A key bilateral accord with the European Union on open labour markets has won a clear majority at the ballot box.

Rightwing parties, which forced the nationwide vote, suffered a defeat on Sunday as nearly 60 per cent of voters backed the government and a broad alliance of parties, organisations and the business community.

Official results show 59.6 per cent of the electorate approving a proposal to continue a labour accord with 25 EU states and at the same time extend the agreement to the newest members Bulgaria and Romania.

Turnout was just under 51 per cent, which is above average for nationwide votes in general, but lower than in the last two previous votes on relations with EU - Switzerland's main trading partner.

Opponents of the labour accord only won a majority in four out of the country's 26 cantons.

Brussels officials said they would go ahead with plans to invest billions of taxpayers' money on energy and internet projects despite political and legal objections from key EU players such as Germany, France and Italy. 

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso wants to use 5 billion euros ($6.4 billion) of what he says are spare EU budget funds to link up the member states' electricity grids, build gas pipelines, create wind farms and spread broadband internet connections to the countryside.

Barroso says the projects would help improve energy security and make Europe greener while at the same time providing a much-needed shot in the arm to the bloc's economy, which is suffering from its worst recession in decades.

But some governments object to the plans, either because they would need to provide the money themselves, or because they are not interested in the projects.

In a race against time, Italy's government is expected to table in parliament early next week a controversial bill to re-connect a life-support system to a comatose woman at the canter of a right-to-death debate.  

The Senate, parliament's upper-house, is scheduled to begin debating the bill next Tuesday, Senate speaker, Renato Schifani said on Saturday.

By then, medical experts say, Eluana Englaro, will have started to manifest muscle spasms and other serious symptoms related to the suspension, which began Friday, of nutrients and water previously supplied to her body through tubes.

The case of the 38-year-old Englaro, who has spent the last 17 years in a vegetative state after a car accident, has reignited debate in Catholic Italy over euthanasia and its legal technicalities.

French fighter planes were unable to take off after military computers were infected by a computer virus, an intelligence magazine claims.

The aircraft were unable to download their flight plans after databases were infected by a Microsoft virus they had already been warned about several months beforehand.

At one point French naval staff were also instructed not to even open their computers.

Microsoft had warned that the "Conficker" virus, transmitted through Windows, was attacking computer systems in October last year, but according to reports the French military ignored the warning and failed to install the necessary security measures.

The French newspaper Ouest France said the virus had hit the internal computer network at the French Navy.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was reported Sunday to have turned down an offer from Economics Minister Michael Glos to resign. But the move doesn't bode well for her government in an election year. 

The newspaper Bild am Sonntag said the chancellor and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier wanted Glos to remain in office until general elections are held on Sept. 27.

 

Glos, a member of the Christian Social Union (CSU) -- the sister party to Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, had offered to resign on Saturday, but he was immediately turned down by his party boss, Horst Seehofer.

 

In a letter to Seehofer, 64-year-old Glos cited his age and the need for the CSU, after disappointing state election results last September, to renew itself ahead of this year's national polls.

It can no longer be said that the Finnish forestry industry is in crisis.

      Rather, the field seems to be heading through a major crisis into a new primary state, in which there will be clearly fewer workers and mill chimneys in the provinces than before.

      Thursday's published results of all three large forestry companies spoke pointedly of "restructuring measures" and making provisions for what is to come. What this mainly referred to was reductions, curtailments, and elimination of operations, even if the precise targets of such measures were not yet defined.

wild without anchors

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

In the US administration's first major foreign policy speech since taking office, Vice-President Joe Biden promised greater cooperation with Europe. But he also said there would be some strings attached. 

US Vice-President Joe Biden on Saturday, Feb. 7, promised greater cooperation with European allies on security issues, but only in exchange for greater European contributions to fighting global security threats.

 

Biden's speech before the Munich Security Conference, billed as the new US administration's first glimpse of an overarching security and defense policy, presented a laundry list of US priorities around the world, combined with a promise of greater US humility in addressing those issues.

 

"I come to Europe on behalf of the new administration ... determined to set a new tone not just in Washington, but in America's relations around the world," Biden said. "America will do more. That's the good news. The bad news is that America will ask for more from our partners as well."

MUNICH: Vice President Joseph Biden of the United States rejected the notion of a Russian sphere of influence Saturday, promising that the new government under President Barack Obama would continue to press NATO to seek "deeper cooperation" with like-minded countries.

Biden, in a much-anticipated speech at an international security conference, also said the Obama administration would continue to pursue a planned missile defense system that has angered the Kremlin, provided the technology works and is not too expensive. The missile defense shield, Biden said, is needed to "counter a growing Iranian capability."

In the Obama administration's first outline before an international audience of how it will conduct U.S. relations with the rest of the world, the vice president signaled a tough line on Iran. "We will be willing to talk to Iran," Biden said, in a departure from the Bush administration.

But Biden quickly tacked back to a refrain common during the last years of the Bush presidency, and spoke of offering Iran's leader a choice: "Continue down your current course and there will be pressure and isolation; abandon the illicit nuclear program and support for terrorism and there will be meaningful incentives."

VP Biden today gave the first outlook on the Obama administration's foreign policy in a speech at the current Security Conference in Munich. The short version:No change

Specifics:

- Missile defense in Europe will continue to be build.

We will continue to develop missile defenses to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven to work and cost effective.

The Iran line is pure bullshit. The missile defense the U.S. plans is to enable a nuclear first strike capability against Russia. Russia will have to fight this.

I hate to agree with Bill Kristol, but he's right about Vice President Joe Biden's speech at the ongoing Munich security conference when he writes that "the administration chose not to use the occasion to say something interesting. One hopes the Obama administration is actually thinking more seriously than the Biden speech indicates." I'm sure Kristol and I were looking for different things in the speech, but, at least from my point of view, it was hopelessly uninspired and offered no hints of any creative and new thinking that might actually lead to breakthroughs, particularly in the Middle East. Indeed, it sounded like a speech that Condoleezza Rice might have submitted in draft for White House approval before the vice president's office and Elliott Abrams got their hands on it. Remember, this was the Obama administration's first major foreign-policy address and thus a huge opportunity to begin charting its own path.

A few things were especially disappointing, beginning with the emphasis placed by Biden on the change of "tone" the new administration would bring to foreign policy. (This was exactly what Rice meant when she announced in her Senate confirmation hearings in 2005 that "the time for diplomacy is now.") It's nice to have a new "tone", but what about some new content beyond the nominal gestures, like closing Guantanamo and forbidding torture, and the cliches about greater consultation and adherence to international law? In that respect, Biden offered little or nothing substantive.

Top officials from the European Union and NATO look for unity on Russian proposals for a new security treaty in Europe. While the NATO chief was critical of Moscow, France's Sarkozy said Russia posed no military threat. 

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's call for a new treaty in Europe "deserves to be taken seriously" and Europe and the United States "should engage in this discussion," EU foreign-policy chief Javier Solana told the prestigious Munich Security Conference.

 

But the secretary general of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, whose organization will be crucial to any new security arrangement, ruled out such a discussion as long as Russia plans to build military bases in the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

 

"I cannot see how we can have such a discussion of the new architecture ... when Russia is building bases inside Georgia. That cannot be ignored, and it cannot be the foundation of a new security architecture," De Hoop Scheffer told some 350 top world politicians.

Britain's bailed-out institutions are prepared to pay millions to staff, and government plans will not stop them.

A mutinous backlash is growing in Britain this weekend against banks' plans to carry on paying staff millions in bonuses as if the credit crunch had never happened. The Independent on Sunday understands that the Government intends to try to head off the rising tide of resentment against bankers by saying that it will be an "active shareholder" in the institutions receiving significant bailout cash, and say no to "excessive payments".

But the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, will stop short of an absolute veto on bonuses or a salary cap at taxpayer-rescued banks such as Northern Rock, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group. Treasury sources say he will also try to "coax" other banks to rein in pay and bonus packages. He will set up a review "which will examine how banks are managed. I expect the review to make recommendations about the effectiveness of risk-management by banks' boards, including how pay affects risk-taking."

Despite the recession, Britain's clearing banks will this month pay out millions to staff in bonuses. RBS, now propped up with £20bn of public money, wants to pay its staff almost £1bn in bonuses, it emerged yesterday. Critics contrasted the Government's "mere words" with the decisive and legally enforceable cap on executive pay and bonuses announced by President Barack Obama in the US. They dismissed the Chancellor's plans as not much more than a non-binding code of conduct, which banks are sure to flout.

MOSCOW: Does the Taganrog Automobile Factory have a deal for you! Rows of freshly minted Hyundai Santa Fe sport utility vehicles are available right now. In exchange - well, do you have any circuit boards? Or sheet metal? Or sneakers?

Here is a sign of the financial times in Russia: Barter is back on the table.

Advertisements are beginning to appear in newspapers and online, like one that offered "2,500,000 rubles' worth of premium underwear for any automobile," and another promising "lumber in Krasnoyarsk for food or medicine." A crane manufacturer in Yekaterinburg is paying its debtors with excavators.

And one of Russia's original commodities traders, German Sterligov, has rolled out a splashy "anti crisis" initiative that he says will link long chains of enterprises in a worldwide barter system.

UK Guardian: Turn failed banks back into mutuals, Labour told

Pressure is mounting for the government to explore ways to remutualise Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley, nationalised after the shares crashed amid fears that they could collapse amid the world financial crisis. Both companies were mutuals before becoming stockmarket-listed banks in the 1990s.

Labour MPs are pushing for the government to expand the role of mutuals, which are owned by depositors and borrowers. They do not have shareholders who may be more interested in diverting profit to bolster dividends than getting customers a better deal.

Mutually owned building societies are widely viewed as more cautious than banks, which have been accused of irresponsible lending during the boom. Societies are barred from funding more than half their mortgages from the wholesale money markets, which have frozen up in the wake of the credit crunch.

This looks like a good way to handle the banking crisis in Britain, and in the US as well.

Done right, you can create a finance sector that has a heavy social component. Why not establish something on the Spanish model, where you have mutalized banks taking an equity interest in startup firms, and putting this a market basis after the company has grown into viability.

This system was essential to getting renewable energy firms in Northeast Spain up and running.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

Letters: Obama's team of zombies - Salon

You want to know what happened to our economy?

Mexico happened to our economy.

China happened to our economy.

That's the root of the problem: we loaded our economy on a boat and shipped it overseas.

No, wait a minute. That's not the root of the problem.

That's the trunk of the problem.

The root of the problem is that have a political system based on money.

Thus, the hot air solutions.

What are the chances that our public officials, who owe their very existence to the interests who bankroll them, are going to attack the root of the problems we face?

Approximately...nil. Unless we find a way to force them.

There are going to be no bills proposing new tariffs on products made in China. There are going to be no bills that make it illegal for an American corporation to park its assets in the Cayman Islands. There are going to be no bills that contain minimum environmental or labor standards for imports. No relief for people in hock to credit card companies. Nothing that would threaten the stranglehold of insurance companies on the healthcare system. Nothing but a wag of the finger and a dog-and-pony show in front of an "outraged" Congress for the banking industry.

snip

But what about the unprecedented grassroots fund-raising machine that elected Barack Obama? That money came overwhelmingly from small donors with no special interest except the demand for change. What about their interests?

Yeah. What about their interests?

For some reason, they don't seem to command the same respect as, say, that of manufacturers of children's toys.

I have no clever, one sentence answer for that one.

How come the interest group that paid the most has the least clout?

Maybe in order to have clout, you gotta use clout.

And so far, our guy hasn't shown the inclination to use clout. For a guy from Chicago, he seems strangely dainty. He talks about bipartisanship. We didn't pay Barack Obama to be bipartisan!

We paid him to change things.

We gave Barack Obama, in denominations of $5, $10, $100, the clout to fundamentally change things. We gave Barack Obama 65 million votes. We gave Barack Obama a 75% approval rating. We gave Barack Obama over $745 million. Surely we should get something for our $745 million - besides the president's "appreciation," as Blago would say.

For $745 million, we oughta be fucking golden.

haha, as vbo might opine...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or has the possibility of totalitarianism been as real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is finished. Our children will never have the standard of living we had. And poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague. This is the bleak future. There is nothing President Obama can do to stop it. It has been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with a trillion or two trillion dollars in bailout money. Our empire is dying. Our economy has collapsed.

How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and a glorious tomorrow or will we responsibly face our stark new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up out of the slime in moments of crisis to offer fantastic visions? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? We won't have to wait long to find out.

There are a few isolated individuals who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul and Andrew Bacevich, as well as writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten and Naomi Klein, along with activists such as Bill McKibben and Ralph Nader, rang the alarm bells. They were largely ignored or ridiculed. Our corporate media and corporate universities proved, when we needed them most, intellectually and morally useless.

Wolin, who taught political philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley and at Princeton, in his book "Democracy Incorporated" uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. "Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true," Wolin writes. "Economics dominates politics--and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness."

that last sentence is anglo disease in the proverbial nutshell...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Towering flames razed entire towns in southeastern Australia and burned fleeing residents in their cars as the death toll from the country's worst ever fire disaster continued to rise today.

At least 640 homes were destroyed in Saturday's inferno when searing temperatures and wind blasts produced a firestorm that swept across a swath of the country's Victoria state, where all the deaths occurred.

Barack Obama has been warned by the CIA that British Islamist extremists are the greatest threat to US homeland security.

American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain.

They believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under the visa waiver programme is the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on American soil.

Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.

Iran's former president Mohammad Khatami has ended months of speculation by announcing that he will run in June's presidential election.

Mr Khatami was president of Iran from 1997-2005 and was succeeded by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative.

"I will seriously take part as a candidate for the election," he told a meeting of a pro-reform group.

In January, a close aide to Mr Ahmadinejad said the incumbent would, as expected, stand for re-election.

Lieutenant-Colonel Yvonne Bradley, an American military lawyer, will step through the grand entrance of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London tomorrow and demand the release of her client - a British resident who claims he was repeatedly tortured at the behest of US intelligence officials - from Guantánamo Bay. Bradley will also request the disclosure of 42 secret documents that allegedly chronicle not only how Binyam Mohamed was tortured, but may also corroborate claims that Britain was complicit in his treatment.

But first, Bradley, a US military attorney for 20 years, will reveal that Mohamed, 31, is dying in his Guantánamo cell and that conditions inside the Cuban prison camp have deteriorated badly since Barack Obama took office. Fifty of its 260 detainees are on hunger strike and, say witnesses, are being strapped to chairs and force-fed, with those who resist being beaten. At least 20 are described as being so unhealthy they are on a "critical list", according to Bradley.

Mohamed, who is suffering dramatic weight loss after a month-long hunger strike, has told Bradley, 45, that he is "very scared" of being attacked by guards, after witnessing a savage beating for a detainee who refused to be strapped down and have a feeding tube forced into his mouth. It is the first account Bradley has personally received of a detainee being physically assaulted in Guantánamo.

all the best, oxen.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

The ship, which used to be known as the Clemenceau, completed its journey from Brest, in France, to join the ranks of "ghost ships" gathered at Graythorp, in Teesside.

At 738ft (225m) long and 213ft (65m high), the 32,780-tonne vessel will become the largest ship to be recycled in Europe and will bring jobs to the area, but the project has faced criticism from environmental campaigners.

Seven other decommissioned vessels, known as "ghost ships" are already on site at the Teesside Reclamation and Recycling Centre (TERRC) near Hartlepool, which is owned by ship recycling company Able UK.

The company, which won a contract reported to be worth up to 4 million euros (£3.5 million) to scrap the ship, had to apply for an exemption from the Health and Safety Executive before the vessel can be dismantled.

3 simple, inexpensive steps - no lawyer involved - to protect. US law is quoted, but the EU equivalents are easily found.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Anyway, if Obama changes American policy in any manner away from the America militarism and the complex that benefits from death and war --- though I doubt he can beat that mob alone, but maybe unify Americans approximately toward that end --- he will have been our greatest president. And I think he is so ambitious he wants to be exactly that and has a reasonably sane "no drama Obama" approach that could work.
But for now he's just another new boss, farting in the same mahogany Oval Office chair as the old boss, but making some very good iconic gestures to indicate things are not going to be the same as the old boss. And the whole world is relieved and more optimistic.  As I've said many times, I do not believe in raw hope, which is childish, can mean anything to anybody, which makes it too easily manipulated by those in authority. But I do believe in justified optimism. And I'm beginning to detect a scent of that in the air. Let's just hope the full course meal will follow.
Still, no matter what Obama does, even in making the finest of choices, somebody's ox is going to be gored. Especially in a country whose economy and sense of identity is driven by a ridiculous infantile and pointless lifestyle of gadgets,20fads and flatulence. In other words, somebody is not going to get their goddamned pony for Christmas and be pissed as hell. Which makes them prime fodder for demagogues and profiteering corporate sharks.
In the end Obama will have done what he could in his time. I only hope that the cagey idealism we all suspect is there, is really there. Or if it is there, that it will not be snuffed by the massive global financial and corporate cartel that really runs this country, mostly by default because most of our citizenry no longer takes responsibility for their country, or anything else except their choice of pizza toppings. We shall see.

One of Silvio Berlusconi's favourite actresses has been hired by the Italian government to become the new face of Naples, in a PR campaign designed to clean up the city's image.

Elena Russo, 35, achieved notoriety last year when she featured in a set of tapes in which Berlusconi appeared to pressure directors of Italian state television to find more work for her. "I have this problem of Elena Russo," he said during one conversation, which was leaked to newspapers. "She is practically out of work."

Transcripts of the leaked conversations caused uproar as critics accused the prime minister of improper interference in state media. Now the government has funded the next step in Russo's career, as Berlusconi seeks to claim credit for the transformation of one of Italy's most problematic cities.