expert in myworld

Indian in record chilli attempt

2009-04-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

Ms Tamuly was disappointed she had not managed more

An Indian mother is set for an entry into the Guinness World Records after eating 51 of the world's hottest chilli in two minutes.

Anandita Dutta Tamuly, 26, gobbled up the "ghost chillis" in front of visiting British chef Gordon Ramsay in the north-eastern state of Assam.

Ms Tamuly told Associated Press she "felt terrible" - because she had managed 60 in an earlier local event.

Mr Ramsay tried a chilli but said "it's too much" and pleaded for water.

He is in Assam for a television shoot of a global food series.

'Awestruck'

Guinness World Records accepted in 2007 that the ghost chilli was the world's spiciest at more than one million Scoville units, the measure of spiciness, twice the heat of its closest rival.

A standard green chilli has about 1,500 units.

The chilli record took place on Thursday in Jorhat, 300km (200 miles) north-east of state capital, Guwahati.

Ms Tamuly told AP she used to eat the chilli as a child "while children of my age roamed the village to look for berries".

Atul Lahkar, a local chef, told the Times of India that Ms Tamuly also "smeared seeds of 25 chillies in her eyes in one minute with the crowd simply awestruck".

The previous record for eating was held by a South African with eight jalapenos in a minute.

Guinness World Records has not yet formally confirmed the record.

Obama sees 'hope' for US economy

2009-04-10T09:48:00.000-07:00

US President Barack Obama has said he sees "glimmers of hope" in the economy, but warned that the system remained under "severe strain".

Speaking after a meeting with his top economic advisers, he said there was still "a lot of work to do".

Mr Obama promised more action on the economy in the coming weeks.

He said he and his team had discussed the stability of the financial system, the housing market and plans to help banks clear their books of bad assets.

Russia 'will buy Israeli drones'

2009-04-10T09:47:00.000-07:00

Performance of Russia's drones was criticised during the Georgia conflict

Russia has signed a deal to buy Israeli unmanned spy planes to help the country improve its own drones, reports say.

The news comes after reports that Moscow was unhappy with the performance of similar Russian aircraft during the conflict last year with Georgia.

An industry source in Israel said Russian generals had been impressed with the Israeli drones used by Georgia in the conflict.

Reports say the Israeli planes will cost a total of $50m (£35m).

Russia's deputy defence minister, Vladimir Popovkin, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying the military had signed a contract to buy an unspecified number of pilotless drones.

"I was in Israel and even operated one," RIA-Novosti quoted him as saying.

He added that Russia wanted to study the technology of the drones in an effort to improve its own pilotless planes, which came under criticism during the Georgia conflict.

Mr Popovkin said Russia had used a Tipchak drone during the fighting with Georgia, but that it had "very many problems", RIA-Novosti reported.

"You could hear it flying from 100km away," RIA-Novosti quoted him as saying. "It returned all shot up."

The chief of staff of Russia's armed forces said in December that Moscow was negotiating with Israel to buy a batch of spy drones.

Charles Darwin's egg rediscovered

2009-04-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

A look at Charles Darwin's rediscovered egg in Cambridge

An egg collected by Charles Darwin during his voyage on HMS Beagle has been rediscovered at Cambridge University.

The small dark brown egg, with Darwin's name written on it, was found by a retired volunteer at the university's zoology museum.

It bears a large crack, caused after the great naturalist put it in a box that was too small for it.

The egg is the only one known to exist from Darwin's Beagle collection.

The significance of the egg was only seen later

At one time it was thought there were a dozen or more.

It was spotted one day in February by volunteer Liz Wetton, who spends a day each week sorting eggs in the Museum's collection.

She said: "It was an exhilarating experience. After working on the egg collections for 10 years this was a tremendous thing to happen."

It was the collections manager, Mathew Lowe, who first realised the importance of the specimen.

"There are so many historical treasures in the collection, Liz did not realise this was a new discovery," Mr Lowe told BBC News.

"To have rediscovered a Beagle specimen in the 200th year of Darwin's birth is special enough, but to have evidence that Darwin himself broke it is a wonderful twist."

Dr Mike Brooke, the museum's curator of ornithology, traced the specimen's origin in the notebook of Professor Alfred Newton, a friend of Darwin's and a professor of zoology in the late 19th century.

Newton had written: "One egg, received through Frank Darwin, having been sent to me by his father who said he got it at Maldonado (Uruguay) and that it belonged to the Common Tinamou of those parts.

"The great man put it into too small a box and hence its unhappy state."

Darwin himself mistook the bird for a partridge at first. And in his notebooks from 1833, he wrote that the bird had a "high shrill chirp" and that its flesh was "most delicately white" when cooked.

The museum's director, Professor Michael Akam, said: "This find shows just how valuable the work of our loyal volunteers is to the museum".

Sweden targets strippers for tax

2009-04-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

Sweden's tax authorities are seeking the bare facts about webcam strippers' income, estimating that hundreds of Swedish women are dodging the law.

Webcam stripping is proving lucrative for some Swedish women

The search involves tax officials examining websites that feature Swedish strippers, in an effort to identify them and chase them for tax returns.

The tax loss is estimated at about 40m Swedish kronor (£3.3m) annually.

Project leader Dag Hardyson said 200 Swedish strippers had been investigated so far. He said the total could be 500.

"They are young girls, we can see from the photos. We think that perhaps they are not well informed about the rules," said Mr Hardyson, head of the tax authority's national project on internet trade.

The investigation into strippers is part of a wider tax project that includes online poker and fake trader locations.

Detective work

Mr Hardyson told BBC News that the strippers could be liable to pay about half of their earnings in tax. Striptease via webcam is quite legal in Sweden, unlike prostitution, he added.

"I don't think they have any costs really - almost 100% of what they earn is pocketed. Many have regular work and this is extra income. We want them to register their activity as a business - it's still taxable, even if it's a hobby," he said.

He stressed the difficulty of identifying strippers, saying the contact information on the websites was often "not obvious".

"We have to visit the companies behind the websites to get the information, then we have to work with the electronic wallets where the money is going in."

He said the Swedish tax authorities had been tipped off about Swedish internet strippers by the Dutch authorities, who had started a similar investigation earlier.

Web search tools like spiders had failed to detect the Swedish strippers.

"When we investigated the sites manually it worked better," he added.

Captain 'tried to escape pirates'

2009-04-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

The US captain taken hostage by Somali pirates managed to jump off their lifeboat overnight but was recaptured, according to US media reports.

The escape attempt by Capt Richard Phillips was witnessed by a US navy ship nearby but happened too fast for it to come to his aid, NBC News says.

He was captured after a struggle on his ship, Maersk Alabama. Pirates seized the ship but the crew fought them off.

The US navy is bolstering its forces in the area to combat the pirate captors.

After a lull earlier this year, the Maersk Alabama was the sixth ship hijacked off Somalia in the past week.

Andrew Mwangura, of the East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme, told the BBC at least 18 vessels were now being held in Somali waters, with at least 267 crew members held hostage.

MAJOR PIRATE INCIDENTS

Ukrainian ship MV Faina seized on 25 September 2008, held until 5 February 2009

Saudi tanker Sirius Star held for two months from November 2008; a $3m ransom was negotiated

At least 15 pirate attacks reported to International Maritime Bureau during March 2009

The 32,500-tonne Malaspina Castle, UK-owned but operated by Italians, seized on 6 April 2009.

There are thought to be four pirates with Capt Phillips in the lifeboat, which has reportedly run out of fuel, and it is not yet clear what they are demanding.

The Maersk Alabama is reportedly sailing for the Kenyan port of Mombasa under armed guard.

Gen David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, said reinforcements would arrive within 48 hours, adding that a warship was already very close to the lifeboat.

But other hijacked ships with hostages aboard are also reported to be nearing the area to support the pirates on the lifeboat.

Top priority

There has been rising concern over the fate of Capt Phillips.

"The safe return of the captain is the top priority," US Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Washington.

Is there a 19th Century solution?

Profile: Capt Richard Phillips

The cruise-missile carrying USS Bainbridge was sent to the scene in a move analysts say will strengthen the hand of US negotiators.

The destroyer is shadowing the lifeboat, and its officers are talking to the pirates, as well as giving them food and batteries for a two-way radio.

Capt Phillips has a radio and contacted the navy and crew of his ship to say he was unharmed, the Maersk shipping company said in a statement.

FBI experts are helping negotiate his release.

Analysts have said negotiations could be lengthy, with the pirates likely to want a hefty ransom for the captain as well as compensation for a boat that was wrecked in the attack.

Pirate reinforcement

Mohamed Samaw, a Somali who claimed to have a "share" in a British ship hijacked this week, told AP news agency two hijacked ships had left the pirate stronghold of Eyl on Wednesday afternoon.

The USS Bainbridge remains close to the scene of the stand-off

He said a further two seized vessels were also sailing towards the lifeboat.

Two of the ships have some 54 hostages aboard, from China, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, the Philippines, Tuvalu, Indonesia and Taiwan.

A man identified as a pirate named Badow told AP: "They had asked us for reinforcement and we have already sent a good number of well-equipped colleagues, who were holding a German cargo ship."

He said there was no intention of harming the captain, as long as the pirates holding him were not hurt.

"All we need, first, is a safe route to escape with the captain, and then (negotiate) ransom later," he said.

Destabilisation concern

The cargo ship, carrying food aid destined for Somalia and Uganda, was seized about 500km (311 miles) off Somalia's coast in the early hours of Wednesday.

Capt Phillips' sister-in-law Lea Coggino says he is "a smart guy who is in control"

After a long struggle, the crew members regained control of the ship.

It is thought that Capt Phillips offered himself as a hostage in order to save his crew.

Zoya Quinn, wife of the ship's second officer, told the Associated Press that Capt Phillips had told the crew to lock themselves in a room and that the pirates, who were "desperate", searched all over the ship for them.

The crew held a wounded pirate for about 12 hours, dressing his wounds "because he was bleeding all over the ship", she said, after communication with her husband Ken by phone and e-mail.

Somalia has been without an effective government since 1991, fuelling the lawlessness which has allowed the pirates to thrive.

Pirates typically hold the ships and crews until large ransoms are paid by the shipping companies - last year the firms handed over about $80m (£54m).

Efforts to stop the pirates have so far had only limited success, with international naval patrols struggling to cover the vast areas of ocean where pirates operate.

The UN's Somalia envoy, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, told Reuters that piracy was threatening to destabilise the region.

In what may prove an important test case, Kenyan officials are currently seeking to try seven pirates captured by US forces in February, the Wall Street Journal reports.

It has previously proved difficult to prove national jurisdiction because pirate attacks usually take place in international waters.

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SOMALIA - FAILED STATE

PIRACY HOT-SPOT

Gunboat diplomacy
The merits of a 19th Century approach to piracy

Captain 'tried to escape pirates'

How to deliver a pirate ransom

Is EU task force up to the job?

Lure of easy money

Q&A: Somali piracy

ISLAMISTS ON THE RISE

Text insurgency
SMS Islamists vying to seize Somalia and beyond

President faces tough task

Somali Islamists unbroken

Unending security nightmare

UK Somalis play politics from afar

Mogadishu: Ghost city

Profile: President Ahmed

PERSONAL STORIES

BACKGROUND

Timeline: Ethiopia and Somalia

Q&A: Somali conflict

Country profile

OECD names and shames tax havens

2009-04-04T10:05:00.001-07:00

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has published its blacklist of non-cooperative tax havens.

Costa Rica, Malaysia, and the Philippines are the countries listed as not having agreed to tax standards.

Uruguay had originally been listed too, but later protested that it had been wrongly included.

After listening to its arguments the OECD said it was happy the country had agreed to its tax transparency rules.

The list is part of efforts agreed at the G20 summit to clamp down on havens.

There is also a list of 38 places that have agreed to improve standards but not yet done so, such as Gibraltar, Liechtenstein, Andorra and San Marino.

'Willing to co-operate'

On Thursday, G20 leaders agreed to take sanctions against tax havens using the OECD list as its basis.

In their communique, they agreed, "to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens".

"We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over."

Uruguay had objected to its inclusion on the list, published earlier on Friday.

The South American country sent a letter to Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the OECD, from its finance minister Alvaro García.

He informed the OECD that Uruguay had formally endorsed the body's standards on transparency and exchange of information.

"I am pleased that Uruguay joins a growing number of nations willing to co-operate in fighting tax evasion and other tax abuses," said Mr Gurria.

Pressure

Angel Gurria, secretary general of the OECD, said that the G20 summit had helped to focus minds on the issue of tax havens.

There were frosty negotiations between France and China over the inclusion of Macau
Paul Mason, BBC Two Newsnight economics editor

The tax haven that vanished

"We've had more progress in the last two weeks on this matter than we've had in the last 10 or 12 years," he told the BBC.

He added that the progress had come despite the leaders not specifying what sanctions they would take.

"[Non-cooperating countries] will move because they know the question of sanctions, however ill-defined that was, is going to affect them somehow."

The Philippines is already reported to be taking steps to remove itself from the blacklist.

"The Philippine government would take the necessary steps to ensure we meet their expectations," Trade Secretary Peter Favila told the Associated Press news agency.

"It is really up to us to prove them wrong."

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said that his country should not be on the blacklist at all.

"We should not be in that category as, in practice, we have been committed to OECD requirements," he said in a statement.

Bomb hits Islamabad police base

2009-04-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

A suicide bomber has killed at least five paramilitary police in an attack on a security base in the capital, Islamabad, police say.

The attacker apparently slipped into the base under cover of darkness and attacked a mess tent, also injuring a number of policemen.

Shots heard after the explosion are believed to have come from guards.

It was the second attack on security forces in Islamabad in two weeks and comes amid a rise in militant violence.

Map

A suicide bomb attack on a police station on 23 March left one policeman dead and another injured.

The Pakistani Taleban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, claimed responsibility for that attack.

Violence in Pakistan has surged in recent months amid a wave of attacks blamed on Islamist militants.

Last June a massive bomb blast in Islamabad's Marriott hotel killed at least 53 people and injured more than 250.

Berlusconi call puts Nato on hold

2009-04-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

First he complimented Barack Obama's "tan", then he played hide and seek with the German leader. He has even annoyed the Queen by being too loud.

Now Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has held up the start of a key Nato summit - by talking for too long on his mobile phone.

In his defence, Mr Berlusconi was talking to Turkey's prime minister in a bid to resolve a row at the summit.

But Germany's leader was kept waiting on the red carpet for several minutes.

Angela Merkel had just led Nato leaders from Germany across a bridge straddling the River Rhine to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy coming from Strasbourg on the French side.

Mr Berlusconi joined the group shortly afterwards.

Mrs Merkel looked bemused as the Italian's call dragged on and finally opted to start the event's opening ceremony without the Italian.

It emerged later that Mr Berlusconi had been speaking to his Turkish counterpart in Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in an attempt to persuade Turkey to drop its opposition to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as Nato's new chief.

In the event, Turkey did concede, with Mr Erdogan saying it had been swayed by US President Barack Obama's assurances.

Playboy tactics

The Italian leader has developed a reputation for gaffes, outspoken comments and playful behaviour, even on the world stage.

Silvio Berlusconi speaks on his mobile phone during the French-German Nato summit, 4 April 2009
The best political leader in Europe and the world
Silvio Berlusconi, on himself

Berlusconi in his own words
Berlusconi in pictures

The latest incident comes just days after the Queen appeared to express mild irritation when Mr Berlusconi noisily greeted US President Barack Obama at a photo-call in London.

Last year he was filmed apparently playing "hide and seek" with Mrs Merkel in Trieste, hiding behind a large column as she walked past.

Earlier, he came under fire for describing Barack Obama as "young, handsome and tanned". Mr Berlusconi has palmed off the criticism those comments prompted, saying it emanated from humourless "imbeciles".

Mr Berlusconi's previous practical jokes at formal gatherings include making the Italian horned cuckold gesture behind a Spanish minister during a group photo of EU leaders in 2002.

The billionaire media mogul then sparked a minor diplomatic incident in 2005 by suggesting he had used "playboy tactics" to woo Finnish President Tarja Halonen in order to ensure her backing for Italy to host the European Food Safety Authority.

G20 leaders seal $1tn global deal

2009-04-04T09:57:00.002-07:00

The G20 summit has ended in a global deal to boost world growth.

Is it the beginning of a new world economic order?

At first glance, there is less than meets the eye in the G20 communiqué.

There was no co-ordinated economic stimulus plan, and the extra $500bn pledged to the IMF will come with too many strings attached to boost the world economy.

And regulation, although global in principle, will still be applied by national regulators who may take different approaches.

Any help to poor countries was limited in scope, and there seems little prospect of a global trade deal that could lift their prospects in the long term.

New consensus

But there are hints, in the rhetoric and in substantive measures, that a new way of running the world economy may be emerging from the G20 process.

President Barack Obama said as much when he acknowledged that the 'Washington consensus' of unfettered globalisation and deregulation was now outmoded, and called for a more balanced approach to regulating markets rather than letting them run free.

NEW FUNDING PLEDGES
$500bn for the IMF to lend to struggling economies
$250bn to boost world trade
$250bn for a new IMF "overdraft facility" countries can draw on
$100bn that international development banks can lend to poorest countries
IMF will raise $6bn from selling gold reserves to increase lending for the poorest countries
Source: BBC

G20 leaders' statement
Global markets rise on G20 deal
Historic IMF changes
Q&A: The G20's $1tn deal
First Lady moved by school visit
Mixed reactions to G20 outcome

And it is the shift in the US position, which was previously the strongest opponent of international regulation, that has opened the way for a much broader attempt to regulate the financial sector.

These go far beyond banks' capital requirements to include the global regulation of hedge funds, tax havens and executive pay - something that would have been unthinkable before the crisis broke.

And in the new Financial Stability Board, which will now incorporate all G20 members, there is the potential for a powerful new global financial regulator.

Even more significant is the increased power given to the international financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who have been subcontracted by the G20 to monitor and run many of their policies.

IMF managing director Dominique Strauss Kahn was jubilant after the meeting, saying that the IMF "is now truly back."

The IMF's image had been tarnished during the Asian financial crisis and, until the current crisis came to a head, there had been fears that the organisation was losing its relevance.

Mr Strauss-Kahn was particularly enthusiastic about the plan for the IMF to issue $250bn worth of its own currency, the SDR, saying this was the first step on the IMF issuing its own liquity as well as being a lender of last resort - the two key functions of a world central bank.

The IMF will also be made more representative, with China and India getting a bigger say, and its top job opened to all comers, not just Europeans, in the future.

Further meetings

But perhaps most significantly, the G20 decided to continue to meet regularly to monitor progress on dealing with the global economic crisis - with the next meeting scheduled for later this year.

Mr Strauss Kahn said that he believed that the G20 was shaping up as the board of governors for the world economy, and said he favoured an even bigger grouping to give more representation to poor countries.

It may be that after the crisis is over, the G20 disbands as a group.

But given the belief by governments on both sides of the Atlantic that global cooperation is now essential for economic growth, the likelihood is that it will carry on and attempt to strengthen its role.

With fits and starts, the world may be moving to a recognition that as the economy has become global, the power of governments can only be effective if they too become more international in scope.

What the $1tn pledge really costs

2009-04-04T09:57:00.001-07:00

Since the financial crisis came to a head we have had to get used to some very large numbers. The G20 summit has given us some more.

Once again, we are using the word "trillion", the one with 12 zeros. That's the headline figure for the financial firepower that the summit is aiming at the crisis.

What has been agreed by world leaders?

But it is not hard cash in the same way as it is when governments repair roads or send rebate cheques out to taxpayers.

The initial destination for a large part of this very large number of dollars is the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But it is loans which will be used to offer more loans. The big IMF member countries are offering to lend money to the IMF - Japan has already done the deal. The IMF will then have more resources available to help countries if they are hit by the crisis.

HOW BIG IS ONE TRILLION?
Understanding one trillion

Big numbers explained

Since the crisis began, the IMF has made commitments to lend of about $60bn. It hasn't all been handed over yet, but the figures are rising fast.

Mexico is seeking a facility of $47bn. Mexico might well not need it all, but it adds up pretty quickly, when the IMF had lending resources of $250bn before the crisis.

Still they are loans and, apart from some recent special deals for the poorest countries, the IMF generally gets repaid in full.

'IMF-made money'

It gets even murkier when you look at the G20's proposal to create $250bn worth of something called Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

NEW FUNDING PLEDGES
$500bn for the IMF to lend to struggling economies
$250bn to boost world trade
$250bn for a new IMF "overdraft facility" countries can draw on
$100bn that international development banks can lend to poorest countries
IMF will raise $6bn from selling gold reserves to increase lending for the poorest countries
Source: BBC

G20 leaders' statement
Global markets rise on G20 deal
Historic IMF changes
Q&A: The G20's $1tn deal
First Lady moved by school visit
Mixed reactions to G20 outcome

It is an IMF device for boosting countries' foreign exchange reserves and could help them weather the financial storms.

They could be described as obscure, but this huge - tenfold - boost in the total amount probably means they won't stay that way.

They are the nearest equivalent the IMF has to printing international money. They don't really take money away from one place and give it another.

And much of this IMF-made money might just hang around in foreign currency reserves as a kind of financial security blanket.

But that would be a useful function. The additional reserves would reduce the risk of a currency crisis.

Higher risk

Finance for international trade is another area where the figure is large but real spending will, with luck, be a lot less than the headline number of $250bn.

That support will come not in the form of grants but loans or guarantees - insurance for suppliers against the risk of not being paid.

The risk is higher just now, so when banks have become much more cautious trade credit has become especially scarce.

None of this is to say that these measures aren't worth taking or that they involve no real cost.

They may well be worthwhile and some will cost something. But unless thing get much worse they won't cost as much as the headline figure suggests.

Barack Obama has hailed the G20 summit as a historic turning point in the pursuit of world economic recovery.

2009-04-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

Leaders pledged new spending and tougher financial regulations, in what the US leader called an unprecedented set of actions to ease the crisis.

He now heads to Strasbourg for talks with the French and German leaders, before a Nato summit begins.

Security is extremely tight in the city, with tens of thousands of troops and police deployed.

On Thursday police clashed with protesters, firing tear gas and rubber bullets to stop a crowd getting to the city centre.

Masked protesters smashed bus shelters and set fire to rubbish bins. French news agency AFP reported around 100 arrests.

Nato talks

Speaking at a news conference in London late on Thursday, Mr Obama said that the G20 leaders had agreed "unprecedented steps to restore growth and prevent a crisis like this from happening again".

NEW FUNDING PLEDGES
$500bn for the IMF to lend to struggling economies
$250bn to boost world trade
$250bn for a new IMF "overdraft facility" countries can draw on
$100bn that international development banks can lend to poorest countries
IMF will raise $6bn from selling gold reserves to increase lending for the poorest countries
Source: BBC

G20 leaders' statement
Global markets rise on G20 deal
Historic IMF changes
Q&A: The G20's $1tn deal
First Lady moved by school visit
Mixed reactions to G20 outcome

They pledged a total of $1.1 trillion (£681bn) in funding to tackle the crisis, including $750bn to the International Monetary Fund, $250bn to boost global trade and $100bn for international development banks to lend to the poorest countries.

Leaders also agreed to introduce tougher financial regulations and sanctions against secretive tax havens.

"This was the day the world came together to fight back against global recession," said Gordon Brown, the host of the summit.

Representatives from the developing world welcomed the outcome.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told the BBC's Newsnight programme that rich countries had engaged with emerging nations on "equal terms" to achieve a good result.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy - who had threatened to walk out of the meeting if it did not yield concrete gains - said that the conclusions were "more than we could have hoped for".

He will meet Mr Obama for one-to-one talks on Friday, after which the US leader will cross into Germany for a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Then the focus will turn to Nato and the 60th anniversary summit that is being hosted jointly by France and Germany.

Leaders will gather for a working dinner in the German city of Baden Baden on Friday night before the main talks on Saturday.

The US president is expected to use the opportunity to build support for his new strategy for Afghanistan.

More troops are needed certainly, says the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus, but above all the Americans want to see their allies stumping up a good deal more money and more training teams to build Afghanistan's own security forces.

G20 ‘must give money to Africa’

2009-04-02T09:05:00.001-07:00

Aid group Oxfam has told the BBC the G20 summit of world leaders must commit to a $580bn rescue package for Africa.

The group of the world's most powerful countries are meeting in the UK to discuss the global economic crisis.

Other international aid agencies have also expressed concerns that the needs of developing countries in Africa and elsewhere will be forgotten.

But UK minister Lord Malloch Brown has promised that Africa's needs will be addressed at the summit.

Speaking at an event at London's Chatham House think tank, he said the UK hoped a global plan for economic reform would include a package of assistance arranged through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Oxfam says Africa is looking for serious money and recognition that the crisis is hitting the poorest countries too.

Tax havens

"About $580bn (£403bn) we think is what is needed to service a stimulus in the African continent," Oxfam's regional manager in Kenya, Michael Obriane, told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

One of the concerns at the moment is that 17 of the G20 countries have actually brought in various protectionist measures since the start of the crisis
Oxfam's David Green

What should the G20 do for Africa?

He also called for the world's richest countries to deliver on the promise to give 0.7% of their gross national income as aid and to crack down on tax havens.

"Tax havens… bleed money from rich and poor countries alike, but particularly African countries," he said.

Oxfam's head of research, David Green, emphasised that Africa needs an increase in aid and more trade.

"You can't do a fiscal stimulus if you're an African economy, because you've no money," he told the BBC.

"One of the concerns at the moment is that 17 of the G20 countries have actually brought in various protectionist measures since the start of the crisis."

The aid agency has also called for reform of global governance, to give developing countries the same say as rich countries in decision-making at the global level

South Africa, which has so far avoided a recession, is the only African country in the G20.

But the BBC's Peter Biles in Johannesburg says economists are warning that up to 300,000 jobs could be lost this year, pushing South Africa's unemployment up from the current level of 22%.

The worst hit areas are in mining, the motor industry, clothing and textiles, he says.

In the neighbouring countries of Botswana and Namibia, production at some diamond mines has had to be suspended and some 200,000 jobs have been cut in the Democratic Republic of Congo's mining sector.

Is G20 make or break for Brown?

2009-04-02T09:03:00.000-07:00

It is perhaps appropriate that the G20 meeting is taking place in London's Docklands.

This is an area which rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of past economic shocks but which needed state intervention, and sizeable public spending on infrastructure, before it took off.

But the parallels don't stop there.

The prime minister's long-standing reputation for economic competence has also taken a battering as the world shifted around him.

So he is hoping that it too can rise again as a result of state spending - rescuing the economy, and Labour's political prospects, simultaneously.

But while he had hoped to bask in the warm glow of international approval at the G20 for his "fiscal stimulus" - his plans to spend his way out of the recession - he may instead get his fingers burnt.

Although many other countries are pumping money into their economies, their rhetoric does not always mirror the prime minister's, or indeed that of the US president with whom Gordon Brown is keen to appear close.

G20 LONDON SUMMIT
World leaders will meet this week in London to discuss measures to tackle the downturn. See our in-depth guide to the G20 summit.
The G20 members are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the US and the EU.

Q&A: G20 Summit
G20 protesters: What they want

Many EU leaders - and in particular Germany's right-of-centre chancellor, Angela Merkel - are warning about the risk of building up debt.

Part of Labour's political strategy was to use this week to highlight David Cameron's isolation but the Conservative leader will pounce on any difference of emphasis among G20 governments to suggest that the world is not all that keen on being saved by Mr Brown.

So it is perhaps not surprising that government ministers are now engaged in an exercise of expectation management.

There is less talk than before of a global "new deal" being hammered out.

Reduced expectations

Instead, the Chancellor Alastair Darling is saying there is little point in being "overly optimistic" about what can be achieved.

The G20 summit, he believes, "is important, but it is not the end of the process".

But even if the G20 turns out to be a diplomatic and economic success - for example, there are hopes in government that there will be agreement on tackling tax havens; on instituting better international regulation of the banks and on increasing resources for the International Monetary Fund to help poorer nations - there may not be much of a political premium for the prime minister.

The agenda of the G20 may seem remote from people who - to use the government's own phrase - need "real help now".

The benefits of any agreement at the G20 on a new global financial order might not become apparent until after the next election.

So this week's international meeting should be seen as something of a companion piece to a decidedly national event.

In three weeks' time - much later than is usual in the fiscal cycle - the government will unveil the Budget.

Downing Street insiders are already telling anyone who will listen that there will be substantial help for the least well-off.

That is partly to draw dividing lines with the Conservatives, who are persisting with plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold, and partly in the belief that those lower down the income scale will spend rather than save any extra cash, thus boosting the economy.

But the Conservatives will focus on rising debt levels and even more gloomy forecasts for economic growth - so the Budget will not necessarily boost Gordon Brown's political prospects even if it does boost some people's incomes.

Panic button

With Labour trailing the Conservatives consistently in the polls, some see the G20 as the last thrown of the dice for the prime minister.

The international financier George Soros has said the event is "make or break" for the world economy.

But it will not be make or break for Gordon Brown.

A more likely date to circle in the diary is the day after the European elections in June.

By then, voters will have benefited from any Budget munificence, and might also be in a position to see if the world is shunning or supporting Britain's economic strategy.

If they remain unimpressed as they go to the ballot box, then that is when Labour MPs might be tempted to hit the panic button.

The leaders of the Group of 20, or G20, of the world's most powerful countries are meeting in London with the global economic crisis topping the age

2009-04-02T08:59:00.000-07:00

Page last updated at 07:49 GMT, Thursday, 2 April 2009 08:49 UK
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G20: Economic snapshot

The leaders of the Group of 20, or G20, of the world's most powerful countries are meeting in London with the global economic crisis topping the agenda.

G20 countries
G20 members G7 members Show country names
Map of the world highlighting the G20 nations Map of the world showing G7 nations
Click on the links below to find out more about the effects of the recession on each member state and how governments are trying to tackle their problems.

Argentina
Australia
Brazil
Canada
China
France
Germany
India
Indonesia
Italy

Japan
Mexico
Russia
Saudi Arabia
South Africa
South Korea
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States
European Union

ARGENTINA

One of South America's largest economies, Argentina was in economic difficulties even before the global downturn struck.

LATEST NEWS
Cristina Fernandez

Argentine farmers protest
Argentine pension takeover passed

Expansionary policies had caused the economy to overheat, fuelling inflation, while tax revenues shrank because the country's farm exports were fetching lower prices on world markets.

The government responded to the fall in tax revenues by increasing taxation on agricultural exports, a move that sparked continuing protests by farmers.

President Cristina Fernandez, who came to power in December 2007, nationalised the private pension system in November to help plug the hole in the government's finances.

Previously privatised companies such as Aerolineas Argentinas have also returned to state control.

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AUSTRALIA

Australia has experienced a long period of stable economic growth since its last recession in 1991, benefiting from the rise of China and India as markets for its raw materials.

LATEST NEWS
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd

Australia in Asian trade pact
Australia unveils economic boost

However, its resources-based economy has struggled since the worldwide financial turmoil began in the middle of 2008.

Its mining firms are cutting back on capital spending, reducing staff numbers and mothballing projects.

The government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recently announced a 42bn Australian dollar ($26.5bn; £19bn) stimulus plan, as it seeks to shield the country from the global downturn.

Mr Rudd has argued that the G20 alone has the global economic reach to tackle the world economic crisis.

Mr Rudd continues to enjoy strong approval ratings over his handling of the economy, and is renowned for his strong work ethic, earning him the nickname Kevin 24/7.

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BRAZIL

Latin America's biggest economy is also the world's biggest exporter of products ranging from beef and chicken, to orange juice and coffee.

LATEST NEWS
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

Brazil wants bigger G20 role
Brazil squares up to economic storm

But it has been hit by sharp falls in world commodity prices as the global downturn curbs demand. Brazil's currency and stock markets have also suffered, after foreign investors sold off assets in order to cover losses back home.

The financial turmoil has already seen one big banking merger, between local giants Itau and Unibanco, and further consolidation may be in prospect.

Brazil's government recently criticised the "Buy American" clause in the US's $787bn (£563bn) economic stimulus package.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the US and other developed countries should not turn to protectionism.

And he hopes the G20 summit will lead to a greater role for developing countries in the world economy.

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CANADA

Thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), Canada's economic health is closely linked to that of the US, which buys three-quarters of its exports.

LATEST NEWS
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Canada approves stimulus plan
Canada unveils stimulus package

The ailing car industry, for instance, is as big a problem for Ottawa as it is for Washington. As a result, Canada has copied many of the US government's tactics, such as cutting interest rates and drawing up stimulus packages, although with the same lack of success.

However, Canada's banking sector and housing market are in better shape than in the US, with far fewer sub-prime mortgages.

In February, the Canadian parliament passed a 40bn Canadian dollar ($32bn; £23bn) economic stimulus package as part of the country's annual budget.

The successful vote was, however, hard to come by for the Conservative government, as opposition parties said the original stimulus deal was insufficient, sparking a political crisis.

The storm resulted in Prime Minister Stephen Harper suspending parliament for six weeks so his government could revise the plans.

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CHINA

The global downturn failed to prevent China overtaking Germany as the world's third-largest economy, but it has had serious consequences for the country, both internally and externally.

Chinese exports have been hit hard by falling world demand, with millions of rural migrants returning to their villages after the factories that employed them closed down.

LATEST NEWS
Premier Wen Jiabao

China warns on social unrest
China seeks economic reforms

China's waning appetite for raw materials has had a knock-on effect on other countries' exports, crushing hopes that key emerging markets could compensate for the developed world's slowdown.

Its banks have not felt the impact like elsewhere, but ordinary people have - with migrant workers especially hard hit.

While China's growth remains relatively strong compared to other countries, it has launched a $587bn stimulus package and has underlined that it now has the largest deficit in twenty years.

And China has recently been talking about the possibility of a new world currency to replace the dollar.

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FRANCE

Unlike most other G20 countries, France has already seen social unrest in response to the global downturn.

In January, millions of French workers in both public and private sectors took industrial action in protest at the government's handling of the economic crisis.

LATEST NEWS
President Nicolas Sarkozy

French fear for car industry
Sarkozy defends plans for economy

The government has since announced a 26bn-euro ($33.1bn; £23.5bn) initiative designed to revitalise the economy.

While France has not officially entered a recession, there are expectations that it will do so in 2009. Its trade deficit hit a record 55.7bn euros ($71.4bn; £48.6bn) in 2008.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has won domestic plaudits for his plans to offer financial support for French industry, most notably the country's carmakers. However, this has angered other European governments, who accuse him of protectionism.

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GERMANY

Germany's economy, which accounts for about a third of eurozone output, is set for a grim year.

The government has predicted that the economy will shrink by 2.25% in 2009, which would be its worst performance in the post-World War II era.

LATEST NEWS
Chancellor Angela Merkel

German economy faces gloomy 2009
Germany pushes bolder rescue plan

The news has come as a shock to many Germans, who prided themselves on their fiscal rectitude, unlike the free-spending, highly-indebted British and Americans.

However, Germany's export-led economy has been relying on demand in other countries, which has now dried up because of the global slowdown.

In February, the country approved a 50bn euro ($63bn, £44bn) stimulus plan, and Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany would emerge from the economic crisis stronger than when it entered it.

"We are operating on the principle that Germany is strong and therefore can come to terms with this difficult economic situation," she said.

However, Mrs Merkel has warned other countries not to expect Germany to reflate its economy further before it sees how the initial stimulus package has worked.

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INDIA

India's economy has undoubtedly been affected by the global recession.

LATEST NEWS
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

Indian economy in sharp slowdown
India worries boom will vanish

The most recent official figures showed that its economy grew by less than expected in the last three months of 2008.

The country's gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 5.3% between October and December, compared with 7.6% in the previous three months, and 8.9% in the same period a year earlier.

Agriculture, which makes up about a fifth of the economy was one of the sectors to see growth fall, while industrial firms such as Tata have been severely affected by the freeze in world credit markets and general fall in global spending.

The Congress-led government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh now faces a general election, starting on 16 April.

It is hoping that pledged to waive farm loans and a rural employment guarantee scheme will help it win a second term in power.

India is worried that without a global stimulus plan at the G20, its economic boom may be over.

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INDONESIA

Globalisation has been a significant economic benefit for Indonesia in recent years.

Thanks in no small part to a big growth in manufacturing facilities for major multinationals, its economy grew 6.1% in 2008.

LATEST NEWS
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

Corruption classes in Indonesia
Indonesia in Australian trade deal

However, with Western firms cutting back production towards the end of the year, Indonesia's exports dropped sharply in the final three months of the year.

To help lift the economy, the government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has passed a $6bn (£4.3bn) fiscal stimulus.

But with overseas debts estimated at $151.7bn, the government has its own financial woes.

Critics also say it isn't doing enough to stamp out corruption that continues to deter some would-be investors.

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ITALY

The Italian economy, the third-largest in the eurozone, was one of the first to enter recession.

Its economy has now shrunk for three quarters in succession: in the final three months of 2008, it declined by 1.8%, following previous contractions of 0.5% and 0.4%.

LATEST NEWS
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

Economy boost for Spain and Italy
French and Italian output falls

It was also one of the first to approve a stimulus programme. In November, the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi approved an 80bn euro ($102bn; £66bn) emergency package that included tax breaks for poorer families, public works projects and mortgage relief.

Italy has the world's third-highest debt burden, expected to top 110% of GDP this year.

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JAPAN

By the Japanese government's own admission, it is facing the worst economic crisis since the end of World War II.

The slowdown in the world's second-biggest economy is steeper than that being experienced in the US or Europe, as Japan has been hit particularly hard by falling global demand for its products, particularly electronic equipment and cars.

LATEST NEWS
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso

Japan's economy in quarterly dive
Big fall in Japanese car sales

Consumers have cut back too, alarmed by rising unemployment. The economy contracted by 3.3% in the last three months of 2008, its worst showing since the oil crisis of the 1970s.

And in January its exports plunged 45.7% to a 10-year low.

Prime Minister Taro Aso is now pushing to introduce a stimulus package, but commentators said he is being hampered by his growing unpopularity within his own party.

MEXICO

The Mexican economy is so intertwined with that of the US that when Wall Street sneezes, Mexican firms can find themselves in intensive care.

LATEST NEWS
President Felipe Calderon

Protesters rally in Mexico City
Slowdown hits Mexico remittances

Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), the proportion of Mexico's exports heading for the US has grown to 85%, leaving the country vulnerable to falling US demand.

Mexico also thrives on remittances from workers who have migrated to the US, but these have fallen for the first time since records began in 1995.

In January, thousands attended a rally in Mexico City to protest at the economic policies of President Felipe Calderon's government.

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RUSSIA

Russia's economy is reeling from the effect of a sharp fall in the price of oil.

The 2009 budget is expected to slip into deficit and analysts predict that the country is heading for its first recession since 1998.

LATEST NEWS
President Dmitry Medvedev

Russia braced for more challenges
Crisis hits Russia's super-rich

Russia's stock markets have plunged in recent months and the central bank has spent billions of dollars trying to support the rouble. The country has also seen unemployment rise sharply recently.

Social unrest has already been broken out in Vladivostok, while the financial crisis has cut the combined fortune of the 10 richest Russians by 66% to $75.9bn, according to business magazine Finans.

Overseas investment in the country is also being deterred by the perception that state-run firms bully or intimidate foreign companies into handing over control of their investments.

There is also widespread cynicism as to how much President Dmitry Medvedev is really in control, and whether power really lies with Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin.

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SAUDI ARABIA

The Saudi kingdom is the only G20 country that also belongs to oil producers' cartel Opec (Indonesia allowed its membership to lapse at the end of 2008).

LATEST NEWS
Saudi King Abdullah

Gulf states to see fall in growth
Major reshuffle in Saudi Arabia

The global downturn has led to lower demand for energy, further depressing world oil prices, despite Opec's attempts to cut output.

As a result, the International Monetary Fund predicts that Saudi Arabia and its neighbours will record fiscal deficits of up to 3.1% of GDP in 2009, a marked decline from surpluses of 22.8% of GDP in 2008.

King Abdullah recently replaced the country's central bank chief in a rare reshuffle.

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SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa has the continent's biggest economy and is the only African member of the G20.

The country has already been hit by the global recession, its economy contracting for the first time in 10 years in the last three months of 2008. Between October and December it shrank 1.8% from the previous quarter.

Like Brazil, it fears that the global downturn will lead to a rise in protectionism in rich nations, making it even harder for developing countries to gain a foothold in key markets and increasing their sense of economic isolation.

LATEST NEWS
President Kgalema Motlanthe

Dire warnings about protectionism
What lies ahead for Africa in 2009?

South Africa's finance minister Trevor Manuel told the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that Africa was "at risk of decoupling, derailment and abandonment together".

The African National Congress government of President Kgalema Motlanthe continues to face tough challenges in alleviating poverty and reducing crime levels.

The country goes to the polls on 22 April.

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SOUTH KOREA

The government in Seoul, like its neighbours in the region, fears that the global slowdown could lead to a repeat of the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis.

LATEST NEWS
Lee Myung-bak

East Asia nations hit by downturn
South Korea in $11bn economy plan

South Korea's economy shrank by 3.4% in the last quarter of 2008 compared with the year before, while President Lee Myung-bak has warned that his country faces an "economic emergency".

In response, the government has announced a stimulus package worth 14 trillion won ($10.9bn; £6.6bn) to boost the economy, with eleven trillion won aimed at public projects and three trillion won for tax cuts to encourage spending.

Meanwhile, interest rates have fallen to record lows.

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TURKEY

As it tries to revive its EU membership bid, Turkey has been talking up its response to the downturn as evidence that its reactions are those of a developed country, not an emerging market.

LATEST NEWS
Tayyip Erdogan

Turkey tries to revive EU drive
Which direction for Turkey now?

In the past three months, the central bank has cut interest rates by 3.75 percentage points, although the rate remains high by world standards at 13%.

However, the Turkish lira fell 25% against the dollar in 2008, while industrial output fell 19% in December. Loan talks with the International Monetary Fund were suspended in January after disagreements over the terms.

As well as trying to reduce unemployment levels from the current 12%, the government of Tayyip Erdogan has had to face constant suspicion of its Islamist roots, in a country where the secular and religious are often divided.

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UNITED KINGDOM

The International Monetary Fund expects the UK to suffer the worst contraction among advanced nations in 2009, with its economy predicted to shrink by 2.8%.

LATEST NEWS
Prime Minister Gordon Brown

Grim expectations for UK economy
Bank warns on further stimulus plans

The Bank of England has already cut interest rates to just 0.5% in a bid to help the British economy out of recession, while unemployment is now over 2 million - the highest level since 1997. It has also begun a programme of quantitative easing to pump more funds into the economy by purchasing government bonds.

Troubles in the banking sector have led the government to bail out some of the country's biggest financial institutions, including Royal Bank of Scotland, in which it now holds a 68% stake.

Recently, the governor of the Bank of England warned that the UK economy could not afford another stimulus package, with the government deficit set to soar to 11% of GDP.

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UNITED STATES

The global economic turmoil began in the US, thanks to the sub-prime mortgage crisis in which underperforming home loans were repackaged and sold on as toxic debt.

LATEST NEWS
Barack Obama

US interest rates kept near zero
Q&A: Obama stimulus plan

The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates to near zero in a bid to unfreeze the credit markets, while new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has announced a partnership with the private sector to purchase toxic assets, in order to get them off the banks' balance sheets.

President Barack Obama has signed into law a slimmed-down economic stimulus plan worth $787bn (£563bn), but problems in the wider economy are worsening, with unemployment at its highest since 1992.

The government has also announced new plans for tougher financial regulation, including international oversight.

But President Obama has made it clear that he expects other countries to join the US in doing the heavy lifting of pulling the world economy out of recession.

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EUROPEAN UNION

Sixteen of the 27 European Union countries share the euro as their common currency. Their individual economic performances vary considerably, but the eurozone as a whole has been in recession since September 2008 and is forecast to shrink by 1.9% in 2009.

LATEST NEWS

Eurozone economy 'to shrink 1.9%'
Latvia's economy shrinks rapidly

Unemployment in the euro area is expected to exceed 10% in 2010, up from 7.5% in 2008. The eurozone's key interest rate is now at 2%, its lowest level since December 2005. The worst performing EU economy is Latvia, which does not belong to the eurozone. Latvian GDP could fall by as much as 10% this year.

LIVE TEXT AND VIDEO (all times GMT+1)

2009-04-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

Welcome to our live coverage of the G20 summit in London, where world leaders have gathered to find a way out of the global economic crisis. We'll bring you news, insights from BBC correspondents, your e-mails, Twitter and the best of the blogs.

1650 The BBC's Jonathan Marcus says: Everybody will be pleased the promised fireworks didn't emerge and that everybody has been on side for a communique, which in many ways appears to have gone rather better perhaps than many of the pundits might have expected in the days leading up to the summit.

1653 Police have drawn batons to push back protestors at Royal Exchange buildings near Bank. Officers using dogs to pursue a small group.
1651 White House says Obama's news conference might start at 1815 BST or perhaps later.

1639 The BBC's Stephanie Flanders says: The unexpected part of the communique is the $100bn for multilateral development banks such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.

1637 German Chancellor Angela Merkel describes the agreement as a very, very good, almost historic compromise that will give the world a clearer financial market architecture, reports AP news agency.

1634 The BBC's Kristina Block says: He can't help it. German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck closes his statement by saying he thinks it's "very beneficial the G20 communique does not mention any obligation for states to launch further stimulus packages".

1631 The BBC's Andrew Walker at the ExCeL centre says: Gordon Brown clearly does feel he's achieved quite a lot, and in particular he's talking about the end of the 'Washington consensus', which was basically a free market view of the way the international economy would operate, in favour of something rather different.

1628 Brown says Britain is not planning to take advantage of the extra cash available from the IMF.

1626 The BBC's Kristina Block says: Sarkozy started his press conference at exactly the same time as Brown and as the walls between the briefing rooms are temporary and rather thin you can hear Sarkozy talking next door throughout Brown's presser.

1626 Meanwhile, next door, Sarkozy says he's happy with the summit's outcome beyond what he could have imagined.

1616 Brown says the $1tn to IMF and World Bank is in addition to the $5tn of fiscal stimulus that has already been announced by G20 countries.

1615 Gordon Brown says the issues people thought divided us did not divide us at all.

Dominic Casciani
1614 The BBC's Dominic Casciani at Canning Town says: Lots of demonstrators have streamed away from ExCeL, a bit bored with the day. They're penned so far away from the G20 that it's all felt a bit like shouting in a sound-proofed room.

1613 Brown says China has contributed $40bn to the IMF, the EU has put in $100bn and another $100bn came from Japan.

1610 The BBC's Stephanie Flanders says: These are the final numbers now agreed: an extra $500bn for the IMF; $250bn for trade finance; $250bn in new SDRs; $100bn for the multilateral development banks to lend to poor countries; and a $6bn increase in lending for the poorest countries by the IMF. The support for the poorest countries was the last piece of the puzzle that aid groups were waiting for. So the grand total is indeed just over $1.1 trillion.

1609 Brown says there will be another G20 summit later in the year to assess the progress towards achieving the goals of the communique.

1607 Brown says IMF to look into option of selling some of its gold reserves to provide extra funding for poor countries.

1606 Gordon Brown says making available $250bn in trade finance, including $50bn for new trade programme from the World Bank.

1605 Gordon Brown says emerging markets and developing economies to be given bigger voice in IMF and World Bank, leaders of which will be appointed on merit.

1605 Brown confirms a $1tn stimulus has been agreed, including $250bn in Special Drawing Rights.

1601 Brown says banking secrecy will come to an end. He says that hedge funds and credit rating agencies will be more closely regulated.

1601 Gordon Brown pledges to crack down on tax havens.

1601 And wouldn't you know it... both press conferences started at exactly the same time.

1600 The idea that the communique could be ready earlier than scheduled seemed somewhat optimistic. Now we are faced with the prospect that there could be parallel press conferences from Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy.

e-mail sent in by reader
Javier, London, says: My partner and I live next door to the ExCeL. We felt compelled to stay with friends elsewhere this week. We had to spend hours securing our flat and packing our valuables. It bothers me that all the sympathy appears to be only for the City firms. Have your say

Rory Cellan-Jones
The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones blogs: Anarchists using iPhones? Or Twitter? Does that really compute? One is a mobile phone that you might think was more of a yuppie toy than a revolutionary tool - the other is a social network used principally by an older, more establishment crowd than, say, Facebook. Read Rory Cellan-Jones's blog

1540 Let's hope today's outcome is better than the last time a Scottish Labour PM held a huge economic summit in London. Ramsay MacDonald hosted dignitaries from 66 nations in 1933 in a bid to stave off the Depression. The meeting broke up without agreement. If I remember correctly, that decade didn't end in hilarity.

1530 BBC diplomatic correspondent James Robbins says: The G20 has eclipsed the G8: the club of the world's most industrialised nations. I think the G20 is the pattern of the future - the largest economies and the emerging and developing economies together.

Bob Geldof talks to the BBC's Emily Maitlis

e-mail sent in by reader
Jan, Sydney, Australia, says: Sometimes you need to get everyone around the table and agree a way forward, and if now is not the time for that I don't know when is. Have your say

Robert Peston
1520 The BBC's Robert Peston says: A chap who knows a lot more about this Special Drawing Rights stuff tells me its not very useful for very poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa. It will be most useful for middle-income, emerging market economies.

1517 The BBC's Joe Lynam says: The German delegation tells me that the G20 will pledge $1.1tn for multilateral organisations such as the IMF.

1510 South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel tells the BBC: I'm a bit more optimistic than I've been for a very long time.

James Reynolds
The BBC's James Reynolds blogs: The Chinese media has covered every moment of President Hu's trip to London. Of particular interest appears to be his first meeting with Barack Obama. Read more.

Nick Robinson
The BBC's Nick Robinson blogs: He's done it. Gordon Brown has got his trillion. Remember, of course, that this is not a trillion dollars spent now. It is a pledge to make funds available up to that level if countries can show they've met the criteria. Read Nick Robinson's Newslog.

Stephanie Flanders
The BBC's Stephanie Flanders blogs: Here's the issue for Gordon Brown - how do you bring it all home to the UK? How do you show British voters it will make a difference to them? Read Stephanomics.

1501 The BBC's Emily Maitlis says: We are hearing that the closing news conference that we were expecting at 1530 could be starting in the next few minutes.

1457 Latest G20 arrest figures from Met Police: 101 total, made up of 86 until last night/early hours of this morning and 15 since. Including four arrested at Rampart St squat today.

1445 Bob Geldof tells the BBC: It's academic if Sarkozy walks out. Dude - if you've got a problem walk out - who cares? The French national economy in the face of the global one is nothing and I think we're beginning to understand that. National grandstanding is over or at least it should be.

tweet
Alok Jha tweets: Protestors in Exchange Sq taping up messages - tributes to man who died and further claiming police brutality yesterday. Read Alok Jha's tweets.

1443 Global Call to Action Against Poverty founder Kumi Naidoo told the BBC: Right now monitoring the negotiations, they are stuck on virtually every single issue.

Bob Geldof with Emily Maitlis
1441 Bob Geldof, after a diatribe against world leaders, financiers and regulators, turns on demonstrators, telling a blushing Emily Maitlis of the BBC: Protesters should be protesting against themselves because we all sucked on the tit of free money!

1434 Business Secretary Lord Mandelson tells the BBC: I think you will see a major stand taken today against protectionism. I hope what we see is the World Trade Organisation undertaking a monitoring role so that if there are countries that are tempted to go along the protectionist road they cannot do so in privacy.

e-mail sent in by reader
Cityboy, London, UK, says: Do people seriously imagine that there is a shortage of regulation? Have a look at the FSA Handbook - there's plenty there. Hedge fund managers - also regulated. The question is one of enforcement by the FSA of its existing rules. Have your say

1426 A witness to Wednesday's incident in the City when a man died says: I saw him collapse and smash his head and then he was lying there with his eyes wide open. And then a guy in the audience had a megaphone and shouted "police, we need a medic", and within seconds the police had a team of eight people ran forward. And yeah, there was a couple of people throwing bottles and bricks but there was a few other anarchists saying "no, stop this, time out, time out". So within seconds there were no more missiles so the police were with him for a good like two or three minutes before they dragged him back. But as they were dragging him back, then the missiles began.

1424 Bob Geldof at the summit says: The price of failure is beyond comprehension. Normally in summits you get a nice agreement but nobody takes it seriously. We'd better take it very seriously indeed.

Robert Peston
1423 Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband tells the BBC: I'm hoping out of the communique that we should get an ambitious agreement at the end of this year at Copenhagen, which is the successor to Kyoto.

Nick Robinson
1421 The BBC's Nick Robinson says: Only $50bn needed to reach the magic figure of a trillion. Not much between G20 friends. Is it? Read Nick Robinson's Newslog.

BBC correspondent Ben Brown
1415 The BBC's Ben Brown says: There are between 500-600 protesters at the ExCeL Centre, representing everything from the anti-war movement to separatists in Ethiopia.

comment from blogger
Daudi Were writes about African issues on his blog mentalacrobatics.com: As Africans we are under-represented at these summits because we are increasingly irrelevant, have even less power and no force at all (except against other African countries). Read Daudi Were's blog

Robert Peston
1400 The BBC's Robert Peston says: We're hearing the $250bn increase in Special Drawing Rights is at least a ten-fold increase in the current stock. That will allow poor nations to borrow (in a world that won't lend to them) at the US official interest rate of practically zero.

1357 The BBC's Dominic Hurst says: Police in riot gear are detaining around 60 people at a squat in Earl Street in East London. They are questioning them about possible links to yesterday's violence. A crowd of about 30 demonstrators is chanting "shame on you" at police, but the situation is peaceful.

1355 Police have raided two squats looking for people suspected of being involved with yesterday's violence in the City. Police said 80 people were detained at Rampart Street in Aldgate, and Earl Street near Liverpool Street Station.

BBC correspondent Ben Brown
1345 The BBC's Ben Brown says: There are 300-400 demonstrators in a cordon about quarter of a mile from the ExCeL centre. They are quite noisy and quite colourful but very peaceful and very calm.

e-mail sent in by reader
Charles Moore, Aarhus, Denmark says: Obama will have a difficult task domestically if the fiscal rules the French and Germans want are too strong and move the focus away from the US and UK financial centres. Have your say

1343 The BBC's Andrew Walker says: There's talk of big increases in funds for the IMF; one figure emerging in the last hour or so is for a made-up IMF currency to be used for bolstering countries' foreign currency reserves. They're planning to release $250bn of that to help nations weather the financial storm.

1321 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's spokesman tells the BBC he wants to clarify that Harper was not in the bathroom during the first family photo. Following the morning session, the PM was pulled aside by officials in order to brief him on the latest draft communique and that's why he missed the first family photo.

1314 The BBC's Stephanie McGovern says: Apparently Silvio Berlusconi didn't turn up for the second attempt at the family photo. So still no complete family picture!

Stephanie Flanders
1310 The BBC's Stephanie Flanders says: Note the significance of the $250bn Special Drawing Rights allocation number - that's the maximum increase they could do without the US having to seek approval from Congress. Read Stephanie Flander's blog

1302 The BBC's Emily Maitlis says: It's like the Challenge Anneka of international politics

Robert Peston
1300 The BBC's Robert Peston blogs: The Special Drawing Rights increase is big stuff - and I haven't properly explained the significance. The record $250bn increase in SDRs is shared between all IMF countries, broadly according to their size (on a quota basis). The increase boosts every country's reserves and thus their liquidity. It's particularly valuable for cash-strapped poorer countries or emerging economies. But it's really the equivalent of creating money for all economies, including ours, or for the global economy. Read Peston's Picks.

1257 The G20 leaders are also said to have agreed an increase in the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) made available by the IMF, which can be converted by national governments into currency to provide a swift injection of liquidity and confidence into their economies.

1255 The European Central Bank has cut its main interest rate by a quarter of a percent to 1.25%. It is the sixth cut since October. The bank is responding to the economic downturn, which has seen unemployment in EU countries which use the euro at a three-year high. Most analysts had been expecting a larger rate cut.

1248 World leaders are still locked in talks trying to reach a deal on a recovery plan for the global economy. Latest reports suggest the resources of the International Monetary Fund could be increased to $750bn. But it's not clear if the French president and German chancellor have succeeded in securing tougher rules on financial regulation.

Robert Peston
1243 The BBC's Robert Peston blogs: The amount of trade credit being promised is $200bn (up from the $100bn minimum pledged in the finance ministers' summit last month). Read Peston's Picks.

Stephanie Flanders
1240 The BBC's Stephanie Flanders blogs: The official explanation is that Mr Harper was in the bathroom, but given what I said yesterday about Canada's squeaky clean record I suspect foul play. They'll be putting him behind a pot plant for the next one... More at Stephanomics.

1228 BBC economics producer Stephanie McGovern says: The "family photo" of the G20 is now being taken again after the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, missed it. Apparently, he was in the loo and nobody seemed to notice!

G20 'family photo'
Can you guess where Stephen Harper was meant to stand in the 'family photo'?

1225 UK Chancellor Alistair Darling tells the BBC the talks so far have been "pretty constructive". He says he expects an agreement to be reached on increasing trade guarantees to about $250bn (£171bn), which would be a "big help" to getting world trade moving again. "For a recovery to happen, in here and other parts of the world, we need world trade to be going on - but I think that's one indication of where there's a determination amongst all the 20 countries here to act together," he says.

Alistair Darling says agreement on trade guarantees has been reached

1216 French free-climber Alain "Spiderman" Robert has attempted to scale the Lloyds building in the City of London as part of a protest. He unfurled a banner and has now returned to the ground.

1205 The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) says it is to "assess" the death of man at a G20 demonstration in London on Wednesday. Investigators will be examining CCTV footage and attending the post-mortem this afternoon, it says in a statement.

Dominic Casciani
1152 The BBC's Dominic Casciani says: I've seen more people turn out to oppose a Tesco supermarket's planning application. This multi-cause demonstration consists of a bloke dressed as a gorilla, various left-wing groups, a polite Ethiopian group and a smattering of NGOs. There is a young woman in a nice sloaney hat gamely struggling under the weight of Socialist Worker banners because she can't find enough people to take them off her hands. Can the G20 see the demo? Let's put it this way: if that famous smoker Barack Obama gets a ciggie break, and if it's up on the roof of ExceL, and if he just happens to be looking through some binoculars possibly borrowed from his Secret Service detail, he might just might see a flag half a mile away (subject to the mist).

1155 The chairman of the Commission of the African Union, Jean Ping, tells the BBC that he would be making the case for a sell-off of the IMF's gold reserves to provide money for Africa. "We are not asking countries to put their hands in their pockets and give us money because they've promised, promised, promised and done nothing," he says. "[The measure] could be put in place quickly and we could have the money straight away."

1150 If the increase of the IMF's resources by $500bn is agreed, that would effectively triple the amount of resources the institution has to lend to countries in financial difficulty. Some countries, including Japan, the US and the European Union, have already said they will contribute around $100bn each to the fund.

1140 Stuart Fraser from the City of London Corporation says Wednesday's security operation was a success and the day had a "good carnival atmosphere" on the whole. "The high cost is the price of democracy," he added.

Robert Peston
The BBC's Robert Peston blogs: Okay, here's some news (well, sort of). The leaders are close to agreement on the big money questions. There will be a significant increase in the resources of the IMF, the emergency rescue service for ailing economies. The increment in funding for the IMF could be nearer $500bn than the $250bn already pledged as a minimum. Read Peston's Picks.

1137 A spokesman for the UN Millennium Campaign tells the BBC it is vital the rich countries represented at the summit keep their aid commitments and that the commitments made today are monitored.

e-mail sent in by reader
Gary L, Lincolnshire, UK, says: Whether it's the G20 summit or something else, at least people are talking. Give it a chance before we condemn it. If it achieves little, then condemn it. Have your say

comment from blogger
Jotman, one of the bloggers inside the ExceL centre, says he is impressed at the sheer scale of the operation: You could fit two 747 jets inside the media center area of the conference center alone! There are 2,800 journalists and 50 bloggers reporting on the event from inside. Read Jotman's blog

Steve Schifferes
1130 The BBC's Steve Schifferes says: UK Treasury Minister Stephen Timms has said the G20 will definitely introduce sanctions against tax havens - countries which the OECD judges do not comply with rules on financial transparency. He said the only question was the timing of the sanctions - how long countries would have to comply. And he added that the issue was not a red herring because many of the toxic assets that caused the financial meltdown were concealed in such tax havens. The strong line will please the French and Germans.

BBC Europe editor Mark Mardell blogs: The president of France and chancellor of Germany are delivering a message to London and Washington that will be popular at home. There is a widespread feeling that this crisis was created by a financial system that gave priority to vast profits and the acceptance of immense borrowing of money as a way of life. And that it was clearly marked "made in the USA". But this intercontinental financial missile has devastated their towns and cities and they want economic arms talks right now. Read Mark Mardell's Euroblog.

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1122 The BBC's Dominic Casciani texts: At G20 trying and failing to get anywhere near ExceL Centre. Perimeter lockdown is extraordinary. Been around the same roundabout three times. Good news for the cabbie!

1115 UK Secretary of State for International Development Douglas Alexander tells the BBC that agreement of co-ordinated fiscal action, and tougher and more transparent regulation would send a powerful and significant signal to world markets.

BBC correspondent Ben Brown
1115 The BBC's Ben Brown outside the ExceL Centre says: There's room for between 5,000 and 6,000 protesters. Police have been surprised that there are only about 200 protesters here at the moment. One policeman suggested anarchists did not get up very early.

A man in a kilt walks past police near the Excel Centre (20 April 2009)

1108 BBC business correspondent John Moylan says: If measures are implemented with unity and confidence, there's a good chance of a short, sharp slowdown rather than a long and prolonged one.

1100 Mark Malloch Brown, a UK foreign office minister and senior negotiator for the British government, at the summit tells the BBC there is "a lot of drama and hard work ahead during the rest of this morning". "It's nearly there but I think politicians and leaders have arrived with so much vested in this, they've got to go home with a success," he says. "There's a lot more political capital caught up in this process than is normal with most summits."

1056 It's straight down to business as Gordon Brown opens by outlining the work plan for the next few hours. The BBC's Robert Peston says the broad message of the prime minister's statement is that the leaders will all say that the erection of barriers to trade will be resisted at all costs.

1052 UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, with Barack Obama to his right and UK Chancellor Alistair Darling to his left, is poised to make his opening statement.

1049 The leaders are starting to take their seats. Others are still working the room as TV cameras continue to roll.

Steve Schifferes
1048 The BBC's Steve Schifferes at the ExceL centre says: A massive media scrum of photographers, journalists and cameramen surrounds Bob Geldof as he arrives at the summit to urge it to give more help to Africa. He says that the real problem is that the poorest 50% are so underrepresented at gatherings like the G20. He urges a $50bn stimulus plan for Africa. Only one of the G20 countries (South Africa) is from that region.

Dominic Casciani
The BBC's Dominic Casciani outside the Bank of England, says: It's clean-up day. Workers are slowly putting things right here. The traffic is slowing and life is returning to normal, as gardeners replant the box hedging and clear away the trampled daffodils. The statue of Wellington resplendent upon a horse is covered with graffiti, but that's about to be washed.

Graffiti outside the Bank of England (2 April 2009)

1035 Gordon Brown is flanked by Brazil and China's leaders. Germany and France hover on the sidelines. The photographers are given five seconds at the most to get their shot.

1034 G20 leaders gather for a team photo. Body language experts have their eyes peeled.

1033 The BBC's Claire Bolderson says: All the leaders are assembling for what they call a family photo, a photo of them all before they start talking. Any minute after that we are going to get opening statements from the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and that's when the talking actually starts.

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G20 leaders gather for the traditional 'family photo'
1032 Dan Price, a former assistant to President George W Bush for international economic affairs, tells the BBC he thinks there will be a combination of statements of principle and some concrete details at the summit. "These could include enhancing the resources of the IMF and firm action on pushing back against protectionism," he adds.

1030 World Bank President Robert Zoellick tells the BBC that it has just issued a new forecast which predicts a global economic contraction of 1.7%. "We haven't seen numbers like that since World War II - that really means the Great Depression," he says. "We believe that the lower growth will lead to some 200,000 to 400,000 babies dying this year. So the overall effects are dramatic."

The World Bank's Robert Zoellick on the scale of the crisis
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1019 The BBC's Dominic Casciani at the London Stock Exchange texts: No more protest here. Alternative monopoly players gone home saying they need a sit down and a nice cup of tea.

BBC correspondent Ben Brown
1014 The BBC's Ben Brown says: The protest outside the ExCeL Centre has a very different flavour from Wednesday's. One banner on display belongs to the African People's Socialist Society, while another demands: "Stop silent genocide in DR Congo".

1013 When asked about the mood among the G20 leaders, BBC business editor Robert Peston says: "They're all rather jolly from what I can gather. I get the sense that the supposedly intractable issue of tax havens has been sorted."

1008 Talks are scheduled to begin at 1025 with the summit host, Gordon Brown, making the opening speech. After three hours, lunch will be served. Then, leaders will hopefully put the finishing touches to the final communique during another hour of discussion, before a closing press conference due at 1530.

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Opakunle Raphael Abayomi, Nigeria, says: Jobs have been lost, people have cut their spending, demand has shrunk, remittance to third world countries has noticed a significant decline. The G20 protesters should be patient so that a lasting solution will be provided. Have your say

1000 The world's main industrial and developing nations, the G20, have begun a summit in London aimed at rescuing the global economy from its worst crisis since the 1930s. Leaders are discussing what is expected to be an agreement to tighten controls on banks and other financial institutions. France and Germany in particular are pressing for a tough regulatory system to prevent any repeat of the crisis. There are also proposals to act against tax havens. The UK and US have emphasised the need for further stimulus measures.

0953 George Parker, of the Financial Times, tells the BBC that the British public are not worried whether this summit will boost Gordon Brown's popularity. Instead, he says, they want to know whether the world will turns towards protectionism.

0950 South African President Kgalema Motlanthe tells the BBC he wants developing economies to be given extra help at the summit. "We are here to put across the position of the developing world, particularly with regards to the need to protect jobs because it's the impact on the real economy which affects ordinary working people," he says. "And, therefore, if we're to find an everlasting solution we must develop a response that is inclusive of working people."

0945 A Bank of England report says the credit crunch is showing signs of easing, with lenders indicating they will make more credit available to individuals and businesses in the coming three months.

0943 European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso tells the BBC he thinks differences between the G20 leaders are not as marked as they may seem. "There is a real willingness to have convergence at the end of this summit and so I really believe that at the end we'll have a consensus around the two points that sometimes appear as differences: the stimulus of the economy and regulation," he says.

Jose Manuel Barroso says it is essential for the summit to strike a balance between confidence and regulation
0934 US President Barack Obama has a busy day ahead of him. As well as the summit talks, he is holding bilateral meetings with the leaders of South Korea, India and Saudi Arabia. He is cramming all that in before a press conference at 1745.

Obama nd South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak hold a one-to-one meeting

Robert Peston
The BBC's Robert Peston blogs: The message of the UK's business secretary is that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is being "greedy" - greedy for massive additional resources for the IMF for bailing out beleaguered economies; greedy for hundreds of billions of commitments to finance drooping world trade; greedy for a substantial injection of funds into poorer developing nations. Read Peston's Picks.

The BBC's Robert Peston talks to Lord Mandelson

0920 The working breakfast is well under way. Once the last of the croissants is polished off, there will be a group photo of the leaders. The event is scheduled for 0935, but the summit is running late.

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Tim tweets: The demonstration at London Stock Exchange is pretty pathetic. Even the dwindling number of protesters look bored. Read Tim's tweets.

0916 The BBC's Rob Broomby, who is outside the summit venue, says: There's a handful of protesters here, maybe 10 at the most. They're been kept back by a ring of steel. There's every hope there will be no repetition to the kinds of scenes we saw in the City of London on Wednesday. We can even see police in boats out on the Royal Victoria dock - nobody's going to get anywhere near.

The BBC's Robert Hall explains how police are stopping protesters reaching the ExCeL Centre
0913 The BBC's Richard Westcott outside the London Stock Exchange says: The protest planned for 0700 in the City of London is getting off to a late start. Only 40 demonstrators have made it out so far. Looks like some of the protesters needed a lie-in.

0910 UK house prices rose for the first time in 16 months during March, according to the latest survey from the Nationwide building society. They were up by 0.9%. However, officials say it is too early to talk of a sustained recovery in the housing market.

0906 BBC business correspondent John Moylan says about four or five drafts of the final communique are currently being circulated.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel chat athe G20 summit (2 April 2009)

0905 Lord Mandelson says that three outstanding issues at the summit are trade finance, funding for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and tax havens. He says that we will need to wait and see on the language on the fiscal stimulus packages. He adds off camera that Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants bigger numbers on all of these matters, reports the BBC's Steve Schifferes.

0903 The UK's Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, tells the BBC there is nothing manufactured about the reported disagreements among G20 leaders: "I wish they were manufactured, then they would be easily ironed out but they have persisted overnight," he says.

0902 UK Treasury sources have revealed that agreement has been reached with the tax haven of Liechtenstein to co-operate over tax disclosure with other authorities, reports the BBC's Hugh Pym at the ExCeL Centre. British officials visited Liechtenstein yesterday to discuss how this might be implemented. Our correspondent says this agreement will feature as part of the final summit communique, in which a crackdown on tax havens will feature strongly.

Robert Peston
The BBC's Robert Peston blogs: Thank goodness for le president, M Sarkozy. His tantrum yesterday, his near-threat that he would stomp out if the excesses of Anglo-American financial capitalism aren't definitively tamed, created the almost convincing impression that the stuff which really matters in today's communique hasn't been stitched up and choreographed in the preceding days by diligent officials. Read Peston's Picks

The BBC's Robert Peston on whether chaos for G20 journalists this morning could sour reporting of the summit
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PCMyrs, Tonbridge, UK, says: Get a grip on financial regulation! Hedge funds, short selling, spread betting, leveraged buyouts must be curtailed. Regulate them hard! Better, ban them! Have your say

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Diana Atkin, Canada, says: The only thing the G20 should achieve is that in future there should be no sole world economic power shaping global economics. Have your say

James Robbins
The BBC's James Robbins says: Arguments over the balance to be struck between pumping more money into shrunken economies and far tougher rules and restrictions for financial institutions mean the final communique will be worked on word-by-word throughout the summit. The leaders will work around a vast table with 64 seats, while their "sherpas", or chief negotiators, constantly refine and update the joint texts on computer screens in a nearby room.

0838 Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is the last to arrive.

World leaders arrive at the ExCeL Centre

0833 Silvio Berlusconi arrives. The Italian prime minister appears to want to get straight down to business, waving a piece of paper in front of Gordon Brown with some consternation. Not sure what was on it, possibly a newspaper article or the schedule for the day.

The BBC's Andrew Walker says: Mr Sarkozy has been specially vocal in calling for this summit to mark the start of a stronger system of international financial regulation, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel shares his views. Drafts of the communique do include plans to tackle executive pay arrangements that encourage excessively risky trading and to require banks to hold more capital to protect themselves against losses. There is also a proposal to name and apply sanctions to tax havens. But Mr Sarkozy has said that he wants the language on regulation to be tougher.

0831 Nicolas Sarkozy pulls up. Momentary confusion follows over where to stand for the noisy crowd of photographers. There's the odd smile between the French and British leaders, as well as some furrowed brows. "He's always my friend," President Sarkozy says.

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thecityblog tweets: Monopoly takes shape at the Stock Exchange. Who's going to play the banker? Read thecityblog 's tweets.

Blogger Moorgate Mercurius took this photo of an over sized monopoly board being used by protesters this morning outside the Stock Exchange
Blogger Moorgate Mercurius took this photo of an over-sized monopoly board being used by protesters outside the London Stock Exchange on Monday

0826 The Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known as Lula back in Brazil, stops for a quick chat with Gordon Brown before posing for the cameras. Ahead of the summit, President Lula said the world's poor should not be forced to pay for the global financial crisis. "It is a crisis caused and encouraged by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes," he said, "who before the crisis appeared to know everything, but are now showing that they know nothing."

0822 Chinese President Hu Jintao is next in.

0820 Angela Merkel, German chancellor and thorn in the side of Gordon Brown, arrives. "I'm the last already?" she asks. "No, no, no..." he mutters.

0815 A cheerful-looking Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, is greeted by Gordon Brown. The British PM must surely be getting jaw and arm ache with all that smiling and handshaking.

0812 Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner arrives.

Steve Schifferes
0810 The BBC's Steve Schifferes says: The huge press area at the ExCeL Centre for the written media - with hundreds of desks - is still mostly deserted. It may be that the security problems around journalists arriving earlier have delayed many journalists who were hoping to arrive earlier. Staff are passing out G20 notepads and pens in compensation.

0808 Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan joins his fellow leaders at the ExCeL Centre.

0807 Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso arrive. But there is still no sign of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, or French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

0805 The managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, arrives next. On the eve of the summit, he told the BBC that there was plenty the IMF and world leaders could agree to do. "I think they all understand that this crisis is for a large part a crisis of confidence and they need in their own hand to show leadership," he said.

0803 Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono gets a firm handshake from Britain's leader on arrival.

0759 Next to arrive is the Spanish PM, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

0755 South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, World Trade Organisation director-general Pascal Lamy, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are next in.

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Eder Medina, Lima, Peru, says: The G20 summit is now the hope of millions of people from all over the world despite the fact that this summit has triggered popular outcry. Have your say

0751 Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is greeted by Mr Brown.

0749 World leaders are trickling in, with Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso the latest to arrive.

0748 The BBC's Richard Westcott says: One man tried to climb a monument in Paternoster Square, not far from the London Stock Exchange until the police stepped in. Other than that, it's quiet there are the moment, with 40 protesters and a game of Monopoly under way.

A man is led away by Police in Paternoster Square (2 April 2009)

0746 The Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, has arrived. Mr Zenawi is leading a delegation from the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad). The African Union is backing international calls for stricter regulation of banks, hedge funds and tax havens and that it is urging the international community to help create a financial stimulus package for Africa, the AFP news agency reports.

0744 Mr Obama looks relaxed as he is greeted by the British leader. The two of them flash their smiles for the cameras.

0742 US President Barack Obama pulls up outside the venue in "The Beast", his now famous armoured limousine. On Wednesday, he stressed that the world leaders were not going to agree on every point, but said the summit was an opportunity not to be missed.

Barack Obama arrives at the ExCeL Centre in "The Beast"

0740 UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown arrives with his Thai counterpart, Abhisit Vejjajiva, followed by Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek. The Czech Republic currently holds the EU presidency.

0739 The BBC's Philip Hampsheir at the London Stock Exchange says there are 150 police officers outside, about the same number of reporters, and just 15 protesters.

0735 So far, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, and Mario Draghi, chairman of the Financial Stability Forum, have arrived.

text message
0730 The BBC's Steve Schifferes texts: Media buses in lock-down for head of state arrivals

0728 The arrival of the leaders is imminent. Reporters are keeping an eye on the sky for Barack Obama flying in by helicopter. Things will kick off with a working breakfast before the talks begin in earnest.

Bridget Kendall
The BBC's Bridge Kendall says: Barack Obama's first foray across the Atlantic as US president to bolster ties with Europeans met its first hiccup on Wednesday. The blunt warning from the French and German leaders that they will not back down from demanding tough new rules for banks, hedge funds and tax havens was aimed above all at America. It exposes a deep fault line between countries who back US-style capitalism with its light regulatory touch and those - more critical - who argue now is the time for a radical global overhaul. There is not much time left for Gordon Brown, as host, to ensure he has got them all on board. The summit ends this afternoon with the signing of a joint communique.

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0715 The BBC's Peter Machin at ExCeL texts: Connaught Bridge leading to ExCeL closed. Reason unknown, rumoured to be protester action on bridge. Diversions.

People walk past the G20 logo in the main press centre of the ExCel Centre in London (1 April 2009)

e-mail sent in by reader
Paul, Manchester, UK, says: What do the protesters think the world leaders are 'in town' to do? They are here to find answers and resolve the issues. Protesting is not helping, it's just causing problems, heightening security risks and generally wasting the tax payers' money. Have your say

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Evie, Canterbury UK, says: I was at the protests because I believe that the leaders meeting at this summit aren't going to come up with solutions that will solve the problems we are facing in the world today. I can only hope that we aren't totally dismissed. Have your say

Hugh Pym
0655 BBC chief economics correspondent Hugh Pym says: We had a rendezvous in a desolate car park at 0530 this morning to get the press bus, followed by a bizarre journey around Docklands to the media accreditation centre. Then another bus journey through a bleak landscape to an underground car park. Finally, we entered the vast ExCeL Centre, where we were given coffee and bacon butties. Life's not so bad. I've just heard that some buses have been held up, delaying other journalists. At least I am in.

0652 Further protests are expected today - this time the London Stock Exchange and the ExCeL Centre will provide the backdrop. There will also be anti-war demonstrations. A massive security operation will be in force once again, with hundreds of police officers on duty at possible flashpoints around the city.

0650 Tragically, a man involved in the protests died on Wednesday evening - after collapsing. The man, thought to be in his 30s, was found unconscious near the Bank of England. Police say bottles were thrown at officers who tried to help him.

0648 The Metropolitan Police say four people arrested during Wednesday's protests have been charged - three with possessing a bladed weapon, and one with assault, the Press Association reports.

Protester shouts outide Bank of England (1 April 2009)

0645 A BBC correspondent says a major security problem at the ExCeL Centre in the Docklands has stopped members of the media checking in for an hour. Time is ticking, however, as the leaders are due to begin arriving in five minutes ahead of a working breakfast.

0638 On Wednesday, there were several violent incidents in London as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest over capitalism, climate change and war to coincide with the summit. Some smashed their way into a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, trashing equipment and daubing graffiti on the walls. Nearly 90 people were arrested. But the protests were generally peaceful.

0635 The G20 is meeting against a background of grim forecasts from several international agencies suggesting that the world economy will contract this year for the first time since World War II. The US and UK would like to see continental European countries to do more to stimulate growth, but for both Germany and France the big issue is more financial regulation to prevent any repetition of the crisis.

0630 Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of the G20 summit in London. We will be updating this page throughout the day, bringing you insights from BBC correspondents, some of your emails, Twitter, and the best of the blogs. As ever, we would love to hear what you make of the summit's developments, or the widespread protests expected nearby.

The International Monetary Fund looks like the big winner in the G20 summit, with huge increases planned in its resources and new roles.

2009-04-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

ut what does it do, and how will its role change in the future?

The IMF was set up to help countries which get into short-term financial crises because they do not have enough currency to pay their bills.

It offers short-term loans to help those countries over the difficulties.

But in return, it imposes strict conditions on those countries, such as cutting their budget deficits.

At first, when the IMF was set up in 1944, it was mainly European countries that turned to it for help. But in recent years, it has been developing countries that have been forced to ask for help when times are hard.

Now, with the financial crisis intensifying, more and more countries are coming to the IMF for help and its supply of funds to loan may run out.

So the G20 has agreed that the IMF should triple its borrowing, to ensure that it has enough money to offer loans.

The money would have to be pledged by other IMF countries. Japan, for example, has already offered to loan the IMF $100bn and the EU says it will put in $100bn.

Radical step

The IMF wants to use this money to offer a new kind of loan that would be preventative. Rather than waiting for countries to get into financial difficulties, it would offer them a line of credit to help them defend their currencies in advance.

In the past, countries were reluctant to ask for such money, as the financial markets got worried that they were in trouble. But Mexico has become the first country to ask for such a facility and there now seems to be less stigma about this approach.

Much of the new IMF funds would be used in this facility, which would mainly be directed to the middle income countries who had relatively sound economies.

But in an even more radical step, the G20 leaders appear to have agreed to increase another type of IMF funds, the quotas owned by individual countries, by an additional $250bn.

This would be done by creating more of its own currency, the SDR or special drawing right, which is a basket of currencies including the US dollar, the yen and the euro.

This would give countries essentially free money, which they could use as they wish without having to negotiate deals with the IMF, and would do much to boost confidence among poorer countries. Many of them have been critical of the harsh conditions imposed by the IMF before they are given help.

In the past, such moves have always been resisted by Germany, on the grounds that creating money is inflationary. But in the current deflationary climate, they appear to have lifted their objections.

Reform looms

The IMF is also set to have a bigger role in preventing future crises, by developing an early warning system for financial problems, and taking a larger role in looking at the problems of the financial sector as a whole, in conjunction with a new global regulator, the Financial Services Board.

But the biggest changes in the IMF will come after 2011, when it has been agreed that there will be a review of the voting structure. That could lead to the US losing its veto power, while China and other emerging countries get a bigger voice.

It has already been agreed that in future, the convention that the World Bank and IMF must be headed by an American and a European respectively will be abandoned.

In return, China will be asked to lend some of its reserves to the IMF - and will continue to push for the idea that the SDR will become a real reserve currency, ultimately replacing the dollar.

The changes to the resources and the role of the IMF are historic and perhaps the most important outcome of the G20 summit.

But it must be borne in mind that providing more resources for the IMF can be only a short-term solution to the immediate crisis now engulfing developing countries.

It is no substitute for a fiscal stimulus, as the money is loaned and must be paid back. Nor will it counter the need for additional development aid to counteract poverty.

But it is a move towards a more global system of international finance.

Austrian Fritzl sentenced to life

2009-03-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

Austrian Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter in a cellar and fathered her seven children, has been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Fritzl, 73, was found guilty of all charges against him, including rape, incest, murder and enslavement.

He showed no obvious emotion at the verdict, telling the court that he accepted it and would not appeal.

The court ordered that Fritzl should serve his life sentence in a secure psychiatric facility.

The judge said he could speak to his lawyer but he shook his head. Then he was led out of court with an impassive face.

See the Fritzl family tree

Fritzl's lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, said outside the court after the verdict: "I would say that the verdict was a logical consequence of a confession.

"Of course if you have 3,000 cases of rape and 24 years of being kept in a cellar, it is evident that there can only be a punishment or verdict like this one."

Court officials describe the details of Fritzl's life sentence

The life sentence was handed down for the murder by neglect of one of the children, who died soon after birth.

The jury unanimously accepted prosecutors' arguments that the child could have survived if it had received medical care denied by Fritzl.

The defendant first denied murder and enslavement but changed his plea to guilty after seeing testimony from his daughter.

The verdict is final and irreversible, as neither the defence nor the prosecution is contesting it.

Co-ordination centre

The BBC's Bethany Bell at the court says there has been a huge amount of media interest in the trial, and its twists and turns have been enormous.

At the time of the first details of this case, no-one could grasp the extent of this man's crimes, she says, and Austria still has to come to terms with it.

Court officials said Fritzl would initially return to St Poelten jail, where he has been held in custody. Justice Ministry spokeswoman Katharina Swoboda told AFP news agency that he would remain there in the coming weeks.

I regret from the bottom of my heart what I've done to my family
Josef Fritzl

In pictures: Josef Fritzl trial
Timeline: Austrian cellar case
Profile: Josef Fritzl

The prison's deputy warden, Erich Huber-Guensthofer, said he would be kept under suicide watch.

He will then be sent to a co-ordination centre, where it will be determined how dangerous he is and whether he is able to undergo therapy, before going on to the psychiatric facility.

He could in theory be released from the facility if he is deemed to be cured of his illness and would serve the remainder of his sentence in a normal prison.

In this case he will be eligible for release after 15 years.

Court spokesman Franz Cutka said Fritzl's daughter could also bring a civil case against her father, adding that there was no limit to the damages she could request.

Regrets

The Austrian imprisoned his daughter in a cellar under his house for 24 years and repeatedly raped her.

FRITZL'S CRIMES
Murder by neglect
Enslavement
Deprivation of liberty
Rape
Incest
Coercion

Why did Fritzl change his mind?
Lawyer: 'Fritzl had to be powerful'
Day-by-day: Fritzl trial
The daughter and three of the children were kept captive in the cellar until the case came to light in April last year, when one of them became seriously ill and was taken to hospital.

In his surprise confession on Wednesday, Fritzl admitted murdering by neglect one of newborn twin boys his daughter gave birth to in 1996, having failed to arrange medical care for the ailing infant.

The other three children were raised in the family home by Fritzl and his wife, after he told people that his daughter had abandoned them and joined a sect.

The daughter and her six surviving children been recovering from their ordeal in a psychiatric clinic and at a secret location.

Addressing the jury before the verdict, Fritzl said: "I regret from the bottom of my heart what I've done to my family."

"Unfortunately I cannot undo what I did. I can only try to limit the damage done as best as I can," he said.

The world economy is set to shrink by between 0.5% and 1.0% in 2009, the first global contraction in 60 years.

2009-03-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

In its gloomiest forecast yet, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that developed countries will suffer a "deep recession".

The global economic body says "the prolonged financial crisis has battered global economic activity beyond what was previously anticipated".

Just two months ago, the IMF predicted world output would increase by 0.5%.

In the event of further delays in implementing comprehensive policies to stabilise financial conditions, the recession will be deeper and more prolonged
IMF
EU to debate extra stimulus calls
What is a global recession?

But in its report drawn up for the G20 group of finance ministers, the IMF now says that the whole world economy will shrink, and predicts that the advanced economies will suffer a decline in output of between 3% and 3.5% in 2009, and barely grow in 2010, with growth of between 0% and 0.5%.

The IMF says this will happen despite a big fiscal stimulus from many G20 countries designed to boost growth.

It says that the G20 as a whole is adding 1.8% of GDP ($780bn) to boost growth this year - but that the EU is lagging behind with only 1%.

And it warns that the UK is building up the biggest fiscal deficit amongst all the G20 countries, which will amount to 11% of GDP by 2010.

Financial crisis unresolved

The IMF warns that the economic conditions could still deteriorate further if the banking crisis was not tackled head on by governments around the world.

"In the event of further delays in implementing comprehensive policies to stabilise financial conditions, the recession will be deeper and more prolonged," the report says.

Bangladesh textile workers
The global slowdown has affected exporters such as Bangladesh

The IMF says its revised projections reflect "unrelenting financial turmoil, negative incoming data, sinking confidence, and the limited effect to date of policy responses with respect to the restoration of financial system health."

Japan is forecast to decline the most, by 5.8% this year, while the eurozone will contract by 3.2% and the US by 2.6%.

The most urgent problem in restoring the banking system to health is in the United States, where the Obama administration has yet to reveal details of its plan for private-public partnership to buy up to $1tn in toxic assets.

At the G20 finance ministers meeting at the weekend, restoring lending by tackling problems in the financial system was cited as the "key priority" - a message reinforced by G20 business leaders who met in London on Wednesday.

Warning on Eastern Europe

Meanwhile, the IMF was also warns of a serious risk that emerging economies will be unable to secure external finance, as banks and investors in rich countries withdraw their money.

G20 LONDON SUMMIT
World leaders will meet next month in London to discuss measures to tackle the downturn. See our in-depth guide to the G20 summit.
The G20 countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the US and the EU.
The G20 make up 80% of the world economy and 90% of trade

Q&A: G20 Summit
What do G20 sherpas do?
Send us your comments

"The risks are largest for emerging countries that rely on cross-border flows to finance current account deficits," it says.

And this makes central and eastern European countries likely to be the "most adversely affected" - with the Baltic states, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria "suffering the greatest damage".

The IMF is already in negotiations about a rescue package for Romania.

East Asian countries, which rely heavily on manufacturing exports, have also been hard-hit by the decline of world trade, particularly in the IT sector.

In relative terms, the developing and emerging market countries as a whole, which are predicted to grow by just 1.5% to 2.5%, below the growth of population in many countries, have suffered the biggest downward revisions.

Fiscal stimulus

In addition to fixing the banking sector, many countries are now spending more public money to boost economic growth.

The IMF estimates that the G20 countries as a whole will spend an extra 1.8% of GDP ($780bn) in 2009 on fiscal stimulus, not far from its earlier recommendation that they spend at least 2% of GDP on boosting growth.

Taking into account the "automatic stabilisers", for example the increased spending on unemployment benefits that results from a slowdown, it says that in 2009 there will be a 2.4% boost to GDP from fiscal expansion.

It says the fiscal expansion could add around 2% to world growth in 2009 and create approximately 7 million new jobs (or 19 million if China and India are included).

But the IMF warns that there is much less spending planned for 2010, with extra government spending of only $580bn (1.2% of GDP) across the G20, and a total fiscal boost of only 0.4%.

This has caused much dissent among G20 members, with the US, whose huge fiscal stimulus plan runs well into 2010, urging other G20 countries to boost their spending further.

Japan warns it may shoot down North Korean satellite launcher

2009-03-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

Japan today threatened to shoot down a satellite that North Korea plans to launch early next month if it shows any signs of striking its territory.

Tokyo's warning that it would deploy its multibillion-dollar missile defence system raised tensions in the region after North Korea said that it had identified a potential "danger area" near Japanese territory along the rocket's flight path.

The regime told the International Maritime Organisation that the missile would be launched during daylight between 4 and 8 April, and that its boosters would fall into the Sea of Japan – about 75 miles (120km) from Japan's north-west coast – and the Pacific Ocean.

Officials in Tokyo said they reserved the right to destroy any threatening object in mid-flight, despite North Korean warnings that it would consider such a move an act of war.

"Under our law, we can intercept any object if it is falling towards Japan, including any attacks on Japan, for our security," Takeo Kawamura, the chief cabinet secretary, told reporters.

Despite repeated assurances from Pyongyang that the rocket is a vital part of North Korea's space programme, other countries in the region suspect the hardware is a Taepodong-2 ballistic missile.

South Korean intelligence has reported a build-up of activity in recent days near the missile's launch pad at Musudan-ri base on its neighbour's north-east coast.

Any missile launch, even one intended to put a satellite into orbit, would represent a snub to the US administration, which has repeatedly invited the communist state to return to negotiations over its nuclear weapons programme.

Last month the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, urged the north to cancel the launch, which US officials say would be in violation of a 2006 UN security council resolution.

The South Korean foreign ministry said in a statement: "If North Korea goes ahead with the launch, we believe there will be discussions and a response by the security council on the violation of the resolution."

The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said a missile or satellite launch would "threaten the peace and stability in the region."

After Japan's transport ministry ordered airlines and shipping companies operating in the area to take precautionary measures, Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways said they would alter flight paths on several European and other routes.

Speculation has been mounting for weeks that North Korea was about to put its hitherto unreliable missile technology to the test. The regime suffered a setback in 2006 when a Taepodong-2 missile – theoretically capable of reaching Alaska – blew up moments into its flight.

Japan has intensified efforts to protect itself against conventional missile attacks since 1998, when the north test-launched a long-range rocket over its territory without warning.

In response, Japan and the US have jointly developed a ballistic missile defence system that includes interceptor missiles on board ships and Patriot missiles dotted around Tokyo.

But experts believe that a rocket capable of launching a satellite into orbit may be too high to intercept.

Madoff to plead guilty, faces 150 years in prison

2009-03-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

Bernard Madoff will plead guilty Thursday to 11 criminal counts including money laundering, perjury and securities, mail and wire fraud and will do so without a plea deal, knowing it carries a potential prison term of 150 years, lawyers said Tuesday in court.

Lawyers outlined the plea arrangement for the 70-year-old former Nasdaq chairman that was set to unfold later this week after Madoff waived several potential conflicts of interest between Madoff and his lawyer, Ira Sorkin.

He was charged in court papers with securities fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, false statements and perjury among other charges. U.S. prosecutor Marc Litt said there was no plea agreement with Madoff, accused of bilking thousands of investors worldwide over many years.
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The prosecutor told U.S. District Judge Denny Chin at a hearing that Madoff could face up to 150 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines. The judge said he would sentence Madoff in several months in the event of a guilty plea.

In court, Madoff's attorney Ira Lee Sorkin said there was an expectation that Madoff, 70, would plead guilty on Thursday to the criminal charges.

At the court hearing in New York over potential conflicts of interest for Sorkin, Madoff said "Yes, I am" when asked by the judge whether he was satisfied with his attorney continuing to represent him.

U.S. prosecutors have said Madoff, free on $10 million bail but under 24-hour house arrest and electronic surveillance in his luxury Manhattan apartment, ran a massive Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi scheme early investors are paid with money from new investors.

The purported swindle ran for decades with consistent returns of between 10% and 12%, but collapsed in last year's market meltdown

Put Maddoff and Blagojevich on work detail

2009-03-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

When you hear about the outrageous accusations against Wall Street icon, now shamed, Bernard Maddoff, regarding his $50 billion Ponzi scheme and the corrupt thinking Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his peddling of Obama's Senate seat, it almost makes you want to bring back the firing squad because their offenses are almost treasonous.

Are we not in the midst of a financial battle of historic proportion? If the charges against them hold true, have they not destroyed the lives of thousands of people, not to mention the integrity of both the political and financial systems at a time when our nation is in crises?

Unfortunately, as they used to quip in another time; "hanging is too good for them!"

I have another solution for them and all white collar criminals doing soft time, even if it is a long time, PUT THEM TO WORK!

There are many manufacturing jobs we have exported to foreign countries because we have priced ourselves out of so many markets and we would not be competing with American labor to do so. Putting these felons to work would accomplish many beneficial results.

First of all we would be able to bring jobs home and the criminals would be helping to support the cost of their incarceration. Second we would be helping to balance (note the scales of justice) the trade deficit, which is hurting all of us more each year. Third, these guys need to do work that will help them better understand what it means to actually do an honest day's work. And lastly they could also make some restitution to those they have harmed.

Not to make light of President Bush's recent shoe incident in Iraq but I think the ideal job is to make shoes. I think it would be great if our "resort" jails had contracts with Skechers or Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) to bring their manufacturing home. While Bush showed his agility in avoiding getting hit by the flying shoes, white collar criminals should not be allowed to avoid being hit with a more severe and just penalty.

UFO Alien

2009-03-12T09:42:00.001-07:00

Sistem Teknologi UFO
(Reverse-Engineering Roswell UFO Technology)

Oleh: Jack Shulman

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 6, Number 4 (June-July 1999)
from NexusMagazine Website

Computer company chief Jack Shulman argues that the transistor could never have been invented so suddenly at AT&T in late 1947 without the input of alien technology.

Edited from a lecture given by Jack Shulman
President
American Computer Company
at the Global Sciences Congress, Florida, USA, 11-17 March 1999
(Audiotape transcribed by Ruth Parnell)

Hi, I'm Jack Shulman. I'm the head of the American Computer Company. American Computer Company is part of the Technology International Group and Bell North America group of companies. I'm also one of the owners of the group of companies. I've been in the computer industry for about 28 or 29 years. I've worked for IBM as a professional services management consultant. I worked on the development of the personal computer in 1978 for FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology] and Simplicity Patterns, later adopted by IBM. I developed something called the "pattern creator". That's where we got the term "PC". Prior to that, I'd developed what you might call the first windowing operating system in 1975 for Citibank, and before that there were earlier versions I did for a company called Vydec. I'm a serious computer person - very, very serious - and also someone who's not generally inclined to leap to great predispositions about any unusual subject.

Well, as it turns out, a few years ago I got my dose of reality. It was in the form of a visit from a friend of mine. When I was very young I'd got involved in technology, partly by virtue of the influence of a friend's father. I grew up in central New Jersey, which is around where AT&T and Bell Labs originated, and my friend's father was the head of Bell Labs. I ended up at a private school and ended up living at the household of the head of Bell Labs, going to that private school and going to college with his son as a roommate, and I kind of grew up around the various projects at Bell Laboratories in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I'd always held out that AT&T was this rather magnificent institution. Anybody here worked for AT&T in the past? So, you know when I say Bell Labs research, I'm speaking Holy Grail; and in certain parts of the defence community and in government I'm also speaking Holy Grail. Anyone here realise that AT&T and Bell Laboratories ran our nuclear arsenal for 45 years? Anybody who knows that, raise your hand. Not a one of you. I didn't really even know until a little bit later in my career, but I knew something strange was going on because it always seemed to me that AT&T always had what it needed to make innovations in technology, and subsequently such technology would migrate to an IBM or a Sarnoff Research or to an RCA.

And I could never really figure out, in the course of my young life, who were these magnificent, incredible scientists, other than that I frequently met them...like a fellow by the name of William Shockley. He was quite a frequent friend to Jack Morton's household, and I knew him, and I knew some of the other folks that he knew, like a fellow by the name of - well, I guess not too many people would know him - Bob Noyce, and Jack Kilby who was an acquaintance of theirs, and so forth. These names, if you've ever worked for AT&T or in the electronics industry, are also Holy Grail names. These are Mount Rushmores of the technology industry. Jack Kilby is credited with the invention of the integrated circuit.

I was rather shocked when, about late 1995, a dear friend came to me. He was at one time one of the very well known generals in the Pentagon, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is now a consultant. I'd known him a very long time through the Morton family and Bell and when working for IBM. He asked me to analyse some documents that he had in his possession. He showed me some pictures. I kind of turned up my nose. I said, "I don't believe this." He suggested they were pictures of an alien craft. I said to him, "Well, why do you come to me and ask me this?" "Because there are some documents that fell into my possession that I would also like you to see, that go beyond these drawings, these pictures, these photographs, that describe some technology; and I would like you to analyse this technology and make a determination for me of the veracity of these documents, help me to authenticate them." I said, "Fine. I don't believe this is real. I'm sceptical. I don't believe in aliens, I don't believe in UFOs, I don't believe in any of that." And he said, "Okay, well, I'd still want you to take a look at them, Jack." And I agreed.

I met with him at his home. I met a woman by the name of Mrs Jeffrey Proscauer. That's not her real name, but it's the name she goes by; she does not want her true identity revealed. And I got a chance to piece and look through some 28 boxes of materials that had come from Western Electric Laboratories in the late 1940s, 1947, early 1948 and beyond, and some subsequent documents.

Now again, if you've ever worked for AT&T, you know that the laboratories at Bell Laboratories are often quite distinct, and the documentation from a laboratory is kept in an ongoing, growing tome called a "Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook". It turns out that even in the super-secret laboratories, the ones in the part of Western Electric or Bell Laboratories that manage the nuclear arsenal, these notebooks are kept, and they grow and they're ongoing and they become almost like a living representation of what that laboratory did for a living.

Well, such as it is, I was rather shocked at what I had to see there in these boxes of materials, and I convinced them to let me look at them over the course of about three-and-a-half weeks. They were kept at the consultant's house during that time period, and he actually kept a security guard with them at all times because he was afraid that someone might come and steal them. Now of course, I wasn't sure why he was afraid, because at the time I didn't realise the full magnitude of what I was looking at.

In any event, after about two or three weeks of looking at them, I came back to him and we sat down over what turned out to be a Christmas Eve dinner, and I said to him: "I've got to tell you something. I'm having a real problem with this because what you're showing me looks like technology that we have not yet developed, that humanity has not yet developed, yet the documents you're showing me appear to be forty-eight, forty-nine years old. This would put them in 1947, 1948, 1949."

I suggested to him that before I could proceed I would have to have someone verify the age, carbon-date or come up with some other means to verify the age of the documents, and he agreed. So, with the help of a mutual acquaintance - a private investigator formerly with the Justice Department - we were able to take fragments of the documents without damaging them.

We sent them to an expert who formerly consulted for Scotland Yard; he's a fairly well known forensic expert at...I believe it's the University of Edinburgh in Scotland today; he was at a different university at the time. He analysed these fragments of these documents for me, and came back and told me that the ink, the paper, even the presentations were valid; that this was in fact a book or series of books from the 1947, '48, '49, 1950 time period. That took him about four and a half weeks of analysis, and I was for four and a half weeks, as you can imagine, holding my breath.

The things that I saw described in this Lab Shopkeeper's Notebook consisted of things that today would be more powerful than the Intel Pentium processor, for instance, or the Cray supercomputer. There were communications devices that were described; there were ways to sandwich-in very, very thin, micrometre-thin layers; special metals to produce moving parts for things like...from the descriptions that I read, the nearest thing I could describe...an anti-gravity propulsion unit for a spacecraft. They included dynamic electronic and power-control technology that even to this day we have not yet developed. They included communications technology that was described only as having been taken from an object of unknown or unearthly origin. The documents were very carefully worded not to reveal what was, in reality, in these boxes of materials.

I was sort of at a loss at that juncture, because even though we had forensic information at the time from this particular forensic expert that would date these boxes back to the late '40s, and even though they said "Western Electric, Bell Laboratories", part of them said something called "Z-Division" on them. We knew of the Z-Division: it was a segment of the United States Army, formed in 1947 and 1948. The implications were that this project was operating on the fringes of the nuclear bomb development project - then known as the Manhattan Project Group.

It turns out that in 1947 - between '47 and actually late '48 - Harry Truman decided he was going to grant a contract to AT&T to go through the overseeing and management of our nuclear arsenal and the commercialisation of derived product technologies from the nuclear bomb, from the bomb project: the physics, the electronics, the control systems, even the ballistics, the radar that was used, the ICBM technology that was under development in the late '40s after we got a hold of the V-series rockets from the Nazis, and so forth. The contract was inked by Truman in early 1949, if I recall correctly, but during the prior two-year period there was an informal relationship, during which AT&T played a greater and greater role in the organisation of super-secret military weapons-grade projects for the federal government and eventually got pretty much control of what was then known as the Z-Division.

Z-Division, believe it or not, originated in Roswell, New Mexico. I guess the reason is, that is where the original nuclear bomb armada was formed - the first bomber wing that carried the nuclear bomb - and it migrated over to Kirtland Air Force Base during the time period when Orlando Lawrence, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories fellow, was called in. He was called in by Teller, Oppenheimer...all those folks responsible for the nuclear bomb...Leo Szwilard. Lawrence was called in at the time because he could make accelerators, or "cyclotrons" as they were known at the time. Those cyclotrons were capable of refining uranium, refining plutonium...well, actually, back then, they weren't working with plutonium but with uranium.

I guess you could imagine what it must have been like in the time period. They were in the middle of a war when they were building the nuclear bombs and they had to do everything secretly, so this Z-Division was created with super-secrecy as its fundamental core.

Ultimately Lawrence was called in because they had to build enough of an accelerator to refine enough uranium to make the bomb possible, and, in spite of all the greatest minds of nuclear physics assigned to the Z-Division in the Manhattan Project, none of them could figure out how to refine enough uranium to make the nuclear bomb a possibility. This was before the first bomb was exploded. So Lawrence was brought in because he knew how to make a cyclotron; but his cyclotron, the biggest one he'd ever created, was about the size of this white board over here, and it could produce about a thimbleful of refined uranium - which would have been about enough to make a nuclear bomb capable of blowing off your left foot.

In any event, Lawrence one day is called in and he's asked: "How do we build a cyclotron big enough?" He makes a few calculations and hands a requisition order to Harold Ackerman - today a federal judge, and who was the chief supply clerk for the Manhattan Project - to requisition enough silver to build a big silver racetrack; something like 12 million tons of silver. In fact, he took it to the United States Treasury, handed it to the then Secretary of the Treasury - I guess it was Morganthal - and Morganthal was asked to fill a 12-million-ton order, which also necessitated the relocation of Z-Division to some place where they could put all this silver and build this racetrack.

We decided one day at American Computer Company that we were going to be brave. I talked with my board and I talked with some of the people at the company and they agreed. "Yeah, we can try this; let's see what happens."

We decided that we were going to take the story that had been conveyed to me about this unusual Shopkeeper's Notebook with these unusual technological artifacts in them, and naively and blithely put a panel on the Internet, describing in black and white and colour what we had found, and raise the question. However, the picture that we put up was a picture of Testor's model of the so-called Roswell Lander. It's a picture of what looks like a spacecraft with wings and a jet propulsion system, with a pod in the front to hold alien occupants who were piloting it. We superimposed the picture over an image from the Thunder Range - of course, we picked the wrong place; the Plains of San Agustin was the right place, actually - and we put a little bit of rhetoric on this panel and just placed it right in the middle of our American Computer Company website.

Now that probably was the stupidest thing we ever did. Here's this picture of a Roswell alien lander sitting on a panel in the middle of a computer company website, and on it it said something like: "Did AT&T receive stolen alien technologies from the US Government in 1947 and thereby invent the transistor, the laser, the integrated circuit, and...on and on and on...different technologies?" Well, we figured the reaction we would get from the public would be one of, "Oh gee, isn't that cute? That's funny, X-Files, you know..." The reaction we got was not one we had anticipated.

Three days after we placed the image onto our website, we received a very strange series of military faxes to our tech support fax machine, referring to a piece of hardware known as "Sky Station". Anybody ever hear of anything called Sky Station? Never heard of it, have you? Well, it's up there. It's an orbital platform of some kind. We were receiving live messages from Sky Station for a day or two and we decided this wasn't right; we were going to call the Pentagon and tell them about it.

So I picked up the phone and first I called Fort Monmouth; then I called down to Langley Air Force Base. They wanted to know, "Why are you calling Langley Air Force Base?" Well, where else would I call about a satellite that's sending messages to our fax machine...talk about sounding strange...that say this satellite is about to crash, it's coming down, its communications systems are breaking down. Well, finally we got to somebody who was of authority. It was Colonel James that we got to, and he gets on the phone with me...I'm in my car, on my car phone...and he says: "Mr Shulman, please secure these faxes. Do not let anyone see them. We'll take care of it. We'll let you know what to do with the faxes." It's like...the military goes silent.

That next day our offices were broken into. Our front door was smashed, our glass was smashed to smithereens all over the place, and everything was taken out of the file cabinets in our offices. My office was a wreck when I got in there. It was awful. We came in the next day to work and it was like: what happened, what happened?

I had these faxes in my briefcase. I'd taken them with me, home. So apparently, by not leaving them there, I probably worsened the situation. It might have been better if I'd left them there, to be frank; if they'd found them and had just come and arrested us, taken us away. They were top level, five-level clearance. We're not supposed to even see or even know such a thing, but inadvertently, as a result, we became aware of the fact that there's an orbital DSP [Defense Space Platform], called Sky Station, which is nuclear-hardened and equipped to carry nuclear weapons, because it was described in these faxes.

It is not a very pleasant place to be, to discover that now, here we are at the end of the Cold War with an agreement that there will be no nuclear weapons in space in orbit, and there is apparently a platform up there that the United States secretly put up back in the '60s or '70s or '80s, that's equipped; it's nuclear-hardened, it's one of the Star Wars SDI series, based on Spacelab, equipped to handle and carry nuclear weapons.

So now, not only did we have a picture of an alleged alien craft on our website, talking about alien technologies being transferred to AT&T, but we also were in possession of very high level, Level Five, Top Secret security clearance military faxes describing something called Sky Station.

That week we had visits from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. They came up and they interviewed us. They put me through a day-long third degree. We didn't want it happening in the middle of our customers coming in and seeing us or selling personal computers and servers, so I took them to an out-of-the-way part of the office, down the hall, down the elevator to a little office downstairs, and I got a query about everything just short of...well, it included my shoe size, when I was born, names of parents, names of grandparents, when they entered the country, driver's licence number. They went through a Q&A with me and with my staff, that just came short of asking me the wrong question - if you know what I mean.

We were very startled, naturally. We weren't certain what in fact was going on, but we're not ones to back down at American Computer so we decided that instead of running for cover and taking the picture down off of our website...because we kind of connected that the two things might have something to do with each other...instead of backing down and turning it all off, we would go the other direction. So we moved the picture to a separate section of our website and created an entire website within our website, called American Computer Company Special Investigation. This is what happens when you grow up in New Jersey! Of course, we couldn't have rubbed salt into a deeper wound: "Some have claimed that alien technology was found on board a UFO crashed in Roswell, 1947. Very dramatic. Is it true? Did the US military discover something strange in the desert near Albuquerque, New Mexico? Did they alter human history? Was the transistor one of those alien marvels? Click here for the original story."

We tried to be a little cute. We put up a picture, and if you go to our website it's still there. If you go to our main website, http://accpc.com/, at the bottom of the page is a nav bar with a pointer in the middle of the corporate info products, catalogue, features, tech support, Roswell 1947, help. You can go to that link and click on it and it'll take you to this special page which, of course, has now grown tremendously. It has something like, we estimate, about 9,000 messages and articles now stored within it. We started off on one Internet server and moved it to five Internet servers, and now we are on one of our super-servers which consists of four groups of four Pentium XEONs and three different service-provider carriers and a whole lot of communications just to handle the load.

We get about, we estimate, three million to three and a half million visitors a month to the site. And they're not necessarily people like yourselves, open-minded, interested; they're kids from college, kids from high schools, military people from countries like Iran...I'm serious! I mean, we can track some of the addresses that show up in our logs. I didn't even know Iran had Internet! We've got a very strange reaction to our story.

What we did in the story was we isolated a few pointers, some of which only I was privy to. One of them was that there was some relationship between the government and AT&T that resulted in the transistor's invention. I mentioned I grew up in the household of the head of Bell Labs, so I knew that there was something strange about the transistor because I knew Bill Shockley, and Bill Shockley was something of a witless buffoon. There's no way he could have invented the transistor.

The symbol for the transistor is made up of three pieces: positive, positive and negative; or negative, negative and positive...silicon dioxide doped with arsenic and boron, in 1947. Now, in 1947, doping things with boron was not easy. It required the sort of equipment that even Bell Labs in 1946 did not possess. They had this type of equipment at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories - but it would have taken thousands and thousands and thousands of man-hours to invent the transistor.

If you look back at it historically, what AT&T was claiming was that one day this "genius", William Shockley, was working with a rectifier; he looked at it and he noticed it had unusual propensities, and there, bingo, he invented the transistor! He figured it out right there! And to verify that, the two other "geniuses" that they got to help work on the transistor, Dr Bardeen and Dr Brattain, both said: "Oh yeah, I remember a guy by the name of Case was [allegedly] talking about transistors in 1931, and I knew back then we were going to have them."

That is the history of the transistor at AT&T prior to 1948, other than claiming it was invented in December of 1947 by Dr Shockley. Anybody believe that story? Me neither. And I knew, because the administrative head of the transistor project was Jack Morton - the man at whose house I was staying to go to school and whose sons I was friends with - and he often commented on the fact that it was really a shame that those three idiots got responsibility for the transistor and he didn't. And I always wondered, because he too didn't possess the scientific ability to develop the transistor. He was a brilliant man who had invented the radiobroadcast vacuum tube, the close-spaced triode, but it appears as if he was brought in to head up the project to try to draw back the transistor in time to radio tubes and the things that Shockley talked about; and it was as if the whole thing was just a ploy and he might as easily have been given responsibility and got the Nobel Prize as Bill Shockley. Professional jealousy?

In any event, for most of my young life I believed that the transistor had come from a government project and that they were just hiding its origins. Which government project, I did not realise until I saw the Shopkeeper's Notebook in the possession of my friend, the consultant.

Now, I'd heard a lot about Roswell in my life and I'd read the Project Blue Book books and I'd read a lot of books like Berlitz's books and so forth, but I was not someone who believed in Roswell, who believed that a UFO had crashed at Roswell at the time, in any event. There I was, stuck with all this information and having created this rather minor scandal on the Internet...well, maybe not minor, with the Air Force coming to visit us.

Next thing I know, radio talk show host Art Bell sends science reporter Linda Moulton Howe to my office. She has to be there because she has to see whether or not our offices were actually broken into. A beautiful woman, very intelligent...she shows up at the office with a tape recorder. I'm exhausted...the weeks have been going not so good lately, and we're still picking up the pieces of glass out of the sofas in the lobby. She sees the windows are broken in the front and we have a wooden partition set up to try to keep the air out of the building, and she records me answering questions about all this. I try to be as vague as I can and answer the questions about what's going on here, and she talks about the story. And next thing I know, she plays the tape on "Dreamland", on Art's show. I swear to God, it was the strangest thing we had ever seen happen!

That very next day we got well over 3,000 phone calls from people all trying to get in to see me personally; they had to come to see me personally, to tell me about Roswell. We received mail and e-mail by the 10,000 pieces. Our normal 2,000 visitors a day on our World Wide Web site jumped up so high that one of our carriers refused to carry us anymore.

At that point I realised there's more than just a casual interest on the part of the public, so we decided we would carry the original ACC Roswell story right through to its ultimate conclusion. We have been for several years now.

UFO Alien

2009-03-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

Obama Overturns Bush Policy on Stem Cells

2009-03-12T09:35:00.000-07:00

President Obama signed an executive order Monday repealing a Bush-era policy that limited federal tax dollars for embryonic stem cell research.

Obama's move overturns an order signed by President Bush in 2001 that barred the National Institutes of Health from funding research on embryonic stem cells beyond using 60 cell lines that existed at that time.

Obama also signed a presidential memorandum establishing greater independence for federal science policies and programs.

"In recent years, when it comes to stem cell research, rather than furthering discovery, our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values," Obama said at the White House.

"In this case, I believe the two are not inconsistent. As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering. I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research -- and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly."

The Mafia and Freemasonry

2009-03-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

'A Web of Favoritism and Corruption'

Brother, foot to foot teaches you that you should, whenever asked, go on a brother's errand, if within the length of your cable-tow, even if you should have to go barefoot and bareheaded. Knee to knee, that you should always remember a Master Mason in your devotions to Almighty God. Breast to breast, that you should keep the Master Mason's secrets, when given to you in charge as such, as secure and inviolable in your breast as they were in his own before communicated to you. Hand to back, that you should support a Master Mason behind his back as before his face. Mouth to ear, that you should support his good name as well behind his back as before his face.

'The Five Points of Fellowship'
Master Master Initiation Ritual

You must conceal all crimes of your brother Masons...and should you be summoned as a witness against a brother Mason be always sure to shield him...It may be perjury to do this, it is true, but you're keeping your obligations.

Ronayne
Handbook of Masonry, page 183

The committee feels that the link between Cosa Nostra and institutions is mostly through the "Massoneria" (freemasonry):

The fundamental terrain on which the link between Cosa Nostra with public officials and private professions was created and reinforced is the Massoneria. The Massoneria bond serves to keep the relationship continuous and organic. The admission of members of Cosa Nostra, even at high levels, in Massoneria is not an occassional or episodical one, but a strategic choice. The oath of allegence to Cosa Nostra remains the pivot point around which "uomini d'onore" (men of honor) are prominently held. But the Massoneria associations offer the mafia a formidible instrument to extend their own power, to obtain favors and privileges in every field: both for the conclusion of big business and "fixing trials", as many collaborators with justice have revealed.

Commissione Parlamentare d'inchiesta sul fenomeno della mafia e sulle altre associazioni criminali similari
(CPA: Commissione Parlamentare Antimafia)
Relazione sui Rapporti tra Mafia e Politica, Page 59
Roma, 1993

CSD - Centro Siciliano di Documentazione "Giuseppe Impastato"

Law Enforcement in Italy and Europe against mafia and organized crime

Umberto Santino

Premise: The Sicilian Mafia as a local and transnational criminality and the proliferation of criminals of the mafia type

1. The laws regarding organized crime in Italy

1.1. 114 laws in ten years
1.2. From Palermo's maxi-trial to the arrest of mafia bosses
1.3. The Antimafia Committee's report on mafia and politics
1.4. The mafia as a political subject. Double mafia in a double State

2. European Unity: first tentatives at anticrime politics

2.1. A continent of variable legality
2.2. The drug plan in the European Union
2.3. Measures against money laundering
2.4. EEC fraud and organized crime

3. The contradictions of today's society: basic trends and compensative measures

The Author
Endnotes
References

Premise: The Sicilian Mafia as a local and transnational criminality and the proliferation of criminals of the mafia type

The Sicilian Mafia is probably the best known form of organized crime, so much so, that mass media represents it as sort of a universal Evil. The "octopus" that directly or indirectly controls all criminal activities: from drug to arms trafficking and now even radioactive substances. In reality the Sicilian Mafia can be considered a "winning model" of organized crime (at least up until now) due to its complexity and long-standing role in society, but care must be taken against stereotypes that always see the octopus' tentacles everywhere.

The mafia's strength lies in its capacity to be both local and international, in the sense that it grew to a worldwide level without losing its roots in Sicilian society. Its strong-point has historically been the capacity to combine continuity with innovation: it has never abbandoned its traditional activities (extortion for example) but knew how to choose the most profitable activities and become a part of them.

Immigration to the United States during the end of the XIX century has also had a role in the formation of this "cultural elasticity and adaptibility", eventhough, at first the connections between Sicilian Mafiosos and Sicilian-Americans were rare. Only after the second world war has the connection between them grown closer and drug trafficking has "welded" Sicily to the United States, but both groups remain autonomous. In the last few decades the Sicilian Mafia has grown on the national, European and international level. It has trafficked heroin with the Corso-Marsigliesi (the French Connection), with Turkish, Middle East and Asiatic clans and now deals cocaine with the Latin American Cartels. International channels are used for money laundering from Switzerland to the tax havens worldwide. At first the mafia organization was only present in the western part of Sicily, now it is found in all of Sicily and in many Italian regions, countries of Europe and in th e world. Besides this spread of the mafia, the development of illegal activities, the formation and strengthening of other criminal groups similar to the mafia are causes for worry. Many criminal organizations are present in Italy: the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Camorra in Campania, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia and other groups. On the international level, besides historical groups like the Japanese Yakusa and the Chinese Triads, new organizations like the South American Cartels and the Russian Mafia have formed.

Today's criminal market is complex because the criminal activities are more articulated and the criminal groups have grown in number. Therefore, it is misleading to sustain that the mafia or any other criminal organization has a monopoly on world crime. There isn't a monarchy, a Number One, in the organized crime world, but there are many republics that variously interact and are protagonists of the international division of criminal labor.

Today's society produces criminality because of some of its main characteristics (the contradictions will be dealt with at the end of the chapter) and the intertwining of legal and illegal economies, that have grown closer, as have criminals in the social and institutional context. Drugs and money laundering are the best known aspects of today's criminal activities, but the most devastitating is probably the connection between politics and crime. This mixture between illegal and legal, criminal and institutional, is the heart of the mafia's historical model, but it has grown and spread indipendent of the presence of Sicilian mafiosos or Sicilian-Americans. It is not the mafia that has invaded the world, it is the world that has produced more and more groups and organizations of the mafia type.

In light of all this, the actual judicial system, both national and international are greatly inadequate. Not only are they behind the times but the repressive measures are often counteractions that can not debilitate phenomenons that proliferate due to the system's contradictions.

The laws regarding organized crime in Italy

1.1. 114 laws in ten years

Only in the last few years has Italian legislation prepared itself to deal with the great increase in the mafia's activities and with other forms of organized crime. In ten years, from 1982-1992, 114 laws regarding organized crime, directly or indirectly, were introduced. All of these laws are connected with terrible crimes that shocked both local and international public opinion, and are considered the offspring of the emergency situation, that is, they are answers to the criminal challenge and not part of a coherent law enforcement program.

The first general Italian law, the so called Rognoni-La Torre Law (named after the backers of two proposals that were later unified, the Christian-democrat Minister Virginio Rognoni and the Comunist leader Pio La Torre, assassinated April 30, 1982) or "Antimafia law", was approved September 13, 1982, after the assassination of General-Prefect Dalla Chiesa, and for the first time defined mafia as a specific type of organized crime. According to article 416 bis, introduced by the new law,

The organization is of the mafia type when its components use intimidation, subjection and, consequencially, silence (omertà), to commit crimes, directly or indirectly acquire the management or the control of businesses, concessions, authorizations, public contracts and public services to obtain either unjust profits or advantages for themselves or others.

Article 416 of the Italian Penal Code that has its origins in the fascist period (1930), defines simple organized crime on the basis of the presence of three elements: the associative bond, the organized structure, the criminal program. Organized crime of the mafia type presents additional specific characteristics: the associative bond has such an intimidating capacity to cause subjection and omertà. It is at such a level that it may be considered a system, an absolute rule of obedience and a law of silence, that first of all demands, from the entire population, the refusal to collaborate with law enforcement. An actual submission to the power of the mafia.

Besides the creation of this type of crime, the most important and original points of the new antimafia law are the measures taken to control the origins of patrimonies, that allow the confiscation of possessions of illecit origin, and the explicit authorization to subcontract public works.

The role of Alto Commissario (High Commissioner) was also created in September 1982 to fight the mafia, giving a government official the power to coordinate the fight, that Prefect Dalla Chiesa so vainly requested. The High Commissioner's first headquarters was Palermo, and later Rome, and was substantially useless and canceled in 1992.

During the last few years other provisions intervened. The most significant are: the measures taken against the money laundering, the provisions for those mafiosos that collaborate with law enforcement officials, the so called "pentiti" (repenters), the revision of the procedure code for the treatment of mafiosos, the creation of the DIA (Direzione Investigativa Antimafia: Antimafia Investigative Administration) and the DNA (Direzione Nazionale Antimafia or Superprocura: National Antimafia Administration) and the integration of criminal association of the mafia type, that includes those that interfere with the right to vote.

The crime of laundering money of illecit origin was introduced in Italian legal system in 1978 with article 648 bis of the Penal Code, limited to the profits obtained from aggravated robbery, aggravated extortion and kidnapping for extortion. Article 23 of the law n° 55 of March 19, 1990, extended the crime to the capital obtained from the production and sale of drugs. Later, the law by decree of May 3, 1991 n° 143, converted into law n° 197 of July 5, 1991, introduced "emergency actions to limit the use of cash and bearer securities in transactions and prevent the utilization of the financial system in money laundering". These measures decree that sums above 20,000,000 lire must be transfered either in cash or through approved mediators or by means explicitly indicated, dictate rules that regulate finance companies and in exception of the right to secrecy, allow the exchange of information between control organizations.

Law n° 328, published August 28, 1993 in the "Gazzetta Ufficiale", repealed in part the European convention concerning money laundering. With this new regulation, the crime money laundering regards any case of reinvestment of profits obtained from any type of crime and therefore, not only the four crimes covered by the previous laws (that is, drug dealing, kidnapping, aggravated robbery and extortion). There are still a few problems to be resolved. A central data bank to keep track of all the financial operations is lacking, so sums can be kept under 20,000,000 lire and therefore, avoid controls. The companies registry is lacking, eventhough it was established by law in 1942, so it is impossible to follow transactions between firms.

In 1990, other measures were passed regarding the exclusion of those condemned of serious crimes (drug dealing, kidnapping, massacres, mafia member) from the benefits given to prisoners by the "Gozzini Law" (the benefits are home imprisonment and limited liberty), detention in prison while awaiting trial for those suspected of being guilty of serious crimes, regulations concerning wire tapping, reduction of the punishment for those that collaborate with justice, the prolongation of preliminary investigations from a period of six months to one year, the modification of the terms of the prescription of crimes.

The law by decree n° 345 of October 29, 1991 was converted into law n° 410 of December 30, 1991 and established the DIA, to coordinate the police forces and conform the organization of investigative services with the goal of preventing and repressing organized crime.

At the same time, law by decree n° 367 of November 20, 1991, converted into law n° 8 of January 20, 1992, established the district antimafia administrations and the DNA. One of the candidates for the position of Superprocuratore (General Attorney) was Giovanni Falcone, assassinated with his wife and three bodyguards, May 23, 1992, while driving on the highway that connects Palermo's airport Punta Raisi to Palermo (the Capaci massacre).

After the Capaci massacre and the massacre of Via D'Amelio, where Judge Paolo Borsellino and five of his bodyguards were assassinated July 19, 1992, new emergency measures entitled "Urgent modifications to the new Penal Proceedings Code and actions against organized crime of the mafia type" were taken. The decree n° 306 of June 8, 1992, converted into law n° 356 of August 7, 1992, introduces significant modifications to the Penal Proceedings Code approved in 1988, that replaced the investigative rite with a prosecutive rite. The modifications regard the way proof is acquired and constituted: for common criminals the proof is constituted during the debate, while for mafiosos, due to their capacity to intimidate, proof can be drawn from other proceedings.

The new law introduces further preventive measures for "pentiti", arranges severe prison terms for mafiosos, exasperates preventive measures regarding patrimonies and has two clauses regarding elections. The first, article 11 bis, that integrates article 416 bis, states that it is organized crime of the mafia type when intimidation is used: to hinder or deny the right to vote or to obtain votes. The second regulation is article 11 ter, that punishes the "political-mafia exchange": when a member of the mafia promises to obtain votes for a politician in exchange for money. The original form of the law included the promise to obtain concessions, authorizations, contracts, public financing, or any means of gaining illegal profits. Law n° 16 of January 18, 1992, that also deals with elections and limits the passive electorate, states that if a person undergoes penal proceedings for organized crime of the mafia type and/or other crimes related to organized crime, he must be suspended or removed from the position of regional, provincial or city counsellor, President of the regional, provincial or city council, and other administrative responsibilities.

The regulative framework that began taking shape during the last decade was fairly chaotic, nonetheless, a few fondamental principles were set up.

The first was the double track regime. The Penal Code Procedure was applied to common criminals and not to mafiosos, for which different prison treatment was expected.

The second principle regards the legislation that rewards mafiosos that collaborate with justice. It was introduced for terrorists but has been greatly expanded in the last few years.

The third principle was the reversal of the charges against the person investigated as a mafioso, that must prove the legitimate origin of goods and monies in his possession. But the Constitutional Court, with a sentence of February 1994, declared the latter unconstitutional.

Italian antimafia legislation, judged on the whole, is behind the times, was created as an emergency response, is inadequate in comprehending the mafia phenomenon and is characterized by the prevalence of symbolic-measures.

Organized crime of the mafia type has existed since the XIX century (1) but only with the law of 1982 was the crime of mafia association introduced. Since the second half of the 1950s the mafiosos, either directly or through their accomplices, became legitimate entrepreneurs, especially in construction, but only with the law of 1982 can these "mafia enterprises" be touched (2). Since the 1970's, the financial size of these mafia groups, both in terms of their capability of accumulating capital and utilization of the financial system for money laundering, is significant, but only with recent measures can they begin to be fought (3).

The responsive measures are almost always taken after the mafia has commited a terrible crime (murder of an important person, massacres) through laws by decree, that is, the due legal response to urgent situations, eventhough they have been greatly used in the last few years to escape the red tape of the parliamentary course. This is mainly due to the idea that mafia must be handled as an emergency. According to official government stereotypes, the mafia only exists when they murder someone, it is a problem only when they shoot someone influential, it's a national emergency when they murder an important government official and/or a famous person like Dalla Chiesa, Falcone and Borsellino. Instead, mafia has been a continuous part of our society for more than a century, an institution, and if for a certain period there aren't any murders that doesn't mean that the mafia doesn't exist anymore, it means that there is a "pax mafiosa" and things are going very well for organized crime.

It can be said that up until now, the Italian legal system deals with the mafia phenomenon inadequately, and lacks a concrete plan to contrast the mafia in all of its complex aspects. An example is the already mentioned article 416 bis that states, if the mafia member is armed, the punishment is greater; but the mafia is always armed and its characteristic is its use of private violence, that is, the non recognition of the State's monopoly on violence.

The measures taken to contrast the mafia are above all exclusively symbolic laws, that is, reactions to the most outstanding crimes. They want to demonstrate the institution's power because they are decreed almost immediately after a crime, without taking into consideration their real value and usefulness. After the 1992 massacres, in which Judges Falcone and Borsellino lost their lives, the army was sent to Sicily. Even this is a symbolic measure to contrast the mafia's territorial control. The mafia's territorial reign of Sicily is based on secular and widespread knowledge of the territory's reality while many of the drafted soldiers sent to Sicily are there for the first time.

1.2. From Palermo's maxi-trial to the arrest of mafia bosses

Even the repression carried out against the mafia phenomenon is based on a reaction to an emergency situation. Trials are conducted and concluded with convictions only after important crimes, while the mafia enjoys an absolute or almost absolute impunity. An example is Luciano Liggio, one of the bloodiest bosses: he received a series of acquittals for insufficiency of evidence and was sentenced to life imprisonment for only one murder (the murder of mafia boss, doctor and "Cavaliere al merito della Republica Italiana", Michele Navarra). This conviction came when Liggio's reputation was well known and his previous acquittals had become a national scandal.

Palermo's maxi-trial, the most important mafia trial in the history of Italy, was officiated after an enormous number of murders during the early 1980s and after the assassination of renowned persons like Vice-Questore Boris Giuliano, Magistrates Cesare Terranova and Gaetano Costa, President of the Sicilian Region Piersanti Mattarella, Regional Secretary of the Italian Comunist Party Pio La Torre and especially the Prefect Dalla Chiesa (4).

The first round of the maxi-trial ended with many convictions, but the Court of Appeals reduced many sentences and the mafiosos expected further reductions from the Corte di Cassazione (the Supreme Court) (5).

The foundation for the maxi-trial was already laid during the preliminary investigative phase done by Pal ermo's Antimafia Pool, created by Judge Rocco Chinnici, in which Judges Falcone and Borsellino worked, and was confirmed by the first degree conviction. Accordingly, mafia is identified with the Cosa Nostra organization, defined a unique, pyramidal and apex type organization, provincially directed by a "commissione" or "cupola" (commission or dome) and regionally by an interprovincial organism, in which the head of the Palermo commission has a hegemonic role. The leaders of Cosa Nostra are "Corleonesi", mafiosos from Corleone (a town in the province of Palermo, traditional stonghold of the mafia but also capital of the peasant's movement until the 1950s), long since working in Palermo.

According to this vision of the mafia, based on statements made by "pentiti", the most famous of which is Buscetta, the gravest crimes were decided by the cupola, the members of which are collectively responsible and therefore, the trials for mafia crimes must be tried as one and dealt with by the Court of Palermo, considered the capital of the mafia.

Other magistrates and the Cassazione, instead sustain, that mafia associations are autonomous groups, not connected amongst themselves, therefore, it is senseless to speak of collective responsibility for the cupola members, and consequentially, mafia trials must deal with the crime singly and they must be held where the crimes were commited. Only in February 1992 did the Cassazione agree with the theory of the Antimafia Pool of Palermo and the members of the cupola were considered responsible for most of the crimes commited in the 1980s in and around the mafia organization. In the meantime, the Antimafia Pool of Palermo was dismantled, Chinnici was murdered in 1983, Falcone and Borsellino in 1992.

Only after Falcone and Borsellino were assassinated were the most renowned mafia bosses, fugitives from justice for years, arrested. The so called boss of the bosses, Totò Riina, was fugitive for 23 years, and was finally arrested in downtown Palermo.

An important contribution to the understanding of the administrative structure of Cosa Nostra, its crimes, and the arrest of its bosses, is due to the "pentiti". The repenting phenomenon isn't completely a new one (significant cases are documented in the XIX century) (6). But only recently has it become so widespread, in fact, there are about 750 pentiti that collaborate with justice today.

The first pentiti, during the 1980s, were mostly drug traffickers working with mafiosos, and it can be explained by the expansion of the mafia's activities and the involvement of criminals foreign to the mafia tradition, that have no regard for omertà. The ensuing pentiti statements, beginning with Buscetta and Contorno, involve the declining mafiosos in a mafia war from 1981-3, and is explained by the internal violence caused by the tentative to take complete control by the Corleonesi. The boomerang effect involved the Corleonesi and their allies due to their continuous use of violence and even the most recent massacres, that caused a profound effect on public opinion and government reaction. This reaction can be outlined as follows: a very strong reaction after the gravest crimes (which lasted about two years or slightly more) followed by a weakening period, prelude to an actual reverse tendency demonstrated by the dismantling of the Antimafia Pool of Palermo and the isolation of Giovanni Falcone that rendered his work at the Court of Palermo almost impossible. Even now, two years after the 1992 massacres, after the latest "urgent" laws and the arrest of the mafia bosses, the reverse tendency has begun again, with doubts arising as to the legitimacy of using pentiti's testimonies, the attack against some magistrates particularly active by those close to the winners of the last election that brought to government those associated with the "Polo delle libertà" (Liberty Pole) (7).

Another important aspect of the battle against organized crime that was dealt with using the logic of an emergency situation: the seizure (a temporary measure) and the confiscation (a final measure) of all the possessions belonging to a person suspected of being a member of organized crime of the mafia type. The main difference, and it is a great difference, between seizing and confiscating is that possessions are often seized in too much of a hurry, always from the point of view of a responsive measure against the gravest mafia crimes and therefore, most of the possessions (real estate, automobiles, etc.) seized are then returned to the owner. From 1992 to 1993, just over 160 billion lire (about 100 million dollars) in possessions were confiscated. This sum is only 12% of the amount seized (1,334 billion lire).

The delays, uncertainties and about faces in the battle against organized crime in Italy have a deep rooted explanation: the mafia, as other Italian forms of organized crime are not only criminal organizations dedicated to various criminal activities, but are intertwined in the social context, especially economy and institutions. Without these intricate relationships, their growth and strength is uncomprenhensive.

Tariq Aziz guilty of Iraq murders

2009-03-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

Tariq Aziz, for many years the public face of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, has been jailed for 15 years for his role in the execution of 42 merchants.

Aziz had denied any role in the summary trials of the men accused in 1992 of profiteering during economic sanctions.

Two of Saddam Hussein's half-brothers were also found guilty and sentenced to death by a court in Baghdad.

Another top official, Ali Hassan al-Majid - commonly known as Chemical Ali - was jailed for 15 years.

Two other Iraqi officials were jailed for six and 15 years, while a former governor of the Iraqi central bank was acquitted.

Although Aziz was a world-renowned politician in his time, the BBC's Mike Sergeant in Baghdad says this trial is not viewed by Iraqis as a big political event

'Poor health'

TARIQ AZIZ
Born in 1936, near Mosul, northern Iraq
Studied English literature and became a journalist
The most senior Christian in the toppled regime
Enlisted US support for war on Iran
Met US President Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1984
In US custody since April 2003

Profile: Tariq Aziz
This is Tariq Aziz's first conviction in the controversial Iraqi High Tribunal process, which has been criticised by human rights groups on a number of counts.

He could also have received a death penalty. Last week he was acquitted in a separate trial over the killings of Shia Muslim protesters in 1999.

Aziz, a Christian, was Iraq's foreign minister during the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, later becoming the deputy prime minister.

He had argued that his work was political and he bore no responsibility for the deaths of the flour merchants.

Aziz surrendered to US troops on 24 April 2003, shortly after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and has been in custody ever since.

In recent years, he has reportedly suffered from poor health in prison awaiting trial.

His Amman-based lawyer Badea Aref told AFP news agency that he had expected his client would be acquitted for a second time as he had not been in Iraq at the time of the killings.

Mr Aref said he would appeal within the statutory 30-day period, and added that Aziz is awaiting verdicts in two further trials.

'Flawed' process

Sabawi Ibrahim giving evidence in court 13 June 2006
Sabawi Ibrahim said he would be proud to die a martyr
On Wednesday, two of Saddam Hussein's half-brothers - former presidential adviser Watban Ibrahim and former intelligence chief Sabawi Ibrahim - were sentenced to death by hanging.

As his death sentence was read out, reports say Sabaawi Ibrahim stood up and proclaimed "God is great" and that he was proud to be a martyr. The judge told him to sit down.

Co-defendant Majid was jailed for 15 years. Majid had faced his fourth capital conviction in the merchants' case, having already been sentenced in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, the crushing of a Shia uprising in 1991 and the 1999 killings.

Saddam Hussein himself was hanged in December 2006 in a separate case.

Human Rights Watch issued a report into the trial of Saddam Hussein, concluding that the process was flawed and its verdict unsound because of "serious administrative, procedural and substantive legal defects".

The Qur'an

2009-03-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

The Qur'an is the holy book for Muslims, revealed in stages to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) over 23 years.

Qur'anic revelations are regarded by Muslims as the sacred word of God, intended to correct any errors in previous holy books such as the Old and New Testaments.
Origin

The Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by God in Arabic.

Some Qur'anic fragments have been dated as far back as the eighth, and possibly even the seventh, century. The oldest existing copy of the full text is from the ninth century.

Although early variants of the Qur'an are known to have existed, Muslims believe that the text we have today was established shortly after the death of the Prophet by the Caliph Uthman.
Contents

There are 114 chapters in the Qur'an, which is written in the old Arabic dialect.

All the chapters except one begin with the sentence Bismillahir rahmanir raheem, 'In the name of Allah the most merciful and the most kind'. This is the thought with which Muslims should start every action.

The longest chapter of the Qur'an is Surah Baqarah (The Cow) with 286 verses and the shortest is Surah Al-Kawther (abundance) which has 3 verses.

The arrangement of surahs does not correspond to the chronological order in which they were revealed.

The Qur'an is sometimes divided into 30 roughly equal parts, known as juz'. These divisions make it easier for Muslims to read the Qur'an during the course of a month and many will read one juz' each day, particularly during the month of Ramadan.
Translations

Translations of the Qur'an exist in over 40 languages but Muslims are still taught to learn and recite it in Arabic, even if this is not their native language and they cannot converse in it.

Translations are regarded by Muslims as new versions of the holy book, rather than as translations in the conventional sense.
Page of an old Qur'an

Qur'an page ©
Memorising the Qur'an

At the time of the revelation of the Qur'an, books were not readily available and so it was common for people to learn it by heart.

Committing the Qur'an to memory acted as a great aid for its preservation and any person who is able to accomplish this is known as a hafiz.
Respect

The Qur'an is treated with immense respect by Muslims because it is the sacred word of God.

While the Qur'an is recited aloud, Muslims should behave with reverence and refrain from speaking, eating or drinking, or making distracting noise.
Sunnah and Hadith

In addition to the Qur'an, the other sacred sources are the Sunnah, the practise and examples of the Prophet Muhammad's life, and the Hadith, reports of what the prophet Muhammad said or approved.

Both the Hadith and Sunnah must adhere to a strict chain of narration that ensures its authenticity, taking into account factors such as the character of people in the chain and continuity in narration. Reports that fail to meet such criteria will be disregarded.

One famous example is that of the scholar of Hadith literature, Imam Bukhari, who travelled several hundred miles on horseback to acquire a Hadith. When he arrived, he saw the man that knew the Hadith deceiving his donkey into thinking there was grain in a sack in order to induce him to move forward. Imam Bukhari promptly left without approaching the man because he was not willing to allow any individual with a questionable personality to join a chain of narration or contribute knowledge that would define the practice of the religion.

Islamic teachings on abortion

2009-03-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

Muslims regard abortion as wrong and haram (forbidden), but many accept that it may be permitted in certain cases.

All schools of Muslim law accept that abortion is permitted if continuing the pregnancy would put the mother's life in real danger. This is the only reason accepted for abortion after 120 days of the pregnancy.

Different schools of Muslim law hold different views on whether any other reasons for abortion are permitted, and at what stage of pregnancy if so.

Some schools of Muslim law permit abortion in the first 16 weeks of pregnancy, while others only permit it in the first 7 weeks.

However, even those scholars who would permit early abortion in certain cases still regard abortion as wrong, but do not regard it as a punishable wrong. The more advanced the pregnancy, the greater the wrong.

The Qur'an does not explicitly refer to abortion but offers guidance on related matters. Scholars accept that this guidance can properly be applied to abortion.
Sanctity of life

The Islamic view is based on the very high priority the faith gives to the sanctity of life. The Qur'an states:

Whosoever has spared the life of a soul, it is as though he has spared the life of all people. Whosoever has killed a soul, it is as though he has murdered all of mankind.Qur'an 5:32

Most Muslim scholars would say that a foetus in the womb is recognised and protected by Islam as a human life.
Protection of the mother's life

Islam allows abortion to save the life of the mother because it sees this as the 'lesser of two evils' and there is a general principle in Sharia (Muslim law) of choosing the lesser of two evils.

Abortion is regarded as a lesser evil in this case because:

* the mother is the 'originator' of the foetus
* the mother's life is well-established
* the mother has with duties and responsibilities
* the mother is part of a family
* allowing the mother to die would also kill the foetus in most cases

Providing for the child

The Qur'an makes it clear that a foetus must not be aborted because the family fear that they will not be able to provide for it - they should trust Allah to look after things:

Kill not your offspring for fear of poverty; it is We who provide for them and for you. Surely, killing them is a great sin.Qur'an 17:32

Youngest billionaires lose money

2009-03-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

The world's youngest billionaires have lost nearly a third of their wealth, according to Forbes rich list.

The average net worth of billionaires aged 40 and under is $2.9bn (£2.1bn), down 30% from last year.

The youngest billionaire is Germany's car-racing bachelor Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis, who is worth about $2.1bn at the age of 25.

His fortune dropped 10% as the financial downturn hit his family's real estate and forestry holdings.

Old money

The family's wealth derives from centuries ago when, under the German emperors, they had a monopoly over running the postal system.

According to Forbes, Prince Albert's 30,000 hectares of woodland in Germany is considered one of the largest forest holdings in Europe.

YOUNG BILLIONAIRES
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, $12bn
Larry Page, Google co-founder, $12bn
Sheik Mansour Bin Sayed Al Nahayan, Abu Dhabi royal family, $4.9bn
Daniel Ziff, Ziff Brother Investments, $3.5bn
John Arnold, Centaurus Hedge Fund, $2.7bn
Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis, $2.1
Kenneth Griffin, Citadel Hedge Fund, $1.5bn
Chu Lam Yiu, Huabao International, $1.5bn
Jerry Yang, Yahoo co-founder, $1.1bn
William Ding, Netease founder, $1.1bn
Andrey Melnichenko, MDM Bank founder, $1bn
source: Forbes

His mother, Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, is one of Germany's leading socialites.

The next youngest billionaires are Google founders Sergey Brin, 35, and Larry Page, 36, who have about $12bn each, according to Forbes, which also makes them the richest on the list.

Both have lost just over $6.5bn as shares in Google have dropped 30% in the past 12 months.

Drop outs

The two met at Stanford University before dropping out in 1998 to start Google from a friend's garage.

Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, scrapes into the list with a personal wealth of $1.1bn. Shares in Yahoo have fallen by 55% since the last list was compiled after the search engine's sale to Microsoft fell through.

Sheik Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahayan, the 39-year-old member of Abu Dhabi's royal family, also appears in the list.

He came to prominence by buying Manchester City football club last year, as well as investing large sums of cash into Barclays bank.

Andrey Melnichenko, the Russian industrialist worth $1bn, just managed to keep his place in the list despite losing 80% of his personal fortune in recent months.

The same cannot be said of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who drops off the list completely after heading it last year.

Forbes magazine compiles an annual list of the world's billionaires.

France set to reconcile with Nato

2009-03-11T08:54:00.000-07:00

President Nicolas Sarkozy is set to announce that France will return to Nato's military command, reversing four decades of self-imposed exile.

Mr Sarkozy is expected to confirm the decision in a speech to defence experts in Paris shortly.

President Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of Nato's integrated military command in 1966, saying it undermined France's sovereignty.

Critics say France will now be no more than "a clone of Great Britain".

Correspondents say France's "independence" from Nato is dearly treasured by many French, and Mr Sarkozy's move has provoked a furore among those who fear it will now have to bow to US dominance.

"Nothing today justifies returning to Nato military command," said the leader of the opposition Socialists, Martine Aubry.

"There's no hurry, no fundamental need, except for this Atlanticism that's becoming an ideology," she said.

Military action

But Defence Minister Herve Morin rejected claims that France would now be forced to go along with the US on issues like the war with Iraq, which it vehemently opposed.

If tomorrow, we integrated into Nato, would we, could we, maintain the position that we have done on Iraq?
Dominique de Villepin
Former French foreign minister

French split over rejoining Nato
2007: France edges closer to Nato

Germany, he noted, has remained fully integrated in Nato yet opposed the war.

Renewing France's relations with Nato "will benefit the alliance, benefit Europe and benefit France. It will be done without calling into question the independence of France", Mr Morin said.

Indeed it would allow France to take a greater role in shaping military strategy, he argued.

While France withdrew from Nato's decision-making core, its nuclear weapons structure and planning committee, it never left the alliance itself.

Indeed it has been one of the most active members, supplying troops under allied command in Bosnia, Kosovo and in Afghanistan, where it has suffered significant losses.

Analysts say France has actually been gradually moving closer to the heart of Nato since the end of the Cold War.

Mr Sarkozy is due to announce the move at a seminar at the Ecole Militaire staff college in Paris, and to formalise it with a letter to Nato before the alliance celebrates its 60th anniversary next month with a summit in the French city of Strasbourg.

German school gunman 'kills 16'

2009-03-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

The shooting started at a secondary school near Stuttgart

Sixteen people have been killed by a teenage gunman who went on a rampage in south-west Germany, officials say.

Among the dead were 10 pupils and three teachers at the Albertville secondary school in Winnenden, north of Stuttgart, police say.

The gunman, a 17-year-old former pupil, entered the school at about 0930 (0830 GMT) dressed in black combat gear and opened fire at random.

He fled in a stolen car, but was later killed in a shoot-out with police.

See where the school shooting took place

German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the shooting as "incomprehensible".

"It is unimaginable that in just seconds, pupils and teachers were killed - it is an appalling crime," she told reporters.

"This is a day of mourning for for the whole of Germany."

'Trembling and crying'

Police said the suspect - now named as Tim Kretschmer - was killed during a shoot-out with officers in the town of Wendlingen, about 40km (25 miles) away from the school.

He had fled there in a car he had hijacked after the school shooting - killing a passer-by as he made his escape, police said.

Spokeswoman Inka Buckmiller said the shoot-out took place at a car showroom, where two bystanders were killed and two police officers were injured.

GERMAN SCHOOL ATTACKS
2006: A former pupil injures 11 students at a school in western town of Emsdetten before turning the gun on himself.
2002: A former pupil kills 17 people in his school in the eastern city of Erfurt, then kills himself.

In pictures: School shooting
Timeline of school shootings

"The suspect also died as a result of this shooting," she said.

Baden-Wuerttemburg state governor Guenther Oettinger said police killed the suspect, the Associated Press reported.

In total, 10 students, three teachers and three passers-by are thought to be among the dead.

One woman said her daughter had been in the school at the time of the shooting, and she was now at home "trembling and crying".

"She and her friend jumped out of the window. Her friend is now in hospital... We hope that she's all right," the woman said.

"What can I say? I don't understand the world any more."

'Heart-breaking'

Regional police chief Erwin Hetger said the teenager "went into the school with a weapon and carried out a bloodbath", according to the Associated Press.

"I've never seen anything like this in my life," he said.

Mr Hetger said informing the families of what had happened was a heart-breaking job.

"Our thoughts are concentrated on the parents. I have looked some of them in the eye, and it's damn hard to keep your composure," he said.

Local media reported that police had raided the youth's house and recovered 16 weapons.

The teenager's father, thought to be a prominent businessman in the area, was reported to be a member of a local shooting club.

Earlier, the chief reporter of the Stuttgart Journal newspaper, Kevin Latzel, told the BBC that there was a lot of confusion at the school.

"It's very horrible... the parents are crying, the pupils are crying and a lot of police is there and nobody knows really what happened," he said.

About 1,000 children are thought to attend the Albertville school, about 20km (12 miles) north-east of Stuttgart.

In pictures: Gaza Massacre

2009-03-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

A Palestinian man cries over the body of his son following an Israeli air strike in Gaza December 27, 2008.

December 27, 2008

After announcements that a decision whether to increase the military attack on the Gaza Strip would be made tomorrow, Sunday, Israeli forces instead launched a major operation today.

The Israelis killed 150 Palestinians with more expected to die. The Israeli government says it is just the beginning.

Gaza children traumatised after massacre

2009-03-11T08:35:00.000-07:00

FIVE-YEAR-OLD Mohammed al-Najjar lets his mind wander as he puts crayon to paper in an effort to depict an Israeli air strike inside a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. "This is the plane and those are two missiles it fired. They hit a house and the house was damaged but was fine. The fridge caught fire," he says in matter-of-fact detail, sitting at a table with other children in Gaza's Jabalya camp.

He draws a girl who has survived the attack and places her outside the house, but there is also a boy. "Khaled was killed," he says.

The scene, which Mohammed drew at the urging of his teacher and a mental health counsellor who visited his classroom, is imaginary. His home in Jabalya was not damaged, but others nearby were.

Health workers say many children, including those who did not lose family members or their homes, are suffering post-war trauma. The Gaza Mental Health Programme is seeking them out in hospitals, schools and kindergartens.

Mohammed and his immediate family survived the 22-day Israeli air, land and sea assault launched on Dec 27 by Israel to try and stop Hamas from firing rockets into southern Israel towns. But his nearby neighbours were victims.

Inas Jouda, a mental health nurse involved in the programme, said many of the Gaza Strip's children have refused to return to their homes. Some have bad dreams or wet their beds, while others show aggressive behaviour or little signs of life at all.

Drawing is a way for them to deal with the trauma and for workers to judge their mood. "Those who draw flowers and trees are not necessarily without trauma. The nice drawings can reflect what they hope to see and hope to have," Jouda said.

The children also listen to music and dance to help them deal with the experience. Some of them have flashbacks. Around 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli operation, including more than 300 children, Palestinian medical officials said.

Victims of war

Israelis have also suffered in the conflict. The latest phase began with a Palestinian uprising launched in 2000 as peace talks with Israel on a Palestinian state ran aground. Some 8,000 rockets and mortar rounds were fired by Hamas at Israeli towns near Gaza since 2000, killing 18 people before the war.

Three more Israeli civilians were killed in the fighting. The trauma suffered by Israeli children was often cited by politicians as a justification for Israel's latest offensive.

In Jabalya, Nagham al-Askari, 5, revisits how she and her sister were wounded when Israeli forces targeted a passing motorcycle. "My sister Amira was wounded, and (doctors) removed part of her liver. I was wounded and my uncle bandaged my leg," Nagham said. In Beit Lahyia, Ahmed Zayed, 9, cries as he recalls how Israeli bulldozers ploughed up land owned by his family. A wall in his home collapsed when it was hit by an Israeli tank shell. "Our land was like heaven, with all sorts of fruits growing. It used to be the source of living for seven families. Why did it have to be bulldozed? I'd rather have died than see this," he said after plucking up the courage to visit his damaged school.

His father said he led the family to a UN-run building waving a white flag. "My boy was shocked and I have been trying in vain to alleviate the shock. We're still living the reality and what we saw was beyond what a person can handle," he said. Now Ahmed tries to look forward to happier times. "Every time I switch on the television I see funerals and bombardment. I hope to see cartoon movies," he says.

Russia’s refusal to sell its zenith rocket complexes to Iran can help Moscow establish good relations with Washington and Israel 18.02.09 10:43

2009-03-11T08:22:00.000-07:00

Azerbaijan, Baku, Feb. 17 /corr. Trend News E.Tariverdiyeva / Russia’s refusal to sell its zenith rocket complexes to Iran will help Moscow not only establish good relations with Washington, but also strengthen co-operation with Israel.

“Our refusal to Iran is a signal for Washington, but more considerably this is connected with the fact that we have serious and good relations with Israel,” said Russian military expert Pavel Felgengauer.

To Moscow yesterday arrived the Minister of Defense of Iran [Mostafa] Mohammed [Nadzhzhar] with the three-day visit for the negotiations about the deliveries of Russian armament, first of all air defense weapons.

On Feb. 16, the Minister of Defense of Iran Mostafa Mohammed Nadzhar arrived in Moscow on a three days visit to hold negotiations on delivery of Russian arms.

Teheran is interested in zenith rocket complexes S-300PMU-1, supply agreement on which has already been signed long ago. According to the information, still Russia does not intend to provide these complexes to Iran, since this can prevent the commenced dialogue between Moscow and new U.S. Administration.

Before departure from Teheran, the Minister of Defense of Iran reported that he intended to make a basic accent on the deliveries of Russian air defense arms to Iran.

Experts consider that Russia will unlikely realize deliveries of the promised air defense arms soon, since for one or other reasons, this is not of interest now.

Each state builds relations with other countries within its own interests, and Russia’s refusal to provide the promised air defense arms is in the interests of Russia itself, Bahram Amirahmedyan, Iranian expert on Russia and Caucasus, told TrendNews in a telephone conversation from Tehran.

According to him, now the deployment of the missile defense system in Europe is stopping, and friendship is developing with Washington in the interests of Russia.

“Iran understands this, and this will in no way affect the relations between Russia and Iran,” Amirahmedyan said.

By the recent period, the USA intended to, until 2010, place radar in the Czech Republic and ten interceptor missiles in Poland under the pretext of protection from the rocket threat from Iran. Russia fears that these systems will threaten its security. In the beginning of November, the President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev said that as a response to deployment of the American missile defense system in Europe, Russia will place Iskander missile complexes in Kaliningrad region, and also will use radio-electronic suppression of missile defense system. However, after Barack Obama came to power in the USA, more frequently they speak of stopping or canceling the development of the third position region in Europe.

If the Kremlin gives a high priority to repairing relations with the United States, Russia will continue to refuse to sell that system to Tehran—even though a negative decision will anger the Iranian government, U.S. military expert Ted Carpenter said.

“If, on the other hand, Russian leaders have concluded that Washington is not serious about wanting to improve relations, the Kremlin will end its refusal and thereby seek to strengthen its ties with Iran,” Cato Institute defense and foreign policy studies vice president Ted Carpenter wrote to Trend News in an email.

Carpenter said Iran is not in a good bargaining position. “ If Russia blocks the sale, there is little Iranian leaders can do—especially since Tehran remains dependent on Moscow for assistance in other aspects of its defense and needs Moscow to continue blocking robust sanctions measures that the United States and its European allies continue to propose in response to Iran’s nuclear program,” he said.

From a Russian perspective this would not be a good time to announce such a
sale because the government is currently exploring its relationship with the
new Obama Administration, military expert Ian Anthony said.

“Discussions with colleagues from the United States are taking place now or are expected soon on several important topics and this announcement would be a negative complication,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Research Coordinator
Ian Anthony wrote to Trend News in an email.

The governmental agreements between the US and its European allies are signed even if they are not yet in force, so it will be difficult for the United States to shut down the missile defense programs that have already been agreed. However, further development of the system would be a very negative signal to Russia, said Anthony.

However, leading Russian military expert Felgengauer said that the refusal to Iran rather proceeded from Russia's desire to strengthen cooperation with Israel.

The deal is rather an agreement between Russia and Israel than between Russia and Washington, said the expert.

Russian Parliamentary Defense Committee member Mikhail Musatov told RIA Novosti in early 2009 that in the next two to three years Russian Armed Forces will procure unmanned aerial vehicles from Israel. Musatov recalled the words of Russian Armed Forces General Staff Chief of Nikolai Makarov and specified that this step is necessary because Russian manufacturers do not have similar reconnaissance aircraft.

Felgengauer said Russia maintains very serious contracts and joint projects with Israel, including purchase of modern weapons. “In recent years, Russia has significantly improved relations with Israel. Purchasing a large consignment of unmanned aerial vehicles is being negotiated” Felgengauer told Trend News in a telephone conversation from Moscow.

A proof is that Moscow had refused to Iran and Syria before Obama Administration came to the White House.

“It is difficult to deal with Iran. The country is endlessly bargaining. Allied relations with Iran did not result in expected partnership. Therefore, Russia now does not want to sell its S-300 to the country,” said Felgengauer.

Hell Freezes Over

2009-03-06T07:31:00.000-08:00

Climate Change: Sin City gets hit with almost 4 inches of snow as the white stuff even dusts Malibu, Calif. We don’t know what computer model global warmongers are using. A slot machine with three ice cubes, perhaps?
What happens in Vegas, they say, stays in Vegas. But as more evidence of the decade-long cooling trend is shoveled off the Strip, we hope that doesn’t apply to the truth about global warming.

On Friday, the Las Vegas Sun reported that eight inches of snow had hit the Las Vegas Valley. The 3.6 inches that had already fallen as of late Wednesday near McCarran Airport added up to the most snow recorded for the area in December since they began keeping records 70 years ago.

The white powder even dusted Malibu as a winter storm hit parts of California.

We commented recently on an Associated Press story claiming that, rather than being “evidence of some kind of cooling trend,” such events “actually illustrate how fast the world is warming.” But not everybody is convinced.

“If the issues weren’t so serious and the ramifications so profound, I would have to laugh at it,” said David Deming, a geology professor at the University of Oklahoma.

“The mean global temperature, at least measured by satellite, is the same as it was in the year 1980. In the last couple of years, sea level has stopped rising, hurricane and cyclone activity in the Northern Hemisphere is at a 24-year low and sea ice globally is also the same as it was in 1980.”

Speaking of rising sea levels, is Al Gore smarter than a fourth-grader? James O’Brien, emeritus professor at Florida State University who studies climate variability and the oceans, thinks not. “When the Arctic Ocean ice melts, it never raises sea level because floating ice is floating ice, because it’s displacing water,” he points out.

“When the ice melts, sea level actually goes down. I call it a fourth-grade science experiment: Take a glass, put some ice in it, put water in it, mark level where water is. . . . After the ice melts, the sea level didn’t go up in your glass of water. It’s called the Archimedes principle.”

Global temperatures stopped rising after 1998 and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-08 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models. It was predictable by a decline in sunspot activity since 2000 and by a cyclical ocean-current phenomenon known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

On CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” recently, Jay Lehr, a senior fellow and science director at the Heartland Institute, was asked by the host what he considered the dominant influence on Earth’s climate.

“Well, clearly, Lou, it is the sun,” Lehr answered, adding that “if we go back in really recorded human history; in the 13th century, we were probably seven degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now.”

Lehr considers global cooling to be the real threat, part of a natural pattern as we continue coming out of a period known as the Little Ice Age. “If we go back to the Revolutionary War, 300 years ago,” he said, “it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period. And now we’re back into a cooling cycle.”

The Associated Press claims that the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since Bill Clinton’s second inaugural. But after it was discovered that NASA’s James Hansen, Gore’s chief scientific ally, had been fudging the numbers, the agency was forced to correct its data. The 10 warmest years turn out to be, in descending order: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939.

If there’s a trend there, we don’t see it. So is global warming man-made and an imminent danger? As the snow falls in Vegas, don’t bet on it.

Obama climate czar has socialist ties

2009-03-06T07:30:00.000-08:00

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner’s name and biography had been removed from Socialist International’s Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world’s social democratic political parties such as Britain’s Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

The group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the organization’s action arm on climate change, says the developed world must reduce consumption and commit to binding and punitive limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Obama, who has said action on climate change would be a priority in his administration, tapped Mrs. Browner last month to fill a new position as White House coordinator of climate and energy policies. The appointment does not need Senate confirmation.

Mr. Obama’s transition team said Mrs. Browner’s membership in the organization is not a problem and that it brings experience in U.S. policymaking to her new role.

“The Commission for a Sustainable World Society includes world leaders from a variety of political parties, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair, in serving as vice president of the convening organization,” Obama transition spokesman Nick Shapiro said.

“Carol Browner was chosen to help the president-elect coordinate energy and climate policy because she understands that our efforts to create jobs, achieve energy security and combat climate change demand integration among different agencies; cooperation between federal, state and local governments; and partnership with the private sector,” Mr. Shapiro said in an e-mail.

Mrs. Browner ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton. Until she was tapped for the Obama administration, she was on the board of directors for the National Audubon Society, the League of Conservation Voters, the Center for American Progress and former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.

Her name has been removed from the Gore organization’s Web site list of directors, and the Audubon Society issued a press release about her departure from that organization.

Republicans said Mrs. Browner’s work with Socialist International raises questions.

“Does she agree with the group’s positions on global governance - that the United States should abdicate its international leadership to international organizations? Does she support its position that the international community should be the ultimate arbiter of climate change policy?” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican.

“These are questions that merit answers - especially when you consider this group’s deep skepticism about America’s ability to be a force for positive change in the world,” she said.

An aide on the Obama team said its information shows that Mrs. Browner resigned from the organization in June 2008. The aide, who asked not to be named because he was discussing internal matters, said the transition team was aware she had been a member of the group when she was vetted.

The Socialist International Web site didn’t have a copy of her June 30 speech, but the agenda for the meeting had her scheduled to speak as part of a panel on “How do we strengthen the multilateral architecture for a sustainable future?”

Other panel participants were Sergey Mironov, speaker of the Russian legislature’s upper chamber and a close ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin; Zhang Zhijun, vice minister of the International Department of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee; and Jesus Caldera, a former Minister of Employment and Social Affairs of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party.

A woman answering the phone at Socialist International’s headquarters in London said all officers were traveling.

Nobody from the organization returned a message left Friday.

Socialist International bills itself as the world body of democratic socialist movements. It includes members ranging from Israel’s Labor Party and France’s Socialist Party to Angola’s MPLA, which won the 1970s Angolan civil war with the aid of Soviet arms and Cuban troops.

The organization distinguishes itself from violent or revolutionary communist parties. However, some such groups, including the Chinese Communist Party, have been invited to its events as guest organizations.

The Democratic Socialists of America, not the Democratic Party, is listed as the group’s U.S. representative. But Mrs. Browner was listed as an individual member of Socialist International, but not a member of the DSA.

While agreeing with Mr. Obama on the need for action to address climate change, the organization wants more draconian policies than the president-elect’s preferred solution.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama called for a cap-and-trade system to control carbon emissions. He argued that such a system is efficient and lets the free market determine where it’s easiest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Socialist International says such “flexible mechanisms” do not clamp down hard enough on polluters.

The organization often takes a decidedly critical view of the U.S.

At this summer’s meeting, the group issued a statement on economics that blasted the “neo-liberal market ideology and the unilateralist, U.S.-dominated approach in the global economic system,” and attacked the U.S. for dominating international financial institutions.

At its meeting earlier in 2008 in Santiago, Chile, Socialist International endorsed “global governance” as the solution to the world’s problems of peace and climate change.

At a July meeting in St. Petersburg, the commission said developed countries “should think of decreasing current consumption levels” - which would mean shrinking their economies - in order to help the environment.

Socialist International regularly blasts the construction of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. The fence was approved by both houses of Congress, including with Mr. Obama’s vote in the Senate.

Socialist International was congratulatory when Mr. Obama won the election, issuing a statement noting that “the sky may seem a bit brighter today” but warning still that “there are enormous global challenges that must be addressed effectively and without delay

The Farce of Global Warming

2009-03-06T07:29:00.000-08:00

With the Obama administration calling for curbs on greenhouse gas emissions and the nation in the grip of the most severe economic downturn since 1929, it would seem prudent to re-examine the debate on the causes of global warming before tossing aside entire industries and technologies in favor of untried, and possibly infeasible and unprofitable, “green” technologies.
Wholesale acceptance of human-caused global warming does not, in fact, exist. Indeed, many scientists believe that the highly politicized global warming scare is one of the greatest scams inflicted on the planet. They hold it responsible for enforced political restrictions on legitimate scientific inquiry and dissent and feel that a deliberate attempt has been made to silence prominent atmospheric and climate scientists who offer legitimate criticism.
The Politicization of Global Warming
The politicization of global warming was at play in February 2007, when in response to a report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) citing human activity as the primary cause of global warming, syndicated columnist, Ellen Goodman, proclaimed global warming an unequivocal, alarming fact. Ms. Goodman, who holds no scientific credentials, exclaimed that global warming deniers were on par with Holocaust deniers.
A meteorologist with the Weather Channel, Heidi Cullen, subsequently recommended that the Meteorologist Seal of Approval be revoked for any meteorologists skeptical of the human causation of global warming. And although scientists are far from unanimous in their opinions of human responsibility for climate change, Oregon governor, Tel Kulongoski, went so far as to consider firing the state’s climatologist for disagreeing with the U.N. conclusions.
Dr. James Hanson, a NASA climate scientist who pioneered the research on global warming and politicized the issue with Al Gore’s widely debunked Academy Award-winning movie The Inconvenient Truth, has referred to skeptics as being guilty of “high crimes against humanity and nature.” He has called for mass civil disobedience at the coal-fired capital power plant in Washington, D.C.
Voices of Dissent
Yet, much doubt exists over the IPPC climate change theory. Hanson’s own supervisor at NASA claims that Hanson has “gone off the deep end” with insufficient evidence and has violated NASA policies by arguing against the agency’s official position on climate.
Recently, a group of Japanese scientists from a government advisory panel publicly announced their disagreement with the IPCC report and declared that climate change is driven by natural cycles related to solar activity and has nothing to do with CO2 emissions. The climate modeling used to support claims of man-made global warming was dubbed “ancient astrology” by a program director for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology.
Skepticism over human-caused global warming was also raised as recently as February 25th at a U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing hosted by Senators Barbara Boxer and James Inhofe. There, Dr. William Harper, Princeton University professor and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy (1990-1993), presented some of his key findings on climate change. One of just four scientists invited to address the forum, Dr. Harper, who supervised all DOE work on climate change, is a climate crisis skeptic. In his presentation, he noted that 650 prominent international scientists, including both former and current IPCC participants, have challenged the claims made by the 52 scientists who authorized the U.N. panel’s report. He also called CO2, a compound singled out by the IPCC as a major contributor to global warming, as, in fact, a beneficial compound essential for life on earth.
CO2 Levels
In his analysis of CO2 as a factor in climate change, Dr. Harper affirmed that CO2 is not a cause for alarm, as it is neither a pollutant nor a poison. Indeed, Harper argued that CO2 limitations, such as the 450 ppm (parts per million) standard recommended by the IPCC to “stabilize” CO2 in the atmosphere, will actually damage the environment.
According to Dr. Harper, the current warming period (which actually ended 10 years ago) began in 1800 following the close of the little ice age (1300-1650 AD), which was preceded by a Medieval Warm Period (800-1300 AD). Harper noted that the little ice age and the Medieval Warm Period were curiously omitted from the IPCC report and that the Medieval Warm Period was as warm or warmer than today. Clearly at that point in time, global warming had nothing to do with the burning of fossils fuels. Also, Dr. Harper explained that several warmings have existed over the last 10,000 years since the last ice age, thus confirming that climate change has occurred multiple times absent mankind’s actions.
Furthermore, plants and our primitive ancestors evolved when atmospheric CO2 was 1000 ppm. This compares to our current level of 380 ppm. Dr. Harper reported that higher levels of CO2 benefit the environment because they result in higher crop yield and more drought-tolerant plants. He cited a modern day example: greenhouse operations that are typically maintained at 1000 ppm. In truth, Harper said we are actually in a CO2 famine as most of the earth’s CO2 levels throughout the planet’s history have been at least 1000 ppm or higher. At these points in time, “the oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it’s baffling to me that we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started,” he said.
Dr. Harper also cited examinations of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets as further evidence of his claims. From that data, past temperatures and concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere can be determined. The findings indicate that first temperatures rose and about 800 years later, CO2 levels rose from the CO2 released from warmer oceans. This finding is in direct contradiction to the beliefs of global warming advocates who believe that higher levels of CO2 cause warmer temperatures.
The Fallacy of Scientific Consensus
Dr. Harper, who ironically was fired by Al Gore for disagreeing with his views on climate issues, cautioned the Senate committee members about the dangers of creating a crisis mentality and of demanding or aiming for consensus among scientists on climate theory. He observed that scientific breakthroughs and discoveries have never been determined by consensus, quite the contrary. As an example, he cited the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia when the majority of physicians wrongly believed in a bleeding cure for the disease. A few contrarians noticed that yellow fever victims were more likely to survive by foregoing these ministrations but were summarily ignored. Today, global warming proponents point to the rise in the incidence of malaria and yellow fever as evidence of the ill effects of rising temperatures. However, according to Dr. Harper and other scientists, this phenomenon has more to do with controlling mosquitoes than controlling temperatures.
The late Michael Crichton had this to say about scientific consensus, “Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels. It is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. The great scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with consensus.”
Dr. Harper maintains that the current climate crisis is a political creation that does not enjoy consensus but has the backing of the media, influential politicians, certain scientific societies and well-funded non-profit organizations. He cautions that climate warming dogma, absent critical analysis and the presentation of contrary data, is being taught in our schools along with the widespread viewing of the seriously flawed film The Inconvenient Truth.
Impact on Our Energy Supplies
Contrary to what the media and U.N. have portrayed, no evidence exists that today’s climate changes differ qualitatively from in the past. In fact, not global warming but a slight cooling has taken place over the past 10 years which clearly negates the predictions of the IPCC models. As Harper concludes, climate alarmism is unrealistic and more a function of politics than scientific truths. His belief that climate change is driven by natural cycles rather than human activity is gaining currency against the hysteria of global warming doomsayers who want to institute ill-advised energy use and taxation programs that will alter our way of life and harm our economy unnecessarily.
Climate change alarmists continue to rail against our use of the conventional sources of energy that have contributed to our economy prosperity. They have amassed significant support in Washington for “cap and trade” taxation schemes and prohibitions on drilling and energy exploration. The United States should not yield to political pressure and penalize energy use in an effort to garner new taxes. Common sense and good science should rule the day and politicians should not let more than 2,340 global warming lobbyists in Washington, clamoring for “cap and trade” regulation, allow us to seriously drag down our already flailing economy. Our economic health and growth should not be sacrificed for an unproven theory that is fast loosing support from the scientific community.
Given the present administration’s call for legislation to curb greenhouse gas emission allegedly in the service of climate control, the testimony of scientists like Dr. Harper warrants serious consideration.

Obama’s Cap-And-Trade Rip-Off

2009-03-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

President Obama wants to pay you to support global warming regulation. What he isn’t saying, however, is that his enticement won’t come close to covering what the regulations will cost you.

In his 10-year budget released last week, the President proposed a so-called “cap-and-trade” scheme to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Under the proposal, 100 percent of the permits to emit greenhouse gases would be auctioned to coal and natural gas-burning electric utilities, industrial plants and other emitters still to be designated. The proceeds from the auctions would then be distributed to individual Americans “to help the transition to a clean energy economy,” according to his budget proposal.

But what does this proposal mean for the average person in terms of actual dollars and cents? It’s difficult to work out the precise financial impacts, but you can get an idea by doing some back-of-the-envelop calculations with some of the facts and figures that have recently been bandied about.

Based on past global warming legislation, like the Lieberman-Warner bill that failed in the Senate last June, a cap-and-trade plan would probably cover about 80 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions — about 5.8 billion tons based on a total of 7.3 billion tons emitted during 2007.

Assuming that permits are auctioned at a price of $12 per ton – a safety valve price included in past climate bills — the Obama plan would raise about $70 billion in its first year. Given that President Obama has proposed to spend about $15 billion per year of the auction proceeds on “clean energy” projects, about $55 billion would be leftover for distribution to individuals – that is, every American with a social security number. Dividing the $55 billion among more than 300 million Americans, then, works out to about $180 per person and $720 per family of four per year. It’s not like winning the lottery, but it’s better than nothing — or is it?

The liberal think tank Center on Budget Priorities and Policy estimated last week that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would cost the poorest families in America $750 per year as higher energy prices ripple through the economy affecting all goods and services. So if the poorest families, who use far less energy than the rest of America, are in a financial hole under the President’s plan, one can easily imagine how the rest of us will end up. Consider the potential consequences on just your electric bill.

The Lieberman-Warner bill would have auctioned only 25 percent of the permits — not 100 percent as President Obama is proposing. The remaining 75 percent of the credits would have been distributed for free to electric utilities and other designated greenhouse gas emitters. But even under that scheme, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers told the New York Times last summer that electricity rates would rise by 40 percent in the first year to cover his utility’s $2 billion outlay for credits. So a 100 percent auction could increase electricity bills for Duke’s 4 million customers by 160 percent — meaning a $100 monthly electric bill becomes, perhaps, a $260 monthly bill. Based on these calculations, a family of four that pays more than $40 per month for electricity — that is, every family — is a net loser under President Obama’s plan.

And those are the potential increases for just your electric bill. Not included are other likely price hikes for goods and services — gasoline, food, travel, etc. — that will necessarily be passed along to consumers. As you can readily see, your share of President Obama’s auction proceeds does not need come close to breaking even on greenhouse gas regulation.

Maybe you’re thinking that these extra costs are worth it, as they will be dwarfed by the environmental benefits of tackling the much-dreaded global warming. Think again. There will be no detectable or tangible benefits from reduced greenhouse gas emissions. First, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas targeted by regulation is invisible, colorless and odorless. Since it exists in the atmosphere at levels measured in the parts per million, unless you’re plant that needs CO2 to live, you’re not going to notice it.

Next, there is no evidence that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing detectable changes, much less any harm, to the climate. (Check out this popular YouTube video I made on this issue.) This means, of course, that there is no evidence that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will have any detectable changes on climate.

Even assuming for the sake of argument that manmade carbon dioxide emissions were changing climate, President Obama’s cap-and-trade bill will still have no detectable impact. First, EPA projects that a maximum clamp down on future U.S. emissions would reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by about 5 percent or less — a trivial change no matter what you believe about carbon dioxide. Moreover, China and India have vowed not to harm their economies because of global warming — so their emissions can be expected to soar as they develop and more than make-up for our reductions.

If the economics of Obama’s cap-and-trade rip-off don’t bother you, the fact that the rip-off will also accomplish nothing should give you pause.

Barack Obama - Narcissist or Merely Narcissistic?

2009-03-06T07:23:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist. Scroll down for a detailed treatment.

Granted, only a qualified mental health diagnostician can determine whether someone suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and this, following lengthy tests and personal interviews. But, in the absence of access to Barack Obama, one has to rely on his overt performance and on testimonies by his closest, nearest and dearest.

Narcissistic leaders are nefarious and their effects pernicious. They are subtle, refined, socially-adept, manipulative, possessed of thespian skills, and convincing. Both types equally lack empathy and are ruthless and relentless or driven.

Perhaps it is time to require each candidate to high office in the USA to submit to a rigorous physical and mental checkup with the results made public.

I. Upbringing and Childhood

Obama’s early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations. Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then, his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia: a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. She died of cancer in 1995.

Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse or trauma is immaterial: the perpetrators could be dysfunctional or absent parents, teachers, other adults, or peers.

II. Behavior Patterns

The narcissist:

Feels grandiose and self-important (e.g., exaggerates accomplishments, talents, skills, contacts, and personality traits to the point of lying, demands to be recognised as superior without commensurate achievements);

Is obsessed with fantasies of unlimited success, fame, fearsome power or omnipotence, unequalled brilliance (the cerebral narcissist), bodily beauty or sexual performance (the somatic narcissist), or ideal, everlasting, all-conquering love or passion;

Firmly convinced that he or she is unique and, being special, can only be understood by, should only be treated by, or associate with, other special or unique, or high-status people (or institutions);

Requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation – or, failing that, wishes to be feared and to be notorious (Narcissistic Supply);

Feels entitled. Demands automatic and full compliance with his or her unreasonable expectations for special and favourable priority treatment;

Is “interpersonally exploitative”, i.e., uses others to achieve his or her own ends;

Devoid of empathy. Is unable or unwilling to identify with, acknowledge, or accept the feelings, needs, preferences, priorities, and choices of others;

Constantly envious of others and seeks to hurt or destroy the objects of his or her frustration. Suffers from persecutory (paranoid) delusions as he or she believes that they feel the same about him or her and are likely to act similarly;

Behaves arrogantly and haughtily. Feels superior, omnipotent, omniscient, invincible, immune, “above the law”, and omnipresent (magical thinking). Rages when frustrated, contradicted, or confronted by people he or she considers inferior to him or her and unworthy.

Narcissism is a defense mechanism whose role is to deflect hurt and trauma from the victim’s “True Self” into a “False Self” which is omnipotent, invulnerable, and omniscient. This False Self is then used by the narcissist to garner narcissistic supply from his human environment. Narcissistic supply is any form of attention, both positive and negative and it is instrumental in the regulation of the narcissist’s labile sense of self-worth.

Perhaps the most immediately evident trait of patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is their vulnerability to criticism and disagreement. Subject to negative input, real or imagined, even to a mild rebuke, a constructive suggestion, or an offer to help, they feel injured, humiliated and empty and they react with disdain (devaluation), rage, and defiance.

From my book “Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited”:

“To avoid such intolerable pain, some patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) socially withdraw and feign false modesty and humility to mask their underlying grandiosity. Dysthymic and depressive disorders are common reactions to isolation and feelings of shame and inadequacy.”

Due to their lack of empathy, disregard for others, exploitativeness, sense of entitlement, and constant need for attention (narcissistic supply), narcissists are rarely able to maintain functional and healthy interpersonal relationships.

Many narcissists are over-achievers and ambitious. Some of them are even talented and skilled. But they are incapable of team work because they cannot tolerate setbacks. They are easily frustrated and demoralized and are unable to cope with disagreement and criticism. Though some narcissists have meteoric and inspiring careers, in the long-run, all of them find it difficult to maintain long-term professional achievements and the respect and appreciation of their peers. The narcissist’s fantastic grandiosity, frequently coupled with a hypomanic mood, is typically incommensurate with his or her real accomplishments (the “grandiosity gap”).

An important distinction is between cerebral and somatic narcissists. The cerebrals derive their Narcissistic Supply from their intelligence or academic achievements and the somatics derive their Narcissistic Supply from their physique, exercise, physical or sexual prowess and romantic or physical “conquests”.

Another crucial division within the ranks of patients with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is between the classic variety (those who meet five of the nine diagnostic criteria included in the DSM), and the compensatory kind (their narcissism compensates for deep-set feelings of inferiority and lack of self-worth).

Obama displays the following behaviors, which are among the hallmarks of pathological narcissism:

Subtly misrepresents facts and expediently and opportunistically shifts positions, views, opinions, and “ideals” (e.g., about campaign finance, re-districting). These flip-flops do not cause him overt distress and are ego-syntonic (he feels justified in acting this way). Alternatively, reuses to commit to a standpoint and, in the process, evidences a lack of empathy.

Ignores data that conflict with his fantasy world, or with his inflated and grandiose self-image. This has to do with magical thinking. Obama already sees himself as president because he is firmly convinced that his dreams, thoughts, and wishes affect reality. Additionally, he denies the gap between his fantasies and his modest or limited real-life achievements (for instance, in 12 years of academic career, he hasn’t published a single scholarly paper or book).

Feels that he is above the law, incl. and especially his own laws.

Talks about himself in the 3rd person singluar or uses the regal “we” and craves to be the exclsuive center of attention, even adulation

Have a messianic-cosmic vision of himself and his life and his “mission”.

Sets ever more complex rules in a convoluted world of grandiose fantasies with its own language (jargon)

Displays false modesty and unctuous “folksiness” but unable to sustain these behaviors (the persona, or mask) for long. It slips and the true Obama is revealed: haughty, aloof, distant, and disdainful of simple folk and their lives.

Sublimates aggression and holds grudges.

Behaves as an eternal adolescent (e.g., his choice of language, youthful image he projects, demands indulgence and feels entitled to special treatment, even though his objective accomplishments do not justify it).

III. Body Language

Many complain of the incredible deceptive powers of the narcissist. They find themselves involved with narcissists (emotionally, in business, or otherwise) before they have a chance to discover their true character. Shocked by the later revelation, they mourn their inability to separate from the narcissist and their gullibility.

Narcissists are an elusive breed, hard to spot, harder to pinpoint, impossible to capture. Even an experienced mental health diagnostician with unmitigated access to the record and to the person examined would find it fiendishly difficult to determine with any degree of certainty whether someone suffers from a full fledged Narcissistic Personality Disorder – or merely possesses narcissistic traits, a narcissistic style, a personality structure (”character”), or a narcissistic “overlay” superimposed on another mental health problem.

Moreover, it is important to distinguish between traits and behavior patterns that are independent of the patient’s cultural-social context (i.e., which are inherent, or idiosyncratic) – and reactive patterns, or conformity to cultural and social morals and norms. Reactions to severe life crises or circumstances are also often characterized by transient pathological narcissism, for instance (Ronningstam and Gunderson, 1996). But such reactions do not a narcissist make.

When a person belongs to a society or culture that has often been described as narcissistic by scholars (such as Theodore Millon) and social thinkers (e.g., Christopher Lasch) – how much of his behavior can be attributed to his milieu and which of his traits are really his?

The Narcissistic Personality Disorder is rigorously defined in the DSM IV-TR with a set of strict criteria and differential diagnoses.

Narcissism is regarded by many scholars to be an adaptative strategy (”healthy narcissism”). It is considered pathological in the clinical sense only when it becomes a rigid personality structure replete with a series of primitive defence mechanisms (such as splitting, projection, projective identification, or intellectualization) – and when it leads to dysfunctions in one or more areas of the patient’s life.

Pathological narcissism is the art of deception. The narcissist projects a False Self and manages all his social interactions through this concocted fictional construct.

When the narcissist reveals his true colors, it is usually far too late. His victims are unable to separate from him. They are frustrated by this acquired helplessness and angry at themselves for having they failed to see through the narcissist earlier on.

But the narcissist does emit subtle, almost subliminal, signals (”presenting symptoms”) even in a first or casual encounter. Compare the following list to Barack Obama’s body language during his paublic appearances.

These are:

“Haughty” body language – The narcissist adopts a physical posture which implies and exudes an air of superiority, seniority, hidden powers, mysteriousness, amused indifference, etc. Though the narcissist usually maintains sustained and piercing eye contact, he often refrains from physical proximity (he is “territorial”).

The narcissist takes part in social interactions – even mere banter – condescendingly, from a position of supremacy and faux “magnanimity and largesse”. But he rarely mingles socially and prefers to remain the “observer”, or the “lone wolf”.

Entitlement markers – The narcissist immediately asks for “special treatment” of some kind. Not to wait his turn, to have a longer or a shorter therapeutic session, to talk directly to authority figures (and not to their assistants or secretaries), to be granted special payment terms, to enjoy custom tailored arrangements - or to get served first.

The narcissist is the one who – vocally and demonstratively – demands the undivided attention of the head waiter in a restaurant, or monopolizes the hostess, or latches on to celebrities in a party. The narcissist reacts with rage and indignantly when denied his wishes and if treated equally with others whom he deems inferior.

Idealization or devaluation – The narcissist instantly idealizes or devalues his interlocutor. This depends on how the narcissist appraises the potential his converser has as a Narcissistic Supply Source. The narcissist flatters, adores, admires and applauds the “target” in an embarrassingly exaggerated and profuse manner – or sulks, abuses, and humiliates her.

Narcissists are polite only in the presence of a potential Supply Source. But they are unable to sustain even perfunctory civility and fast deteriorate to barbs and thinly-veiled hostility, to verbal or other violent displays of abuse, rage attacks, or cold detachment.

The “membership” posture – The narcissist always tries to “belong”. Yet, at the very same time, he maintains his stance as an outsider. The narcissist seeks to be admired for his ability to integrate and ingratiate himself without investing the efforts commensurate with such an undertaking.

For instance: if the narcissist talks to a psychologist, the narcissist first states emphatically that he never studied psychology. He then proceeds to make seemingly effortless use of obscure professional terms, thus demonstrating that he mastered the discipline all the same, as an autodidact – which proves that he is exceptionally intelligent or introspective.

In general, the narcissist always prefers show-off to substance. One of the most effective methods of exposing a narcissist is by trying to delve deeper. The narcissist is shallow, a pond pretending to be an ocean. He likes to think of himself as a Renaissance man, a Jack of all trades. The narcissist never admits to ignorance in any field – yet, typically, he is ignorant of them all. It is surprisingly easy to penetrate the gloss and the veneer of the narcissist’s self-proclaimed omniscience.

Bragging and false autobiography – The narcissist brags incessantly. His speech is peppered with “I”, “my”, “myself”, and “mine”. He describes himself as intelligent, or rich, or modest, or intuitive, or creative – but always excessively, implausibly, and extraordinarily so.

The narcissist’s biography sounds unusually rich and complex. His achievements – incommensurate with his age, education, or renown. Yet, his actual condition is evidently and demonstrably incompatible with his claims. Very often, the narcissist lies or his fantasies are easily discernible. He always name-drops and appropriates other people’s experiences and accomplishments.

Emotion-free language – The narcissist likes to talk about himself and only about himself. He is not interested in others or what they have to say, unless they constitute potential Sources of Supply and in order to obtain said supply. He acts bored, disdainful, even angry, if he feels that they are intruding on his precious time and, thus, abusing him.

In general, the narcissist is very impatient, easily bored, with strong attention deficits – unless and until he is the topic of discussion. One can publicly dissect all aspects of the intimate life of a narcissist without repercussions, providing the discourse is not “emotionally tinted”.

If asked to relate directly to his emotions, the narcissist intellectualizes, rationalizes, speaks about himself in the third person and in a detached “scientific” tone or composes a narrative with a fictitious character in it, suspiciously autobiographical. Narcissists like to refer to themselves in mechanical terms, as efficient automata or machines.

Seriousness and sense of intrusion and coercion – The narcissist is dead serious about himself. He may possess a subtle, wry, and riotous sense of humor, scathing and cynical, but rarely is he self-deprecating. The narcissist regards himself as being on a constant mission, whose importance is cosmic and whose consequences are global. If a scientist – he is always in the throes of revolutionizing science. If a journalist – he is in the middle of the greatest story ever. If a novelist - he is on his way to a Booker or Nobel prize.

This self-misperception is not amenable to light-headedness or self-effacement. The narcissist is easily hurt and insulted (narcissistic injury). Even the most innocuous remarks or acts are interpreted by him as belittling, intruding, or coercive. His time is more valuable than others’ – therefore, it cannot be wasted on unimportant matters such as mere banter or going out for a walk.

Any suggested help, advice, or concerned inquiry are immediately cast by the narcissist as intentional humiliation, implying that the narcissist is in need of help and counsel and, thus, imperfect and less than omnipotent. Any attempt to set an agenda is, to the narcissist, an intimidating act of enslavement. In this sense, the narcissist is both schizoid and paranoid and often entertains ideas of reference.

These – the lack of empathy, the aloofness, the disdain, the sense of entitlement, the constricted sense of humor, the unequal treatment and the paranoia – render the narcissist a social misfit. The narcissist is able to provoke in his milieu, in his casual acquaintances, even in his psychotherapist, the strongest, most avid and furious hatred and revulsion. To his shock, indignation and consternation, he invariably induces in others unbridled aggression.

He is perceived to be asocial at best and, often, antisocial. This, perhaps, is the strongest presenting symptom. One feels ill at ease in the presence of a narcissist for no apparent reason. No matter how charming, intelligent, thought provoking, outgoing, easy going and social the narcissist is – he fails to secure the sympathy of others, a sympathy he is never ready, willing, or able to reciprocate.

IV. Narcissistic and psychopathic Leaders

The narcissistic or psychopathic leader is the culmination and reification of his period, culture, and civilization. He is likely to rise to prominence in narcissistic societies.

The malignant narcissist invents and then projects a false, fictitious, self for the world to fear, or to admire. He maintains a tenuous grasp on reality to start with and this is further exacerbated by the trappings of power. The narcissist’s grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience are supported by real life authority and the narcissist’s predilection to surround himself with obsequious sycophants.

The narcissist’s personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement. Most narcissists are paranoid and suffer from ideas of reference (the delusion that they are being mocked or discussed when they are not). Thus, narcissists often regard themselves as “victims of persecution”.

The narcissistic leader fosters and encourages a personality cult with all the hallmarks of an institutional religion: priesthood, rites, rituals, temples, worship, catechism, mythology. The leader is this religion’s ascetic saint. He monastically denies himself earthly pleasures (or so he claims) in order to be able to dedicate himself fully to his calling.

The narcissistic leader is a monstrously inverted Jesus, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that his people - or humanity at large - should benefit. By surpassing and suppressing his humanity, the narcissistic leader became a distorted version of Nietzsche’s “superman”.

But being a-human or super-human also means being a-sexual and a-moral.

In this restricted sense, narcissistic leaders are post-modernist and moral relativists. They project to the masses an androgynous figure and enhance it by engendering the adoration of nudity and all things “natural” - or by strongly repressing these feelings. But what they refer to as “nature” is not natural at all.

The narcissistic leader invariably proffers an aesthetic of decadence and evil carefully orchestrated and artificial - though it is not perceived this way by him or by his followers. Narcissistic leadership is about reproduced copies, not about originals. It is about the manipulation of symbols - not about veritable atavism or true conservatism.

In short: narcissistic leadership is about theatre, not about life. To enjoy the spectacle (and be subsumed by it), the leader demands the suspension of judgment, depersonalization, and de-realization. Catharsis is tantamount, in this narcissistic dramaturgy, to self-annulment.

Narcissism is nihilistic not only operationally, or ideologically. Its very language and narratives are nihilistic. Narcissism is conspicuous nihilism - and the cult’s leader serves as a role model, annihilating the Man, only to re-appear as a pre-ordained and irresistible force of nature.

Narcissistic leadership often poses as a rebellion against the “old ways” - against the hegemonic culture, the upper classes, the established religions, the superpowers, the corrupt order. Narcissistic movements are puerile, a reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon a narcissistic (and rather psychopathic) toddler nation-state, or group, or upon the leader.

Minorities or “others” - often arbitrarily selected - constitute a perfect, easily identifiable, embodiment of all that is “wrong”. They are accused of being old, they are eerily disembodied, they are cosmopolitan, they are part of the establishment, they are “decadent”, they are hated on religious and socio-economic grounds, or because of their race, sexual orientation, origin … They are different, they are narcissistic (feel and act as morally superior), they are everywhere, they are defenceless, they are credulous, they are adaptable (and thus can be co-opted to collaborate in their own destruction). They are the perfect hate figure. Narcissists thrive on hatred and pathological envy.

This is precisely the source of the fascination with Hitler, diagnosed by Erich Fromm - together with Stalin - as a malignant narcissist. He was an inverted human. His unconscious was his conscious. He acted out our most repressed drives, fantasies, and wishes. He provides us with a glimpse of the horrors that lie beneath the veneer, the barbarians at our personal gates, and what it was like before we invented civilization. Hitler forced us all through a time warp and many did not emerge. He was not the devil. He was one of us. He was what Arendt aptly called the banality of evil. Just an ordinary, mentally disturbed, failure, a member of a mentally disturbed and failing nation, who lived through disturbed and failing times. He was the perfect mirror, a channel, a voice, and the very depth of our souls.

The narcissistic leader prefers the sparkle and glamour of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishments. His reign is all smoke and mirrors, devoid of substances, consisting of mere appearances and mass delusions. In the aftermath of his regime - the narcissistic leader having died, been deposed, or voted out of office - it all unravels. The tireless and constant prestidigitation ceases and the entire edifice crumbles. What looked like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble. Loosely-held empires disintegrate. Laboriously assembled business conglomerates go to pieces. “Earth shattering” and “revolutionary” scientific discoveries and theories are discredited. Social experiments end in mayhem.

It is important to understand that the use of violence must be ego-syntonic. It must accord with the self-image of the narcissist. It must abet and sustain his grandiose fantasies and feed his sense of entitlement. It must conform with the narcissistic narrative.

Thus, a narcissist who regards himself as the benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elite - is highly unlikely to use violence at first.

The pacific mask crumbles when the narcissist has become convinced that the very people he purported to speak for, his constituency, his grassroots fans, the prime sources of his narcissistic supply - have turned against him. At first, in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction underlying his chaotic personality, the narcissist strives to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment. “The people are being duped by (the media, big industry, the military, the elite, etc.)”, “they don’t really know what they are doing”, “following a rude awakening, they will revert to form”, etc.

When these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology fail - the narcissist is injured. Narcissistic injury inevitably leads to narcissistic rage and to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression. The pent-up frustration and hurt translate into devaluation. That which was previously idealized - is now discarded with contempt and hatred.

This primitive defense mechanism is called “splitting”. To the narcissist, things and people are either entirely bad (evil) or entirely good. He projects onto others his own shortcomings and negative emotions, thus becoming a totally good object. A narcissistic leader is likely to justify the butchering of his own people by claiming that they intended to kill him, undo the revolution, devastate the economy, or the country, etc.

The “small people”, the “rank and file”, the “loyal soldiers” of the narcissist - his flock, his nation, his employees - they pay the price. The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated - is drawn-out. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of the narcissist. This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.

Deception at Core of Obama Plans

2009-03-06T07:19:00.001-08:00

WASHINGTON — Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the “$2 trillion dollars in savings” that “we have already identified,” $1.6 trillion of which President Obama’s budget director later admits is the “savings” of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 — 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama’s tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that’s a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama’s radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has now arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan’s Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What’s going on? “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his “Big Bang” agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

Obama fights false links to Islam

2009-03-06T07:17:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON — For Barack Obama, it is an ember that he has doused time and again, only to see it flicker anew: links to Islam fanned by false rumors, innuendo and association. Obama and his campaign reacted strongly this week when a photo of him in Kenyan tribal garb began spreading on the Internet.

And the praise he received Sunday from Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan prompted pointed questions -- during Tuesday night's presidential debate and also in a private meeting over the weekend with Jewish leaders in Cleveland.

During the debate, Obama repeated his denunciation of Farrakhan's views, which have included numerous anti-Semitic comments. And, after being pressed, he rejected Farrakhan's support in the presidential race.

The Democratic candidate says repeatedly that he's a Christian who took the oath of office on a family Bible. Yet on the Internet and on talk radio -- and in a campaign introduction for John McCain this week -- he is often depicted, falsely, as a Muslim with shadowy ties and his middle name, Hussein, is emphasized as a reminder of Iraq's former leader.

"If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim," he told the Jewish leaders in Cleveland, according to a transcript of the private session.

The photo of Obama wearing Kenyan tribal raiments -- taken by an Associated Press photographer during his visit in 2006 to the country where his father was born -- resurfaced on the Internet amid unsubstantiated claims that it was being circulated by members of Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign. Clinton and her aides said they had nothing to do with it. The Obama campaign accused them of "shameful, offensive fear-mongering."

On Tuesday Republican candidate McCain denounced the introduction he got in Cincinnati that criticized Obama in vivid terms. Talk show host Bill Cunningham referred to Obama three times as "Barack Hussein Obama" and called him a "hack, Chicago-style" politician during the introduction of McCain.

The Obama campaign is closely attuned to the rumors and insinuations. Information on Obama's Christian faith is prominently available on the "Know the facts" page of his Web site. The campaign has distributed flyers to churches in states with presidential contests. And it encourages supporters to flag any attack that may make its way into cyberspace.

"Our campaign is vigilant in quickly responding to any information about Senator Obama that surfaces, be it on the Internet, in the media or from our opponents," spokesman Bill Burton said Wednesday.

If there is confusion -- and opportunity for political mischief -- it derives at least in part from Obama's rich cultural background. His mother was a white woman from Kansas, his father was Kenyan and he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, a largely Muslim country.

"My grandfather, who was Kenyan, converted to Christianity, then converted to Islam," Obama said Sunday. "My father never practiced; he was basically agnostic. So, other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for four years when I was a child, I have very little connection to the Islamic religion."

Obama has become careful in denouncing the links, lately noting that some rumors about him also have been insulting to Muslims. Jim Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, said many Arab Americans are drawn to Obama because of his cultural background.

"It is clear he wants to have a broader relationship with the Muslim world," Zogby said. "He has a biography that connects him to the Muslim world."

Obama, though in the presidential limelight now for more than a year, is still introducing himself to voters. An AP-Yahoo poll in January asked people to volunteer the first few words that came to mind about each of the candidates, and 4 percent of the respondents, unprompted, mentioned the word Muslim when describing Obama.

Some of the rumors and allegations about Obama are clearly not true, yet still spread, often anonymously:

_ A debunked chain e-mail circulating widely on the Internet suggests he is hiding his Islamic roots. It says he was sworn into the Senate on the Quran and turns his back on the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance.

He took his Senate oath with his hand on a family Bible, and he says, "Whenever I'm in the United States Senate, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America." In fact, no candidate could survive if he publicly spurned the pledge.

_ Another false report says he attended a Muslim madrassa school as a child in Jakarta. Obama was born in Hawaii and moved to Indonesia when he was 6 to live with his mother and stepfather. He returned to Hawaii when he was 10 to live with his maternal grandparents. Interviews last year by The Associated Press at the elementary school in Jakarta found that it is a public and secular institution and has been open to students of all faiths since before Obama attended in the late 1960s. Said vice principal Akmad Solichin: "Yes, most of our students are Muslim, but there are Christians as well. Everyone's welcome here."

_ Obama also has faced questions about his pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where he has been a member for 20 years. Trinity calls itself "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." But it accepts non-black congregants. The United Church of Christ's president and general minister, the Rev. John H. Thomas, was quoted in a church publication as pointing out that the Rev. Jane Fisler-Hoffman, Illinois Conference Minister, who is white, "has been a member of the congregation for years."

_ Obama has been asked about Farrakhan's words of praise and Farrakhan's receipt of an award from "Trumpet Newsmagazine," a Trinity church publication last month. Obama told Jewish leaders Sunday: "An award was given to Farrakhan for his work on behalf of ex-offenders completely unrelated to his controversial statements. And I believe that was a mistake and showed a lack of sensitivity to the Jewish community and I said so."

Farrakhan did not endorse Obama but said Sunday: "This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better." Asked Tuesday night whether he would accept support from Farrakhan, Obama said: "I live in Chicago. He lives in Chicago. I've been very clear, in terms of me believing that what he has said is reprehensible and inappropriate. And I have consistently distanced myself from him."

Following an exchange with Clinton, he then added: "There's no formal offer of help from Minister Farrakhan that would involve me rejecting it. But if the word 'reject' Senator Clinton feels is stronger than the word 'denounce,' then I'm happy to concede the point, and I would reject and denounce."

The Obama Double Tax Whammy

2009-03-06T07:15:00.000-08:00

President Obama’s proposal to provide only a 28 percent benefit for charitable contributions by top-bracket taxpayers is part of a double whammy, since he proposes at the same time to raise the top bracket from 35 to 39.6 percent. The double-barreled increase/decrease reflects a two-part strategy that is much more than a simple tax increase. Less civil society and more government power is the result.
Taken alone, an increase in tax rates would result in more charitable giving: if one receives a 39.6 percent benefit from giving to charity, and one previously gave $1,000 at an after-tax cost of $650 (based on a 35 percent deduction), one can now give $1,076 at the same after-tax cost of $650.

In addition, higher tax rates might increase charitable contributions even beyond that, since higher rates also have a psychological effect. When the state and federal government together take close to 50 percent of the income of top-bracket taxpayers, those taxpayers increasingly prefer giving money to charity rather than sending it to government. They may round the $1,076 contribution up to $1,250 (or higher): in that instance, the $1,000 contribution that used to cost the government $350 turns into a $1,250 contribution costing the government $500.

By simultaneously increasing tax rates to 39.6 percent and decreasing the tax benefits of deductions to 28 percent, the government can (a) eliminate the increased tax incentive for giving and thus protect its new revenue; and (b) at the same time, reduce the tax benefit for the giving already occurring and thus generate even more money for the government. The government keeps its higher revenues that might be reduced by increased contributions, while the charities see existing contributions fall (since the tax cost to contributors of even the existing level of contributions increases). There is an effective shift of money from private charity to government — the exact opposite of what would occur if there were only a single whammy (an increase in tax rates).

So the Obama plan hurts not only top-bracket taxpayers, but the charities themselves. The administration has an answer to this, but as Jacob Sullum notes in “Obama’s Charitable Taking,” the response reveals the underlying philosophy behind the two-whammy proposal:

In response to nonprofit organizations worried that limiting the deduction for charitable contributions will reduce donations, The Washington Times reports, [Budget Director Peter] Orszag “said Mr. Obama took care of that by giving charities government money to make up part of the difference.” Orszag noted that “in the recovery act, there’s $100 million to support nonprofits and charities.” In essence, then, Obama plans to take money people otherwise would have given to the charities of their choice and give it to the charities of his choice.

The increase/decrease proposal will thus shift significant funds from charities chosen by taxpayers to government-chosen charities that are politically connected (or at least politically correct). Charities that want to share in the increased government largesse will need to ensure that their goals and activities are the ones the government wants to support. Civil society is weakened and government empowered.

Taxpayers who might otherwise choose to opt out of the 39.6 percent tax — by increasing contributions to charitable, educational, and religious institutions they want to support — will thus find that exit strategy blocked by the 28 percent deduction limit. Any increased contributions will necessitate an 11.6 percent toll charge to be paid to the government along with the contribution.

Audacious, no? If you are a taxpayer and think you can choose to support worthwhile charities instead of paying more money to the government, Obama is here to tell you: no, you can’t. If you are a charity and think that, as a private institution with private support, the government cannot affect the direction of your activities, Obama also has a response: yes, we can.

Graham Says Obama Is ‘AWOL’ on Stimulus Debate

2009-03-06T07:08:00.000-08:00

Graham Says Obama Is ‘AWOL’ on Stimulus Debate

Sen Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., says the president has not been providing leadership and criticizes him for giving TV interviews and writing an editorial touting the package rather than addressing the complaints of lawmakers.

President Obama has been “AWOL” in negotiations over the economic stimulus package, Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday in a scathing rebuke of the new president.

The South Carolina Republican told FOX News that Obama has not been providing leadership, and he criticized the president for giving TV interviews and writing an editorial touting the package, rather than addressing the complaints of lawmakers.

“This process stinks,” Graham told FOX News, before repeating a lot of his criticisms on the Senate floor. “We’re making this up as we go and it is a waste of money. It is a broken process, and the president, as far as I’m concerned, has been AWOL on providing leadership on something as important as this.”

Republican senators and congressmen have been reluctant to direct any criticism at the president since his inauguration. They mostly have fired shots at Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, saying they have obstructed the bipartisan process Obama sought.

But Graham broke that practice after Obama granted a round of interviews defending his plan Tuesday and wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post Thursday in which he warned of disastrous consequences if Congress does not pass the stimulus bill.

“Scaring people is not leadership. Writing an editorial that if you don’t pass this bad bill we’re going to have disaster — we’ve had enough presidents trying to scare people to make bad decisions,” Graham said.

“I like President Obama, but he is not leading. Having lunch is not leading … and doing TV interviews is not leading.”

Obama renewed his plea for the bill at the Energy Department Thursday, shortly after Graham spoke.

“The time for talk is over. The time for action is now,” Obama said.

Obama, in his op-ed, wrote that inaction could lead the economy into an irreversible decline.

“Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes,” he wrote. “And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”
Posted in B Hussein Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Obama, Hussein Obama, Islam, Islam sympathizers, Islamic immigration, Obama, democrat muslim, islam fundamentalist.

Netanyahu to form Israel cabinet

2009-03-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-of-centre Likud party, has been asked to form Israel's next government.

Mr Netanyahu said Israel faced "great challenges" including the global economic crisis and what he said was Iran's wish to obtain nuclear weapons.

He said he would try to form a unity government with his political rivals.

But Tzipi Livni, leader of the centrist Kadima, has suggested she would rather be in opposition than join a government led by Mr Netanyahu.

Kadima narrowly defeated Likud in the election held on 10 February, but Mr Netanyahu has the support of religious and right-wing parties in the Israeli parliament.

His position was bolstered on Thursday when Avigdor Lieberman, head of Yisrael Beiteinu, which favours tightening the Israeli blockade on Gaza, said it wanted him to be prime minister.

Let's unite to secure the future of the State of Israel
Benjamin Netanyahu
Likud leader

Profile: Benjamin Netanyahu

President Shimon Peres and Mr Netanyahu held a news conference to officially announce that the Likud leader now has six weeks to put together a coalition.

He told the news conference he wanted to open talks with his political rivals to form a "broad national unity government for the good of the people and the state".

He said: "I call on Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni and Labour Party chairman Ehud Barak and I say to them - let's unite to secure the future of the State of Israel."

On Iran, Mr Netanyahu returned to a key campaign theme, suggesting that Tehran had emerged as Israel's greatest security threat.

The Islamic Republic was seeking to develop nuclear weapons, he said, as well as sponsoring the Hezbollah and Hamas militant groups in Lebanon and Gaza.

'Pawn'

The BBC's diplomatic correspondent, Jonathan Marcus, says the decision to choose Mr Netanyahu marks the beginning of a period of serious horse-trading.

He says Mr Netanyahu will have a real job on his hands - either to persuade Ms Livni to join his government, or to reconcile the differences among the various factions on the right.

ELECTION RESULTS
Kadima: 28 seats
Likud: 27 seats
Yisrael Beiteinu: 15
Labour: 13
Shas: 11
United Torah Judaism: 5

See results in full
Tough dealing ahead
Q&A: Israel's general election

Minutes before the news came out that the Likud leader would be asked to form a government, Ms Livni said what was being proposed was a government "without political vision, a government with no values".

"I will not be a pawn in a government that would be against our ideals," she said.

Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported on Thursday that Ms Livni said she would consider a coalition which included Likud, Kadima, and Yisrael Beiteinu.

She ruled out joining a coalition which included a number of other right-wing parties, the newspaper reported.

One of the main points of contention between the two parties is how to handle the Palestinian territories.

Ms Livni favours more talks and the creation of a separate state for the Palestinians.

Mr Netanyahu says he does not want Israel to rule the Palestinians, but says they should not be allowed things he considers a threat to Israeli security, such as an army, or control of airspace or the Jordan Valley.

Likud's 1999 charter "flatly rejects" a sovereign Palestinian state, but backs Palestinian self rule.

Palestinian officials reacted with caution to the news of Mr Netanyahu's appointment.

Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been negotiating with Israel's outgoing Kadima-led coalition, said Israel needed a government committed to peace.

"We will not be in the negotiations with an Israeli government that continues settlement activities, that refuses the two-state solution, and that doesn't accept agreements signed," he said.

كلينتون: أمريكا مصممة على التقدم في طريق السلام

2009-03-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

اعلنت وزيرة الخارجية الامريكية هيلاري كلينتون الاربعاء ان الولايات المتحدة تريد المضي قدما على طريق السلام في الشرق الاوسط.

وصرحت كلينتون خلال مؤتمر صحافي مشترك مع الرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس "اننا مصممون على احراز تقدم. الوقت يداهمنا".

و اعلنت وزيرة الخارجية الامريكية ان المبعوث الاميركي الخاص الى الشرق الاوسط جورج ميتشل سيعود الى المنطقة بعد تشكيل الحكومة الاسرائيلية الجديدة.

ووصفت كلينتون خطة اسرائيل لتدمير عشرات المنازل التي تعود لفلسطينيين في الضفة الغربية بانه اختراق للقانون الدولي.

وأضافت "إن من الواضح أن هذا النوع من التصرفات غير مفيد، وتخالف التزام خطة خريطة الطريق".

ومن جانبه، قال عباس انه يجب على الحكومة الاسرائيلية المقبلة وقف الاستيطان في الضفة الغربية وفتح المعابر مع غزة.

وأضاف عباس خلال المؤتمر الصحافي انه يجب على الحكومة الاسرائيلية المقبلة وقف الاستيطان في الضفة الغربية وفتح المعابر مع غزة.

وقال عباس "نحن نحترم خيار الشعب الاسرائيلي ونحترم الانتخابات" الاسرائيلية، طالبا بالمقابل بان تحترم الحكومة الاسرائيلية المقبلة خريطة الطريق وحل الدولتين الاسرائيلية والفلسطينية.

واضاف "على اسرائيل الالتزام بحل الدولتين ووقف الاستيطان وهدم المنازل".

وشدد عباس كذلك على ضرورة فتح المعابر مع قطاع غزة لوضع حد لـ"معاناة الشعب الفلسطيني" في القطاع والسماح باعادة اعماره بعد الهجوم الاسرائيلي المدمر عليهوكانت كلينتون قد التقت في وقت سابق اليوم في رام الله رئيس الوزراء الفلسطيني سلام فياض.

وكانت كلينتون قد وصلت إلى رام الله اليوم قادمة من إسرائيل حيث التقت بالمسؤولين الإسرائيليين وأكدت من جديد التزام الإدارة الأمريكية بإقامة دولة فلسطينية وقالت إن ذلك سيكون في مصلحة إسرائيل.

إلا أن بنيامين نيتانياهو، المكلف بتشكيل الحكومة الاسرائيلية الجديدة، كرّر رفضه لهذا المبدأ.
سورية

وكانت كلينتون قد كشفت في وقت سابق أن بلادها سترسل مبعوثين إلى دمشق في احدث مسعى لادارة الرئيس باراك أوباما للتعاطي مع سورية.

وفي تصريحات أدلت بها في القدس قالت كلينتون أن الولايات المتحدة ستواصل "بقوة" مساعيها الهادفة إلى إقامة دولة فلسطينية مستقلة.

وقالت إن التوجه إلى إقامة دولة فلسطينية هو أكثر ما يمكن أن يخدم مصالح إسرائيل.

وجاءت تصريحات كلينتون قبل اجتماعها مع نظيرتها الإسرائيلية تسيبي ليفني خلال أول زيارة تقوم بها للشرق الأوسط منذ تسلمها وزارة الخارجية في إدارة أوباما.

كما عقدت وزير الخارجية الامريكية لقاء مع رئيس الوزراء المكلف بينيامين نتانياهو الذي عرف بمعارضته لحل الدولتين، إلا انه وبعد لقاءه مع كلينتون قال إنه اسمتع إلى لغة مشتركة.

ويتبنى نتنياهو موقفا متشككا تجاه قيام دولة فلسطينية مفضلا بدلا من ذلك اتباع برنامج لتنمية الاقتصاد الفلسطيني والتصدي لمشكلة إيران، وقد أثار تصريحاته مخاوف من صدام بين حكومة يترأسها والإدارة الأمريكية.

شاهد بالفيديو:
كلينتون

"نشارك إسرائيل قلقها"

وفي تصريح لهيلاري كلينتون بعد لقاء عقدته مع الرئيس الاسرائيلي شيمون بيريز اعلنت كلينتون دعم بلادها "الثابت والدائم" لاسرائيل وامنها.

وفي المقابل وصفت حركة حماس تصريحات وزيرة الخارجية الامريكية بانها "قمة في الانحياز لصالح الاحتلال الاسرائيلي".

وقال طاهر النونو المتحدث باسم الحكومة الفلسطينية المقالة في بيان ان تصريحات كلينتون هي "قمة في الانحياز لصالح الاحتلال الاسرائيلي وتؤكد ان حكومة ايهود اولمرت هي من افشلت جهود التهدئة في اللحظات الاخيرة".

من جهته اعتبر فوزي برهوم المتحدث باسم حركة حماس ان هذه التصريحات هي "دعوة صريحة لاستمرار العنف ضد الشعب الفلسطيني وتحريض مباشر على حركة حماس واهلنا في غزة وتبرير وغطاء لجرائم الاحتلال الصهيوني".

ارسل هذا الموضوع لصديق نسخة سهلة الطبع

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أوكامبو: الحكومة السودانية ملزمة بتنفيذ مذكرة الاعتقال

2009-03-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

أكد مدعي المحكمة الجنائية الدولية لويس مورينو اوكامبو ان الحكومة السودانية ملزمة بتنفيذ مذكرة الإعتقال التي أصدرتها المحكمة باعتقال الرئيس السوداني عمر البشير. جاء ذلك في مؤتمر صحفي لأوكامبو تعليقا على هذا القرار.

غير أن السودان أعلن رفضه قرار المحكمة. وقال وزير الدولة السوداني للشؤون الخارجية علي أحمد كرتي رفض بلاده التام للقرارن مشيرا إلى أن البشير سيحضر قمة الدوحة العربية ويقوم بمهامه وواجباته رغم صدور مذكرة المحكمة الجنائية الدولية بتوقيفه.

كما أكد وزير العدل السوداني ان الخرطوم لن تتعامل مع المحكمة، ووصف مستشار الرئيس السوداني القرار بانه جزء من الاستعمار الجديد.

وصرح متحدث باسم الجيش السوداني بان "القوات المسلحة ستتعامل بالحسم مع كل من يتعامل مع ما يسمى بالمحكمة الجنائية الدولية".

وكانت المحكمة الجنائية الدولية قد أصدرت مذكرة باعتقال الرئيس السوداني عمر البشير.

وجاء في بيان المحكمة "اليوم أصدرت المحكمة مذكرة باعتقال الرئيس السوداني عمر البشير fتهم جرائم حرب وجرائم ضد الانسانية، وهناك اشتباه بمسؤوليته بشكل مباشر أو غير مباشر عن شن الهجمات على المجتمع المدني في إقليم دارفور مما أدى إلى قتل وتشريد أعداد كبيرة من المدنيين".

واضاف البيان "إن منصب البشير لا يمنحه الحصانة، والقضاة يرون أن الجرائم المذكورة قد ارتكبت ويقال إن هذه الحملة شنت عام 2003 بعد الهجوم على مطار الفاشر نتيجة لخطة مشتركة شارك فيها كبار اعضاء الحكومة".

وتابع البيان "وكان الجزء الأساسي من تلك الحملة الهجوم على المدنيين في دارفور الذين يعتقد انهم مقربون من الجماعات المسلحة والذين تعرضوا لهجمات من قبل الجيش السوداني وميليشيا الجنجاويد".

ومضى البيان قائلا "إن قرار المحكمة ان عمر البشير نسق ووضع خطة الحملة ونفذها ضد المتمردين وهناك مبررات معقولة للاعتقاد بانه كان مشرفا على أجهزة الحكومة في السودان خلال تلك الحملة".

واشار البيان إلى سبع تهم موجهة إلى البشير وهي خمس تهم لجرائم ضد الانسانية وهي القتل والقضاء على الأشخاص والتشريد الاجباري والاغتصاب، وهناك تهمتان بارتكاب جرائم حرب وهي التعمد في شن هجمات على سكان مدنيين أو ضد مدنيين افراد لا يشاركون في اعمال قتالية والسلب والنهب ولكن لا تشمل التهم الابادة الجماعية ولكن إذا تم تقديم المزيد من الاثباتات فقد توجه لاحقا".

وقال البيان "والآن سيتم مطالبة السودان بالتعاون لتسليم الرئيس السوداني ومطالبة جميع الدول بالتعاون مع هذا القرار".

Profile: Benjamin Netanyahu

2009-03-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the most right-wing and controversial leaders in Israel's history.

He became the youngest person to hold the position of prime minister in 1996, but three years later he lost office after defeat at the polls to Labour.

He subsequently lost the Likud leadership to Ariel Sharon, though he served as a sometimes rancorous member of Mr Sharon's cabinet.

His chance came again in 2005, when Mr Sharon - just before a massive stroke that has left him in a coma - split from Likud and set up his new centrist party, Kadima.

Mr Netanyahu won the Likud leadership and became a trenchant critic of the Kadima-led coalition and Mr Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert.

KEY CAMPAIGN POLICIES

Iran: considers it Israel's greatest threat and wants to thwart any nuclear weapons plan
Hamas: has called for its removal from Gaza, and an end to the threat of rockets fired into Israel.
Peace process: has pledged to work with the US, and wants to pursue a 'workable peace' with Palestinians but not the creation of a Palestinian state

Mr Olmert became engulfed in a mire of sleaze allegations and was unable to win back credibility or popularity after the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war.

The Israeli military offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, launched in late December 2008, slightly narrowed Mr Netanyahu's lead over his rivals in the 10 February election.

Although Kadima narrowly defeated Likud in the poll, it was Mr Netanyahu who President Shimon Peres asked to form the next government.

Land for peace

Mr Netanyahu's three-year premiership was brief but dramatic.

His election, by the narrowest of margins, represented a major turning point in Israeli politics.

Known as Bibi to his friends and enemies alike, he was the first Israeli leader to be born after the creation of the Jewish state.

Politically, he positioned himself to the right of previous leaders of the secular centre-right Likud Party.

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A look at the career of Benjamin Netanyahu
To his supporters, he came across as young, handsome, energetic, articulate in English and a master of how to handle the Western media.

But as prime minister, Mr Netanyahu, who had said he would not give up land controlled by Israel for peace, did just that under US pressure.

Despite his antagonism towards a peace process that might lead to the creation of a Palestinian state he handed over 80% of Hebron in January 1997 to Palestinian Authority control and signed the Wye River Memorandum on 23 October 1998 outlining further withdrawals from the West Bank.

This alienated his supporters on the right. At the same time, he did not bend sufficiently to keep the support of those in Israel who favoured a land-for-peace deal with the Arabs.

His critics said a more seasoned politician could have avoided many of the difficulties in the first place.

Mr Netanyahu survived rather than prospered, and lost office in May 1999 after he called elections 17 months early.

Life in US

Mr Netanyahu's inexperience reflected his fast rise to power and his long sojourns away from the ruthless and rowdy world of Israeli politics.

LIFE AND TIMES
1949: Born in Tel Aviv
1967-73: Serves as soldier and commando captain
1984: Becomes ambassador to UN
1988: Enters Knesset and cabinet
1996: Becomes prime minister
1999: Loses election
2002-3: Serves as foreign minister
Feb 2003 to Aug 2005: Serves as finance minister, resigning over withdrawal from Gaza
December 2005: Wins back the leadership of the Likud party

When he was a teenager, his family moved to the US where he completed his education.

Back in Israel, he spent five distinguished years in the army, serving as a captain in an elite commando unit.

His brother, Jonathan, became a posthumous hero when he was killed leading a raid against a hijacked airliner in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976.

Out of the military, Mr Netanyahu returned to the US, taking courses at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1981, he secured a post in the Israeli embassy in Washington, where his friend and future Israeli Foreign Minister, Moshe Arens, was ambassador.

Overnight, Mr Netanyahu's public life was launched.

He became a familiar face on US television and an effective advocate of the Israeli cause.

Mr Netanyahu was equally successful in this respect while serving as Israel's ambassador at the United Nations.

Only in 1988, when he returned to Israel, did he become involved in domestic politics, winning a seat in the Knesset and becoming deputy foreign minister.