World record on the Gotthard: The longest railway tunnel in the world has become a reality. On 15 October 2010 in the east tunnel, 30 km from the north portal and 27 km from the south portal, the final breakthrough of the Gotthard took place. At about 14:30, the tunnel boring machine, drilling from Faido, broke through the last metre of rock on the route to Sedrun.

The tunnel breakthrough was highly accurate. At 8 cm horizontally and 1 cm vertically, the deviation was very small...

Here is the video (the breakthrough is at around 1:50 in):

I may put together something over the weekend; but the First breakthrough on longest tunnel diary from 2006 already describes the tunnel.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

The leadership of the Party of European Socialists, the pan-European political party that brings together all European social democratic outfits, on Friday (15 October) adopted new five-point code of conduct on how to act around extreme right parties, which have seen a sharp rise in support in many countries in the wake of the economic crisis.

"Regarding this threat ... all European parties should sign up to our plan to refuse to work with the extreme-right," the party's president and former Danish prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen.

...Socialists themselves have in parts of Europe been known to embrace the far right in order to cobble together a parliamentary majority.

In 2006, the Slovak centre-left, Smer, entered into a coalition with the nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS) and as a result was suspended from membership of the PES and only readmitted in 2008.

"What worries me is that this government is depending on the support of a radical right party, to put it mildly. I hope this is not going to push it in a direction I would not like it to go," Belgian Liberal MEP and ELDR President Annemie Neyts-Uyttebroeck told EUobserver by phone on Thursday (14 October).

"His MEPs are not very exciting. They are extremely narrow-minded and are still stuck in a phase of knee-jerk reactions. If it seems to impinge on sovereignty, it's bad. They are for Nato but against [defence] co-operation with the EU - it's very simplistic."

One of Germany's most outspoken environmental politicians has died at the age of 66. Hermann Scheer, a Social Democratic member of the German parliament, won the alternative Nobel prize for his work on renewable energy.

Damn. Just a reminder, he wrote Andrea Ypsilanti's election programme when she ran in Hessen against Roland Koch.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

A leading Turkish lobbyist called yesterday (14 October) for the EU to lift visa requirements for his country's nationals by using as a basis a court decision. But the European Commission made clear that the long-standing problem was not likely to be resolved by legal means.

José Socrates, Portugal's prime minister, has appealed to opposition parties to reassure financial markets over the country's sovereign debt difficulties by expressing support for a tough austerity budget.

Speaking shortly before details of the 2011 budget proposals were due to be presented to parliament on Friday night, he warned that rejecting the bill would plunge the country into a damaging political crisis.

Mr Sócrates has said his minority Socialist government will resign if it is defeated in the budget vote. But the centre-right Social Democrats (PSD), the main opposition party, have refused to give any assurances that they will allow the bill to pass.

"This uncertainly is extremely harmful to the country," Mr Sócrates told parliament. "It is time for the PSD to end the taboo on how they will vote."

But PSD leaders said they would not make any commitment until they had studied the proposals in detail, accusing the government of trying to press them into approving inadequate measures.

Olli Rehn, the European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, says that the Greek debt crisis revealed that part of the rapid growth and improved employment in the European Union was based on unsustainable indebtedness that built up during the first ten years of Monetary Union.
      Rehn was speaking at the annual meeting of the National Defence Course Association in Helsinki.
      "The boom, which was based on low interest rates and rapid indebtedness in the periphery of the euro zone, created an erroneous image of the power of the euro zone", Rehn said.

Rehn also stated (not reported in English) that he regarded the worst of the economic crisis in Europe to be over and expressed his concern over inequality between the world's economic zones and also of the imbalance between the Chinese currency and the Euro.

You can't be me, I'm taken

So a battle of wills is taking place, between a goverment that insists France cannot afford its current pension plan and many workers who believe the French way of life is being compromised because of mistakes by bankers.

This struggle looks set to intensify in the days ahead.

My personal view is that only the 'paralysis of France' (or any other country taking the same government route) will lead to the necessary steps to improve the equality and equilibrium of society.

The patient is now so sick that major surgery is needed immediately.

You can't be me, I'm taken