The definition conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. A new report details how it’s been used to justify punitive action against Palestine advocates in Europe.
Where has all the water gone and what is being done?
Even in the face of such climatic disturbance affecting that most vital of resources for life, countries will still find the miraculous energy and industry to wage war or at least prepare for it, all the while continuing to despoil environments. In time, the proposition that war will even be waged over water supply is a distinct, disturbing possibility.
A succession of events starting in Barcelona, Spain, in February, and followed in Liège, Belgium, and Oslo, Norway, in April sent a strong message to Israel: The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) is alive and well.
Israel’s world support is distinctly dead and dependent on a minority of shamed nations like the US, UK, and Australia
“The village of Huwwara needs to be wiped out. I think that the State of Israel needs to do that – not, God forbid, private individuals,” Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Wednesday.
This genocidal call came just days after hordes of Israeli settlers, protected by the army, attacked the occupied West Bank village, burning Palestinian homes and cars and ransacking businesses.
Russia’s attempt to blackmail Germany and the rest of Europe into giving up its support of Ukraine by cutting energy supplies has failed, chancellor Olaf Scholz has said on the anniversary of Russia’s invasion attempt of its western neighbour. “Those who look at the past year will see: the Russian president has failed,” Scholz said in a statement.
“But if we don’t do it then we run the risk that the storage facilities will not be full enough at the end of the year towards the winter season. And then we are blackmailable on a political level,” he said.
A thousand gigawatts is termed a terawatt, i.e. a trillion watts. Right now, there is only about one terawatt of solar electricity-producing capacity in the whole world, so these European countries want to double it in 8 years.
Given Australia’s L-NP is little more than a carbon copy of GOP policies Putanism is also breeding in their heart. Surveillance of Australians has never been greater than the degree to which it has under Peter Dutton and he wants it increased. He wants politician’s parliamentary privilege extended beyond Parliament to be able to defend and sue defamation cases at will and taxpayers’ expense.
The L-NP wants criticism stifled by putting restrictions in place on social media for individuals, disallowing the ABC and Independent media a source of income but ensuring the corporate MSM has theirs. Basically guaranteeing their quid pro quo relationship is in tact and will continue. Lets face it, Murdoch is currently Putin, the GOP’s and the Australian Liberal Party’s biggest supporter and Murdoch is Putin’s in the West. Fox News is even being dubbed and replayed on Russian State Media.
Make no mistake: Putin’s authoritarian neo-fascism has rooted itself in America. It may be possible to prevent Putin’s aggression from spreading to the rest of Europe. But it is not possible to win a cold civil war inside America without destroying the United States – another of Putin’s objectives when he ordered his spy agencies to help Trump.
Will Putin now invade Finland as Stalin did in 1939 because they are now too, considering joining NATO?
An embattled Ukraine moved to solidify its bond with the West on Monday by applying to join the European Union, while the first round of Ukraine-Russia talks aimed at ending the fighting concluded with no deal but an agreement to keep talking. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted photos of himself signing the EU application, a largely symbolic move for now that could take years to become reality and is unlikely to sit well with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long accused the West of trying to pull Ukraine into its orbit.
But let us be clear: No American president is going to go to war with Russia over the Ukraine. There is no compelling US national interest in a military involvement in that part of the world, and Russia is a nuclear-armed state. The steps President Biden has spoken about, including sending 8,000 US troops to countries in the vicinity of Ukraine that are allied with Washington, are (rather weak) symbolism. The threat of economic sanctions is in any case far more powerful. But Biden wouldn’t be playing such a weak hand if the US had had a unified position for the past five years and if Trump hadn’t appeared to be working for the other side.
“Me” vs “We” brigade is organized and DEADLY. Demanding the right on the streets to irresponsibly fill our hospitals and die next winter. Meanwhile, Dan Andrews with 58 % of polled support is thinking ahead to prevent a Covid-19 future from overtaking the limited resources of our universal health system. An event that the EU, UK and the USA are beginning to re-experience as a 4th wave and resurgence hit with the onset of winter.
European governments are taking a hard-line stance against anti-vaxxers as infection numbers surge to record levels in many countries and threaten to ruin Christmas. The continent has become the global epicentre of the pandemic at a time when families had been hoping to once again embrace holiday festivities, and one another. With infections spiking again despite nearly two years of restrictions, the health crisis is increasingly pitting citizen against citizen — the vaccinated against the unvaccinated. Governments desperate to shield overburdened healthcare systems are imposing rules that limit choices for the unvaccinated in the hope doing so will drive up rates of vaccination. Despite overwhelming medical evidence that vaccines protect against death or serious illness and slow the pandemic’s spread, opposition remains stubbornly strong among parts of the population. In the Netherlands, protests this weekend turned into riots and police opened fire on crowds when a demonstration turned into what Rotterdam’s mayor called an “an orgy of violence”.
Last month, a Czech police officer kneeled on the neck of Romani man Stanislav Tomáš until he stopped breathing. Fifty years since the first World Romani Congress, Europe’s Romani people urgently need a new movement against discrimination and deprivation.
At least 58 deaths were reported in Germany and eight in Belgium The scale of the disaster is not yet clear France and the Netherlands have also experienced flooding
Europe is bracing for a new spate of national lockdowns as coronavirus surges across the continent and threatens to fill hospitals with more patients than the first deadly wave of earlier this year.
Dr Fitschen said Germany would diversify its political and economic relations in Asia so that it did not fall into a dependency on China’s market. “Diversification does not mean decoupling. Diversification means China plus X,” he said. “The German government and the EU must put in place the necessary conditions for this.”
Incredibly, the European press is speculating whether the US Navy will intervene, without any warrant of international law.
Trump and his warmongers have not only failed to increase US prestige among key allies in Europe, but have actually so diminished the US superpower that now small European courts are defying it.
Behind the scenes at Westminster and the teetering fate of the British government lies an even more profound change in British politics: the very real possibility of the break-up of the United Kingdom. In this situation Australia needs to tread carefully and maintain its good relations with what has emerged as its more stable European partner, the European Union, while offering silent support for whatever governments or countries could emerge from Brexit. Is the UK headed for dissolution?
EU doesn’t think Australia 1% of the words emmissions are insignificant as the Conservatives do (ODT)
The Coalition’s internal climate war risks damaging the economy after Europe declared it would reject a $15 billion trade deal with Australia unless the Morrison government keeps its pledge to cut pollution under the Paris accord.
The EU bloc is Australia’s second largest trading partner, third largest export destination and second largest services market. The EU was also Australia’s largest source of foreign investment in 2017.
Mr Morrison – who is in Jakarta for trade talks – and Trade Minister Simon Birmingham declined to comment on the European Parliament’s position.
I’m of a generation where the idea of the UN Security Council meeting without the US is hard to imagine. The conference is eloquent about how isolated and increasingly irrelevant Trump has made America. The rest of the world now sees Washington as an annoying problem to get around.
Moreover, think of it. This meeting involves three of America’s closest military and economic allies–Britain, France and Germany– having been pushed by Trump into the same corner with Russia and China in seeking to have better relations with Iran. I guess Trump has taught *them* a lesson.
Trump is ordering the US Department of the Treasury to slap third party sanctions on non-US firms who do business with Iran. Companies like Total, S.A., the French oil giant, who do business with the US, cannot afford to buck the Treasury Department and so are pulling out of planned Iran investments.
Berlin (AFP) – A member of the German government on Tuesday accused the new US ambassador in Berlin of meddling in domestic politics and aggravating already tense ties, as left-wing parties called for the staunch ally of Donald Trump to be expelled.
Richard Grenell took up his Berlin posting on May 8 and immediately irked Germany when he tweeted the same day that German companies should stop doing business with Iran as Trump quit the nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic.
He stoked further outrage last weekend with reported comments to right-wing news website Breitbart of his ambition to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders.”
Hundreds of leaked pages from the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) show that the deal could be about to collapse, according to campaigners. The huge leak – which gives the first full insight into the negotiations – shows that the relationship between Europe and the US are weaker than had been thought and that major divisions remain on some of the agreement’s most central provisions.
Has something gone adrift within the moral compass of our ‘news’ reporting? In the past week, 64 Afghans have been killed in the largest bomb to have exploded in Kabul in 15 years. At least 340 were wounded. The Taliban set off their explosives at the very wall of the ‘elite’ security force – watch out for that word ‘elite’ – which was supposed to protect the capital. Whole families were annihilated. No autopsies for them. Local television showed an entire family – a mother and father and three children blown to pieces in a millisecond – while the city’s
Barack Obama’s intervention in the European Union referendum was more spectacular than many in the In campaign dared to hope for. They will now dare to dream that it might prove a game-changer in the tight referendum race.
Last week began well for security forces. But then came the bombings. And then the realisation intelligence had failed to contain a group more durable than anyone expected
Hoping to show Europeans they have an alternative to the prevailing system of “authoritarianism” and austerity, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced a new cross-continent movement with a “simple, common agenda:” To democratize Europe. The movement, known as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (or DiEM 25), will be launched on February 9 at Berlin’s Volksbühne theater.
Most of the European Parliament’s members have voted in favor of asking its member nations to grant protection to the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden. The man himself has called this a ‘game-changer’ and a ‘chance to move forward’. The MEPs have asked EU …
Unlike Lebanon or Turkey dealing with over two million asylum seekers, the EU is not really facing ‘a crisis’, said Anas El Gomati of the Libya-based Sadeq Institute think tank. European politicians are flaming xenophobic sentiment to get political power, he adds.
In 1957 a little blue-eyed boy was sat on the desk of the Australian High Commission in Sri Lanka and closely appraised. His parents had applied to migrate to Australia, but his aunts and uncles had already been knocked back.On paper they were European descent and English speaking, as they needed to be in order to pass the test of Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act (1901) – the White Australia policy.
Editorial: Angela Merkel has faced up to how a humanitarian emergency is threatening a continent’s defining values. The rest of Europe should pay attention, and follow suit
Europe is buckling under the weight of hundreds of thousands of African and Middle Eastern refugees trying to get into the EU. The Keleti train station in Budapest shut down Tuesday due to the number of migrants trying to get from Hungary to Germany; in late August, 71 refugees were found dead after suffocating in a refrigerated truck in Austria. Germany, meanwhile, is expecting 800,000 refugee arrivals this year.In response to the crisis, the tiny island nation of Iceland has only offered the smallest amount of aid, agreeing to take in a mere 50 Syrian refugees. That wasn’t nearly enough for popular Icelandic children’s book author Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir. She launched a Facebook campaign that asked her fellow countrymen and women to open up their homes and urge the government to do more, The Telegraph reports. In 24 hours, more than 10,000 Icelanders had offered their homes for refugees to stay in. Keep in mind that Iceland’s entire population is less than 330,000.”I think people have had enough of seeing news stories from the Mediterranean and refugee camps of dying people and they want something done now,” Björgvinsdóttir told Icelandic public television RUV in response to the overwhelming support.That seems to be true. “I’m a single mother with a 6-year-old son…We can take a child in need. I’m a teacher and would teach the child to speak, read, and write Icelandic, and adjust to Icelandic society,” one Facebook user wrote. “We have clothes, a bed, toys, and everything a child needs. I would of course pay for the airplane ticket.”The Icelandic government is now looking into how to accept more refugees. Whatever they decide, this much is for sure: The migrants they take in will have a warm welcome waiting for them. Jeva Lange
From laissez-faire economics in 18th-century India to neoliberalism in today’s Europe the subordination of human welfare to power is a brutal tradition
Starving people clamour at the gates of a workhouse during the Irish famine,’One eighth of the population was killed – one could almost say murdered – by the British refusal [to set] policies that offended the holy doctrine of laissez-faire economics.’ Photograph: Hulton
Greece may be financially bankrupt, but the troika is politically bankrupt. Those who persecute this nation wield illegitimate, undemocratic powers, powers of the kind now afflicting us all. Consider the International Monetary Fund. The distribution of power here was perfectly stitched up: IMF decisions require an 85% majority, and the US holds 17% of the votes.
The IMF is controlled by the rich, and governs the poor on their behalf. It’s now doing to Greece what it has done to one poor nation after another, from Argentina to Zambia. Its structural adjustment programmes have forced scores of elected governments to dismantle public spending, destroying health, education and all the means by which the wretched of the earth might improve their lives.
The euro will be stuck with austerity unless it learns to embrace democracy
The same programme is imposed regardless of circumstance: every country the IMF colonises must place the control of inflation ahead of other economic objectives; immediately remove barriers to trade and the flow of capital; liberalise its banking system; reduce government spending on everything bar debt repayments; and privatise assets that can be sold to foreign investors.
Using the threat of its self-fulfilling prophecy (it warns the financial markets that countries that don’t submit to its demands are doomed), it has forced governments to abandon progressive policies. Almost single-handedly, it engineered the 1997 Asian financial crisis: by forcing governments to remove capital controls, it opened currencies to attack by financial speculators. Only countries such as Malaysia and China, which refused to cave in, escaped.
Consider the European Central Bank. Like most other central banks, it enjoys “political independence”. This does not mean that it is free from politics, only that it is free from democracy. It is ruled instead by the financial sector, whose interests it is constitutionally obliged to champion through its inflation target of around 2%. Ever mindful of where power lies, it has exceeded this mandate, inflicting deflation and epic unemployment on poorer members of the eurozone.
The Maastricht treaty, establishing the European Union and the euro, was built on a lethal delusion: a belief that the ECB could provide the only common economic governance that monetary union required. It arose from an extreme version of market fundamentalism: if inflation were kept low, its authors imagined, the magic of the markets would resolve all other social and economic problems, making politics redundant. Those sober, suited, serious people, who now pronounce themselves the only adults in the room, turn out to be demented utopian fantasists, votaries of a fanatical economic cult.
Those sober, suited, serious people turn out to be demented utopian fantasists, votaries of a fanatical economic cult
All this is but a recent chapter in the long tradition of subordinating human welfare to financial power. The brutal austerity imposed on Greece is mild compared with earlier versions. Take the 19th century Irish and Indian famines, both exacerbated (in the second case caused) by the doctrine of laissez-faire, which we now know as market fundamentalism or neoliberalism.
In Ireland’s case, one eighth of the population was killed – one could almost say murdered– in the late 1840s, partly by the British refusal to distribute food, to prohibit the export of grain or provide effective poor relief. Such policies offended the holy doctrine of laissez-faire economics that nothing should stay the market’s invisible hand.
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When drought struck India in 1877 and 1878, the British imperial government insisted on exporting record amounts of grain, precipitating a famine that killed millions. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices”. The only relief permitted was forced work in labour camps, in which less food was provided than to the inmates of Buchenwald. Monthly mortality in these camps in 1877 was equivalent to an annual rate of 94%.
As Karl Polanyi argued in The Great Transformation, the gold standard – the self-regulating system at the heart of laissez-faire economics – prevented governments in the 19th and early 20th centuries from raising public spending or stimulating employment. It obliged them to keep the majority poor while the rich enjoyed a gilded age. Few means of containing public discontent were available, other than sucking wealth from the colonies and promoting aggressive nationalism. This was one of the factors that contributed to the first world war. The resumption of the gold standard by many nations after the war exacerbated the Great Depression, preventing central banks from increasing the money supply and funding deficits. You might have hoped that European governments would remember the results.
Greek debt crisis: Tsipras gets ultimatum to reach deal or face Grexit – as it happened
On Sunday, European leaders will meet for a summit that will decide whether Greece gets another bailout or leaves the eurozone
Read more
Today equivalents to the gold standard – inflexible commitments to austerity – abound. In December 2011 the European Council agreed a new fiscal compact, imposing on all members of the eurozone a rule that “government budgets shall be balanced or in surplus”. This rule, which had to be transcribed into national law, would “contain an automatic correction mechanism that shall be triggered in the event of deviation.” This helps to explain the seigneurial horror with which the troika’s unelected technocrats have greeted the resurgence of democracy in Greece. Hadn’t they ensured that choice was illegal? Such diktats mean the only possible democratic outcome in Europe is now the collapse of the euro: like it or not, all else is slow-burning tyranny.
It is hard for those of us on the left to admit, but Margaret Thatcher saved the UK from this despotism. European monetary union, she predicted, would ensure that the poorer countries must not be bailed out, “which would devastate their inefficient economies.”
But only, it seems, for her party to supplant it with a homegrown tyranny. George Osborne’s proposed legal commitment to a budgetary surplus exceeds that of the eurozone rule. Labour’s promised budget responsibility lock, though milder, had a similar intent. In all cases governments deny themselves the possibility of change. In other words, they pledge to thwart democracy. So it has been for the past two centuries, with the exception of the 30-year Keynesian respite.
The crushing of political choice is not a side-effect of this utopian belief system but a necessary component. Neoliberalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, as people will always rebel against the austerity and fiscal tyranny it prescribes. Something has to give, and it must be the people. This is the true road to serfdom: disinventing democracy on behalf of the elite.
Newsy |. (Video News Clip) | / The Tree | – – “Energy companies representing almost the entire European Union …
“America cannot care more for your children’s future security than you do.”
Unlike Lebanon or Turkey dealing with over two million asylum seekers, the EU is not really facing ‘a crisis’, said Anas El Gomati of the Libya-based Sadeq Institute think tank. European politicians are flaming xenophobic sentiment to get political power, he adds.
Editorial: Angela Merkel has faced up to how a humanitarian emergency is threatening a continent’s defining values. The rest of Europe should pay attention, and follow suit
Europe is buckling under the weight of hundreds of thousands of African and Middle Eastern refugees trying to get into the EU. The Keleti train station in Budapest shut down Tuesday due to the number of migrants trying to get from Hungary to Germany; in late August, 71 refugees were found dead after suffocating in a refrigerated truck in Austria. Germany, meanwhile, is expecting 800,000 refugee arrivals this year.In response to the crisis, the tiny island nation of Iceland has only offered the smallest amount of aid, agreeing to take in a mere 50 Syrian refugees. That wasn’t nearly enough for popular Icelandic children’s book author Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir. She launched a Facebook campaign that asked her fellow countrymen and women to open up their homes and urge the government to do more, The Telegraph reports. In 24 hours, more than 10,000 Icelanders had offered their homes for refugees to stay in. Keep in mind that Iceland’s entire population is less than 330,000.”I think people have had enough of seeing news stories from the Mediterranean and refugee camps of dying people and they want something done now,” Björgvinsdóttir told Icelandic public television RUV in response to the overwhelming support.That seems to be true. “I’m a single mother with a 6-year-old son…We can take a child in need. I’m a teacher and would teach the child to speak, read, and write Icelandic, and adjust to Icelandic society,” one Facebook user wrote. “We have clothes, a bed, toys, and everything a child needs. I would of course pay for the airplane ticket.”The Icelandic government is now looking into how to accept more refugees. Whatever they decide, this much is for sure: The migrants they take in will have a warm welcome waiting for them. Jeva Lange
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