The Media Mirror – this weekend’s press

In the weekend papers and magazines, a Gas OPEC, an inevitable reality of tomorrow. Kosovo welcomes the world to the law of the jungle. And a ghost skyscraper in downtown New York.

But first – the picture of the week by ITOGI. His last parade. Comandante Fidel on May 1, 2006. Nearly two years after that, on February 19, 2008 Fidel Castro left politics.

PROFILE writes that the forming of an OPEC-like organisation of natural gas exporters is becoming a nightmare for quite a few politicians in the U.S. The U.S. demand for imported gas is going to grow intensively in the next decade, as North American gas deposits are about to run out. Iran, under constant threat of a U.S. invasion, wants to create a gas OPEC to obtain protection from Russia. Venezuela may soon want the same. Russia, as do all others, has an interest in controlling gas prices.

No wonder there are such bizarre suggestions as converting NATO into an alliance of gas consumers against gas producers. That is nothing but a perfect shortcut to war. The magazine says: As a gas OPEC is a reality that cannot be avoided, maybe it’s better to negotiate some form of cooperation?

EXPERT magazine writes that Kosovo’s self-proclaimed independence is a logical result of the NATO invasion in 1999. The support of the independence by the U.S. and the EU without a sanction from the UN Security council has made it clear: times are back when all international disputes are solved by force or behind-the-scenes politicking.

Some experts believe, writes the magazine, that a quasi-independent Kosovo with one of the biggest American military bases in the world, is a hedgehog which the U.S. is putting under Europe’s hindquarters. It may well be, says the magazine. Apart from the U.S. base there are all those drug-trafficking, nationalist-separatist and Islamic-militant connections tangled in one big knot.

OGONYOK reports: U.S. flags keep flying in the streets alongside the Albanian ones. The new-born Kosovo flag is more often seen in schools where teachers are trying hard to invent a teachable Kosovo patriotism.

PROFILE. Professor Sergei Lopatnikov writes that there’s a skyscraper full of ghosts in downtown New York by the East River. Thousands of UN officials turned into ghosts overnight on the 17th of February. But the world doesn’t need to fear: they are totally harmless. They cannot impose their will even on a fly.