The South Ossetia war may be winding down but fighting continues in Georgia's other breakaway province, Abkhazia. Roughly 3,000 Abkhaz troops attacked Georgian military positions in the disputed Kodori Gorge this morning. The region's president Sergei Bagapsh claims, “We will take the region under complete control in a few days.”

Russia has escalated its "peacekeeping" presence in the region to 9,000 troops in recent days but denies that they took part in this assault though. At this point, they don't really need to. It's hard to imagine the Georgian military launching a major counteroffensive after the Ossetian catastrophe.

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Turns out the wine and cheese set isn't as "civilized" as one would think. At least that's the case in France's Languedoc-Roussillon region, which happens to be the world's biggest wine-growing area by volume, Time reports:

Hurting from overproduction and cheap imports and punished lately by the rising cost of gas, a small group of local winegrowers has resorted to "wine terrorism" in a violent attempt to shock the French government into helping them.

Targets have included "public and private buildings, supermarkets, tanker trucks hauling cheap imported wine, and businesses accused of gouging growers with ever shrinking prices." So far, only one of the guerrilla grape growers has been hurt, but the violence and destruction have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of damage.

While the rising cost of gas has exacerbated their situation, the wine terrorists aren't exactly a new phenomenon. Last summer, the guerrilla growers released a video threatening "blood will flow" unless the French government moved to raise wine prices. And in 1907, the French army shot six demonstrators during a revolt of winemakers in the region. These grape gripes, it appears, go back a long way.

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Russia may be embracing market capitalism, but investors got a reminder recently that Vladimir Putin still holds significant sway over the business world. Two brief remarks from the president-turned-prime minister "helped wipe out half the value" of steelmaker Mechel, the Financial Times reports.

Putin seems to have it out for Mechel's majority owner Igor Zyuzin, who was Russia's 12th richest man before his shares plummeted. Putin accused Zyuzin of price gouging and tax evasion, also questioning the reclusive tycoon's health:

"Sickness is sickness," Mr Putin said. "I think Igor Vladimirovich [Zyuzin] should get better as quickly as possible; otherwise we'll have to send him a doctor to clear up all these problems."

It's a good thing Apple isn't a Russian company.

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Speaking of cars, if you thought India's Tata Nano, the world's cheapest car at $2,500, sounded too good to be true, you may have been right:

Malhotra is having second thoughts. He's done the math and realized that once taxes and insurance costs are added, the price of the entry-level Nano rises to just over $3,000. For an extra $500, he says, he could buy a decent used car with a more powerful engine and air conditioning, which the Nano won't have.

To make things worse, rising global steel prices and a recent flood at the Tata factory in East Bengal are slicing the company's profit margin razor thin. Given that increasing the price isn't really an option since the price is the whole point, the ambitious project's prospects look dim.

Maybe Thomas Friedman didn't have to worry after all.

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This should be easy fodder for the anti-globalization crowd. A lobbyist for oil giant Chevron, which is embroiled in a potentially costly lawsuit with Ecuador over the dumping of toxic oil waste in the Ecuadorian Amazon, is complaining of mistreatment at the hands of the big bad South American nation:

"The ultimate issue here is Ecuador has mistreated a U.S. company," said one Chevron lobbyist who asked not to be identified talking about the firm's arguments to U.S. officials. "We can't let little countries screw around with big companies like this—companies that have made big investments around the world."

Chevron is playing hardball, asking the Bush administration to revoke special trade preferences with Ecuador if the case isn't dismissed. But the plaintiffs have the backing of Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, a Hugo Chávez ally, and two years ago secured the support of one Barack Obama, who wrote a letter arguing that the Ecuadorian peasants pressing the case should have "their day in court."

If the Bush administration doesn't act, and Obama wins in November, I wouldn't bet on Chevron in this rumble in the jungle.

Sailing ships making a comeback?

The first commercial cargo of French wine to be transported by sailboat in the modern era is due to arrive in Dublin this week after a six-day trip. The 108 year-old boat, chartered by French shipping company Compagnie de Transport Maritime a la Voile (CMTV), is carrying 30,000 bottles of wine.

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It was only a matter of time before the declining dollar affected the world of sport. In years past, the Europe's prime basketball talent bolted across the pond for the superior pay and play of the NBA. Now, the trend appears to be heading in the opposite direction, thanks to the rising euro and an influx of Russian investment in the European league. Suddenly, playing in Europe doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all.

Former New Jersey Net Bostjan Nachbar (above left, with Dallas's Dirk Nowitzki) is the latest player to spurn the NBA and sign a more lucrative contract with a European team, which pays in the much more attractive euro, and often tax-free:

The NBA had better be careful," Nachbar said. "European teams are offering a lot of money. It's much more, considering there are no taxes, than what I could make signing for the midlevel exception."

Once confined to players with previous overseas experience, the trend is spreading to home-grown Americans, too. Highly rated high schooler Brandon Jennings, struggling with academic issues, shocked the college basketball world by opting to play in Europe instead of attending school. And Atlanta's Josh Childress, unhappy with the state of contract negotiations with the Hawks, is weighing an offer to play in Greece.

Although the NBA, already cultivating the Chinese market, has been eyeing European expansion, I don't think this is exactly what Commissioner David Stern had in mind.

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Scrap metal is piled up at a metal recycling facility on July 17 in Chicago, Illinois. With scrap metal prices near historic highs, many communities are experiencing an increase in thefts of metal including cemetery ornaments, plumbing pipe, gutters, and even manhole covers.

Coors, Miller, and now Anheuser-Busch are all owned by foreign conglomerates. So where can a patriotic guy find an all-American brew these days?

Believe it or not, Pabst Brewing Company is now the largest American-owned brewer. But Pabst doesn't even brew its own beer anymore. All 29 Pabst beers, from Schlitz, to Lone Star to Colt 45 to the legendary Pabst Blue Ribbon are outsourced to SAB Miller, based in South Africa.

Next on the list comes Boston Beer Company, which counterintuitively bottles its famous Sam Adams lager in Pennsylvania.

Third is D.G. Yuengling and Son Inc., known far and wide as America's oldest brewery, operating in Pottsville, PA since 1829.

Here's the full list of America's top American-owned breweries according to the Brewer's Association:

1. Pabst Brewing Co.
2. Boston Beer Co.
3. D.G. Yuengling and Son Inc.
4. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
5. New Belgium Brewing Co. Inc.
6. High Falls Brewing Co.
7. Spoetzl Brewery
8. Widmer Brothers Brewing Group
9. Redhook Ale Brewery
10. Pyramid Breweries Inc.

I liked this straight talk from Boeing spokesman Charlie Miller, referring to complaints that Dubai's Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum was able to jump ahead of other customers waiting to buy jumbo jets:

A lot depends on who the customer is," said Charlie Miller, a Boeing spokesman. "Clearly, if you are Emirates [the international airline of the United Arab Emirates], you deal with them differently," he said.

Boeing has a backlog of 3,600 planes, but the sheikh needs his 54 jets in time for the 2009 launch of FlyDubai, his new low-fare airline.

I have to wonder, though, just why anyone would want to be in the airline business right now. Virgin's Richard Branson is predicting "spectacular casualties" in the industry. Why not just scoop up an American carrier when it inevitably goes under, or get into, say, the potash mining business instead?

In some ways, the iPhone is a step backward for Japan, where the masses are accustomed to using their mobile phones for everything from watching television to buying Royal Milk Tea from vending machines. But the iPhone 2.0's lack of such modern conveniences failed to deter the more than 1,000 people who waited patiently overnight outside the Softbank Mobile store in Tokyo to get their hands on Apple's latest device for the first time. Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, the richest man in Japan, hailed it as "a historic day."

It's hard to tell from the photo below, but it looks like this guy is so excited, he's made himself an iPhone hat. Either that, or he's wearing a visor and leaning against a very clean glass window:

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Barack Obama's urging this week that Americans "learn a foreign language" -- he suggested Spanish -- sparked some healthy back-and-forth on Passport and beyond. The key question: Putting "learning for learning's sake" aside, can Americans really maximize their utility by learning another language? My sources and instincts say sí.

According to a 2006 survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, around 30 million people in the United States call Spanish their primary language -- and about half of them don't speak English "well" (keep in mind, too, that these numbers only represent legal citizens). That's not a small slice of the U.S. population of 304 million. What that number represents are roughly 15 million people who work for companies and contractors, and who buy groceries, cars, and clothing. That's 15 million people who need healthcare, legal advice, and schooling. It's 15 million people who seek Spanish-language entertainment on the radio and television, and in magazines and newspapers.

So here's the translation: Those needs increase the demand for doctors, teachers, lawyers, writers, radio hosts, construction foremen, salesmen and many other types of blue and white collar U.S. workers who can speak Spanish. This need has already begun impacting hiring practices. Bilingual job fairs and Web sites are increasingly popular, and nearly half of corporate managers are starting to target Spanish-speaking job candidates. More schools have begun targeting Spanish-speakers too, even shelling out bigger bucks for bilingual teachers.

In fact, Spanish may even someday be an unofficial prerequisite for the biggest job of all: the U.S. presidency. President Bush, hardly a globe-hopping polyglot, speaks the language (sometimes to a fault), and Obama knows "a little Spanish" in addition to his Indonesian. But with America's Spanish-speaking population growing by at least a million people each year, it won't be long before un poquito doesn't cut it anymore.

iStockphoto.com

Another American icon gobbled up by oil-rich overseas investors? Apparently so: An Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund bought a controlling stake in the Chrysler Building, a fixture of the Manhattan skyline that was the world's tallest building until 1933. The purchase was the second acquisition of a New York landmark by a Middle Eastern fund in little over a month, a trend that may continue:

Investors from the region have been a force in New York real estate for some time, rivalling Europe for the dollar volume of their investments in recent years.

Now many in the industry say they have seen increased interest from the Middle East, especially in top assets in major US cities such as New York, LA, Washington and Boston, as oil prices soar, the dollar remains weak and building values soften or fall.

Many Americans find sovereign wealth funds confusing (a particularly unfortunate typo in today's Washington Post Express citing "Abu Ghraib investors" behind the Chrysler deal probably doesn't help). But should we really be all that worried?

As Anders Åslund wrote in an FP Web exclusive last December, the short answer is no. According to Åslund, Americans and Europeans have nothing to fear. Soverign wealth funds are actually a "lousy bargain" for the citizens of the investor countries themselves, he writes.

Purchases such as the Chrysler Building may be a public relations boon for foreign investors, but similar forays into American icons such as Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center in the 1990s proved to be busts. If past is prologue, Abu Dhabi may come to regret this vanity investment.

A few weeks back, one of our editors blogged about a California newspaper outsourcing basic newspaper work like copy-editing and layout to India. The paper had enlisted Mindworks Global Media, an India-based company that helps Newspaper publishers cut costs and increase efficiency.

Lest you think the Orange County Register is the only American newspaper now being partly designed, edited, and produced in India, think again. The firm already boasts eight overseas clients, including the Miami Herald, and expects more business as Western print media publishers and editors continue to cut costs, Businessweek reports.

The firm "claims it helps publications cut costs 35% to 40%," which is certainly a temptation in today's rough media market, where ad revenues and readership for print media are declining rapidly. Mindworks' CEO Tony Joseph even lives in New York to be closer to his clients, even as their work is being shipped halfway across the world to his home country of India. That's globalization at work, my friends.

With U.S. gas prices screaming past $4 a gallon, you would think that everyone would be rushing out to buy a fuel-efficient hybrid. Yet Green Car Congress reports that U.S. hybrid sales, which were booming earlier this year, are falling back down to earth:

Reported US sales of hybrids took a 27% dive in June 2008 to 24,917 units from 34,300 units in June 2007 as Toyota continued to struggle with limited availability of the Prius. The Prius sold 11,765 units in June 2008, down 34% from June 2007. June 2008 had 24 selling days, compared to 27 in June 2007.

Total light-duty vehicle sales in the US dropped 18.3% by volume in June to 1,189,108 units, according to Autodata, with sales of passenger cars dropping 7.9% and sales of light trucks dropping 28.4%. Reported hybrid sales represent 2.1% of new vehicle sales for the month.

What gives?

The drop isn't due to a lack of demand. Toyota can't make Priuses fast enough: Waiting lists to buy the world's dominant hybrid vehicle stretch to as long as six months, and the company has only a one-day supply of them on hand (60 days is the industry norm). The major kink in Toyota's supply chain? The batteries, all of which are produced in just one factory in Japan. The factory can only churn out 500,000 batteries per year, though the car company is planning to ramp up production and open a second facility.

Toyota had better get its act together soon. The competition is about to get fierce. 

Monday's ruling by a French court that eBay must pay French luxury goods manufacturer LVMH $60.8 million and do more to prevent counterfeit sales (think: fake Louis Vuitton handbags) raises big questions about globalization and the future of e-commerce.

As International Herald Tribune blogger Daniel Altman puts it, who should police the Internet? There's a potential slippery slope here, Altman points out, if countries are left to their own devices and sue portals such as Amazon for books considered libelous or YouTube for videos considered indecent.

The French, at least, have a history of holding Internet providers accountable for content hosted on sites they own. There's precedent in the United States, too, from the 2001 decision ordering Napster to prevent illegal file sharing between users of its site.

To some, Monday's ruling reeks of protectionism. The ruling condemns eBay's unauthorized sales of certain perfumes, limiting the sale of these luxury items to approved channels such as perfume and department stores, not the open market.

What's the answer? Leaving regulation to national courts may lead to a hodgepodge of different rulings in different countries, making it difficult for multinational firms to navigate.

Altman asks if a "global authority" to help nations and multilationals sort out e-commerce is necessary. Perhaps, but it's hard to imagine what such an authority would look like or how it would operate. I think it's safe to say eBay is on its own for now.

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images

Last month, Dmitry Medvedev assured a group of international CEOs that he would work to enforce the rule of law and establish "absolutely independent modern courts that comply with the country's economic development level." But if the assembled corporate leaders were hoping that the new Russian president would be true to his word, and the corruption and politically motivated prosecutions of the Putin era would end, this has not been an encouraging couple of days.

Yesterday, most of the expatriate staff of TNK-BP, an oil venture co-owned by British Petroleum, were denied extensions of their work visas. CEO Robert Dudley e-mailed employees this morning telling them to prepare for relocation as early as next week. The standoff between BP and its Russian partners has been escalating for months but after today, it appears that that the Russian shareholders have effectively wrestled the company away from the departing Brits. (Medvedev has denied accusations that the government is intervening on behalf of the Russian oligarchs on TNK-BP's board as well as the rumors that his old company Gazprom plans to take control of what's left of the company.)

Also today, new charges were filed against Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Once Russia's richest man, the former CEO of oil company Yukos has languished in a Siberian prison since a tax-evasion conviction in 2003 that was widely seen as punishment for the tycoon's political ambitions. Khodorkovsky has now been charged with embezzling more than $28 billion and stealing 350 million tons of oil. Kohodorkovsky's lawyers had hoped he could be released early after having served more than half his original sentence, but the new charges could keep him behind bars for another 20 years. One of his lawyers, Robert Amsterdam, told Bloomberg: "I don't think they're even trying to make these new charges look real."

Russia's leaders have created a legal system in which it's essentially impossible for a business to operate legally, making anyone who does business there subject to arbitrary prosecution. It's an arrangement that's well-suited to protecting state power, but not very effective at promoting economic growth. If Medvedev really wants to make Russia the world's fifth largest economy by 2020, he's going to need to try a littler harder.

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There's no question airlines are hurting right now. The price of jet fuel has shot up more than 80 percent since 2007, and carriers are now charging for services that were once included in the ticket price.

But did you know that airlines are actually cutting back on fuel to save money? IEEE Spectrum blogger Tekla Perry found that out the hard way when his Continental flight to Newark, New Jersey, had to make an emergency pit stop at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York.

It so happens that Continental has made more "minimum fuel declarations" than any other airline, meaning that its pilots have more often notified air traffic controllers that they may need to land in a hurry. Perry cites a remarkably unsubtle October memo sent from management to pilots that reads, "[A]dding fuel indiscriminately without critical thinking ultimately reduces profit sharing and possibly pension funding." Perhaps a little more critical thinking is needed in the board room?

Preeti Aroon for FP

At the Claude Taylor Photography Gallery, just a short stroll from FP's office at Dupont Circle in Washington, you don't need dollars if you want to buy a print. Just hand over your euros -- each gets you $1.50, according to this sign in the window. The studio began accepting euros in March, owner Claude Taylor told the Washington Post, citing his perception of increased numbers of European tourists due to the weak dollar. The phenomenon isn't limited to Washington. Some stores in New York have also been accepting euros.

Meanwhile, also in the Washington area, guess who's buying SUVs in this era of record-high oil prices? Europeans. With the weak dollar, they can import jumbo vehicles at teeny prices.

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As the general election heats up, John McCain is adamantly proclaiming himself a free trader while attempting to paint Barack Obama as a protectionist. But the attempted hostile takeover of Anheuser-Busch by Belgain brewery InBev may place McCain in a precarious political position.

McCain, who sided with the Bush administration during the Dubai Ports World controversy two years ago, has been mum on the issue so far. The spotlight instead has focused on his wife, Cindy, who owns beer distributor Hensley & Co. and some $1 million in Anheuser-Busch shares and would stand to benefit from a deal.

With tradition and patriotism on one side, and financial gain and free trade principles on the other, McCain faces a tough choice. Although his reputation as a straight-talking maverick precedes him, I wouldn't be suprised if politics won out, just as it did with McCain's support of offshore drilling and Obama's decision to forgo public campaign financing.

The reason? Missouri, which went Republican the past two presidential elections, could be in play this year. Missouri politicans from both sides are lining up against the deal, and saveAB.com, which has garnered over 59,000 signatures on its online petition offers the following message, dripping in election year rhetoric:

Like baseball, apple pie and ice cold beer (wrapped in a red, white and blue label), Anheuser-Busch is an American original. ... With your help we can fight the foreign invasion of A-B. We will fight to protect this American treasure. We will take to the Internet, to the streets, to the marble halls of our capitals, whatever it takes to stop the invasion.