Flickr photos from march 10.

The European Parliament has come under fire for spending millions of pounds of taxpayers' money on a "propaganda" television service, ski trips and language lessons for staff.

The UK taxpayer could still end up forking out for the bailout of debt-stricken Greece despite Treasury assurances, politicians warned last night.

The fears come as eurozone finance ministers are today expected to discuss a package of aid worth tens of billions of euros for the ailing country.

Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, last night said it would be 'unacceptable' for UK taxpayers to be asked to pay any money to help Athens.

Brussels bureaucrats want to spread GM crops throughout Europe, against the will of most of its people, says Geoffrey Lean.

Not just a spud, this is likely to prove a very hot political potato indeed. It is living, knobbly proof of the determination of Brussels bureaucrats to spread GM crops throughout Europe, against the will of most of its people.

It looks like these FALSE RUMORS of a bailout are being driven by speculators - and particularly Goldman Sachs - in an effort to PROP UP THE EURO against the US dollar. Greece has said they don’t want or need a bailout. Germany has said that Greece needs to take care of its own problems and Germany won’t jump in and give them any money. Nothing has changed in the positions of Greece or Germany throughout this whole matter.

Alan Hart views the myth and reality of anti-Semitism and argues that the myth, created and propagated by Israel and Zionism, is the single biggest potential threat to Jews the world over.

We as a society need to start producing again. We need to start competing with others who wish to produce. This is how wealth is created. The more wealth we create, the more prosperous we all become. For a few decades now, we have tried to maintain our lifestyles with a service economy. It didn´t work. Now the economy is collapsing worldwide. Now the banks are hoarding that which they created and are trying to claim the real wealth that should be owned by private sovereigns. We need to ask ourselves, can we be proactive and stop this before we wake up and find ourselves in the same boat as Iceland? If not, will we simply say no and refuse to pay as they did, or will we allow our society to break down and resort to violence as the Greeks?

Street clashes broke out between rioting youths and police in central Athens today as tens of thousands demonstrated during a nationwide strike against the cash-strapped government.

“We have hundreds of nuclear warheads and missiles that can reach different targets in the heart of the European continent, including beyond the borders of Rome, the Italian capital,” Karfeld said, adding that most of the European capitals would become preferred targets for the Israeli air force.

The Israeli historian reiterated Israel’s ability to destroy the whole world whenever it felt its existence would be doomed to extinction.

I n 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were committed to asylums and hundreds afflicted.

Until the last minute the government had tried to discourage the voters from voting. The Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance both said they would not participate in the referendum. They saw it as a “waste of money” and a “farce”.
This disregard for the very people who had put them into office angered just about everybody who is the slightest bit interested in politics here.

Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, NATO is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics have become fractious to the point of dysfunction. Perhaps like any sexagenarian in this age of health-care crises and economic malaise, the transatlantic alliance is simply anxious about its future.

Frankly, it should be.

Jonathan Cook reports that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is set to accept Israel as a member – thus conferring legitimacy on its illegal occupation of Arab lands – despite Israel’s failure to meet a number of OECD criteria, including on corruption, copyright and wealth disparity.

Who cleans up the mess when ignorant, greedy bankers rack up massive debt then go broke? The people of Iceland made a strong statement Saturday. The sins of big bankers and government regulators shouldn't fall on the citizens. By a 93% to 2% margin, they voted down a proposal requiring them to cover bad debt incurred by one of the nation's oldest and largest banks. Covering the debt would have cost Iceland's 317,000 citizens around $17,000 each.

Iceland's national referendum was the first opportunity for the people of any nation to vote directly on who pays when the financial elite fail.

Gordon Long, founder of a private venture-capital fund, said in an investor note that there is more than $600 trillion in notational value in the global derivative market, with $437 trillion of it tied to interest rate swaps.

EUROPE’S chief bureaucrat last night provoked fury after threatening to use the “full force” of the Lisbon Treaty to impose economic control over every EU nation.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso claimed that financial stability was so critical that sweeping new powers were needed for Eurocrats in Brussels to meddle in the economies of all EU members.

Things are worsening for Israel from moral and legal perspectives. In fact, one year after the Goldstone Report on its ‘war crimes’ during its war on Gaza and amidst growing suspicions of its direct responsibility in the assassination of a Palestinian leader in Dubai, an international court has now concluded that Israel is violating international law with Europe’s complicity.

The European Commission is planning an EU-wide minimum tax on carbon as part of the EU's green energy agenda - but the UK opposes such a move.

The minimum tax would apply to fuel, natural gas and coal.

Proposals expected to be announced next month would give the EU its first funding which would not come from national governments.

Algirdas Semeta, the new European commissioner for taxation, is planning a "minimum rate of tax on carbon" across the whole EU as a "priority".

"In my estimation it is possible to start discussions," he told European Voice, a weekly Brussels newspaper. "There is currently the right momentum."

A similar proposal was considered so controversial that it was shelved without discussion five years ago.

Nation-states have, over the years, been a pretty sturdy defence against totalitarian ideologies, whether fascism, Soviet Communism or jihadi fundamentalism. Rooted as it is in organic loyalties, the nation is a naturally democratic unit. This is not to say that all nation-states are liberal democracies; simply that ideologies which claim to be bigger than national allegiances can be dangerous. They can even lead, as Mr Verhofstadt really ought to know, to mass murder.

“He [Vanunu] has written letters to us this year and last year also, where he stated explicitly that he did not want to be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. The reason he gave was that Simon Peres had received the Nobel Peace Prize, and Peres he alleged was the father of the Israeli atomic bomb and he did not want to be associated with Peres in any way.” – Geir Lundestad, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, 24 February 2010.

For the first time in the history of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a preemptive request to withdraw a nomination—by the nominee—was made.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is defending his decision to change the law allowing private people to demand arrest warrants against foreign leaders and officers visiting Britain.

The government’s decision to change the law was made following an arrest warrant issued against Israeli Opposition Chairwoman Tzipi Livni, who was scheduled to visit London last year.

HANOVER, Germany — It sounds like something from a sci-fi film, but one in four Germans would be happy to have a microchip implanted in their body if they derived concrete benefits from it, a poll Monday showed.

Christopher King argues that “a situation exists in which it may be in the interests of the United States to seek a ‘cold war’ situation with Russia and China as a pretext for defaulting on its external debt, attacking Iran, taking direct control of all Middle Eastern oilfields and effective control of Europe”.

Greece's debt crisis has plunged the euro into a ‘ difficult situation’, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted last night, prompting fresh fears about the collapse of the single currency.

In the gravest sign yet of the international threat posed by Greece’s crippled economy, Mrs Merkel warned for the first time that the eurozone faces a ‘ dangerous’ period.

Three Google executives were convicted of privacy violations today in allowing a video of a boy with autism being abused to be posted online.

Italian Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the three to a six-month suspended sentence in a case that has set a new precedent for internet freedom.

Google called the decision 'astonishing' and said it would appeal.

'The judge has decided I'm primarily responsible for the actions of some teenagers who uploaded a reprehensible video to Google video,' Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, who was convicted in absentia, said in a statement.

The International Monetary Fund operates primarily as a banker bailout machine. They cajole and tempt and confuse and threaten the leaders of governments worldwide to pay off the failed bets of the big bankers using the taxpayer funds of their countries. This has been going on a long time, at least since the early 1980s.

Master global puppeteer, billionaire oligarch George Soros, wants to be able to manipulate the entire EU in one fell swoop.

European credit markets are flashing the most serious warnings signs in a year as the yields on risker bonds rise sharply and a string of companies cancel share flotations, raising fears that the recovery may falter in coming months.

Jitters over Chinese credit tightening and default risks in Greece and Dubai are causing bond vigilantes to batten down the hatches across the world, bringing the most dramatic credit rally for a century to a shuddering halt.

It is bad enough that the British, Dutch and other Europeans are suffering heavy casualties in following the aggressive adventures of the failed state that is the United States. The matter is much more serious and closer to home. I have said it before and will say it again: Europe and the UK must rid itself of American bases and those who support them, and form its own defence force independent of the United States. That is where economic and defence security lie.

Christopher King expresses the hope that the fall of the Dutch government over participation in the US-led aggression in Afghanistan could be the start of a trend that will see Europe regain its independence from the USA.

Dutch troops will almost certainly be withdrawn from Afghanistan this year following the collapse of the coalition government in The Hague.

The government fell because of a dispute between its main partners over how long its soldiers should stay in the war.

from Risk Magazine

In November 2001, the Greek finance ministry’s public debt division made a public statement about its debt management strategy. It acknowledged that its debt was a ‘critical macroeconomic parameter’, and pledged to reduce debt servicing costs by means that included ‘the extensive use of derivatives’. Apparently, this was not enough for Brussels. In February 2002, the European Commission pointed out future deficit forecasts by Greece relied ‘primarily’ on achieving reductions in interest costs. It called for Greece to reduce its ‘very high’ debt ratio, and to provide ‘more detailed information on financial operations’.

Although Greece’s public debt division points out that it uses 18 derivatives counterparties, there is no doubt that the division, which is headed by Christopher Sardelis, has a particularly close relationship with Goldman Sachs. Indeed, the account has been handled personally at Goldman Sachs by Antigone Loudiadis, the London-based European head of sales for the firm’s fixed-income, currencies and commodities unit. Highly respected by other dealers, Loudiadis has enjoyed a successful career at Goldman, joining the firm’s partnership committee and attaining her present position in 2000. According to sources, by early 2002, Loudiadis and her team put together a deal aimed at alleviating Greece’s problem of debt ratios and high interest costs.

Gilad Atzmon argues that, given the close relationship between the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Mossad intelligence agency, Premier Binyamin Netanyahu must be held to account personally for the murder of a Hamas official in Dubai by Israeli Mossad agents travelling on cloned European passports.

Mr Papandreou blamed the European Commission for failing to crack down on the previous conservative government’s “criminal record” in falsifying statistics. “This has undermined the responsibility of the European institutions with international markets,” he said.

As USSR had to falsify the reality to be more like they wanted it to be.

The European single currency is facing an 'inevitable break-up' a leading French bank claimed yesterday.

Strategists at Paris-based Société Générale said that any bailout of the stricken Greek economy would only provide 'sticking plasters' to cover the deep- seated flaws in the eurozone bloc.

A U.S. push to legally access data generated by Europe's electronic banking activity has been rebuffed by EU lawmakers in a vote of parliament, according to published reports.

Though U.S. snoops have been allowed to access data through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) since the beginning of February on the basis of a provisional security agreement, "Liberal, Socialist and Green euro-MPs" were successful in vetoing the deal, Euronews reported.

This government will ban transactions in cash over 1500 euros, in order to make all of us have credit cards. The obvious first step is to ban all cash transactions, then merge this new ID card with the credit system, then, well.... insert this merged ID card into our bodies...

Public sector workers in Greece have launched a national strike, with thousands rallying against the government's budget-cutting measures.

Winter weather in Europe: deep snow in Romania, ice in Germany, avalanche in Switzerland
Snow-covered cars are seen on a street in Bucharest. Heavy snow caused traffic chaos in Bulgaria and Romania, closing major highway links, delaying flights and trains and cutting off electricity

Stock markets tumbled worldwide yesterday amid fears that crippling debt levels in southern Europe could destabilise the euro and derail economic recovery.

Portugal and Spain became the latest Eurozone countries to cause a panic among investors, as economists cast doubt on their ability to control their national debt.

With Greece already expected to need a bail-out of up to £16billion from the European Central Bank, there are real concerns that the Eurozone may become unviable in its present form.

The EU may be planning an emergency rescue plan for Greece after a leading German politician warned the 'dangerous weakness' of some EU states could threaten the entire euro zone.

The NRK report concluded that “not a single one of the offenders had a Western background. Four people have been arrested. In all other cases, the victims reported that the offenders either looked like non-Western immigrants, or they spoke a non-Western language. Not a single case has been connected to a Western man.”

According to official figures released in 2008, Third World immigration accounted for 25 percent of Oslo’s population. Data from the city and state statistics bureau shows that of Oslo’s 560,484 residents, 137,878 were immigrants.

The largest single immigrant group continues to be from Pakistan. Next in line is Somalia. Other countries with relatively large immigrant groups in Oslo include Sri Lanka, Iraq, Turkey, Vietnam and Iran.

New rules to be introduced by government decree will require people who upload videos onto the Internet to obtain authorization from the Communications Ministry similar to that required by television broadcasters, drastically reducing freedom to communicate over the Web, opposition lawmakers have warned.

Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the US have all indicated in the past two weeks that they will be renegotiating their deals.

Demand for vaccines to combat H1N1 influenza has fizzled out because the pandemic has proven to be less aggressive than was first feared. Regulators who initially indicated that two vaccinations would be needed by each swine flu patient now say that one dose is sufficient. Analysts predict that European governments could return or cancel up to 50 per cent of what they ordered, which could reduce GSK's income from Pandemrix by £300m.