long time. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov finished his visit on Cuba yesterday where he discussed clearing Cuba’s $166 million debt before Russia. The prime minister, however, did not raise the issue of the $26 billion debt to the Soviet Union. The Russian government believes that this matter should be negotiated only after Fidel Castro’s regime has changed. Fidel Castro’s government stopped...

MINSK, Belarus Belarus' authoritarian president railed Friday against a proposed merger with Russia, warning it could lead to violence and disorder worse than in Russia's restive Chechnya region. President Alexander Lukashenko's blunt remarks highlighted the rising tensions between the two ex-Soviet allies amid strained talks over natural gas prices. Moscow and Minsk signed a union treaty in 1996 that envisaged close political, economic and military ties, but stopped short of creating a single state. The Kremlin, increasingly impatient about subsidizing Belarus' Soviet-style economy with cheap gas, has since proposed that Belarus be absorbed into Russia. Lukashenko, who has vehemently opposed...

The papal message for this year's World Communications Day should become a practical guide to the world of media, also because media still hide many secrets and unsolved riddles. In his message Benedict XVI reflects on the various ways media influence man. First of all, they are effective tools to propagate all that is good and true. They provide versatile information and facilitate instantaneous and direct communication between people, even when separated by vast distances. Unfortunately, they show signs of being dangerously tainted. Little has been written about the phenomenon of taint so far. Similar problems of information poisoning or...

BERLIN: Red-faced officials at the German culture ministry scrambled to apologise yesterday after two gaffes at former Nazi concentration camps. The first occurred when Hermann Schaefer, deputy federal representative for culture and media at the ministry, gave a speech at a memorial concert for victims of the Buchenwald camp near Weimar in central Germany. He spoke at length about the ordeal faced by Germans expelled from their homes by Red Army forces in the final days of World War II but failed to mention Nazi crimes or Holocaust victims at any point during the speech. Some 250,000 people from 36...

A collection of letters written by popes and kings some 700 years ago will be returned to Poland's national archives after a man in Milwaukee found them among the belongings of his father, a World War II veteran. The letters, some of which were displayed at a news conference Thursday, are remarkably preserved, the gracefully flowing letters still legible on the vellum, or animal skin, on which they were written. The 17 letters date back as far as 1256 and primarily record real-estate transactions, said Wanda Zemler-Cizewski, the Marquette University theology professor who authenticated them in 2003. The documents were...

HAVANA (AP) - Leftist intellectuals and human rights activists from around the world pleaded with the United States on Monday not to interfere with Cuba while Fidel Castro recovers from intestinal surgery. Many of the 400 signers of the open letter are from Latin America, and numerous Nobel Peace laureates are listed, such as former Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and activist Rigoberta Menchu of Guatemala. Announcing the letter at a news conference, leading Cuban writer Roberto Fernandez Retamar said Cubans are convinced that Castro's handover of power to his younger brother and defence minister, Raul Castro, is only...

The European Union has dismissed a plan by Poland’s president for the return of the death penalty across Europe. "The death penalty is not compatible with European values," Steffan de Rynck, the European Commission spokesman, said. Lech Kaczynski - whose identical twin brother is Poland’s prime minister - said last week that the EU would come to see that the death penalty is justified for murder. "Countries who give up this penalty award an unimaginable advantage to the criminal over his victim, the advantage of life over death," he told a radio station on Friday. Poland officially abolished capital punishment...

Within the last month Russian-Georgian relations have worsened sharply. A number of hostile actions and gestures from both sides of a political, military and economic nature have escalated the tension. The main objects of the conflict are the republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, formally parts of Georgia but de facto independent. While Tbilisi has recently intensified its actions to regain control over both republics, Moscow has threatened Georgia with military intervention should Tbilisi begin an armed operation against the separatists. The situation in the region is so serious at the moment that outbreaks of fighting in both separatist republics...

EUOBSERVER / STRASBOURG - A Polish MEP has sparked a sharp exchange of views in the European Parliament with his comment that Europe needs more politicians like Spanish dictator General Franco, as deputies debated the lessons learnt 70 years after his coup in Spain. Maciej Marian Giertych, a Polish non-attached MEP from the League of Polish Families, a ruling coalition party in Poland, broke rank from his European counterparts who condemned General Franco and his dictatorship during a plenary debate on Tuesday (4 July). In his speech on the subject, Mr Giertych praised the Spanish right-wing powers and in particular...

Squabbling over what ingredients can be used to make true vodka threatens to hold up European Commission proposals to tighten the definition of spirit drinks. Calls to restrict the raw materials that can be used to make vodka would damage Europe's vodka trade, said the European Vodka Alliance this week. It is an issue threatening to cause full-scale rows between several EU member states, as new proposals for defining spirit drinks work their way through the EU machine. Poland has led a delegation including Sweden, Finland, the Baltic states and Germany, demanding that true vodka could only be made from...

While Russia is at war with Georgia Ukraine decided to help its Georgian friends. Before Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvilli’s visit to Kyiv for a GUAM summit there appeared lots of bill-boards supporting Georgian wine. In particular, on Saakashvilli’s way along Boryspil-Kyiv highway there have been set billboards with a glass of wine and inscription: “Try the wine of freedom”, “It has more freedom than it’s allowed” Both variants of billboards had an additional inscription “Georgian wine is forbidden in Russia”. The same billboards and light-boxes have been set in all central streets in Kyiv. As known, at the end of...

Russian State Duma seeks ways to take Crimea back The State Duma of the Russian Federation intends to inquire the government how to take Crimea back to Russia. Today Duma’s members by majority have backed the corresponding protocol message to the Duma Committees on the International Affairs and CIS. Regarding the bilateral agreement on Russia’s recognition of Ukraine’s current frontiers until 2007, Russia should claim a non-prolongation of the agreement and restitution of Crimea in accordance with the Kuchuk-Kainardzhijsk Agreement of 1774, the Duma envoys told. According to the agreement of 1774, Russia and Ottoman Empire recognized Crimea as “free...

Moscow - Moscow police on Saturday arrested around 120 people during an unsanctioned gay rights demonstration at which a German MP was injured in a scuffle with right-wing activists. Municipal authorities had banned a planned gay and lesbian parade through the capital despite a court appeal by organizers who pledged to hold a rally regardless. Around two dozen gay activists mounted an initial protest in front of the city hall where violence ensued as other groups of citizens reportedly including right-wing radicals tried to break up the gathering. Police units then moved on the crowd and made numerous arrests. Up...

"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women," wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis." The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts....

DUBROVNIK, Croatia (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney pledged strong U.S. support on Saturday for Croatia's bid to join NATO and the European Union, following the example of other post-communist states in transition to democracy. Cheney made the promise to reformist Prime Minister Ivo Sanader on the eve of a meeting in Dubrovnik with leaders of Croatia, Macedonia and Albania, as he toured former East bloc nations that increasingly have turned west since the Cold War. He caused diplomatic waves on Thursday with a speech to Baltic and Black Sea heads of state in Vilnius where he accused Russian President...