At least some countries are getting it: (h/t Orangutan)

Finnish Fortum and the City of Stockholm have been feverishly working to design a pay-to-pump electric car infrastructure. Sweden took a baby step ahead this week when start-up company Sust (Sustainable Innovation AM) declared its intention to quickly make the country a test market for the world's electric hybrid and pure electric car manufacturers. They'll have to beat off Israel abroad.

But Sweden isn't particularly far ahead in building electric infrastructure in Scandinavia. Norway takes that prize - it has longer had THINK and Buddy electric cars tootling around the streets of Oslo and other cities, and has both built 20 and promised 400 more recharging stations. Both Sweden and Norway have a secret weapon compared to most other countries.

It's thousands of old motor-warming posts that are stationed up and down the countries' long, cold and even desolate northern highways, where you may be more likely to meet a moose than a fellow traveler. The advantage of the motor-warmer stations is that they are estimated to cost only about US$ 35 each to upgrade with the grounding and currency requirements to recharge cars. Everything else - freeway exit and entrances, especially - are already in place.

But we're talking about allowing off-shore drilling and tax subsidies to oil companies for alternative energy "exploration".

What with Iraq's "success" so fragile that it might shatter, Afghanistan becoming even more deadly than Iraq ever was, Pakistan threatening retaliation for cross-border raids, Russia baring its teeth over the Caucusus conflict started by John McCain's pal - with all those, you know the last thing America wants is a disturbance down South America way.

Unfortunately, that's what's happening. Bolivia is swiftly slipping into violent chaos and the Bolivian leader, Evo Morales, has blamed it all in American provocateurs. He has expelled the US ambassador to Bolivia and, in solidarity, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has sent the ambassador to his country packing too. Washington has responded by throwing out envoys from Bolivia and Venezuela and freezing the assets of three aides to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

In Washington, US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the US regretted the actions of Venezuela and Bolivia.

"This reflects the weakness and desperation of these leaders as they face internal challenges, and an inability to communicate effectively internationally in order to build international support," he said.

Bolivian and Venezuelan allegations - including that the US supports continuing anti-government protests in Bolivia - were false "and the leaders of those countries know it", Mr McCormack added.

Meanwhile, Honduras has refused the credentials of a new US ambassador, postponing his appointment.

...Freezing the assets of the three Venezuelan aides, the US Treasury accused them of "materially assisting the narcotics trafficking" of rebels in Colombia.

Analysts say the trio - Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, Henry de Jesus Rangel Silva and Ramon Rodriguez Chacin - are members of Mr Chavez's inner circle.

Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega may yet tell the US ambassador there to take a hike too - he's saying he backs he Bolivian leader.

Perhaps Ortega is remembering when the current US Director of national Intelligence, John Negroponte, was working in Honduras on CIA covert operations in support of the contras. Those covert operations involved several other figures who are part of, or close to, the Bush administration. It's OK to be paranoid when you have evidence they really are out to get you.

Now, just to make matters worse, the feud with Russia is getting all tangled up with the diplomatic feud in Latin America, as Russian forces get ready for joint military exercises with Venezuela. If there ever was or could have been a unipolar world, neoconservative foreign policy has ensured that it isn't to be. With much of America's military tied down in protracted occupations, fought to exhaustion by ragtag militias, other nations aren't as cowed as the used to be.

Dick Cheney may be the least introspective man in history.

Dick Cheney, the US vice president, broadened his attack on Russia late on Saturday, directly challenging Vladimir Putin’s view of history and warning that his government could “not have it both ways” by using “brute force” and still hoping to build economic progress.

Form anyone else, the hypocrisy would be breathtaking - as Bush's administration continues to push its military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq and neo-whatevers calls for more wars with Iran, Syria, Russia ... to say nothing of any "humanitarian" excuse they can come up with for armed intervention. For Cheney its par for the course and everyone expects it.

Business leaders and politicians attending the conference had expected an uncompromising assault by Mr Cheney. But some said it only highlighted a sense of exasperation by a departing administration that had failed in its own diplomacy toward Russia, and the acute differences between Washington and Europe.

[José Manuel Barroso, the head of the European Commission,] also appeared to want to diminish the role of the US in resolving the conflict in Georgia, telling the Financial Times: “The hope for peace is the EU.”

“I’ve not seen any proposals coming from any parts of the world apart from the peace proposal put forward by president Sarkozy on behalf of the EU,” he said.

Speaking later to reporters, Mr Barroso said: “We are interested in having constructive relations with Russia. It is important to note what we need. We need cool heads, not a cold war and this is the basic message.”

From all we've heard so far a McCain-Palin administration would simply repeat all the mistakes of the Bush-Cheney one and America's reputation would continue it's downslide as foreign policy failure piled on failure.

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Fallout from the Georgian conflict is still widening, in what may become the defining foreign policy issue of the 2008 US elections.

In yet another example of Bush administration "diplomacy", Condi Rice is seemingly refusing to talk to her Russian counterpart about escalating tensions in Georgia - even over the phone.

Two and a half years ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said U.S. ties with Russia were the best they had been for "quite some time."

Now she and her Russian counterpart are barely on speaking terms over Georgia, and foreign policy analysts are worried that the soured relations will curtail Washington's diplomatic clout around the world.

... U.S. officials said on Friday Rice had not spoken to Lavrov for nearly two weeks -- since a ceasefire was negotiated that Washington accuses Russia of disobeying.

She has not visited Moscow either, but she went to Georgia to show support for beleaguered President Mikheil Saakashvili.

"There's no need to pick up the phone and talk to the Russians right now," said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.

Meanwhile, Russia is saying it will respond in kind to any Western measures against it, meeting sanctions with sanctions or aggression with aggression.

"Russia does not want confrontation with any country. Russia does not plan to isolate itself," Medvedev said in an interview with Russia's three main television stations.

But he added: "Everyone should understand that if someone launches an aggressive sortie, he will receive a response."

The comment may well have been aimed at bellicose rhetoric from Republican candidate John McCain and from his campaign proxies. By now, in normal times, the crisis in Georgia would be calming down. But it hasn't and Russia has explicity accused the Bush administration of hyping the conflict to aid the Republican election campaign. That has been denied, of course, but Russia has pointed to an American passport (h/t Kat) - belonging to a Texan named Michael Lee White - which was found in a building occupied by Georgian commandos as circumstantial evidence that US advisors were aiding Georgian troops during the fighting. (EDIT: White has denied involvement and said his passport was stolen on a flight from Moscow back in December 2005.)

In an op-ed at Murdoch's London Times, associate editor Anatole Kalestsky writes that America must give the Republicans "a good kicking" to reassert the most important facet of democracy - not just to elect good governance but to get rid of bad governance. It's an op-ed that is highly critical of the Democratic party's choice - Murdoch's UK papers preferred Clinton - and of Dem tactics to date. But it really gets the message across on McCain and the GOP.

Whether or not Mr McCain would continue the policies of President Bush (and much of the evidence suggests that his would be a Bush presidency on steroids), he would keep in power the coalition of interests that the Republican Party represents: the energy and military-industrial lobbies, the religious conservatives, the anti-environment interests and the neoconservative think-tanks. These groups - which have gained enormous influence, both financially and intellectually, under President Bush - are as responsible for the blunders of the Bush Administration as Mr Bush himself, arguably more so, given the President's notorious lack of interest in the details of any of his own policies.

If a Republican is again elected president, these same centres of power will continue to dominate Washington. However many wars they encouraged, however high the price of oil rose, however many tax dollars were redistributed in their favour, the neoconservatives and Pentagon contractors and religious fundamentalists and oil and Wall Street lobbies would conclude that there would be no political price to pay for failure. They would be justified in concluding that there is no longer any democratic check on their ambitions.

It is only by ejecting the Republicans from the White House that American voters can send the message that they are still in charge of their country and that gross government incompetence will not go unpunished. Accountability - not personality or rhetoric or colour or age or gender - should be the overriding issue in this election.

That's exactly right - and it's great to see Bill Clinton, Biden and Kerry all do so very effectively rather than trying to keep the brand pristine. (Even the Right is admitting they did good - albeit with weasel words.) I'm a bit of an outside observer on US elections, being a "furriner' and all, and it has disappointed me until now that the Dem campaign after the primaries had seemed rather flat. That's changed, and while the Dems are still sticking to the moral high ground by not descending to the kind of lies and smears of McCain's campaign, they're now obviously in no mood to let the Republicans have the field to themselves. As my pal Kyle Moore writes, if the Dems had pulled out these kinds of performances four years ago the Dems would be working on Kerry's re-election. More of this, please.

In a remarkable development at the High Court in London, an email from a senior US State Dept. official has been revealed, apparently threatening to curb co-operation with Britain on international intelligence sharing if details on a detainees interrogation are revealed. Lawyers for Binyam Mohamed, held at Gitmo, have taken legal action in the UK to force the release of details which, they say, will prove Mohamed was ilegally abducted and tortured into a confession. Mohamed claims that his torture included having his penis cut with a razor blade by Moroccan proxies for the US.

In an email to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was sent on to the court, Stephen Mathias, a legal adviser to the US state department, said that the disclosure of information would cause "serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence-sharing relationship and thus the national security of the UK, and the aggressive and unprecedented intervention in the apparently functioning adjudicatory processes of a longtime ally of the UK, in contravention of well-established principles of international comity."

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The Glasgow Herald's veteran political correspondent Iain McWhirter wonders wtf is wrong with America, that John McCain is actually level with Obama in the polls. A lot of Europeans are wondering the same thing.

It seems incredible, but as the Democrats gather in Denver to anoint Barack Obama, America could be on course to re-elect a Republican as their President. Not just any Republican either, but a belligerent 71-year-old who can't remember how many houses he owns, would happily nuke Iran and whose answer to global warming is to drill for oil in environmentally sensitive areas off the coast of America which don't even have much oil. But according to the polls, John McCain is drawing level with Barack Obama, and even pulling ahead.

Really, America is a strange, strange country. After a disastrous and illegal war, in which 4000 American soldiers have died, in the middle of an economic crisis largely caused by the investment houses that finance the Republican party, you would have thought it almost inconceivable that the Republicans could be re-elected. Could any political brand be more toxic? Has any party in history deserved to be thrown out at an election more than the Republicans in 2008?

... Yet enough American voters believe that John McCain might have the answers for him to become a serious contender. Which is scary. McCain is not an unknown quantity - he is a highly excitable politician with a notoriously short temper, who would bring his impetuous and confrontational style into American foreign policy. With the world entering a global economic slump, and old enmities raging in Europe, John McCain as President would be like a flamethrower in a fireworks factory.

It is scary - and Obama has to take a fair chunk of the blame. He's seemed flat since the exhausting primary race (here's hoping he does better at the convention) and although his campaign actually has a decent set of detailed policies, he's been awful at articulating them. Good on the inspirational rhetoric, crap on getting down in the weeds and it's left him looking like, as the right likes to put it, an "empty suit". Maybe Biden will help there - even when I've disagreed with him on policy, Joe's been adept at putting detailed policies into easy to swallow forms that don't obscure that there is detail there.

But McWhirter points to the major reason a McCain presidency is scary:

I got an insight into the McCain worldview last week at the Edinburgh Book Festival in a session I did with Robert Kagan, McCain's leading foreign affairs adviser, and author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams. The good news is that the war against terror is past tense, it seems, because he didn't mention al Qaeda once. The bad news is that America might be about to revisit, not the cold war, but the era of nineteenth-century great power rivalry, which is how Kagan characterised the current state of international affairs.

He believes the great faultline is between America and an axis of authoritarianism represented by China and Russia. There is a new era of geopolitical confrontation, according to Kagan, as Russia re-arms and China builds the biggest army in the world. America has to step up."The future international order will be shaped," he says, "by those who have the power and the collective will to shape it." No prizes for guessing whether John McCain is up to the military challenge. Europe, which Kagan dismissed as an irrelevant entity in the new world of hard power, would get trampled in the rush.

That's basically an admission from Kagan that a McCain foreign policy would consist entirely of looking for reasons to fight with Russia and China.

The neocons finally have their wet dream. No longer do they have to hype up a bunch of ragtag misfits hanging out in Pakistan's wilds or an "existential threat" from Iran that is anything but. They've got an enemy worthy of their ideology, their notion that America shows itself best when in a war for its very existence. They want to take on the two largest rival military powers in the world, both at once. And they don't want to do it by diplomacy, containment or any of that other pantywaist stuff. Oh no - they're want to use "hard power' - that's a euphemism for war, folks - and they believe McCain is just the angry old duffer they can lead by the nose into providing it.

"Scary" doesn't even begin to describe it. Completely batshit insane would be better. In case anyone doesn't remember, the era of nineteenth-century great power rivalry led directly to the Great War and WW2, the first of which began over a tiny incident that lit the fuse on the powderkeg. How comforting is it to know that, under a McCain presidency, the neocons would actively go looking for a new spark?

(Crossposted from Newshoggers)

President Karzai of Afghhanistan's signature is on a pardon for three gang-rapists who just happened to be cronies of a former Taliban commander and Afghan MP. The woman who was raped and her family didn't even know about it until the men turned up in their village again, but Karzai's office says he doesn't know anything about it.

“Everyone was shocked,” said Sara’s husband, Dilawar, who like many Afghans uses only one name. “These were men who had been sentenced and found guilty by the Supreme Court, walking around freely.”

Sara’s case highlights concerns about the close relationship between the Afghan president and men accused of war crimes and human rights abuses.

The men were freed discreetly but the rape itself was public and brutal. It took place in September 2005, in the run up to Afghanistan’s first democratic parliamentary elections.

... A copy of the pardon was numbered, dated in May and appeared to bear the personal signature of Hamid Karzai. It recommended the men’s release because, it said, “they had been forced to confess to their crimes.”

When showed copies of the presidential pardon and court papers, President Karzai’s spokesman, Hamayun Hamidzada, was visibly shocked and said that if the documents proved genuine, Mr Karzai would be “upset and appalled.”

He said it was impossible that President Karzai could knowingly have signed a pardon for rapists, but refused to speculate on how the pardon could have come about.

An Afghan MP told the Independent's Kate Clark that “The commanders, the war criminals, still have armed groups,” he said. “They’re in the government. Karzai, the Americans, the British sit down with them. They have impunity. They’ve become very courageous and can do whatever crimes they like.” UN officials say cases such as this are increasingly common - and the family of Sara, the raped woman, are in hiding again.

There's none of this that an Afghan Surge can solve - just as the Iraqi Surge hasn't solved very similiar problems there. And yet again the need to pretend that "democracy" follows in the Bush administration's wake outweighs the needs of the common people, while exiles pushed by the West and local crooks carve up the country to suit themselves. Such nice allies we have.

There's a bit of a difference of opinion between NATO and Afghan authorities over the result of recent airstrikes.

American-led coalition forces killed 76 Afghan civilians in western Afghanistan on Friday, the interior ministry said.

"Seventy-six civilians, most of them women and children, were martyred today in a coalition forces operation in Herat province," the statement said.

Coalition forces bombarded the Azizabad area of Shindand district in Herat province on Friday afternoon, the ministry said. Nineteen victims were women, seven were men, and the rest were children under 15, it said.

However, the coalition denied killing civilians. It said 30 militants had been killed in an air strike in Shindand district in the early hours of Friday and no further air strikes had been launched. Air strikes took place between 1am-2am after Afghan and coalition soldiers were ambushed by insurgents while on a patrol targeting a Taliban commander in Herat, the US military said in a statement.

...Saeed Sharif, a council member where the strike occurred, said: "Last night at 2am some people were attending a holy Koran recitation in Shindand district when Americans started bombing."

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. What usually happens next is the NATO carries out an investigation and says it is in the clear while the Afghans stick to their story. Which makes me wonder about the disconnect between that absence of admission for culpability in individual incidents and the overall admission that airstrikes and shootings by coalition troops killed as many Afghans as the Taliban did last year. I'm sure Afghans wonder too - and then NATO wonders why the Taliban is resurgent.

Matthew Engel at the UK's Financial Times thinks so:

The protest by the US team that cost Churandy Martina of the Netherlands Antilles his silver medal in the 200 metres was seen by some, perhaps unfairly, as bullying of a small nation. There was also the bizarre election scandalette in the poll among competitors for athlete-representatives to the International Olympic Committee. The US tried to ensure victory for its candidate, Julie Foudy, by offering team members a $50 (€34, £27) shopping voucher if they voted.

The consolation for Americans is that they believe they are triumphant. The medals table is unofficial and, indeed, frowned on by the Olympic Charter, which insists the games are “between athletes . . . and not between countries”. Nonetheless, its format is well established: the number of golds decides the placings, with minor medals used to settle ties. At least, it is well established outside the US.

The American media add up the golds, silvers and bronzes, giving them equal weighting, which is ludicrous. By an amazing coincidence, this puts the Americans on top, well ahead of China. The normal method has the US far behind. But guess which way plays better in Peoria?

Engels thinks that the problem, other than the effect of George W. Bush’s presidency on America’s global standing, is because America doesn't play team sports the same way as the rest of the world - for the joy of taking part rather than the joy of winning.

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, might agree with him. At least, so suggests Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post as she satirizes him for condemning Usain Bolt for his celebrations while ignoring alleged underage competitors and helping supress political protests at the Games.

Sour grapes from losers, or a sign that just maybe Ugly Americanism should try to keep its head down in public so as not to furnish convenient distractions?