"Taiwan is a country whose sovereignty lies outside the People's Republic of China," he added, referring to China by its formal name.He spoke of a "four wants" policy - namely independence, a new constitution, further development and a change to the country's officially designated name. Since taking office, President Chen has sought to emphasise the island's separate identity, the BBC's Caroline Gluck in Taipei says.

But his latest comments are his strongest since taking office and raise new worries of increased tensions with China as well as Taiwan's main ally, the US, our correspondent adds. Those fears contributed to falls on Taiwan's stock market on Monday and a weakening of the Taiwan dollar against the US dollar. Opposition leaders accused him of being irresponsible and putting Taiwan at risk of a possible war with China.

China sees Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to use force if the island ever moved to declare formal independence. The United States is committed to supplying Taiwan with defensive weapons, but opposes any Taiwanese provocation of China. In response to Mr Chen's comments, China's Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told Taiwanese reporters in Beijing: "Don't listen to local leaders".

"Whoever wants to split away will become a criminal in history". Amid increasing international concern at the country's expanding military, China on Sunday announced a 17% increase in the defence budget for 2007. Taiwan's defence ministry warned that the move not only upset the military balance across the Taiwan Strait, but also increases "the potential for a disruption to peace and stability in Asia".

The two sides have made considerable progress, and Vietnam's prime minister met Pope Benedict in Rome in January. But the Vatican - whose delegation is being led by the Holy See's Undersecretary of State for Relations with States, Monsignor Pietro Parolin - remains concerned about a number of issues.

Last month, Father Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest and democracy activist, was taken from his home in the Bishop's Palace in the central city of Hue by police and placed under house arrest 20kms (12 miles) outside the city. A Vatican news agency has also alleged mistreatment of Catholics by, among others, local authorities in the north west of Vietnam.

The Vatican wants the government to return church property confiscated decades ago, and also to be allowed to provide more education and welfare services. This is something the government is considering as it tries to manage some of the problems caused by Vietnam's rapid economic development. The government keeps the Catholic Church under tight control - for example, it must approve the appointment of every priest. This is a legacy of a time when the communist authorities saw the church as an agent of colonialism.

But times have changed and now it sees the church as a potential ally against social problems and even as a force for national unity.

China's state-run Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association welcomed the meeting and especially Pope Benedict XVI's decision to write a letter to China's 10m Catholics. Association vice-chairman Liu Bainian said: "This is beneficial for China-Vatican relations. It is a step forward but we still have to see the concrete actions."

The two main causes of disagreement between the sides are the Vatican's recognition of Taiwan and China's ordination of bishops without the Holy See's consent. Three such bishops were appointed last year. While the Vatican has indicated it is willing to downgrade relations with Taiwan, the Episcopal appointments remain a sticking point.

The BBC's David Willey in Rome says both sides seem to want to improve ties, keeping open the possibility of a papal visit around the time of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

"The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in," said Isabel V. Sawhill, an expert on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Marriage has declined across all income groups, but it has declined far less among couples who make the most money and have the best education. These couples are also less likely to divorce. Many demographers peg the rise of a class-based marriage gap to the erosion since 1970 of the broad-based economic prosperity that followed World War II.

As cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births increase among the broader population, social scientists predict that marriage with children will continue its decades-long retreat into relatively high-income exclusivity.College-educated women, whose numbers have risen sharply since 1980, often live with a partner and postpone marriage. But in most cases, they eventually marry and have children, and divorce at about half the rate of women who do not finish high school.

While the marriage gap appears to be driven primarily by education and income, it does have a racial dimension.Marriage and childbearing seem to be more "de-coupled" among black people than white people, with about a third of first births among white women coming before marriage, compared with three-quarters among black women, according to a recent review of research on cohabitation. As for children, the review found that 55 percent of blacks, 40 percent of Hispanics and 30 percent of whites spend some of their childhood with cohabiting parents.

Class, though, is a much better tool than race for predicting whether Americans will marry or cohabit, said Pamela Smock, co-author of the review and a University of Michigan sociology professor. "The poor aren't entering into marriage very much at all," said Smock, who has interviewed more than 100 cohabitating couples. She said young people from these backgrounds often do not think they can afford marriage.Arguments that marriage can mean stability do not seem to change their attitudes, Smock said, noting that many of them have parents with troubled marriages.

"This is not a product that everyone would want to consume," Rissler said, adding that other companies grow such plants indoors or in vats. "It is unwise to produce drugs in plants outdoors."Ventria has developed three varieties of rice, each endowed with a different human gene that makes the plants produce one of three human proteins. Two of them -- lactoferrin and lysozyme -- are bacteria-fighting compounds found in breast milk and saliva.

The company is also talking to the Food and Drug Administration about putting the proteins into health foods. Its third variety of rice makes serum albumin, a blood protein used in medical therapies. Also on Wednesday, the agency revealed that a type of rice seed in Arkansas had become contaminated with a different variety of genetically engineered rice, LL62, that was never released for marketing. The error was discovered in the course of an ongoing investigation into the widespread contamination of U.S. rice by yet another gene-altered variety, LL601, which has seriously disrupted rice exports.

Those problems, along with the previous discovery of unapproved, gene-altered StarLink corn in food and the accidental release of crops that had been engineered to make a vaccine for pig diarrhea, undermine the USDA's credibility, critics said.
"USDA's record is not good," Rissler said, pointing to several recent court judgments against the department and a December 2005 inspector general report that savaged the department for its poor oversight of biotechnology. "We don't think they can enforce even the inadequate system that is in place.

(from - www.organicconsumers.org) "Scientists have begun putting genes from human beings into food crops in a dramatic extension of genetic modification. The move, which is causing disgust and revulsion among critics, is bound to strengthen accusations that GM technology is creating "Frankenstein foods" and drive the controversy surrounding it to new heights. Even before this development, many people have opposed the technology on the grounds that it is playing God by creating unnatural combinations of living things. Opponents say that no one will want to eat the partially human-derived food because it will smack of cannibalism".

The summit comes at a time of sectarian division and tension between Saudis and Iran over events in Iraq and Lebanon. Saudi Arabia, a major Sunni power in the region, and Iran, an important Shia power, have found themselves aligned with groups on opposing political sides. Correspondents say Saudi Arabia has led a diplomatic drive in recent months to counterbalance what it sees as Iran's growing influence in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

An account of the talks was issued by the official Saudi Press Agency early on Sunday, shortly after Mr Ahmadinejad left Riyadh to return home to Tehran. Speaking in Tehran after the talks, Mr Ahmadinejad said: "We discussed the Palestinian and Iraq issues comprehensively. We have common views in this regard."

He also said that "plots carried out by the enemies in order to divide the world of Islam were discussed" and that the Saudis had joined Iran in condemning them, the AFP news agency reports. "Iran and Saudi Arabia oppose the dominance of enemies over the region and their conspiracies. During this trip, we tried to devise some measures to prevent the enemies from harming the Muslim world and to foil their plots," Mr Ahmadinejad said.

Mr Ahmadinejad's trip to Riyadh came as Iran is under growing pressure from the West over its refusal to halt its uranium enrichment programme. The US has also claimed that the "highest levels" of Iran's government are supplying arms used by Shia militants in Iraq. Iran is a rising power bolstered by the removal by the US of its two great enemies - the Taleban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq - the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says.

Iran's Shia allies are now the dominant force in Iraq, while Tehran's influence is spreading more widely into Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Sunni-ruled states like Jordan and Saudi Arabia are watching Iran's rise with a degree of anxiety, our correspondent adds. It makes sense for the Saudis and the Iranians to talk as neither country has an interest in a Sunni-Shia rivalry in the region getting out of control, our correspondent says.

Indeed, the fact that this bilateral meeting has come ahead of a wider multilateral gathering on Iraq suggests that some sort of new understanding just might be in the works, he says.

This time round we are already deep in a New Cold War whose stakes are literally the future of life on this planet. The debacle in Iraq, or the prospect of a US tactical nuclear pre-emptive strike against Iran are ghastly enough. In comparison to what is at play in the US global military buildup against its most formidable remaining global rival, Russia, they loom relatively small. The US military policies since the end of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Republic of Russia in 1991 are in need of close examination in this context. Only then do Putin's frank remarks on February 10 at the Munich Conference on Security make sense.

Putin spoke in general terms of Washington's vision of a 'unipolar' world, with 'one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making, calling it a 'world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.'

Then the Russian President got to the heart of the matter: 'Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force military force in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible.'

Putin continued, 'We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state's legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?'

The vast resources-rich and population-rich Eurasian Heartland and landmass is building economic and military ties with one another for the first time in history, ties whose driving force is the increasingly aggressive Washington role in the world.

The driver of the emerging Eurasian geopolitical cooperation is obvious. China, with the world's largest population and an economy expanding at double digits, urgently needs secure alliance partners who could secure her energy security. Russia, an energy goliath, needs secure trade outlets independent of Washington control to develop and rebuild its tattered economy. These complimentary needs form the seed crystal of what Washington and US strategists define as a new Cold War, this one over energy, over oil and natural gas above all. Military might is the currency this time as in the earlier Cold War.

By 2006 Moscow and Beijing had clearly decided to upgrade their cooperation with their Eurasian neighbors. They both agreed to turn to a moribund loose organization that they had co-founded in 2001, in the wake of the 1998 Asia crisis, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO. The SCO had highly significant members, geopolitically seen. SCO included oil-rich Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well as China and Russia. By 2006 Beijing and Moscow began to view the SCO as a nascent counterweight to increasingly arbitrary American power politics. The organization was discussing projects of energy cooperation and even military mutual defense.

A new Armageddon is in the making. The unilateral military agenda of Washington has predictably provoked a major effort by Russia to defend herself. The prospects of a global nuclear conflagration, by miscalculation, increase by the day. At what point might an American President, God forbid, decide to order a pre-emptive full-scale nuclear attack on Russia to prevent Russia from rebuilding a state of mutual deterrence?

Bush's America is a hollowed-out debt-ridden economy engaged on using its last card, its vast military power to prop up the dollar and its role as world sole Superpower.

Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools. The home-schooling community in Germany is tiny. As Hitler knew, Germans tend to obey orders unquestioningly. Only some 500 children are being home-schooled in a country of 80 million. Home-schooling families are prosecuted without mercy.

All German political parties, including the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Angela Merkel, are opposed to home-schooling. They say that "the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be tampered with." The home-schoolers receive no support from the official (state funded) churches, either. These maintain that home-schoolers "isolate themselves from the world" and that "freedom of religion does not justify opposition against the obligation to attend school."

Six decades after Hitler, German politicians and church leaders still do not understand true freedom: that raising children is a prerogative of their fathers and mothers and not of the state, which is never a benevolent parent and often an enemy.

While it is disquieting that Europeans have not learned the lessons from their dictatorial past upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including children, to psychiatric wards, as the Soviets used to do there is reason for Americans to worry, too.

The United Nations is also restricting the rights of parents. Article 29 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that it is the goal of the state to direct the education of children. In Belgium, the U.N. Convention is currently being used to limit the constitutional right to home-school. In 1995 Britain was told that it violated the U.N. Convention by allowing parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes.

Last year, the American Home School Legal Defense Association warned that the U.N. Convention could make home-schooling illegal in America, even though the Senate has never ratified it. Some lawyers and liberal politicians in the states claim that U.N. conventions are "customary international law" and should be considered part of American jurisprudence.

At present, young Melissa Busekros' ordeal is a German horror story. Could it soon be an American one?

"The growth in factory farms in the developing world is being driven by the fact that there are more people in cities and they have more money to buy meat," she told IPS in an interview. Rising incomes, populations and demand for meat has resulted in the global poultry population quadrupling since the 1960s to about 18 billion birds today. Once mostly raised under free-range conditions or in backyards by very small producers, most poultry are now kept in large flocks numbering several hundred thousand.

Cramming 100,000 chickens into a single facility to produce low-cost meat also creates the perfect atmosphere for the spread of disease. For that very reason intensive livestock production systems in Europe and North America feed large volumes of antibiotics to chickens, pigs and cows to control diseases. This widespread use of antibiotics has created bacteria that are now resistant to antibiotics and pose yet another human health threat.

There is mounting evidence that there are other vectors of the disease. No wild birds have been detected with the virus in Europe or Africa this winter, yet there have been outbreaks in Nigeria, Egypt and Europe. Illegal and improper trade in poultry is thought to be the reason for these outbreaks. "Many of us at the outset underestimated the role of trade," Samuel Jutzi, director of Animal Production and Health at the FAO, told the International Herald Tribune last week.

"The poultry sector is the most globalised in agriculture," Jutzi said. "There is incredible movement of chicks and other products." The pathogenic H5N1 form of avian flu does not usually develop in wild birds or backyard poultry because their populations are too spread out and diverse, said Cathy Holtslander, project organiser for the Beyond Factory Farming Coalition, a Canadian NGO. Concentrating huge numbers of animals in small spaces, feeding them the cheapest food possible, centralising and speeding up processing, and distributing the product widely around the world is the perfect recipe for spreading disease, Holtslander told IPS.

The growing numbers of livestock around the world are responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent), according to the FAO. It's not just methane and manure -- the FAO shows that land-use changes, especially deforestation to expand pastures and to create arable land for feed crops, is a big part. So is the use of energy to produce fertilisers, to run the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants, and to pump water.
Already surpassing emissions from the world's transportation sector, livestock numbers are rising fast.

"The world's poor probably need more meat, but we in North America and Europe should eat a lot less meat," said Nierenberg. And it would be better and healthier to get meat from small-scale, localised production systems. Factory farms provide cheap meat only because the real costs in terms of air and water pollution, terrible conditions for workers and animals and so on are not factored in, she said.

"The U.S. infrastructure can barely handle the problems caused by factory farms," Nierenberg said. "I don't know how they can address these in the developing world."

Currently Berlin is pursuing the logistics business in Middle Eastern countries as well as in Russia. Whereas the Persian Gulf has become the turntable for exports to the Arab world, the Russian Federation is considered the "corridor" for overland transport to China - including weapons supplies to the Afghan theatre of operations. With additional billions, the German government is financing the expansion of German maritime trade as well. The objective is for Germany to obtain the predominating global position in the transport of merchandise - "the world champion in transport"

The German maritime transport sees itself well on its way to reach this goal. At the end of last year, the German merchant fleet was comprised of 2,998 ships - ten percent more than one year earlier. Thus this fleet has tripled in size since 1999. German shipowners, in the meantime, have the third largest merchant fleet in the world, after Greece and Japan. As far as the container freighters are concerned, economically the most important ships, Germany, with 1,280 ships, is the world leader.

Further growth is programmed. In 2006, 727 ships, valued at approximately seven billion Euros, were ordered at the dockyards. Altogether German shipowners have made construction contracts valued at 26.4 billion Euros. Therefore the Federation of German Shipowners is optimistic. "Germany, as a location, is using its potentials in the area of maritime travel and is expanding. That is positive."

Not only the shipping companies, but the entire German sea and port economy is booming. Shipyards and port operators are likewise making record profits and can, once again, count on billions in state subsidies and tax benefits - because of the "very hard international competition". Chancellor Angela Merkel felt it necessary to warn the fifth national maritime conference, that the People's Republic of China is making substantial effort toward becoming the number one shipbuilding nation. This threatens Germany with the loss of market shares.

Navigation is a "national task", explained the Chancellor and promised business enterprises the appropriate state support. Alongside financial support - the government intends to make 5.1 billion Euros available for the elaboration of the ports - the chancellor gave also assurances of political influence. "Especially during the German EU presidency" the government will have an "open ear for the maritime economy".

On the Eastern European axis, German enterprises will be preparing further expansion steps in Moscow from February 7 - 9, 2007. The venue will be a German/Russian logistics conference, jointly organized by the German BVL and the Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation. German railway workers were welcomed in Moscow and considered ingenious engineers.

The intensive cooperation in logistics on the Eastern European axis is accompanied by a German-Russian military commerce. Thus Moscow makes its railway network available for the transport of German weapons and NATO equipment to Afghanistan. The current development of an alliance between Germany and Russia is directly aimed at the movements of resistance in the Middle East and Asia Minor, and indirectly, it facilitates the logistical encirclement of the People's Republic of China.

The charts designate parts of France, Denmark, the whole of Luxemburg, Switzerland and upper Italy to the political fiction of a German-dominated centre. Naturally, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are taken into the project. Various areas are claimed as part of "Middle Europe" because they were originally part of the German Reich, "quite separately" from their later conquest by the Nazis. These charts bear a worrying similarity to projections made by the predecessor states of the German Federal Republic.

The plan was discussed in the "Standing Committee for Geographical Names" (StAGN), a body little known outside specialist circles, of which the Director of the Leibniz-Institute for Territorial Science is a member. This institution enjoys state funding and publishes authoritative guidance for geopolitical purposes. The German specialists in re-ordering are supposedly geographers but have repeatedly produced work affecting the sovereign rights of foreign states. In the institute, "Lebensraum" is a matter occasionally discussed.

Germans dominate the "Middle Europe" fiction in the West, as in "North Schleswig" (Denmark) and in Luxemburg. Belgium is relieved of its "German districts" and France of Alsace and Lorraine. The "Region" (Alsace-Lorraine) is stated "to carry a strong French character today" - and this concerning a part of French territory. According to the report this character should belong to "an autonomous native people". This is associated with the supposed issue of a semi-German local language.

"At any rate" the report proudly states the "Region" (Alsace-Lorraine) "Belonged to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and was part of Reich territory from 1871 to 1918 - a matter completely unconnected with the situation arising in the Second World War." The air-brushing out of the Nazi European dictatorship under the title of "Middle Europe" saves the originators from drawing attention to the economic and military background of the up-and-coming "Middle Europe" fiction in Germany.

According to these reports, votes were to be bought, so that Germany could attain world power status with a seat on the UN Security Council. The emergence of the German/Japanese alliance is accompanied by Tokyo's politico-military offensive. Powerful forces in Japan strive for a revision of the postwar constitution, which currently only permits self-defense forces.

The intention is to unharness Japanese military potential on a global scale. The rearmament of Japan is coordinated with Washington and is to lead to an institutionalized cooperation with NATO. Discussions to this effect were the focus of Shinzo Abe's recent visit to the German capital. The German government announced its wish to further intensify the very close cooperation with its ex-World War II ally. The alliance is directed against China, a repeated victim of Japanese crimes of aggression.

Now Japan is also striving to take the step toward a global military presence, that Germany has accomplished over the last 15 years, and therefore plans to change its postwar constitution. World-wide deployments of Japanese military forces will then again be possible. Last Tuesday, Tokyo's former "Self-Defense Authority" was upgraded to a "Ministry of Defense".

The Japanese government seeks to carry out its military ascent along the lines of the German model and with the support of its closest ally, the United States - that encourages Japan to cooperate closely with NATO. Washington is hoping to be able to shift the burden of its Middle Eastern wars onto the shoulders of another state. In addition, Japan is an element of the western plans to encircle the People's Republic of China.

The legal basis for this was provided by the Prüm Treaty, signed two years ago by a group of EU pioneers. Using its EU Council Presidency, Berlin is planning to initiate the incorporation of the Prüm Treaty into the EU's legal framework. This Treaty has come under criticism in Germany because of deficits in the protection of data privacy and its lack of democratic control.

The intended application throughout the EU has also come under massive protest. It is expected that this international treaty, elaborated and signed by the executive, will, at best, be slipped though national parliaments, without debate, and have supervision renounced by the European Parliament. Great Britain, Ireland, Poland and the Czech Republic have, until now, strictly refused to join this treaty.]

At the heart of the book is the fundamental question: why is it you can bake a cake at home with as few as six ingredients, but Twinkies require 39? And why do many of them seem to bear so little resemblance to actual food? The answer: To stay fresh on a grocery-store shelf, Twinkies can't contain anything that might spoil, like milk, cream or butter. Once you remove such real ingredients, something has to take their place and cellulose gum, lecithin and sodium stearoyl lactylate are a good start. Add the fact that industrial quantities of batter have to pump easily through automated tubes into cake molds, and you begin to get the idea.

Even so, it can be unsettling to learn just how closely the basic ingredients in processed foods resemble industrial materials. Corn dextrin, a common thickener, is also the glue on postage stamps and envelopes. Ferrous sulfate, the iron supplement in enriched flour and vitamin pills, is used as a disinfectant and weedkiller.
Is this cause for concern? Ettlinger says no, though you wouldn't want a diet that consists solely of Twinkies. Ultimately, all food, natural and otherwise, is composed of chemical compounds and normal ingredients like salt have industrial applications, too. Still, it gives you pause when he describes calcium sulfate, a dough conditioner, as "food-grade plaster of Paris."

In the end, you may learn more than you really wanted to about the Twinkie-Industrial Complex, as Ettlinger calls it. But you will never read a label the same way again. Industrial-strength junk food, anyone?

The choice of Cardinal Biffi raised eyebrows in the Vatican, given his sometimes eccentric views. The cardinal gave a warning of the coming of the Antichrist during his two decades as the Archbishop of Bologna, and said that an invasion of Muslim immigrants was undermining Europe's Christian values.

Cardinal Biffi said that the Antichrist was not necessarily a person but the reduction of Christianity to an ideology . . . The teaching that the great Russian philosopher left us is that Christianity cannot be reduced to a set of values. At the heart of being a Christian is the personal encounter with Jesus Christ. But he quoted with approval from Solovyov's Three Dialogues on War, Progress and the End of History, which suggests that the Antichrist is a real figure.

Cardinal Biffi said that Christianity stood for absolute values, such as goodness, truth, beauty. If relative values such as solidarity, love of peace and respect for nature became absolute, they would encourage idolatry and put obstacles in the way of salvation.

When he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict sternly defended core Roman Catholic doctrines and opposed calls for an ecumenical Third Vatican Council advanced by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the liberal former Archbishop of Milan.

The choice of Lenten speaker has in the past given a clue to Vatican policy, although one source said that Cardinal Biffi had perhaps been chosen because his verbal fireworks would keep listeners awake.

The doctrine of the Antichrist appears in the New Testament, and could denote someone setting himself up as a Christlike saviour. The Book of Revelation refers to the Number of the Beast, 666

-Martin Luther and other reformers saw the Pope as the Antichrist
-In 1888 the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche denounced Christianity in The Antichrist
-When the Pope addressed the European Parliament in 1988 the Rev Ian Paisley interrupted him, shouting, I renounce you as the Antichrist!