Breathtaking vision to join gas networks of 8 countries!

I personally like people who paint grand visions which are realistic at the same time. When you hear about it, you go, bloody hell, it makes perfect sense and why on earth did nobody think of it before? Its not like proposing a vision to setup holiday camps on venus, but to join the gas networks of 8 countries. For core infrastructure like this, it is a scale matter, and bigger the scale, the better it is. And it provides energy security to Europe by providing an alternative to Russia. I quote:

Mol, the Hungarian oil and gas company facing a take-over bid from OMV of Austria, has proposed a merger of the gas transmission businesses of eight countries in central and south-east Europe to form a new $10bn company that could be floated on the stock market.
The radical project, given the working name of the New Europe Transmission System, would create one of the biggest gas networks in Europe. It would bring together the pipeline systems of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Austria.
Mol says unifying the networks would encourage investment, build connections between countries and create a single gas market in the region. It would also help open up alternatives to Russian sources of supply, such as the Nabucco project to bring gas from the Caspian region to the European Union.

Execution will be tough, but hey, so is any great and wonderful thing!, go for it!

Read, wonder and hope!

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Islamists spreading their poison in Bosnia

Quite worrying, this report. This is what happens when you do not lance the boil of fundamentalism and patriotism, give secular education primacy and push for liberal educational standards. Russia's obduracy, the strange incompetence of Europe, the military angles that USA take all means that the social and educational aspects of Bosnia are ignored. With predictably sad results. Also, again see the root of the trouble, Saudi Arabia, funding this kind of fundamentalist thought. The Al Saud family has made a Faustian bargain with the wahhabi's and while they are enjoying their corrupt and ill gotten gains, their fundamentalist backers are creating havoc all over the world. I quote:

Before the war, women in full-body coverings and men with long beards
were a rare sight. Today, though, they hardly turn a head.
Wahhabism is quickly gaining ground in the country, with polls showing that 13 percent of Bosnian Muslims support the conservative Sunni Islam reform movement. The movement is financed primarily by Saudi Arabian backers, who have invested well over a half-billion euros in Bosnia's development -- especially in the construction of over 150 mosques. The 8,187 square meter (88,124 square foot) King Fahd Mosque in Sarajevo alone cost €20 million euros ($29 million), and it's also where radicals go to pray.
In trying to transform the country into a theocracy, the new preachers
of fundamental Islam aren't just fighting with the Koran. In Kalesija, militant
Wahhabis drove out the local imam after a fight (between local Muslims and the
Wahhabis). In the village of Dedici, residents took up their shotguns to defend
their mosque against the attacking fanatics. Recently, the Careva Mosque
(Emperor's Mosque) in Sarajevo locked its doors during prayer for the first time
in its 441-year history when a group of Wahhabis tried to enter and perform
their own prayer rites.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!