In a separate operation, another 800-strong French force with U.S. air support this month recaptured the Uzbin Valley, a pro-Taliban stronghold where 10 French soldiers were killed last year in the war’s single biggest combat loss for foreign troops.
The American gunner gives a hand signal and French commandos from the 27th Alpine Battalion leap out of the back of the Chinook onto a moonlit Afghan mountaintop.
U.S. Apache gunships provide cover as the French troops spread out, taking up positions in the eerie dawn light.
The dizzyingly high sheer rock outcrop, nicknamed “the castle” by NATO, was in Taliban hands days ago, giving the militants a stronghold that overlooked the massive U.S. Bagram airbase, which now lights up a distant plain in the darkness.
The Alah Say valley below was a stubborn Taliban bastion. Now it is in NATO’s hands. Credit “Old Europe”.
“Think of waves as concentrated wind power,” says Max Carcas, business development director at Pelamis Wave Power in Edinburgh, Scotland. As winds move across the oceans, they create ripples, which grow into swells. Because water is heavier than air, each wave can transfer some 800 times more energy than a similar volume of wind.
While wind farms remain landlocked in the U.S., the offshore variety is flourishing in Europe. And European players lead the world in related technologies, from rugged turbines designed to handle rough storms to giant crane ships that transport and assemble the huge windmills. Burntisland Fabrications (BiFab), a unit of oil services specialist JCE Group, has found a promising niche in the emerging offshore wind industry.
Adapting designs first used for oil rigs, BiFab builds large scaffolds—each resembling a submerged Eiffel Tower—to moor the wind turbines to the sea floor. The structures, consisting of relatively light but sturdy lattice work, require less steel than the single-tube designs typically used to support land turbines.
BiFab, based in Fife, Scotland, pioneered the design to prop up two 5-megawatt turbines—among the world’s largest. Standing in some 120 feet of water, the duo help power a North Sea oil platform. Late last year, BiFab won bids to supply a new, lighter-weight design to support scores of turbines being built in the Irish and North Seas.
“Johanna is a very private person,” said an Icelandic government source. “A lot of people didn’t even know she was gay. When they learn about it people tend to shrug and say, ‘Oh’. That’s not to say they are not interested; they are interested in who she’s living with – but no more so than if she was a man living with a woman.”
The first government collapse of the global economic crisis is about to yield the world’s first openly-gay leader. Johanna Sigurdardottir, a former air hostess, is expected to be sworn in as Iceland’s Prime Minister by the end of the week.
Her moment in the international spotlight comes at the most horrendous moment in her nation’s recent history. As the global meltdown began, the collapse of Iceland’s grossly over-leveraged economy was followed smartly by the implosion of its banks and currency. Now its government has gone the same way, the first to succumb to the backwash from the crisis.
Ms Sigurdardottir’s party, the Social Democrat Alliance, was asked to form a new government but its leader is taking a leave of absence to recover from treatment for a benign tumour. And so, “Saint Johanna”, as she has come to be known, has been propelled from the social affairs ministry – which she has presided over for a decade – to take centre stage in a choice hailed as “unexpected but brilliant”.
The study, titled Europe’s Muslim women: potential aspirations and challenges, was commissioned by the King Baudouin Foundation and carried out by Dr Sara Silvestri, a Research Associate at Cambridge University’s Von Huegel Institute.
Muslim women in Europe are proud to live in and belong to Europe, despite facing a daily struggle against prejudice from both within and
outside their own communities, a new research suggests.
The study, carried out at the University of Cambridge, indicates that Muslim women believe life in Europe has given them freedom, opportunities and security.
It also reveals that an emerging generation of Muslim women are becoming increasingly independent and are determined to assert their right to a full education, a career and to follow their own dreams.
“The euro is sheltering businesses from the exchange rate volatility which has battered them in previous downturns,” European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said on Monday. “To put it simply, the euro works.”
Europe’s single currency has come of age early. The euro turns ten on Jan. 1, a milestone for one of the most powerful symbols of European identity. It has already endured a rite of passage over the past few months, as the global financial crisis battered European markets yet failed to fluster the euro. And, like any debutante, it has its suitors: a string of countries lining up to dump their national currencies and join the euro zone.
It’s a remarkable achievement for a currency whose only global rival is the U.S. dollar. The greenback has over two centuries of history behind it. But it wasn’t until Jan. 1, 1999 that 11 E.U. countries locked their national currencies together into a fixed exchange rate. Three years later physical coins and notes became available, replacing national cash in a massive changeover operation. (Read TIME’s Top 10 business deals of the year.)
The euro zone is now 15 members large and has a combined population of around 320 million. However, many more people are directly affected by the euro, from would-be members whose currencies are already pegged to it, to countries like Montenegro and Kosovo whose effective national currency is the euro. France’s former African colonies also peg their common currency to Europe’s. That means around 500 million people rely on the euro or euro-pegged currencies.
Some 15 million new jobs in the last six years have been created by making trade and travel easier through a single market.
Ten years ago, Europe launched its grand experiment with a shared currency — and watched it plunge in value before recovering.
But as the anniversary approaches of the Jan. 1, 1999, arrival of the euro, economists say the new currency is finally fulfilling its promise as a way to lower borrowing costs, ease trade and tourism, boost growth and strengthen the European community.
And doing it amid a global financial crisis that, for the moment, underlines the safety in numbers that comes from joining one, big currency.
“After 10 years it has truly created a zone of security and stability,” French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said in mid-December. “From all these points of view, the euro has in fact proven wrong the forecasts some made against the euro 10 years ago.”
Holland, one of the most liberal countries in the world, has 138 Saudi students currently on scholarships; 36 of them are women.
At the immigration check at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, Ghadeer Al-Swailim got her first taste of how things are done in the West. As he always does, Al-Swailim’s brother handed the immigration officer his passport as well as his sister’s. The immigration officer initially refused to take the booklets, telling the brother that his sister must hold her own passport when she goes through the immigration and customs process at the airport.
“I felt independent!” said Ghadeer, a 20-year-old Saudi postgraduate student on her way to Maastricht under Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah’s foreign scholarship program.
Finance minister Peer Steinbrück has been among the most vocal European government official complaining about how the problems started in the U.S. sub-prime market - and how they will result in the erosion of American influence. “The U.S. will lose its superpower status in the world financial system,” he has said, predicting that the dollar will also lose ground to the euro and the Japanese yen.
First you mess up the world’s financial system. Then you blow the rescue of it. Now let’s show you how to do it properly.
That, in a nutshell, is the less-than-flattering message European governments are sending to the U.S. as they mount their own gigantic bank bailout. The plans, announced Monday after two weeks of dithering, involve Britain, Germany, France and some others recapitalizing national banks that require help, and providing state guarantees and other measures to kick-start the stalled credit market. The details are strikingly different from the U.S. approach adopted by U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the Federal Reserve Board. And there’s a big reason for that: The Europeans think Paulson got it badly wrong, and have watched aghast as he failed to restore confidence in the world’s financial system.
