Vladmir Putin´s KGB/Stasi style welcome to British and US diplomats in Moscow

KGB/FSB is alive and kicking in Moscow

Obama´s reset partner and David Cameron´s recent discussion partner in Moscow, former second rate KGB spy Vladimir Putin - soon to be "elected" president again - probably is proud of the kind of welcome offered to Brítish and American diplomats in Moscow:

Russia's spy agency is waging a massive undercover campaign of harassment against British and American diplomats, as well as other targets, using deniable "psychological" techniques developed by the KGB, a new book reveals.

The federal security service (FSB) operation involves breaking into the private homes of western diplomats – a method the US state department describes as "home intrusions". Typically the agents move around personal items, open windows and set alarms in an attempt to demoralise and intimidate their targets.
The FSB operation includes the bugging of private apartments, widespread phone tapping, physical surveillance, and email interception. Its victims include local Russian staff working for western embassies, opposition activists, human rights workers and journalists.

The clandestine campaign is revealed in Mafia State, a book by the Guardian's former Moscow correspondent Luke Harding, serialised in Saturday's Weekend magazine.

The British and American governments are acutely aware of the FSB's campaign of intimidation. But neither has publicly complained about these demonstrative "counter-intelligence" measures, for fear of further straining already difficult relations with Vladmir Putin's resurgent regime. Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, was head of the FSB.

Read the entire article here

Great news from the University of Utah

There is reason to celebrate: The National Geographic reports about a new study that shows the benefits of  global warming :

There may be a bright side to global warming, at least in the Arctic—the changing climate could improve air quality in the polar region, a new study shows.
The find is rare good news for the Arctic, which most studies find is warming much more rapidly than the rest of the planet.
Currently, air pollutants generally travel from industrially developed regions in the south northward to the Arctic, where pollution contributes to heating up the polar climate.
The reason for the potential boost in air quality is increased global rainfall, which many climate models predict will be a widespread result of global warming, said study leader Timothy Garrett, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah. (See an interactive map of global warming's effects.)
"Precipitation is the atmosphere's single most efficient way of removing particulate pollution," Garrett said. That's because raindrops simply take the pollutants with them as they fall from the atmosphere—the mechanism behind acid rain.
Thus, pollution may be already scrubbed from the air in other regions before it even reaches the Arctic.

Less Soot = Less Warming?
To verify that rainfall can remove pollutants before they reach the Arctic, Garrett's team examined a decade's worth of air-quality records from Barrow, Alaska, and Alert in Nunavut, Canada—the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world. (See an Arctic map.)
The team compared levels of carbon monoxide—a pollutant not removed by rainfall—with those of sulfates and soot, which are scoured out of the atmosphere by rain. The results showed that the sulfur and soot levels were lower than expected, leading the team to conclude that rainfall is already cleaning the Arctic air. (Test your knowledge of pollution.)
This effect may also partially counteract Arctic warming, Garrett noted.
That's because air pollutants, particularly soot, increase the greenhouse effect that's the hallmark of global warming. (Watch a video explaining the greenhouse effect.)

Read the entire article here

Cleaner air and less warming - what more could one ask for! This must be really unpleasant news for all doomsday prophets. Somewhere the warmists must already be planning a counterattack on the "traitor" Garrett and his University.

Closely guarded Ban Ki-moon in a hot place

                        Ban Ki-moon and his sauna partners in Finland

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is a closely guarded person. In July he and his wife were vacationing in Finland as the guests of Finnish president Tarja Halonen (who seems eager to get a UN job after retiring as president early next year). In a speech to Mme Halonen in New York earlier this week, Ban Ki-moon revealed that he was not even allowed to take a bath in Halonen´s sauna without his bodyguards being present:

As you can imagine, President Halonen insisted I take at least one (sauna bath) during my stay at Kulturanta.

Here's the problem: I can never go anywhere alone. So ? into the sauna I went – with my security detail.

I insisted they not take their weapons – of course! Who needs second-degree burns?

Or maybe the Secretary General did not trust the native guards after this incident?:

Finnish regional daily Turun Sanomat reported Tuesday that a policeman had reported for duty to guard Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, while blind drunk.
According to the paper the incident happened at Kultaranta, the Finnish president's summer residence in Naantali, on 17 July.
Turun Sanomat reported further that the policeman had driven to the site.
"The policeman was clearly intoxicated when he arrived at Kultaranta, so his superior gave him a breath test," Kari Frilander, a prosecutor heading an investigation into the incident, was quoted as saying by the paper

"The explosion of the European project"

                              The end of the present "EUSSR" is near

Both the elected and the unelected (like EU "president" van Rompuy here) leaders of the European Union are still talking as if they were representing a real European empire. However, the future of the EU looks somewhat different, as Bret Stephens points out in his column in the Wall Street Journal:

Here is where Europe slipped from convenient fiction to outright fraud.
There was the fraud of Greece's entry into the euro, a double-edged affair since Athens lied about its budgetary figures and Brussels chose to accept the lie. There was the fraud of the so-called Maastricht criteria—the fiscal rules that were supposed to govern the euro only to be quickly flouted by France and Germany and then junked altogether in the current crisis. There was the fraud of the European Constitution, overwhelmingly rejected wherever a vote on it was permitted, only to be revised and imposed by parliamentary fiat.
What is now happening in Europe isn't so much a crisis as it is an exposure: a Madoff-type event rather than a Lehman one. The shock is that it's a shock. Greece was never going to be bailed out and will, sooner or later, default. The banks holding Greek debt will, sooner or later, be recapitalized. The recapitalization will be borne by German taxpayers, and it will bring them—sooner rather than later—to the outer limit of their forbearance. The Chinese will not ride to the rescue: They know not to throw good money after bad.
And then Italy will go Greek. Europe's crisis will lap on U.S. shores, and America's economic woes will lap on Europe's—a two-way tsunami.
America will survive this because America is a state. But as Bismarck once remarked, "Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression." The "fiscal union" that's being mooted will never come to pass: German voters won't stand for it, and neither will any other country that wants to retain fiscal independence—which is to say, the core attribute of democratic sovereignty.
What comes next is the explosion of the European project. Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it's not an altogether bad thing. But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It's a long, likely parade of horribles.
Where is the Europe of Ismay, Erhard and Monnet? It's there in memory, if anyone cares to recover it. Give it another 50 years, and maybe someone will.

Read the entire column here

PS
Stephens is probably right in his basic analysis, but the future of Europe need not be quite as dark as he thinks. The EU could also transform to a kind of "EU light" keeping free trade, the single market and the best parts of the present union.

Medvedev wants oligarchs to tell schoolchildren how they became rich

Alexander Lebedev (a billionaire himself) about Russia´s oligarchs: "They don't read books. They don't have time. They don't go to exhibitions. They think the only way to impress anyone is to buy a yacht."


Russian president, Putin´s puppet Dmitry Medvedev has called on Russia’s oligarchs to teach schoolchildren about their personal success stories.

 “I will call on representatives of big business, mostly people whose wealth starts, for example, at $1 billion, and say they should all start teaching in schools,” he told members of the Presidential Commission for Implementation of Top-Priority National Projects and Demographic Policy.
Medvedev added that he expects school principals to support his “success story” initiative, although it has sparked debate among Russians.

A daring initiative by the puppet president, who certainly must know how the Russian oligarchs got their money:

"In my view there is no oligarch in this country who didn't steal the assets in the first instance. There's no doubt about that."
Vadim Kleiner, Hermitage Capital Management

Or maybe Medvedev plans to ask his master to tell Russian schoolchildren about his personal wealth creation "success story"?:

Citing sources inside the president's administration, Belkovsky claims that after eight years in power Putin has secretly accumulated more than $40bn (£20bn). The sum would make him Russia's - and Europe's - richest man.
In an interview with the Guardian, Belkovsky repeated his claims that Putin owns vast holdings in three Russian oil and gas companies, concealed behind a "non-transparent network of offshore trusts".
Putin "effectively" controls 37% of the shares of Surgutneftegaz, an oil exploration company and Russia's third biggest oil producer, worth $20bn, he says. He also owns 4.5% of Gazprom, and "at least 75%" of Gunvor, a mysterious Swiss-based oil trader, founded by Gennady Timchenko, a friend of the president's, Belkovsky alleges.

Read the entire article here

Ordinary Russians have reacted quite rationally to Medvedev´s initiative:

Most ordinary Russians responded negatively to the proposal, claiming Russia’s oligarchs could only teach cynicism, moral bankruptcy and corruption.
---
Yaroslav Kabakov, rector of investment firm Finam’s educational center is more skeptical about the idea of turning Russian oligarchs into teachers, saying that they would probably not be interested in telling their real life stories to anybody, including children. Russia’s oligarchs, who made their money by snapping up state assets at knock-down prices after the collapse of the Soviet Union, are indeed identified with the chaos and criminality that swept Russia in the early 1990s.

Expert on carbon markets: "You couldn’t design a better instrument for corruption"

                                         Flashback 2010

The "rich" nations have promised to provide $30 billion by 2012 "to help poorer, vulnerable countries adapt to climate change" and they have pledged to raise that amount to $100 billion a year by 2020.

Fortunately, it is highly unlikely that the "rich" nations will ever raise those sums of money. Still, before the final unraveling of the case for human caused global warming, billions of dollars are likely to be wasted on corruption e.g. in connection with carbon markets (cap and trade), recently described in this way by an expert: “You couldn’t design a better instrument for corruption":

 "corruption risks are particularly high in carbon markets, programmes to preserve forests, and projects under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM allows rich nations to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by supporting emissions-reducing projects in poor countries.
Protection work in remote forest areas is difficult to monitor, said Fiona Napier, associate director of Global Witness, an organisation that investigates resource extraction and human rights issues.
And carbon markets, with their multiple layers of trading in intangible assets, are a magnet for corruption, she added.
“You couldn’t design a better instrument for corruption as far as we can work out,” she said.
CDM regulations, meanwhile, are a “labyrinth”, said Peter Newell, a climate and corruption expert at the University of Sussex. In some countries, the people charged with signing off on the projects are the same ones developing and even auditing them, he noted."

Read the entire article here

European Union "president" van Rompuy misinforms the UN about the EU´s role in Libya

The unelected "president" brags about the EU as "fatherland of democracy"!


The unelected European Union "president" Herman van Rompuy used his opportunity to speak at the UN General Assembly to brag and misinform about the EU´s role in the liberation of Libya:

"When, earlier this year, there was the risk of a bloodbath in Benghazi, European leaders, together with others, acted with swiftness and determination," he added. "You can rest assured that Europe will remain engaged together with you to create a world of peace and security, to promote universal values of human rights and democracy and to combat famine and poverty."

The EU Observer´s Andrew Rettman rightly points out what really happened:

The speech glosses over the fact EU countries cozied up to Arab dictators for decades for the sake of oil and security - Van Rompuy's staff before the summer quietly removed a framed picture of Gaddafi from his EU headquarters in Brussels. It also glosses over that Germany did not back Nato air strikes in Libya and that the EU's only military contribution, the so-called Eufor aid mission, was rejected by the UN.

Read the entire article here

PS

van Rompuy, who addressed the General Assembly for the first time as the EU´s top official, also tried to give the impression that he is one of the world leaders (which he is not):

"This institutional innovation gives our union more continuity and consistency vis-a-vis other world leaders."