This is Norway Primer Minister Anne-Grete Strøm Erichsen during the inspection of Norway military contingent in Lebanon, September 2006.

Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen was born in Bergen in 1949. She was educated as computer engineer. She has twenty years private and public sector experience in computers and information technology in the fields of system development and management. She was Commissioner, City of Bergen, from 2003 until she was appointed minister of defence.

Political positions:

Date
Position

1991 - 2005
Member of Bergen City Council

1991 - 2000
Member of the Executive Board, Bergen City Council

1992
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in Bergen

1995 - 1998
Councillor and Chairman of the Principal Committee on Schools, City of Bergen

1997 - 1999
Leader of Hordaland Labour Party

1998 - 1999
Deputy Mayor, City of Bergen

1998 - 1999
Chairman of the Committee on Leisure and Culture, City of Bergen

1998 - 2000
Chairman of the Board of Directors, Bergen City of Culture 2000

1999 - 2001
President of the Organization of World Heritage Cities (OWHC)

1999 - June 2000
Mayor, City of Bergen

June 2000 - October 2003
Chief Commissioner of the City of Bergen following introduction of the parliamentary system of city government

2001 -
Member of Labour Party Central Council

October 2003 - 2005
Councillor and Chairman of the Standing Committee on Environmental Affairs and Urban Development for the City of Bergen

Just so interesting article in today International Herald Tribune wrote by Nicholas D. Kristof as I would like to put it here completely.

We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.

In his endorsement of Obama, Colin Powell noted that “the new president is going to have to fix the reputation that we’ve left with the rest of the world.” That’s not because we Americans crave admiration, but because cooperation is essential to address 21st-century challenges; you can’t fire cruise missiles at the global financial crisis.

In his endorsement, Powell added that an Obama election “will also not only electrify our country, I think it’ll electrify the world.” You can already see that. A 22-nation survey by the BBC found that voters abroad preferred Obama to McCain in every single country - by four to one overall. Nearly half of those in the BBC poll said that the election of Obama, an African-American, would “fundamentally change” their perceptions of the United States.

Europe is particularly intoxicated by the possibility of restoring amity with America in an Obama presidency. As The Economist put it: “Across the Continent, Bush hatred has been replaced by Obama-mania.”

Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Obama’s rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world “know” about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Obama’s rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.

“It’s an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.,” Kull said.

Europeans like to mock the vapidity of American politics, but they also acknowledge that it would be difficult to imagine a brown or black person leading France or Germany.

As for Africa, Obama’s Kenyan father was of the Luo tribe, a minority that has long suffered brutal discrimination in both Kenya and in Uganda (where it is known as the Acholi). The bitter joke in East Africa is that a Luo has more of a chance of becoming president in the United States than in Kenya.

Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it’s worth remembering something else.

In the Western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica’s 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.

Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don’t forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.

Look, Obama’s skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him. Substance should always trump symbolism.

Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America’s global influence - and thus to achieve some of our international objectives - in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person’s epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we’re every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.

I know only 3 faces from 4 - Sarach Palin, John McCain and Barak Obama.
Who is the 4-th person?

Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the botched reaction to is became one of the darkest moments of Bush administration in 2005. So today Republicans are not going to make the same mistake. McCain could not risk a single television image or photo of a delegate enjoying himself or herself, festooned in buttons or waving partisan signs, juxtaposed against images of hurricane survivors fighting for their lives.

“I have every expectation that we will not see the mistakes of Katrina repeated,” he said from St. Louis, Mo., in a statement beamed into the convention centre here and to a national audience via cable news networks.

Renowned conductor Valery Gergiev will give a requiem outdoor concert tonight in the heard of the capital of South Ossetia Tskhinvali. The performance would be “a requiem for those who died at the hands of the aggressors, for those who sacrificed their lives defending their homeland from a treacherous attack by Georgia”, a South Ossetian spokesman said.

“The world should know what is happening. There were a thousand or more South Ossetians were killed at that time,” he told the BBC last week. “The arrival of Russian troops saved maybe a thousand or more lives.” “The President of Georgia had no right to order his army to go and crush and use Grad missiles against peaceful civilians,” he said, calling it “the mistake of his life”.
You can >see the long-suffering town and listen the great music performing by great musicians

Symphony No. 7 (Shostakovich)

This article, that I find very interesting, has been published 2 days ago on the Canadian Global Research Site. However it explains me lots including the strange situation with senseless Georgia’s president barbarian action in Osetia.

“Operation Brimstone ended only one week ago. This was the joint US/UK/French naval war games in the Atlantic Ocean preparing for a naval blockade of Iran and the likely resulting war in the Persian Gulf area. The massive war games included a US Navy supercarrier battle group, an US Navy expeditionary carrier battle group, a Royal Navy carrier battle group, a French nuclear hunter-killer submarine plus a large number of US Navy cruisers, destroyers and frigates playing the “enemy force”.

Does it mean that it looks like all of them just did not expect such quick and powered Russian response.
UD. Ups, the article is not available? Disappeared…:-)

After a long national debate, the Israeli cabinet voted to trade a Lebanese murderer for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. The Israeli army has confirmed that human remains handed over by Lebanon’s Hezbollah as part of a prisoner swap are those of two of its soldiers, BBC reports.

The two men, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, were captured in 2006, but it was not certain they had died.

In return, Israel is handing over five Lebanese prisoners and the bodies of 200 Lebanese and Palestinians fighters and a captive for the body of an Israeli was linked to efforts to win freedom of two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah a year ago. Israel received the body of an Israeli who drowned nearly three years ago in exchange for the bodies of two Lebanese militants killed in the war last summer and another Hezbollah captive, who was released for medical reasons, the statement by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office said.

Israeli generals have reportedly visited both the soldiers’ families to inform them personally of the identification.

The official 3 days visit of French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Israel is continuing. Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy have received a really warm welcome in Tel Aviv after years of frosty ties between two countries.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy (C), his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (L) and Israel’s President Shimon Peres attend a welcome ceremony at Tel Aviv airport June 22, 2008. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

“I have always been and will always be a friend of Israel,” Sarkozy said at a welcoming ceremony at Israel’s international airport in Tel Aviv. He quickly turned his attention to the staggering peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians.

“I believe that the path to peace lies there before us, that the path to peace is not blocked. I have come to bring my support and that of France and the European Union, your partners in the negotiations,” he said. “An agreement is possible, tomorrow, and that agreement would allow the two peoples to live side-by-side in peace and security.”