Merkel says errant states should be kicked out of eurozone.

Angela Merkel says the eurozone’s current rules are not sufficient.

ANDREW WILLIS

17.03.2010 @ 17:45 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the eurozone must be able to expel members that repeatedly break the club’s fiscal rules in the future.

In a speech to the German parliament on Wednesday (17 March), the chancellor stressed that such an option would only be used “as a last resort”, but added that the EU’s current Stability and Growth Pact rules are no longer sufficient to deal with the euro area’s difficulties.

“In the future, we need an entry in the [Lisbon] Treaty that would make it possible, as a last resort, to exclude a country from the eurozone if the conditions are not fulfilled again and again over the long term,” Ms Merkel said. “Otherwise co-operation is impossible.”

Market doubts over Greece’s ability to meet refinancing needs in the coming months have plunged the euro area into its greatest crisis in its 11-year history, with the possibility of a sovereign debt default weighing heavily on the euro currency.

With a deficit of 12.7 percent of GDP last year, Athens is grossly in breach of the three-percent limit laid down by stability and growth pact. Other member states have proved little better however, raising the prospect of contagion spreading to other EU countries with weak finances such as Portugal or Spain.

Ms Merkel’s comment’s echo plans outlined by Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, earlier this month, under which a European IMF-style monetary fund would be set up to aid struggling eurozone countries, but backed up by much tougher fiscal rules including the possibility of expelling repeat offenders.

With German public opinion strongly against a Greek bail-out, to which Berlin would be a main contributor, a number of analysts have interpreted Mr Schauble’s plans as a means of avoiding such aid transfers in the future by making it easier for eurozone members to leave the single currency.

At least one senior euro area official greeted Ms Merkel’s statements with sympathy on Wednesday. “An alternative view of ’safeguarding financial stability’ in the eurozone, [a stated desire of EU leaders], is to look for mechanisms that would facilitate an orderly exit of a consistently ‘misbehaving’ member state,” the official told EUobserver.

Greek situation

With the likely need for a treaty change ruling out the quick establishment of such an exit mechanism, Ms Merkel said no member state should be “left on its own” in a crisis.

But she added that: “A quick act of solidarity is definitely not the right answer,” confirming the German line that no aid will be offered to Greece unless absolutely necessary.

That date may arrive at some point over the months of April and May when roughly €20 billion of Greek debt is set to mature. Athens has indicated that the interest rate of 6.3 percent, offered to investors during the country’s last bond issuance, is unsustainable.

On Tuesday, EU finance ministers agreed much of the detail of a mechanism to provide financial aid to Greece, but the political decision to announce the plans has yet to be taken.

A Greek spokesperson said on Wednesday that the country’s centre-left Pasok administration is looking for “clear support” next week from EU leaders at a summit in Brussels, adding that Athens could turn to the IMF if the EU support is not forthcoming.

“I believe the summit is when it will become evident whether the European partners want to support a country … or whether we have to resort to some other solution,” Mr George Petalotis said, report newswires.

Greece has used the threat of turning to the IMF as a means of putting pressure on euro area governments in the past, with EU officials previously indicating their desire to solve eurozone problems internally.

However, reports suggest a number of eurozone countries are softening their stance on potential IMF aid to Greece, with the international organisation already providing technical advice.

“It would be good if the IMF were a part of the package. Finland supports both technical and economic aid [from the IMF]“, Finnish finance minister Jyrki Katainen reportedly said this week.

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EU economic governance inevitable, Belgian PM says

Leterme: “It’s about Europe’s financial stability and it’s not an ideological debate about federalism.”

ANDREW RETTMAN

16.03.2010

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme has said that joint economic governance among some or all EU member states is an inevitable consequence of the creation of the euro.

Speaking in an interview with EUobserver about the prospects for setting up a future European Debt Agency (EDA) and a European Monetary Fund (EMF), Mr Leterme predicted that current resistance to the plans will melt away in the coming year.

“You can have doubts about the political will today …but the idea of strengthened economic government has been put on the table and will make progress. In the end, the EDA or something like it will become a reality. I’m convinced of this,” he said.

“It’s about Europe’s financial stability and it’s not an ideological debate about federalism. I myself am a federalist. But more integration and deeper integration are simply logical consequences of having a single currency.”

Mr Leterme floated the debt agency proposal in the press on 5 March.

The agency would be a new EU institution based at the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg. It would help EU governments to borrow money more cheaply by selling bonds guaranteed by all participating states and channeling funds to national treasuries, within a set of limits.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that if markets bought the bonds at an interest rate just 0.1 percent lower than today, the EU as a whole could save €6.6 billion.

The EMF plan was put forward by Germany and involves the creation of a new fund to grant emergency loans to countries at risk of sovereign default.

Both proposals would require EU states to give up fiscal decision-making powers and to co-ordinate national budgets at the EU level to a far greater extent than today. They could also require financially sound EU countries to prop up their insolvent cousins.

The EMF would most likely need a new EU treaty, which forbids eurozone bail-outs as things stand. But the EDA could be set up on the basis of Article 136 of the existing treaty on “the proper functioning of economic and monetary union,” Mr Leterme’s advisors say.

The Belgian leader may raise the debt agency plan at the EU summit on 25 March. It would be “interesting” for EU leaders to discuss it further at the informal, monthly summits proposed by EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy, he said.

The EDA could initially be set up outside EU structures if need be. “We can do a lot of things on an intergovernmental basis, a kind of coalition of the willing, a coalition of the willing of most of the eurozone countries,” Mr Leterme explained.

‘Doubt in their eyes’

The global financial crisis and the more recent Greek debt crisis have caused a shift in EU thinking.

Recalling an extraordinary EU summit in October 2008, which took place a few weeks after the collapse of the US investment bank, Lehman Brothers, the premier said: “We saw the doubt in the eyes of [French and German leaders] Mr Sarkozy and Mrs Merkel. You could feel that they were thinking that sharing the risks, the common approach is not necessary because they were big enough as countries to save their own banking systems.”

But today, he said: “Even Mr Sarkozy and Mrs Merkel realise that if this was to happen again and there was a problem for one of their banks, it would not be easy to avoid a common approach.”

Mr Leterme cautioned that on the one hand, pro-integration countries must strike while the iron is hot: “[The Greek crisis] creates a momentum which we have to seize.”

But on the other hand, the EDA requires a deep technical analysis best made away from the volatile emotions and media glare surrounding the Greek bail-out case. “The problem is that you should not do this at the moment when it is at the core of the public debate. You have to be able to do it in a more theoretical way, a scientific way,” he said.

From: Sylvia Gardner
November 16, 2009
Mechanical Miracles of the 21st Century

Mechanical Miracles of the 21st Century

Underwater City Starts Yielding Secrets.

Divers Find Pottery, Streets, Courtyards, Tombs and Buildings

AOL News

‘A Frozen Moment of the Past’

Oct. 22) — Scientists have known for 40 years that a 5,000-year-old city lay obscured by water off southern Greece. But divers haven’t had a chance to study the ruins until now.

Scientists are just beginning to unlock the mysteries of Pavlopetri, a submerged city discovered 40 years ago off Greece. During a dive earlier this year, researchers from the University of Nottingham in England determined that the city was 5,000 years old, more than 1,000 years older than first believed. Here, a diver from the team surveys the site in an undated photo.

The Bronze Age site is believed to have been submerged since 1000 B.C.

In an interview in the Guardian, Jon Henderson, associate professor of underwater archaeology at Nottingham, explained the significance of the site.

“It has remains dating from 2800 to 1200 B.C., long before the glory days of classical Greece,” he said. “There are older sunken sites in the world but none can be considered to be planned towns such as this, which is why it is unique.”

The city may have inspired the myth of the lost city of Atlantis, the Guardian said.

The divers have found a wealth of material on the sea floor, including pottery shards, streets, courtyards, tombs and 97,000 square feet of buildings, the Guardian reported. “But what really took us by surprise was the discovery of a possible megaron, a monumental structure with a large rectangular hall, which also suggests that the town had been used by an elite, and automatically raised the status of the settlement,” Henderson said.

The site was discovered in 1967 by Nicholas Flemming, a marine scientist at the University of Southampton, the BBC said. He is a part of the new expedition team, which plans to study the city for five years and publish its research in 2014, the BBC said.

Greece’s underwater antiquities department is co-directing the study. The site “is significant because as a submerged site it was never reoccupied,” Elias Spondylis, an official with the agency, said in an interview with the Guardian. “As such it represents a frozen moment of the past.”

For more on the team’s discoveries, go to the BBC and the Guardian.

Below are two videos on the research project from the University of Nottingham. The second one has Flemming’s account of his discovery of the city.

http://news.aol.com/article/divers-get-first-look-at-underwater-city/732031?icid=main|main|dl1|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fnews.aol.com%2Farticle%2Fdivers-get-first-look-at-underwater-city%2F732031

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So, what submerged this city? What happened to Atlantis? These must have been disasters that did not come because of climate change but their effects show us that life in a location can be extinguished by some event – man made or not. It is our responsibility nevertheless to do every possible human effort so that this does not happen.

——–

Now the clencher:

IT IS SHABBAT NOAH this Saturday!

Jews read Parashat Noah – that is about the ark, the flood … and what caused that flood. You guessed it – it was the human transgressions!  JUST LIKE NOW!!!

So, some will have a “Global Climate Healing Shabbat” this weekend.

THE CLIMATE IS CHANGING AND WHO IS BUILDING THE ARK?

That needs a Jewish Response!

Greek Hunters Take Dim View Of Solar Energy Scheme

Date: 31-Jul-09
Reuters from  GREECE
by Ingrid Melander

MEGALOPOLIS - {a village about 120 km (75 miles) of Athens – big name but small horizon - www.SustainabiliTank.info comment} - Lignite power plants belch dust and smoke into the air above the southern Greek town of Megalopolis, but residents resistant to environmental arguments have blocked a scheme to build the country’s biggest solar energy project on a nearby hillside.

Local game hunters, angry that an earlier plan to grow a forest on the site was scrapped, have gone to court to try to stop the construction of a 50-megawatt solar panel park.

“Under no conditions will we accept sacrificing even one tree … we are not bowing to these interests,” Kostas Markopoulos, president of the Hunters’ Association of the Peloponnese, said on a visit to the site on a hill overlooking the small town.

Below lie the huge open-air mine where lignite, a cheap but highly polluting energy source also known as brown coal, is extracted and adjacent plants where it is burned to generate electricity for southern Greece. The nearest houses stand only about 100 meters away.

Red tape, a lack of political will and local opposition have cramped the development of an otherwise promising renewable energy market in Greece, whose climate is endowed with plenty of sunshine and wind.

This puts Greece far behind European Union leaders in the field, such as much less sunny Germany.

Despite one of the most generous government subsidies and long-term guaranteed electricity prices worldwide, it ranked 18th in percentage of renewables as a proportion of gross electricity consumption in the EU in 2007.

The Megalopolis project, using photovoltaic panels to convert sunlight into electricity, would be one of the biggest solar energy schemes in the world. It is expected to cost 200 million to 250 million euros ($280 million to $349 million).

Nearly two years after electricity operator PPC was granted production licenses, nothing has been built on the site. A court ruling on the hunters’ appeal is still awaited.

SLEEPING GIANT

Investors, waiting for years to tap Greece’s huge potential, say that after decades of struggling with endless bureaucracy, they see some reason for hope as new legislation takes effect.

“In the past 15 years, Greece has been the sleeping giant of European renewables,” said Nikos Vassilakos, who heads a Greek and a European association of investors in renewables. “Now something is moving, maybe at a slow pace but investors have learnt to be patient.”

Greece is notorious for its long licensing procedure, which Vassilakos estimated at three to four years on average.

The government has just passed a zoning law for renewables as well as approved new incentives for individuals to install solar panels on rooftops and sell the electricity, doing away with a licensing process that used to cost thousands of euros.

Within the next two months, it plans to submit a law to shorten procedures for wind farms and small hydroelectric plants.

With installed capacity of about 1,200 megawatts, mostly from wind, Greece must move up a gear to comply with EU rules.

It needs to produce more than a third of its electricity from renewables by 2020, from about 9 percent currently — the figure drops to about 4 percent without large hydro plants, which experts say is a more realistic assessment.

Investors present in the Greek renewables market include Italy’s Enel, France’s EDF, and Spain’s Iberdola as well as other, smaller companies. More than 4 billion euros’ worth of renewable applications are awaiting approval by Greece’s energy regulator.

“It’s an exciting moment,” Vassilakos said. “Look at how big the untapped potential is.”

MISSING THE BIG PICTURE

Walking around the mine and the hamlets bordering the plant, where pollutants in the air burn the throat after just a few minutes, the hunters’ leader Markopoulos is unconvinced.

“A (solar) park here at such a large scale … would be one large mirror that will drive away wildlife,” he told Reuters. “This should be done in other areas, and they exist, that do not destroy the natural environment.”

Environmentalists, investors and local authorities shake their heads in dismay and say the hunters and others lack information and are missing the big picture of environmental, health and economic benefits.

“Building photovoltaics there is going to be better for the environment than a few trees,” said PPC Renewables chief executive Tassos Garis.

“At first we heard things like the temperature will reach 60 degrees Celsius, dreadful things, nothing to do with reality,” said Megalopolis mayor Panayiotis Bouras, who backs the project.

Solar power is usually among the most warmly welcomed green options. Hydroelectric dams can cause anger when valleys are flooded and wind turbines can be called eyesores, but solar power is rarely criticized since its panels are usually quite inconspicuous.

The hunters, who shoot rabbits and other small game in the surrounding hills, are not the only ones worried about the project. Those who depend on the power plant and mine for a living fear jobs will be threatened.

“People work here (in the lignite plant), they earn their livelihood there … what can we do?” said 77-year old Aggeliki, chatting with neighbors near a group of houses a stone’s throw from one of the plants.

Turkey Gets Boost from Pipeline Politics.

by Helena Cobban

WASHINGTON, Jul 19 (IPS) – The political geography of the modern Middle East has been affected for one hundred years by the appetite of westerners and other outsiders for the region’s hydrocarbons. Last week, the region’s “pipeline politics” took another step forward with the signing in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, of an agreement to build a new, 3,300-kilometre gas pipeline called Nabucco, running between eastern Turkey and Vienna, Austria.

The project underlines the new influential role that Turkey, a majority Muslim nation of 72 million people, is playing in the Middle East, and far beyond. The new project’s name was chosen, Austrian officials said, after the Verdi opera that representatives of the five participating countries – who include Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, along with the two terminus states – saw together during an earlier round of negotiations in Vienna.

But the name also gives clues to two intriguing aspects of the project’s geopolitical significance. The theme of the opera is the liberation from bondage of slaves held by the ancient Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (‘Nabucco’) – and it is a widely discussed feature of the Nabucco project that many European nations want access to a gas source that is not under the control of Russia. Last winter, several European nations suffered severe gas shortages after Russia, locked in a tariff dispute with transit-country Ukraine, closed off the spigots completely.

But the other implication of the name is more strictly Middle Eastern. The modern-day home of Nebuchadnezzar is Iraq. Washington has given strong support to the Nabucco project – and one of the reasons U.S. officials give for this support is their hope that once Nabucco is up and running in 2015, Iraq can be one of the nations that reaps large profits by feeding gas into it. However, construction of the pipeline is estimated to cost some eight billion dollars, and many officials in the participating countries are still unclear where they will get enough gas to make it economically viable.

The Nabucco participants had been hoping that a key feeder state would be one of Turkey’s eastern neighbours, Azerbaijan. But on the eve of the project’s inauguration in Ankara, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev took the CEO of the vast Russian gas company Gazprom to Azerbaijan, where they signed a contract with the state gas company that will force Nabucco to compete hard against Gazprom for any purchase it wants to make from Azerbaijan. One fairly evident other source for Nabucco’s would be Iran, which is reported to have considerable amounts of new gas coming online in the next five years.

 The Greens — unique in campaigning on a common Europe-wide platform — proposed a Green New Deal economic plan to invest in environmental initiatives that would create ‘green-collar’ jobs in renewable energy, social care, sustainable housing and public transportation…

They Greens in Europe say – Lets create 5 million jobs – Europe needs a Green New Deal!

There is a way to combat climate change, and there is an answer to the economic crisis. Introducing a Green New Deal we can fight both at the same time. We need policies which will:

- create green collar jobs for five million Europeans within 5 years.

 - mobilise a cohesive strategy for private and public investment in the green economy   that amounts to 500 billion Euros   over the next five years (0,75% of the GDP of the EU).

 - keep energy affordable.

 - help to fight climate change and green the European economy.

The Green New Deal will set the European economy on a sustainable path and place Europe at the forefront of the Green industrial revolution.

———–

“Riding a wave of public concern over the effects of climate change, the Green-European Freedom Alliance bloc captured 53 of the EU parliament’s 736 seats, compared with 43 spots in the last 785-seat assembly… .

The Greens saw their biggest electoral surprise in France, where the Europe Ecologie party took third place nationally.

Acknowledging that support, Prime Minister Francois Fillon said France’s governing conservative UMP party would make tackling the economic crisis and global warming its priorities in the European Parliament.

Greens also took third place in Germany, where they pushed the campaign for renewable energy.

Greek Greens won one seat for the first time, while Green candidates from Sweden and Finland went from one to two seats each.

There were some setbacks. British Greens failed to add to their two seats,

Italian Greens fell short of the 4% threshold for a seat,

and Austrian Greens lost one of their two seats.”

Latvian government could fall as crisis bites.
Leigh Phillips, Brussels, EUobserver, February 4, 2009

As unrest spreads in Latvia as a result of the worsening economic crisis, the government faces a no confidence vote in the parliament on Wednesday (4 February).

The vote could see the first European Union government – and the second in Europe after Iceland – felled by the financial and economic turmoil that has hit Latvia harder than most other states in the 27-member bloc.

Tractors blocked roads in Latvia in the second such protest in a week.

On Tuesday (February 3, 2009), the country’s agriculture minister resigned in the wake of farmer protests that blocked the main road around the capital, Riga, and saw the agriculture ministry building surrounded by tractors.

The farmers lit bonfires outside the ministry building and demanded the minister resign.

In imitation of similar actions by Greek farmers in recent days, thousands of tractor-driving farmers headed to Riga, bringing traffic to a halt on a number of motorways – the second such action in a week.

The government convened an emergency meeting out of which emerged €34 million (22m lats) in fresh aid for the farmers. Shortly after Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis announced the decision, the agriculture minister, Martyns Roze, fell on his sword.

The economic crisis has bludgeoned the country’s farmers, whose productivity has slid as prices plunge. The losses are bankrupting rural Latvia, with producers unable to pay their loans and processing firms going out of business.

Some 15 million lats is to come from the State Forests budget and another 7 million from the Latvian Privatization Agency. The aid amounts to around 5 million lats more than originally planned.

A system of export loan guarantees is also to be established for dairy farmers, which, according to the prime minister, will temporarily save the sector from bankruptcy.

The industrial sector has also dropped off the cliff, with industrial production dropping 2.5 percent in December, equal to a year-on-year decline of 14.2 percent, according to figures released on Tuesday by Statistics Latvia. The fall comes atop an already steep drop of 3.1 percent in November.

Manufacturing has been pummelled in particular, seeing a decline of 18.2 percent on an annual basis.

Some 70 percent of the people have lost faith in the government according to polls and last week, the Union of Greens and Farmers said it would abandon the ruling coalition if the government did not come up with additional aid for farmers.

The prime minister approached opposition parties to join the government, but they all declined his offer.

Meanwhile, the country’s neighbour, Lithuania, is itself seeing fresh protests, a fortnight after riots over the economic crisis hit the capital.

A small demonstration of some 200 people, many of whom pensioners, was countered by 500 police officers and a kilometre-long fence was put up to protect the Seimas, the Lithuanian parliament, from the “unsanctioned protest”, according to Vilnius police commissariat spokesperson Loreta Tumalaviciene, the Baltic Course newspaper reports.

The UN Holocaust event announced for Tuesday January 27, 2009 (The Mandated Day to Remember the Holocaust) is balanced out with an announcement for the Arab Edition on a book on The Question of Palestine. We find this appalling.

//////////////////

From: UN DPI UPDATES (16 – 31 January 2009)

MEETINGS, CONFERENCES AND SPECIAL EVENTS:

Tuesday 27 January 2009

10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: Memorial ceremony at the UN General Assembly Hall :   “An Authentic Basis for Hope: Holocaust Remembrance and Education”, with keynote speaker Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chairman of Yad Vashem Council.   USG Kiyo Akasaka will open the event, which will include a message from United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.   Statements will be made by H.E. Mr. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, President of the 63rd session of the General Assembly, and H.E. Ambassador Gabriela Shalev, Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations. Ruth Glasberg Gold, a survivor of the Transnistria camps, and WWII veteran Leonid Rozenberg will share their personal stories. Cantor Ya’akov Motzen will recite “El Ma’le Rachamim” and “Ani Ma’amin”. The ceremony will also include musical performances by Elisha Abas (piano) and Yoon Kwon (violin). Please register at  holocaustremembrance at un.org or by fax 212-963-0536.    
Wednesday 28 January

1:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.   Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project Book Signing at the UN Bookshop. Mrs. Frances Irwin will present and sign copies of her memoir included in the volume titled “Stolen Youth: Five Women’s Survival in the Holocaust”.   Every January in observance of the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, volumes from the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project are on display in the Public Lobby and for sale in the Book Shop.   Mrs. Jeannie Rosensaft, one of the editors of the memoirs, will discuss the Project, which is an initiative of Nobel Prize laureate and United Nations Messenger of Peace Elie Wiesel, and Menachem Rosensaft, Chairman of the Project’s Editorial Board.

For further information, please contact  holocaustremembrance at un.org

—————

Thursday 29 January

9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.: DPI-NGO briefing on the experience of Jews in Greece during the Holocaust, in the Dag Hammarskjöld Library Auditorium.   Non-UN grounds pass holders please register at  HU2 at un.org .

6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.:   Film screening, “Forgiving Dr. Mengele”, with statement by Ms. Eva Kor, who makes an inspirational visit to Germany, Israel and Auschwitz to come to terms with her experience.     Venue: Dag Hammarskjöld Library Auditorium.   Please register at  holocaustremembrance at un.org or by fax 212-963-0536.

Contact:  mann at The Question of Palestine and the United Nations (Arabic edition):   The Arabic edition of The Question of Palestine and the United Nations will be published by the end of January.        
Contact:  ueki at un.org

—————–

From: UN DAILY NEWS , UNITED NATIONS NEWS SERVICE
16 January, 2009 =========================================================================

BAN URGES UNILATERAL ISRAELI CEASEFIRE IN GAZA; MEETS WITH PALESTINIAN LEADERS

On the third day of his intensive diplomatic mission to secure a ceasefire in the Gaza conflict, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon conferred today with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in Ramallah, and called on Israel to unilaterally cease hostilities.

“We have no time to lose,” he told reporters after his meetings in the West Bank on the 21st day of the offensive Israel launched with the stated aim of halting Hamas rocket attacks against it from Gaza. “A unilateral declaration of a ceasefire would be necessary at this time.” He said he would exert his utmost efforts to realize that goal and underscored his full support for President Abbas’s leadership.

“There is increasing hope that flows from the intensive political discussions that are going on, not least by our Secretary-General, which is much appreciated here on the ground,” a top UN official in Gaza reported, speaking to journalists in New York by video link from ground zero from where he has been giving daily briefings on the death and destruction.

“Let’s keep the urgency and momentum moving, because if there were a briefing tomorrow I am sorry to say there are people alive including children right now who will be dead, so that is where the imperative lies, we have to get the ceasefire because every hour that passes without a ceasefire is costing the lives of innocent civilians here,” Gaza Director of Operations of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) John Ging said.

As of noon New York time the death toll stood at 1,115 dead, including 370 children, with 5,150 wounded, 1,745 of them children, according to Gazan health ministry figures, which UN officials call credible. Mr. Ging said 4,000 more people had fled their homes in the last 24 hours to seek shelter in UN schools, bringing the total to 49,000. Hundreds of thousands of others are estimated to have sought refuge with relatives and friends in less conflict-hit areas of Gaza.

After meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem last night, Mr. Ban told reporters the Israeli Government would make an important decision on a ceasefire and he hoped it would be the right one, with Israel showing the world that it is a responsible member of the UN, abiding by Security Council resolutions. Last week the Council called for an immediate ceasefire.

Following his stop in Ramallah, Mr. Ban travelled to Ankara to meet with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, stressing his determination to work with the Turkish Government to help find solutions to the terrible crisis in Gaza. At the weekend he will go to Lebanon and Syria for talks with Government officials in both countries about the violence in Gaza and southern Israel, before attending the Arab Economic Summit in Kuwait on Monday.

Mr. Ging said UNRWA, which aids 750,000 Palestinian refugees in Gaza, about half the population, is establishing alternative warehouses and is “up and running again” after Israeli shells destroyed the warehouse in its main compound yesterday, sending hundreds of tons of food and medicine up in flames. The fire continued to burn today. “Massive devastation and destruction” was reported in the area of the compound, he added.

“I myself would never have predicted what has happened in full view of the whole world over these past 21 days and nights, but it has happened and continues right now, but I am hopeful, not least because of the efforts of our Secretary-General, which is there for all to see, and I wish others would join him in the degree of commitment and pro-activity that he is bringing to bear.”

DPI UPDATES (16 – 31 January 2009)

• Monday 26 January 2009

• Tuesday 27 January 2009

• Wednesday 28 January

• Thursday 29 January

World leaders, visionaries, advocates, meet to find solutions to scourge of corruption.

13th International Anti-Corruption Conference kicks off on 30 October in Athens, Greece

Athens, 29 October 2008 – As the world faces financial, energy and food crises and the challenges to governance and accountability they pose, the global anti-corruption community gathers for the 13th International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) beginning tomorrow, 30 October 2008 in Athens, Greece.

Under the banner “Global Transparency: Fighting corruption for a sustainable future”, this year’s IACC will examine sustainability as a governance challenge and the role of corruption in some crucial areas: peace and security, the natural resources and energy sectors, climate change and sustainable globalisation.

***

Joining a diverse group of 1300 participants from all regions of the world, will be prominent speakers such as: HRH Prince El Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Managing Director of the World Bank, Siim Kallas, Vice-President of the European Commission, Kostas Karamanlis, Prime Minister of Greece, Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, Festus Mogae, former President of Botswana and recent winner of the Mo Ibrahim Prize and George Papandreou, President of Socialist International and President of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK).

The IACC, first held in 1983, has evolved into the leading global forum on governance and anti-corruption. The conference fosters cooperation and innovation in developing tools to tackle corruption, a scourge that continues to trap millions in a vicious cycle of poverty and threatens sustainable development. The conference brings together heads of state, academics, compliance experts, civil society, business and government representatives, all of whom are engaged in innovative work to prevent and fight corruption in all its forms.

“The objective of this conference is to re-invigorate anti-corruption work by generating new ideas, partnerships and propositions that can match the depth and complexity of corruption in the 21st century,” said the Honourable Justice Barry O’Keefe, Chair of the IACC Council.

Huguette Labelle, Chair of Transparency International added: “The mission of the IACC, to find anti-corruption solutions through policy, trade and awareness, has never been more relevant for alleviating the poverty, alienation and conflict that corruption breeds. The challenges of transparency and accountability are immense, but so is the commitment and creativity of the anti-corruption community gathered here.”

Costas Bakouris, Chair of Transparency International Greece stated: “A constructive discussion about the grounds and ways of confronting corruption in the era of globalisation is imperative. Raising social conscience and building a coalition of all valuable forces is the essential antidote to corruption. The International Anti-Corruption Conference serves this purpose.”

The 13th IACC is organised by the IACC Council in cooperation with Transparency International and Transparency International Greece (Hellas).

 EUOBSERVER / WEEKLY AGENDA (5 – 12 October) – This week will start with a meeting of the EU’s economy and finance ministers (ECOFIN) in Luxembourg on the need for a European response to the international financial crisis, just a day after the bloc’s four biggest states – Germany, France, Britain and Italy – hold emergency talks on the subject in Paris.

The ECOFIN meeting on Tuesday (7 October) is expected to highlight the need for co-operation and cohesion among EU states on the issue, as well as the necessity of constructing a “structural response” to the crisis, rather than taking ad hoc actions.

The ministers will also underline the need to respect the so-called Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) – the rules underpinning the euro, following comments coming from some EU capitals that tackling the crisis should take priority over keeping budget deficits in line with EU rules.

“[The SGP rules] are temporarily not the priority of priorities. The priority is to save the global banking system and the savings of citizens. There is no other choice,” Henri Guaino, a close adviser of French President Nicolas Sarkozy told French television channel Canal Plus on Thursday.

The meeting – which will be preceded on Monday by a meeting of the economy and finance ministers from EU countries using the euro – will also assess the impact of the crisis on banks and insurance companies, as well as on small and medium-sized enterprises.

===============

France believes EU-level measures may have to be cobbled together to aid banks in smaller member states, while denying rumours of a €300 billion package. But Germany has indicated it would not support any European “big-bang” deal.

“What happens if a smaller EU state is hit by a looming bank collapse? Maybe this country does not have the means to save the bank,” French finance minister Christine Lagarde told the Handelsblatt in an interview published on Thursday (2 October). “Therefore the question of a European safety net solution comes up.”

The safety package may be presented by French President Nicholas Sarkozy at a 4 October meeting between himself, the prime ministers of Germany, Italy and the UK, as well as Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Juncker and European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet.

Reports have it that the Netherlands is the source of the €300 billion proposal. The country quickly denied this was the case.

But any suggestion of a European version of US treasury secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion bail-out plan for Wall Street is being stiffly resisted by Berlin. In an interview with German daily Bild, Chancellor Angela Merkel said she opposed writing “blank cheques” for banks.

“The idea of applying one solution, one big bang … is not practicable and would create new, enormous problems,” German finance ministry spokesperson Torsten Albig told reporters yesterday in Berlin. “Germany does not think much of such a plan,” he said, according to AFP.

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso on Thursday welcomed the approval of the package by the American Senate, which had enabled another attempt to hammer out the bill in the House of Representatives and described it as “a good step forward in the right direction.”

But after receiving negative signals from both Berlin and London on the idea of a similar emergency fund worth €300 billion for Europe’s banking sector, French president Nicolas Sarkozy distanced himself from the proposal.

A day later Sarkozy said: “I deny the sum and the principle,” according to media reports. And from Christine Lagarde’s office:   “there was an exchange of ideas but no French proposals. There was no French plan,” AFP says.

Asked by journalists about a possible EU version of the US banking rescue scheme on Thursday, the European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet – also to attend the Paris mini-summit together with commission chief Barroso – openly said it would not work for Europe. “We do not have a federal budget, so the idea that we could do the same as what is done on the other side of the Atlantic doesn’t fit with the political structure of Europe.”

Britain has suggested that solutions to the financial crisis need to be primarily sought by national authorities. “It is right that individual countries would want to take their own decisions, particularly when national taxpayers’ money is potentially at risk,” said spokesman of Gordon Brown, UK’s prime minister: “The purpose of the [Paris] meeting will be to discuss how each of the four major economies in Europe are responding to the global financial crisis,” he added, according to the BBC.

The Irish parliament on Thursday passed a bill fully guaranteeing all bank deposits, which has sparked a controversy in other European capitals about unfair advantage for Irish banks over foreign competitors.

British media reported a rising interest among Brits to switch from the UK’s to Ireland’s banks in a bid to secure their savings in a rising atmosphere of insecurity. Minister Lagarde said in a BBC live interview that better European co-ordination could prevent such cases, arguing that “a measure decided in one [EU] member state has to be shared in advance with other member states.”

EU competition spokesman Jonathan Todd said his department still hadn’t received any formal explanation from Ireland about how its bank insurance programme would work, meaning it was still uncertain whether or not the EU will even clear the Irish move as legal.

The Guardian says that Greece has followed Ireland in offering a guarantee on deposits in all banks operating in the country, after it says savers were getting restless. The paper goes on to say that it puts EU leaders in a difficult position ahead of an emergency summit in Paris on Saturday to find a common response to the crisis.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Welle says that on Thursday the European commission gave the go-ahead to Germany for a €35bn deal to bail out mortgage lender Hypo Real Estate.

And El País says that the EU is struggling to come up with a common response to the financial crisis, with individual member states taking unilateral action to save their own banks: the UK (Bradford and Bingley and Northern Rock), France and Belgium (Dexia), and Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg (Fortis).

****
France and Germany at odds over EU ‘Paulson Plan’ – 02.10.2008

—————————————————————————-
France believes EU-level measures may have to be cobbled together to aid
banks in smaller member states, while denying rumours of a €300 billion
package. But Germany has indicated it would not support any European
“big-bang” deal.
 http://euobserver.com/9/26851/?rk=1

****
EU big four gather for financial crisis talks – 03.10.2008

—————————————————————————-
The leaders of the EU’s four biggest states – Germany, France, Britain and
Italy – are gathering for emergency talks on the financial crisis in Paris
on Saturday, one day after US lawmakers are expected to vote on an amended
bail-out plan. But France says there will be no US-type rescue package for
the EU.
 http://euobserver.com/9/26857/?rk=1

Why doesn’t Greece like carbon capture?
LEIGH PHILLIPS, The EUobserver, September 23, 2008.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – If Europe is to get serious on climate change, we have no choice but to embrace a controversial series of carbon emission mitigation technologies known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS.

Its proponents say without the technology, coal with continue to produce some 60 percent of Europe’s energy needs and all its carbon emissions will continue to enter the atmosphere.

Greece has worries about carbon capture technology similar to those of environmental groups.

***
However, within the Council of Ministers, Greece is one of the technologies biggest opponents, arguing that there are other environmental considerations.

The Balkan country’s concerns have been dismissed as worries about losing competitive advantage to other member states as they are most likely unable to deploy CCS due to earthquakes in the region.

But Greece’s concerns go much further.

The EUobserver recently sat down with Kyriakos Psychas, the Greek mission to the EU’s counselor on the environment to understand his country’s objections.

***

Not against CCS:

“It would not be true to say that we are against CCS,” inists the Greek diplomat, “or that we don’t want to see it developed. In the fight against climate change, we need every weapon available to us.

“But we have to be careful not to let these weapons backfire on us, our children or our children’s children,” he says, arguing that the burial of carbon has to be forever, and so future generations come into play.

He says that when the European Council first made a decision on CCS, it was to develop the technology in an environmentally safe way. “And this has been an on-going concern that we continue to raise. In order to be sustainable, it has to be environmentally friendly and safe.”

“We believe we’re going very, very fast with the wide deployment of this novel technology,” he warns. “The parliament is also in a hurry to implement this basically untested technology.”

“What about the precautionary principle?” he asks. “Environmentally safe application needs time and patience.

“In five years’ time, if there is a big accident, that would be the end of CCS … These people who are rushing this through, without ensuring safety and environmental safeguards, may actually harm what we want to achieve with CCS.”

***

Oil recovery:

“Why this rush? Is it the desire to fight climate change? Perhaps. Is it based on commercial strategies? Perhaps that is also true. Perhaps it is a combination of both,” he says, referring to the interests of oil firms in the technology.

The petrol giants such as Shell and BP are hoping to use a CCS-related process called “enhanced oil recovery” to inject CO2 into geological formations to achieve greater oil recovery.

CCS boosters say that this is not only acceptable, but to be encouraged, as the sale of recovered oil brings online supplementary revenue streams that can thus lower the overall cost of the process.

“All our experience [with CCS] so far has focussed on enhanced oil recovery by petrol companies,” he points out. “But the injection experience is not the same as a storage experience, it is different.”

And here, Mr Psychas points to worries both he and environmental groups have over the corrosive effects on storage sites, and the potential for leakage.

***

Acidic brine in our aquifers:

“If the carbon leaks, how are we going to trap it? How we are going to monitor a leakage if it’s small and far away from the storage site?

The Greek diplomat argues that in order to ensure that there is no potential leakage, implementation first requires at least two years’ worth of measurement of background data that can then be compared to monitoring data during operation of a storage site. Mr Psychas says that thus part of their main efforts in discussions on CCS is ensuring reliability of any monitoring systems.

“We should be very sure we can trust the data, so we need to be very strict with the whole monitoring scheme. We need concise standards and procedures, and a verification and validation process.” He also insists this be done by an independent body.

“Additionally CO2 is not like petrol, it can dissolve minerals. This has already been established by some North American studies. By dissolving the minerals, it can

create escape paths, and since it’s buoyant, it can also get into aquifers.”

Researchers performing a 2006 United States Geological Survey (USGS) field experiment on CCS in Texas found that in their location, buried CO2 dissolved large amounts of the surrounding minerals that were supposed to keep it locked away forever.

The CO2 reacted with salty water in the geological formation turning it as acidic as vinegar. The acidified brine then dissolved other minerals, including metals such as iron and manganese, and large amounts of carbonate materials. Carbonate are often used in the cement used to contain the CO2. If these are dissolved, the CO2 could leak into the atmosphere or the acidic brine into drinking water.

***

Freshwater use:

The diplomat is also concerned about problems that are specific to Greece and other Mediterranean countries.

“Carbon capture requires the use of 90 percent more freshwater than ordinary power stations. That might especially be a problem for areas in southern Europe.”

He also admits that earthquakes are indeed a concern.

“In an earthquake zone such as the south-east Mediterranean, the seismic activity of storing carbon dioxide underground might trigger earthquakes.

“So even if in the end CCS is shown to work, it might still leave some at a competitive disadvantage. We will have developed a technological tool that some countries will not be able to use due to earthquakes.”

Ultimately, like some environmental groups, he is worried that the very expensive process of developing CCS will result in monies being diverted from renewable energies, and allow the coal industry to carry on regardless.

“Of course we have to fight climate change fast, but in doing so, we might just end up burying our problems and not really facing them.

“Everyone is talking about reduction of CO2. This is not reduction – it’s removal.

“It’s like sweeping things under the rug. It’s out of sight and everything looks clean. But we all know the dangers of tripping over the lump. We cannot afford to create a situation that will cause future generations to fall over.”

——————-

Carbon capture in Europe can begin to make money by 2030, report says.

LEIGH PHILLIPS, The EUobserver, September 23, 2008.

A controversial and experimental technology that hopes to scrub coal-fired power production of its carbon emissions and store them underground could indeed be an affordable tool in the European Union’s toolbox of alternative energy systems that aim to fix our climate problems, according to a new report.

Carbon captured from coal plants and stored underground will become economically viable by 2030, according to a new report.

The technology – “carbon capture and storage” or CCS – is the main mechanism for improving the environmental impact of coal plants within a panoply of technologies that are often promoted as ‘clean coal’ by such politicians as George Bush and the coal industry.

The technology – which is actually three different technologies that are still very much under development, the most effective of which is yet to be established – involves ‘capturing’ the carbon from the burning of coal and ’storing’ this CO2 somewhere – perhaps in an exhausted oil field, deep underground or underwater – forever – so that the carbon does not enter the atmosphere.

Apart from environmental considerations, the main obstacle to its uptake is that CCS costs two or three times what conventional coal plants do, and so thus far, power companies have balked at developing the technology.

However, according to a new report from the business management consultancy McKinsey, the technology should be “economically viable” for the private sector by 2030, and so until then, it is essential that the public purse gets the ball rolling by subsidising 10 to 12 demonstration plants to be up and running by 2015.

Until 2030, the technology would add an extra €60 to €90 per tonne of carbon released to the cost of producing coal-powered energy, making the whole idea far too expensive.

But as the cost of buying carbon pollution permits rises under the EU’s emissions trading schemes, by 2030, CCS would cost only an extra €30 to €40 per tonne of CO2, a much more affordable figure, according to a range of calculations from Deutsche Bank, UBS and other institutions.

This figure could drop still further if the technology was adopted by coal plants everywhere around the world, say the McKinsey analysts.

***

Demonstration projects need funding soon:

However, if Europe does not get moving with funding such demonstration projects fairly soon, and if the first commercial projects do not start until well after the demonstration phase, “CCS could struggle to reach large scale in 2030″, says the report – and by then, it will be too late. Europe needs to make massive reductions in its carbon emissions now.

Energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs hailed the report for helping “to push the technology forward”.

His comments are unsurprising, as the European Commission strongly backs the development of CCS, and as part of its package on climate and energy unveiled in January, it proposed a regulatory framework that would enable monies from the emissions trading scheme (ETS) to support CCS development.

With CCS currently under discussion in the European Parliament, Chris Davies, the British MEP responsible for steering the dossier through the parliament, has suggested that €10 billion from the ETS be set aside to finance demonstration projects.

Last March, European leaders also committed themselves to having 10 to 12 demonstration plants online by 2015.

However, despite this pledge, divisions on the technology within the council are substantial.

The UK and the Netherlands are strong backers, as carbon storage can also be used as a mechanism for pumping out extra oil from a dying oil field, something which the two countries believe can extend the life of their North Sea oil industries.

Before the recent change of government, Italy had strong oppositions, but the new Berlusconi administration has rallied behind the idea.

Germany meanwhile is wavering, while Greece is the most outspoken opponent, echoing the environmental criticisms of such groups as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and is afraid that because the country lies in an earthquake zone, it will not be able to deploy the technology anywhere in its territory and will be frozen out of any benefits from emissions reductions, meaning they will have to be made elsewhere in its economy.

***

No such thing as clean coal:

Most environmental groups are steadfastly opposed, saying there is no such thing as clean coal and worry that the manoeuvre will allow the coal industry to stay in business while genuine renewable sources of energy such as wind, geothermal and solar power are sidelined.

A number of diplomats also ask why a particular technology should be benefiting from subsidies, and not renewables.

Green groups say that in any case 2030 is not soon enough to deliver the emissions savings Europe needs to make.

“The report only proves that CCS cannot be delivered within the right time frame. Climate change scientists such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say emissions must peak before 2015,” said a campaigner with Greenpeace, Joris Den Blanken.

“It’s just too late. Better to start right away with investing in energy efficiency and technologies that are already proven such as renewables.”

They are also concerned that CCS wastes energy, with the technology itself requiring 10 to 40 percent of the energy produced by a power station.

Environmentalists also fear that storing carbon underground is not safe or permanent, and argue that the technology is incredibly water-intensive, adding extra pressure on the already limited water resources of southern EU member states.

Ecologists are not however of one mind on the subject.

Norwegian environmental group Bellona argues that whatever the demerits of CCS, governments must be realistic and recognise that if Europe does not take the lead in developing the technology, other jurisdictions, notably China, are moving ahead with building dozens of new coal plants that without CCS technology strapped on will wipe out all the other efforts of Western governments and industry at reducing carbon emissions.

The Worldwide Fund for Animals, or WWF, also feels that CCS is a necessary evil.

Mr Davies’ proposal is to be voted on by the parliament’s environment committee on 7 October.

To read an interview with the environment attache for Greece’s mission to the EU on his country’s opposition to the technology, please read this companion article.

Libya says Mediterranean Union will divide Africa: Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi – the only one who was invited to the launching of the Mediterranean Union, but declined to attend – he prefers to see Arab dominance in Africa – not North Africa as part of a European Alliance.

RENATA GOLDIROVA for the EUobserver, August 5, 2008.

Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi has reaffirmed his critical stance towards the Union for the Mediterranean – the brainchild of French President Nicolas Sarkozy – saying it will divide the 53-nation African Union.

“We have good relations with European countries, with the European Union, but I do not accept integration into the Union for the Mediterranean,” Colonel Gaddafi said on Monday,   July 4, 2008, AFP reports.

Libya’s head of state – once isolated by the West – added he did not agree with “cutting up Africa for hypothetical prospects with Europe” referring to a possible split between north African countries and the rest of the African Union.

Muammar Gaddafi was the only leader who refused to attend the launch of the Mediterranean union in Paris in July.

Mr Sarkozy’s plan brings together 43 states – the 27-member EU as well as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Turkey, Israel, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Monaco and Mauritania.

The aim is to boost ties between the EU and its southern neighbours. At the moment, it is focussed on six specific projects, including the cleaning up of Mediterranean pollution, the development of maritime and land highways and the setting up of a joint civil protection programme on prevention and response to disasters.

But Muammar Gaddafi, who came to power in 1969 and has become the Arab world’s longest serving leader, has labelled the participation of African countries in the Mediterranean project a “violation” of resolutions by the African Union.

In addition, he has accused the EU of wanting to dominate its southern partners, once under European colonial rule.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Credit Sarkozy for working to revive a club – that is the Mediterranean Club.

By CHRIS PATTEN, OXFORD, England, and posted as http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/eo20…

Maybe it is time to be a bit more generous to French President Nicolas Sarkozy and look at the outcome of what he does rather than the way he does it.

The original launch of the Mediterranean Union almost sank the whole enterprise. Appearing to speak without giving the issue much thought, Sarkozy initially proposed a club of European and mostly Arab states along the Mediterranean’s shore. It would have been in essence a French-run enterprise that the rest of Europe would have paid for. This did not go down well, particularly with the Germans.

Suspicion was strong that the French were trying to find a way to buy off Turkey with a relationship falling well short of European Union membership.

So the auguries for an attempt to revitalize Europe’s relationship with its Mediterranean partners were not good. But by the time of this month’s grand Paris Summit to send the new club on its way, initial suspicions had largely dissipated.

Sarkozy bowed to his European critics and enjoyed a diplomatic triumph. We shall soon see whether there is substance to the initiative, or whether it is just a coat of fresh paint on an old and tired idea.

The original Barcelona Process, launched in 1995, was an excellent scheme. Intended to provide an economic and political backdrop to peacemaking through confidence-building in the Middle East, it was an admirable recognition of Europe’s historical, commercial, cultural and political ties with its neighbors south of the sea, which have brought us all together over the years.

There were aspirations for a free-trade area by 2010. There were pledges of political integration based on shared values. There were people-to-people links. There was a forum where Israelis and their long-term Arab foes could sit together and discuss other matters than the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Development projects were funded through grants or cheap loans, and these have probably played at least some part in increasing the attractiveness of the Maghreb and the Mashraq to foreign investors.

There was some lowering of agricultural and other tariffs by the EU. Dialogue on political reform, and the euros to support it, helped further the process in some countries, notably Morocco and Jordan. There was some cooperation on common problems like illegal drug use and immigration.

Yet, the successes of the Barcelona Process were modest: a great idea on the launchpad had difficulty getting off the ground. So Sarkozy deserves at least 2 1/2 cheers for trying to revitalize it. But if the Mediterranean Union is to achieve more than was managed in its first manifestation, a number of things will need to happen.

First, Europe is better at talking about free-trade areas than delivering free trade. For example, there are still too many barriers to agricultural trade between the north and the south. And guess which country leads the opposition to any significant opening up of European agriculture. France, take a bow.

Second, however slow we have been in opening up a real Mediterranean market, the barriers to freer trade between Arab League countries are just as great.

Third, it was excellent that, in Paris, Sarkozy began the process of bringing Syria in out of the diplomatic cold. Hopefully, his attempts to act as a peace broker between West Bank Palestinians and Israel are also blessed with success.

But the truth is that Europe, for all the gallant efforts of Javier Solana, has been absent from serious politics in the Middle East. We have not dared cross the absentee monopolists of policy in Washington.

Europe should get more seriously involved, even at the risk of occasionally irritating America, which may be less likely to happen once the Bush administration is history.

For a start, we should recognize that there will be no political settlement in Palestine without including Hamas. What would incredibly have been former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s first visit to Gaza in his first year of peacemaking had to be canceled recently because of security concerns. Enough said.

Europe must decide how serious it is about all the admirable stuff in the Barcelona Process regarding pluralism, civil society, the rule of law and democracy. Should a shared concept of human rights be one of the foundations of our Mediterranean partnership?

If so, what are we in Europe proposing to do about it? If this is just blah-blah, better not say it. We discredit ourselves and important principles when we say things we don’t mean.

————-

Lord Patten is a former governor of Hong Kong and European commissioner for external affairs. He is currently chancellor of Oxford University and co-chair of the International Crisis Group.  www.project-syndicate.org)

EU threatens obligatory visa for US diplomats: Travel between Europe and the US is set to remain a hot topic for the coming months.

HONOR MAHONY, for EUobserver.com July 23, 2008

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.

“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.”

At the moment, citizens from 12 of the 27 member states need a visa when travelling to the US – these include most of the ex-Communist countries that joined the bloc since 2004 as well as Greece.

The visa issue has bubbled below the surface continually since the EU’s major enlargement to the east four years ago.

The countries it took on included several very pro-US states – some of whom committed troops to Iraq – and they could not understand why their citizens were not being treated equally to citizens from western states such as Germany, France and the UK.

Earlier this year, Washington irritated Brussels by initiating air passenger data deals with individual eastern countries on the understanding that they in return would also become part of the US visa-waiver programme.

The Czech Republic reached a deal with Washington in spring, it was later followed by Hungary and Bulgaria.

The European Commission was annoyed at what it saw as Washington’s divide-and-rule tactics, especially as it believed the bloc’s data privacy laws would be undermined as a side effect.

Eastern member states have often raised the prospect of reciprocity on the visa issue but this is the first time that the commission has come with a concrete retaliatory suggestion.

“It is unacceptable that nationals from some third countries can benefit from visa-free travel to the EU whilst some of our fellow EU citizens cannot travel visa-free to those countries,” said EU justice commissioner Jacques Barrot.

The US visa waiver programme was set up in 1988 and originally focussed on restricting immigration, but the emphasis changed to a security issue after the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

Washington assess countries for inclusion in the programme on the basis of a number of criteria such as the number of visas that have been refused – however the EU would like the bloc to be treated as whole.

Travel arrangements between the two blocs is set to continue as a hot topic for the coming months.

The US has already announced plans to create an Electronic System of Travel Authorisation for all citizens travelling to the States, including Europeans, from January next year. It maintains it is not a disguised form of visa, but the Europe Commission has yet to establish whether it amounts to a visa policy or not.

July 3, 2008. Liberal leader expresses dismay at socialist populism over Lisbon Treaty.

On the margins of an ALDE Group meeting in Tallinn yesterday, European Liberal Democrat Leader, Graham Watson, met Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip to discuss the future of the Lisbon Treaty in light of the Irish referendum and recent unhelpful remarks by European socialists (notably PASOK President George A. Papandreou and Austrian Chancellor Gusenbauer) demanding referendums on changes to the Treaty.

“Recent moves by Socialist leaders to make all EU treaty changes dependent on national referenda is at best irresponsible and at worst – an ill-conceived bow to populist pressure. Pawning the solution to the treaty stalemate is a bid to court eurosceptic voters which makes us all hostages to fortune” said Watson after the meeting. “The Irish rejected the Treaty, so it is right that their Government be invited to come back with an alternative solution to the dilemma we now face. Their task will not be assisted by such unilateral declarations.”

Watson went on to praise Estonia’s constructive role in Europe and the country’s Liberal economic model combining a flexible labour market and strict fiscal policies.

Deutsche Welle says Ireland has dashed hopes of a quick fix to the uncertainty caused by the Lisbon treaty rejection, after Irish foreign minister Micheál Martin said that he didn’t think there would be any solution on the table by October.

Meanwhile, at a summit of EU leaders that kicked off last night, French president Nicolas Sarkozy accused the EU’s trade chief of causing the Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty, says the Telegraph.

Sarkozy said Peter Mandelson’s policies had alarmed Irish farmers and contributed to the no vote.

The Belfast Telegraph says that Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen is due to have more talks with his EU counterparts today as the summit continues, after EU countries agreed to give the Irish until October to come up with a solution to the impasse.

Meanwhile, the Irish Times reports that Sarkozy may visit Ireland in July to hear the Irish perspective on the no vote. France is keen to get the treaty ratified during their presidency of the EU, which is fast approaching.

And the Guardian says that Sarkozy has put pressure on the Irish to vote again on the treaty, and encouraged the other eight member states which have not ratified it yet to do so as swiftly as possible.

The Euobserver presents three different Commentaries on the subject:

[Comment A] A coalition of the willing has to bring Europe back on track – 19.06.2008 – 16:58
—————————————————————————-
The time is up for mini-compromises and mini-solutions. We need a coalition of the willing to get Europe back on track, argues Christoph Leitl, President of SME Union and Honorary President of
Eurochambres.
 http://euobserver.com/9/26359/?rk=1

[Comment B] The EU: reform or self destruct? – 19.06.2008 – 16:33
—————————————————————————-
The better way out would be to accept the Irish No vote for what it was – a rational rejection of deeper EU integration – and to carry out the reformsthat were promised in the Laeken Declaration, writes Open Europe Director Neil O’Brien.
 http://euobserver.com/9/26356/?rk=1

[Comment C] Democracy may be the price for securing a Lisbon agreement – 19.06.2008 – 09:51
—————————————————————————-
The EU’s democratic deficit has killed the Lisbon Treaty, argues Peter Sain ley Berry. Nevertheless, a non-treaty ‘Lisbon
Arrangement’ might succeed if a real extension of European democracy was on the agenda.
 http://euobserver.com/9/26355/?rk=1

This year’s Green Week will focus on efforts to live more sustainably, says Stavros Dimas

Mankind is consuming the Earth’s natural resources at an alarming rate, yet few people realise how fast this is happening. We produce more waste than we can recycle as a useful resource. Urgent action is needed to raise public and political awareness and to reverse these trends. Green Week 2008, which the European commission is hosting in Brussels from 3 to 6 June, will tackle this issue head on under the slogan ‘Only one world: Don’t waste it!’

Green Week is the biggest annual conference event dedicated to EU environment policy. It brings together some 3000 participants from policy-making, science, business and non-governmental groups, from all over Europe and beyond. Now in its eighth year, Green Week has established itself as a crucial forum for environmental dialogue and sharing of best practice. It provides an invaluable opportunity for the commission, parliament and other EU institutions not only to explain what they are doing but also to listen to and learn from a wide spectrum of stakeholders with considerable expertise to contribute. The ultimate objective is to find the most effective ways to protect and improve Europe’s environment, now and for the future.

The resource demands of today’s global population of 6.8 billion people – our ‘ecological footprint’ – already exceed the Earth’s biological capacity by over 25 per cent. This means we are depleting the planet’s ecological stocks faster than nature can regenerate them and eroding resources for future generations. Europe’s footprint surpasses our biological capacity by even more – if the rest of the world used as many resources as we do, we would need more than two Earths. Making our use of natural resources more sustainable is thus key to addressing the major environmental challenges that Europe and the world face. That is why Green Week 2008 will also focus on three environmental themes that are closely linked to the issue of resources use, as well as being major challenges in their own right: sustainable consumption and production, climate change, and nature and biodiversity.

This focus reflects the fact that climate change and loss of biodiversity are being driven in part by our growing hunger for energy and other natural resources. Current consumption and production patterns are a major contributor to this demand. At European level we are addressing the resources issue by implementing the commission’s strategy on sustainable use of natural resources, presented in late 2005, together with its complementary strategy on waste. These strategies will form the backdrop to several Green Week discussion sessions.

The resources strategy has helped to create momentum at international level, which has led to the establishment by the UN environment programme of the international panel for sustainable resource management, in which the European commission is closely involved. A session on the first day of Green Week will be devoted to the resource panel and its future work. As well as being central to efforts to achieve more sustainable use of resources, the sustainable consumption and production (SCP) theme is also highly topical: the commission is currently putting the final touches to an action plan on SCP and sustainable industrial policy, which I expect to come out either during Green Week itself or shortly afterwards. The action plan will be the focus of several discussion sessions.

Taken together, the programme of almost 40 individual sessions covers a very broad range of issues – from the commission’s plans to revise the EU emissions trading scheme to waste management in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, from the economic effects of biodiversity loss to the application of extended producer responsibility for products, and from water saving to the pros and cons of biofuels.

Green Week also has a lively side events programme and a highlight this year will be a ceremony on the evening of 3 June to announce the winners of the 2008 European business awards for the environment. These awards are one of the ways in which the commission encourages and rewards European companies that set an example to their peers by combining environmental concern, innovation and economic viability. Eleven companies from seven different EU countries are vying for awards in four categories: management practices, products, processes and international cooperation.

Stavros Dimas is European commissioner for environment

Climate Destruction Will Produce Millions of ‘Envirogees’
By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted May 27, 2008.

The rise of environmental disasters from climate change and destruction of ecosystems will create a surge of refugees across the planet. Chew on this word, jargon lovers. Envirogee.

It carries more 21st century buzz than its semi-official designation climate refugee, which is a displaced individual who has been forced to migrate because of environmental devastation. Maybe the buzzword will catch on faster and shed some much-needed light on what will become a serious problem, probably by the end of this or the next decade. That light is crucial, because so far envirogees haven’t been fully recognized by those who certify the civil liberties of Earth’s various populations, whether that is the United Nations or local and national governments whose people are increasingly on the move for a whole new set of devastating reasons.

In short, immigration is about to enter a new phase, which resembles an old one with a 21st century twist. For thousands of years, humanity has fled across Earth’s surface fearing instability and in search of sustainability. But that resource war has kicked into overdrive thanks to our current climate crisis — a manufactured war with its own clock. And the clock is ticking.

From earthquakes in China to cyclones in Myanmar to water rationing in Los Angeles, societies are shifting like their borders. And all the outcry over so-called illegal immigration neglects to answer one time-honored question: If the borders aren’t standing still, why should the people who live in their outlines do so? Especially when they’re under attack from catastrophic floods, fires, droughts and any number of other environmental dangers?

Right now, the 1951 Geneva Convention does not recognize the envirogee phenomenon, instead focusing on immigration as a result of political persecution. But then again, it was established over five decades ago when Earth’s climate was anything but a terrorist. But the Geneva Convention, like everything that must adapt or die, needs to mutate in time with the rest of the world and its hyperconsuming inhabitants in order to remain relevant in our still-new millennium.

Here are some startling envirogee numbers to crunch: According to the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Earth’s fracturing communities will have 150 million envirogees by 2050. According to Australian climatologist Dr. Graeme Pearman, coastal flooding resulting from a mere two-degree rise in temperature would kick 100 million people out of their danger-zone homes by 2100.

Here’s more scary data. Desertification is claiming land from China to Morocco to Tunisia and beyond at an increasing rate. New Orleans and parts of Alaska are slowly sliding into the sea, while the former, as Hurricane Katrina ably illustrated, is becoming a reliable target for intensifying weather events, human corruption and half-assed infrastructure. Aquifers around the world are shrinking, while acidification is claiming cropland in Egypt and beyond. Hypoxia has claimed portions of the ocean itself with alarming speed, as stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific lose oxygen and, by extension, the marine life that not only feeds millions but establishes the continuity of the food chain.

No food chain, no food. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

But numbers are fallible, which is another way of saying the above figures are most likely best-case scenarios. In other words, the future is now. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the IPCC might have taken home a Nobel for their statistics and bleeding hearts, but their math was significantly off. Worse, the rate at which these things happen is rising exponentially.

“The rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentrations accelerated over recent decades along with fossil fuel emissions,” explained a report on methane and CO2 rises by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Organization for Atmospheric Administration. “Since 2000, annual increases of two ppm or more have been common, compared with 1.5 ppm per year in the 1980s and less than one ppm per year during the 1960s.” As for methane, in 2007 it exploded by 27 million tons after a decade with relatively no rise at all. Think about that next time you eat that Happy Meal.

So what’s an envirogee to do, other than opt out of wasted fantasies like Happy Meals, factory farming, bottled water and Hummers? What else? Move.

Which is what envirogees worldwide are already doing right now, by choice or by gunpoint, and will do more often than not as situations on the ground and in the air deteriorate.

The conflict raging in Darfur is a sobering example of the complexity of the situation. It has so far displaced 2-3 million people, and for all the talk of political or religious persecution, the fact remains that it is at its root an environmental crisis. An arid desert whose water is drying up by the day, Darfur is one of the first flashpoints of our new phase of climate conflict, a conflict that U.N. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon explained in the Washington Post as one “that grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation and a scarcity of resources, foremost among them water.” But this too should have been foreseen: According to remote sensing, Darfur sits atop of an underground lake that once used to hold over 600 cubic miles of water and dried up thousands of years ago.

And like Darfur, we are numbly sitting atop our climatological past while it races to catch up with us. Parched by thirst and hungry for fossil fuels which, in turn, only exacerbate that thirst and the wars it engenders, envirogees are streaming out of these hot zones into less murderous ones, whose inhabitants are circling their wagons on the outsiders. Civil wars are breaking out. Outsiders, in turn, are becoming invaders. The irony is rich.

It gets richer, or poorer, depending on where you stand on peak oil. The planet’s shrinking petroleum reserves are now more valuable than ever, and the prices for its capture and capitalization show zero sign of returning to normal. That expense is also beginning to be measured in lives, as carbon concentration exponentially increases and weather events become more extreme.

And you all know what they say about extreme times calling for extreme measures.

We’ve been here before, which is to say on the brink of extinction. In one instance, drought shrunk our numbers to about 2,000 scattered in a diaspora across Africa, a fearsome thought for a 21st century superpower that may be entering its own permanent drought. But the wrinkle is different this time around the tightrope: We built this coming dystopia with our own hands.

And that’s going to reshape not just immigration policy, but the concept of immigration altogether. And that’s where the envirogee comes in. The envirogee, you see, is on the run from himself.

In other words, and no matter how much blowhards like CNN’s Lou Dobbs bitch and whine, the inconvenient truth of climate change, and its rampant resource wars for what’s left of the planet’s stores, remains a reality. Beneath genocide in Darfur lies a desert that used to be a lake. There probably isn’t a better metaphor for our current hyperhighway to hell in existence, if one could argue that it was a metaphor to begin with. But one can’t, because it is reality, pure and simple. And so are envirogees, regardless of the outdated assertions of the Geneva Convention or the staid refusals of the insurance industry to wake up and smell the hurricanes.

“If we keep going down this path,” French prime minister Nicholas Sarkozy argued to the superpowers gathered at the Major Economics Meeting in Paris last month, “climate change will encourage the immigration of people with nothing towards areas where the population do have something, and the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others,” he stressed.

That is, we won’t be worried about Mexicans coming to the U.S. for economic reasons, or Africans doing the same in France and England. We will be worried about hyperviolent cyclones, floods and droughts destroying what’s left of our jobs and the people who want them, as we all pack our crap and move northward, where temperate weather and more bountiful supplies of water, gas and food lie. We will be the ones enduring the hard stares and perhaps bullets fired from locals who are circling their wagons against victims of their own consumption and apathy.

Whether or not we can settle, literally, with that solution, time will tell. But according to the continually underperforming science of climate crisis, we won’t settle for long. Barring any meaningful sociopolitical or economic engagement, to say nothing of much-needed technological revolution, on the issue, we’ll have turned from territorial citizens into climate nomads, all in a cosmological eyeblink.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

May 15, 2008 was the main Hooray of CSD 16. In Conference Room 4 was going on “at High Level” – Deputy Assistant Secretary of a Ministry, and Second Secretary of a Permanent Mission to the UN – the “Thematic Cluster for the implementation cycle 2008/2009 – review session. But outside that room there were so many true high level parallel side events, CSD Related Events, Learning Center Sessions, and Other UN Activities, that trying to cover that whole gamut of events, I had to walk in and out – choosing particular presentations, and obviously loosing out on much of the discussion.

I will proceed now to try to give some proof why I still think that the UN CSD has to be saved – rather then walked away from with disgust.

First, under the category of Other UN Activities, during the UN lunch break 1:15 – 2:30 pm, in conference room 7, UNCTAD, with invitation to everybody interested, this including the CSD participants, had a “
Briefing on the outcome of the 12-th session of the UN Conference on Trade and Development that was held in Accra, Ghana, April 20-25, 2008.

I picked up the documents, listened to the opening, and when the first speaker started to show the touristic markets of Accra, I left. I had later the chance to find out that someone connected to UNCTAD did in effect not know the name of one of the first that did run that organization. I am attaching here the “Accra Declaration” and note that UNCTAD, that was created as an antidote to the World Trade Organization, has worked itself into a corner of irrelevance. My belief is that it should be merged into the CSD as trade is definitely part of development, and it   has thus to be pursued in the context of Sustainable Development. Again, if the CSD is aching but needed, it can be improved eventually if less outside organizations are let to run around lose – turning themselves into touristic experiences.

Also a general UN event held during the lunch-time UN recess:

This event was sponsored by the Permanent Mission of the Philippines as per UN General Assembly Resolution 55/282.
Actually, the organizers had invited Mr. Kiyotaka Akasaka, the USG for Communications and Public Information. Seemingly busy he delegated participation to a much more eager and UN troubleshooter Mr. Eric Falt who has been brought in this year – as Director of the Outreach Division of DPI, to help save the UN from itself.

This event will have a follow up of sorts on May 21, 2008 with the help of the SUSTAINABLE FUTURE CAMPAIGN www.sustainablefuturecampaign.com and the UN Youth and Student Association of Austria www.afa.at
We will mention here that youth is a CSD “Major Group” and 14 delegations prided themselves with having had a youth representative at CSD 16. The youth had also a desk in the corridor and did their naive best to try to convince those present at the CSD meetings to take their task seriously.

But from all of these activities, as said, the most impressive were the four parallel events of the “Side Events” to   CSD 16 that were held during the lunch-time intermission:

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The event in Conference room 2 was organized by the ICLEI of the EU showing off an integrated sustainable development program in the “County of the South East” of the Spanish Island of Gran Canaria (Gran Canaria Sur Este, Spain, that includes the communities of – Aguimes, Ingenio, and Santa Lucia.   www. surestegc.org The event’s   shepherd was   Mr. Jan-Gustav Strandenaes, Senior Policy Advisor, The Northern Alliance for Sustainability, (ANPED}, The Stakeholder Forum, and the Partnerships for Sustainable Development.

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The event in Conference Room 4 was a high powered technical event organized by Greece and involving the European Commission’s Mediterranean initiative with special emphasis on the Impact of Climate Change on Water Resources in the region. The event, besides the EU, also involved the Arab Network for Environment and Development (RAED) a high official of Tunisia, and the leader on Environment issues for the UN Economic Commission for Western Asia (UN-ESCWA) thus bypassing an Israeli participation. This was unfortunate because in other Mediterranean fora there is a very positive history of cooperation between Israel and the Arab States – including in fora organized by the EU under Spanish leadership. The unfortunate part is in the participation of ESCWA that is located in Damascus, even though in the past, in private discussion, upon a question about the need of regional cooperation on subject of Middle East environment, I remember that Dr. Hosni Khordagui told me that he cooperates regularly with Israeli scientists.

Originally, invited were also a representative of Lebanon, the African Development Bank, and the World Bank – but they did not confirm their participation and did not show up.

Professor Scoulos pointed out that ” some non-EU members of the group have yet to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, others have difficulties in implementing it correctly.” Recently the Mediterranean countries have adopted the Almeria Declaration to the Barcelona Convention of 2005, identifying a number of measures and common actions on climate change.

He pointed out that the Mediterranean area can expect by 2100 a temperature increase of 2.2 -5.1 degrees C and total precipitation drop of 4-27% In the Middle East there will be competition over water resources. There will be migratory pressure from South and East.   www.mio-ecsde.org and www.gwpmed.org

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The Dag Hammarskjold Library Auditorium event organized by the Norway, dealt with our need to change the ways of economic development, what technically is called MITIGATION of climate change – and the need for ADAPTATION in order to handle disasters caused by climate change. This was the downside of climate change – the recognition that we have done very little to avoid it and very little to help those most threatened.

With opening statements from the Norwegian highest ranking UNDP official, Director of the Bureau for Development Policy, Mr. Olav Kjorven, and the Panel Chair, Ambassador Mona Elisabeth Brother from the Norway Ministry of Foreign Affairs foreign aid programs, and the Permanent Representative of Denmark to the UN (Ambassador Carsten Staur) it was for the Permanent Representatives of Haiti (Ambassador Leo Merores, President of ECOSOC) and Grenada (Ambassador Angus Friday, Chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States – AOSIS) to state the obvious facts that it is the weakest States that are the first to suffer from the effects of climte change.

The Heads of the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery at UNDP, The new office of Climate Change effects established by UNSG Ban Ki-moon, and Field Support team of the Red Cross (IFRC) were there to point out the Human and Security problems that will be resulting from climate change induced massive migration. There is very little heartening that can be expected with such visions. Norway is there to worn us with the need to prepare to act.

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The fourth among the “Side Events” during the lunch time break of May 15th, – held in room 6 – the smallest of the rooms – was probably the most important from all the four important events. This was the reason we decided on our title for this posting, and as we will eventually see from the reporting dealing with the following day’s closing of CSD 16, it will become clear that I do regard the penultimate day to be of higher value,   that might show more lasting effect.

The two main presentations were by Ahim Steiner and Michel Jarraud, but to us the special thing was the position taken by Josue Dione. He came out saying that for food security Africa has to develop it by themselves, and he gave the example of Malawi who did the right thing and now are not short of food anymore, In effect they do export food now to neighboring countries. The point is that Africa must stop complaining and start digging themselves out from hunger by themselves. Sure it needs help but Africa has to do the work.

Among the material I picked up here was a set of data collected by the UN as Energy Indicators for Sustainable Development for: Brazil, Cuba. Lithuania, Mexico, Russia, Slovakia, Thailand.

And two recent volumes published by Springer which I intend to review separately:

a – “Climate and Land Degradation” edited by Mannava V.K.Sivakumar and Ndegwa Ndiang’ui.

b – “Managing Weather and Climate Risks in Agriculture” edited by Mannava V.K. Sivakumar and Raymond P. Motha.

Aeschylus wrote the original play eight years after having participated in the sea battle of 480 BC, in which 310 Greek Ships under Themistocles beat off the attacking 1200 Persian ships lead by King Xerxes, son of the late King Darius. Xerxes mother appears in the show, Darius’s ghost is acting up also. Aeschylus was on the winning side, so was large part of the audience that saw the play. The Play probes the losers ambitions, the idea of empire, and was probably intended to off-warn similar development in Aeschylus’ own Athens. He achieves his goals of forewarning Athens by presenting a remorseful Xerxes, and by showing his demotion in his openness post-factum, Aeschylus tells generations to come of how war is misery. Dr. Mahmood Karimi-Hakkak explains in the program that in his Siena version, he punctuates scenes with contemporary sounds and imagery, so that by relying on what we know, we can then understand the misery and horrors that Xerxes caused, and how he concludes about himself as “a sad hollow, born to bring home …/ sorrow, sorrow … my heart howling from its bony cage.” But then, on the other hand, to bring the drama even more home to us, when Xerxes finally vanishes under the weight of the shields of the dead, those shields’ backsides turn to us as mirrors – now think – you folks how things are right here in our times!

We see The Persian as a man whose life is devastated by his actions and the effect the fall of his people had to cause his fall, which then effected even further his surviving people. The Editor of this version, Michael Sham, reminds us that Herodotus, the historian, was keen at saying that the World, history itself, as embodied by the Gods, mitigate against imperial designs, an overreaching grasp, an arrogant spirit.

“Xerxes’ recognition that he has gone too far and has angered the gods does not necessarily imply a reclaimed nobility; there is too little time for that.” The cruel end of Xerxes’ monologue reminds us of Oedipus taking the brooches and plunging them into his eyes. That is the spirits lowest ebb. The entropy or time’s arrow, has no return or forgiveness. The Greek tragedy is unidirectional. The play was a warning to the Athenians and to us. We are reminded that we lost our ways in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Darfur. So, what is our future relation to Iran? Whose posturing in this arena is now tending to reach to the brink?

Again, based on the production’s program – “The Siena production attempts to create a bridge that spans our leaders unquenchable thirst for power and history of their arrogance. It is staged in the tradition of Persian Ta’ziyeh, an annual ritual performed on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, to help us remember how swiftly we forget the past and thus allow history to repeat itself. The method uses a theater in the round – with actors occupying the central space. In this form the actors at times break the dramatic illusion and speak directly to the audience.”

The Persians invade Greece – We Watch the Persian court:

Will they come home ? – Time Stretches Thin.
The Whole Fleet Went Down:   No War – Peace Now.

Never Again Silence.
Home Again.

Something Not Human Has Cut Our Forces Down.   The TV camera rolls in.   It was the Greek ship that opened the fight and every Persian ship went down.
Our men died of thirst and hunger.
He closed the Bosphorus and had them cross the sea.
How can this not be sickness of the mind that moved your son? Asks the old King that was resurected to hear the chant as happened.

The gate to the underworld is closed.

Q. Where are they now?
A. The sorrow is mine!

Q. My son too. I am stunned. The few that followed your carriage are back.
A. I am the leader – I mispaced.

Q. You Sped of defeat – Ships went down!

They are Gone, Gone, Gone.
They are Dead
They are Gone.

And the women hang on his neck the photos of their dead sons.
The music in the background is from Africa.
The photos weigh him down and they put on him their masks on his shield.

Before entering the enclosed round space of the show, we had the chance to look over stacks of statistics of the unhumanity of man-to-man.

I will just bring one of the 70-80 pages Mahmood allowed me to take with me:

After the show, while waiting for the Director, I spoke with a gentleman connected to the College, whose son was in the cast. The father was in Albany all his life and went to school also at Siena College.
He was here in the sixties. His generation at Siena protested the Vietnam war – Now his son protests the Iraq war. The father is now an environmentalist and gave me the reference to someone else who is                                                                                         now an environmentalist active at the UN. He told me that the war is about oil and this is the wrong war. Is this going to war similar to the Persian King who went for an unexplained war against the Greeks?

This production was entered in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) and we hope that it will be given the chance to be seen outside its College home.