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“What was the purpose of that gentleman being among the special forces, and what is he doing today, I so far cannot answer,” said Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the general staff, holding up an enlarged color photocopy of the passport. He identified its owner as Michael Lee White, a resident of Houston, born in 1967, state-owned Vesti television reported.

Saakashvili, in an interview Friday morning with The Washington Post, dismissed the passport report as “typical tricks.”

Any such move would be a dramatic escalation of the Georgia crisis and play havoc with the oil markets.

Reports have begun to circulate in Moscow that Russian oil companies are under orders from the Kremlin to prepare for a supply cut to Germany and Poland through the Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline. It is believed that executives from lead-producer LUKoil have been put on weekend alert.

Around 15 drug gangsters in vehicles surprised the soldiers while they were camped out in the central state of Guanajuato on Tuesday night, shooting at them with automatic weapons.

“Two soldiers were injured in the clash in a firefight that lasted several minutes,” a spokesman for the Guanajuato state attorney general’s office said.

Guanajuato state is famed for its beautiful historic state capital popular with U.S. and European tourists, but drug violence is creeping up in the once quiet area as drug gangs fight over smuggling routes to the United States.

More than 2,300 people have been killed in drug violence across Mexico this year, a faster rate than in 2007, as Mexico’s most-wanted man, Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, vies with rivals for control of the country’s lucrative drug trade.

President Felipe Calderon has made crushing drug gangs the main goal so far of his six-year term, sending troops across Mexico on taking office in December 2006.

More than 170 passengers were due to leave Kunming, capital of southwestern Yunnan province, on three flights operated by China Southern Airlines late Monday, but the flights were cancelled due to bad weather, Xinhua news agency said.

“All the passengers had to spend the night on the planes or in the departure hall,” Xinhua said. “No one came to tend to their food and board.”

The passengers clashed with airport police Tuesday morning, smashing computers and desks, Xinhua said, blaming the melee on China Southern staff’s “inappropriate working attitude.”

At around 2 a.m., many of the passengers — including toddlers and people over 60 — took taxis to a hotel where China Southern said they could stay, only to be turned away once they arrived, Xinhua said.

Frustration at mysterious delays, diversions and cancellations have at times boiled over into violence at Chinese airports as passengers try to storm grounded aircraft and police are brought in to keep the peace.

Long a symbol of humanity’s throw-away culture, existing landfill sites are now being viewed as mines of potential that could also help bolster the planet’s dwindling natural resources as the world population grows.

“By 2020 we might have nine billion people on the planet, we could have a very big middle class driving millions more cars, and we could be in a really resource-hungry world with the oil price climbing and a supply situation in Libya, Russia and Saudi, where natural gas is limited,” said Peter Jones, a leading expert on waste management in Britain. “It is those drivers, those conditions, which will encourage the possibility of landfill mining.”

In Britain alone, experts say landfill sites could offer an estimated 200 million tons of old plastic – worth up to £60 billion, or $111 billion, at current prices – to be recovered and recycled, or converted to liquid fuel.

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The extreme rhetoric from the Kremlin’s envoy to NATO came as President Dmitry Medvedev stressed he will make a military response to US missile defence installations in eastern Europe, sending new shudders across countries whose people were once blighted by the Iron Curtain.

And Moscow also emphasised it was closely monitoring what it claims is a build-up of NATO firepower in the Black Sea.

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Top military figure Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, president of the Academy of Geopolitical Studies in Moscow, alleged that the US and NATO had been arming Georgia as a dress rehearsal for a future military operation in Iran.

“We are close to a serious conflict – U.S. and NATO preparations on a strategic scale are ongoing. In the operation the West conducted on Georgian soil against Russia – South Ossetians were the victims or hostages of it – we can see a rehearsal for an attack on Iran.”

With consumer price inflation at 37 percent according to the latest central bank estimate, demand has pushed a kilogram of rat meat up to around 5,000 riel (69 pence) from 1,200 riel last year.

Spicy field rat dishes with garlic thrown in have become particularly popular at a time when beef costs 20,000 riel a kg.

Officials said rats were fleeing to higher ground from flooded areas of the lower Mekong Delta, making it easier for villagers to catch them.

“Many children are happy making some money from selling the animals to the markets, but they keep some for their family,” Ly Marong, an agriculture official, said by telephone from the Koh Thom district on the border with Vietnam.

“Not only are our poor eating it, but there is also demand from Vietnamese living on the border with us.”

He estimated that Cambodia supplied more than a tonne of live rats a day to Vietnam.

The average value of a home fell 10.5 percent to 164,654 pounds ($301,500), the biggest drop since the final quarter of 1990, Nationwide Building Society said today. A gauge of retail sales fell to minus 46 from minus 36 the previous month, the Confederation of British Industry said in a separate report. That’s the lowest since its survey began in July 1983.

Today’s reports indicate Britain is heading for its first recession since the early 1990s after stagnating in the second quarter as higher living costs hurt spending and the credit squeeze ripples through the economy. As the outlook worsens, economists at banks including Societe Generale SA and Bank of America Corp. now forecast the Bank of England will be forced to set aside inflation concerns and cut interest rates this year.

“The big issue is how long and how severe” the U.K.’s recession is going to be, said Jim O’Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. “We’re in it. It shouldn’t be news anymore.”

U.K. government bonds rose. The yield on the two-year gilt dropped 3 basis points to 4.46 percent at 12:30 p.m. in London.

House prices declined 1.9 percent from a month earlier, the 10th consecutive decline in values, Nationwide said. Meanwhile, retailers’ pessimism deepened to the lowest on record, with the quarterly index of stores’ business situation falling to minus 38 from minus 17 in May, today’s report showed. The CBI survey was conducted between July 29 and Aug. 13.

Brutal Recession

“The CBI figures look even worse that what we saw in the troughs of the last recession, and that was brutal,” said Ross Walker, an economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London.