"Estonia is now developing an e-academy to teach ex-Soviet states how to adopt this kind of technology.

Latvia and Lithuania have signed up.

To encourage people to use the internet, there are 500 public internet access points in Estonia, one of the highest numbers in Europe.

If you want to find one, you just look for an @ symbol on a road sign. "

He told the Commons that war was declared because the regime had ONCE been in possession of them.

And he insisted they did not have to be found to justify the invasion.

His astonishing U-turn stunned MPs on all sides of the Commons - and came hours after Tony Blair again insisted that weapons were there and would be found.

...Labour MP Tam Dalyell, the Father of the House, accused the Government of hoodwinking the nation.

He said: "We were told again and again the reason for going to war was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they could be used within 45 minutes.

"Now it's clear that the Iraqis have had no weapons for some time and that Parliament was given a completely false impression.""

"President Putin scuppered Tony Blairís efforts to repair Anglo-Russian relations after the Iraq war by challenging him and President Bush to uncover weapons of mass destruction to justify the conflict.

The Prime Minister suffered a second blow from the anti-war axis when France and Germany backed plans for a European defence force independent of Nato. "

"Whatever its immediate apparent outcome, the war on Iraq represents a catastrophic breakdown of the British and American imagination. We've utterly failed to comprehend the character of the people whose lands we have invaded, and for that we're likely to find ourselves paying a price beside which the body-count on both sides in the Iraqi conflict will seem trifling.

Passionate ideologues are incurious by nature and have no time for obstructive details. It's impossible to think of Paul Wolfowitz curling up for the evening with Edward Said's Orientalism, or the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, or Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or the letters of Gertrude Bell, or the recently published, knotty, often opaque, but useful book by Lawrence Rosen, The Culture of Islam, based on Rosen's anthropological fieldwork in Morocco, or Sayyid Qutb's Milestones. Yet these, and a dozen other titles, should have been required reading for anyone setting out on such an ambitious liberal-imperial project to inflict freedom and democracy by force on the Arab world. The single most important thing that Wolfowitz might have learned is that in Arabia, words like "self", "community," "brotherhood" and "nation" do not mean what he believes them to mean. When the deputy secretary of defence thinks of his own self, he - like me, and, probably, like you - envisages an interiorised, secret entity whose true workings are hidden from public view. Masks, roles, personae (like being deputy secretary for defence) mediate between this inner self and the other people with whom it comes into contact. The post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic self, with its autonomous subjective world, is a western construct, and quite different from the self as it is conceived in Islam. Muslims put an overwhelming stress on the idea of the individual as a social being. The self exists as the sum of its interactions with others. Rosen puts it like this: "The configuration of one's bonds of obligation define who a person is . . . the self is not an artefact of interior construction but an unavoidably public act.
..."

"A Nationalist is someone who is offended if someone
protests against the government, does not worship it's
symbols -like flags and such, does not respect it's
leader, and states any opinion which goes against
government policy or statements. When the country is
at war, a Nationalist thinks anyone who says or does
anything the government does not like should be
killed, jailed, beaten, and/or deported, period. To the
Nationalist, anyone who speaks out with a dissenting
opinion is a traitor.

A Patriot is someone who loves the people of the
country, who loves the liberty and freedom of the
country, and who will uphold the ideals of the
country by protesting against what they perceive to be
government misbehavior, mismanagement, or bad policy.
When the country is at war, a patriot who feels
the war is wrong, for whatever reason, considers it
even more important to speak up, demonstrate, and seek
to find consensus to stop the war. A Patriot may or
may not wave a flag or sing nationalist songs, but
they do not put them over the rights of the people.

Nationalists, like Nazis, Royalist, and Totalitarian
Communists, have always been the bane of freedom,
seeking from their cowardice to lock down all
freedom with an extreme set of rules which they alone
gladly obey, in lockstep fashion. In America, as the
Second Iraq War shows, Nationalists and Patriots
are deeply mixed, and the Right Wing Nationalists,
through their radio pundits, are again seeking to
destroy America through their twisted fear of
freedom and Liberty. Nationalists have never failed to
destroy the ideals and eventually the existence of
their countries through perpetual war and internal
oppression. For examples, look at Nazi Germany and
Stalinist Russia."

"Fascinating explanation of some major economic mechanisms involving dollars and euros and oil. A very big reason that the United States is such an economically and militarily dominating country is apparently that U.S. dollar is the de facto world reserve currency."

"LONDON: The problem with American power is not that it's American. Most states with the resources and opportunities the US possesses would have done far worse.

The problem is that one nation, effectively unchecked by any other, can, if it chooses, now determine how the rest of the world will live. Eventually, unless we stop it, it will use this power. So far, it has merely tested its new muscles.

...
Were it not for a monumental economic distortion, the US economy would, by now, have all but collapsed. ... It survives only because conventional measures do not apply: the rest of the world has granted it an unnatural lease of life.

Almost 70 per cent of the world's currency reserves - the money that nations use to finance international trade and protect themselves against financial speculators - takes the form of US dollars. The dollar is used for this purpose because it is relatively stable, it is produced by a nation with a major share of world trade, and certain commodities, in particular oil, are denominated in it, which means that dollars are required to buy them.

The US does very well from this arrangement. In order to earn dollars, other nations must provide goods and services to the US. When commodities are valued in dollars, the US needs do no more than print pieces of green paper to obtain them: it acquires them, in effect, for free. Once earned, other nations' dollar reserves must be invested back into the American economy. This inflow of money helps the US to finance its massive deficit. The only serious threat to the dollar's international dominance at the moment is the euro.

Next year, when the European Union acquires 10 new members, its gross domestic product will be roughly the same as that of the US, and its population 60 per cent bigger. If the euro is adopted by all the members of the union, which suffers from none of the major underlying crises afflicting the US economy, it will begin to look like a more stable and more attractive investment than the dollar. Only one further development would then be required to unseat the dollar as the pre-eminent global currency: nations would need to start trading oil in euros. Until last week, this was already beginning to happen.

...Last year, Javad Yarjani, a senior official at Opec, the oil producers' cartel, put forward several compelling reasons why his members might one day start selling their produce in euros. Europe is the Middle East's biggest trading partner it imports more oil and petrol products than the US, it has a bigger share of global trade and its external accounts are better balanced. One key tipping point, he suggested, could be the adoption of the euro by Europe's two principal oil producers: Norway and the United Kingdom, whose Brent crude is one of the "markers" for international oil prices.

"This might," Yarjani said, "create a momentum to shift the oil pricing system to euros." If this happens, oil importing nations will no longer need dollar reserves to buy oil. The demand for the dollar will fall, and its value is likely to decline. As the dollar slips, central banks will start to move their reserves into safer currencies such as the euro and possibly the yen and the yuan, precipitating further slippage. The US economy, followed rapidly by US power, could then be expected to falter or collapse.
..."

"To defend UK sovereignty - and that of the rest of the world - from the US, the British must yield some of their sovereignty to Europe. That they have a moral duty to contest the developing power of the US is surely evident. That they can contest it by no other means is equally obvious. Those British who are concerned about American power must abandon their opposition to the euro."

The FCC is about to put vital control of media in this country in a very few hands - and quickly needs to be stopped.

Under "deregulation" rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission, the already dangerous monopoly of TV and radio (and therefore of news, public thought and action) would dramatically worsen.The five corporations that own TV networks would be green-lighted to buy up each other. Local TV and radio stations would be swallowed by larger companies. Local newspapers and broadcast outlets would be allowed to purchase each other.

In a few years, Fox, General Electric and the radio giant Clear Channel - the most ambitious players - would potentially have an iron grip on the way the majority of the public gets its information. These companies have shown no interest in the public good, only in protecting their bottom lines while putting out news that is more deceiving than informing, when not actually right-wing propaganda - witness the leadup to and coverage of the Iraq war.

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee is preparing to hold crucial hearings on the proposed FCC deregulation. FCC chair Michael Powell is promising a vote on the new FCC regulations by June 2.

The media giants have spent huge amounts to buy support in Congress and have cleansed their news of any critical reporting on the Bush administration. Breaking with the industry line, mogul Barry Diller recently told Bill Moyers deregulation would greatly increase oligarchic control of media.

Join the new Media Challenge! actions. Contact Congress and the FCC to stop this anti-democratic takeover. Here's how to do it:

"The Black Flag is a progressive, independent, alternative news venture based in Roswell, New Mexico. Its goal is to provide alternative viewpoints not commonly expressed in the popular media, and to effect change on both the local and national level."

"What we call politics is really a shadow play conducted by corporate power. Parliament is the buffer between the popular desire for democracy and the reality of corporate rule. People, after all, are unlikely to resist that rule so long as politicians (and journalists) succeed in persuading us that it is not there; that in fact it is we who are in control. The mass media plays a crucial role in supporting the democracy illusion by pretending that the arguments presented to us - together with the parties we are allowed to choose from - constitute a free and fair spectrum of choices, which are our choices, and not what is left after state and corporate power have filtered out choices that threaten to interfere. One of the choices deemed unfit for public consumption is the idea that the mass media is a propaganda system."