As the war of words over expulsions of Roma from France escalates, the leader of France’s Socialist Party (PS) has been accused of hypocrisy for herself demanding the dismantling of a gypsy camp at Lille where she is mayor.

Martine Aubry has been vocal in her opposition to French government policy, announced at the end of July, of dismantling illegal traveller camps and “repatriating” their non-French inhabitants, mainly to Romania and Bulgaria. Both countries are members of the European Union.

Last week, in a speech concluding the PS summer conference, Aubry accused French President Nicolas Sarkozy of playing on “irrational fears” in his treatment of Roma, thereby “debasing the French Republic”.

Aubry believes the initiative poses a moral problem because it targets a community group, and says it is being used as a pretext by the ruling UMP party to divert attention from its economic problems.

On Wednesday, right-leaning daily Le Figaro published a letter written by Aubry’s lawyer on July 19 to the main court in Lille, asking for an order for police to evict forcibly a Roma encampment in the northern French city.

The letter, according to the Figaro, reads: “Over the last few days a number of vehicles and caravans have arrived [in the Villeneuve d'Ascq district of Lille], constituting a flagrant breach of property law and risking becoming a source of problems for neighbouring residents. There is an urgent need to order their expulsion.”

Aubry was quick to defend her actions and distance the “evacuation” of the Lille camp from the government’s more hard-line policy of repatriation.

She said that the dismantling of the Lille camps, which took place at the end of August, had been ordered well before Sarkozy’s speech in Grenoble at the end of July, where he outlined his policy against illegal Roma camps.

Read more here.

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A week after Robert Mugabe told the US and EU to “go to hell” at his sister’s funeral – a comment that prompted Western diplomats to stage a walk-out – the Zimbabwean President struck a more conciliatory note in a speech on Monday.

“We seek friendship not enmity, togetherness not apartness,” he told thousands of people gathered to celebrate National Heroes’ Day.

He inspected a guard of honour, and stood to attention as cannons boomed and jet fighters flew overhead.

Mugabe did insist however that the EU and the US were still in the wrong, and that they want to continue to make Zimbabweans suffer by maintaining their targeted sanctions against Zimbabwe, including travel bans and asset freezes.

The president said he was appealing to the EU to think again.

Zimbabwe has been under Western sanctions since 2002, because of human rights abuses and alleged election rigging. Around 200 people, many of them opposition supporters, were killed in 2008.

Read more here.

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Iran has criticized new EU sanctions against the country over its nuclear program, saying such measures will “only complicate matters,” reports Press TV.

The European Union on Monday adopted new sanctions against Iran which mainly target investment in and technical assistance to Iran’s refining, liquefaction and liquefied natural gas sectors.

“Sanctions… will only complicate matters and move away [the parties] from mutual understanding,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast was quoted by IRNA as saying.

The sanctions came a day after the Iranian foreign minister announced Tehran was ready to hold talks with the West on nuclear fuel swap.

Manouchehr Mottaki made the remark in a press conference after holding trilateral talks with his counterparts from Turkey and Brazil in Istanbul on Sunday.

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Kosovo, the young Balkans nation, is on the right path to become “India of Europe” in terms of information technology development and customer service call center for Europe, especially the German speaking states.

In Kosovo, currently are operating 28 companies as call centers, while the trend of opening of these businesses is growing. In these companies have over 600 employees, whose average age ranges 18-25 years.

These companies provide services to the field of Telemarketing, customer service, billing and account maintenance and technical support.

Vjollca Cavolli, executive director of the Association for Information and Communication Technologies in Kosovo said that Kosovo has the potential and capacity to provide services to call for European countries, in particular the German states.

The number of Kosovars who speak the German language is the highest in the Balkans.

Read the post here.

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According to a press release from The Institute of National Statistics, on January 1, 2010, the Romanian population was recorded as 21,462,000 inhabitants. The male population is represented by 48.7 percent and the female population is represented by 51.3 percent. Romania is the seventh country in the European Union on the largest population chart. It follows Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Poland.

The young population (0-15 years old) is about 15.2 percent, the adult population is 69.9 percent, and the seniors (65+) – 14.9 percent. By January 1, 2010, the average age of the Romanian population was about 39.6 years.

In the urban areas, there are over 11,819,000 dwellers, more than half of the Romania’s population (55.1 per cent). The cities with the largest population are: Bucharest (the capital) – 1,944,500 inhabitants, Timyshoara – 311,400 inhabitants, Iashi – 308,700 inhabitants, and Cluj – 307,200 inhabitants.

The population of Romania is decreasing because of the migration process that has increased after Romania joined the European Union in 2007, giving Romanians the possibility to travel and work without restrictions. The labor migration is a serious problem in Romania, while millions of people went to Italy, Spain, Greece, and other EU countries to work.

Read the full post here.

Germany is the leading contributor to the European Union- and IMF-led fund to shore up the battered euro. An emergency provision in the agreement for the 750 billion euro rescue package, however, could see the country paying a lot more than the upper ceiling of 148 billion euros.

German taxpayers have already had to dig deep into their pockets to fund the bailout for nearly insolvent Greece and the triple-digit billion fund reserved to provide guarantees for euro zone member states if they run into trouble. Some members of the German government, though, are concerned that the tab for taxpayers could get even bigger.

Members of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government fear that country’s contribution to the rescue of financially troubled euro zone member states could surge above the €148 billion ($183 billion) ceiling promised by Berlin.
Although the emergency fund agreement does reference the ceiling, it also has a provision for emergency situations that, in the worst case scenario, could see Germany’s participation go well beyond the amount originally pledged. The provision states that, in an emergency, if a nation is unable to contribute its share to the bailout package, it can call upon other contributing countries for assistance in providing its share. If the request is approved unanimously by the partners to the agreement, the struggling nation’s share can then be assigned to other countries. Under this scenario, there are no caps on the total amount.

Read more here.

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Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko has ordered the government halt the transit of Russian gas to Europe until Gazprom pays off its existing debt for gas transit.

The European Commission will gather with Russian and Belarusian representatives for an urgent session on Tuesday, EU energy spokeswoman Marlene Holzner said.

More than six percent of EU gas consumption could be at risk because of the row between Russia and its neighbor Belarus, she underlined.

Speaking about President Lukashenko’s order to cut transit gas flow to European customers, Holzner said, they received no official information on the matter.

Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev has already given all the necessary orders to Gazprom’s management regarding Belarus’ actions.

Lukashenko made the announcement at a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Gazprom’s debt to Belarus for gas transit to Europe was created artificially because Belarus has not signed the gas transit act, Gazprom spokesman Sergey Kupriyanov said on Monday.

“Yes, there is a debt. Belarus is not signing a document about completed work and this prevents us from paying off this debt,” Kupriyanov admitted, adding that the debt itself is about $192 million.

Read more here.

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EU officials have reached agreement on the shape of the Union’s diplomatic service, after several months of hard negotiation.

Meeting in Madrid on Monday (21 June), EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and deputies from the European Parliament sealed a deal on the nature and content of the new corps, meant to give coherency to the Union’s external policy.

“We should not underestimate how important today’s decision is (…). This means we can now move forward with the service and have it operational by the autumn.” said Ms Ashton after the lengthy meeting in the Spanish capital.

The news is something of a personal boon for Ms Ashton, an unlikely nominee to the post of EU’s chief of diplomacy last year.

The foreign policy challenges she has faced since taking up the position on 1 December have been compounded by her relative lack of experience but also by not having a wide range of policy experts on whose opinion she could quickly draw.

Although the blueprint was signed off by member states and the European Commission in April, the parliament, represented by three deputies, were able to win important modifications due to their decision-making clout on staffing and financing the outfit.

The deal – the details of which are to be announced on Tuesday – is set to be endorsed by the parliament as a whole next month and then by EU foreign ministers meeting 26 July.

This will allow Ms Ashton to begin making appointments to the service, expected to have up to 8,000 people once it is fully up and running.

The idea for a diplomatic service was raised 10 years ago by then German foreign minister Joschka Fischer. Work on the corps got under way in earnest with the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty towards the end of 2009.

Read more here.

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In the wake of an admission by internet search giant Google that it had accidentally collected data from unencrypted wifi networks in people’s homes while its fleet of cars were out photographing buildings and roads for its ‘Street View’ map service, Austria has said it wants to make such moves punishable.

Currently, only when such data is deliberately extracted in a premeditated fashion, for example, with the purpose of selling on that data, is such activity governed by criminal law in the country.

State secretary for media Josef Ostermayer said this was necessary so that companies “were not even tempted” to use such data.

In an interview with Austrian daily Der Standard, he said that he wanted to see changes in this regard to the EU data protection directive.

“If there is no EU legislation, we are planning a national law.”

On 17 May, the company said that its Street View vehicles had unintentionally gathered communications such as emails and fragments of webpages amounting to 600 gigabytes worth of data from a total of 30 countries over the past three years.

The Austrian move comes as Google missed a deadline from Germany’s Hamburg data protection authority to hand over this data.

The regulator had asked the firm to deliver the hard drives containing the data by the end of Wednesday.

Google says it needs more time to consider the possible legal fall-out for sharing such private data with the government.

Read more here.

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“Does Belgium make sense any more?” was the question printed not many days ago by ‘Le Soir’, the best known Belgian daily. Not a fresh question. It has been asked for decades; the difference today is only in the accrued degree of incompatibility between the two ethnic components of the country, Flemish and Walloon. They simply do not seem able and/or willing to stay united.

Their possible splitting would not of course menace the peace of Europe. So, why are we ruminating about Belgium, a state only 10% larger than Maryland? The reason is that Belgium is the heart of the Carolingian continent. In fact Europe’s bureaucratic headquarters is in Brussels. In 1914, Belgium was the nominal reason for the United Kingdom entry into WW1, an atrocious conflict whose cost was one million dead for the British Empire only. Before 1579, Belgian was part of the Netherlands. When the Protestant provinces became independent, the Catholic (Belgian) ones remained in the Spanish fold. In 1713, they moved to the Austrian Habsburg empire; eighty years later to revolutionary France.

For fifteen years after 1815, Belgium was part of the Dutch kingdom, then became a state under the German dynasty of Saxony-Coburg-Gotha. At the beginning of the XX century, Belgium acquired officially the Congo, thus becoming an important colonial power.

The present shaky constitutional tie between Flanders and Wallonia dates back to 1980. The immediate cause of today’s crisis is the initiative of Flemish groups to obtain the dismemberment of the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (Bhv) district, the one that includes the national capital and the seat of the European Union. This district, roughly similar to the federal District of Columbia, is officially bilingual (Flemish-French). Now that the Flemish appear bent in annexing the northern part of Bhv, the precarious compromise that permitted the common sharing of the Bhv may have proved impracticable.

The Walloon (Southern) part of Belgium is somewhat less prosperous  and dynamic than the Flemish one, so the latter feels that it would have a better deal if it would join affluent Holland, with whom the linguistic and cultural affinity is the highest. Should the Flemish go, theoretically the Walloon would be wise to unite with France. But history does not usually obey theories. Even illogical factors such as the monarchical sentiments of Belgians would operate against entering the French hyper-republican context.

By the way, nothing is rational in the almost naive loyalty to kings and grand dukes of several Western and Northern nations of Europe: Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, not to say a word about Spain and Britain. They go on loving their crowned heads, whose main justification today is that monarchies do not need presidents, with connected electoral campaigns, political bickering and horse-trading. On the other hand, monarchies need superfluous dignitaries and a lot of outdated procedures.

Possibly Belgians will refrain from scuttling their unlucky vessel, considering the trouble and cost of partition. As one of the oldest among industrial societies, Belgium is sophisticated and complex. But should one day her people decide to put an end to national unity, no real tragedy would follow.

More dangerous are the volcanic ashes in the skies

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