OAO Gazprom asked Georgian authorities to finalize the amount of Russian gas imports they want for next year at a price of $235 per 1,000 cubic meters, or risk receiving no gas at all, Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said in a statement.

Georgia, which now pays $110, has accused Russia of using its energy resources as "political blackmail" and as a means of punishing the small, ex-Soviet republic for its efforts to join NATO and shake off the Kremlin's influence.

Russia denies the accusations, saying the price is similar to what it charges other European consumers.

His comments were believed to further fuel the outcry prompted by the two-day conference in Tehran finished on Tuesday, which wanted to debate what Iran calls "taboos surrounding the Holocaust." Participants at the event included some of Europe's and the United States' best-known Holocaust deniers and white supremacists.

"The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom," Ahmadinejad said, according to the official IRNA news agency. He also called for elections among "Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner."

Swiss Foreign Ministry spokesman Johann Aeschlimann said Tuesday that it was "unacceptable" to doubt the Holocaust's existence. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday the conference was "shocking beyond belief" and "a symbol of sectarianism and hatred." The White House condemned Iran for convening a conference it called "an affront to the entire civilized world."

Around 6 million Jews are estimated to have been killed by the Nazi regime during the Second World War.

The U.S. dollar has suffered a long process of deterioration," Domingo Maza Zavala, one of seven board members at the central bank of Venezuela, said in a Dec. 14 interview. "The diversification strategy started this year."
Banco Central de Venezuela has slashed the percentage of its $35.9 billion worth of reserves invested in dollars and gold to 80 percent from 95 percent a year ago, said Maza Zavala. The country, the world's fifth-largest oil supplier, has boosted its euro holdings to 15 percent, from less than 5 percent in the same period.

The dollar has slumped against the European currency in 2006 as growth in the euro region outpaced the U.S. for the first time in five years. It rebounded 0.7 percent last week to finish at $1.308 against the euro. The U.S. currency is little changed versus the yen this year, closing on Dec. 15 at 118.17 yen.

Bank Indonesia is boosting euro holdings, said Senior Deputy Governor Miranda S Goeltom in a Dec. 13 interview in Jakarta. Indonesia has $39.9 billion in reserves. Sultan Bin Nasser al-Suwaidi, the governor of the Central Bank of the UAE, last month said he was considering when to shift as much as 8 percent of the nation's $24.9 billion in reserves into euros.

The central banks are changing policy "because the oil price has come down a long way and the U.S. dollar has been declining," said Michael Derks, chief markets strategist at Arch Financial Products LLP, a London-based hedge fund. "The euro stands to benefit."

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which produces 40 percent of the world's crude oil, said at a Dec. 14 meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, that it would cut output by 500,000 barrels a day to boost prices. Crude gained 92 cents on Dec. 15 to $63.43, the highest close since Dec. 1. Prices have fallen from a high of $78.40 in mid-July.

Crude is priced in dollars and the U.S. is the biggest consumer, importing around $400 million worth of the fuel a day in 2005, according to data from BP Plc, Europe's second-biggest oil company.
Oil states will probably buy the European currency at a faster rate to bring their reserves closer in line with other nations, according to David Durrant at Julius Baer Investment Management in New York.

"They've done very little diversification in the past," said Durrant, an investment strategist at Julius Baer, which oversees about $40 billion. "We're at the start."

"The government has ordered the central bank to replace the dollar with the euro to limit the problems of the executive organs in commercial transactions," said Gholam Hossein Elham, a government spokesman, on
Monday. "We will also employ this change for Iranian assets (in dollars) held abroad." Elham added that Iran's budget would in future be calculated in euros.

"Until now the budget has been calculated according to revenues in dollars but this calculation will now change," he said.
The move comes amid pressure from the United States for the UN Security Council to agree sanctions against Iran over its controversial nuclear programme.

The US alleges that Iran is covertly building a nuclear weapon. Iran insists its nuclear programme is purely for civilian use. Elham implied that the move to the euro would also apply to Iran's oil revenues.

"Foreign income sources and oil revenues will be calculated in euros and we will receive them in euros in order to put an end to our dependence on the dollar," Elham said. Bankers in Iran have said it has become difficult to receive Iranian-held money denominated in dollars from European bank accounts.

They said that this was because of US pressure on European banking giants not to allow dollar-denominated funds to be sent into, or out of, the Islamic republic.

The Truro Church and the Falls Church voted to place themselves instead under the authority of the Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola. He has called for the Episcopal Church to be expelled from the worldwide Anglican Communion. He is a fierce critic of the ordination of gay priests.

The parishes of Truro and Falls Church in Virginia - founded in British colonial times - are two of the oldest and largest church congregations in the US. They were once part of the Church of England but now they have voted to sever ties with their diocese and turn instead to the 17 million member church in Nigeria.

Several other congregations in the US have already left the national church but none so high profile as these, reports the BBC's religious affairs correspondent Jane Little. It will also add further pressure to an embattled Archbishop of Canterbury as he struggles to hold the world's third largest Christian denomination together, our correspondent says.

There are an estimated 77 million Anglicans across the world.

"The 2006 federal budget deficit of $4.6 trillion is $1.1 trillion more than the 2005 federal budget deficit," econometrician John Williams, who publishes the website Shadow Government Statistics, told WND. "The Bush administration is in an untenable situation with a budget deficit this dramatic. Taxing 100 percent of all wages, salaries, and corporate profits would not eliminate a deficit of this magnitude, and cutting Social Security and Medicare spending is politically impossible."

In his subscription newsletter, Williams comments that the GAAP accounting numbers reported in the 2006 Treasury report show that, "the actual deficit number was nearly 19-times the size of the gimmicked 'official' deficit for 2006 of $248 billion. Total obligations were 4.2-times annual U.S. gross domestic product (GDP)."
"The federal government is bankrupt," Williams explained to WND. "In a post-Enron world, if the federal government were a corporation such as General Motors, the president and senior Treasury officers would be in federal penitentiary."

In his letter, David Walker commented that until these financial reporting problems were resolved within the federal government, the problems outlined in the audit report "will continue to have adverse implications for the federal government and American taxpayers."
"That's an understatement," Williams told WND.

"What the comptroller of the United States is telling us is that as bad as a $4.6 trillion federal budget deficit and a $53.1 trillion GAAP negative net worth are today, the situation with the Bush administration federal budget deficit might even be worse yet if the government's overall bad accounting procedures could be fixed. With truly accurate GAAP reporting by the various administrative agencies, the 2006 financial report of the federal government would have shown even larger deficits and a larger negative net worth, hard as that may be to imagine."

One French speaker said: "The Holocaust is a gigantic lie and the gas chambers should be put in the rubbish bin of history."

He had already spent one year in prison because of what he called "one of his little books". Little books - but big lies - denying the Nazis had a deliberate policy to exterminate the Jewish people.
He summed up his argument succinctly. He claimed there were no gas chambers at all - millions of Jews did not die - therefore there was no holocaust.

And if there was no Holocaust then there was no justification for the creation of the state of Israel. Therefore Israel was an impostor.

It had all the simplicity of a mathematical proof - refuting the worst genocide in living memory and absolving one of the most evil and wicked regimes in history of its crimes against humanity. So this was the aim of the conference for Iran - to undermine the very argument for the existence of Israel.

The upgrading of the defence agency to a full ministry passed parliament without significant opposition, propelled by deep concern in Japan over North Korea's nuclear test on October 9.

The upgrade, to be effected early next year, gives Japan's generals greater budgetary powers and prestige - a reversal for a military establishment that has kept a low profile since the war.

The education measure, the first change to Japan's main education law since 1947, calls on schools to "to cultivate an attitude that respects tradition and culture, that loves the nation and home country".

The reform reflected concerns voiced by Abe and Bunmei Ibuki, the education minister, that Japan's long stretch of economic prosperity has eroded the morals and co-operative spirit of prewar Japanese.

"The new education law will allow children to acquire a good understanding of their heritage and become intelligent and dignified Japanese," Hiroo Nakashima, an LDP legislator, said during the upper house debate.

Critics, however, attacked the move as harkening back to Japan's war-era education system, in which children were instructed to support the country's imperialist military and sacrifice themselves for the emperor and nation.

Opponents on Friday voiced fears that the changes could lead to schools grading students on their patriotic fervor - possibly as a prelude to making Japan an aggressive nation once again.

Ikuko Ishii, a Communist party lawmaker, said: "The government is putting the future of Japanese children at risk and turning Japan into a country that wages war abroad."

The call for more patriotism in the schools coincides with a push by some local governments to crack down on teachers and students who refuse to stand for the national flag or sing an anthem to the emperor at school ceremonies.

The document issued this week affirms peace as "an essential of faith" and asserts that our nation has "an inescapable responsibility and an indispensable role to provide creative, determined leadership for building a just peace for all in the Middle East."

The Jewish, Muslim and Christian leaders have also sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to express their support for urgent U.S. leadership for peace.

Opening a conference in September where the new interreligious consensus was developed, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired archbishop of Washington, D.C., acknowledged the challenges ahead.

He said: "I hope that together we can build on the unprecedented past work for peace which has joined us together and that in solidarity we can articulate a new consensus for peace that addresses central aspects of the current situation in the Middle East."

Iran said it wanted to debate what it called taboos surrounding the Holocaust. Some six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime during World War II. The BBC's Frances Harrison in Tehran said the conference was like a roll call of the world's most infamous Holocaust deniers - all delighted that Iran had given them the oxygen of publicity.

"The trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want," President Ahmadinejad said.

CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Australian Fredrick Toeben , jailed in Germany for incitement and insulting the memory of the dead
Frenchman Robert Faurisson , convicted in France under Holocaust denial laws
Frenchman Georges Thiel , convicted in France under Holocaust denial laws
American David Duke , a former KKK leader and white supremacist

"Whether the Holocaust occurred or did not or whether it had vast dimensions or not, it has become a pretext to create a base for aggression and threats for the countries of the region," he said. Mr Ahmadinejad urged the participants - including ultra-Orthodox Jews who say the creation of Israel was an abomination - to examine Holocaust in more detail.

"Iran is your home and is the home of all freedom seekers of the world. Here you can express your views and exchange opinions in a friendly, brotherly and free atmosphere," he said. Iran, which is home to 25,000 Jews, says 67 researchers from 30 countries attended the meeting. Participants included a number of well-known "revisionist" Western academics.

Mr Ahmadinejad has repeatedly downplayed the extent of the Holocaust, describing it as a myth used to justify the existence of Israel and oppression of the Palestinians. He has called for an end to the Israeli state.

Many Iranians must be wondering why they have the right to deny the Holocaust with impunity, but not to question their own leaders without risking jail, our correspondent says. In recent months, newspapers have been closed, journalists jailed and students penalised for engaging in any sort of political activity in Iran.

Previs told the television audience many Canadians are "upset" about the amero. Most Americans outside of Texas largely are unaware of the amero or the plans to integrate North America, Previs observed, claiming many are just "putting their head in the sand" over the plans

At the same time, the Chinese central bank set the yuan at 7.0402 per dollar, the highest level since Beijing established a new currency exchange system in 2005 that severed China's previous policy of tying the value of the yuan to the U.S. dollar.

Many analysts worldwide attributed the dramatic fall in the value of the U.S. dollar at least partially to China's announcement last week that it would seek to diversify its foreign exchange currency holdings away from the U.S. dollar. China recently has crossed the threshold of holding $1 trillion in U.S. dollar foreign-exchange reserves, surpassing Japan as the largest holder in the world.
Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez is in Bejing leading a trade delegation of more than two dozen U.S. business executives.

"The future should be focused on exporting to China," Guiterrez told reporters in Bejing, noting that this year, U.S. exports to China are up 34 percent on a year-to-year basis, surpassing last year's gain of 20 percent.

One way to improve the U.S. trade imbalance may be to ease up on restrictions of exporting high-tech products and allowing technology transfers to China, a move likely to be politically charged in the U.S.

The decline in value of the dollar will also make U.S. exports more attractive and Chinese exports to the U.S. more expensive.

In February 2007, a virtually unprecedented top-level U.S. economic mission is scheduled to travel to China. Included in the mission are Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Jr., Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Some of them belong to Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City), a group of a few thousand people which views Zionism - the movement to establish a Jewish national home or state in what was Palestine - as a "poison" threatening "true Jews".

A representative, UK-based Rabbi Aharon Cohen, told the conference he prayed "that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East, namely the state known as Israel, be totally and peacefully dissolved".

In its place, Rabbi Cohen said, should be "a regime fully in accordance with the aspirations of the Palestinians when Arab and Jew will be able to live peacefully together as they did for centuries".
Neturei Karta believes the very idea of an Israeli state goes against the Jewish religion.
The book of Jewish law or Talmud, they say, teaches that believers may not use human force to create a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah.

However, he also argued that the genocide had been divine will. "The Zionists, with their secular pompous approach behave in complete opposition to this philosophy and dare to say 'Never Again'.
"They have the audacity to think that they can prevent the Almighty from repeating a Holocaust. This is heresy."

Neturei Karta have been condemned by other Orthodox Jews as an extreme fringe movement while the Tehran conference has been denounced by the Israeli parliament.

The EU citizens' watchdog, ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros, on Monday (11 December) reitirated demands that presidency websites, which are used to explain upcoming events and get across political messages, should be available not only in English and French, but also in German and, possibly, other languages.

The leaders of the parliament's two biggest political groups - both German - immediately backed the latest calls from the Strasbourg-based ombudsman.

A spokesperson for socialist PES leader Martin Schulz said the German MEP favoured the idea, in order to promote multilingualism in general but also for boosting knowledge of German itself.

"It is the most spoken mother tongue language in the EU", the spokesperson said.

EPP leader Hans-Gert Poettering was later reported as saying "The EPP would welcome any extra languages, especially German which is the majority language in the EU, being added to the presidency websites."

Monday's move is one out of several to promote German in recent years.
Bundestag president Norbert Lammert earlier this year wrote a letter to European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso saying the German parliament would refuse to debate EU documents that were not printed in German.

The next few days will be critical. Any apparent revenge attacks or sustained casting of blame could spill over into street clashes. Security forces loyal to Abbas and also Hamas have deployed in Gaza. These forces have clashed in the past, although so far there have been no incidents. Leaders from both factions have urged the authorities to find the killers of Colonel Baha Balousha's children. Some Fatah lawmakers have called on the government to resign for failing to curb chaos.
Abbas's aides have been warning for months the president would sack the government. Abbas has been more circumspect, saying all options were open. His aides said he had told them his repeated efforts to convince Hamas to moderate had failed, leaving him no choice but to propose early presidential and parliamentary elections. Some analysts question whether Abbas would risk possible civil war by firing the government and calling new elections.

Only a minute's walk from the fast-receding coastline of the Dead Sea is the starkest evidence of what environmentalists have feared for years. Decades of a policy to drain water from the Sea of Galilee and Jordan River to turn the deserts green have inflicted a heavy cost ? the shrinking of the Dead Sea, and the alarming appearance of fissures and sinkholes on its shores.

Faced with an ecological disaster and driven by an insatiable thirst for water in the Middle East, officials from Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and the World Bank will gather beside the lowest-lying body of water on Earth tomorrow to launch a feasibility study aimed at saving the rapidly disappearing biblical waters.

The officials hope that the two-year feasibility study and environmental and social assessment will recommend a multibillion-dollar project to link the Dead Sea with the Red Sea, which lies 200km (125 miles) to the south, using a pipeline or canal to suck 1,900 million cubic metres (2.1 million cubic yards) of water annually from the Gulf of Aqaba.

However, many people including environmentalists and Israeli scientists living in the worst-affected areas say that it is a costly extravaganza that fails to address the root cause and could ruin the very sea that they are trying to save.
Eli Raz, an Israeli geologist, said that pumping lighter seawater into the Dead Sea could kill its delicate micro- organisms and harm its appeal for tourists, who float in its mineral-rich waters.

Running from Eilat and Aqaba to the Plain of Sodom, the Red-Dead conduit would include a desalination facility to provide 850 million cubic metres of water a year, and an electricity plant to generate 550 megawatts.