Keys Corner

It seems a US missile defence system similar to that intended for Poland that is upsetting Russia at the moment can only shoot down modern weapons:

The Pentagon was forced to abort a bid to shoot down a long-range missile over the Pacific Friday when it failed to fly high enough to engage the missile defense system, US officials said.

“The target did not reach sufficient altitude to be deemed a threat and so the Ballistic Missile Defense System did not engage it, as designed,” said Air Force Lieutenant General Henry Obering…

...But Obering said there was “always a risk of this occurrence since we are flying old intercontinental ballistic missile motors in our targets.

“We have initiated a target modernization program within our existing budget, which should mitigate these risks for the future,” he said, adding the agency would try to repeat the test later this summer.

Given that Russia probably has a lot of older missiles lying around, it obviously shouldn’t be a problem for them if they want to pop off a missile or two. On the other hand why any EU country would want to install such a system is a bit of a puzzle. A defence system which consists of a grand total of ten missiles only capable of shooting down high-powered hardware seems a bit pointless, don’t you think?

(Yes, I know the US claims the defence is against Iran – I hope they know what state the Iranian rocket motors are in, they didn’t get it right on WMD in Iraq, did they?)

The Economist has regularly published reports on how property prices are developing in different countries, and it has been very frustrating for us to see that while in the last 25 years, the average price of a house in the UK has increased from £23 000 to £158 000 (a factor of over six times), property prices in Germany have remained stagnant. (If you live in Germany, you might find that a little difficult to believe, but you can download an Excel sheet of UK prices since 1952 from the Nationwide Building Society and check the UK figures yourself). In fact, when we sold an apartment we bought in Munich in 1982 a couple of years ago, we sold it for 20% less than we paid for it. If only we’d kept our money invested in property in the UK, instead of transfering it to Germany…

What I haven’t understood until now was why the German market was performing so abysmally, when the USA, Australia and most European countries have been behaving like the UK market. However, this week the Wirtschaftswoche published an article (WiWo Nr. 27, 2006-07-03: Konjunkturkommentar – Kräftig durchluften) pushing for deregulation of the German property market and things became a little clearer.

What is different between Germany and the rest of those countries where the market has boomed for 25 years or more?

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr Leon Bennun, Director of Science, Policy and Information for BirdLife International, raises an interesting possibility in the BBC’s Green Room series – he points out that the outbreaks lie mainly on major trade routes, rather than on the routes taken by migrating birds. And countries which have implemented strict controls on importing and movement of poultry, such as Japan and South Korea, have had no outbreaks after the controls were imposed:

In fact, countries which have not yet developed a large-scale intensive poultry industry have also been largely spared. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that in Laos, 42 out of 45 outbreaks affected intensive poultry units.

So – it could be that avian flu is largely caused by the overcrowded, insanitary conditions in many large intensive poultry-farms. As Bennun says of the dying swans being reported across Europe:

They may have caught the disease from other wild birds; but this is unlikely given the tens of thousands of waterfowl that have tested negative for H5N1 over the last decade. Much more likely is that before starting out, they picked up the virus from farms, either from infected poultry or their faeces. Mute swans often graze agricultural fields, and are likely to have come into contact with poultry manure spread as a fertiliser.

If wild birds had been spreading the disease across continents there would have been trails of outbreaks following migration routes; but this hasn’t happened…

Greenland’s glaciers seem to be melting down fast: the giant Jakobshavn glacier, which is four miles wide and 300 m thick is now moving towards the sea at a rate of 34 meters a year; the normal annual speed of a glacier is just 30 cm per year.

And the front of the Helheim glacier which has remained in the same place since records began, has retreated four and a half miles in the last four years. Previously scientists talked in terms of the Greenland icecap melting completely over the next 1000 years, but now experts think it could be gone within less than half that time. However, the most pressing issue is that the melting ice threatens to disrupt the Gulf Stream, responsible for Europe’s mild climate, which is driven by very salty water sinking off and drawing warmer water in to replace it.

A proposal to introduce flat-rate income tax in Germany may have contributed to the completely unexpected failure of the CDU/CSU to win a workable majority in the recent elections. The proposal was fought tooth and nail by Gerhard Schröder, arguing that it would mean that an industry boss would be paying the same rate as a worker, which might have been correct, but which came over as if Schröder meant the number of Euro would be the same, rather than the percentage, and in any case wasn’t correct as the proposed flat rate would have included a tax-free sum for the first 8000 Euro, meaning that lower earners would have also paid a lower percentage than the managers.

However, I came across an argument in the Independent, referring to the UK tax system, which I don’t recall seeing in the German election campaign. It highlights a major problem of introducing a flat tax if you already have progressive tax bands and lots of deductible personal allowances (which is the situation in Germany today):

10 per cent of UK taxpayers contribute about 50 per cent of the personal tax take, and the average contribution by households is just 18.2 per cent of their income. To get the same revenue, you’d need to charge a flat rate of 23 per cent if you kept current allowances. This would leave 90 per cent of taxpayers – or 27 million people – worse off. Even if you scrapped all but the most basic personal allowances, 22 million taxpayers would be worse off. And if you try to consolidate national insurance into your flat tax, pensioners would be worse off.

The authors of that analysis claimed it took ten minutes to do the sums, and half of that was doing research on the internet to gather the necessary figures. Anyone fancy doing the sums for Germany?

The FBI appears to have al-Qa’ida and the Mafia sewn up and has reset it’s target on eco-terrorism, reports The Independent, quoting John Lewis, the agency’s deputy assistant director for counter-terrorism:

“There is nothing else going on in this country over the past several years that is racking up the high number of violent crimes and terrorist actions,” he told senators…

...The chairman of the senate committee, the Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma, added to the sense of alarm, agreeing with Mr Lewis that killings might be next…

...And evoking language more normally heard in connection with al-Qa’ida, Senator Inhofe urged the FBI to seek out the money pipeline funding the groups.

In Italy, however, the Mafia still poses a problem, running its operations successfully from within jail, where inmates pass on instructions to other family members while being video-recorded by the authorities.

I was googling topics related to the EU, mainly looking for information on the EU Consitution (PDF file, 1 MB), when I stumbled across this link which plays the EU anthem (MP3 file recorded at 320 bps). I didn’t even know the EU had an anthem. Actually, it is part of the Ninth Symphony by Ludwig Van Beethoven. You can read more about it here. If it reminds you of the Soundtrack of Stanley Kubrik’s Clockwork Orange, then you are quite right – the film also had large chunks of Beethoven’s Ninth as background music.

This is really going to improve Italian public opinion about being involved in the Coalition of the Willing:

March 4 (Bloomberg)—Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi demanded the U.S. explain the shooting death of an Italian officer at a U.S.-controlled Baghdad checkpoint who was escorting a journalist freed in Iraq after a month in captivity.

The shooting occurred after a convoy accompanying Giuliana Sgrena to the airport for her return trip to Italy was stopped at the checkpoint and shooting broke out, Berlusconi said at a press conference in Rome. The Italian intelligence officer, Nicola Calipari, saved Sgrena’s life by using his body to shield her from the gunfire. Sgrena was also shot in the incident, Berlusconi said…

And what a horrific experience, having survived her kidnapping, for Giuliana Sgrena.

(Full article on Bloomberg)