[. . . . China Aviation Oil, the] Singapore-based company is being investigated for losses from speculative oil trading that it hid from investors. [. . . . ]

Yet China Aviation Oil's story may say less about Singapore than about the risks of investing in the Chinese economy. Could the affair turn out to be the Chinese equivalent of the Enron debacle?

[. . . . ] China Aviation Oil - a foreign unit of a Beijing company - is a reminder that transparency and corporate governance at such enterprises can be inadequate.

"Complex corporate structures and unreliable accounting practices make it difficult to perform substantive analysis on some China-related companies," Standard & Poor's said last week. "On the accounting side, the problem of limited disclosure is compounded with problems of compliance."

Active measures should be taken to consolidate and further Sino-French cooperation in aviation, spaceflight, communication and nuclear energy by transfer more technology and upgrade industrial cooperation, Hu said.

Cooperation between China and France in high-tech industry, small and medium-sized enterprises, agriculture and environmental protection should also be expanded and strengthened, he said.

Thirdly, Hu said that the two countries should also enhance exchange and cooperation in culture, education and science and technology.

The two sides could learn from the experience of holding Chinese Culture Year in France and French Year in China and then explore new methods of furthering exchange and cooperation in those fields, Hu said. [. . . . ]

PARIS France's highest administrative court, the Council of State, moved decisively to ban Al Manar television on Monday, ruling that the Beirut-based channel had repeatedly violated the country's hate laws and ignored its own pledge to avoid making anti-Semitic statements. [. . . . ]

MADRID Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said Monday that the previous government had erased all the records documenting cabinet-level activities related to the March 11 train bombings here that killed 191 people before it left office in April

The government contributed more than $4.7-million to Mr. Scully's now controversial series into the life of "Rocket" Richard and most of the $450,000 agencies billed for commissions was for work they never did, he said.

SAN FRANCISCO - Stacks of hard-to-find books are being scanned into Google Inc.'s widely used Internet search engine in its attempt to establish a massive online reading room for five major libraries.

Material from the New York public library as well as libraries at four universities — Harvard, Stanford, Michigan and Oxford — will be indexed on Mountain View, Calif.-based Google under the ambitious initiative announced late Monday.
The Michigan and Stanford libraries are the only two so far to agree to submit all their material to Google's scanners.

The New York library is allowing Google to include a small portion of its books no longer covered by copyright while Harvard is confining its participation to 40,000 volumes so it can gauge how well the process works. Oxford wants Google to scan all its books originally published before 1901. [. . . . ]

It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power — the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power — American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory — the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.

It is easier to see the contrast as an American living in Europe. Europeans are more conscious of the growing differences, perhaps because they fear them more. European intellectuals are nearly unanimous in the conviction that Americans and Europeans no longer share a common “strategic culture.” The European caricature at its most extreme depicts an America dominated by a “culture of death,” its warlike temperament the natural product of a violent society where every man has a gun and the death penalty reigns. But even those who do not make this crude link agree there are profound differences in the way the United States and Europe conduct foreign policy.

The United States, they argue, resorts to force more quickly and, compared with Europe, is less patient with diplomacy. Americans generally see the world divided between good and evil, between friends and enemies, while Europeans see a more complex picture. [That characterization of Americans is painting a wide swath over the complex country to our south.]

[. . . . ] Most Europeans do not see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of “moral consciousness,” it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.

Some Europeans do understand the conundrum. Some Britons, not surprisingly, understand it