The European Commission has raised the stakes in its tussle with Washington over visas by suggesting that from the beginning of next year US diplomats be required to apply for a visa for t ravel to the European Union.

Brussels' move is prompting by frustration at the US government over the slow pace of talks on granting all EU citizens visa-free travel to the United States.

Travel between Europe and the US is set to remain a hot topic for the coming months

"No tangible progress has been made regarding the United States despite all efforts of the commission and individual member states," the commission said on Wednesday (23 July).

"Therefore, the commission will propose retaliatory measures e.g. temporary restoration of the visa requirement for US nationals holding diplomatic and service or official passports as of 1 January, 2009 if no progress is achieved."

European Union foreign ministers on Tuesday (22 July) called for further diplomacy in dealing with concerns over Iran's nuclear programme and ruled out a military strike as an option.

UK foreign secretary David Miliband said following the meeting: "We are 100 percent focussed on a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian issue."

Uranium enrichment: Iran insists it is for peaceful purposes

The EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said there was "no other route" apart from diplomacy.

"The position of the European Union is clear," said Mr Solana according to the AP. "We want to find a diplomatic solution to this, in particular to clarify to the fullest the nature of their nuclear programme."

Mr Solana outlined for the ministers the results of a meeting on Saturday between Iran and diplomats from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, and Russia, where Tehran was encouraged to halt its uranium enrichment in return for a package of economic and political carrots.

When a number of EU countries recognized Kosovo's independence early this year, Serbia withdrew its ambassadors. Now, Belgrade is thinking of sending them back. Are the Serbs giving up on Kosovo?

REUTERS

A Serbian demonstrator marching against Kosovo independence in February. First it was the announcement on Tuesday that presumed war criminal Radovan Karadzic had been captured just outside of Belgrade. And now, it looks like the Serbian government may soon resume diplomatic relations with those European Union countries which have recognized the independence of Kosovo.

In an interview published in the Wednesday edition of the French daily Le Monde, Serbia's pro-Western Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said that he wants to resume diplomatic ties with those European Union countries which recognized Kosovo when the breakaway province declared independence in February. He said he planned to introduce the proposal to the Serbian cabinet on Thursday.

"We have two absolute priorities," Jeremic told Le Monde, "the European integration of Serbia and pursuing diplomatic efforts to defend our sovereignty over Kosovo."

Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb genocide suspect captured earlier this week, has decided to defend himself before the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, his lawyer said today.

Dr Karadzic, who stands indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity, was arrested in Belgrade on Monday evening after more than a decade on the run.

He evaded capture by disguising himself as a heavily bearded alternative health guru by the name of Dragan David Dabic, and lived in the suburbs of the Serb capital.

Colonel Gaddafi has launched a bizarre diplomatic assault on Switzerland -- including closing Swiss businesses, arresting Swiss nationals and throwing diplomats out of Libya -- after his son, Hannibal, was arrested for assaulting a member of staff at a Geneva hotel.

The European country's Foreign Ministry claims that Mr Gaddafi has launched a single-minded campaign against Swiss interests in general ever since Hannibal, 32, was detained on July 15.

It says that the Libyan Government was guilty of initiating "retaliatory measures" in place against Switzerland from two days after the arrest. Libya's envoy in Switzerland has been recalled and Libyan authorities have suspended the issuing of visas to Swiss citizens.

Air links between Switzerland and Libya have been reduced, two Swiss nationals have been placed in police custody since Saturday, Swiss businesses in Libya have received closure orders, and Libya has threatened to cut its oil supplies.

BERLIN: This month, the Czechs discovered the beauty of sovereignty.

Defying Russia, the government in Prague signed an accord with the United States to accept on its territory a radar tracking system for the Pentagon's controversial anti-ballistic missile defense system.

Soon after Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, had completed the signing ceremony in Prague, the Kremlin announced it would retaliate. Oil deliveries, which Russia sends to the Czech Republic through the Druzba, or Friendship, pipeline were reduced as much as 40 percent.

Officially, Russia denied that the decision was a response to the missile shield agreement. "The Russian side said it was due to technical reasons," said Tomas Bartovsky, a spokesman for the Czech Trade and Industry Ministry. No further explanations were given, he said.

Full deliveries have yet to be resumed, but there has been no outcry in Prague. There also has been no shortage of energy. Within a day of the Russian cut, additional oil supplies were flowing through the IKL pipeline from Germany. This was possible because the Czech Republic is the only former Communist country in Eastern Europe that has access to alternate sources of energy, thanks to a decision made back in the early 1990s.

LONDON: Only days before he is to meet in London with Senator Barack Obama, Prime Minister Gordon Brown outlined a tentative plan on Tuesday for withdrawing most of Britain's remaining troops from Iraq early in 2009.

Brown told Parliament that Britain planned a "fundamental change of mission" at the turn of the year for the 4,100 troops it has in its Iraq contingent, the second largest group of foreign troops serving in Iraq. About 140,000 Americans will be deployed there after current American troop withdrawals are completed.

The prime minister gave no fixed timetable for British withdrawals, and left open the number of troops who would be returning home. He also said troop reductions would depend on the "advice of our military commanders on the ground" when detailed decisions are made. A spokesman at 10 Downing Street said the British leader was reluctant to give details because of a recognition that security conditions could deteriorate in southern Iraq, where most of the British soldiers are based.

But Defense Ministry officials said the aim was to withdraw most of the troops in the first half of 2009, if the security improvements of recent months are sustained. They said more details would be announced in the fall by the defense minister, Desmond Browne. Current British troop strength in Iraq is a fraction of the force of more than 40,000 troops who took part in the invasion of 2003. Britain has 8,000 troops in Afghanistan, and has said that it intends to concentrate on its future combat role there.

A member of the European Parliament, German politician Silvana Koch-Mehrin would like to see a decentralized Europe that puts its citizens first, she writes in an exclusive essay for DW-WORLD.DE.

Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a member of the European Parliament, belongs to Germany's free market liberal party, the FDP, and heads up its European Parliament group.

My vision of Europe includes lasting diversity. Herein lies its potential. Diversity has characterized Europe for centuries, and diversity feeds the common European identity. It is absurd to think that Europe will ever flourish if its roots are enforced equality and shared values dictated from above. A liberal Europe of the future is based on recognition of diversity, and it will continue to promote this principle. Business long ago realized that competition is healthier than monopolies, and the same principle applies to politics. 

Decentralization encourages this competition, which needs to permeate every level of politics. Take competition among business locations. Competition allows citizens and companies to identify where to base the services their taxes help provide. If these are to be tied to a region or a country in the long-run, their hosts need to budget well and meet their responsibilities. Decentralization is a way to prevent governments from collecting extortionate taxes only in order to dole out subsidies and create mountains of debt.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has won parliamentary backing for a crime package critics say discriminates against immigrants.

Under new laws approved by the Senate, illegal immigrants convicted of crimes will now face jail sentences a third longer than those for Italians.

Courts will be able to jail illegal immigrants for up to four years rather than simply deport them.

Property rented to illegal immigrants can also be confiscated.

France's parliament has passed a law which effectively ends the country's compulsory 35-hour working week.

The new law will allow companies to strike individual deals with unions on working hours and overtime.

Since coming into office last year, President Nicolas Sarkozy has blamed the 35-hour week for damaging France's economic competitiveness.

Introduced 10 years ago by the then Socialist government, polls show most French still support the 35-hour week.

The "Obama show," as one newspaper calls it, is set to take Berlin by storm on Thursday, July 24. But a small minority is questioning whether the Democratic candidate can live up to the hype -- or justify the costs.

In the build-up to what is probably the most anticipated American campaign speech ever held on foreign soil, one of Berlin's main city magazines offered its readership cut-out American flags to wave at Barack Obama's planned address.

The presumed Democratic nominee plans to arrive in the German capital on Thursday morning. Not much of his agenda for the day has been made public, but he is set to speak at Berlin's Victory Column -- formally the main site of the Love Parade -- at 7PM local time.

Those who want to hear Obama live have been told to start arriving three hours earlier. Berlin authorities say that as many as a million people could attend. Four TV stations are broadcasting the entire speech, and the rest are scrambling to secure prime locations at the site.

Smog, dust particles, algae blooms: the high levels of pollution at Olympic venues has the sporting world worried. The Chinese authorities are working feverishly to address the problem -- closing factories, banning cars from the roads, and renewing promises of "green games." But will it be enough?

Down in the courtyard there's a silver-colored building made of corrugated sheet metal that looks something like a missile control center. Inside, large screens hang on the wall with position lights and graphs showing current cloud formations throughout China. Double rows of scientists in white coats sit silently in front of computers and compile data.

Thomas Arthur has been on death row since 1982. His execution is set for July 31 -- although strong doubts remain about his guilt. The governor of Alabama is refusing to allow DNA tests that may prove his innocence.

Twice already, Sherrie Stone has said farewell to her father for what she thought was the last time. Twice she told him "my goodbyes," as she puts it, in a prison in Atmore, Alabama. Twice she watched him shuffle off to his cell on death row, where he has been waiting to die for 26 years.

Twice his execution has been postponed, only hours beforehand.

Next week, Stone, 47, will go to Atmore a third and probably last time. An eight-hour drive from Florida, where she lives, to Alabama, where her father, Thomas Arthur, has been incarcerated for murder since 1982. On July 31, when he is finally to die by lethal injection, Stone will go through the farewell motions yet again. It doesn't get any easier.

Barack Obama said today that there was a window of opportunity to tackle the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, but warned of mounting "hopelessness and despair" on both sides.

"I think we have a window right now that needs to be taken advantage of," said Mr Obama in the rocket-battered southern Israeli town of Sderot.

In a swipe at President George Bush's slowness to wade into the Middle East, he added: "I will not wait until a few years into my term or my second term if I am elected in order to get the process moving."

When it comes to Barack Obama, I'm not merely disappointed anymore. Now I'm scared.

From Paul Joseph Watson in Infowars

Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama has called for a "civilian national security force" as powerful as the U.S. military, comments that were ignored by the vast majority of the corporate media but compared by one journalist to the Nazi Hitler Youth.

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded," Obama told a Colorado Springs audience earlier this month.

MOSCOW: President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia declared Tuesday that their countries would more closely coordinate their actions on global oil and gas markets and that they would work together on foreign policy, a sphere in which both countries have sought to counter American influence.

Chávez, who was also expected to sign contracts to purchase more than $1 billion worth of Russian arms, called for the two nations to become "strategic partners" to defend against what he called an American threat to his country.

"That will guarantee the sovereignty of Venezuela, which the United States is now threatening," Chávez said, according to the official Russian news agency RIA-Novosti, at the start of two days of planned meetings.

Medvedev, who met Chávez for the first time since succeeding Vladimir Putin as president, stopped short of endorsing his guest's sharp remarks about the United States. So did Russian officials, who stressed the business significance of the new cooperation, including three new deals to expand Russian oil and gas companies' presence in Latin America, rather than its political import.

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaeda is back - with a vengeance of sorts. Listen to Mustafa Abu al-Yazeed - a senior al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan, in a very rare interview with Pakistan's Geo TV, shot in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan.

"At this stage this is our understanding - that there is no difference between the American people and the American government itself. If we see this through sharia [Islamic] law, American people and the government itself are infidels and are fighting against Islam. We have to rely on suicide attacks which are absolutely correct according to Islamic law. We have adopted this way of war because there is a huge difference between our

material resources and our enemy's, and this is the only option to attack our enemy."

The interview is not only about defensive jihad. Yazeed delves into classic al-Qaeda strategy - inciting a cross-border Taliban jihad against the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces and blasting a state, in this case the government of Pakistan. According to him, "Sadly, it is the government of Pakistan which has most damaged our cause. President [Pervez] Musharraf violated the trust of Muslims and contributed to the destruction of the Islamic government of Afghanistan ... Musharraf and his government have made big mistakes, there is no such example in other Islamic states."

Yazeed also said al-Qaeda was responsible for the suicide car bombing on the Danish Embassy in Islamabad in early June, when six people were killed.

So why is al-Qaeda feeling so emboldened to have one of its top commanders on camera - and on a foreign TV network to boot, not as-Sahab, al-Qaeda's media arm?

MOSCOW, July 23 (RIA Novosti) - Russia should respond to U.S. missile defense plans for Central Europe by reopening a 'spy' facility in Cuba to gather intelligence on the United States, a Russian analyst said on Wednesday.

The electronic monitoring and surveillance facility near Havana at Torrens, also known as the Lourdes facility, the largest Russian Sigint site abroad, was shut down in October 2001 by then- president Vladimir Putin.

"Cuba is a unique place to gather intelligence on the United States. I believe that the reopening of this station is both possible and necessary amid the threat that the Americans are creating for Russia," Alexander Pikayev, head of the disarmament and conflict resolution department at the Russian Academy of Sciences' World Economics and International Relations Institute, told a news conference at RIA Novosti.

"Russia has every right to respond," he added.

Uprising Against the Ethanol Mandate
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

Published: July 23, 2008

The ethanol industry, until recently a golden child that got favorable treatment from Washington, is facing a critical decision on its future.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily waive regulations requiring the oil industry to blend ever-increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. A decision is expected in the next few weeks.

Mr. Perry says the billions of bushels of corn being used to produce all that mandated ethanol would be better suited as livestock feed than as fuel.

Feed prices have soared in the last two years as fuel has begun competing with food for cropland.

"When you find yourself in a hole, you have to quit digging," Mr. Perry said in an interview. "And we are in a hole."

The entire California delegation opposed ethanol mandates and then sought exemptions from them. Very little corn is grown in California.  They saw this as another Enron.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

Drying out is a subject on which President George Bush has personal insights. And when he used the metaphor of a drunk sobering up after a bender to describe America's economic travails, people sat up and listened.

"Wall Street got drunk," Mr Bush told a private gathering in Texas as he sought to explain why the world's biggest and most complex economy was teetering on the brink of recession.

When speaking in public, the President, a Harvard MBA, usually prefers euphemisms to refer to the millions of people who are hurting and losing their homes. "Challenges in the housing and financial markets," is a favourite one. But speaking to a closed-door Republican fund-raiser in Houston last week his explanation was much blunter.

German firm halts bank note sales to Mugabe regime - Yahoo! News

FRANKFURT, Germany - A German company that has been supplying paper used by Zimbabwe's central bank to print bank notes said Tuesday it is stopping shipments immediately at the request of Germany's government.

The move could be a new problem for the regime of President Robert Mugabe, which has been churning out currency amid skyrocketing inflation that forces Zimbabweans to shop with bundles of cash. A pint of milk can cost 3 billion Zimbabwe dollars, or about 30 U.S. cents.

Giesecke & Devrient GmbH of Munich said it would stop delivering bank note paper to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe "with immediate effect." It said the decision came in response to an official request from the German government and calls for international sanctions by the European Union and United Nations.

"Our decision is a reaction to the political tension in Zimbabwe, which is mounting significantly rather than easing as expected, and takes account of the critical evaluation by the international community, German government and general public," chief executive Karsten Ottenberg said in a statement.

Zimbabwe's currency needs have spiraled upward as a shattered economy spurs overheated inflation. Prices rose 165,000 percent in February, according to government figures, but independent experts say the real inflation rate is closer to 4 million percent.

i wonder what each banknote cost to print?

"These days, there's nothing more ridiculous than the truth." Leonard Pitts Jr

Climate change offers Europe a chance to change the way the world solves problems by drawing in poorer countries, says sociologist Ulrich Beck in an exclusive essay for DW-WORLD.DE.

Ulrich Beck is a professor of sociology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the London School of Economics and Political Science. His publications focus on the possibilities of European integration.

Climate change is a problem that the younger generations (particularly in Europe) take very seriously, both personally and politically. Although climate change represents a horrible danger to humanity, it also offers a wonderful chance to turn politics into collective action.

The EU deserves praise for its groundbreaking efforts against climate change. It can take on a global leadership role and has the possibility to bring about a paradigm shift in world politics.

But the situation also raises great expectations. The world is hoping for progress from Europe in the cosmopolitan project and evidence that it's possible to reduce carbon dioxide emissions without cutting back on social benefits or economic growth.

When several years ago, Malta decided to build a new university, they sent expert engineers to examine how universities were built in Sweden. Sweden is a land where the sun is very rarely seen. So, the Swedes built their universities with their sides of glass facing the sun to absorb as much sun as possible.

The experts came to Malta and did the same idea. When the university was ready, it was discovered that it was a place fit to bake humans. They had to invent shades for the windows.

Now, the same thing is happening with the wind energy. These rotors were invented for the land of Denmark where the land is all flat and mostly under water. So, the Maltese authorities are obsessed with the idea of building the wind farms on water. They forget that Malta is blessed with several hills, not flat like Denmark. The hills are bare, nothing grows on them because of the force of the wind that blows over them. Malta is a hilly country, from north to the extreme south. Bare hills that are useless except for this purpose of wind power.