Juncker was chosen as the lead candidate of the conservative center-right European People's Party (EPP) at a party congress in Dublin. A veteran of EU politics, the former Luxembourg prime minister lost office last year after 18 years in the position.

Juncker beat French rival Michel Barnier, the EU's regulation chief, with a first tally among EPP delegates showing he secured 382 votes to Barnier's 245. Delegates included German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Ballots for the vote in Crimea on joining Russia announced for 16 March appear to have been printed.

...Update: Kyiv Post has translated the rest of the ballot and concluded that there is no way to vote no:

The ballot asks two questions and leaves no option for a "no" vote. Voters are simply asked to check one of two boxes:

Do you support joining Crimea with the Russian Federation as a subject of Russian Federation?

And:

Do you support restoration of 1992 Crimean Constitution and Crimea's status as a part of Ukraine?

That Constitution declares that Crimea is an independent state.

The questions are written in Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar, the three most widely spoken languages on the peninsula, and the paper carries a warning in all three languages that marking both options will invalidate the ballot.

Last year, Petko Elenkov, a security guard, shot and killed a Roma teenager, who had allegedly jumped over the wall of a refrigerator depot in Sofia in order to steal scrap metal. Elenkov, 50, denies any wrongdoing. A year on, the trial still hasn't begun.

Elenkov was released on a 5000 leva (2500 euro) bail prompting Roma minority groups to demonstrate on the streets, calling for justice. Nationalist and pro-Nazi demonstrations ensued.

"Nationalism is on the rise in Bulgaria," Daniela Mikhaylova, who heads the Equal Opportunities Initiative, an NGO based in Sofia's Roma ghetto, told DW. In her opinion, this "new level of violence came as a result of a specific nationalist attitude that has gone unchecked for too long. When such violence happens and people in the media forums write things like, 'Very good, they [Roma] got what they deserved,' people start thinking that this reaction is something natural and even legitimate."

... Many of the state institutions today are influenced by Ataka - a nationalistic party that entered parliament for the first time in 2005, winning close to nine percent of the vote. Today, an Ataka MP presides over the parliamentary ethics commission, and the party has its own representative in the commission for protection against discrimination. "It's no big surprise that their rulings are often supporting the discrimination, rather than fighting it," said Kanev

Whether it's thousands of indignados camping out for weeks or a handful of older people rallying against a freeze in pensions, the backdrop is almost always the same: Madrid's Puerta del Sol square.

And that's a problem, according to the city's mayor, Ana Botella, local businesses and the regional government, who are calling on the interior ministry to limit the number of protests in the Spanish capital's best known and busiest square.

...The mayor's response elicited derision from union leader Luis Miguel López Reillo. "The ideas of our mayor are often a bit strange," said the secretary general of the Unión General de Trabajadores. "How can you call it a protected area when it's a public space that belongs to Madrid and its citizens?" he said.

..."I think there are bigger problems in Madrid that she could focus on," he said.

It may be within these bigger problems that the solution lies, one politician suggested delicately. As Ángel Pérez, spokesperson for the leftwing coalition Izquierda Unida in Madrid recently said: "If they want to avoid protests in Puerta del Sol, all the government has to do is stop applying the harmful policies that are generating these protests."

In a speech at lunchtime on Friday, Theresa Villiers will say that even the 187 IRA "on-the-runs" - members who are wanted in either Great Britain or Northern Ireland for crimes committed during the Troubles between 1969 and 1998 - would not be immune from future arrests or detentions.

Villiers will tell a gathering of European journalists in Belfast that "no-one holding one of these letters should be in any doubt, they are not 'get-out-of-jail-free cards'".

...While in power, Labour attempted in 2005 to introduce legislation to grant immunity from prosecution for IRA fugitives who were wanted in the UK for past crimes. When the opposition scuppered the legislation after objections from Dublin and the nationalist SDLP, Labour created a secret scheme giving 187 IRA "on-the-runs" the letters of assurance.

The existence of the letters was revealed at the Old Bailey two weeks ago when defence lawyers produced one held by John Downey, a convicted IRA member who was standing trial for the 1982 Hyde Park bomb atrocity. As a result of the letter being produced in court, the case against Downey collapsed.

"Muzychko brutally tortured captive military men of Russia, and murdered them afterwards. Muzychko personally tortured, and then murdered at least 20 captive soldiers of troops of federal forces during the indicated period, demanding the necessary information," RIA Novosti quotes an official representative of the Russian Investigative Committee Vladimir Markin.

The Somali telecommunications intercepted in Burum are collected to support the Dutch navy mission in the Gulf of Aden. But the Americans are likely to be doing something else with it altogether.

According to the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the US has conducted between five and eight drone strikes in Somalia since 2011. Between 10 and 24 people were killed. According to the US, most of them were senior members of the extremist Al-Shabaab movement, which last year openly allied itself with Al-Qaeda.

Metadata play a crucial role in these `targeted killings', according to research by the American website The Intercept, run by journalists Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras.

Secret NSA documents show that the monitoring service works closely with the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command, which carries out the attacks. Greenwald and his colleague Scahill spoke to a drone operator who worked for the JSCOC. This anonymous source said the JSCOC leans heavily on signal intelligence. `Everything they turned into a kinetic strike or a night raid was almost 90 percent that,' he said. `You could tell, because you'd go back to the mission reports and it will say `this mission was triggered by SIGINT.'

EU leaders are rapidly drawing up plans to send some of their stocks of Russian gas back to Ukraine and other eastern European countries that need it, if Vladimir Putin reacts to western sanctions over the Crimea crisis by starving the continent of energy.

In order to achieve these goals, I propose the following set of agreements:

1. A five-year moratorium on offers to Ukraine of accession or partnership agreements with the Eurasian Union, the EU or NATO.

2. Thereafter, a constitutional amendment would be introduced, making ratification of any such agreement dependent on a majority of at least 70% of voters in a referendum.

3. Russia reaffirms its agreement to the new elections in May. The elections will be supervised and monitored by the UN, to prevent intimidation by nationalist or pro-Russian forces.

4. Russia withdraws its troops in Crimea to military bases. The Ukrainian government cancels its military alert as well as its call-up of reservists.

5. Russia recognizes the new government in Kiev as legitimate on a provisional basis -- in return for placing the Defense, Security and Interior ministries under neutral professional officials.

6. A promise by the new government in Kiev not to pass any laws banning political parties or carrying out lustrations of former or serving officials, and not to take any action to replace elected officials and councils in eastern and southern Ukraine. The carrots

If Russia agrees to these terms, then the existing Western threats of non-attendance at the G8 Summit in Sochi in early June 2014, and of economic and other sanctions, should be suspended.

If the government in Kiev agrees to them, then the international community should move to put together a financial rescue package for Ukraine.

No doubt, these terms will be difficult for both Russia and Ukraine to accept:

• Russia because it would involve abandoning Russian recognition of Yanukovych as elected president (though Putin has said publicly himself that he does not think that Yanukovych has any political future);

• the new Ukrainian government because it would have to accept certain internationally mandated restrictions on its internal actions.

Without an agreement however, developments on the ground -- for example, actions by both Ukrainian and pro-Russian militias to seize control of provincial governments in the East and South -- could easily bring about a war that neither Kiev nor Moscow desires.

that threads the needle quite well

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

So any mediation now hinges on Germany. Berlin has no time for "sanctions" -- the sacrosanct American exceptionalist mantra; Russia is a plush market for German industry. And for all the vociferations at the Economist and the Financial Times, the City of London also does not want sanctions; the financial center feeds on lavish Russian politico/oligarch funds. As for the West's "punishment" for Russia by threatening to expel it from the Group of Eight, that is a joke. The G-8, which excludes China, does not decide anything relevant anymore; the G-20 does. 

If a wide-ranging poll were to be conducted today, it would reveal that the majority of Ukrainians don't want to be part of the E.U. -- as much as the majority of Europeans don't want the Ukraine in the E.U. What's left for millions of Ukrainians is the bloodsucking IMF, to be duly welcomed by "Yats" (as Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is treated by Vic "F**k the E.U." Nuland). 

Ukraine is slouching towards federalization. The Kiev regime-changers will have no say on autonomous Crimea -- which most certainly will remain part of Ukraine (and Russia by the way will save $90 million in annual rent for the Sevastopol base, which until now was payable to Kiev.) 

The endgame is all but written; Moscow controls an autonomous Crimea for free, and the U.S./E.U. "control," or try to plunder, disaster capitalism-style, a back of beyond western Ukraine wasteland "managed" by a bunch of Western puppets and oligarchs, with a smattering of neo-nazis. 

France said it still plans to deliver two aircraft carriers to the Russian Navy despite this whole invading a sovereign country for no good reason thing. As Russia moves troops into Crimea region, and the European Union weighs punishment, France seems unwilling to dump the deal. 

bizniz rulz

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

France and Slovenia are the only two countries to have received a specific recommendation from the EU executive on public deficits.

During the presentation of its country-specific analysis of macroeconomic imbalances on 5 March, the Commission has used "a new instrument to attract the attention of two eurozone member states, namely France and Slovenia on the risk of non-compliance with the recommended budget target for this year."

BRUSSELS - The European Central Bank (ECB) should scrap its target to keep price inflation at 2 percent, Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said on Thursday (6 March).

Speaking at an event organised by the European Parliament's Socialist group, Stiglitz said central banks should look to strike a balance between controlling inflation and supporting job creation.

"The ECB's mandate needs to be changed," he noted.

Irish Times @MarkPaulTimes  gave Apple Sales International tax figures for 2004-08. But 2005-09 is $10.9bn pre-tax profit, $37.9m tax, 0.35%

— Neil Chenoweth (@NeilChenoweth) March 8, 2014

US Senate PCI figures: Apple Sales International 2010 pretax $12.1bn, tax $7m; 2011 pre-tax $22bn tax $10m. That's 0.045%, 45c per $1000.

— Neil Chenoweth (@NeilChenoweth) March 8, 2014

Interesting Apple Sales International reported $697m interest earnings 2002-09. Looks like the Irish didn't get much tax out of that either

— Neil Chenoweth (@NeilChenoweth) March 8, 2014

The International Criminal Court has found a Congolese ex-militia boss complicit in war crimes in an attack on a village in the DRC. He was acquitted, however, of charges he used child solders in the incident.

Libya threatens to bomb North Korean-flagged tanker if it takes oil from rebels

Prime minister warns of an `environmental disaster' if tanker leaves rebel-held port of Es Sider with oil cargo
The rebels, who have seized three major Libyan ports since August to press their demands for more autonomy, warned Tripoli against staging an attack to halt the oil sale after the tanker docked at Es Sider terminal, one of the country's biggest. The vessel started loading crude late at night, oil officials said.

The government is struggling to control militias that helped topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 but kept their weapons and now challenge state authority.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly asked his cabinet secretary to investigate a highly complicated Dutch-Belgian border arrangement, under which citizens of one country live in enclaves within the other, as a possible precedent to enable Jewish settlers in the West Bank to remain under Israeli rule inside a future Palestinian state.

The prime minister has tasked Cabinet Secretary Avichai Mandelblit with researching the arrangements that prevail in the Belgian "Baarle-Hertog" and Dutch "Baarle-Nassau" areas -- complex border arrangements that originated in a mixture of medieval treaties, land swaps, land sales and other agreements -- to see whether they constitute a viable legal precedent for similar arrangements under which Jewish settlers could stay put within a Palestinian state, Israel's Channel 2 news reported on Sunday night.

A bid to limit dangerous Nitrogen Oxide (Nox) emissions from new ships is in danger of being delayed until 2021, because of pressure from Russia that may be felt in a meeting of EU diplomats today (7 March).

Pollution from international shipping is estimated to be responsible for more than 50,000 premature deaths in Europe alone and, by 2020, maritime Nox emissions are expected to equal or overtake those from land-based sources.

Because they take place close to shore, such emissions can have a disproportionately damaging effect on human health.

But last year, Russia called for a five-year delay to a deal cut at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 2008 which would have strictly limited the shipping pollution from 2016. Russia has given no indication that it would support any future curb on NOx emissions in 2021.

"Each of the last three decades has been warmer than the last. Extreme events are on the increase. Even if what we have just had [this winter] was not caused by anthropogenic climate change, events of this nature are increasing both in intensity and frequency," said Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Two types of extreme events are going to occur more frequently - extreme precipitation and heatwaves. It is important for societies to deal with climate change if we want to avoid the impacts."

Pachauri was speaking ahead of the publication next month of a major global assessment of the impact of climate change on the world's food supplies, human health, cities and rural areas. Leaked copies seen by the Guardian warn of crop yields falling 2% a decade even as the demand from rapidly growing population increases by 14% per decade. It also warns of extreme heat stress in cities, increased precipitation and widespread flooding.

Arguably the single most important mistake the revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s made was to overlook the resilience of capitalism. The idea - catastrophism, as it is often called - that the system was going to crumble under the pressure of its own contradictions, that the bourgeoisie produces its own "gravediggers" (as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto) has been disproved. When the rate of profit started showing signs of decline in the first half of the 70s, the redistributive policies implemented after the second world war were terminated and the neoliberal revolution was launched.

This resilience of capitalism has little to do with the dominant classes being particularly clever or far-sighted. In fact, they can keep on making mistakes - yet capitalism still thrives. Why?

...the left would be better off learning from its past mistakes. Capitalism might well be capable not only of adapting to climate change but of profiting from it. One hears that the capitalist system is confronted with a double crisis: an economic one that started in 2008, and an ecological one, rendering the situation doubly perilous. But one crisis can sometimes serve to solve another.

Capitalism is responding to the challenge of the ecological crisis with two of its favourite weapons: financialisation and militarisation. In times of crisis, for instance, markets will require simultaneously that wages be cut and that people keep consuming. Opening the flow of credit allows the reconciliation of these two contradictory injunctions - at least until the next financial crisis.

EU-mandated spending cuts in the Greek healthcare system has brought the country decades back into time, with the new-born death rate jumping by 43% since the beginning of the crisis, according to Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a liberal MEP from the German FDP party.

The austerity policies, ordered by Greece's Troika of international creditors, have worsened the socio-economic situation in Greece to a level not seen since the Second World War, Chatzimarkakis said.

The new-born death rate rose by 43% since austerity measures were implemented, he underlined.

Speaking at the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday (5 March) Chatzimarkakis, who is of Greek descent, said that what the EU allows the Troika to do in Greece goes against fundamental human rights.

Across Germany, right-wing organizations are using anti-Islam rhetoric to further their ideas -- and finding a receptive audience. Now legal experts are debating whether it's time for a new kind of hate-crime legislation.

The more that scientists stare at it, the more a strange signal from the center of the Milky Way galaxy appears to be the result of dark matter annihilation. If confirmed, it would be the first direct evidence for dark matter ever seen.

Dark matter is a mysterious, invisible substance making up roughly 85 percent of all matter in the universe. It floats throughout our galaxy, but is more concentrated at its center. There, a dark matter particle can meet another dark matter particle flying through space. If they crash into one another, they will annihilate each other (dark matter is its own antiparticle) and give off gamma rays.

To search for a dark matter signal, astronomers use NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope to map the gamma radiation throughout the galaxy. Then, they try to account for all known sources of light within this map. They plot the location of gas and dust that could be emitting radiation and subtract that signal from their gamma-ray map. Then they determine where all the stars are and subtract out that light, and so on for every object that might be emitting radiation. Once all those sources are gone, there remains a tiny excess of gamma radiation in the data that no known process can account for.

There's no left in the US today. Proof is that I am the most left-wing person I know and I'm a classical conservative http://t.co/G83nkJryWx

— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) marzo 9, 2014

Just how far Silicon Valley will go to remove such risks is at the heart of a class-action lawsuit that accuses industry executives of agreeing between 2005 and 2009 not to poach one another's employees. Headed to trial in San Jose this spring, the case involves 64,000 programmers and seeks billions of dollars in damages. Its mastermind, court papers say, was the executive who was the most successful, most innovative and most concerned about competition of all -- Steve Jobs.<aside style="display: none;" data-marginalia-type="sprinkled" data-skip-to-para-id="story-continues-5">

The suit shows how more than two years after his death, Mr. Jobs still casts a long shadow. It also offers a portrait of Silicon Valley engineers that differs sharply from their current caricature as well-paid villains who are driving up the price of real estate in San Francisco and making the city unbearable for others.

Alan Hyde, a Rutgers professor who wrote "Working in Silicon Valley: Economic and Legal Analysis of a High-Velocity Labor Market," said the no-poaching accusations go contrary to what has made the valley so successful: job-hopping.

"There is a fair amount of research that tech companies, particularly in California, have distinctive personnel practices," he said. "They hire for short tenures and keep ties with former employees so there can be an exchange of information across company lines. The companies in this suit might have been killing the golden goose."

8 March 1914 – birth of Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (d. 1987) Soviet nuclear scientist, co-discoverer of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (which allows the detection of dark matter, dark energy and cosmological constants by observing the cosmic microwave background radiation)

9 March 1934 – birth of Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, the first man in space (d. 1968)

Judges last April ordered the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy's phones to be bugged as part of an investigation into allegations his 2007 election campaign was bankrolled by Libya's then leader, Muammar Gaddafi, it was claimed on Friday.

The phone tapping, believed to be the first of its kind against a French leader, was described by Sarkozy's lawyer as a "monstrous" violation of his legal rights. But transcripts of the taped conversations have reportedly embroiled him in further damaging corruption allegations.

...Somehow Sarkozy got wind of the move and became "laconic" in his phone manner, Le Monde claimed. He then obtained a second mobile which he used to contact his lawyer Thierry Herzog, who had also reportedly bought a second mobile using a "borrowed identity".

It is not known what the phone taps revealed about Gaddafi, but transcripts of bugged conversations between president and lawyer, alerted investigators to how surprisingly "well informed" they were about a separate legal case, says Le Monde.

...Le Monde claims investigators established that he and his lawyer were being fed confidential information from the case files by a senior prosecutor, described as a "veteran supporter" of the political right.

So that's why he suddenly had to meet Merkel for a nice photo-op.

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