Cameron Backs EU Treaty Deal in Move That Could Block Another Referendum

The Coalition Government will support a new European treaty to strengthen central control of EU economies in Brussels, David Cameron has announced.

In a statement to MPs, the Prime Minister said Britain will not stand in the way of eurozone governments if they want to pass control over their budgets to Brussels bureaucrats.

But Mr Cameron insisted he will not support moves to pass controls from Westminster to the European Union.

That could allow the Government to push through yet another EU treaty without the need to offer a referendum to the British public - a move likely to spark a row with grassroots Tories.

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EU Considering Aid to Israeli Military

A leading Israeli supplier of warplanes used to kill and maim civilians in Gaza is in the running for two new scientific research grants from the European Union.

Israel's attacks on Gaza in late 2008 and 2009 provided its air force with an opportunity to experiment with state-of-the-art pilotless drones such as the Heron. Although human rights groups have calculated that the Heron and other drones killed at least 87 civilians during that three-week war, EU officials have tentatively approved the release of fresh finance to the Heron's manufacturer, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).

Two projects involving IAI have recently passed the evaluation stages of a call for proposals under the EU's multi-annual programme for research, which has been allocated 53 billion euros (65.4 billion dollars) for the 2007-13 period.'

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Bank Run in Spain and Its Destabilizing Ramifications for the Entire EU

'This is nothing but a sign of a run on Spanish banks. They can't get funding in the markets and there is a steady withdrawal of funds from the banks. For all practical purposes, the ECB is supporting the Spanish banking system with life support measures. This means that the ECB will have to drain funds from elsewhere in the system to sterilize this rescue operation. Without sterilization the effort becomes very inflationary, with sterilization the effort distorts the entire EU economy. It's all destabilizing.'

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Every Google Search to be Logged and Saved for Two Years Under New Euro MP Plan

Every Google web search could be stored for up to two years under a controversial new EU plan that has the backing of more than 300 Euro-MEPs.

'Written Declaration 29' is intended to be used as an early warning system to stop paedophiles by logging what they look for using search engines.

But civil liberty groups have hit out at the proposal which they say is a 'completely unjustifiable' intrusion into citizens' privacy.

And they claim that there is no evidence that it would even be effective in trapping paedophiles who would never use search engines like Google to look for child pornography.'

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Euro 'Will be Dead in Five Years'

The single currency is in its death throes and may not survive in its current membership for a week, let alone the next five years, according to a selection of responses to the survey – the first major wide-ranging litmus test of economic opinion in the City since the election. The findings underline suspicions that the new Chancellor, George Osborne, will have to firefight a full-blown crisis in Britain's biggest trading partner in his first years in office.'

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Greece Urged to Give up Euro

The Greek government has been advised by British economists to leave the euro and default on its €300 billion (£255 billion) debt to save its economy.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), a London-based consultancy, has warned Greek ministers they will be unable to escape their debt trap without devaluing their own currency to boost exports. The only way this can happen is if Greece returns to its own currency.

Greek politicians have played down the prospect of abandoning the euro, which could lead to the break-up of the single currency.'

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Paper Reveals EU Plan to Boost GM Crop Cultivation

Europe faces a major overhaul in the way it deals with genetically modified (GM) crops, after the European Commission sparked controversy with new plans to circumvent its cumbersome legislative review process.

The EU executive wants to let national governments decide whether or not to grow genetically modified crops without a long drawn-out review of the bloc's current GM legislation, an initial impact assessment seen by Reuters showed.

Details of the plan, which would open the door to widespread GM cultivation in Europe, provoked a furious reaction from environmentalists already angry at the EU executive's decision to approve the commercial growing of a GM potato in March.'

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The Euro Crisis is a Judgment on the Great Lie of 'Europe'

What we are witnessing here is a judgment on the entire deceitful and self-deceiving way in which the "European project" has been assembled over the past 53 years. One of the most important things to understand about that project is that it has only ever had one real agenda. Everything it has done has been directed to one ultimate goal, full political and economic integration. The headline labels put on the various stages of that process may have changed over the years, such as building first a "common market", then a "single market", finally a "constitution". But by far the most important project of all was locking the member states into a single currency.

This was always above all a political not an economic project, to be driven through at any cost, which was why all those "Maastricht criteria" laid down to bring it about were repeatedly breached. But as expert voices were warning as long ago as the 1970s, when it was first put on the agenda, there was no way economic and monetary union could work unless it was run by a single all-powerful economic government, with the power to raise taxes.

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Don't Expect Britain to Back a New EU Treaty, Cameron tells Merkel

David Cameron flatly ruled out the idea of Britain agreeing to any changes to the European Union's Lisbon Treaty that might involve ceding powers from Westminster to Brussels yesterday, during his first visit to Germany as Prime Minister.

His two hours of talks in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel followed a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday, and Mr Cameron was able afterwards to live up to his reputation in Germany as a staunch Eurosceptic by delivering a robust defence of Conservative Party policy on Europe.'

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The Greek People are the Victims of a Carefully Engineered Financial Extortion Racket

What is happening in Greece concerns all of us. The people are paying for a crisis and a debt that are not their own. Today it is the Greeks, tomorrow it will be others, for the same causes will produce the same effects if we allow it.

First and above all, we express our full and unconditional solidarity with the people who are suffering from an austerity plan without precedent combined with contempt and an arrogance bordering on racism. The strikes and demonstrations are legitimate, and we support them. This is not the crisis of the Greek people, it is the crisis of the world capitalist system. What the Greek people are experiencing is revealing of today’s capitalism. The plan dictated by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) rides roughshod over the most elementary rules of democracy.

If this plan is implemented, it will result in a collapse of the economy and of peoples’ incomes without precedent in Europe since the 1930s. Equally glaring is the collusion of markets, central banks and governments to make the people pay the bill for the arbitrary caprice of the system. [French President] Nicolas Sarkozy still dares to talk of the need to regulate the market, although all the measures he implements are more liberal than ever. The movement is accompanied by a deadening consensus of the Right and the Left. The plan is designed by European governments of the Right and Left – and by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the IMF, an institution that has ravaged the Third World for decades and is now attacking Europe. A plan that is implemented by a Socialist government, [Greek Prime Minister] George Papandreou's, the French side of which is adopted by the UMP [Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, a centre-right party] and the SP [Socialist Party of France] members of parliament combined.

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Germans Turn Against the EU as Eurozone Meltdown Heaps Misery on Angela Merkel

Unlike the lily-livered British red-tops, the main German tabloid, Bild Zeitung, puts nipples on the front page. Day after day for the past week, it has been metaphorically stripping naked the same victim, then pouring cold baked beans over her head. Once-divorced mother-of-none Angela Merkel, 55, from Berlin, a chancellor of Germany, has had probably the worst seven days of her life.

To imagine the full scale of Mrs Merkel's disaster, think of it as a bit like that moment in 2008 when Britain suddenly had to find £46 billion of public money to bail out the banks, overnight storing up years of spending cuts, tax rises and general misery for everyone else. Then multiply the amount of money potentially required, and the amount of pain which could be inflicted, by three.

in the fact that the people the German government has had to rescue aren't even Germans, but Greeks. Add that the deal was done only after the repeated prodding by Mrs Merkel's great European rival, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who reportedly threatened to pull out of the euro. Then there was the problem that as all this was unfolding, Mrs Merkel had to face a vital election.

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European Council On Foreign Relations: EU Needs To Use Crisis For Greater Power

Several more autocratic international voices have added their weight behind proposals to vastly empower the EU with greater authority to govern over nation states in Europe, in the wake of the sovereign debt crisis. Meanwhile, one leading commentator has described the move as “fiscal fascism”.

Proposals tabled yesterday by the European Commission, the legislative arm of the EU, would greatly diminish the ability of nation states to set their own fiscal policies, in favour of a move toward a centralized european treasury.

“There is still a long way to go. We have opened the gate. Now we have yet to go through it,” said Ulrike Guerot, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.

“The crisis has shown us we need to animate moves toward closer political union as well as monetary union and we need a quantitative jump.” Guerot added in comments to Reuters.

“The EU has used crises in the past to make that kind of jump and this is what is needed now.” the German researcher concluded.

“This could be the fuel injection needed to put Europe on course toward closer political and economic union, the goal that drove its founding fathers and leaders a generation ago such as Germany’s Helmut Kohl, France’s Francois Mitterrand and former European Commission President Jacques Delors.” notes Reuters writer Timothy Heritage.

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EU Wants Member Countries to Co-ordinate Budgets

The European Commission wants EU countries to co-ordinate plans for national budgets in a move to strengthen financial co-operation.

It would involve submitting budgets to the EU for a "peer review", possibly before they go to national parliaments.'

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The Greek Spirit of Resistance Turns Its Guns on the IMF

But for those on the left, leading the protests with flags emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, the intervention of the IMF has been the tipping point. The majority of Greeks not only see it as the harbinger of harsh economic reforms but the symbol of foreign occupation. For the abundance of conspiracy theorists on both the left and right, its involvement is part of a grander, but seemingly no less implausible, plan to subjugate Greece after draining the country of its resources.

"This has gone beyond economic matters to a battle for national independence," says Manolis Glezos, the leftist who shot to fame snatching the swastika from the Acropolis shortly after Hitler's forces streamed into Athens in 1941.

"Papandreou himself has admitted we had no say in the economic measures thrust upon us. They were decided by the EU and IMF. We are now under foreign supervision and that raises questions about our economic, military and political independence".'

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British Taxpayers Ordered to Bail Out Euro

All 27 EU finance ministers have been summoned to Brussels on Sunday to sign up to a “European stabilisation mechanism. Britain will be unable to veto this as it will be put through under the “qualified majority voting” system.

The deal, effectively to shore up the euro, was denounced as a “stitch-up” last night after it emerged Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, had devised it behind closed doors and were attempting to push it through at a time when there is no clear government in Britain.'

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EU to Set Up Fund to Prevent Spread of Greek Crisis

European leaders agreed to set up an emergency fund to halt the spread of Greece’s fiscal woes, seeking to prevent a sovereign debt crisis from shattering confidence in the 11-year-old euro.

Jolted into action by the sliding currency and soaring bond yields in Portugal and Spain, leaders of the 16 euro countries said the workings of the financial backstop will be hammered out before Asian markets open late tomorrow European time.

“We will defend the euro, whatever it takes,” European Commission President Jose Barroso told reporters early today after the leaders met in Brussels.'

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EU Is Collapsing Like Tower Of Babel

Monument Securities Chief Economist Stephen Lewis says the chaos in Greece could lead to collapse of the European Union, bringing down with it the dangerous assumption that structures of global governance provide stability in times of financial peril, but the World Bank and IMF vultures will be waiting as ever to feed on the remains of a dying country.'

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EU Wants United Airspace After Ash Cloud

European authorities have seized on this week’s airline crisis to fast-track their control of airspace, but they appear to have less interest in helping airlines pay the bills left by the volcanic ash cloud.

European transport commissioner Siim Kallas will next week present recommendations learned from a week of aviation chaos, which the airline industry says cost it about $1.7 billion in lost revenue, though it also saved some $660 million in costs such as fuel.

Unifying Europe’s airspace is likely to top the list of proposals ahead of a meeting of EU transport ministers on May 4.

“We need a fast coordinated European response to such crises,” said Kallas. “Instead we have a fragmented patchwork of 27 national airspaces. Without a central regulator, Europe was operating with one hand behind its back".'

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EU Climate Chief Calls for Energy Tax

The European Union's top climate official called for an energy tax to boost the bloc's climate protection efforts.

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard told Monday's Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung that "energy taxes are among the instruments we should use for climate protection in the EU, because that's how energy consumption is reduced."

Denmark's Hedegaard, who led the U.N. climate negotiations in Copenhagen last year, said instead of imposing high work-related taxes, which threaten European companies competing with foreign firms "it would be much smarter to install a system that includes a top tax rate for areas threatening the common good, such as a excessive energy consumption".'

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The Greek Financial Crisis and the European Timetable

Now that the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 is behind us, after it was forced through Ireland, after the Irish were told to keep voting on this until they said "yes"; now the European Union moves on to the next item on its timetable. The next step is to create a centralized Ministry in Brussels for Finance and Taxation, thereby further eroding the diminishing national sovereignty of the now twenty-seven member states; and what better way to do this than to organize a specific potshot against the little country of Greece?

After the Berlin Wall fell, the former Warsaw Pact countries have now been Westernized, and so Greece has fallen back to its traditional position in, one could say, the Cinderella portion of Europe, southeast Europe, the Balkans. So, as Brussels may then have decided, here is our current whipping boy, our current scapegoat, Greece.'

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