By Anna Nemtsova

On a sunny afternoon two Georgian police commanders stood on a tiny bridge over a dizzying mountain gorge and the roiling water of the Kodori River. They waved to Russian peacekeepers on the other side, inviting them to come across and talk to a group of foreign correspondents. After a few minutes, two Russian soldiers slowly walked to the middle of the bridge, but only to ask the reporters to please stop taking pictures of them. "We will not come over for any discussions," one said, and walked back.

The Georgian commander in this obscure but seemingly ever worsening standoff in the Caucasus Mountains, Soso Bregvadze, said the tension is increasing to "the boiling temperature" after the Russians deployed an additional 400 paratroopers and artillery men in Kodori. In an ominous sign, Russian peacekeepers, he noted, stopped saying "Hi" to Georgians on the other side of the bridge. "Only a few weeks ago, we could have tea with Russians and take pictures of each other on this bridge," he said with a sigh. "Not any longer.

The tension between Russia and Georgia over Abkhazia, the Georgian separatist republic, has been growing steadily since last year - and many Georgians fear that tensions will boil over into full scale armed conflict soon.

Mikhail Kalashnikov got a fairly raw deal out of Communism. The assault rifle he designed while lying wounded in hospital at the end of the Second World War became a Twentieth Century icon. His name is the world's best-known brand (think about it - there may be Kalahari bushmen who havent heard of Coca Cola, but odds are they've heard of Kalashnikov). According to Jane's Defense Weekly, up to 100 million Kalashnikovs of various

types have been produced since the gun went into production in 1947, largely thanks to the Soviet habit of giving friendly foreign allies the technology to produce the weapons free of charge. But Kalashnikov himself, who will be 90 this year, lives in a modest apartment in the Volga city of Izhevsk. He hasn't received a penny of royalties on his famous invention - though he is a Lieutenant-General and boasts a chestful of medals.

Now, the Russian state is trying to do its best to redress that injustice - if not in the interests of the AK-47's inventor, then at least in the interests of his country. First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov announced today

By Barbie Nadeau 

By Mike Elkin
 
With Spanish national elections two days away, a former Socialist town councilor was assassinated around midday today. Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and opposition leader Mariano Rajoy agreed to cancel the remaining campaign events and have convened a parliamentary session at 7pm to respond to the attack. Government officials attributed to violent separatist group ETA, but no group has claimed responsibility.
 
“The Spanish democracy has shown that it won't allow challenges from those who defy its basic principles and its essential values," said Zapatero. "It hasn't allowed them in the past, it won't allow them now and it will never allow them. Together… we will defend our institutions and our freedoms.” 

The gunman shot dead 42-year-old Isaías Carrasco, who worked at a highway toll station and was a councilman in the town of Arrasate-Mondragón in the Basque Country between 2003 and 2007. He was shot three times as he left his home with his wife and daughter.
 
ETA hasn’t targeted a specific person for assassination since May 2003. It's widely believed that the group is trying to influence the outcome of the election. The separatists, who have killed around 850 people over the past 40 years, appear to be following the precedent set in 2004 when the Madrid train bombings by an Al Qaeda-inspired group tipped the scales in favor of the Socialists. Or perhaps ETA wanted to send a bloody reminder to the country that has been focusing its political attention on the ailing economy and immigration.

It’s hard to say how this attack will affect the elections on Sunday. The initial reaction from the Socialists and Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) has been one of solidarity in the face of a common enemy – a solidarity that has been absent since the Socialists won the last election. The political atmosphere of the past four years and especially this campaign has been tense and angry. And while the PP consistently attacked the government’s anti-terror policy, namely Zapatero’s decision in 2006 to open talks with ETA after it declared a ceasefire, a collective political response is more likely than not.

By Barbie Nadeau

 
For those who may have thought the French were always a little more, hmmmm, you know, open about sex, the latest Le Nouvel Observateur may come as something of a shock. The cover of France's leading weekly magazine of news and opinion--entitled "The New Sexuality of the French"--suggests the country is still coming to grips with the revolution in morals and manners that began 40 years ago in, you guessed it, that pivotal year of Boomer consciousness: 1968. The ensemble of stories includes everything from small talk about deep thinking--an interview with the aging nouveau philosophe Alain Finkielkraut--to a survey of sex toys. Some, we're told, "are useful for relieving stress."

The core of the coverage, however, is built around a survey of 12,364 men and women aged 18 to 69 conducted by the French National Agency for AIDS Research. It's a follow-up on a similar study done in 1992, and the changes revealed are more evolutionary than revolutionary: The traditional idea of men as predators and women "waiting for the warrior at the entrance to the cave," as the Nouvel Obs writes blandly, "just won't fly anymore. Henceforth, women want to take part in the hunt."  Backing that up are numbers that show men have about the same number of sexual partners over a lifetime today (12.9) as they did in 1970 (12.8), while the number of partners for women has increased from an average 1.9 in 1972 to 5.1 today.

With respect to gays, some prejudice endures and homosexual practice, at least as shared with those conducting the survey, seems to be pretty much the same as it's been for years: 4 percent of women say they have sexual relations with other women, compared with 2.6 percent in 1992; among men the numbers are unchanged at 4.1 percent. "The development of tolerance as a matter of principle, which is especially pronounced among the young, has not been enough to produce radical changes in private attitudes toward homosexuality," says the research agency's report.

And sexual practices? There's nothing in Le Nouvel Obs, in fact, about French kissing. But there are many other details about preferred approaches to sexual intercourse--or not, as the case may be. A checklist:

All the criticism of Russia's deeply flawed presidential election yesterday misses the point: the election was doubtless a farce, with no serious opposition to the Kremlin's man. But Vladimir Putin deserves credit for doing what no other Russian leader has ever done--he voluntarily ceded power at the height of his political career. Boris Yeltsin's 2000 resignation falls into a different category: there was no way he had the health or popularity to continue. Putin does. So for all the terrible things he has wreaked on Russia during his tenure--dismantling Russia's democracy chief among them--one must at least salute the man for keeping his word and respecting the letter, if not the spirit, of Russia's constitution.

The inheritance which he's passing to Dmitry Medvedev, the unsurprising victor of Sunday's vote by a landslide of over 70%, is a different matter. As this week's Economist argues, there are dark clouds on the economic horizon. Putin's reaped the benefits of three years of meteoric rises in oil and gas prices, which have allowed him the luxury, unknown to politicians in the West, of booming State revenues without any increase in taxation. But the flip side of Russia's oil-fuelled boom has been brutal inflation and a growing poverty gap.

Home Away From Home: The prince in his accommodations at Forward Operating Base Delhi on Jan. 2, 2008. Photo: John Stillwell / AP-pool.

Around 5pm GMT this afternoon, the breaking news started coming--Prince Harry, the second son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, was fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. The way it was presented, it was almost as if the red-haired party-loving Brit was fighting a one-man battle in the dusty environs of Helmand province. Video started appearing on the BBC, showing the prince firing guns, doing foot patrols and on the telephone doing his high pressured job as a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC).  The prince it seems has been in Afghanistan since mid-December (missing his family's annual Christmas celebrations in Sandringham) . How could the news have taken this long to get out? Because there was a gentlemen's agreement between the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the British press. Fleet Street agreed not to report the deployment in exchange for having access to Prince Harry in the field. Under the blackout deal the British media had access to pooled footage, interviews and photos of the soldier prince that otherwise wouldn't have been released until Harry came back from battle in April.

It's hard to believe that anyone could long for the good old days of Jacques Chirac, but when President Nicolas Sarkozy visited the Agriculture Fair in Paris a few days ago, he managed to remind the French how comfortable they used to feel with his lanky, laid-back predecessor. When Chirac visited the annual fair, he did so as a bon vivant. Sarkozy, on the other hand, went through it in an overheated rush, using language fit for a scrum in the Metro. The video of the event captured by the tabloid daily Le Parisien has been watched by more than three million viewers:

(You can see it with relevant translation on The Shadowland Journal.) The climax comes when Sarkozy is shaking hands with the crowd and one man pulls back, "Ah, no, don't touch me." Sarko, his fixed smile unwavering says, "Get lost, then." To which the man responds, "You got me dirty." To which Sarko responds (this is a polite way of putting it), "Get lost, you jerk."

The French don't like their presidents to talk that way in public. (Chirac's language was plenty salty in private.) But the real problem is that they're discovering they just don't like Sarkozy. The cover story of this week's Le Nouvel Observateur explains why. In the lead article headlined "And if this were to end badly ...," François Bazin writes that other presidents have been unpopular, but for the most part late in their terms. When Chirac's ratings took a nose dive in 1996, early in his first mandate, his prime minister, Alain Juppé, took the fall.

But Sarkozy wants all attention fixed on him, and is managing to attract opprobrium to the office of the president itself. "What's happening today is literally unimaginable," writes Bazin.

"In the current political equation," he says, "there are plenty of other factors that enter into to the bottom line. The international crisis that's sinking growth. A campaign slogan ('Work more to earn more') that's remembered only too well and that's come back like a boomerang. All that creates turbulence, but doesn't justify the sense of an impending crash.The mistake of the president, what has really cost him, goes much further than management of change that's often contrarian and always marked by traces of narcissism that are a bit childish.

"The breaks with past conceptions of a modern presidency that Sarkozy has introduced are all symbolic in nature," writes Bazin. "His cardinal sin is to have called into question, sometimes just with little details or simple matters of behavior, that which legitimizes the authority of the head of state in a country like France." One day he manages to diminish the secular character of the French Republic (which is, to the French, almost sacred). The next he tries to tweak the nation's conscience by making 10-year-olds "adopt" victims their age killed in the Holocaust. On yet another day, he undermines the institutional rules that regulate the relationship  a president has with his ministers, parliament, and the constitutional council. "There's no such thing as good governance without measure and distance," says Bazin. "And that presumes that the head of state is something other than a gang leader you can collar and talk to using he familiar 'tu.' And that also implies a certain simplicity needed in the 'republican monarch' ... who should not be transformed into a jet-setter fascinated by the glitz of power...."

"At the center of the rumbling political and media storm, the president has chosen to expose himself more than is reasonable," Bazin concludes " Every day he makes a statement that's offensive or provocative in some way, radicalizing and shamelessly playing up to a disoriented public opinion that just wants to feel secure. Dividing and victimizing. More than a method, it's the formula of every man for himself. Nicolas Sarkozy is out walking with a lightning rod in his hands. The risk for him—and above all for the office that he holds—is that the thunderbolts will not come from the presidency but land on it, which is not at all the same thing."