European Union Suspends ACTA Ratification

RussiaToday
February 22, 2012

The EU has suspended the ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and referred the text to the European Court of Justice to investigate possible rights breaches.

The European Commission decided on Wednesday to ask the EU’s top court “to clarify that the ACTA agreement and its implementation must be fully compatible with freedom of expression and freedom of the internet.”

The ACTA debate “must be based upon facts and not upon the misinformation or rumor that has dominated social media sites and blogs,” says EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Guch. The EU will not ratify the international treaty until the court delivers its ruling, he added.

De Guch insists the treaty will change nothing in the bloc, but help protect the creative economy.

European countries were quick to sign US- and Japan-lobbied ACTA agreement in Tokyo just a month ago. Ratification of the controversial agreement, however, is not going so smoothly.

ACTA faced fierce opposition by the Europeans, who saw it as an anti-democratic move. People took their anger to the streets in a synchronized protest, saying it violates their rights. About 200 cities participated in an anti-ACTA march on February 11.

The initial goal authorities pursued was to protect intellectual property and copyright, but human rights activists fought to prove its bias in favor of those in power. They argue it violates freedom of expression on the internet and allows unprecedented control of people’s personal information and privacy.

Some critics have been saying ACTA is a somewhat-disguised SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).

ACTA has so far been signed by the EU as a bloc, 22 EU members as individual states, and also by the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea and some other countries. The total number of signatories to the treaty is 31.

The European Parliament is set to vote on ACTA in June. In parallel, the accord has to be ratified by all the 27 EU member states. Germany, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Estonia and Slovakia have not put individual signatures under the treaty as such and, in the wake of the mass anti-ACTA protests in Europe, are not eager to proceed with it. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Latvia suspended the ratification process, while Poland on the second thought refused to ratify the accord all together.

Wednesday’s decision means ACTA’s ratification in the EU could be delayed for months.

Greece’s Corporate Owners Asphyxiating the People

by Nathalie Savaricas
The Independent
February 8, 2012

That’s enough, we can’t take it anymore.” That was the popular chant coming from protesters in Athens yesterday during the latest 24-hour general strike against the country’s austerity measures. Teachers and doctors joined bank employees to demonstrate against a new round of expected cuts as the cash-strapped country continued to negotiate new reductions in spending to help keep the economy afloat.

Several thousand demonstrators from the public and private-sector unions braved the heavy rainfall, gathering outside Parliament to voice their opposition at the latest proposed measures to secure a €130bn (£108bn) bailout package. Minor clashes broke out when protesters tried to remove a cordon near the parliament building. Police sprayed tear gas and at times clashed with strikers, whose anger intensified overnight when a further 15,000 job cuts were announced.

Since the onset of the crisis, the austerity drive has sent unemployment to a record high of 18.2 per cent and the country’s finances into a spiral of recession. Despite the deepening pain, crowds at protests have increasingly dwindled.

“People are scared and haven’t really realised what’s happening yet,” George Pantsios, an electrician for the country’s public power corporation, said. He has only been receiving half of his €850 monthly wage since August. “But once we all lose our jobs and can’t feed our kids, that’s when it’ll go boom and we’ll turn into Tahrir Square.”

Prime Minister Lucas Papademos was scheduled to wrap up a new reforms package with party leaders that back his unity government last night, which will pave the way for more bailout money.

The conservative daily Kathimerini newspaper’s headline said: “Merkel and Sarkozy’s asphyxiating pressure.” It was a reference to lenders’ demands to axe another 15,000 civil servants by the end of the year and cut the minimum wage by 20 per cent.

The European Union and the International Monetary Fund said the measures are needed to restore Greece’s competitiveness and reduce its mounting €300bn debt.

Many in the crowds yesterday said the talks were being used as an excuse to squeeze extra revenue from the sick man of Europe and they fear additional cuts will only stifle any hopes of growth. “We’re already bankrupt. This new agreement will simply be our tombstone and the meeting will be the final curtain of this play,” said Corinna Panopoulos, a state psychologist who demonstrated outside the parliament building.

Ms Panopoulos, who is single and has two children, said she had seen her salary drop by a third and has moved in with her mother to make ends meet. Her sister, Christina, who works as a supply teacher, will lose her state job in June.

Another woman had been forced to close her business: “I should leave and go abroad for work, but I want to stay and fight because my country needs me now.”

The patience of Greece’s creditors is wearing thin as the financial woes threaten to spill into other countries.

Water is not Healthy say European Union Technocrats

This claim is leading the way towards incrementally tyrannical policies that will state people do not have the right enjoy drinkable water, because the liquid, they say, is not healthy and therefore is not a basic necessity.

by Giles Sheldrick
Express.co.uk
November 18, 2011

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has signed the order.

In a scarcely believable ­ruling, a panel of experts threw out a claim that regular water consumption is the best way to rehydrate the body.

The bizarre diktat from Brussels has far-reaching implications for member states, including Britain, as no water sold in the EU can now claim to protect against dehydration.

Any producer breaching the order, signed by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, faces being jailed for up to two years. It took the 21 scientists on the panel three years of analysis into the link between water and dehydration to come to their extraordinary conclusion.

Last night the decision of the European Food Safety Authority’s panel on Dietetic Products, Nutrition and Allergies was labelled “beyond parody”. Ukip’s deputy leader Paul Nuttall, who sits on the European Parliament’s Public Health Committee, said: “I had to read this four or five times before I believed it.

“It is a perfect example of what the EU does best and makes the bendy banana law look positively sane.”

Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are, highly paid, highly pensioned officials trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.

“If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.”

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “Of course water hydrates. While we support the EU in preventing false claims about commercial products, we need to exercise common sense as far as possible.”

German professors Dr Moritz Hagenmeyer and Dr Andreas Hahn, of the Institute for Food Science and Human Nutrition at Hanover Leibniz University, applied for approval for the seemingly uncontentious claim that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration”. However, bureaucrats refused to back them.

After a meeting in Italy a delegation of scientists concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration rather than a risk factor that drinking water could control. Now their verdict has been turned into a regulation that will become UK law by December 6 and is bound to send shockwaves through the soft drinks industry.

Last night Professor Hahn said he was considering appealing against the ruling in the European courts.

The EU has a long history of passing bizarre regulations, the most infamous being 1995 rules setting out dimensions for fruit and vegetables which led to excessively curved bananas and ugly carrots being banned. And last year attempts to regulate the use of root vegetables in Cornish pasties sparked chaos.

EU spokesman David D’Arcy said last night: “Of course drinking water is essential for health and the commission is not stopping anyone from saying so.

“This is a specific case with specific characteristics. Either way the final decision is for member states.”

The EU’s architects never meant it to be a democracy

The rise of a “technocracy” was always part of the plan for Europe.

by Christopher Booker
UK Telegraph
November 14, 2011

So, as headlines scream that vain bids to save the euro threaten us with “Armageddon”, the EU’s ruling elite has toppled two more elected prime ministers, to replace them with technocratic officials who can be trusted to do Brussels’s bidding.

The new Greek prime minister, Lucas Papademos, was the man who, as head of Greece’s central bank, fiddled the figures to enable Greece to get into the euro (against the rules) in the first place – before being rewarded with a senior post in the European Central Bank. He is no more democratically elected than Mario Monti, who will most likely be Italy’s new prime minister and had hurriedly to be made a “senator for life” to qualify him for the job. Monti’s main qualification is that, as a former senior EU Commissioner, he has long been a member of the Brussels elite himself.

One of the few pleasures of watching this self-inflicted shambles unfolding day by day has been to see the panjandrums of the Today programme, James Naughtie and John Humphrys, at last beginning to ask whether the EU is a democratic institution. Had they studied the history of the object of their admiration, they might long ago have realised that the “European project” was never intended to be a democratic institution.

The idea first conceived back in the 1920s by two senior officials of the League of Nations – Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter, a British civil servant – was a United States of Europe, ruled by a government of unelected technocrats like themselves. Two things were anathema to them: nation states with the power of veto (which they had seen destroy the League of Nations) and any need to consult the wishes of the people in elections.

As Richard North and I showed in our book The Great Deception, this was the idea that Monnet put at the heart of the “project” from 1950 onwards, modelling his “government of Europe” on precisely the same four institutions that made up the League of Nations – a commission, a council of ministers, a parliament and a court. Thus, step by step over decades, Monnet’s technocratic dream has come to pass.

Read Full Article…

Brazil faces forecasts of slow growth

UPI
November 1, 2011

Brazilian government economic planners have been served the first warning this year that the Latin American country’s commodities-fueled economy may be slowing.

Data released by the state development bank BNDES indicated the sluggish growth wasn’t only a reality but one that had gained momentum in recent months.

Reports of the continent’s largest economy slowing contrast with projections that continue to indicate healthy activity in most sectors of Brazilian economy. The slowdown prognosis is based on lower lending figures, which indicate momentum in economic activity, the data showed.

The bank said its loan disbursements in 2011 will miss their initial target for the year, reflecting a shortfall of $2.95 billion-$4.14 billion. The estimated total loan disbursements for the year are likely to be no more than $83 billion against estimates of up to $87 billion.

The drop is partly the result of corporate borrowers changing their minds about making new credit requests but it represents the first annual decline in the figure since 2008, when Brazil was battling the global economic downturn.

The financing slump comes amid forecasts that Brazil’s economic growth this year may be less than half that in 2010. Last year’s economic growth, recorded at 7.5 percent, was the fastest in 24 years of economic activity in Brazil and attracted investors from all over the world.

At least part of the drop in borrowing from BNDES stems from conservatism among Brazilian corporate entities that have been buffeted by investor speculation and worries over the possible ramifications of the eurozone crisis.

Talks on building new business bridges with the European Union have been stalled for more than a year and discussions on reaching a free trade deal with Europe within the framework of Latin America’s Mercosur trade bloc have been inconclusive.

Officials say the eurozone crisis may encourage European negotiators to drop their objections to Mercosur, which is seen by the EU agriculture sector as a potential threat. EU analysts have said a deal with Mercosur will help EU to forge new trade links and find new sources of revenue at a time of adversity.

Several Mercosur member countries are doing well and Brazil in particular has a vast surplus that promises EU exporters a potential bonanza if a trade deal is realized.

Mercosur member countries are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay as full members, Venezuela as a full member awaiting confirmation and Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru as associates.

Analysts said the news of a potential economic slowdown in Brazil will likely cause a ripple effect in the rest of the Mercosur region, which has a gross domestic product of $2.895 trillion.

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