Category: Europe

Black Hawks head to Europe

An additional 450 soldiers and 25 Black Hawk helicopters will join the expanding roster of NATO forces converging on Eastern Europe in March

Pilots, flight and ground crews from the 4th Battalion, 3rd Aviation Regiment, 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade out of Hunter Army Air Field, Ga., will be deploying to Illesheim, Germany, later this month.

From the staging ground there, they will then deploy in support of Operation Atlantic Resolve, a multinational training mission to reassure Poland and the Baltic countries of NATO’s commitment in the face of Russia’s aggressive moves in Ukraine.

The unit will remain deployed for about nine months, U.S. Army Europe said in a March 3 news release.

While in Europe they will serve as a supporting element to the Operation Atlantic Resolve ground forces, led by the 1st Armor Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, from Fort Stewart, Ga., as that unit assumes the role of the regionally aligned force in the area. The Vilseck-based 2nd Cavalry Regiment is currently holding that position.

About 100 soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division from Fort Carson, Colo., make up the regionally aligned force operational command element, led in part by Brig. Gen. Randy George, the 4th ID deputy commander.

“USAREUR right now is running [Operation Atlantic Resolve], but the commander of USAREUR also has responsibilities elsewhere throughout Europe,” said 4th ID mission command element deputy chief of staff Maj. George H. Johnson. “He just has somebody now that he can give particular direction to.”

George will run the first iteration of the mission command element in Europe. His first task, according to Johnson, will be to coordinate the transition with the outgoing 2CR.

After that, the 4th Infantry soldiers will settle in for their first long-term command of troops in Europe as Operation Atlantic Resolve continues.

“USAREUR was running that themselves and that is because there hasn’t been a division headquarters in Europe since the 1st Infantry Division left,” Johnson said. “Now they see a place where having a division headquarters in Europe could help in synchronizing between the militaries of nations, making sure that we train together and learn how to work and operate together. That’s what we’re here to do.”

Source: Stars and Stripes

China, Russia to finalize yet another major gas deal

Another major energy deal with Russia shows China is eager to develop overland energy supply lines that reduce its dependence on vulnerable sea lanes

China and Russia will seal an agreement later this year on piped gas from Western Siberia, China’s foreign minister said on Sunday, a deal that will continue Russia’s economic shift towards Asia and away from Western Europe.

Russia’s split with the west over Ukraine has pushed it closer to China, which is eager to develop overland energy supply lines that reduce its dependence on vulnerable sea lanes. China has taken a carefully neutral stance on the Ukraine conflict, while more broadly expressing its support for Russia.

The relationship between the two on-again, off-again Cold War allies is “mature and stable,” Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi told a press conference on Sunday. “There is enormous internal impetus and room for expansion.”

Much of that expansion will be in oil, gas and nuclear energy co-operation, he added. “We will fully begin construction of the eastern gas line and sign a co-operation agreement for the western line,” he said.

During a visit to Beijing in November, Russian president Vladimir Putin reached a preliminary agreement for Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled energy group, to supply China’s state oil company CNPC with 30bn cubic metres of gas per year from the Altai region of western Siberia. However, most of the details — including the price of the gas — are still to be worked out.

Beijing expects the deal to be finalised later this year, leading to a pipeline that will, for the first time, allow Russia to choose between exporting gas to Asia or to Europe.

Russia has also made a commitment to sell gas from its far east to China, but gas from that area of Siberia can only be sold economically to Asia. In a $400bn agreement signed during Mr Putin’s visit to Shanghai in May, Russia agreed to sell up to 38bn cubic metres a year to China.

Chinese and Russian leaders officially inaugurated construction of the Power of Siberia pipeline in September last year, but little work can be done during the harsh Siberian winter. The two sides have also disagreed over financing for the massive projects, with Russia strapped for cash amid sanctions imposed by the West. To sweeten the deal for China, Russia has offered Chinese oil firms the chance to invest directly in its upstream operations. Russia’s deputy premier Arkardy Dvorkovich said at an investment forum last month that there are no longer political barriers to China controlling strategic assets.

Increased economic ties with Russia, particularly the Russian Far East, fall under the broader One Belt, One Road strategy of increasing exports and investment in Central Asia, Mr Wang said.

China wants to create a new Silk Road economic belt that roughly retraces trade networks active at the height of China’s presence in Central Asia, during the Han dynasty 2,000 years ago, as well as a 21st-century maritime Silk Road that revisits the greatest extent of its sea power during the early Ming dynasty.

Rising investment in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa would allow China to export its surplus capacity in steel, rail and other industries, an overhang that is increasingly weighing on its domestic economy.

An added attraction for energy-hungry China is the creation of overland rail, road and pipe networks, which it views as more defensible than easily blockaded sea routes including the Suez Canal and the narrow Strait of Malacca.

Source: FT

NATO tries to torpedo Berlin with fake numbers and no intel

Top NATO commander General Philip Breedlove has raised hackles in Germany with his public statements about the Ukraine crisis.

Hawks in Washington seem determined to torpedo Berlin’s approach of finding a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis, and bellicose statements from NATO’s top commander in Europe has been helping.

It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn’t holding perfectly, but it was holding.

On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine — with “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” having been sent to the Donbass. “What is clear,” Breedlove said, “is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.”

German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn’t understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn’t the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove’s numbers have been fake, playing into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.

The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove’s comments as “dangerous propaganda.” Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove’s comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.

But Breedlove hasn’t been the only source of friction. Europeans have also begun to see others as hindrances in their search for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict. First and foremost among them is Victoria Nuland, head of European affairs at the US State Department. She and others would like to see Washington deliver arms to Ukraine and are supported by Congressional Republicans as well as many powerful Democrats.

Breedlove’s announcements are making Berlin very uneasy. False claims and exaggerated accounts, warned a top German official during a recent meeting on Ukraine, have put NATO — and by extension, the entire West — in danger of losing its credibility.

The fact that NATO has no intelligence agency of its own plays into Breedlove’s hands. The alliance relies on intelligence gathered by agents from the US and Britain.

“I stand by all the public statements I have made during the Ukraine crisis,” he wrote to SPIEGEL in response to a request for a statement accompanied by a list of his controversial claims. He wrote that it was to be expected that assessments of NATO’s intelligence center, which receives information from all 33 alliance members in addition to partner states, doesn’t always match assessments made by individual nations.

Berlin has the impression that important power brokers in Washington are working against the Europeans. Berlin officials have noticed that, following the visit of American politicians or military leaders in Kiev, Ukrainian officials are much more bellicose and optimistic about the Ukrainian military’s ability to win the conflict on the battlefield. “We then have to laboriously bring the Ukrainians back onto the course of negotiations,” said one Berlin official.

Nuland, who is seen as a possible secretary of state should the Republicans win back the White House in next year’s presidential election, is unfortunately an important voice in US policy.

A massive troop training range is located in Yavoriv in western Ukraine near the Polish border. According to the Pentagon’s plans, American officers are going to train troops on how to use American artillery-locating radar devices.

The US Army in Europe commander Lt. Gen. Hodges announced in January that the training would start at the beginning of March, but on Tuesday, Hodges said during an appearance in Berlin that he expects the training will still begin at some point this month.

Source: Der Spiegel

Gays turn to incest in Britain

Gays in Britain have now turned to incest to have children. A woman has helped her 24-year-old son become a father by carrying his child.

In the first surrogacy of its kind, a donor egg fertilised by her son Kyle was implanted in British woman Anne-Marie Casson, 46.

Kyle, gay and single, had wanted to be a father “for some considerable time”.

A surrogacy clinic had turned him away, and then a female relative who had volunteered to be the surrogate developed medical difficulties.

It was at this point that Anne-Marie Casson and her husband Alan decided that she should be the surrogate mother.

A family court judge ruled that it was “entirely lawful” for Kyle to adopt the baby, Miles – his son but also, legally, his brother.

Kyle is the first single man in the UK to have a child through surrogacy, and the first to use his mother as the carrier.

The Cassons’ case has ignited huge controversy: the participants’ consanguinity raises the spectre of one of the few remaining taboos – incest.

Both Anne-Marie and Kyle Casson have said their gay friends have been overwhelmingly supportive.

Racist sexual exploitation on an ‘industrial scale’

A total of 373 girls suffered sexual abuse in Oxfordshire, Britain, a report into ‘indescribably awful’ child sexual exploitation has found – and now fears have been raised that the abuse may have been racially motivated.

Over 15 years hundreds of victims as young as 11 were groomed, raped and forced into prostitution by gangs of men ‘predominantly of Pakistani heritage’, a serious case review has found.

The damning 114-page report said victims were in a ‘living hell from which they couldn’t extricate themselves’ after ‘hostile’ officials wrote some off as ‘difficult girls making bad choices’ when they begged for help.

The vulnerable girls were initially showered with gifts before being plied with alcohol and drugs including crack cocaine and heroin, making them dependent on the men who sexually abused them.

Today Thames Valley’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Anthony Stansfeld, said the abuse may have been a ‘hate crime’.

Mr Stansfeld said that ‘from the outside looking in’ it appeared the abuse was in some way racially motivated.

He said: ‘It needs looking at whether this was hate crime. I think it most certainly could have been and it needs looking at.’

Prime Minister David Cameron said this afternoon that the children in Oxford were abused on an ‘industrial scale’ and vowed laws would be changed in the light of revelations and similar scandals in Rotherham and Rochdale.

Source: Daily Mail

Nobel Peace Prize chairman kicked out

The Nobel Committee’s chairman has been removed from his post for the first time in the award’s 114-year history. He’s been criticized over a number of the panel’s controversial picks, like US president and the EU.

Ousted Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland, a former Norwegian Labor prime minister, had been in charge of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for six years before he was voted out on Tuesday. He will remain a member of the committee, but the leading role has been passed on to the panel’s deputy chairman, Kaci Kullmann Five, a former conservative party leader.

“There’s a new committee with new people, and new people can always lead to new considerations,” Kullmann Five told journalists. “Jagland has been a good leader for the committee for six years.”

Three out of six prize winners chosen under Thorbjoern Jagland have raised controversy.

Jagland’s first year as chairman in 2009 saw the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to US President Barack Obama, who at that time had only been in office for nine months.

Obama won the prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” while the US was engaged in two lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as heightened US drone strikes on suspected militants in Pakistan and Yemen.

The Nobel Prize Committee’s 2012 choice of the European Union as the winner of the award has also raised quite a few eyebrows. Critics pointed out Jagland’s other role as head of the European Council as a potential conflict of interest. Many argued the prize was undeserved because of the EU’s economic and foreign policy failures.

The Norwegian Nobel committee has redefined and remodeled the prize in a manner that it is not consistent with the law, critics said.

A 2010 award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo led to Beijing freezing diplomatic relations with Oslo.

Jagland’s removal has led to speculations over how much the prize is influenced by politics with the likes of archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk receiving the prize.

Nobel Committee members are appointed by Norway’s parliament according to the power balance there. Rightwing parties won elections in 2013, which gave them a 3-2 majority over Labor on the Peace Prize panel.

“This can be interpreted as an attempt by the conservative government to exert more political control over the committee than has been customary,” Nobel historian Asle Sveen told AFP.

Ukrainian army leaves fracking equipment behind

On the outskirts of the village of Shishkovo under the snow and rain rusts the expensive equipment: four residential trailers for employees, diesel substation and equipment for conducting seismic surveys. Judging by the labels this equipment was certified in the U.S., and now it is in possession of the people of Donbass.

Local residents recall that this was a temporary base of geologists from Ukrgazdobicha. The residents of the Shishkovo witnessed the beginning of the work.

“This equipment was brought at a time when in June the Ukrainian tanks came from Metallist and started shelling the city. As we suppose, Kiev authorities planned a quick capture of South-East, Donbass in particular, for further extraction of shale gas,” explains a local resident Vladimir.

“They were from Western Ukraine. Geo-research. They were saying something about gas, said there is shale gas here. First there were two vehicles, then 10 -12. There was a lot,” says a resident.

Earlier the field was divided into squares, here the expert gasman conducted seismic studies and measurements and were preparing to install a rig.

Local mechanics and welders were not hired, because many of the them spoke out against the extraction of shale gas.

The residents of Shishkovo were not notified of the purpose of the camp. The camp was staffed mainly with residents of Western Ukraine, which is revealed by the documents left behind : “Ivano-Frankovsk, Cherkassy, Poltava region, Zhitomir region.” The documents also mention both gas and oil research.

According to the paperwork for 2013 found onsite, similar bases were also located in villages Shevchenko, Raigorodka and Gerasimovka.

As the local residents say, the research continued until the Ukrainian national guard had left. Along with tanks and howitzers the Ukrainian soldiers also took part of the seismic equipment, but in the rush they did not have the time to gather everything.

This abandoned base can be observed well from the Ukrainian side of the frontline. Just over this field, a mile from the abandoned base is the town of Schastye, which is under the complete control of the Ukrainian army. Even now, in the midst of a ceasefire it is not safe to be here. Locals say that during evening hours the Ukrainian Armed forces and volunteer battalions begin to fire at each other.

Translated from Russian LifeNews

Suspects named in Nemtsov murder

The Nemtsov murder investigation has focused on the theory that the crime was organized by a Chechen militant commander Adam Osmayev, of the Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion, who also was named in the case concerning the attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin. Investigators are allowing for the possibility that the militants, who fought against DPR and LPR, operated at the behest of Ukrainian secret services, since the murder of the opposition leader would have discredited the Russian leadership and destabilize the political situation.

A law enforcement source had told the media that the investigating group has evidence that Ukrainian secret services played a role in Nemtsov’s murder. On the day of the murder the Investigative Committee spokesperson Vladimir Markin announced that the investigators are studying the possibility the murder was intended to destabilize the political situation in the country.

“The murder could have been used as a provocation to destabilize the situation, with Nemtsov becoming a sort of a sacrificial lamb for those who are not overly choosy in their political methods,” Markin told Izvestiya.

The investigators are also working on other versions: political, extremist, business, and personal. However, judging by the quality of preparation and implementation, it was done by professionals. The Izvestiya source said that the killer shot Nemtsov only a few tens of meters from the Kremlin, and it since became known that the murder took place in a spot not covered by a surveillance camera. Moreover, they chose a time during which there are no traffic jams, but there is still heavy traffic in the center which allowed the killers’ car to become lost among other vehicles.

The information that Ukraine’s special services ordered the murder is being verified. The bandits may have performed a mission assigned by Ukrainian secret services, but also avenged the death of their former leader Isa Munaev. He was killed on February 1 during the battle for Debaltsevo, after which the battalion’s command was taken over by Adam Osmayev.

The so-called Dzhokhar Dudayev international peacekeeping battalion is fighting on Ukraine’s side, and was formed by Munaev in March 2014. Munaev fought in the first Chechen campaign against Russian forces, and after 1999 he declared himself the commander of the South-Western sector and participated in organizing acts of terrorism.

Munaev fled Chechnya in 2006 for Denmark, where he received asylum. He founded the movement “Free Caucaus” which, according to secret services, financed terrorists. When in 2014 the Ukrainian government launched the ATO against LPR and DPR, Munaev went to Ukraine and declared the formation of his battalion. Russian sources indicate that he was personally invited Igor Kolomoisky, who financed the battalion. The battalion’s core were Chechen immigrants in Denmark, and citizens of other countries who belonged to terrorist organizations.

Isa Munaev was one of the individuals, along with the commanders of Azov and Dnepr, who supported terrorism on Russia’s soil and who were ordered delivered to Chechnya by Ramzan Kadyrov.

Russian services are trying to establish how many people participated in the preparation and implementation of Nemtsov’s murder. It cannot be ruled out that, in addition to killers and spotters, there were also “controllers” in Moscow who observed the murder’s aftermath and political effect. One of them may have been the Ukrainian deputy Aleksey Goncharenko. Experts who were questioned by Izvestiya believe the theory of foreign secret service involvement to have merit.

Translated from Russian LifeNews

Oligarchs, seed companies benefit from land redistribution

The federal government has admitted that national and international companies in Ukraine benefit from EU subsidies and loans. Fertile lands in Ukraine are being transferred to Ukrainian oligarchs and international seed companies, and in return the Kiev government receives international loans.

The inquiry of the parliamentary group of the Left Party, submitted on January 19, 2015, criticizes the ‘land grabbing’, i.e. the ‘landgrab by states and major national and international companies’ in Ukraine.

Concerned citizens are outraged over a planned redistribution of land:

‘In the shadow of the Ukrainian crisis we can observe an alarming transfer of land to Ukrainian oligarchs, but also Western publicly owned agricultural companies and non-Western states. In the past Ukraine was considered a breadbasket of the Soviet Union and thanks to the considerable amount of black earth is known to be particularly fruitful and productive. With 32 million hectares of crop land Ukraine has twice as much crop area as ​​Germany. Ukrainian and foreign agroholdings already control about half of the Ukrainian agricultural land, which is about 17 million hectares. The lessors generate low income due to the low rent payments and are sometimes even paid in kind’.

Seed producers have a strong interest in Ukrainian lands:

‘Ukraine is one of the auspicious growth markets for seed producers Monsanto and DuPont. It is feared that Monsanto exercises great pressure on the authorities in Ukraine to force through its demands for development of production of biotechnology and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Last year Monsanto invested 140 million to increase the capability for future production’.

German companies also benefit from the ‘land grabbing’:

‘One of the German companies that profit from land grabbing in Eastern Europe, is AGRARIUS AG, founded in 2007 with headquartered in Bad Homburg, which offers ‘investment in farmland’ and services related to the purchase of land. In Hamburg German agricultural CEE GmbH lures with returns of 100 percent in the ‘most interesting agricultural market in the world’, and KTG Agrar SE, also based in Hamburg, advertises organic products because they promise a much higher profit margin’.

International and national companies receive financial, developmental and EU subsidies. In the past ten years agricultural corporations have been increasingly cultivating rapeseed in Ukraine. This is connected with the increased needs of the EU for biofuels. About 90 percent of rape is exported to the EU and processed there. The federal government reported as part of the inquiry that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) had awarded 2,014 loans to a total of 131 Ukrainian and 55 international agroholdings.

To the question of whether the agricultural concerns DuPont and Monsanto would receive KfW loans for its operations in Ukraine, the federal government was not willing to give a clear answer.

It is stated in the response:

‘The publication of information on granting of credit by the KfW bank group affects trade and business secrets of the concerned companies. The public response to the question of whether and to what extent a company finances its business activities and by which type of loan is generally suitable to give competitors information not only about the financial resources of a company, but also about its strategy and positioning in the market’.

Source: German Economic News

‘Secret Swedish Asylum group’ plans 400,000 new immigrants

The Swedish government has appointed a “secret asylum-group” planning for 400,000 new immigrants over the next five years – the equivalent of a large Swedish city, the newspaper Dagens Industri revealed yesterday.

The Secret Asylum group is a group of unelected left wing bureaucrats working for the government, that currently outlines the future population of Sweden. The plans have been “secret”, DI states, and without the Swedish people’s knowledge.

Some of those included in the secret group is Lars West Bratt, Eric Nilsson, Max Elger and Annelie Roswall Ljunggren – all well-paid bureaucrats working for the red-green government.

The group has made a decision that Sweden should receive at least 400,000 new immigrants from the third world over the next five years. The plan spans over the next general election, which after the December settlement last month, only will be a symbolic election. Sweden is now run as a mafia cartel of political power.

130,000 of the new inhabitants of Sweden will be “unaccompanied minors”, ie illegal immigrant boys/men whom a large percentage are likely to be jihadists from Syria.

The Swedish Parliament has allocated 34 billion SEK in tax-money to cover the direct costs of the 2015 immigration. How much the five-year plan will cost the Swedish taxpayers is not clear, but it will be several hundreds of billion SEK, even if Sweden is already broke.

Last year Sweden set a new immigration record, which they will surely beat this year. And next year, etc. Until UN is proven right; Sweden will become a third world country.

Source: speisa.com

Russia, Cyprus signs military port deal

Ties between Russia and the West have plummeted in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, but Putin said the ships allowed to dock at Cypriot ports would mostly be used in international anti-terrorism and piracy efforts.

“I don’t think this should worry anyone,” he said.

Cyprus, which is heavily dependent on Russian investment, played down Wednesday’s deal, saying Russian ships had always had access to its ports. A government source said it was simply the first time access had been spelled out in a separate accord.

Russia has sought to forge stronger ties with individual members of the European Union, including Cyprus, Hungary and Greece, after the 28-nation bloc, along with the United States, imposed cumulative sanctions on Moscow for its role in Ukraine.

Officials in Brussels fear this policy is aimed at weakening EU resolve and preventing a further tightening of sanctions.

Earlier this week Russia restructured a 2.5 billion euro ($2.8 billion) loan to Cyprus it signed in 2011, cutting the annual interest rate to 2.5 percent from 4.5 percent and the redemption period to 2018-2021.

Russia has sought Mediterranean ports for its navy to visit since Moscow lost a military maintenance base on Syria’s coast during fighting between anti-government rebels and troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, whom Putin has supported in the nearly four-year conflict.

Russian agency TASS said Wednesday’s deal included the possibility of Russian ships and warplanes using airports and seaports in humanitarian crises.

Long been a destination for cash from Russia, Cyprus saw capital outflows of a record $151 billion last year. U.S.-based non-profit organization Global Financial Integrity said in 2013 that illicit money flows from Russia to Cyprus amounted to at least $211.5 billion between 1994-2011. ($1 = 0.8807 euros)

Source: Maritime Executive

British politicians for sale

Two former ministers were caught on tape saying they would use their political influence in exchange for payouts

Another reminder this week that schadenfreude is a pleasure best avoided by the political class:

Two of Britain’s most senior politicians, one Labour, one Conservative, both former foreign secretaries, have been caught in an embarrassing media sting. When the same fate befell three of Jack Straw’s colleagues before the last election, he chided them for their “stupidity in allowing themselves to be suckered in a sting like this.”

Guess what, Mr. Straw? You got suckered by the same old trick. Undercover reporters, posing as intermediaries for a phony Chinese business, tempted Straw, who was foreign secretary during the Iraq War, and Sir Malcolm Rifkind into claiming they would make extensive use their political influence in exchange for great wads of cash.

Nothing either man did was illegal, and their willingness to accept well-paid advisory roles may not even have breached House of Commons guidelines. Nonetheless, hidden camera footage of the former ministers grasping for money reinforces the view that politicians are more interested in looking out for themselves than the voters they are supposed to represent.

“I am kicking myself,” admitted Straw, after news of the footage to be shown on Channel 4’s Dispatches emerged on Sunday night.

Rifkind, who was foreign secretary in the dying days of the last Conservative government in the 1990s, tried to brazen it out, insisting that there was no reason for him to resign as chairman of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee. On Tuesday morning he strode defiantly to work in Westminster, telling the TV cameras to “mind your own business” before mocking a cameraman for the way he was walking and for forgetting the correct name of Rifkind’s committee.

Not long after Rifkind had marched into the office, he was skulking back out again to announce that, yes, he was going to resign after all. In the intervening minutes, Downing Street had let him know that the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, was displeased. With an election less than three months away, this sort of slipup was not to be tolerated.

In one of the videos, Rifkind was seen boasting that he could call a meeting with any ambassador in London. “They’ll all see me personally,” he said. “That provides access in a way that is, is useful.”

He also told the undercover reporters from Channel 4 and The Telegraph that he would be willing to write to ministers on behalf of the fictitious Hong Kong-based communications agency without mentioning the name of the business. He said his fee would be between £5,000 and £8,000 for half a day’s work. “You’d be surprised how much free time I have,” he said, despite leading the committee entrusted with scrutinizing MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, which has been caught up in many of the Snowden revelations.

Perhaps most embarrassingly, Rifkind claimed that he was “self-employed” because “nobody pays me a salary,” even though he is receives more than $125,000 a year as an MP who chairs a committee.

After the tape had emerged, he made matters worse by claiming he was entitled to a far larger income. “The reality is that anyone from a professional or business background earns considerably more,” he told the BBC. “I want to have the standard of living my professional background would normally entitle me to have.”

MPs are allowed to undertake paid work in the private sector as long as they declare it on a parliamentary register of outside interests. One hundred eighty MPs make money on the side, and a dozen of those earn more from their sideline than their parliamentary work. Last year, Rifkind declared more than $100,000 in additional earnings.

He announced on Tuesday that he would not stand for re-election in May.

Straw was already planning to retire from frontline politics this year, and he told the undercover reporters that he would only be able to help them once he had left Parliament. He did, however, claim that he had successfully lobbied on behalf of private clients in the past. He said he had been able to change European Union sugar regulations in order to help ED&F Man Holdings, a commodities company that pays him more than $90,000 a year. “I got in to see the relevant director general and his officials in Brussels,” Straw said. “It’s public that the regulations have been changed, but the best way of dealing with these things is under the radar.”

Straw, who became a confidant of Colin Powell during the buildup to the Iraq War, asked to be suspended from the Labour Party, but his retirement is likely to begin before any inquiry into his conduct can be held.

Source: The Daily Beast

‘Mein Kampf’ returning to German bookshops

“This book is too dangerous for the general public,” library historian Florian Sepp warned as he carefully laid a first edition of “Mein Kampf” — Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto of hate — on a table in a restricted reading room of the Bavarian State Library.

Nevertheless, the book that once served as a kind of Nazi bible, banned from domestic reprints since the end of World War II, will soon be returning to German bookstores from the Alps to the Baltic Sea.

The prohibition on reissue for years was upheld by the state of Bavaria, which owns the German copyright and legally blocked attempts to duplicate it. But those rights expire in December, and the first new print run here since Hitler’s death is due out early next year. The new edition is a heavily annotated volume in its original German that is stirring an impassioned debate over history, anti-Semitism and the latent power of the written word.

The book’s reissue, to the chagrin of critics, is effectively being financed by German taxpayers, who fund the historical society that is producing and publishing the new edition. Rather than a how-to guidebook for the aspiring fascist, the new reprint, the group said this month, will instead be a vital academic tool, a 2,000-page volume packed with more criticisms and analysis than the original text.

Still, opponents are aghast, in part because the book is coming out at a time of rising anti-Semitism in Europe and as the English and other foreign-language versions of “Mein Kampf” — unhindered by the German copyrights — are in the midst of a global renaissance.

Although authorities here struck deals with online sellers such as Amazon.com to prohibit sales in Germany, new copies of “Mein Kampf” have become widely available via the Internet around the globe. In retail stores in India, it is enjoying strong popularity as a self-help book for Hindu nationalists. A comic-book edition was issued in Japan. A new generation of aficionados is also rising among the surging ranks of the right in Europe. The Golden Dawn party in Greece, for instance, has stocked “Mein Kampf” at its bookstore in Athens.

Regardless of the academic context provided by the new volume, critics say the new German edition will ultimately allow Hitler’s voice to rise from beyond the grave.

“I am absolutely against the publication of ‘Mein Kampf,’ even with annotations. Can you annotate the Devil? Can you annotate a person like Hitler?” said Levi Salomon, spokesman for the Berlin-based Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism. “This book is outside of human logic.”

Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Jewish community in Munich, said she had not vigorously opposed it when the project first surfaced. But her position, she said, hardened after hearing from outraged Holocaust survivors.

“This book is most evil; it is the worst anti-Semitic pamphlet and a guidebook for the Holocaust,” she said. “It is a Pandora’s box that, once opened again, cannot be closed.”

Source: Washington Post

Britain heading for near total solar eclipse

Britain’s most complete solar eclipse in 16 years will block out as much as 90 percent of sunlight across parts of the UK and Europe next month.

The moon will pass in front of the sun on Friday, March 20, casting a large shadow over the Earth.

The partial eclipse will last for around two hours and will be visible across Europe.

It is expected to affect energy supplies due to an increasing reliance on solar power. Energy experts warned of possible blackouts.

The European Network Transmission System Operators for Electricity said: “The risk of incident cannot be completely ruled out. Solar eclipses have happened before but with the increase of installed photovoltaic energy generation, the risk of an incident could be serious without appropriate countermeasures.”

Since 1999, the use of solar power in Europe as a proportion of all renewables has risen from 0.1 percent to 10.5 percent.

When an almost total solar eclipse casts an umbra on northern Europe, it may face an unprecedented test of its electricity grid due to the massive development of solar power production.

The warning comes from the French power grid RTE, which said Friday that Europe must be prepared for the event.

“The passage of this shadow will considerably reduce photovoltaic power production,” Dominique Maillard, the head of RTE, told reporters during its winter outlook presentation, as cited by Reuters. “According to our calculations, the impact could be a drop in production of as much as 30,000 megawatts across Europe, it’s the equivalent of a six degrees Celsius drop in temperatures in half an hour.”

In northern Scotland, more than 95 percent of the sun will be covered by the moon, while in London and the UK’s South East 85 percent will be obscured.