The Agonist - Europe Minus UK

UK: 'No need' to keep troops in Germany

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:41:06 -0800

Nov 21

Press Association - British troops could be withdrawn from Germany for good, nearly 70 years after the end of the Second World War, if the Conservatives win the general election.

Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox said it was "no longer necessary" to maintain the presence of more than 20,000 military personnel.

Ending the commitment would free up forces to carry out vital Nato operations outside of Europe, he insisted.

And in the US Lou Dobbs want you to sign his petiton to bring home all US troops from everywhere.

Generations of squaddies and their families have passed through Germany, although the size has been scaled down over the years. The presence is now centred on Herford near Hanover, where the 1st Armoured Division is based.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Dr Fox signalled his determination to conduct a "wholesale recasting of our foreign and defence policy".

He wants new Nato member states from eastern and central Europe, particularly Poland, to take over Britain's commitments in Germany and free British troops to be deployed elsewhere.

The guru with a gift for brainwashing

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:24:52 -0800

John Litchfield & Kevin Rawlinson | Paris | Nov 21

The Independent - How did a self-styled master-spy persuade a French aristocrat family to give up their freedom and fortune and join his 'crusade against evil'?

Thierry Tilly looks like a geography teacher or a chartered accountant, or a French version of Bill Gates. He claims, variously, to be a Nato "master-spy", a confidant of presidents and prime ministers, a financial genius, a 21st-century representative of an ancient, secret order descended from the Knights Templar and a man with superhuman powers sworn to fight the forces of evil.

He is now in a French prison, refusing to answer questions on possible charges of kidnap, brutality and torture. Seven or eight of his followers, from three generations of a French aristocratic family, are living in Oxford, Tilly's base for the past nine years. One of them, formerly a gynaecologist, is working as a gardener. Others have jobs in fast-food restaurants. Until 2006, 11 members of the family had spent five years barricaded in their château at Monflanquin, 100 miles east of Bordeaux.

Their relatives say they remain under the spell of a lurid fantasy, which might have been torn from the pages of a Dan Brown thriller. They have been convinced by Tilly that their family – the De Védrines, part of the Protestant nobility of south-west France for 300 years – has been chosen to struggle against supreme evil by an ancient order called L'Equilibre du Monde (The Balance of the World). Lawyers and relatives say they refuse to accept that they have been duped and fleeced of the family fortune of up to €5m (£4.5m) by an unscrupulous, possibly deranged but mysteriously effective con-man.

Angry landlords in Oxford, owed tens of thousands of pounds by Tilly and his followers, say the De Védrines, aged from 96 to 24, are not necessarily all victims. Some members of the clan, they say, have become Tilly's willing accomplices.

Beam circles 'Big Bang' machine

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:06:08 -0800

Paul Rincon | Large Hadron Collider | November 20

BBC - Engineers have sent proton particles all the way round the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine for the first time in more than a year.

But they still do not have a stable circulating beam; this step is expected to happen after 0600 GMT on Saturday.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel some 100m beneath the French-Swiss border.

It will smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.

Circulation of LHC Beams Could Resume in Earnest over the Weekend

The lab that operates the oft-delayed particle collider is ready to put it to work

Scientific American, By John Matson, November 20

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, is drawing near to its long-awaited reboot. More than a year after the European collider's initial start-up was quashed by a helium leak caused by a faulty electrical connection, particle beams have been injected into the collider, known as the LHC, and may guided fully through its rings in the coming hours.

"We're hoping to have beam overnight in the LHC," James Gillies, a spokesperson for CERN, the European particle physics lab that operates the LHC, said Friday. "So all being well, we will wake up tomorrow morning and there will be circulating beams." By 3:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on Friday, a beam had completed a full lap of the tunnel in the clockwise direction, with a counterclockwise beam still to come, according to CERN's Twitter feed.

Proton beams have been run through segments of the collider's 27-kilometer underground circumference near Geneva this fall, but putting the entirety of the collider ring through its paces as is now under way will be a much truer test of the machine's fortitude. In September 2008, it was just nine days after beam circulation that the LHC experienced its crippling breakdown. Since that time the LHC's minders have been dealing with the fallout from the helium leak, painstakingly repairing, upgrading and recommissioning the machine to get it back in working order and to try to forestall a repeat incident.

If all goes according to plan, the LHC's operators could break new ground with the machine in short order. "One thing we didn't do last year was use the LHC as a particle accelerator," Gillies says. "Last year we injected beams and circulated beams before we had the breakdown, but we didn't accelerate them. So once we've got a beam circulating, we'll start testing the acceleration systems of the LHC."

Although the LHC is designed to accelerate protons to a whopping 7 TeV (tera-electron-volts), CERN has long said that it plans to work the machine's energy up over time. The initial target for accelerated beams will be 1.2 TeV, which would already surpass the current top dog among particle accelerators, the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.

Images from the LHC Restart.

In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for

New Scientist, By Anil Ananthaswamy, November 11

AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the "God particle", the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.

"I'm terrified," he says. "Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis."

Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century - the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.

Hence Weinberg's fears. However, if the theorists are right, before it ever finds the Higgs, the LHC will see the first outline of something far bigger: the grand, overarching theory known as supersymmetry. SUSY, as it is endearingly called, is a daring theory that doubles the number of particles needed to explain the world. And it could be just what particle physicists need to set them on the path to fresh enlightenment.

'Iron Lady of the North' in late bid for EU's top job

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:34:34 -0800

Vanessa mock | Nov 17

The Independent - Flame-haired Latvian Vaira Vike-Freiberga, known as the "Iron Lady of the North", is leading a pack of late contenders who have dashed into the closing round of the race to become the EU's first president.

With so much still to play for, diplomats have warned of a long night on Thursday, when EU leaders meet to decide names over dinner. Some suspect the talks will spill over into Friday; others that a decision may be postponed even beyond that, but the Swedish presidency is determined not to let that happen.

Over the past days, another Baltic colleague, Estonia's President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, has added his name to the growing list of presidential hopefuls, which is now thought to include around a dozen potential candidates. Although Tony Blair's chances still look extremely slim, there has been renewed momentum behind a faltering bid by Luxembourg's premier Jean-Claude Juncker and mentions of Spain's ex-leader Jose Maria Aznar. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who was president of Latvia until 2007 and led the former Soviet state into the EU and Nato, is the only female candidate applying for the newly created job. Known for her charisma and outspoken views, she was an enormously popular leader at home, with thousands of grateful Latvians turning out to lay flowers when she retired.

But she is now nearly 72 and despite a vigorous campaign on Facebook and in a string of European capitals looks unlikely to unseat the current favourite, Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy.

However, her candidacy chimes with growing demands to appoint a woman as either President or EU High Representative, the number two post created by the Lisbon
Treaty.

Now you can have what she’s having...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:43:45 -0800

Jeremy Laurance | Lyon, France | November 16

The Independent - As the old joke has it, men can be turned on with a simple flick of a switch while women require attention to a battery of dials and buttons. Today the debate over how to stimulate female sexual desire is set to be reopened with the discovery of a drug described as “Viagra for women”.

Doctors testing a new anti-depressant found it was useless as a mood brightener - but was unexpectedly effective at boosting the female libido.

Now three clinical trials have shown that the drug fibanserin significantly improved sexual desire and satisfaction in women.

The accidental discovery mirrors that of Viagra, which was being tested as a heart medicine in the 1990s when the male subjects prescribed it discovered it had a pleasing side effect.

Libyan Leader in Italy Seeks Tall, Leggy and Pious

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:32:03 -0800

Rachel Donadio | Rome | November 16

NYT - The 200 women who answered a Rome modeling agency’s advertisement for tall, attractive party guests thought they would be attending an elegant soirée on Sunday. They were — only the host turned out to be the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and instead of hors d’oeuvres he offered them copies of the Koran and urged them to convert to Islam, the Italian news media reported Monday.

The women, all between the ages of 18 and 35, assembled in a Rome hotel before being screened by both metal detectors and the fashion police, who turned away anyone in a miniskirt or provocative clothing, according to Paola Lo Mele, a journalist for the ANSA news agency, who answered the modeling agency’s request and went undercover to the event. The women were each paid $75 to attend.

Colonel Qaddafi and other world leaders are in Rome for the World Summit on Food Security of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The women who made the cut were bused to a villa in Rome, ANSA reported, where they waited an hour, unsure of what was to follow, before the famously late Libyan leader arrived.

“All the girls expected a party with a gala dinner,” Ms. Lo Mele reported. Instead, Colonel Qaddafi “made a 45-minute speech on Islam and women’s role in Islam.” He gave the women a copy of the Koran and said that he would pay for them to visit Mecca, the duty of every Muslim, if they converted.

Police catch helicopter jailbird

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:00:11 -0800

Nov 16

Reuters - Greek police have arrested a heavily armed fugitive, Alket Rijai, who embarrassed authorities by twice escaping from prison in a helicopter.

Rijai, a 41-year-old Albanian, was sleeping when policemen stormed his hideout in a village north-east of Athens, a police official said.

"He had no time to use his machine gun, pistols or hand grenades," a police official said.

Another three suspected accomplices were arrested in the same house.

Rijai, who was serving prison terms on multiple counts of murder and robbery, had last escaped the Athens high-security Korydallos prison in February with Greek accomplice Vassilis Paleokostas, who is still at large.

The two first escaped from the Athens jail by a helicopter in 2006. They were recaptured, only to escape by the same method in February.

After economic collapse, Iceland agrees 'honesty' is key

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 08:10:27 -0800

Nov 15

AFP - After a year of soul-searching over the financial crisis that floored Iceland's economy, Icelanders are apparently yearning for the return of old-fashioned qualities like honesty.

Honesty came top on Saturday when 1,500 Icelanders gathered in Reykjavik were asked to discuss what kind of society they wanted.

A grassroots organisation calling itself The Anthill convened a so-called National Assembly of 1,200 people from the age of 18, chosen randomly, along with 300 representatives of organisations and institutions.

They were asked to name the values Icelandic society should be based upon, as well as their vision for the country's future and possible ways of rebuilding the country's economy and society.
..
Halla Tomasdottir, one of the National Assembly organisers, told AFP one of the reasons for the meeting was to try to halt the negativity that has prevailed in Iceland since the start of the crisis.

"We are seeking positive solutions to the situation we find ourselves in. This is a unique opportunity to ask ourselves what kind of a nation we want to be and what kind of a nation we want to hand down to our children," she said.

"Killing" that sparked Velvet Revolution still a mystery

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:09:44 -0800

Katerina Zachovalova | Beroun, Czech Republic | Nov 15

DPA - It was a revolution whose dissident leaders vowed that truth and love would triumph over lies and hatred. Yet Czechoslovakia's 'Velvet Revolution' would not have happened the way it did were it not for what was essentially a lie.

After a bloody crackdown on a non-violent student march in Prague on November 17, 1989, a woman falsely claimed that the riot police had beaten to death her friend, a 19-year-old mathematics student named Martin Smid.

Reports of the alleged death spread like wildfire, rousing ordinary people from their lethargy and igniting the peaceful coup that brought back democracy to Czechs and Slovaks.

Twenty years later, the motivations of the women's false claim - and the role of journalists in spreading it - remains clouded in mystery.

'I am convinced that I will not know until the end of my days what actually happened,' said Jana Smidova, a mother of one Martin Smid - then and now very much alive - who fit the 'dead' student's description.

What is known is that the rumour was disseminated by Drahomira Drazska, then a 23-year-old Prague resident. In a recently re- discovered video from the time, she offered a grueling account of the beating to death of a student.

'They were kicking him in his face with their boots. They were stepping on his head,' she said. 'It was no longer a head. It was devastated living matter.'

Looking straight into the camera, the woman with a round face and shoulder-length hair added: 'All that I have declared is true.'

Drazska's tale, recounted to the regime's opponents, was passed on to the foreign media on November 18, 1989, a day after the bloody crackdown.

Two students fit her description - a blond, chubby-faced Martin Smid from an orderly, middle-class family living in Beroun - a small town outside the capital - and Jana Smidova's lanky, brown-haired son from Prague.

Amid chaos, the classmates and police soon found out that both Martin Smids were still alive. The next day, Czechoslovak state television broadcast what what was then regarded as an unpersuasive denial. But by then, people were already in the streets of Prague.

'It was an impulse that roused many people who would not have otherwise stood up,' Martin Smid, the 'dead' student from Beroun, told the German Press Agency dpa. 'But of course I take no credit. My participation in all this was a coincidence.'

To this day, investigators, historians and journalists struggle to explain why Drazska spread the rumour. Both Smids were not aware of having previously met her.

Despite a lack of convincing evidence, many believe that Drazska was a puppet in a plot orchestrated either by a Communist faction seeking to oust the Party's conservative leadership or by anti- Communist dissidents wishing to overthrow Communist rule altogether.

And many suspect that the dissidents and journalists who ran the false report of publishing what they knew was a falsehood, to help trigger the regime's collapse.

Italy: Mock funeral for ' Venice's death'

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:22:24 -0800

November 14

BBC -
Venetians have been taking part in a mock funeral procession to highlight the city's dwindling population. Organisers of Saturday's event say the population has dipped below 60,000, with many native Venetians choosing to live in more affordable areas. City officials have refuted the claims that Venice is simply a "ghost town", filled only with tourists.

The Venetian architect and historian, Francisco da Mosta, told the BBC that the government needed to step in to make the city habitable for its residents. He said Venice is not being run "with intelligence or dignity". The city's population has dropped by two-thirds since the 1950s and much of the blame has been put on tourism. It has driven up food and property prices, forcing many people to move to the mainland.

Residents carried an empty coffin in a procession of boats to the mayor's office.

Spanish region takes hands-on approach to sex education

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:32:57 -0800

Giles Tremlett | Madrid | Nov 13

The Guardian - Officials launch campaign to teach young people about 'sexual self-exploration and discovery of self-pleasure'

It is a subject that would make most governments blush, but officials in the Spanish region of Extremadura have launched a major programme to encourage what could be described as a more hands-on approach to sexuality.

The region's socialist government has launched a €14,000 (£12,600) campaign aimed at teaching young people how best to set about "sexual self-exploration and the discovery of self-pleasure" – or to put it less delicately: masturbation.

"Pleasure is in your own hands" is the slogan of a campaign that has sparked political controversy and challenges traditional Roman Catholic views on people having sex, even on their own, for non-reproductive reasons.

Hey, maybe Carrie Prejean can give them hand..

Italians outraged as European court rules against crucifixes

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 08:27:47 -0800

After a European court rules against crucifixes in Italian schoolrooms, Italians from across the political spectrum decry an assault on the country's Roman Catholic identity.

Christian Science Monitor, By Nick Squires, November 3

Rome - Italians reacted with outrage on Tuesday after a European court ruled that displaying crucifixes in the country's schools violated the principle of secular education.

Italy's education minister condemned the judgment by the European Court of Human Rights, saying that the Christian cross was a symbol of the country's Roman Catholic religion and cultural identity.

Mariastella Gelmini, a member of the conservative government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, argued that "no one, and certainly not an ideological European court, will succeed in erasing our identity," said

Other ministers said they were appalled by the ruling, calling it "absurd," "shameful" and "offensive."

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologist, Dies at 100

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:47:32 -0800

Edward Rothstein | Paris | November 3

NYT - Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

Also: The Influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Hallowe’en is the devil’s work, Catholic church warns parents

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:10:11 -0700

Graham Keeley & Richard Owen | Madrid / Rome | October 31

The Times - When Victoria Romero, 6, dressed up as a witch for a Hallowe’en party this week she could hardly have imagined that she was provoking the wrath of God by attending a celebration akin to a Black Mass — at least in the eyes of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church in Spain.

Wearing skeleton suits, dressing up as vampires, witches or goblins or slapping on fake blood is not far removed from communing with the Devil, according to the country’s bishops.

However, the bishops, with Vatican backing, have reserved their venom for the millions of parents who allowed their children to celebrate this “pagan” festival.

Father Joan María Canals, the director of the Spanish Bishops Conference Committee on Liturgy, condemned parents for permitting their children to go to “un-Christian” parties when they should be focusing on All Saints Day today and All Souls Day on Monday.

His views were endorsed yesterday by L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, which reported his views under the headline “Hallowe’en’s dangerous messages”.

It quoted him as saying: “Hallowe’en has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.” Parents should “be aware of this and try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death”, he said.

[...]

José Sánchez González, the Bishop of Sigüenza-Guadalajara, in central Spain, went further, suggesting that Hallowe’en parties had a “background of the occult and anti-Christianity”. He said that he saw the dark influence of Hollywood playing with the young minds of Spanish children as they danced innocently around pumpkins, little realising that they were attending a pagan festival.

Prosecution opens case against Karadzic, absent again

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:57:15 -0700

Reed Stevenson | The hague | Oct 27

Reuters - Radovan Karadzic led a campaign to make Bosnian Muslims "disappear from the face of the earth" and carve out a mono-ethnic state for Bosnian Serbs, war crimes prosecutors told a U.N. tribunal on Tuesday.

In opening statements, prosecutors painted a picture of the former Bosnian Serb leader as a supreme commander single-mindedly pursing a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Their statements were delivered to empty chairs on the defendant's side of the court as Karadzic boycotted the trial for a second day.

"The Supreme Commander explained in October 1991 what was coming for Sarajevo: 'Sarajevo will be a black cauldron where Muslims will die. They will disappear, that people will disappear from the face of the earth'," Prosecutor Alan Tieger cited Karadzic as saying.

He was referring to the 43-month siege of Sarajevo that began in 1992 and killed an estimated 10,000.

The break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s saw Serbs, Croats and Muslims fighting for land. More than 100,000 people were killed.

"The supreme commander had directed his forces in a campaign to carve out a mono-ethnic state within his multi-ethnic country," Tieger said, calling him a "hands-on leader who maintained direct contact".