This Can't Be Good

Apparent outbreak of war between Russia and Georgia (the country, not the state...) via Times UK

Nice way to kick off the Olympics...key graphs:

"One hundred and fifty Russian tanks, armoured personnel carriers and other vehicles have entered South Ossetia," President Saakashvili of Georgia told reporters in Tbilisi. "This is a clear intrusion on another country’s territory. We have Russian tanks on our territory, jets on our territory in broad daylight."

Eduard Kokoity, the South Ossetian rebel leader, said that there were "hundreds of dead civilians" in the city. His Nationalities Minister, Teimuraz Kasaev, put the number at "more than a thousand".

The area is of strategic importance, largely because of the BTC oil pipeline, which runs through central Georgia just south of the breakaway region. The pipeline – which features in the 1999 James Bond film The World is Not Enough – pumps around one per cent of global crude supplies from the Caspian to the Turkish port of Ceyhan for export to Western Europe but is already closed because of an attack in Turkey last week by the Kurdish separatist organisation PKK.