Has our "leadership" traded democracy for empire? Have their over-bloated egos convinced them that they are the world's newly crowned colonial kings? Author Chalmers Johnson is certainly not given to wearing rose-colored glasses. As he concludes in his newest book, Nemesis: " my country is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences."

Johnson's well-argued, persuasive argument draws on the economic, military, and political lessons of the past, which may be just what's needed to wake up Americans in time to change course. In this interview, he explained his hopes and fears for contemporary America.

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Perhaps that was intended as no more than a statement of fact but it also points towards the one concession that has been made in private by fans of the constitution: the name itself will be dropped. Mrs Merkel said that by June there should be a roadmap on the way forward. German diplomats have told me that to meet the deadline of getting functioning rules in place by 2009 there has to be an agreement by the beginning of next year at the very latest. That means a lot of work, and a lot of disagreement to overcome.

Many expect the guts of the constitution to be the basis of any new agreement. In his speech, the Italian Prime Minister said the leaders of 27 countries had backed it before the French and Dutch voted it down and provoked what he called "a period of mourning" so it should form "a very solid basis" for the future.

Tony Blair later said that the matter should be resolved "as quickly as possible", while not forgetting those No votes. Curiously, he did not answer my direct question if the British people would be allowed to vote on the result.

The Germans have on the whole achieved their aim of writing an accessible and easy to understand document that won't cause offence in the governments of the member countries.
But to deal with that tricky issue of what happens to the constitution, the Germans had to use more oblique language.

While they avoid the word "constitution" itself, the declaration says: "We are united in our aim of placing the European Union on a renewed common basis" by 2009. This is quick. Diplomats say to achieve the 2009 deadline there would have to be agreement at a big summit by next January at the latest.

The question in Brussels is "what's the threshold?" in other words: what does the British Government see as a step too far, that would need a popular vote. The real answer is "what the market will bear". How tough Mr Blair is, will depend largely on how tough David Cameron is, and how noisy the Eurosceptic newspapers are.

Fifty years on, the European Union is still that curious mixture of grand projects and statements and complex arguments about the rule book.

The China National Petroleum Corp. will look to develop heavy crude oil production in the Orinoco Belt and cooperate with Venezuela in building three refineries in China and a "super-fleet" of crude tankers, the Information Ministry said.

"The United States as a power is on the way down, China is on the way up. China is the market of the future," Chavez was quoted as saying by an Information Ministry statement after meeting CNPC President Jiang Jiemin in Caracas.

Chavez is pushing ahead with a nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, stripping major US companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips and Chevron Corp. of their majority stakes in heavy crude projects.

While sidelining such majors, Chavez is seeking to do more business with China, Russia and Iran, part of forming what he describes as a multipolar alliance against the United States.

Japan:- A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 7.1 jolted the coastal area of central Japan on Sunday, killing at least one person and injuring around 85, Japanese officials and media said. At least nine houses collapsed, landslides were triggered and roads buckled when the quake struck at 9:42 a.m. (0042 GMT), public broadcaster NHK and Kyodo news agency said.

A 52-year-old woman died in Wajima, on the western side of the peninsula, after being trapped under a stone lantern that toppled in her garden, officials said. Media said about 80 people were being treated in the local hospital in Wajima for injuries. "Sprinklers went on, some walls collapsed. It's really bad," a hotel employee in Wajima told NHK, which showed footage of a tiled roof collapsed into a street and broken glass. In Nanao, a city with a population of around 60,000 on the peninsula, ambulance services were flooded with calls to help people who had suffered burns and injuries, Kyodo said.

TV footage showed collapsed wooden houses, tiles from roofs scattered on narrow streets and a man digging through piles of boards from a collapsed house in Wajima. Anxious residents gathered outside their homes in Wajima, some holding children in their arms.

Vanuatu:- Two powerful earthquakes also hit near Vanuatu in the southern Pacific. US seismologists reported them as having magnitudes of 7.2 and 6.0. The larger struck at 1140 (0040 GMT Sunday), and was followed 28 minutes later by the magnitude 6.0 quake, both located 335km (210 miles) south-east of the capital, Port Vila.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage. However, police said they were checking remote islands where the quake was closer to land areas.

Russia:- A volcano on the northern Kuril island of Paramushir, off Russia's Pacific Coast, is again showing signs of activity, local meteorological services said Thursday. Tatyana Kotenko, of the hydro-meteorological station Severokurilsk, said steam and gas clouds could be seen rising some 150 meters (450 feet) above the Ebeko volcano's crater in the morning.
"The volcano is spewing out steam and gases 100 to 300 meters (300 to 900 feet) [into the air], with the temperature upwards 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit)," Kotenko said. "With a western wind blowing, or when there is no wind, Severokurilsk residents can smell the sulfur and chlorine."

The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer. Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.
"We would take a couple of ounces of bone marrow cells from the patient,' said Prof Zanjani, whose work is highlighted in a Channel 4 programme tomorrow.

"We would isolate the stem cells from them, inject them into the peritoneum of these animals and then these cells would get distributed throughout the metabolic system into the circulatory system of all the organs in the body. The two ounces of stem cell or bone marrow cell we get would provide enough stem cells to do about ten foetuses. So you don't just have one organ for transplant purposes, you have many available in case the first one fails."

Scientists at King's College, London, and the North East Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle have now applied to the HFEA, the Government's fertility watchdog, for permission to start work on the chimeras. But the development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race.

Dr Patrick Dixon, an international lecturer on biological trends, warned: "Many silent viruses could create a biological nightmare in humans. Mutant animal viruses are a real threat, as we have seen with HIV." Animal rights activists fear that if the cells get mixed together, they could end up with cellular fusion, creating a hybrid which would have the features and characteristics of both man and sheep. But Prof Zanjani said: "Transplanting the cells into foetal sheep at this early stage does not result in fusion at all."

What to give someone for their 50th birthday? A nice silk tie perhaps? Maybe a gift certificate to a nice restaurant. A romantic weekend get-away with their spouse?

Or how about an army? That, at least, is what German Chancellor Angela Merkel wished for the European Union this week as the 27-member club prepares to celebrate a half century of unity on Sunday. In a Friday interview with the mass-circulation German tabloid Bild Zeitung, Merkel envisions Europe growing even closer together and more transparent. She also wants a Europe with its own fighting force.

"In the European Union we have to come closer to the creation of a European army," she said when asked about the future of the continent. But she stopped short of putting a so-called "United States of Europe" on the wish list. "Even in another 50 years there won't be a federal Europe," she said. "We will maintain the current diversity of nation states."

Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl likewise spoke with Bild Zeitung on Friday about the European Union. The father of German reunification emphasized how important the EU was for the rebirth of Germany after the catastrophe of World War II and also for the later coming together of East and West Germany in 1990.

"Without European unification, German unification would never have been possible," Kohl said.

Walter Haefeker sits on the board of directors of the German Beekeepers Association (DBIB) and is vice president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.

As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein's apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing -- something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.

Felix Kriechbaum, an official with a regional beekeepers' association in Bavaria, recently reported a decline of almost 12 percent in local bee populations. When "bee populations disappear without a trace," says Kriechbaum, it is difficult to investigate the causes, because "most bees don't die in the beehive." There are many diseases that can cause bees to lose their sense of orientation so they can no longer find their way back to their hives.

Manfred Hederer, the president of the German Beekeepers Association, almost simultaneously reported a 25 percent drop in bee populations throughout Germany. In isolated cases, says Hederer, declines of up to 80 percent have been reported. He speculates that "a particular toxin, some agent with which we are not familiar," is killing the bees.

In an article in its business section in late February, the New York Times calculated the damage US agriculture would suffer if bees died out. Experts at Cornell University in upstate New York have estimated the value bees generate -- by pollinating fruit and vegetable plants, almond trees and animal feed like clover -- at more than $14 billion.

Scientists call the mysterious phenomenon "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD), and it is fast turning into a national catastrophe of sorts. A number of universities and government agencies have formed a "CCD Working Group" to search for the causes of the calamity, but have so far come up empty-handed. But, like Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, they are already referring to the problem as a potential "AIDS for the bee industry."

One thing is certain: Millions of bees have simply vanished. In most cases, all that's left in the hives are the doomed offspring. But dead bees are nowhere to be found -- neither in nor anywhere close to the hives. Diana Cox-Foster, a member of the CCD Working Group, told The Independent that researchers were "extremely alarmed," adding that the crisis "has the potential to devastate the US beekeeping industry."

In many cases, scientists have found evidence of almost all known bee viruses in the few surviving bees found in the hives after most have disappeared. Some had five or six infections at the same time and were infested with fungi -- a sign, experts say, that the insects' immune system may have collapsed.
The scientists are also surprised that bees and other insects usually leave the abandoned hives untouched. Nearby bee populations or parasites would normally raid the honey and pollen stores of colonies that have died for other reasons, such as excessive winter cold. "This suggests that there is something toxic in the colony itself which is repelling them," says Cox-Foster.

The study in question is a small research project conducted at the University of Jena from 2001 to 2004. The researchers examined the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called "Bt corn" on bees. A gene from a soil bacterium had been inserted into the corn that enabled the plant to produce an agent that is toxic to insect pests.

The study concluded that there was no evidence of a "toxic effect of Bt corn on healthy honeybee populations." But when, by sheer chance, the bees used in the experiments were infested with a parasite, something eerie happened. According to the Jena study, a "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" occurred among the insects that had been fed a highly concentrated Bt poison feed.

According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have "altered the surface of the bee's intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry -- or perhaps it was the other way around. We don't know."

Of course, the concentration of the toxin was ten times higher in the experiments than in normal Bt corn pollen. In addition, the bee feed was administered over a relatively lengthy six-week period. Kaatz would have preferred to continue studying the phenomenon but lacked the necessary funding. "Those who have the money are not interested in this sort of research," says the professor, "and those who are interested don't have the money."

The outreach has been built into a 28-foot 1955 Silver Streak Airstream trailer wherein the "Last Supper" is re-created, surrounding Jesus with famous vegetarians, officials of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals told WND.

"From all the demonstrations, this one has been the most successful in getting people to go vegetarian," he told WND. "People are visibly moved by the display itself." "I've had people telling me they're going to be re-evaluating their food choices and lives after seeing the display," he said.

The vegetarian "disciples" represented in the "Last Supper" include the famed Louisa May Alcott, Kafka, George Bernard Shaw, Cesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony, Jesus, Alec Walker, Paul McCartney, k.d. lang, Gandhi, Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci, officials said.

On the other side of the trailer are graphic images of animal slaughterhouses, and available at the trailer will be screenings of PETA's movie, "Meet Your Meat," narrated by Alec Baldwin.

As an online report about PETA's claims attests, no mainstream theologian buys the vegetarians' argument, since the New Testament clearly states, repeatedly, that Jesus ate animal flesh: "Jesus said unto them, Have ye here any meat? And they gave him a piece of broiled fish. ... And he took it, and did eat before them." (Luke 24:41-43). There are other references to Jesus eating fish, as well as the lamb traditionally served during the Passover.

"The trend line in my M3-plus-debt chart is staggering," Kuever said. "There has been a straight, long-term trend line of M3-plus-credit increasing since 2000. Long-term, we are creating inflation and the dollar has lost almost 98 percent of its value in the past 100 years."Kuever, a retired investor, is concerned that with growing budget and trade deficits "the dollar could collapse."Especially if the Fed cannot increase rates, because we have already entered a recession," he said.
Bob Chapman, who issued a reconstructed M3 estimate to the 100,000 subscribers to his newsletter, "The International Forecaster", agrees."The world is awash in money and credit," Chapman told WND. "My numbers show M3 increasing at about a 10-percent rate right now."Chapman believes the U.S. economy entered a recession in February. In his newsletter of Dec. 9 he predicted the Fed would hold interest rates at 5.25 percent."The Fed is in a very tough spot here," Chapman wrote, "If they raise rates, the real estate market will collapse, and if they lower rates, the dollar will collapse."

How low could the dollar go?
"The key in how low the dollar goes is the interest rates," Chapman told WND. "In March, the Fed is going to have to make a decision which way to go. If Fed rates go up, the dollar will hold in the 78.33 range, but the stock market and the economy will tank. If the Fed lowers rates to keep the economy from crashing, the bottom will fall out of the dollar, and I see it going as low as 55. Once the dollar hits bottom, it will take the stock market and the economy right with it anyway. The Fed is in a box they can't get out of."

How severe will the coming dollar collapse be?
"People in the U.S. are going to be hit hard," Chapman warned. "In the severe recession we are entering now, Bush will argue that we have to form a North American Union to compete with the Euro.""Creating the amero," Chapman explained, "will be presented to the American public as the administration's solution for dollar recovery.

In the process of creating the amero, the Bush administration just abandons the dollar."

Given its reputation as perhaps the most powerful organisation in the world, the Bilderberg group doesn't go a bundle on its switchboard operations. Telephone inquiries are met with an impersonal female voice - the Dutch equivalent of the BT Callminder woman - reciting back the number and inviting callers to "leave a message after the tone". But behind this ultra-modest façade lies one of the most controversial and hotly-debated alliances of our times.

On Thursday the Bilderberg group marks its 50th anniversary with the start of its yearly meeting. For four days some of the West's chief political movers, business leaders, bankers, industrialists and strategic thinkers will hunker down in a five-star hotel in northern Italy to talk about global issues. What sets Bilderberg apart from other high-powered get-togethers, such as the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), is its mystique.

Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted. The shadowy aura extends further - the anonymous answerphone message, for example; the fact that conference venues are kept secret. The group, which includes luminaries such as Henry Kissinger and former UK chancellor Kenneth Clarke, does not even have a website.

This year Bilderberg has announced a list of attendees They include BP chief John Browne, US Senator John Edwards, World Bank president James Wolfensohn and Mrs Bill Gates. In the void created by such aloofness, an extraordinary conspiracy theory has grown up around the group that alleges the fate of the world is largely decided by Bilderberg.

A former journalist, Mr Gosling runs a campaign against the group from his home in Bristol, UK. "My main problem is the secrecy. When so many people with so much power get together in one place I think we are owed an explanation of what is going on.

Mr Gosling seizes on a quote from Will Hutton, the British economist and a former Bilderberg delegate, who likened it to the annual WEF gathering where "the consensus established is the backdrop against which policy is made worldwide". "One of the first places I heard about the determination of US forces to attack Iraq was from leaks that came out of the 2002 Bilderberg meeting," says Mr Gosling.

"There's absolutely nothing in it. We never sought to reach a consensus on the big issues at Bilderberg. It's simply a place for discussion," says Lord Healey. Formed in the spirit of post-war trans-Atlantic co-operation, the idea behind Bilderberg was that future wars could be prevented by bringing power-brokers together in an informal setting away from prying eyes.

"Bilderberg is the most useful international group I ever attended. The confidentiality enabled people to speak honestly without fear of repercussions. "In my experience the most useful meetings are those when one is free to speak openly and honestly. It's not unusual at all. Cabinet meetings in all countries are held behind closed doors and the minutes are not published."

That activists have seized on Bilderberg is no surprise to Alasdair Spark, an expert in conspiracy theories.
"Shouldn't we expect that the rich and powerful organise things in their own interests. It's called capitalism."

According to the president's press office, Pöttering "took advantage of this occasion to invite the Pope to speak during a plenary session of the European Parliament."

During his visit to Italy's capital, the German-born president participated in a congress organized by European bishops on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. Pöttering had been one of the advocates of recognizing the Christian roots of Europe in its constitution.

Pope John Paul II spoke before the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 1988.

A top source in Syrian President Bashar Assad's Baath party told WND European leaders visiting Damascus in recent weeks delivered messages stating Israel was taking measures in advance of a large-scale conflict with Syria, including updating battle plans, training reservist soldiers and preparing the home front for missile attacks.

One senior European Union official told Assad the Israeli government instructed its major hospitals not to allow staff to take vacation time during the summer months for fear a conflict will break out during that period, according to the Baath party source.

The European officials advised Assad to engage in dialogue with the Jewish state and the U.S. leading to a full Israeli withdrawal of the Golan Heights, the Baath official said. The Golan is strategic mountainous territory looking down on Israeli population centres twice used by Syria to mount ground invasions into Israel.

Israeli security sources confirmed stepped-up training schedules for Israel Defense Forces reservist troops have been implemented. They say the training is not related to any expected confrontations, but is in response to internal military investigations that found reservists were not properly trained for the Lebanon war.

Assad, who signed a military alliance with Iran, is accused of supporting the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq and funnelling money and weapons to Hezbollah. Leaders of major Palestinian terror groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, reside openly in Damascus.

A diplomat from Britain's Foreign Ministry touring Israel this week said the UK received signals Washington is ready to act on some of the Study Group recommendations.
"America understands that Iraq cannot be solved unless Syria is engaged and Israel withdraws from the Golan Heights and the West Bank," the diplomat said, speaking on condition his name be withheld.

Also last week, EU Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana told Syria he expected Israel to evacuate the entire Golan Heights as part of any future peace deal. Solana's remarks were blasted by Israeli Knesset members, who pointed out the EU chief did not call for Syria to stop supporting Hezbollah or providing refuge to the leadership of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups, who live openly in Damascus.

The Gospel According to Judas, introduced yesterday at a press conference chaired by the head of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, also denies that Judas accepted 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus. The book will be launched in London today at Westminster Cathedral.

The reception given to the book represents a remarkable rehabilitation for Britain's most celebrated politician-turned-convict. Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, a convicted perjurer, wrote the book with Francis Moloney, one of the Pope's top theological advisers, who was a member of the Vatican's International Theological Commission for 18 years.

Written and presented in the style of an original Gospel, it is being regarded by senior Roman Catholics as a way of bringing the Christian message to a wider audience. Dr Moloney will give his royalties to charity, but Archer will keep his. In an interview in his penthouse flat in London, he told The Times that he needed to earn a living.

Many churchgoers will be surprised at the Church's backing of a book that debunks some of Jesus's miracles. Dr Moloney and Archer said that they did not include the three best-known nature miracles, because they never happened. Nor did they include the most famous Judas story, in which he betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. The betrayal took place, they say, but Judas thought that he was acting as a double agent and was saving Jesus's life. The idea that some miracles did not happen and were written to shore up messianic interpretations of the Hebrew Bible has been common in academic circles for decades.

Dr Moloney, regarded by many as the greatest living Biblical scholar, drew on years of scholarship to make The Gospel According to Judas as close as possible to those passages thought genuine in the three synoptic gospels and the Gospel of St John. But he insisted that they omit verses agreed by scholars to have been invented by the original authors of the Bible.

Old habits die hard, however, and the partnership with Archer almost collapsed when the bestselling author tried to inject unbelievable elements of fiction into the story of Jesus's life, death and resurrection. Dr Moloney agreed that Archer could invent a plausible ending to Judas's life but drew the line at giving him a deathbed conversion to Christianity.

"If there was ever a bill which needed to be vetoed -- this is it," said Traditional Values Coalition Executive Director Andrea Lafferty. "Most Christians might as well rip the pages which condemn homosexuality right out of their Bibles because this bill will make it illegal to publicly express the dictates of their religious beliefs."

Lafferty and other conservatives argue that the bill will "elevate homosexuality" -- a type of behavior, they stipulate -- to the same level as race and other characteristics that can't be changed. "The fact is that Conyers' so-called hate crimes bill is a fraud, designed for only one purpose: to add homosexuals, cross-dressers, drag queens and transsexuals to the ranks of federally protected minority groups," TVC said.

But a homosexual advocacy group -- named after murdered homosexual Matthew Shepard -- applauded the reintroduction of the hate crimes bill, calling it an "appropriate and measured response to the unrelenting and under-addressed problem of violent hate crimes committed against individuals based on their actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability."

Judy Shepard, executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation and Matthew's mother, said it's time the federal government expanded its definition of "hate crimes" to include those motivated by hatred of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) individuals.

The link between more cars and more flooding may not be immediately obvious to most of us, but it is vividly illustrated in a diagram in the report, entitled The Urban Environment, published yesterday by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

Increased car ownership and use leads to demands for more roads and parking, the diagram explains. That then leads to an increase in hard, impermeable surfaces which cannot soak up rain - which in turn leads to more polluted surface water running off into drains, and in real downpours, a much higher risk of a flash flood.

These sort of complex interactions are not being addressed by the Government in policy and planning, says the report, calling for the development of an over-arching policy on the urban environment.

The commission expresses surprise that the Government does not already have such a comprehensive, connected strategy to deal with the combined pollution impact of housing, transport and energy use in the towns and cities, where 80 per cent of Britons now live. It wants "joined-up" policy, it says.

"The commission are actually astonished that the Government doesn't have an over-arching urban environmental policy that takes account of people's health and well-being, the environment and transport, and tries to join up what we do to tackle these problems," Sir John Lawton, the commission chairman said.