It's been a while since I did a review of other stories in the international press, but here goes.
Let me take this as an opportunity to bring your attention to dhonig for his/her Daily Pulse stories.
I'll point you as well to my diary form yestarday which was unfairly neglected...
French nuclear energy
Anyway, for today:
- Brits on the run
- Wages on hold
- Talibans on the rise
- And a special on fuel efficiency
Great escape (Guardian UK)
In the 1980s, the Costa del Sol was the destination of choice for many British criminals. Today they head to Thailand, where the beaches are stunning, the women cheap and the police bribable. Duncan Campbell travels to Pattaya, paradise for sunseekers - and Brits on the run
Richer companies, poorer workers (International Herald Tribune)
Across wealthy nations, pay has stagnated and job creation stalled at a time when corporate profits are soaring.
Some economists see signs that this is more than just a short-lived aberration. As Western businesses become less dependent on their home markets through globalization, standards of living may be stalling in the rich nations even as they relatively improve in emerging economies. But the prospect of a drawn-out redistribution of wealth in the West from employees to shareholders is already generating fears of a potential backlash, raising the heat on corporations from unions and politicians.
"Corporations are getting a growing part of the spoils and that is a recipe for tension," said Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics at Harvard and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. "Some of this is cyclical, but what we're seeing is also part of a longer trend."
Wages have lagged behind productivity growth in Europe and the United States over the past three years. Last year, when adjusted for inflation, they fell outright in both America and Germany.
Revival of the Taliban (Asia Times)
sia Times Online was the first publication to write about the Taliban's new strategy (see
Osama adds weight to Afghan resistance, September 11, 2004), which was the brainchild of a few Taliban who were sent to northern Iraq before the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Oriented with the Ansarul Islam in northern Iraq by al-Qaeda-linked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they were taught the guerrilla tactics then being successfully applied in various Iraqi cities - and which still are. The group returned to Afghanistan some time ago. One of the members was Mehmood Haq Yar, an expert in guerrilla and urban warfare.
Asia Times Online has learned that this Iraq-style resistance is to be activated in Afghanistan.
Go read the rest of the articles.
Meanwhile, the French agency for energy savings has published its ranking of cars by fuel consumption and fuel emissions:
Gasoline cars
Diesel cars (Half of the cars sold in Europe are diesel today)
We count fuel consumption in liters per 100 km. You need to take [UPDATED AND CORRECTED] 235 and divide it by that number to find your MPG. Here's a summary of the table. It only includes the best performers; the only cars you are likely to recognise are the Prius and the Smart; the others are amongst the best selling cars in Europe [table corrected to reflect LEP's comment below]:
Car MPG CO2 emission (g/km)
Smart 69 90 (diesel)
Citroen C2 57 107 (diesel, it's a Mini-sized car)
Renault Clio 55 112 (diesel, a slightly bigger car; 30% of the Europen market is cars of that size)
Toyota Yaris 55 113 (diesel, same size than the Citroen C2)
Toyota Prius 54 104 (the first gasoline car)
Smart 50 113 (gasoline - it's the first "pure" gasoline car in the rankings)
Honda Civic 48 116 (gasoline)
As you can see, the French manufacturers are good specialists of small, efficient diesel engines, and they get better MPG than the Prius (for smaller cars). The other European manufacturers like Volkswagen and Fiat also have very good diesel engines (Ford buys its diseel engines from Peugeot-Citroen and GM form Fiat) and with similar MPG numbers.
The point to note is that half of the cars sold in Europe today have Prius-like MPG and emissions. That comes form a combination of strict regulations (both on emissions and CAFE equivalents) and high gasoline prices through high taxes.
