The new commission president nomination system brings party politics into the process and makes citizens' votes more worthwhile, writes Graham Watson.

The European elections next May will be groundbreaking as it will be the first time the views of the people of Europe will be taken into account when choosing the top people in the EU's executive, the European commission. It will be the first time the European political parties will officially nominate candidates for the job of president of the European commission, thereby bringing a touch of choice and party politics to the process.

Europe's federation of Liberal parties, the Alliance for Liberals and Democrats for Europe (the ALDE Party, which is distinct from the ALDE Group) will announce its candidate for president of the European commission at an extraordinary congress in Brussels on 1 February 2014.

The ALDE Party was actually the first party to decide how it was going to go about choosing its candidate. Nominations will formally open at the ALDE Party congress in London at the end of November and close on 20 December. In order to be nominated, presidential hopefuls will have to get the backing of either two national Liberal parties or 20 per cent of the party's congress, which is made up of representatives of all the national parties.

Focus magazine said an analysis by German security services showed Merkel's calls were listened into by even more people than initially thought.

It said analysis by German security services showed the four countries, and not just the US, were eavesdropping.

The British Embassy in Berlin declined to comment on the allegations. 

Relations between Germany and the US have turned chilly since it was alleged that its National Security Agency (NSA) has been tapping Merkel's phone, possibly from a listening station on top of the US embassy which is just a few hundred metres away from the Chancellor's office in the centre of Berlin.

In early November the Independent newspaper reported that the British embassy housed a similar spy station on its roof.

Focus, meanwhile, also reported that as well as targeting Merkel's phone, Russian spies were particularly active in Germany with 120 agents operating in the country.

The federal government is now scrambling to find alternative forms of financing for road works after Swiss voters rejected a proposed hike in the motorway tax.

More than 60 percent of voters opposed the planned increase in the annual tax to 100 francs ($110) from the current 40 francs, according to referendum results announced on Sunday.

"Apparently we were not able to demonstrate the benefits of this price increase," Transport Minister Doris Leuthard told Swiss media.

The "no" vote removes funding for nearly 400 kilometres of new roads designed to ease bottlenecks in the country's motorway network.

Voters rejected the increase in every canton of the country, including places such as Neuchâtel and Glarus that stood to benefit from new roads.

Progressive taxation won't do any good, apparently.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has defended his move to put on hold a historic deal with the EU, amid continuing mass protest rallies.

He said he was forced by economic necessity and the desire to protect those "most vulnerable".

The EU has accused Russia of exerting heavy economic pressure on Ukraine.

Clashes between protesters and police continued on Monday. Meanwhile, jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko announced an indefinite hunger strike.

BRUSSELS - The European Commission Monday (25 November) unveiled plans to clamp down on tax 'freeloaders' in its latest bid to target corporate tax avoidance.

Officials plan to re-write rules on the tax status of parent and subsidiary companies to prevent firms from setting up 'letter-box' companies in different countries to evade tax.

The EU's Parent-Subsidiary directive, which was last revised in 2003, was originally designed to ensure that companies would not be taxed twice within the EU, by exempting dividends and other profits passed from subsidiary to parent companies.

However, the EU executive is now concerned that the directive has been manipulated by firms to avoid paying tax in any country.

A married couple suspected of holding three women as slaves for more than 30 years are former Maoist activists Aravindan Balakrishnan and his wife Chanda, the BBC understands.

According to Marxist archives they were leading figures at the Mao Zedong Memorial Centre based in Acre Lane, Brixton, south London, in the 1970s.

It was raided by police and five people, including the pair, were held.

Mr Balakrishnan, 73, and his 67-year-old wife were arrested on Thursday.

Three women were rescued from their home in Brixton a month earlier.

The couple has been linked to 13 addresses across London, the Met has confirmed. The force would not confirm or deny their names.

A right-wing extremist has been elected regional governor of Banska Bystrica in central Slovakia.

Marian Kotleba won 55.5% of the vote in the run-off against Vladimir Manka from the Smer-Social Democrat party.

Mr Kotleba is a former leader of a banned far-right organisation who now leads the ultra-nationalist Our Slovakia party.

He has previously organised marches against Slovakia's Roma minority.

The now-banned neo-Nazi party which Mr Kotleba formerly led had expressed sympathy for the Nazi puppet state which ruled Slovakia during World War II.

The number of contracts Americans signed to buy previously-owned homes unexpectedly fell in October for a fifth consecutive month amid higher borrowing costs that are denting the real-estate recovery.

The gauge of pending home sales decreased 0.6 percent after a 4.6 percent drop in September, the National Association of Realtors said today in Washington. The median projection in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for a 1 percent gain in the index from the month before.

Higher mortgage rates and price increases driven by a tighter supply of homes for sale may be keeping some prospective buyers out of the real-estate arena. Further gains in hiring and confidence would help boost the housing-market recovery as well as the U.S. economic expansion.

The Swiss National Bank (SNBN)'s cap on the franc remains appropriate given the currency's strength and economic risks in the euro area, President Thomas Jordan said.

"We believe the franc is still highly valued and there is no risk of inflation," said Jordan, speaking at a business reception in his home town of Biel, Switzerland. "The minimum exchange rate remains indispensable to ensure price stability in Switzerland."

The Zurich-based central bank set a cap of 1.20 per euro on the franc in September 2011, citing the risk of deflation and a recession. It has promised unlimited currency interventions to defend the cap and Jordan repeated that commitment today.

On this, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we would do well to remind ourselves that another loss resulting from that fateful day was that of a progressive trend in leadership regarding federal budgetary policy.  The points are expressed so clearly they require no interpretation or commentary.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Commencement Address, Yale University, June 11, 1962

"If our Federal Budget is to serve not the debate but the country, we must find ways of clarifying this area of discourse. Still in the area of fiscal policy, let me say a word about deficits. The myth persists that Federal deficits create inflation, and budget surpluses prevent it. Yet sizable budget surpluses after the war did not prevent inflation, and persistent deficits for the last several years have not upset our basic price stability. Obviously, deficits are sometimes dangerous--and so are surpluses. But honest assessment plainly requires a more sophisticated view than the old and automatic cliché that deficits automatically bring inflation.

There are myths also about our public debt...debts public and private are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. Borrowing can lead to over-extension and collapse--but it can also lead to expansion and strength. There is no simple slogan in this field that we can trust.

The stereotypes I have been discussing distract our attention and divide our efforts. These stereotypes do our nation a disservice not just because they are exhausted and irrelevant, but above all because they are misleading--because they stand in the way of the solution of hard and complicated facts.

It is not new that past debates should obscure present realities. But the damage of safety of all the world--the very future of freedom--depends as never before on the sensible and clear-headed management of the domestic affairs of the United States.

We cannot understand and attack our contemporary problems...if we are bound by traditional labels and worn-out slogans of an earlier era.

But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that our rhetoric has not kept pace with the speed of social and economic change. Our political debate, our public discourse on current domestic and economic issues, too often bears little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces.

What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need are not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.

The national interest lies in high employment and steady expansion of output and stable prices...The declaration of such an objective is easy. The attainment in an intricate and interdependent economy and world is a little more difficult. To attain them we require not some automatic response but hard thought.

I am suggesting that the problems of fiscal and monetary policy [today] as opposed to the kinds of problems we had in the Thirties demand subtle changes for which technical answers--not political answers--must be provided.

These are matters...which government and business should be discussing in the most sober, dispassionate and careful way if we are to maintain the kind of vigorous economy upon which our country depends.

How can we generate the buying power which can consume what we produce on our farms and in our factories?

How can we take advantage of the miracles of automation with the great demand that it will put upon high-skilled labor and yet offer employment to the half a million of unskilled high school dropouts every year who enter the labor market?

How do we eradicate the barriers which separate substantial minorities of our citizens from access to education and employment on equal terms with the rest?

How, in sum, can we make our free economy work at full capacity, that is, provide adequate wages for labor and adequate utilization of plant and opportunity for all?

These are problems that we should be talking about, that the political parties and the various groups in our country should be discussing. They cannot be solved by incantations from the forgotten past.

Let us not engage in the wrong argument at the wrong time, between the wrong people in the wrong country, while the real problems of our time grow and multiply, fertilized by our neglect."

(Reuters) - The hero of France's top movie comedy of the moment is a French foreign minister who complains about American isolationism and says the Germans must be humored - but above all kept off the U.N. Security Council.

One reason for the box-office success of "Quai d'Orsay" - named after the 19th century palace by the River Seine where France conducts its world affairs - is how closely it flirts with real-life policy.

Another reason, underlined by a weekend poll showing two-thirds of French mired in pessimism about the next decade, is that it transports local audiences into a domain where their country continues to flex real muscle.

November has been a torrid month for France, rapped by the European Commission for failing to reform its economy and hit by a new sovereign debt downgrade. Nationwide anger at rising taxes has sparked often violent protests, notably by Breton livestock workers up in arms over a planned road freight levy.

Yet abroad, it has exuded self-confidence and strength: it played hard ball in major-power nuclear talks with Iran that brought a landmark deal on Sunday; it is gearing up for a risky new peace intervention in ex-colony Central African Republic; and some 1,200 French troops took part in a NATO exercise in eastern Europe - five times more than the U.S. contingent.

Before Zarif was sent to Geneva, he and Rouhani had a meeting with Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose approval was absolutely required for any deal.

"The leader's main concern is his core supporters, who truly believe that there should be no deal with America, and are closely watching the developments to find a weak point or a failure to blame on the negotiators for betraying the leadership," said a former Iranian official, a relative of Khamenei.

The deal was in part the result of months of secret talks held with Iran in such out-of-the-way places as Oman, with U.S. officials using military planes, side entrances and service elevators to avoid giving the game away.

The talks, the most important contacts in more than three decades during which Iran branded the United States the "Great Satan" and the United States described Iran a part of an "axis of evil" that also included Iraq and North Korea, were confirmed by U.S. officials and a former Iranian official.

They illustrate a U.S. desire, dating to the start of Obama's administration in January 2009, to explore whether there might be a way to reconcile two nations that have been hostile since 1979 but were once allies.

Thailand's prime minister has invoked an emergency law after demonstrators seeking to remove her from office occupied parts of the finance and foreign ministries.

Yingluck Shinawatra announced on Monday that the Internal Security Act would cover all of Bangkok and surrounding areas. Three especially sensitive districts of the capital have been under the law since August, when there were early signs of political unrest.

The law authorises officials to seal off roads, take action against security threats, impose curfews and ban the use of electronic devices in designated areas. Peaceful rallies are allowed under the law.

Protesters swarmed into the two government ministries earlier on Monday, overrunning several buildings and cutting electricity in an escalating campaign to topple Yingluck's government.

Protesters say they want Yingluck to step down amid claims that her government is controlled by her brother and former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was toppled in a military coup in 2006 for alleged corruption.

Israeli authorities have green-lighted the construction of 800 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank.

Israel's Defence Ministry said on Monday it had approved a planning stage for the housing earlier this month - an initial step in a protracted bureaucratic process, with construction not expected to begin for months.

Settlement watchdog Peace Now swiftly criticised the announcement.

"This is yet another move that threatens to derail the peace process," group spokesman Lior Amihai said.

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, has warned that ongoing settlement-building by Israel in the Palestinian territories threatens the future of Middle East peace talks, which stand at an impasse little more than three months after they began.

Clashes between Libyan troops and an armed group in the eastern city of Benghazi have killed at least nine people and wounded at least 47 during a military operation, the interior ministry said.

The Libyan army on Monday declared "a state of alert" in Benghazi and summoned all troops to report for duty after the battle with Ansar al-Sharia fighters erupted.

Gunfire and explosions could be heard and thick smoke rose from the Ras Obeida area of the city. The army ordered residents to stay off the streets, witnesses told the Agence France Press news agency.

Fighting broke out when an army special forces unit chased a suspect into an area where Ansar al-Sharia operates its own checkpoints, Benghazi city security officials said.

Rival militia groups withdrew from Tripoli last week after clashes killed more than 40 people when protesters marched to one of the fighters' bases to demand they leave the capital.

NAIROBI, Kenya, November 25, 2013/ -- Schneider Electric (http://www.schneider-electric.com), the market leader in energy management with operations in more than 100 countries, inaugurated the MiCROSOL project aims to develop a single, modular standard technology for producing electricity, drinking water and heat simultaneously, primarily to benefit micro-industries located in rural areas of countries with high levels of sunshine, especially in Africa.

MiCROSOL is based on the principle of cogeneration of electricity and heat, applying a new approach to a technology that is already widespread - solar thermodynamics. The solution focuses its constraints on the design of thermal storage that only uses environmentally-friendly products.

Its purpose is to simultaneously meet three basic needs regularly expressed by these people: Access to electricity that is reliable, efficient and inexpensive; Clean drinking water that is produced economically and consistently; and Heat generation that is continuous and environmentally sound.

Microsol can help micro-producers in the food, textile and paper industries with processing their raw materials by automating some of their processes (e.g. drying, washing, pasteurization, etc.). In the tertiary sector, Microsol can help the tourist industry by providing the energy needed for many premium services: electricity for HVAC, refrigeration or security; heat for hot water, laundry or heating; water for drinking or cooking.

Located in a rural village, Microsol can also meet some or all of the production needs of local residents: water supply, electrification of communal areas, and so forth.

A Microsol solution produces 50 MWh/year of electricit, 1,000 m3/year of drinking water, and around 800 MWh/year of thermal energy. The solution has an expected life of at least 20 years.

"That technology can help Africa's poorest countries", said Pradeep Monga, Director of the Energy & Climate Change Branch of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), while attending the inauguration of Microsol solution.

For the environment, Microsol is a green solution that guarantees zero greenhouse gas emissions, reduced deforestation and health problems owing to the clean production of heat and electricity. Also, Microsol use easily recyclable steel and aluminum components.

See pdf here.

EXCLUSIVE / Better insulation could shave 4% off European industry's total fuel consumption and emissions bill, a sum worth €3.5 billion a year, says an unpublished report by the Ecofys consultancy.

The total cost-effective energy savings potential amounts to 620 petajoules (PJ), the equivalent of 37 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to the paper, `Climate protection with rapid payback', which is due to be published next week.  

"The lack of awareness of the energy savings potential of industrial insulation is surprising all around," said Andreas Gürtler, director of the European Industrial Insulation Foundation, which commissioned the research.

He added: "To tap this large economic potential delivering competitive advantage combined with energy and CO2 savings, a dedicated implementation of article eight of the energy efficiency directive on energy audits is inevitable."

The study estimates the initial investment costs of insulating bare industrial surfaces and repairing damaged industrial insulation at about €900 million. But the payback times for the majority of such investments were under one year, and sometimes just a few months.

The French uranium mining firm Areva is facing calls to end its practice of securing tax exemptions from the government of Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, as contract negotiations between the two reach a critical stage. 

Uranium makes up about 70% of exports from Niger, but only 5.8% of the country's GDP. Campaigners say that one of the reasons for this is a series of national tax opt-outs that the company has secured in its existing contracts.

"Areva is benefiting from tax exemptions, notably on customs rights and VAT," Anne-Sophie Simpere, an advisor to Oxfam France told EurActiv. "They also pay a lower rate of royalties because under the current contracts, they are exempted from Niger's 2006 Mining Law." 

"Under a provision pour reconstitution de gisement, another 20% of their profits are protected from Niger's corporate tax regime," Simpere continued, "According to the tax administration in Niger, they also do not pay tax on the fuel they use - and they use a lot of fuel."

Oxfam has just released a report - 'Areva in Niger: Who benefits from the uranium?' - slamming the company's record. Oxgam points to Niger's yearly budget of $2.5 billion - around a quarter of Areva's annual turnover - and ask why the company should be granted special dispensations.

In the mild coastal climate of western Washington, agricultural growers are learning more about the advantages of growing popular fresh-market vegetables in high tunnel production systems. High tunnels can offer many benefits for delicate vegetable crops, including protection from environmental stresses such as hail, frost, excessive rainfall, and high wind.

Despite these obvious benefits, the use of high tunnels for growing both lettuce and tomato is currently limited in the region--estimated to be only 50 acres for tomato and less than 20 acres for lettuce.

Should Bob and Alice be told?

Meet the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. There must have been some kind of mixup when the group's name was registered -- it's not actually a committee for a constructive tomorrow. It's a $3 million-a-year climate-denying group funded by the likes of ExxonMobil to try to convince the world that climate change is no big deal. (Its latest "special report" extolls the virtues of pumping more carbon dioxide, a.k.a. "the gas of life," into the atmosphere.)

So, that's a bit confusing.

Anyway, to help you to get to know this 28-year-old Washington, D.C.-based group a little bit better, here are some excerpts from a fundraising email signed by its President David Rothbard while United Nations climate talks were underway in Warsaw, Poland:

Plans for a huge wind farm off the north Devon coast have been shelved.

Developer RWE Innogy is pulling the plug on the 240-turbine Atlantic Array project, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) told the BBC.

The scheme, which had not yet received the go-ahead, had attracted criticism, with environmentalists worried about its impact on marine wildlife in the Bristol Channel.

RWE Innogy said it was "not the right time" for the project.
[....]
But BBC South West political editor Martyn Oates said: "Sources have told us that this will not go ahead because of problems in financing it.

Ahem, anyone wanna comment ?

keep to the Fen Causeway

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, a staunch opponent of US mass surveillance, garnered praise for her initiatives against mass Internet monitoring on the international stage. But a plan included in a national law that would force Internet companies to store Brazilian data within the country's borders has been much less popular. Internet experts fear the consequences for a truly global Internet.

Over the past months, the Brazilian government has been exceptionally vocal in its criticism of US mass surveillance. In September, Rousseff canceled a visit to Washington in protest against American spying, and instead traveled to New York to condemn US surveillance practices at the UN. Since then, the Brazilian government announced it will host an international Internet governance summit in 2014, put forward a UN resolution on online privacy, and accelerated work on a national bill of Internet rights called the Marco Civil.

But a plan to nationalize data centers, which was tacked onto the Marco Civil, worries Internet experts, who believe it goes against both the interests of the global Internet and Brazilian Internet users.

The cost of local storage
First to complain against the proposal were the companies who would be obligated to build new servers to continue operations in Brazil, at high costs.

In May 2012, Chen Guangcheng, the Chinese dissident, was getting ready to journey to New York after his improbable escape from house arrest. About a week before his arrival, an Evangelical Christian pastor from Texas and a New York University law professor took a walk in Central Park. They wanted to discuss the difficulties Chen might face as one of the most high-profile and sought-after immigrants to come to the United States in some time.

These men were to become two of Chen's closest advisers in America, which would create a difficulty of its own. Over the course of an increasingly distrustful year, Chen couldn't possibly follow their often sharply conflicting advice simultaneously, leaving him torn. But for now, as the pair strolled through the park on a Sunday afternoon, it seemed as if they were in alliance and set to counsel Chen in unison.

Jerome Cohen, the renowned professor and expert in Chinese law, thought it best if Chen initially spoke with caution, if at all, about his best-known cause: his exposure of the grisly practice of forced abortions and sterilizations in his native Shandong Province as an illegal means of enforcing China's family-planning policy. Chen's efforts enraged local officials and led to nearly seven years of imprisonment and house arrest.

His ordeal ended only when, one April night last year, Chen, who is blind, leapt the walls around his home, evaded the guards who had taken over his village, made his way to Beijing and sought refuge in the American Embassy.

(Reuters) - The rise of social media in China will lead to liberalization, and as more and more people go online China's government will be powerless to halt the changes, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google Inc, said on Monday.

Speaking at a conference in London, Schmidt recalled a meeting with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang this month, just weeks after China passed tough regulations on social media. Under new laws, people face harsh penalties if libellous "online rumors" they create are reposted more than 500 times.

"The most interesting thing about talking to the government, from the president all the way to the governors, is that they are obsessed with the Internet, which is why they passed these laws," Schmidt told the conference, which was organized by independent policy institution Chatham House.

He did not elaborate on their conversations.

Up, up in the sky: It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a . . . jellyfish? That's what researchers have built - a small vehicle whose flying motion resembles the movements of those boneless, pulsating, water-dwelling creatures.

The work, which will be presented at the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting on November 24 in Pittsburgh, demonstrates a new method of flight that could transport miniaturized future robots for surveillance, search-and-rescue, and monitoring of the atmosphere and traffic.

Many approaches to building small aerial robots try to mimic the flight of insects such as fruit flies. The challenge in that, explained Leif Ristroph of New York University, is that the flapping wing of a fly is inherently unstable.

To stay in flight and to maneuver, a fly must constantly monitor its environment to sense every gust of wind or approaching predator, adjusting its flying motion to respond within fractions of a second.

To recreate that sort of complex control in a mechanical device - and to squeeze it into a small robotic frame - is extremely difficult, Ristroph said.

After some tinkering, he devised a new way of flapping-wing flight that doesn't need any sort of control or feedback system to be stable, and is akin to the swimming motions of jellyfish.

A Tennessee parent was arrested last week after complaining about the student pick-up policy at his children's school.

Video of the incident, posted online Saturday, shows dad Jim Howe getting arrested for disorderly conduct at South Cumberland Elementary School. The footage, recorded by Howe's fiancée, had more than 110,000 views on YouTube as of Wednesday afternoon.

As explained in the clip, the school recently instituted a new pick-up policy that asks parents to wait in a line of cars before their children are released from school. Howe, however, felt the line of cars caused safety issues. (The video states the policy causes "traffic [to be] backed up over a mile on a busy highway.") He walked into the school to pick up his children and speak out about the guidelines.

Howe appears composed throughout the video, as he calls the county sheriff to complain. However, the school resource officer, who according to local outlet WATE-TV is also a sheriff's deputy, seems agitated by both Howe's desire to involve the sheriff and his continued grievances.

"I'm going to take you up to the jail," school resource officer Avery Aytes tells Howe. "I'm telling you right now I'm not putting up with this today, you go ahead and record all your want ... you're being childish and it's uncalled for."

Written for a technologist audience: RT @mbrit: Here's a review for my Death of the PC book. https://t.co/fNsOeB76N2" @msgbi @TeraEuro

— Beate Reszat (@rszbt) noviembre 26, 2013

Of course there's an actual euphemism that's getting popular. Spoken in hushed tones in pubs. "He's a right Craft Beer Enthusiast, him."

— Douglas McCaffrey (@EstebanSemtex) noviembre 26, 2013

How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation? XKCD http://t.co/SCgfY9RoqX

— Peter Mount (@peter_mount) noviembre 26, 2013