But now the scramble for Africa is intensifying, with investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds, corporations and business tycoons out to grab some of the world’s cheapest land — for profit.

China has leased 6.91 million acres in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the world’s largest oil palm plantation.

South Korea’s Daewoo conglomerate planned to buy 2.9 million acres of Madagascar until the deal collapsed when rioters toppled the Indian Ocean island’s government.

“Philippe Heilberg, CEO of the New York-based investment fund Jarch Capital … has leased between 998,000 and 2.47 million acres in southern Sudan from the warlord Paulino Matip,” Le Monde Diplomatique reported.

“Foreign direct investment in agriculture is the boardroom euphemism for the new land grab and those promoting the grab spin it as a win-win situation.”

It quoted Heilberg as saying, “When food becomes scarce, the investor needs a weak state that does not force him to abide by any rules.”

According to various assessments, up to 123.5 million acres of African land — double the size of Britain — has been snapped up or is being negotiated by governments or wealthy investors.

Ethiopia alone has approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural projects since 2007.

As African leaders, many out to line their own pockets, sign away their people’s land to foreigners, the continent’s people, among the poorest on the planet, face having to join the estimated 1 billion people in the world who don’t have enough food.

In some cases, human rights groups say many of these deals are done in secret without consulting the people on the land being sold, often dispossessing them.

In the end, critics say, with African farmland in foreign hands, the continent faces widespread conflict over resources in the not-too-distant future.

“Food production in Arab countries is limited by scarce land and water resources,” the World Bank said in recent report. “Arab countries are highly exposed to international food commodity price shocks … because they are heavily dependent on imported food.”

Climate change is accelerating the decline in food production through water shortages, desertification, coastal flooding and changing weather patterns.

As populations expand while the amount of farmland and water supply shrinks, resource wars are expected to erupt across the Middle East and Africa in the years ahead.

“Unchecked land-grabbing carries with it the seeds of conflict, environmental disaster, political and social change, and hunger on an unprecedented scale,” Le Monde Diplomatique warned.

As the foreign purchases of African land multiply unchecked, the United Nations and the World Bank are seeking to bring the land-grabbing under some sort of control.

In November, they started drawing up a code of conduct to regulate overseas investment in farmland, the first effort to put the brakes on the runaway land acquisitions by wealthy states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea.

But critics view this as too little, too late.

The regulations aren’t expected to be ready until late this year. Officials acknowledge the delay gives land-grabbers time to snap up more farmland before the code comes into force.

But even then, it will lack teeth because the regulations will be non-binding: the United Nations doesn’t want to inhibit direct foreign investment in agriculture, which it believes can offer development opportunities.

The land-buying spree by the Arab states is likely to continue as desertification worsens.

Wadid Erian, a soil expert with the Arab Center for the Study of Arid Zones and Dry Land in Cairo, said that desertification is advancing swiftly “and our response needs to match the pace …

“The question we need to be asking is whether using (African) land is a sustainable, long-term solution … We expect that if climate change and desertification continue at this pace, in the next five years we won’t have enough food to supply demand.”

Continuing to amass Africa’s arable land without ensuring that local populations in the world’s hungriest continent reap any benefit, is not the sole long-term answer,” Erian said.

Leonel Fernandez, center, the President of the Dominican Republic, has not yet commented.

Spanish National Court Judge Eloy Valasco has raised the blood pressure of diplomats in three countries after accusing the Venezuelan government of providing logistical assistance to the Basque separatist group ETA and the Colombian rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), acting as a go-between and facilitating meetings on Venezuelan soil where the two rebel groups plotted to kill several high profile political figures in Spain and Columbia, including president Álvaro Uribe.

The accusation by judge Velasco:

“There is evidence in this case which shows the Venezuelan government’s co-operation in the illegal association between Farc and Eta”

The pro forma denial by some anonymous Venezuelan press minister:

“[These are] unacceptable allegations, of a politically motivated nature, against the government of Venezuela

…

We do not house guerrillas, nor do we have a pact with guerrillas,”

Surprisingly, the obligatory Colombian outrage has thus far been absent, perhaps awaiting something more concrete than accusations from a notoriously inflammatory judiciary .

This is not the first dispute between Venezuela and its former imperial master, in 2008 King Juan Carlos told Chavez to “shut up” when he interrupted a speech being given by Spanish PM Jose Luis Zapatero during an Ibero-American. That must’ve been priceless…

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[Venezuela plotted to kill Colombia president, Spain judge says | CS Monitor]

[Hugo Chávez 'terrorist link' sparks diplomatic row between Spain and Venezuela | Guardian.co.uk]

Map via www.usgs.gov

Having a hard time imagining exactly how forceful a magnitude 8.8 earthquake is? Well, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California has found that the quake was strong enough to speed up the rotation of the earth by 1.26 microseconds per revolution. This effectively shortens the time each hemisphere is exposed to the sun every day. But that’s not all:

Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis. [JPL research scientist Richard] Gross calculates the quake should have moved Earth’s figure axis (the axis about which Earth’s mass is balanced) by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters, or 3 inches). Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis; they are offset by about 10 meters (about 33 feet).

By comparison, Gross said the same model estimated the 2004 magnitude 9.1 Sumatran earthquake should have shortened the length of day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted Earth’s axis by 2.32 milliarcseconds (about 7 centimeters, or 2.76 inches).

Now, I don’t know any rocket scientists, but isn’t the tilt on the Earth’s axis what causes the seasons?  Does this mean that mean winters will get worse?

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[Chilean Quake May Have Shortened Earth Days | jpl.nasa.gov]

The forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review fails to address many of the promises President Barack Obama made in his landmark Prague address

Advocates of nuclear disarmament were extremely optimistic when President Barack Obama gave a landmark speech in April of last year announcing his intention to make global nuclear disarmament a central goal of his foreign policy. He said:

Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked — that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century.  And as nuclear power — as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.

So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, “Yes, we can.”

What was perhaps most remarkable about about these strong words was not that they showed an unprecedented commitment to nuclear disarmament by an American president, but rather that they seemed so plausible coming from a man who had been swept into office on a wave of disgust with, among other things, the macho-paranoid militancy of the Bush Administration.

Well, the honeymoon’s been over for some time now and, like so many of the bold policy pronouncements of the earliest days of Obama’s presidency, the actual, binding, position of the United States on the question of nuclear weapons and how to use them is not going to change significantly. The new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) will modify, but not remove, wording that indicates a stated policy of pre-emption when appropriate – essentially declaring that the primary (but not sole) purpose of the American nuclear arsenal is to deter a nuclear attack.  This does not quite “put an end to Cold War thinking” as President Obama stated in his speech. In an interview with the New York Times, Daryl G. Kimball, President of the Arms Control Association said:

“Any declaration that deterring a nuclear attack is a ‘primary purpose’ of our arsenal leaves open the possibility that there are other purposes, and it would not reflect any reduced reliance on nuclear weapons.”

It is also being reported that the new policy paper will seek to reduce American dependency upon nuclear weapons as a deterrent by channeling more funding into missile defense systems and “new, non-nuclear Prompt Global Strike weapons” intended to have the same tactical effect as a nuclear weapon without providing the pretext for a nuclear retaliation.

To be fair, the Prague address did not establish a timetable for eliminating the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the NPR will contain policies that provide for the reduction of the number of weapons stockpiled. However, as Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have both stated, the U.S. adoption of the H.W. Bush-era nuclear testing moratorium has limited the means by which the military can update its nuclear arsenal.

However, the Obama administration adherence to a policy of pre-emption that was created out of morbid cynicism and adopted out of fear makes very little sense when the main military threats to the United States are: insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq – no nuclear weapons there, terrorists – no country to nuke, and Iran & North Korea – Iran couldn’t strike America even if they do currently have a nuclear weapon and North Korea seems to be more interested in using its arsenal for leverage in acquiring badly needed aid.

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[Living up to nuclear expectations | guardian.co.uk]

[White House Is Rethinking Nuclear Policy | New York Times]

[Remarks of President Barack Obama | U.S. State Dept.]

Video of the Prague Address

Dictator, Pan-Africanist, and Hatfield to a Swiss McCoy: Truly a Renaissance man.

Libyan president Colonel Muammar Qaddafi intensified his personal feud with Switzerland when he called for Jihad in response to the recent passage of a Swiss law banning the construction of any new minarets.  On Thursday he was quoted as saying, “Those who destroy God’s mosques deserve to be attacked through jihad, and if Switzerland was on our borders, we would fight it.”

The law has been met with widespread negativity across the Muslim world, as the statute is written as a building code restriction against construction of a certain height though it does not restrict the height of new church steeples. However, Qaddafi has a personal feud with Switzerland stemming from an incident in 2008 when his son and daughter-in-law were arrested by police in Geneva on suspicion of assaulting two members of their staff. The fallout led to the suspension of Libyan oil shipments to Switzerland, Swiss travel restrictions on Qaddafi and his family, Libyan authorities detaining two Swiss businessmen, and Qaddafi personally calling for the abolition of the Helvetic Confederation in advance of Libya’s ascendancy to the head of the UN General Assembly late last year. He said:

“Switzerland is a world mafia and not a state. It is formed of an Italian community that should return to Italy, another German community that should return to Germany, and a third French community that should return to France.”

The investigation into the death of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has grown to target at least 26 people

While many will be neither surprised nor shocked by the above headline anymore, what is most striking is that so much information about the 26-person hit squad allegedly used to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has become public so quickly.

“Multiple passports? Femmes Fatale? That type of stuff only happens in John le Carré novels and during the Cold War. Nobody actually does that anymore.”

The New York Times reports:

Inquiry Grows in Dubai Assassination

By Robert F. Worth

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Dubai police released the names of 15 more suspects on Wednesday in the killing of a senior Hamas operative in a Dubai hotel room last month, expanding the range of an investigation that has already fostered diplomatic tensions between several European countries and Israel, whose intelligence service is widely suspected of planning the assassination.

The new suspects carried Irish, British, French and Australian passports, and they bring the size of the assassination team to 26, including six women, police officials in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, said in a written statement. The roles of the suspects included “preparations and helping to facilitate” the Jan. 19 killing of the Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the statement said.

At least 7 of the 11 suspects the Dubai police identified earlier this month carried what appeared to be expertly copied European passports bearing the names of people living in Israel. Several of the new suspects were similarly identified by names belonging to people living in Israel and carrying foreign passports, according to a report Wednesday evening on Israel’s Channel Two News. One — Gabriella Barney — is believed to be the daughter of a man identified in the first group of suspects.

The initial identifications drew sharp questions from British, Irish and German diplomats about how the fraudulent passports came to be, as well as statements of concern from the European Union. They also reinforced suspicions about the involvement of the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Dubai’s police chief, Dahi Khalfan al-Tamim, was quoted in the Emirati news media last week as saying that he was “99 percent, if not 100 percent” sure that Mossad was behind the killing.

Israel has declined to comment on the accusations, as is its custom with claims related to the Mossad.

The Dubai police statement issued Wednesday included a striking detail: two of the new suspects, identified as Nicole Sandra McCabe and Adam Marcus Korman and carrying Australian passports, left Dubai on a ship bound for Iran. All the others traveled by plane to European and Asian countries, according to the statement. The statement included no further information about the two suspects or why they would have gone to Iran.

The police had stated previously that the suspects obtained credit cards issued by an American bank using their passports, and then used them to buy plane tickets and other items related to the assassination. On Wednesday, the police statement identified the bank as MetaBank, and added that 14 of the suspects had used credit cards issued by the bank.

All 26 suspects appear to have traveled on passports from countries that do not need prior visas to travel to the United Arab Emirates, and do not need travelers to go through eye scans or provide other biometric data required of some nationalities. Emirati officials said this week that they might revise their visa guidelines.

The Dubai police have made public extensive video surveillance showing the suspects tracking Mr. Mabhouh at the airport and at his hotel, sometimes even donning wigs and posing as tennis-playing tourists, rackets in hand, as they followed Mr. Mabhouh.

In all, the team suspected of carrying out the assassination now includes 12 traveling on British passports; 6 on Irish passports; 4 on French passports; 3 on Australian passports; and 1 on a German passport.

Two Palestinians have also been arrested in connection with the killing, but their role in it is not clear.

Mr. Mabhouh had a role in the 1989 abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers, and he was also involved in smuggling weapons into Gaza, Israel and Hamas have said. Israel officials say the weapons came from Iran.

An employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

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[Inquiry Grows in Dubai Assassination | New York Times]

A fresh round of cutbacks in Greek government spending may not be enough to stem the bleeding.

While the continuing debacle in Greece is exposing the stress points in a European Union that may have thought itself more sound than it actually is, some question remains as to exactly how things got so bad so quickly. Enter the columnists and their younger, more attractive cousins, the bloggers:

John Authers, writing in the Thursday’s Financial Times, blames credit default swaps and those that trade them. A shadowy and unregulated cabal of investors who stand to make huge piles of money at the expense of Ma and Pa Papanickolas – specifically their government check – by insinuating that Greek debt is closer to default than it may actually be:

Yields on Greek debt jolted upwards, as did the cost of insuring against Greek default, prices on the Athens stock exchange fell, and the prices of unrelated but risky assets in other markets followed suit. Plainly the Greek crisis, with its attendant risk of a crisis for the euro in future, is making waves far beyond Europe.

But it is unfair to put all the blame on Greece. A look at why sentiment hardened against its debt on Thursday reveals a deeper flaw – the regulatory incentive for investors to outsource their judgment on credit to a few rating agencies. Thursday’s spasm was driven by comments from a Moody’s Investors Service analyst, who suggested that if the country deviated from its austerity plan, its sovereign debt might have to be downgraded by two notches.

Right, that explains it, and in a way that all us veterans from the near collapse of AIG and the freezing of the financial markets in the United States can understand: “moral hazard” “credit markets” “bond ratings” &c.

Not so fast, says Bloomberg’s Shannon Harrington. According to the Chart of the Day, credit default swaps only account for a tiny percentage of sovereign debt:

The $108 billion figure, which is the maximum amount on the line if all of the countries were to default, is 0.98 percent of the $11 trillion in outstanding debt of those countries. In Greece, where the heaviest complaints about credit-swaps trading have been leveled, bets of $9 billion compare with $267 billion of debt.

“It’s very easy to point the fingers at this sort of murky cabal of CDS traders, but in this case, it’s hard to argue with the fundamentals,” said Tim Backshall, chief strategist at Credit Derivatives Research LLC in Walnut Creek, California. “To move the government bond market 40 basis points on the back of less than $10 billion notional exposure to Greece in the CDS market seems a bit of a stretch.”

European leaders have said trading in the contracts fuels speculation that can distort perceptions and have warned hedge funds about trying to profit from the problems on the continent. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is considering ways to “tighten up rules” in the market. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said Feb. 17 “we should examine the suitability” of credit swaps.

So if it’s not CDS and the loss of moral hazard (also possibly corrupting our children), then what is it? Is there even a real problem? Why doesn’t the European Central Government just inject a bunch of cash into the Greek treasury so they can pay their civil servants the bonuses they’ve already planned on spending?

Luke Baker, a reporter and blogger for Reuters:

Fitch, one of the big three credit ratings agencies, has made some positive noises on behalf of Greece, briefly bucking the onslaught of negative comment.

Speaking in an interview with Reuters,  a Fitch analyst said there was no reason to cut the country’s credit rating from its current BBB+ just yet,  although he was keeping a very close eye on the situation and maintaining a negative outlook.

That should have given the eurozone, so worried about the potential implosion of one of its members’ sovereign debt markets, cause to breathe more easily, at least briefly.

But the analyst added a comment that is exactly what the European Union and the 16 countries that make up the euro zone do not want to hear.

“If there was concrete EU help (for Greece), available  on certain terms known in advance, then clearly it would be a strong point for the rating,” he said.

And therein lies the rub

Indeed.  His take is that the bigwigs in Brussels want to use the current turmoil to get the Greeks to rein in their profligate social spending before they will release so much as one euro-dime to bail the foundering country out:

What the eurozone and EU are trying to do is make firm demands on Greece to get its act together — for example cutting the deficit by trimming the bloated state sector — while keeping their own hand hidden from the markets, by saying only that they stand ready to help Greece if needs be.

It’s a delicate balance and a very hard one to maintain. And it’s caused deep frustration in Greece, where ministers have turned around and accused the EU of being wishy-washy and poorly led, unable to take concrete decisions on how to help Athens. It’s beginning to look like a very high stakes game of fiscal chicken, with market speculators wondering whether Greece will get its finances in order first or the EU will be forced to blink and provide support first.

So, as the dear departed World Federalist Walter Cronkite would say: “And that’s the way it is.”

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[Short View: The market's Achilles heel | FT.com]

[Greece Credit Swaps ‘Cabal’ May Be Just Sideshow | Bloomberg]

[Of Greece, the EU and high-stakes | Reuters]

Greece, paralyzed for the second time this month by a general strike called to protest austerity measures intended to stave off (if possible) a complete economic meltdown – though that term has been thrown around so much in the last two years, I’m not quite sure what it is supposed to exactly describe anymore, is causing the EU to face up to some of the deficiencies inherent in the way it has been structured. Like how to reconcile the absolute necessity for the free flow of fiscal aid to ailing economies with lingering bitterness about World War II (on the Greek side) or acute frustration over having the highest functioning economy in the Eurozone and having to bail out the underperforming states such as Greece, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal.

His column, published on 24 February:

The agonies of the eurozone reflect a far more significant hidden deficit.
The spirit that once led Europeans into union has vanished, just as we now face the euro’s widely predicted flaws

So Antigone had a part in this tragedy too. That’s ­Antigone Loudiadis of Goldman Sachs, who ­arranged a complex ­currency swap deal that helped Greece to conceal the scale of its debt, in what the Financial Times delicately calls “an optical illusion“, as the country snuck into the eurozone. Pity Greece didn’t consult someone as wise as ­Socrates; and I don’t mean José Sócrates, the Portuguese prime minister, whose own country the gods – that is, the bond ­markets – are also eyeing leerily.

Joking apart, we need to recognise that this is not just the first great test of the eurozone but also a defining moment for the whole project of a European Union. Since this is Europe, not Apollo 13, failure is definitely an option. More likely, however, is an agonised muddling through, leaving our old and demographically ageing continent even more preoccupied with its own internal problems. And the world will not wait while we spend another decade ­navel-gazing. Call me Cassandra, if you will, but that’s how I see it.

No special gift of prophecy was needed to foresee the dilemmas that now face the eurozone. They were extensively debated before it was launched. I wrote in 1998 that monetary union was “an unprecedented, high-risk gamble”, and argued that it was the wrong priority for Europe at that time. Subsequently, I was lulled into a false sense of security by the euro’s apparent success, and by the practical and symbolic pleasures of travelling around the continent with just one ­currency in my pocket.

Now we have the predicted difficulties. As George Soros observes, a “fully fledged” currency needs not just a ­central bank but also a treasury. It requires a degree of fiscal as well as monetary discipline, linked with the capacity to make fiscal transfers to ­suffering areas (complemented by labour mobility from those areas), as you have in a country like the United States or the United Kingdom.

To survive and prosper, a European monetary union must develop at least a stronger element of economic union, and that in turn requires a stronger element of political union. Which, by the way, was one of the main motives for some of the chief political architects of what was then deliberately called “economic and monetary union”, including François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl. This was not just, as is often said, Europe putting the (monetary) cart before the (political) horse. It was an attempt to use the cart to bring on the horse. It was the last big fling of the so-called ­”functionalist” approach, by which you build a politically integrated Europe through economic integration. Broadly speaking, that worked for half a century, from the 1950s to the 1990s; but in this case, it has not. Not unless this crisis catalyses further steps of integration, as earlier crises sometimes have.

By its mendacious and self-harming profligacy, Greece has precipitated the crunch. Greece is unique, even among the Pigs (Portugal, Italy/Ireland, Greece, Spain), in its combination of massive deficit (an estimated 12.7% of GDP last year) and massive debt (some 125% of GDP and rising). It has not only lived beyond its means; it has used its years in the eurozone to become even less competitive, in starkest contrast to ­Germany. According to one calculation cited by the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf, between 2000 and 2009 Greek unit labour costs rose by 23% against Germany’s.

Yesterday, the country was hit by the second general strike in two weeks, and we ain’t seen nothing yet. Greece has promised its eurozone allies to get its deficit down from 12.7% to 8.7% this year. Oh yes, and pigs can fly. Or call on Goldman Sachs for some more optical illusions. Even if the Greeks let their government do the right thing, such deep cuts, as well as structural reforms, can make things worse before they get better. Meanwhile, it seems the Greek government needs to borrow some €55bn this year, up to half of it within the next three months. What if the gods (bond markets) grow angry, and decline to play?

Well, that third act has not been written. Anything could happen. But my guess is this: through gritted teeth, Germany will agree to some form of eurozone bailout. However, it will only support the minimum needed to ­placate the gods, and only with the most astringent, Creon-like conditions being imposed on Greece. It is an ­important but ultimately secondary question whether this help comes in the form of bilateral loans, loans from the European Investment Bank, purchases of Greek government debt, EU ­spending transfers, jointly issued eurobonds or any of the other mechanisms ­suggested. EU leaders will deny that this is a ­bailout and everyone will know that it is a bailout.

Both Greeks and Germans will then be furious. One well-placed diplomatic observer in Athens suggests to me that, as part of the European supervision of Greece’s fiscal discipline, “there’ll be a German under every desk”. Just don’t mention the war. Except that Greece’s deputy prime minister, Theodoros Pangalos, already has. Recalling the Nazi occupation, he said earlier this week: “They took away the gold that was in the Bank of Greece, they took away Greek money, and they never gave it back. This is an issue that has to be faced sometime in the future.”

To which furious Germans will reply: “They took away our d-mark, and nobody asked us if we wanted to give it up. We were assured, in ­solemn treaties and ­rulings of our constitutional court, that we’d never have to bail anyone out. We took 10 years of painful reform to make ourselves competitive again, while those Pigs lived high on the hog. Now we’re being asked to work till age 67 so the Greeks can ­retire at 63.” And so on.

Eurozone Europeans are big and grownup enough to get over this, but it will take a large toll of effort, anger and internal strains. In the long run, the ­crisis might even make the eurozone a little stronger, adding an element of what is carefully called “economic governance” (which means different things in French and German).

In the meantime, European economic growth is limping while Asians forge ahead. The always over-ambitious goal of the 2000 Lisbon agenda, to make Europe the world’s most competitive knowledge-based economy by 2010, looks ridiculous now, in 2010. And Europe’s economic and political ­weakness compound each other.

Behind the monetary lurks the fiscal; behind the fiscal, the economic; behind the economic, the political; and behind the political, the historical. The deepest reality underlying this crisis is that the personal experiences and memories that have pushed European integration ahead for 65 years, since 1945, are ­losing their force. The personal memory of war, occupation, humiliation, ­European barbarism; fear of Germany, including Germany’s fear of itself; the Soviet threat, the cold war, the “return to Europe” as a guarantee of hard-won freedom; the hope of restored European greatness.

These were massive biographical motivators, which drove people like Mitterrand and Kohl even unto the euro. Can Europeans go on building Europe without such profound motivators? Are there new ones in sight?

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[The agonies of the eurozone reflect a far more significant hidden deficit | The Guardian (UK)]

Can oil-sharing prevent the Sudan from plunging into another civil war?

In an effort to soften the economic blow to Khartoum that the impending referendum on the question of secession by the southern part of the country is likely to cause, the highest ranking official in the government of South Sudan, Luka Biong Deng, minister of presidential affairs, has indicated willingness to give half of its oil revenues to Sudan for a limited period of time.

Citing a desire to maintain stability of the Khartoum-based government, upon whom a landlocked prospective state of South Sudan would rely to transport oil to refineries and ports on the red sea, Mr. Biong said, “Our concern is the economic viability … and the unity of the north, which, I think, will make us even see whether we can continue with the same arrangement that we have,… For a certain period of time, one would go for that.”

Any such deal would be a tough sell for the rank-and-file of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, the political arm of the former rebel army that fought the decades-long civil war and that comprises the bulk of the government in the south.  However, as the Financial Times Reports:

75% of the Sudan's proven oil reserves are inside the border of the prospective state of South Sudan

The alternative – gaining independence with all the oil revenues – could trigger another civil war. By continuing to share the proceeds, the south could prevent the north’s economy from suffering and avoid a dangerous flashpoint.

If the south is forced to choose between defending independence with blood or buying it with oil, some would prefer the latter.

…

About 75 per cent of Sudan’s proven reserves of 6.3bn barrels are in the south but the pipeline that carries the oil to export terminals and refineries runs through the north. The south needs Khartoum’s co-operation to sell its oil; the north needs revenues from its neighbour’s resources.

Some 98 per cent of south Sudan’s non-aid income comes from oil, while the corresponding figure for the north is 60-70 per cent.

Under the current peace agreement South Sudan gives about 60% of its oil revenues to Khartoum.

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[South Sudan uses oil to ease secession fears | FT.com]

The drilling rig at the center of the dispute

Depending upon whom you ask, the latest flare-up of hostilities between Argentina and the UK over the control of the Falkland Islands (called the Malvinas by Argentina) is either: a) A calculated jingoistic frivolity designed by an increasingly unpopular president to distract the Argentine people from the real problems facing their country or b) The continuation an archaic British imperial system that has long since crumbled and is now making a predictable move to exploit the surrounding waters for oil.

There is, of course, a bit of bloody history behind the islands, which are jointly claimed by the UK and Argentina: (from the Christian Science Monitor)

It was nearly 30 years ago that Argentina occupied the Falkland Islands, attempting to reclaim by force the windswept archipelago that lies 300 miles off the coast of South America.

Argentine forces were handily defeated. But the South American nation has continued to lay claim over the islands, which they call the Malvinas, ever since.

Now the two nations are locked in a battle as British firms set out to begin exploring oil reserves this week in the South Atlantic. While no one expects a military showdown – some analysts dismiss the rhetoric as a political ploy by Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s administration to detract attention from domestic woes – the potential of billions of barrels of oil has sparked one of the most tense disputes since the Falklands conflict of 1982.

“The Malvinas is an issue for many Argentines, it is part of the DNA of Argentines,” says Eduardo Diez, a foreign policy expert at the Argentine-American Dialogue think tank in Buenos Aires. “The Malvinas is still a nationalistic issue for many. … It’s also economical: there is really a lot of oil over there.”

And…if that wasn’t enough, Hugo Chavez also has an opinion on the Queen’s possession of what he views as South American territory.

On Sunday, Chávez said “Look, England, how long are you going to be in Las Malvinas? Queen of England, I’m talking to you…. The time for empires is over, haven’t you noticed? Return the Malvinas to the Argentine people.”

The dispute is being presented to the United Nations this week, which recognizes the territory as disputed and has passed resolutions urging the two parties to find a resolution. However, the UK is a permanent member of the security council, and thus has veto power over any resolution the UN may attempt to pass.

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BONUS: For our Spanish-speaking readers, the excerpt of “Alo Presidente” where Hugo Chavez tells the Queen of England that her empire is dead.

[Falkland Island: British oil drillers reopen dispute with Argentina | Christian Science Monitor]

[Oil drilling begins in Falklands | Al Jazeera]

[Hugo Chavez – "Reina de Inglaterra, devuelvele las Malvinas | Youtube]