EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Reactions to the European Commission's communication on a new economic strategy for Europe have so far proved to be lukewarm, at best.

While a list of targets advocating higher employment, greener growth and greater research spending have met with general approval, few feel confident they can actually be achieved by means of an EU plan.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Ombudsman is on Thursday (4 March) to censure the European Commission for refusing to release correspondence between itself and German car manufacturer Porsche.

In an excoriating report to the European Parliament seen by EUobserver, the ombudsman, Nikiforos Diamandouros, accuses the EU executive of failing to co-operate with him in good faith and ultimately of undermining the rule of law.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The UK and Sweden have said the EU should build bigger embassies in up-and-coming capitals such as New Delhi and warned EU institutions not to hog senior diplomatic posts.

British foreign minister David Miliband and his Swedish counterpart, Carl Bildt, in a joint letter to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Wednesday (3 March) urged the bloc to create "larger and more political" delegations in the capitals of India, Pakistan, China, Brasil and Indonesia.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Early results suggest the hard-right anti-immigration party of Geert Wilders looks set to emerge as the main winner in local elections held in the Netherlands on Wednesday (3 March), setting the stage for a national showdown in June.

"We are going to conquer the entire country ... We are going to be the biggest party in the country," said the blond-haired Mr Wilders as the results came through.

EU foreign affairs supremo Catherine Ashton visited Haiti on Wednesday, almost one month after a devastating earthquake. "I came now because my job is to build for the long-term. And I'm sure that was the right thing to do," she told AFP after French criticism that she should have gone right away.

The Spanish EU presidency's envoy to the nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, on Wednesday said in a statement that the union is moving toward fresh sanctions on Iran: "Iran's apparent lack of interest in pursuing negotiations require a clear response, including through appropriate measures."

The arrests in Belgium come just a day after France announced that it would file terror charges against nine Kurds who it says were recruiting fighters for the PKK. The PKK, or Kurdistan Workers' Party, is considered by the European Union, United States and Turkey to be a terrorist organization. 

Over 300 police raided 25 sites all across Belgium, the German news agency dpa reported, citing Belgian news reports. Police also raided the offices in Denderleeuw of Roj TV, an international Kurdish broadcaster that backs the PKK.

The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday began hearing a $98 billion (71.7 billion euros) claim against Russia by the executives of bankrupt oil company Yukos.

The oil firm, once the largest in Russia, declared bankruptcy in 2006 after a multi-billion-dollar back-tax claim. Former executives say the company was broken up illegally by allies of then President Vladimir Putin in an attempt to consolidate his authority over Russia's influential tycoons.

A German court has sentenced four self-confessed Islamic militants to up to 12 years in jail for a failed plot to attack US targets in Germany.

In the country's biggest terror trial in decades, a higher regional court in Duesseldorf sentenced the two German converts, Fritz Gelowicz and Daniel Schneider, to 12 years each. Turkish national Adem Yilmaz was sentenced to 11 years, while German-Turkish citizen Attila Selek will go to jail for five years.

Candidates from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party (PDL) will not be allowed to contest the polls in Lombardy, his political home turf, and the Lazio region, which includes Rome.

The bungle in Lazio occurred when a party member missed the deadline to register for the March 28-29 regional elections.

A furious Berlusconi has vented his anger at "amateur" party officials, whose blunder could hand a victory to the left-wing opposition in two of Italy's most important regions.

AFP - Portuguese civil servants walk off their jobs on Thursday, hoping to close schools, courts and hospitals in a protest strike against austerity measures imposed by the Socialist government. The strike could be the biggest in years in Portugal and will test the minority government, which has been pressed by financial markets to cut spending after Greece's fiscal crisis turned the focus on weak euro zone members.   Greece targeted civil servants, the rich and the church on Wednesday in a sweeping new 4.8 billion euro ($6.5 billion) austerity programme designed to secure European help to tackle its crippling debt burden. 

Hundreds of people from France's Vendée region gathered Thursday afternoon at a mass in Luçon to mourn the victims of storm Xynthia. Among those present at the cathedral was French Prime Minister François Fillon, who gave a brief speech in homage to those killed before a procession of volunteers, police and firemen.

Xynthia, a powerful storm carrying hurricane-force winds, rampaged across Europe earlier this week, hitting hardest in the Vendée region, where more than half of the total deaths in France occurred. Relief and reconstruction efforts have been launched in the largely flooded area, and the official death toll was put at 53 Thursday, with seven people injured. 

LONDON (Reuters) - The Conservatives have a two point lead over Labour in marginal seats, a poll showed on Thursday, a further indication that Britain could be heading for an inconclusive election.

Thirty-nine percent of those polled said they would vote Conservative, and 37 percent said they would support Labour in the YouGov/Channel 4 News survey of 60 key marginal seats.

The major broadcasters face anger after deciding to invite Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader, to reply to the televised Prime Ministerial debates during the general election campaign.

The BBC, ITV and Sky this week reached agreement on the format of the three encounters between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - US senators from both parties on Wednesday (3 March) pressured the Obama administration to implement free trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia, warning of competition from the EU, which recently clinched similar deals.

Washington's free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea were signed during the George W. Bush administration, but their implementation has been blocked for some three years now due to opposition from Barack Obama's own Democratic Party.

EU single market commissioner Michel Barnier on a trip to the City of London on Wednesday told the FT that he supports a global tax on financial transactions: "It is a fair idea ...If there is a levy, it allows you to put in place a system to anticipate, prevent and manage a future crisis."

Italy's socialist head of state Giorgio Napolitano after a meeting with EU commission chief Barroso in Brussels on Wednesday said the bloc should create its own IMF-type bail-out fund. "There's something missing from our common tool box," he said, AFP reports.

Greek singer Nana Mouskouri, who served as MEP between 1994-1999, offered Athens her EU pension to help ease the pressure on the public finances. She said she saw this as her "duty to the country" and urged fellow Greeks to help the state as well. Ms Mouskuri gets an EU pension of €25,000 a year.

Three in four voters (74%) in Iceland are set to vote No to the Icesave deal in Saturday's referendum, according to a Gallup poll. Just 19% are in favor and 8% undecided. The Icelandic Icesave internet bank collapsed in 2008. The UK and the Netherlands want €3.8 billion back on behalf of clients.

Protests and praise greeted Greece's latest round of austerity measures on Thursday, as Prime Minister George Papandreou introduced a new multi-billion-euro bond in a bid to tackle his country's massive debt.

In central Athens, more than 300 trade unionists occupied the entrance to the Ministry of Finance, protesting the latest measures and calling for an "uprising" in action. A second demonstration was planned for later Thursday.

Last year, Presidents Hu Jintao of China and Boris Tadic of Serbia cemented their bilateral relations and traditional friendship with a strategic partnership. Besides reaffirming their mutual respect for one another's sovereignty and territorial integrity, pledging broader, stronger and deeper ties, the two republics firmly stated their aim to promote economic cooperation and trade.

A document resulting from their partnership agreement said the two sides had expressed a readiness to "ensure continuous and steady growth of bilateral trade and gradually improve the balance of bilateral trade through development in accordance with the principle of equality, mutual benefit, reciprocity and win-win result."

REUTERS - France will play a more hands-on role in managing its state shareholdings, President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Thursday as he unveiled policies aimed at halting the decline of French industry.  Sarkozy also said he would earmark millions of euros to encourage companies to innovate with green investment and bring jobs back to France as part of a plan to help a sector that has shed over half a million workers in the last 10 years.   "The state is going to profoundly review its role as a shareholder in the big industrial companies," he told workers at a Eurocopter factory in southern France.

'If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government," Woodrow Wilson once wrote. "If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it."

This was the great, consuming fear of the once-robust antitrust movement: that competition would be destroyed and government itself brought to heel by concentrated private power. That movement was a force to be reckoned with in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but after World War II the public's dread of bigness seemed to fade away.

    ...Barry C. Lynn's recent book ... arises directly from the old antitrust tradition, and it presents us with an amazing catalogue of present-day monopolies, oligopolies and economic combinations. Its subjects are, by definition, some of the largest and most powerful organizations in the world. And yet almost none of it was familiar to me.

    Mr. Lynn tells us, for example, about the power of single companies or small groups of companies over such disparate fields as eyeglasses, certain categories of pet food, washer-dryer sales, auto parts, many aspects of food processing, surfboards, medical syringes...

....

    Mr. Lynn ... describes companies that swallow their rivals and then, with competitive pressure diminished, set about "destroying product variety and diversity." ... We learn of entire industries where competitors have grown so close to one another that a collapse at one company would probably bring down many of the others as well.

    This is, we are often reminded, a populist age, with fresh flare-ups of fury every time Wall Street bonuses hit the headlines. ...Mr. Lynn's anger at the Wall Street bailout, his fondness for small business, and his frequent homages to the nation's founders may seem superficially similar to the attitudes of the tea party protesters. But Mr. Lynn also takes pains to demonstrate that the economic "freedom" so beloved by the snake-flag set has actually yielded the opposite of freedom: a "neofeudal" system of "private corporate governments" answerable to no one.

European leaders have called for an inquiry into the Greek crisis. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, has told Congress that the Fed is "looking into" Wall Street's deals with Greece, and the Justice Department is investigating the euro bets. That is better than turning a blind eye, but it is not nearly enough.

The bigger problem is in America, where markets are supposed to be fair and transparent. These particular -- and particularly complicated -- instruments are traded privately among banks, their clients and other investors with virtually no regulation or oversight.

The Obama administration and Congress have been talking for a year about fixing the derivatives market. Big banks have been lobbying to block change. And the longer it takes, the weaker the proposed new rules become.

Here are some of the problems that must be fixed:

NO TRANSPARENCY <...>

LIMITED POWER TO STOP ABUSES <...>

NO STATE REGULATION, EITHER <...>

Without effective reform, the derivative-driven financial crisis in the United States that exploded in 2008, and the Greek debt crisis, circa 2010, will be mere way stations on the road to greater calamities.

[Milton Friedmanesque Economic Propaganda Site Alert]

The march of civilizations is a series of defenses that man has put up against the dread of pure existence.

Voters in Togo went to the polls on Thursday to vote in a presidential election that is widely viewed as a test of democracy for the tiny west African country, which is notorious for electoral violence.  Polls opened at 7 am local time on Thursday with hundreds of voters lining up at polling stations in the Togolese capital of Lomé. FRANCE 24 special correspondent Christopher Moore, reporting from a polling station in Lomé, said voting in the early hours was calm.

AFP - A tsunami alert sent terrified Chileans running for coastal hills Wednesday, while a surge of troops finally brought order to the quake-hit second city of Concepcion after rampant looting.
  
Four days after giant waves swept hundreds to their death, two powerful aftershocks, with magnitudes of 5.9 and 6.0, triggered a brief new tsunami warning along the stretch of Chile's central coast worst hit on Saturday.
  
Thousands of traumatized earthquake survivors, some still trying to identify loved ones claimed by killer waves, rushed to higher ground as troops ushered them up hillsides. The alert was lifted less than 30 minutes later.

AFP - Sixty-three people, all of them women and children, were crushed to death in a stampede on Thursday at a temple in northern India where a crowd had gathered for a religious festival.
   
The stampede was triggered when an under-construction gate collapsed on the crowd as people surged forward to collect free food and clothes from a local holy man in northern Uttar Pradesh state, police said
   
"We have now counted all the bodies and they include 37 children and 26 women who had come to collect free gifts," assistant superintendent of police S.P. Pathak told AFP by phone from the disaster site.

AFP - A powerful quake jolted southern Taiwan on Thursday, sending panicked residents fleeing from shaking buildings, toppling farm houses and derailing a carriage on a high-speed train.
   
Initial reports said at least 12 people had been injured in the 6.4-magnitude quake which the US Geological Survey said struck about 70 kilometres (about 40 miles) from the island's second-largest city Kaohsiung.
   
It was felt as far north as the capital Taipei, several hundred kilometres away.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A dozen House of Representatives Democrats opposed to abortion are willing to kill President Barack Obama's healthcare reform plan unless it satisfies their demand for language barring the procedure, Representative Bart Stupak said on Thursday.

"Yes. We're prepared to take responsibility," Stupak said on ABC's "Good Morning America" when asked if he and his 11 Democratic allies were willing to accept the consequences for bringing down healthcare reform over abortion.

"Let's face it. I want to see healthcare. But we're not going to bypass the principles of belief that we feel strongly about," he said.

A US congressional panel has described the killing of Armenians by Turkish forces during World War I as genocide, despite White House objections.

The resolution was narrowly approved by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The administration had warned the panel that the vote would harm reconciliation talks between Turkey and Armenia.

It is unclear whether the non-binding resolution will now go forward to the full House but it is fiercely opposed by Turkey, a key ally of the US.

Is David Cameron preparing to help out his Republican party allies from the comfort of No 10 Downing Street? That's the implication of a clue in an internal Republican party strategy document leaked to the media.

The document - found in a hotel room after a Republican party meeting and passed to Politico - is a collection of PowerPoint slides showing fundraising events organised by the Republicans. Under "3rd quarter events" for September this year, it includes the entry: "9/17 Young Eagles London trip - Meeting with David Cameron - $80,000".

The "Young Eagles" is an invitation-only group of Republican donors under the age of 45, who each pay several thousand dollars a year for the right to attend special party events and get VIP treatment. The $80,000 (£53,000) figure is the profit the Republican National Committee plans to make from the event for the party's coffers.

A familiar face is once more casting its sinister shadow upon the streets of Poznan, Poland. In the run-up to International Women's Day next Monday, none other than Adolf Hitler personally has been drafted from beyond the grave as a Polish anti-abortion campaign's new poster child.

The 200 square meter poster, which has so far appeared only in this western Polish city of half a million residents, depicts the Führer's brooding countenance and clipped mustache alongside graphic photos of aborted fetuses. "Abortion was introduced for Polish women by Hitler on March 9, 1943," it reads.

Read more...

This month, the group expanded its reach, making national news with 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, "Black children are an endangered species [sic]," and a Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com.

Across the country, the anti-abortion movement, long viewed as almost exclusively white and Republican, is turning its attention to African-Americans and encouraging black abortion opponents across the country to become more active.

A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Tex., meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organizations.

Read more...

European Parliament president Jerzy Buzek is opposed to genetically-modified foods but admits the battle can not be won. In Sofia he said: "I am, generally speaking, against because we don't know what will be the long-term effect of it" adding: "We cannot win this battle, so I am not fighting."

SINGAPORE/ANCHORAGE (Reuters) - The world has become far too hot for the aptly named Exit Glacier in Alaska.

Like many low-altitude glaciers, it's steadily melting, shrinking two miles over the past 200 years as it tries to strike a new balance with rising temperatures.

At the Kenai Fjords National Park south of Anchorage, managers have learned to follow the Exit and other glaciers, moving signs and paths to accommodate the ephemeral rivers of blue and white ice as they retreat up deeply carved valleys.

Climate scientists have long warned that global warming could unlock vast stores of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen into the Arctic permafrost, setting off potentially significant increases in global warming.

Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.

Natalia Shakhova, a scientist at the university and a leader of the study, said it was too soon to say whether the findings suggest that a dangerous release of methane looms. In a telephone news conference, she said researchers were only beginning to track the movement of this methane into the atmosphere as the undersea permafrost that traps it degrades.

Almost the entirety of Saudi Arabia's sales positions are held by men, making shopping for underwear a somewhat uncomfortable experience for women. In an attempt to reverse the trend, a group of exasperated Saudis tried to take control of the lingerie business. Did they succeed?

On February 13, a financial analyst and blogger from Jeddah, Reem Asaad, launched a campaign called "No to underwear salesMEN in Saudi Arabia". She called on shoppers to boycott lingerie shops across the country until the government agreed to enforce a law which allows women to work in the shops (Article 8 of decree N120).

The law, put forward by the left-leaning current labour minister, Ghazi al-Qusaibi, was passed in 2006. It specified that all lingerie salesmen should be replaced by saleswomen within a year. But faced with pressure from Saudi clerics and conservative forces opposed to women mixing with men in the workplace, the majority of shops ignored the new law.

The Republican party's national organising committee was furiously backpedalling after an embarrassing document lampooning Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders as 'evil' was found in a hotel room.

The PowerPoint document, reported by the Washington news website Politico, was delivered by the Republican National Committee's head of fundraising to a closed meeting of select party officials and major donors held in Boca Grande, Florida, last month.

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, today defended the government's refusal to disclose why Jon Venables, who was convicted at the age of 10 of the murder of two-year-old James Bulger, has been sent back to prison for unspecified breaches of the conditions of his release on a life licence.

Brown said he understood "public outrage" but insisted it was impossible for the specific details of the breach to be revealed.

The photograph shows a starkly handsome Chinese man walking with a model's measured gait, and wearing a rag-tag but well co-ordinated overcoat on top of a leather jacket. His eyes peer into the middle distance, in what one fan described as "a deep and penetrating way", and he strides confidently forward.

But this is no catwalk model. This is a homeless man in the city of Ningbo. And now a band of web followers are calling him the coolest man in China.

His good looks and bohemian dress sense have won him thousands of online fans after a resident of Ningbo posted a picture online. Web users in China have called him the "Beggar Prince", the "Handsome Vagabond", and, most often, "Brother Sharp".

Odd how, when you want to believe someone is your staunch friend, you keep screening out evidence to the contrary. So it is with our special relationship with America. They're just not that into us.

Why do we find it so hard to see this? All this week I've been reading alarmed commentary about the United States "wavering" in its support on the Falklands. Wavering? Not a bit of it. America has never backed Britain's territorial claim.
[....]
"Only Mitterrand and the French remained staunch allies to the end."

Thousands of passengers reportedly are stuck along with the ships ferrying them in Baltic Sea ice between Stockholm and the Aland Islands, located between Sweden and Finland. Both countries have sent icebreakers to rescue the ships in what is being called the worst Baltic freeze in 15 years.

Four ferries of the Viking Line, which routinely carries passengers between Sweden and Finland, are among the ships stuck in the ice, according to Swedish maritime authorities. Cargo vessels also have been affected, with up to 50 ships reportedly trapped.

Officials blame windy conditions in the Baltic for creating conditions conducive to ice quickly surrounding surprised vessels.

From an ecological perspective, of course, this system of growth at any cost, synonymous with capitalism, places the world economy in direct conflict with environmental sustainability. China's rapid growth in recent decades has also led to record rates of environmental degradation on its part. China is now close to the United States in annual carbon dioxide emissions, though far below the latter in emissions per capita. Yet, despite the seriousness of this contradiction between the capitalist economy and the planet, establishment economists generally argue against any major attempt to avert climate change, i.e., to bailout nature. At the same time they do not hesitate to advocate spending trillions of dollars to bailout banks. President-elect Obama's chief economic advisor, Larry Summers, is notorious for his anti-environmental diatribes. He has said, on more than one occasion, that it makes as much economic sense in terms of future welfare to spend on various non-environmental factors--for example, to rebuild infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.)--as to seek to preserve the environment, say, tropical forests. In addressing the global warming problem, Summers naively stated in 1992, that under "the most pessimistic estimates yet prepared...global warming reduces growth over the next two centuries by less than 0.1 percent a year."39 Yet, under the most pessimistic estimates of climatologists at that time--now proving accurate--global warming under business as usual threatened both life on the planet and human civilization itself. Indeed, nothing is more deranged than the notion of Summers and other orthodox economists that the planet as we know it can be destroyed, while the capitalist economy can continue as before.

Ironically, the current slowdown of the capitalist economy may help temporarily to check some of the increasing burden on the biosphere, by reducing the rate of growth of the overall consumption of energy and materials. However, the usual response to economic crisis within capitalism is to remove protections previously applied to workers and the environment. Hence, the economic decline is likely to result in more intensive forms of ecological exploitation.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will come out with a new book that is a "celebration of American virtues and strengths," publisher HarperCollins announced on Thursday.

The as-yet untitled book by Palin, widely considered to be weighing a run for U.S. president, will feature selections of readings that have inspired her and portraits of people she admires, the publisher said.

"She will also draw from her personal experience to amplify these timely (and timeless) themes," HarperCollins said in a statement.

Palin's first book, "Going Rogue," has sold more than 2.2 million copies, HarperCollins said.

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"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char