22nd Year of Publication number 1144 6-12 december , 2015 € 3.50

www.neweurope.eu

E U governments and the European Parliament drew years of wrangling over se-

curity forces' use of airline passen-ger data toward a close on Friday by agreeing to a compromise deal with the legislature.

The dispute over the retenti-on and sharing of passenger name records -- PNR -- became a shib-boleth in Brussels. As drafts were batted to and fro, PNR defined arguments between protecting people's privacy and protecting people from terrorism.

Islamist attacks in Paris this year, in January and last month, lent im-

petus to France and other govern-ments to press the EU parliament to relent. German lawmakers in particular have been wary of mass data collection, recalling historic abuses and new revelations about U.S. surveillance. However, a new proposal from legislators this week won interior ministers' backing.

"The compromise agreed today will enable the EU to set up an ef-fective PNR system which fully re-spects fundamental rights and free-doms," said Etienne Schneider, the Luxembourg minister who chaired the council of 28 governments in Brussels on Friday.

Timothy Kirkhope (ECR, UK), the member of the Euro-pean Parliament who has steered the legislation, said he would re-commend its adoption in com-mittee. The final step will be a plenary vote, though agreement among the main parties should limit surprises.

"This is a good agreement that will deliver an effective tool for fighting terrorism and serious crime," Kirkhope said. "This has always been a careful balancing act to ensure the system was pro-portionate to the risk that we face."

(Continued on Page 03)

PNR dealEU states strike deal on air passengers data

Brussels Airlines AVRO RJ 100 aircraft approches Riga International Airport, Latvia, 28 October 2015. EPA/VALDA KALNINA

a

Azerbaijan’s economic development

by Ariti-MArinA AlAMAnou PAge 11

A regeneration policy for Piraeus

interview: ioAnnis Moralis PAge10

Current political development in thailand

by Amb noPAdol gunAvibool PAge 09

More sustainable transport systems

CoP21 PAge 05

Morocco: an umbilical relation with europe

interview: HiCHAM raHil PAge 08

How to fight islamic state

interview: sCott Atran PAge 06

PAge 07

Greek borders become the EU’s borders

PAge 13

A post Safe Harbour world

‘Campania’: EU’s regional policy coming of age (Page 04)

02 ANALYSIS NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu

6-12 December , 2015

Focus: ChristmasSeason page 6,7

The European Central Bank (ECB) raisedlast week its basic lending rates by 0.25 of apercentage unit from two percent to 2.25percent, starting an interest rates increasecycle in the entire Eurozone of twelve coun-tries. To soothe critics in the governmentsand the business community, ECB presi-dent Jean-Claude Trichet said that he isnot starting a series of interest rate increas-es, as his American counterpart AllanGreenspan is doing over the last 18months. All the same though, Trichetadded, that the ECB is closely monitoringinflation pressures and if the need arises; hewill not hesitate to proceed to another inter-est rate increase. Those comments weretranslated by market analysts, as a warningfrom the ECB that the Eurozone does runa danger of a new interest hike over the nextfew months.

The same sources predict another increaseof the price of money towards the end of the

first semester next year, of an equal magni-tude of 0.25 percentage points, as the oneon December 1.

Critics say that the ECB should have wait-ed for one or two months before raising thecost of money in the entire Eurozone, onthe grounds that the economy has justentered into a very fragile growth path andthe added interest cost may bring the econ-omy back to a stand-still.

The ECB however seems concerned withinflation pressures that stem from expensiveoil and wage and salaries increases. This isa clear message from the ECB boss to gov-ernments and the business community, tobe very careful with the wage agreements forthe next year. So clearly, if the wage negoti-ations for 2006, due to start in all the 12member countries of the Eurozone, lead tolarge wage increases, then the ECB willintervene again and raise interest ratesrather sooner than later.

The European Weeklywww.new-europe.info

OPEN YOUR MIND SEE EUROPE

Yr. 13, No 654 - December 4 - 10, 2005

NEW EUROPE

T he European Commission last weekwarned Britain not to take away vital-ly needed aid funds from new and

poorer European Union (EU) states incentral and eastern Europe to pay for thebloc’s richer western nations.

EU Commission spokesman JohannesLaitenberger said Commission chief JoseManuel Barroso had held detailed talks onthe EU quest for a new multi-billion Euro2007-2013 budget with Blair earlier lastweek.

Barroso had made clear that “we do notexpect the British presidency to take ... fromthe poor to give to the rich,” Laitenbergertold reporters.

Britain is reportedly planning to slasheastern European countries’ access to EUaid funds by up to 10 percent in a bid to easethe financial burden on rich net contribu-tors to the bloc’s budget.

He has not said whether this will gohand in hand with any moves to acceptchanges in Britain’s controversial five bil-lion Euro EU rebate.

Net contributors - countries which paymore into the joint EU coffers than what

they get back in return as aid from Brussels- include Britain, Germany, France,Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands.

All eastern European states have firmlyrejected suggestions that they should acceptany cutbacks in their access to EU funds.Hungary’s Prime Minister last Friday toldBritish Prime Minister Tony Blair that newEuropean Union member states would notaccept proposed cuts to cohesion funding inthe EU budget unless the British rebate andCommon Agricultural Policy (CAP) werealso reformed.

“The British rebate, CAP and cohesionfunding are linked; all three sacred cowsmust be touched, not just one alone,”Ferenc Gyurcsany, representing theVisegrad 4 countries - Hungary, Poland,Czech Republic and Slovakia - told Blair ata press conference in Budapest. TheVisegrad 4 countries were among ten statesto join the EU in May 2004. Tony Blair wasin Hungary on behalf of the British presi-dency of the EU to attempt to strike anagreement with the Visegrad 4 leaders overproposals for the stricken EU budget,which first foundered in June. Page 10

Europe warns Blair

Jose Maria Barroso (L), President of The European Commission with British Prime Minister Tony Blair

ANA/

EPA/

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EU ministers agree on plans for data retention

European Union justice ministers have agreed on contro-versial proposals for the retention of data from mobile

phones and the Internet as part of a new EU anti-terror pack-age, British Home Secretary Charles Clarke said last Friday.

A majority of ministers backed the British EU presidency’scompromise proposal to store data on phone, fax, mobilephone and email communications for between six months andtwo years, Clarke told reporters after a meeting of EU justiceministers in Brussels.

Existing or planned national regulations on the exact timeframe for the retention of such data, however, will remainuntouched by the new directive.

Those still opposed to the agreement include Ireland,Slovakia and Slovenia. Ministers also agreed that industry willbe reimbursed for the costs of data retention, Clarke said. Butofficials added that full accord on the issue depended on theposition of the European Parliament and national govern-ments. “We now hope to seek ... a deal with the EuropeanParliament,” he said, adding that “all EU institutions standfirm in the fight against terrorism”.

The European Parliament has until this Wednesday tomodify the proposals. The directive will be put to the vote inthe assembly on December 12. The European Members ofParliament had been at odds with justice ministers over pri-vacy safeguards and time limits for data retention.

NOTEBOOK:ECB...regulates Eurozone economy

First rise in over five yearsECB finally delivers rate hike page 8

Post riot scenariounfolds Sarkozy leads France to the right page 17

Commissioner Reding launches .euEU citizens, businesses to get new domain page 9

Kazakh economy to grow 9% says President Nazarbayev page 45

Australia $3.4, Austria EURO 1.81, Balkans EURO 4, Belgium EURO 3.50,Holland EURO 2.70, Central Asia USD7.5, Central Europe USD5, Canada

$5, Cyprus CYP 1.80, Denmark: DKK 19.95, Eastern Europe USD7.5,France EURO 3.04, Germany EURO 3.50, Greece EURO 4, Hungary

HUF430, Japan Y900, Italy EURO 3.62, Nordic countries USD7, PacificRim USD8.5, Russia USD 4, Switzerland SFr4, UK GBP 4.5, USA $2.95,

all other countries EURO 6

MEPs par excellence page 5

NE01.qxd 2/12/2005 5:46 Page 1

The Shooting Gallery

Barack Obama presents the next President of the USA. EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS

The European Commission warned Britain not to take away vitally needed aid funds from new and poorer European Union states in central and Eastern Europe to pay for the bloc’s richer western nations.EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso held de-tailed talks on the EU quest for a new multi-billion Euro 2007-2013 budget with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.Barroso made it clear that “we do not expect the Bri-tish presidency to take... from the poor to give to the rich”. Britain was reportedly planning to slash eastern European countries’ access to EU aid funds by up to 10% in a bid to ease the financial burden on rich net contributors to the bloc’s budget. These are countries that pay more into the joint EU coffers than what they get back as aid from Brussels. The list includes Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands.

ne 10 YeARS

AGO

MMThe crisis in Syria has become a nightmare, not only for its own people, but for the whole of Europe. One of the biggest consequences of the mass movement of Syrian refugees towards a peaceful and prosperous Europe is the threat this poses for the process of integration. Another consequence is the threat that Islamic State poses for Europe’s security. The latter is the direct result of a failed policy of the West in Iraq and Syria.It took only a few months for the Syrian crisis to turn into an in-ternational crisis. The main problem now is the existence of a new military and terrorist reality – that of Islamic State.Once more, Europe was caught off guard with no elaborate or any precise policy towards the refugees and the waves of migration, as well as Islamic State itself. It seems the European Union is only now starting to clarify its po-sition. The problem in Syria, however, is that there are many key players. First, there is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his re-gime. Despite being stable once, it has provoked imaginable dam-age by bombing civilians.Sooner or later, the Assad regime must be replaced by a representa-tive government that will enjoy the trust of all local players, with the exception, of course, of Islamic State.On the other hand, the Democratic Opposition has proven to be unreliable since there are many different factions within the oppo-sition ‘umbrella’. Some of them had ties to fundamentalist Islamist groups. Others had no real influence over parts of the population.The Democratic Opposition never succeeded in controlling con-siderable parts of the Syrian territory. Meanwhile, the United States and some European states have cho-sen to fight Islamic State by bombing its key positions. But the re-sults have been poor since Islamic State is still alive.What is more, Russia’s involvement as an ally of the Assad regime has complicated the situation even more. By focusing its aerial at-tacks mainly on positions held by the opposition, it has not pro-vided any solution to the problem.Saudi Arabia also has a crucial role to play in the crisis since it can influence the situation. It is the most respected Sunni state though many times held responsible for the jihadi movements. Iran is another key player. As an ally of the Assad regime, it might be the only country that can take on Islamic State. But it cannot participate directly. The reason is that the hatred between Iran’s two big sects, the Sunni and Shia Muslims, runs so deep that Iran’s involvement would provoke an unprecedented religious war in the Middle East. All the while, the cost for Europe is heavy. Migrants and refugees, as well as internal divisions between European Union member states, terrorism and insecurity are some of the new problems the bloc is facing.A solution for the Syrian crisis is needed urgently because it is re-lated to European cohesion and security.This is where we stand now. Cooperation between all key players is absolutely necessary.“Security in Europe calls for more cooperative and effective global order,” said Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the Union for foreign affairs said during the Ministerial Council con-ference of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Eu-rope (OSCE).Mogherini also said that “terrorism poses a direct threat to all countries and all people, regardless of ethnic background, religion or belief or nationality.”

Cooperation is the solution to Syria

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03ANALYSISNEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

People in Denmark, do not wish to deepen their country’s EU membership as they voted against the government’s proposal to abolish some Danish opt-outs from EU home affairs legislation.

According to the final results, the “No” side received 53.1 percent of votes, while the “Yes” camp garnered 46.9 percent. The turnout was high as it stood at 72 percent.

Even though an EU state, Denmark does not fully participate in the EU’s justice and home affairs policies after Danish voters rejected the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. After the rejection, Denmark was offered opt-outs in some EU areas in 1993, and only then the Danes agreed to the Maastricht treaty. Denmark is not the only EU Member State with such kind of agreements, as Britain and Ireland have also long enjoyed similar

exemptions from EU laws.The Danish pro-EU centre-right

government, was in favour of yes and asked from citizens of the country to approve the replacement of Denmark’s opt-out to the EU’s justice and home affair rules, with an opt-in agreement that would result in Denmark joining 22 specific EU legislative acts. On the other hand, the right-wing Euro-sceptic Danish People’s Party (DF), led the “no” campaign arguing that dropping the justice opt-out would give too much power to Brussels.

After the vote, Prime Minister of Denmark Lars Lokke Rasmussen told journalists that the results of the referendum indicate “a clear no,” and added that he had “full respect” for the voters’ decision.

Head of the DF, Kristian Thulesen-Dahl said after the election results: “The Danes know

that when things are left to Brussels, they’re left a long way away in a non-transparent system where we lose a lot of our democracy … Danes are saying yes to cooperation but no to relinquishing more sovereignty to Brussels.”

According to the Local Denmark, after leaving a polling station in Copenhagen, a couple who voted no said the referendum was on purpose packed with technicalities.

“They have packed so many things together in that proposal. They talk to the population as if we were idiots,” the couple said. The Local reported that according to daily Politiken, almost two-thirds of Danes were unable to explain the vote mainly because of the complexity of the EU justice policies.

After the election results, Denmark is now unable to stay in Europol when the legal status of the EU agency changes in 2016.

Up until now the intergovernmental legal nature of EU legislation regarding Europol enabled the Nordic country to participate in Europol despite its legal exemption. However, EU legislation on Europol will change in 2016, turning the agency into a supranational and not an inter-governmental institution.

As a result, Denmark may now pushed out of the EU’s joint police law enforcement agency. German public broadcaster, Deutshe Welle, reported that Rasmussen will now have to negotiate new deals with Brussels to be able to ensure a cooperation between Europol and Denmark. The Local reported that opponents of the referendum argued that Danish government can negotiate a separate agreement to stay in Europol. However, governmental official said that such an agreement is neither certain nor simple.

Danes reject deeper integration with the EUIn Denmark a referendum took place, to replace the country’s opt-out on EU Justice and Home Affairs with an opt-in. People in Denmark rejected the idea

(Continued from Page 01)The deal foresees data being available to other countries’ security agencies for six months and stored and available under stricter rules for a further 4-1/2 years. France wanted a year’s easy availability and parliament just three months.

A French call for the rules to apply not only to flights to and from non-EU countries but to internal European Union flights was left in the deal as an option. But French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he was satisfied, since all 28 states had pledged to implement the option of collecting internal flight data.

PNR includes name, travel dates, itinerary, ticket details, contact details, travel agent, means of payment, seat number and baggage information. Many police forces already collect it and many European states share it with each other and with countries outside Europe. But the lack of a common EU system, including data formats, has been seen as hampering European security.

Last week, the Civil Liberties Committee MEP leading the negotiations on the EU Passenger Name Record (PNR) proposal, on the use of air passengers’ data to fight terrorism and serious transnational crime, had already a three-way “trilogue” talks with the Council and Commission. The Commission briefed the committee on its progress. The Parliament aims to reach a deal on this file by the end of 2015. Kirkhope, the rapporteur on the EU PNR proposal, which would oblige airlines to hand their passengers’ data to EU countries in order to help the authorities to fight terrorism and serious transnational crime, also briefed last week the Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee on the progress of the ongoing negotiations with the Council and Commission. Last month already, interior and justice ministers, who met in Brussels at the request of France following the Islamic State attacks that killed 130 people, had agreed to press for a deal by the end of the year on sharing airline travelers’ data. The EU already

has airline passenger data sharing agreements with the United States and Canada, and some countries within the bloc such as France have put in place their own passenger record systems, but there is no EU-wide system.

Here are some successful cases of the use of PNR by the US:

▶ Passenger Name Record (PNR) data led to the arrest and lengthy prison sentence of David Headley for a dozen federal terrorism crimes, relating to his role in planning the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, killing 164 victims, and his role in a subsequent proposed attack on a newspaper in Denmark.

In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provided U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with partial information on a terrorism subject of interest. CBP used this information to query historical Passenger Name Record (PNR) information and identified Headley as the likely subject.

Based on this identification, Headley was nominated to the Terrorist Screening

Database. In August 2009, investigators with the FBI and ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) interviewed Headley when he arrived in the U.S. from Europe. Subsequent investigation led to Headley arrest in October 2009 at O’Hare International Airport before he could board a flight to Philadelphia, intending to travel on to Pakistan to deliver approximately 13 surveillance videos from Denmark that were to be used in a future terrorist attack.

— Also, PNR Data Leads to Arrest of 2009 New York Subway System Attempted Bomber (Najibullah Zazi). U.S. Lawful Permanent Resident Najibullah Zazi and two co-conspirators flew to Peshawar, Pakistan and were recruited by al-Qa’ida, which provided weapons and explosives training.

British authorities identified Zazi from communication by an Al-Qa’ida facilitator in Pakistan, sending a response to an inquiry about bomb-making. This information was shared with U.S. authorities.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) conducted research on historical

Passenger Name Record (PNR) information and linked Zazi to two other conspirators, information forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Joint Terrorism Task Force. Investigation of the two conspirators and others led to the arrest of Zazi in September 2009 for conspiring to conduct suicide attacks using homemade explosives against the New York City subway system.

▶ Also, in November 2014, a U.S. citizen arrived in the United States from Cairo, Egypt via Jeddah, Saudi Arabia after departing for Cairo, Egypt in October 2014. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) referred him to secondary inspection because of the Passenger Name Record (PNR) data. During secondary inspection, the subject claimed he had attempted to enter into Iraq, but did not realize he needed a visa. He stated he traveled to the Middle East to “talk to locals about their feelings on the war” and wanted to contact a group like ISIS to see if there were “things he could sympathize with.” Based on this secondary inspection, CBP was able to refer him to law enforcement for further awareness.

▶ Finally, PNR information could be used to identify at least one potential criminal prior to his arrival. In November 2014, a citizen of Mexico arrived on a flight to Las Vegas from Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) used Passenger Name Record (PNR) data to connect her email address to a known international financial fraud/counterfeit credit card organization that steals credit card information from tourists and uses that information to buy high-end items in the United States. Upon her arrival into the U.S., CBP referred the traveler for a law enforcement interview. In a sworn statement, she admitted to the theft and false use of a credit card to purchase over $3,000 worth of goods. CBP denied entry to the traveler and referred the case for further law enforcement action. Dan Alexe

PNR deal: EU states strike deal on air passenger data

A woman walking up to the passport control point for citizens of the European Union at Duesseldorf Airport which uses the new automatic easy-pass control system. EPA/FEDERICO GAMBARINI

04 ANALYSIS NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

The EU Commission adopted today a new Regional Policy programme for the Italian region of Campania,

worth over €4 billion, with more than €3 billion coming from the European Region-al Development Fund (ERDF).

Commissioner for Regional Policy Co-rina Creţu said: “I am glad to have adopted all the ERDF Operational Programmes for 2014-2020; we now have solid, per-formance-oriented investment packages in place to help regions and cities reach the EU goals of growth and job creations. Now it is up to the regions and cities to im-plement the programmes on time, select quality projects and ensure an efficient and strategic use of the funds on the ground.”

As for all programmes adopted for the 2014-2020 period, investments under the Campania programme are strategically fo-cused on four key growth-generating areas: research and innovation, digital technolo-gies, support to small businesses and to the low-carbon economy.

As “Campania” was the last ERDF “In-vestment for Jobs and Growth” programme left to be adopted for 2014-2020, this adop-tion officially marks the beginning of the implementation phase of the new program-ming period.

The expected results of the 2014-2020 programmes and their contribution to EU objectives of growth and jobs, to the Investment Plan and to the Commission’s priorities over the decade will be disclosed and detailed in the Communication on “Investing in jobs and growth – maxim-ising the contribution of the European

Structural and Investment Funds” that will be issued on 14 December. It will also include the outcomes of the negotiations with all the Member States on the Partner-ship Agreements and programmes and the main challenges per country.

As an efficient implementation is cru-cial to achieve the programmes’ expected results, lessons from the past period need to be learnt: this is one of the purposes of the Task Force for Better Implementation which, one year after its launch, has dem-onstrated the success of its methodology. Working in close cooperation with the national authorities and encouraging the exchange of good practices, the Task Force has helped the concerned Member States make the best use of their 2007-2013 EU

funds allocations while paving the way for a smooth implementation in 2014-2020.

The reformed Cohesion Policy for 2014-2020 is a fully fledged EU investment policy. The new Regulation established the obligation for clear and measurable results. Member States and regions had to set in the programmes the objectives they in-tended to achieve and regular monitoring of the progress made towards these goals will be carried out throughout the imple-mentation phase.

With a 2014-2020 budget of almost €200 billion, the European Regional De-velopment Fund aims to strengthen eco-nomic and social cohesion in the EU while actively contributing to the Commission’s priorities; all the ERDF “Investment for

Jobs and Growth” programmes are now adopted while the last European Territo-rial Cooperation (“interreg”) programmes are well advanced and should be adopted by the end of the year.

The Task Force for Better Implementa-tion is part of a larger initiative to improve how Member States and regions invest and manage Cohesion Policy funds, set by Com-missioner Corina Creţu.

The initiative also focuses on help-ing building administrative capacity in Member States and regions, on reducing territorial disparities and helping slower growth regions to catch up and finally, on assessing the uptake of simplification measures and identifying further possi-bilities to simplify rules.

21st century Luddites rise up in Paris

‘Campania’: EU’s regional policy coming of age

In October 2015, the Bertelsmann Founda-tion Social Justice Index released a compara-tive study of poverty in the EU. The Founda-tion was suggesting at one in four Europeans (24,6%) risk poverty and social exclusion. Therein, there were some interesting and counterintuitive findings, including the fact that the most effective welfare system in preventing poverty in Europe is that of the Czech Republic, followed by the Dutch and the Swedish. Another was the fact that the absolute champion of poverty reduction in Europe during the crisis is Poland that went from 34,4% of its population at risk of pov-erty in 2008 to 25,8% in 2015. That is better than Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Greece.Nonetheless, Poland is a big country and that translates to tens of thousands of case of extreme poverty.Each year, the European Aid for the Most Deprived Fund (FEAD), subsidizes 100k tonnes of food aid for Poland’s hungry. In 2015, up to 5,4% of the Poles are in risk of starvation according to a WP Finance report on Thursday, November 3rd. That corre-sponds to €473 million of funding.EU funding ensures basic products such as starch (pasta, rice, barley, etc.), milk, fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, and sugar makes its way to those who are hungry, pooling

together aid from other sources. The fund targets families and individuals in need, in-cluding poor, unemployed, and the home-less, defined as those who receive an income no greater than 150% of social assistance eligibility.Distribution entails cooperation with the Ministry of labour and social policy and the charity sector, including the Federation of Polish food banks, Caritas Poland, Polish Social Assistance Committee, and the Red Cross. That translates into a nation-wide net-work of effective distribution, which can also handle fresh produce. In this distribution in-frastructure too, Poland is doing better than most. This year, Poland distributed 92,600 tonnes of food aid, that is, money well spent and, apparently, well targeted.

Poland deploys EU funding in its fight against hunger

The homeless and poor tuck into a special Easter Sunday breakfast in a huge marquee in the centre of Warsaw, Poland, 05 April 2015.

Commissioner in Charge of Regional Policy, Corina Cretu address a news conference at the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium, 03 December 2015. EPA/LAURENT DUBRULE

The European Commission has confirmed on Thursday that McDonalds Corp. is the subject of a tax avoidance probe. Apparent-ly, the probe exploited a union report issued in 2013 that revealed practices not totally uncommon to big corporations. However, the European Commission believes that the company misused a double non-taxa-tion treaty between the US and the EU to wrongfully justify double non-taxation, ac-cording to Bloomberg.The Financial Times report that the Com-mission believes that Luxemburg has al-lowed McDonalds Europe to pay no cor-poration tax since 2009. The Netherlands have also been probed for various cases in which corporate profits are made to appear as Royalty charges on branding, recipes and know-how generated outside of the EU, thereby avoiding tax.The European Commission’s anti-trust regulator will be looking at whether or not the fast-food chain’s tax arrangements in Luxembourg violate norms. This comes after a series of probes were announced against a number of corporations, includ-ing behemoths like Apple, Fiat Chrysler,

Strabucks, Anheuset-Busch InBev. Should the regulator find McDonalds guilty, it will be required to repay tax breaks. This makes part of a wider campaign by anti-trust Com-missioner Margrethe Vestager.According to the BBC, the company thus far expresses confidence that the probe will not yield any negative findings: “Mc-Donald’s complies with all tax laws and rules in Europe and pays a significant amount of corporate income tax. In fact, from 2010-14, the McDonald’s compa-nies paid more than $2.1bn just in corpo-rate taxes in the European Union, with an average tax rate of almost 27%. Most com-panies probed thus far have been required to make payments.The Wall Street Journal cites Robert B. Stack, the Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Tax Affairs, a concerned that the European Commission is targeting disproportionately US compa-nies. The European Commission respond-ed on Wednesday that it is merely there to enforce the uniform application of national legislation. I.R.

European Commission probes McDonalds for tax avoidance

05ANALYSISNEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

Transport representatives presen-ted initiatives at the United Na-tions climate change conference

(COP21) to promote the use of electro-mobility in the transport sector.

Recognizing that transportation has the highest growth in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of any industrial sec-tor, the representatives presented nu-merous initiatives on December 3, ai-ming to reduce C02 emissions and build more sustainable transport systems.

Paris Declaration on Electro-Mobili-ty and Climate Change & Call to Action

The most important initiatives were announced at the launch of the Paris Declaration on Electro-Mobility and Climate Change & Call to Action. En-dorsed by the UN Environment Pro-gramme (UNEP), the International En-ergy Agency, as well as Tesla Motors and Michelin Nissan-Renault, it reportedly builds on commitments from compa-nies, cities, States and associations that have undertaken decisive efforts towards sustainable transport electrification.

“I think the sector of transport is one of the most important to succeed in fighting climate change,” Ségolène Ro-yal, the French Minister of Ecology, Su-stainable Development and Energy told the UN News Service. “So I announced three concrete initiatives,” she explained.

“First, an open bid about less expensive electric cars – less than 7,000 dollars [per car]; second, an initiative for towns to build a plan of mobility inside cities; and third, roads with positive energy which [would see thruways] covered with panel and would solve the problem between agriculture areas and road areas.”

According to the International En-ergy Agency, if global warming is to be limited to 2 degrees or less, at least 20 per cent of all road vehicles (cars, two and three-wheelers, trucks, buses and others) must be electric-powered by 2030, in conjunction with the low-carbon pro-duction of electricity and hydrogen.

Emissions from the aviation industry

Other announcements at COP21, which centered around the themes of ‘Trans-port’ and ‘Building,’ included new efforts to stabilize emissions from the aviation industry by 2020. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), said it has received 74 action plans to advance the implementation of mitigation measures by States, which accounts for 80.6 per cent of global CO2 emissions from inter-national flight.

During the opening week of COP21, the UN and the Governments of Peru and France also announced major international partnerships that are mobilizing large-scale financing to protect people who are most vulnerable to climate impacts.

These initiatives were announced on the third day of the COP21, dubbed “Re-silience Day.” All of the initiatives are tak-ing place under the Lima to Paris Action Agenda (LPAA), launched one year ago at the previous climate change conference in Peru, aiming to strength climate action be-yond COP21.

“Resilience is really important because the climate is already changing, and we need to be able to not just adapt to the changes but actually develop in a way that takes into account that in the future, climate will still change,” Janos Pasztor, the UN Assistant Secretary-General on Climate Change, told the UN News Service in an interview at the conference site in Paris.

“Even if we stop all the emissions today, there are already enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that the climate will con-tinue to change,” he continued. “So we need to adjust our development process, adjust our economic approach […] and be more resilient to future changes that will happen.”

“Resilience–it is very important when we talk about climate change and its con-sequences,” Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru’s Minister of the Environment, told the UN News Service.

“When we talk about resilience, we are talking about how can we resist […] and avoid negative consequences to our human population,” he explained. “To the wildlife, to the habitat, to the ecosystems, to the wa-ter, to the ocean–that is why we have the ‘Resilience Day.’ If climate change is going to bring us natural disasters, we should have the objective of resilience as a way to face those kinds of consequences.”

Climate Risk Early Warning System

On 2 December, the UN Office for Disas-ter Risk Reduction (UNISDR) launched a new “Climate Risk Early Warning System,” (CREWS), while the governments of Aus-tralia, Canada, France, Germany, Luxem-bourg and the Netherlands agreed to give more than $80 million dollars to equip up to 80 countries with better systems to sup-port countries most vulnerable to climate disasters.

The plan was first proposed in March by France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Laurent

Fabius at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Ja-pan. “Climate related disasters cause human losses and dramatic economic losses each year,” said France’s Secretary of State for Development Annick Girardin.

“We will first help the most exposed countries among [Least Developed Coun-tries] and Small Island States which will be most at risk as the frequency and severity of such hazards are expected to increase in this part of the world,” she added.

Broad Coalition on Paris Pact on Water and Climate Change

AdaptationNews from COP21 also included the an-nouncement from a broad coalition of na-tions, river basin organizations, businesses and civil society groups of the creation of the international Paris Pact on Water and Climate Change Adaptation to make water systems more resilient to climate impacts.

Almost 290 water basin organizations are reportedly engaged under this new Pact. They say without improved water resources management, the progress towards poverty reduction targets, and sustainable develop-ment in all its economic, social and environ-mental dimensions, will be jeopardized.

COP21: Major international partnerships to protect the most vulnerableThe partnerships aims to molibilse large-scale financing to protect people who are most vulnerable to climate impacts

Transport representatives presented a number of initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide (C02) emissions in order to build more sustainable transport systems

Visitors walks by ice blocks from Greenland as part of an art installation entitled ‘Ice Watch Paris’ by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson on display in front of the Pantheon in Paris, France, 03 December 2015. EPA/GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO

COP21: More sustainable transport systems through electro-mobility

Ban optimistic about the outcome of COP21UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that he witnessed positive signs at the opening days of COP21, but at the same time asked from world lead-ers to do moreUN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave a favourable report card for the opening of COP21, but he still urged both de-veloped and developing countries to do more to reach the much wanted universal agreement on halting climate change.“I was very encouraged by what I saw and I heard during the opening days of COP21,” he told a news conference at UN Headquarters in New York, on 3 December. “World leaders did precisely what they were meant to do: give strong impetus to the negotiations. Almost all countries have submitted climate action plans, known as INDCs [Intended Na-tionally Determined Contributions],” he said. “Major economies have made sig-nificant commitments to cut emissions. Many developed countries have made new financial commitments to help poor and vulnerable countries adapt to climate impacts. Philanthropists and entrepre-neurs are making exciting new commit-ments and investments,” he continued, citing the Breakthrough Energy Coalition announced by Bill Gates.“In the global economy, the transition to a low-emissions future is well under way,” Ban said but he stressed that in the nego-tiating room, “there is still a lot of work to do. Key issues remain unresolved, and there is not much time left.”“I continue to press developed countries to recognize their responsibility to take the lead, while urging developing coun-tries to do more in line with their growing capabilities. The world has gone too long without a universal climate agreement that includes all countries as part of the solution. We cannot delay any longer,” the UN chief stressed said.“There is no perfect agreement. But our goal is clear: an agreement that truly ad-dresses climate change, and puts the world on track for long-term prosperity, stability and peace. That is what the days ahead in Paris can and must deliver,” not-ed the UN chief.

06 INTERVIEW NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

by Grandesso Federico

Scott Atran is a senior research fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. He is also the co-founder of

the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford.

Atran, who often briefs members of government, has tenured as Research Di-rector in Anthropology at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, Institut Jean Nicod-Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. He holds positions as Presidential Scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and visiting professor of psychology and public policy at the University of Michi-gan, Ann Arbor.

On November 24 he spoke about the motivations and backgrounds of foreign ter-rorist fighters at the United Nations Coun-ter-Terrorism Committee meeting.

Can you shed some light on the Islamic State’s current strategy after the attacks in Paris?Islamic State is using the same methods as Al-Qaeda and the effects are pretty much the same as the attacks in Madrid or London some 10-15 years ago.

As regards the strategy of IS, which has replaced Al-Qaeda as the spearhead of this revolutionary movement, the networks are still composed by families and friends. In France, there are 2,000 people going through, back and forth from Syria and Iraq to France. Their strategy is outlined within 10 years by the precursors of the Islamic State, when it was still Al-Qaeda in Iraq or in Mesopotamia. The strategy is called Idaraat at-Tawahoush (“The Management of Savagery”).

It is a very straight forward one. It says: “Our job is to look for chaos anywhere in the world and to manage it by giving the people

organisation and method; and where there is no chaos let’s create it as in Europe in or-der to destroy what they call the grey zone, which is an area where most people and Muslims live, it is between the true believer and the infidel.” The idea is to destroy the grey zone, attacking soft targets like restau-rants, theatres, concert hall, bus stations etc.

The enemy will have to use resources, but the targets are to protect so the confi-dence on the state will be undermined and therefore there will be a reaction against Muslims so that they will join IS. This is the strategy and it works.

So what should Europe do at this point?Europe doesn’t know how to integrate im-migrants, unlike the United States. They can only concentrate them in the suburbs of

places like Paris and in slums that are ghet-toized areas. The first thing is to destroy those areas because it’s there where the sym-pathetic ideas to IS are developing almost like in prisons. Belgium, like France, has an overwhelming prison population made by Muslims. In France, 70% of the prisoners are Muslim so you have a permanent underclass in which these ideas are circulating.

After, when they are released from pris-on and return to their neighbourhood, it’s like being in prison again with the same so-cial environment. So, the terrorist idea can grow and develop.

It is fundamental to reduce the prison population and, most important, to provide young people with positive hope in life. It’s a way of channelling their passions, dreams and idealism into something positive.

So far, this has not been done. And thanks to IS, they feel reborn again doing something new which gives them glory, ad-venture and a sense of significance.

We have to concentrate on young people in a transitional stage in their life. Here, these young people have been lectured by mass repetitive messages that don’t talk to them, while IS has spent hundreds of hours talk-ing to one person telling the story of how the world should change.

Facebook, Twitter and other social me-dia platforms are at the centre of Islamic State’s propaganda. How do you think we should stop this? You can’t shut them all down. IS already has 50,000 Twitter accounts with about 1,000 tweets a piece. One young Palestinian devel-oped an app to identify the IP address of an-ybody even interested in IS twitter accounts of jihadist sites. I think it is a hopeless battle because they go into the Deep Net, which is much harder to penetrate without very sophisticated hacking abilities. The biggest problem is our media which are meant to titillate rather than give a public information service.

So, publicity is the oxygen of this sort of violent terrorism. When an event happens, no matter if it’s big or small, it is amplified way beyond and it is able to destabilise so-ciety. We need a little bit more responsibil-ity in our media to stop the problem. Look now, Brussels is locked down. This is ridicu-lous! The same thing happened in Boston with the attack during the marathon. Look also at the people in London who experi-enced this daily during the blitz of the Ger-man air force. And they didn’t slow down the activities. Now the theatrical means by IS are scaring everybody with the result of having precipitate and not useful actions like bombing Raqqa.

New Europe spoke with terrorism expert Scott Atran about Islamic States’ strategy after the attacks in Paris

A Police officer and soldiers stand guard in the ‘Rue des Bouchers’ street, famous for it’s restaurants, following the terror alert level being elevated to 4/4, in Brussels, Belgium, 22 November 2015. EPA/STEPHANIE LECOCQ

‘We have to work on the young generation to better fight Islamic State’

Turkish Stream: the Turkish-Russian divorce appears too dearby IlIa RoubanIs

On Thursday, November 26th, the Russian Minister of development, Alexei Ulyukayev, said that Russia is cancelling Turkish Stream and, perhaps, even the $20bn Akkuyu pro-ject at the Mersin province. Speaking to Sputnik, Ukulayav stated: “This project is no different from any other, we are talking about our investment cooperation [with Turkey], it is one of the most perspective investment projects, and, just like any other project, it falls under the law on special eco-nomic measures.” On Monday, November 30th, Reuters reported that Gazprom was freezing work on Turkish Stream.

But, then there were afterthoughts. On Tuesday, December 1st, Ulyukayev told Itar-Tass that Turkish Stream was not, af-ter all, canceled; that was later confirmed by Reuters. On Thursday, December 3rd, Russia’s Energy Minister, Alexander Novak, said that preparatory work on the Turkish Stream pipeline project was “temporarily suspended.” The problem for Russia is that giving up on Turkish Stream has a tremen-dous cost, economic and geopolitical.Each day Turkish Stream remains “tempo-rarily suspended” costs. Gazprom has spent €1.8bn on the pipeline to be laid under the Black Sea from Germany’s Europipe and Russia’s United Metallurgical Company

(OMK); the company has placed orders for more. In addition, Gazprom paid €400 million to charter special vessels capable of pipelaying over the Black Sea basin. And Gazprom has been developing a 2,506 kilo-meter ‘Southern Corridor’ overland infra-structure that ends up at the Black Sea port of Anapa, which is the jumping off point for Turkish Stream. Billions have been already spent, although how much precisely is un-clear. But, perhaps the existential threat is Russia’s market share in Europe since Tur-key was envisaged as an essential conduit. Russia’s plan was to build Nord Stream II, scaling up the capacity of an existing pipe-line from Russia to Germany by a massive

55 billion cubic meters a year. Beyond Gazprom, the project had secured the back-ing of BASF, E.ON, Engie, OMV, and Royal Dutch Shell. However, ten EU member states signed a letter on November 26th, rejecting the project: Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Roma-nia, Greece, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The rationale was simple: scaling up Nord Stream would not merely consolidate Mos-cow’s 30% share of the EU’s natural gas mar-ket. As significantly, Ukraine and Slovakia would lose €2,6 bn a year in transit fees (1,8 bn/Ukraine; 800 million for Slovakia) and would have to pay heftier charges for their own supply.

07analysisNEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

Ever since the advent of the print-ing press and the subsequent on-slaught of globalization the flow

of information across national borders has increased steadily, and with the dawn of the digital age this flow of information has become a vital portion of our global economy.

However, as Austrian lawyer and privacy advocate Max Schrems argued recently, the personal information of Eu-ropean citizens could often end up in the hands of US intelligence agencies by way of multi-national corporations such as Fa-cebook and Google.

Specifically, Schrems took aim, and brought down, the European Commis-sion’s Safe Harbour Agreement estab-lished in 2000 to allow data transfer to take place without EU member-state con-sent and prevent US companies from go-ing through costly regulatory loopholes. The European Court of Justice sided with Schrems and struck down Safe Harbour as being in violation of European citizens right to privacy.

The ECJ also asserted that the Com-mission did not have the power to curb national regulatory authorities when they created Safe Harbour.

Now what?In the aftermath of the Safe Harbour de-cision, both the European Commission and the United States have redoubled efforts to come up with a new version of Safe Harbour which they began nearly two years ago. And though Schrems has re-filed a lawsuit against Facebook, Fa-cebook spokespersons have been very clear to outline that this is not a Facebook problem, saying:

It is imperative that EU and US gov-ernments ensure that they continue to provide reliable methods for lawful data transfers and resolve any issues relating to national security

Now, local regulatory agencies for each country are allowed to examine and set their own privacy policies and decide whether or not to suspend data transfer to the United States.

Already, European member states have attempted to exert regulations over Facebook, with the Hamburg data protec-tion office launching an investigation into Facebook and saying:

At the moment, any bodythat wants to remain untouched by the legal and politi-cal implications of the judgement, has to store personal data of European citizens only on servers within the European Un-ion.

The balance between benefiting from services like Facebook and Google along with respecting European rights to pri-

vacy and avoiding U.S surveillance has yet to be struck, and to get a better handle on this. Julie Brill, one of the five Commis-sioners of the U.S Federal Trade Commis-sion was in Brussels on Friday, discussing the next steps to be taken after Safe Har-bour: a new mechanism that will be ready within very early in 2016.

Q&A with Julie BrillFTC Commissioner Julie Brill was sworn into office in 2010, and is considered one of the top US minds on internet privacy and data security. Since then she has ad-vocated for protecting consumer privacy, and received the 2014 award for privacy-from the International Association of Pri-vacy Professionals.

After participating in the Q&A session regarding the current developments sur-rounding a new act concerning internet privacy, she informed the journalists pre-sent at the event that the new act is hope-fully going to be ready by January 2016. She gave assurances that data protection is a major objective on the US agenda, adding that:

“Privacy and data protection is not just happening at a federal level in the US, it’s also happening at a state level, and this is something that I think is less visible, but deeply important.”

The Commissioner gave information re-garding the next steps. When asked to give a state of play on the discussions currently going on and what the expectations were in terms of an actual timeline, Brill said:

I think everyone is hopeful that they [the discussions] will be concluded by then [January], I don’t want to promise that it will happen and I don’t want to indicate that if it did take a little bit longer that that’s a major problem.”

New Europe also asked Brill about wheth-er the political parties in the United States have aligned their position on the new agreement.

“Just about everybody that I have spoken to in the US, whether it’s members of Congress, whether it’s business leaders, […] all are interested in seeing a resolution to this as quickly as possible.”

Her comments regarding whether or not the FTC could have done more through the 39 enforcements that they had on Safe Harbour came out in strong defense of work done by the FTC since Safe Harbour was implemented in 2000:

“We didn’t get many compaints (forwarded by the European data protection authorities). Four in fifteen years”

Asked whether this matter had been discussed with her counterparts in Europe, Brill said that there has been “acknowl-edgement of this on both sides”.

Path forwardOn December 17 both US and EU repre-sentatives are supposed to meet and discuss the future of a new Safe Harbour agreement in preparation for presenting their new agree-ment in January of 2016. Right now the plan of the European Commission is to create new frameworks to allow privacy watchdogs to communicate directly to national govern-ments about how their private information is being handled in order to help avoid some of the pitfalls of the original Safe Harbour Agreement.

However, Schrems has no intention of letting up the pressure, as he currently be-lieves that the ECJ decision will prevent the creation of a new Safe Harbour unless US firms agree to treat data from Europe with the exact same rights afforded to it in Europe. If Schrems is correct then the implications for the global economy would be huge, as regu-lation would become far tougher for smaller firms to deal with and manage. Clearly a bal-ance must be struck, and in finding that bal-ance Commissioner Brill has found perhaps her most difficult challenge to do date. New Europe

FTC Commissioner Julie Brill talks about the mechanism to succeed Safe Harbour

A post Safe Harbour world

Max Schrems waiting for the verdict of the European Court of Justice that would go on to strike down safe Harbour, in Luxembourg, 06 October 2015. EPA

08 ANALYSIS NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu

6-12 December , 2015

by dan alexe

Hicham Rahil, is a young but dyna-mic Moroccan politician elected to the National Bureau for the Popular Movement. New Europe’s Dan Alexe sat down with him to discuss terro-rism in the wake of the Paris attacks, and how his country’s ties to Europe are developing.

Dan Alexe: After the Paris ter-ror attacks, a lot of attention has been given to the supposed fai-lure of the integration of the im-migrants in France and Belgium. How do you comment the fact that so many terrorists and jihadists are of Moroccan origin? In order to understand more,

Hicham Rahil: You know, we don’t really feel that those jihadists and extremists are Moroccans. Technically, even juridically, these are people born in Belgium and in France. Ultimately, they are citizens of those countries.

They are not a product of our system of education. Their ties with Morocco are extremely thin. One can argue, of course, that they have lost their roots in Europe and have a shaky identity. Ultimately, any negli-gence, indifference or lack of under-standing of cultural aspirations ine-vitably leads to rising movements of fear and hatred between the different cultures and religions, if not within the same religion.

Some suggest extreme radica-lisation of many young people of North African extraction is due to a lack of socio-cultural iden-tity. This would explain why, for instance, young Turks are not so radicalised as people of north-African extraction. Young Turks tend to live clustered in the same neighbourhoods and to speak only Turkish among themselves in tightly-knit communities. The lack of integration has no effect on them, because their identity is very strong. The young Moroc-cans, on the other hand, whose Arabic language skills are at times rather shaky, and who are often subjected to police or job discri-mination, feel neither from here, nor from there. Their identity is thus blurred an easily replacea-ble by the message of radical Is-lam. How would you comment on that?

That it is a general phenomenon. Extremism has become, unfortuna-tely, a culture that prevails in coun-tries where people do not have much room for freedoms. This phenome-non that caused so much fear, hatred and terrorism thrives in areas where there are no real economic, cultural and political development plans. It is the oppressed who constitute a rec-ruitment and regimentation reservoir for terrorists.

How does Morocco cooperate with Europe in combatting extre-mism?

The security of Europe has an umbilical relation with Morocco. No-body can deny that my country, the kingdom of Morocco, makes a good model of tolerance and diversity. We have given advice and provided assi-stance to Europe whenever possible.

Would you accept the reproach that a country like Morocco has accepted for too long that mos-ques in Europe, and especially in a country such as Belgium, be fi-nanced, administered and run by Saudi preachers, or preachers from other countries in the Middle East, rather than from the Maghreb re-

gion, preachers who brought with them the sometimes intolerant Sa-lafist doctrine that is the very basis of the ideology of Dash, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq?

I disagree. On the contrary, that Morocco gives the example of a to-lerant and open country by develo-ping training programs for ulama (jurists and preachers of mosques) in Europe.

Do you also feel directly con-cerned by the threat of terrorism?

Yes, we are also confronted with terrorism. History teaches us that the regional conflict of low intensi-ty, such as the one in the Moroccan Sahara, may convert into open wars if they are not effectively resolved. In this regard, Europe must take its responsibility. The Saharan conflict could expand and cause expenses and serious security issues, knowing that the Sahel and the sub-Saharan region is known for bandits, smuggling of weapons and people, and terrorism. Security is not the responsibility of a single state, it is the commitment of mutual work of all states, all political parties, the media and every citizen. I would say: it is time to carry out a multilateral pact against terrorism.

From New Europe’s Knowledge Network

In 2016 we will have the USA Presidential Elections. America must regain its internal competitive advantage but at the same time must be able to reinforce its global situation. In this way it´s essential to learn the lessons that more than ever emerge from an America that is try-ing to rebuild its competitive advantage and to reinvent its effective place in a complex and global world. Obama believes in America and so all we do.In the new global economy and innovation s ociety, America has a central role to play towards a new attitude connected with the creation of value and focus on crea-tivity. In a time of change, America can´t wait. America must confirm itself as an “enabler actor” in a very de-manding world, introducing in the society and in the economy a capital of trust and innovation that is essen-tial to ensure a central leadership in the future relations with China and the more and more dynamic developing world. The actors from America should be more and more global, capable of driving to the social matrix a unique dynamic of knowledge building and selling it as a mobile asset on the global market. We need the America of the citizens. Where people know who they are and have a strong commitment with the values of freedom, social justice and development. This is the reason to believe that a new standard of Democ-racy in America, more than a possibility, is an individual and collective necessity for all of us, effective American citizens. Habermas is more than ever present – the dif-ference of America will be in the exercise of the capacity of the individual participation as the central contribu-tion to the reinvention of the collective society. This is a process that is not determined by law. It is effectively constructed by all the actors in a free and collaborative strategic interaction.In a certain sense, we need a new third way for Europe. When Francis Fukuyama spoke about this special global capacity of creating a new commitment between the Americans toward the challenge of the future, he was in fact speaking about this commitment with a new de-mocracy in America. Based in new standards of Social Innovation, this kind of global strategy is above all the confirmation that in America the individual performance in a complex society is possible, desirable and above all necessary for the future.America is facing a new strategic challenge. Reinventing America and giving the American Actors (states, universi-ties, enterprises, civil society) the opportunity of develop-ing new challenges focused on innovation and creativity is in a large sense giving a central contribution to a new global order. The Reinvention of America is the reinven-tion of its people and institutions. An active commitment, in which the focus in the participation and development of new competences, on a collaborative basis, must be the key of the difference. These are the lessons that Barack Obama talked about as the way for the future.

Francisco Jaime Quesado is the General Manager of the Innovation and Knowledge Society in Portugal, a public agency with the mission of coordinating the policies for Information Society and mobilizing it through dissemination, qualification and research activities. It operates within the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education.

The Reinvention of America

by Francisco Jaime Quesado

Morocco: an umbilical relation with Europe

Hicham Rahil, a Moroccan politician elected to the National Bureau

IntervIew:

09ANALYSISNEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

It is regrettable that many critics in Europe have often overlooked the full context of the Thai

political situation. Hence, I must urge our friends to at least recognise the progress Thailand has made – and intend to make – on journey to a strengthened and durable democracy for the Thai people. Stability, prosperity and democracy remain our ultimate goals. More than ever, we are determined to do away with the political merry-go-round that has for decades set us back time and again.

As of now, the process for the drafting of new constitution is still on track to complete within its estimated 20-month timeframe, and the general elections are expected to take place by June 2017. Although this process was restarted recently, after the National Reform Council had decided to reject the proposed draft constitution on 6 September 2015, the new Constitution Drafting Committee was set up and quickly resumed its work since October 2015. Thailand acknowledged that many of our friends are concerned with certain aspects of the current situation. It is necessary to assess the situation with all things considered. We have a roadmap, but we also need a political environment that is sufficiently stable in order to implement much needed reforms in various areas, such as, political system, education, energy, environment, human rights, and anti-corruption, to name a few. For the past 15 months,

the incumbent Government has made groundbreaking progress in many laws and reforms that were previously proven to be politically unviable for the past governments.

Many concerns have been raised with regard to the area of human rights protection. The Thai Government has acknowledged these grave concerns and has taken prompt actions to address them seriously. Much legislative progress, for one, has been made, with several of human rights protection-related acts either enacted or amended, including, the Gender Equality Act, the Public Assembly Act. The Prevention and Suppression of Human Trafficking Act, and, among other, the amendment of the Criminal Code to criminalise child pornography.

Furthermore, Thailand is committed to playing an even more active role in the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (HRC) as well as partnership and cooperation with various countries in the areas of human rights, and not least, the issue of irregular migration, which is a common challenge both the EU and the South and Southeast Asia are facing. Most recently, Thailand just hosted the International Conference on Irregular Migration in the Indian Ocean in Bangkok for the second time on 3-4 December 2015. The purpose of the conference is to pre-empt any possible humanitarian crises of irregular migration in the Indian Ocean.

With regard to Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing in Thailand, combatting IUU and eliminating human trafficking in fishing industry is among the top priorities of the current Thai Government. New fisheries

legislation, a marine resources management plan, and a national strategic plan aimed to combat IUU fishing and promote sustainable management of living marine resources have been approved recently. The new legislation amounts to a fundamental reform of the legal framework in line with the international standard. Several measures have been implemented including installing vessel monitoring system on fishing boats, enhancing information sharing systems between related agencies, and improving the migrant workers registration system.

On economic policy, the Government is moving ahead with a number of large-scale investment projects, such as in the area of infrastructure development and water management.

We are pursuing the establishment of Special Economic Zone along the border to stimulate trade and investment activities with our neighbours. There is a new investment strategy to encourage more high-tech industries, digital economy, and services sector. As the 2nd largest economy in ASEAN, Thailand economic fundamentals are strong, and the Thai economy is stable.

Resolved to restlessly continue these works, Thailand is still on track to develop a strengthened and sustainable democracy for the Thai people and our partners around the world. We merely call on our friends and partners to acknowledge the progress that will finally allow the Thai democracy to evolve, away from the conditions that led us to the cycle of political paralyses and violent spillovers that we had experienced in the past decade.

Ambassador and Head of Mission of Thailand to the European Union

by Nopadol GuNavibool

Is a European Turkey Europe’s last chance?

Current political development in Thailand

Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha (C-F) poses for a group photo with his cabinet members before their first cabinet meeting at Government House in Bangkok, Thailand, 25 August 2015. EPA/NARONG SANGNAK

Milo Đukanović seems to have been around forever, or at least

since the fall of communismĐukanović is the man in the news nowadays, after NATO foreign ministers have agreed last week to invite Montenegro to join the military alliance. Russia has sent warnings that enlargement of the U.S.-led bloc further into the Balkans would be a provocation. Mos-cow opposes any NATO extension to former communist areas of eastern and southeastern Europe, part of an east-west struggle for influence over former Soviet satellites that is at the centre of the cri-sis in Ukraine.Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said last September that any expansion of NATO was “a mistake, even a provocation”. In comments to Russian media then, he described NATO’s so-called open door policy as “irresponsible”. Now we have Montenegro in, of all places.The Moscow-based RIA news agency cited a Russian senator as say-ing on Wednesday that Russia will end joint projects with Monte-negro if the ex-Communist country joins the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Now, the Adriatic state of 650,000 people is expected to become a member formally next year.Born in 1962, Milo Đukanović is the prime minister of the country. Yes, he seems to have been there from time immemorial. He was elevated to prime minister in 1991 at the age of 29. Actually, it was the first paid job he’d ever had. Since then, he has served five terms as prime minister (1991-93, 1993-96, 1996-98, 2003-06, and again since February this year) and one term as Montenegro’s president (1998-2002). Đukanović is also the long-term president of the Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro, originally the Mon-tenegrin branch of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which has governed Montenegro ever since the introduction of multi-party politics.When Đukanović first emerged on the political scene, he was a close ally of Slobodan Milošević. In 1996, however, he turned against Milošević, abandoning the traditional joint Serbian and Montenegrin vision in favour of an independent Montenegro. He oversaw the conversion of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro and Montenegro’s in-creasing separation from Serbia under his leadership, culminating in victory in the May 2006 independence referendum.After serving continuously in office from 1991 to 2006, Đukanović first retired from politics in late 2006, but he returned to the office of Prime Minister in February 2008. He stepped down again in De-cember 2010 before returning for a second time in December 2012.In 1991, Đukanović backed the Yugoslav military action against Croatia and Montenegrin forces participated in the siege and bom-bardment of the historic port of Dubrovnik and other devastation in Croatia. “I’ll never play chess again,” Đukanović famously said at the time, referring to the chessboard-like pattern on the Croatian flag.He always manoeuvred very cleverly. Before the euro, Đukanović introduced the German mark as Montenegro’s currency. The euro then became the de facto currency in Montenegro -- which became in effect the only country in the euro zone, together with Kosovo, that wasn’t a member of the EU.The boss of a future NATO member country, Đukanović has re-peatedly been accused of running a crime ring and a network of cigarette smuggling and money laundering. Montenegro became infamous throughout the former Yugoslavia as supposed mafia state. “If your car has been stolen -- look for it in Montenegro,” was the common wisdom. But Djukanovic steadfastly maintained his innocence and that the accusations were politically motivated.Still, Montenegro’s aura will float over NATO and bring an element of exoticism inside th Alliance. How exotic? Well… the modern film remake of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, of the James Bond franchise, is set there, on Milo Đukanović’s Mediterranean turf.

by daN alexe

10 INTERVIEW NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

The mayor of the Greek city of Pireaus, Ioan-nis Moralis, visited

Brussels in mid-November to discuss his municipality’s de-velopment with European sta-keholders. The municipality of Piraeus and several other sub-urban municipalities within the regional unit of Piraeus form the greater Piraeus area, which has a population of nearly half a million. New Europe intervie-wed Moralis:

New Europe: Mr. Moralis what was the main purpose of your vi-sit to Brussels?

Ioannis Moralis: The new go-vernment of the Municipality of Piraeus took the initiative to present to High Representatives of EU institutions its Urban De-velopment Plan.

By implementing the tool of Integrated Territorial Invest-ment as introduced and de-fined in the context of new Pro-gramming Period (2014-2020) of the EU Structural Funds, we have designed a solid, long-term and modern plan for a sustainable development of Piraeus. To this end, the expe-rience from best practices, the horizontal perspective and the guidance of Brussels is of pro-foundly outmost significance for our work.

What was the reaction of EU of-ficials to your initiative?

I am returning to Greece reas-sured that we follow the right path, that we do something in-novative and professional, that we move faster that the central public administration. In our meetings with Commissioner Cretu and a technical group of Commission’s experts in Regio-nal Policy, we received compli-ments and encouragement for our work so far.

It was a fruitful and produc-tive collaboration. We discussed extensively and in detail about our overall strategy, the metho-dology and the suggested inter-ventions we propose.

Moreover, we exchanged views on the way this new tool (ITI) is being used in the fra-mework of the regional and sectoral operational programs of the Greek Strategic Partner-ship Agreement 2014-2020 and the capacity of the Greek Ad-ministration to correspond to its prerequisites. I have to admit that the Commission’s represen-tatives had in depth studied our draft plan, and made key com-ments and suggestions.

Could you please briefly de-scribe what is the Urban De-velopment Strategy of Piraeus about?

Eighteen months ago we propo-sed to the citizens of Piraeus a new vision, a new strategic approach for our city. Against a background of de-industrialization, high rates of poverty, degraded living stan-dards, heavy traffic, air pollution, abandoned urban areas, and con-trary to the huge impact of the on-

going economic crisis, we believe that Piraeus can and will change. Our vision is to turn the city into an international business, tourism, cultural, maritime and trade des-tination and an attractive and su-stainable urban environment for its citizens.

We are deploying a compre-hensive strategy in order to meet the challenges the city faces as well as the opportunities that are ope-ning up in the coming years. Our plan is based on solid and long-term group of intervention with the aim to harmoniously combine the creation of friendly environ-ment for business and maritime activities along with an active so-cial and urban regeneration policy. This is our understanding of the notion of urban sustainable deve-lopment, a new model of growth, job creation and better quality of living, for the citizens, workers and visitors of Piraeus. “Blue” - referring to the maritime sector development, “Green” - referring to the use of eco-friendly techno-logies, “Smart” - referring to the adoption of innovative services in the municipality, “Viable” - re-ferring to a holistic development approach , and “Open"-referring

to the accessibility of the city, are the key words that characterize our strategy.

According to our information your delegation hold meetings with other Commission’s Direc-torates and officials.

This is absolutely true. Mr Pe-tros Kokkalis, Executive Coun-cilor of the Department of Euro-pean and National Resources of the City of Piraeus, met several officials from DG MARE, DG REGIO, DG GROW and DG CULT, and discussed about di-rect cooperation and funding opportunities with the Europe-an Commission. Our participa-tion in EU programs is of major importance of our development strategy, especially in the do-mains of blue growth, research and innovation, entrepreneur-ship. Our services are already in process of submitting proposals for Commission’s calls, allow me to say, an area that unfortunately Piraeus has not taken advantage of in the past.Last, but not least, Piraeus is among the Cities that run for the European Capital of Culture 2021. What do you consider are your advantages?

Few months ago, we managed to bring Piraeus at the center of interest of Europe. The Europe-an Maritime Day was organized with huge success due to collec-tive action, innovative ideas and voluntarism. It was an experience that inspired us to move forward and open up our horizons. Pirae-us is a longstanding and inexhau-stible source of pioneering cul-tural inspiration and creativity, both of modern and popular art. Due to its extraversion, the Port of Piraeus is a temporal meeting point of civilizations, cultures, ideas. Famous national cultural centers and archeological sites are located in Piraeus while in 2021 we will celebrate 2500 ye-ars since the Battle of Salamis. I am confident that our candidacy has the operational and manage-rial capacity, as well as adequate infrastructure and financial capa-city not only to profit but also to add value to the European Capi-tal of Culture.

21st

An active social and urban regeneration policy for Piraeus

European Commissioner for Regional Policy, Corina Cretu, meets the Mayor of Piraeus, Ioannis Moralis.

The delegation of the city of Piraeus discuss his municipality's developments with European stakeholders.

11AZERBAIJANNEWEUROPE www.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

A t the first plenary ses-sion of the Azerbaijani parliament’s fifth con-

vocation, President Ilham Aliyev said the country’s recent achieve-ments are praised not only within the former Soviet republic but also abroad.

“The international reputation of our country is rising, Azerbaijan is known as a reliable partner. The number of our friends increases, a growing number of countries want to cooperate with us,” Aliyev said at the Milli Majlis, Azerbaijan’s newly elected parliament.

“Azerbaijan’s election to the UN Security Council several years ago with the huge international support of as many as 155 coun-tries reflects the country’s interna-tional prestige,” he added.

The Azerbaijani President stressed that Azerbaijan has been the fastest growing country in the world over the recent years in terms of economic development.

“Today all major financial and economic organisations confirm these realities and set Azerbaijan as an example for another countries. This is indeed our great achieve-ment. Fast economic develop-ment is reflected in the life of the people. Our successful economic reforms are completed with the strong social policy. As a result of this policy our country has made great strides in the reduction of poverty and unemployment over the recent years. Today the rate of both poverty and unemployment is 5% and it is one of the best in-dicators in the world,” Aliyev said.

Azerbaijan continues syste-mic reforms and efforts against corruption and bribery in terms of its further development, Aliyev

said. The head of state stressed the importance of the development of non-oil sector and implemen-tation of infrastructure and social projects in the country’s regions.

Aliyev said that Azerbaijan is redrawing the energy map of Europe. “The implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor pro-ject would expand the opportu-nities of Azerbaijan and increase Azerbaijan’s influence on the pro-cesses taking place in the region and continent. Azerbaijan also plays an important role in the esta-blishment of the East-West trans-port corridor,” he added.

Aliyev said that the situation in the world and the balance of forces are changing. Azerbaijan is developing successfully as the focus of the authorities is the in-terests of the Azerbaijani people, Aliyev said. “We always defend our interests in the internatio-nal arena. Perhaps that is why in some cases we are subjected to unreasonable and sometimes provocative criticism. But it can-not affect our policy, as we go our own way. A powerful econo-my, stability and the unity of the people and the authorities have created such conditions in Azer-baijan that no outside force can influence our policy,” he said.

Aliyev noted that such attemp-ts have already been made and may recur in the future, but Azerbaijan is ready for this. “The best answer to the vile campaigns against Azer-baijan is the realities of our coun-try. We do not have and will not have any liability to any country. We constantly express our posi-tion in international bilateral and multilateral relations. Maybe this is not like some of the outer cir-

cle. Maybe someone expects that Azerbaijan will remain silent or stop expressing its position. No! We will speak when justice is vio-lated, if there are double standards, not only against us, but in general,” the head of state said.

Aliyev noted that Azerbai-jan was one of the few countries which expressed their views on the immigration crisis, and said that the authorities are not going to be silent, seeing injustice: the so-called crisis is a humanitarian catastrophe for the migrants.

“In the course of meetings with our partners, I always say that we do not need help. No one helps us in the settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, although it is clear who is to blame and who is the victim of the occupation,” Aliyev said.

At the parliament session, organisational issues were consi-dered and the Speaker and deputy speakers of the Parliament, as well as chairmen of the committees were elected. The head of Azerbai-jani Parliament’s administration, Sefa Mirzayev, opened the event.

The oldest member of the newly formed Parliament Fattah Heyda-rov, who chaired the session, de-clared it open.

In a secret voting, at Azerbaijan’s parliament of the fifth convocation, all 124 parliamen-tarians voted for Ogtay Asadov electing him chairman of the Milli Majlis of Azerbaijan on Novem-ber 24. Asadov thanked for confi-dence put in him.

Asadov, born January 3, 1955, is a graduate of the Faculty of Engineering Technologies of the Azerbaijan State Petrochemistry Institute. He is a member of the International Water Association. From 1996 to 2005, he served as the president of the Absheron Regional Joint Stock Water Com-pany. He is also a member of the Council of the New Azerbaijan Party. Previously, Asadov was a member of Azerbaijan’s parlia-ment of the second convocation. From December 2, 2005, he ser-ved as the speaker of the parlia-ment. Asadov is also the head of a delegation to the CIS Interpar-liamentary Assembly. He is mar-ried and has two children. Earlier, Asadov was re-elected the spea-ker of Azerbaijan’s parliament.

Member of Parliament Ziyafat Asgarov was elected first depu-ty chairman of the Milli Majlis, while Bahar Muradova and Valeh Alasgarov were elected deputy chairpersons. The chairmen of the committees of the Parliament were elected.

MP Ali Huseynli was appro-ved as chairman of the committee on legal policy and state building, Asgarov as chairman of the com-mittee on defense, security and fight against corruption, Ziyad

Samadzade as chairman of the committee on economic policy, industry and entrepreneurship, Alasgarov as chairman of the committee on natural resources, energy and environment, Eldar Ibrahimov as chairman of the committee on agrarian policy, Hadi Rajabli as chairman of the committee on labor and social policy, Arif Rahimzade as chair-man of the committee on regional issues, Isa Habibbayli as chairman of the committee on science and education, Rafael Huseynov as chairman of the committee on cul-ture, Muradova as chairperson of the committee on human rights, Samad Seyidov as chairman of the committee on international rela-tions and interparliamentary ties, Ahliman Amiraslanov as chair-man of the newly-established committee on healthcare, Agiya Nakhchivanli as chairperson of the newly-established committee on family, women and children af-fairs, Siyavush Novruzov as chair-man of the newly-established committee on public associations and religious organizations, and Fuad Muradov as chairman of the newly-established committee on youth and sports.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan’s Con-stitutional Court has approved the results of the parliamentary elec-tions held in the country on No-vember 1. Constitutional Court Chairman Farhad Abdullayev read out the decision of the Court’s Ple-num. The Constitutional Court held a special meeting on the re-sults of verification of documents, presented by the Central Election Commission, and approval of the parliamentary election results.

- Ariti-Marina Alamanou

21st century Luddites rise up in Paris

Azerbaijan’s economic development makes it fastest growing country

Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev attends a press briefing at a meeting at EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, June 21, 2013. At the first plenary session of the Azerbaijani parliament’s fifth convocation on November 24, 2015, Aliyev said the country’s recent achievements are praised not only within the former Soviet republic but also abroad. EPA/OLIVIER HOSLET

An exterior view of Heydar Aliyev Center in downtown of Baku, Azerbaijan, June 18, 2015. EPA/ROBERT GHEMENT

in focus

KNOWLDGE NETWORK

12 Profiles in leadershiP NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 december , 2015

Justin Trudeau was not supposed to become Prime Minister of Canada, and yet he was born to be just that very

thing. The 2nd youngest Prime Minister in Canadian history was third in the polls just a few months prior to his election, and did not hold his first elected office until 2008. On the other hand, he was born the son of famous Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his ascension to the position of Prime Minister signals the Trudeau family as being a political dynasty in Canada. Richard Nixon, in 1972 at a state dinner reportedly raised his cup to the young baby in attendance and said, “I’d like to toast to the future prime minister of Canada: To Justin Pierre Trudeau.”

Early lifeTrudeau was born in 1971 when his father was Prime Minister of Canada, and as such he grew up accustomed to the privilege and power that come with being in Canada’s highest governmental office. Trudeau was educated in a private Jesuit school and would go on to study literature and become a teacher. Trudeau also worked as a white water rafting guide, actor, bungee jump coach, bouncer, and worked as a charity boxer prior to becoming an elected official.

However, when disaster struck in 1998 with the tragic death of his brother Michel in an avalanche, Trudeau was launched into a different life.

After Michel’s death, Justin’s father Pierre never recovered, and eventually died in 2000 of prostate cancer which he refused treatment for and kept secret from Justin. It was in 2000 that Trudeau gave a moving eulogy of his father which is now famous in Canadian history.

Ascension to ParliamentAfter his eloquent eulogy for his father, the calls for Trudeau to become a politician were deafening, but he resisted this temptation and chose to lead his father’s charity Katimavik which worked with youth in Canada. Trudeau was also in demand as a speaker and was always quick to encourage volunteerism amongst youth.

However, in 2008 with the liberal party losing seats, Trudeau was elected to the parliament representing Papineau, Quebec, one of the poorest and most diverse areas in all of Canada. However, the liberal slide continued into 2011 as the conservatives in Parliament continued to gain more seats and institute what Trudeau and others saw as being a sort of American brand of conservatism in Canada.

Faced with a new uncertainty, liberals looked to Trudeau to right the ship, but sticking to his refusal to use his name as a career springboard Trudeau said:

Because of the history packaged into my name, a lot of people are turning to me in a way that … to be blunt, concerns me

However, Trudeau did become the leader of the party in 2013 by an overwhelming margin of victory and in his acceptance speech asked liberals to join together and end their years of infighting.

I don’t care if you thought my father was great or arrogant,”It doesn’t matter to me whether you were a Chrétien Liberal or a Martin Liberal … The era of hyphenated Liberals ends right here, right now, tonight.”

Trudeau’s leadership of the party has been short, but in his two years as leader they saw a majority return to Parliament as well as Trudeau’s ascension to the top of Canadian government.

A message of positivityIn a world where politics seems ruled by negativity Justin Trudeau stands above the fray. Whether it is Viktor Orban’s warning of “foreign fighters” and the migration crisis or Bernie Sanders’ warnings about the “top 1%” politics has a strictly negative feel in 2015.

Justin Trudeau totally pushes back against this notion, and it is his message of positivity that has made him so popular in Canada today. They love that he did Yoga in front of the parliament building, that he smoked pot, and that he has a tattoo. His hair, often criticized for being too long, made him even more endearing to the public.

He has called for the government to run a deficit, to hike taxes on the top 1% in Canada, and to stimulate the Canadian economy which is struggling as the global price of oil falls.

When criticized for being too young or frivolous for politics Trudeau embraces the criticism, saying:

I know that I am a younger person than many . . . than the other leaders, anyway, but I have taken that as an advantage,” Because my style of approach is to gather around me brilliant people.”Trudeau is inexperienced, but he has

been open about surrounding himself by experts in his cabinet, many of whom are not politicians but experts in their assigned field.

Way forwardTrudeau is a media darling. He is good looking, young, positive, and from a politically famous family. His policies are left of center, and his messaging has been impeccable. He has recently made headlines by appointing half of his cabinet positions to women, responding to criticism for this with “because it is 2015,” and in addition he is committed to issues like climate change, help for the middle class, and legalizing marijuana.All of this being said, Justin Trudeau has far from arrived in becoming a major world leader. He has shown that he can inspire his people, but can he lead them? Trudeau has the pedigree, a top notch cabinet, and the kind of ethics and morality that make for a good politician. Now, he will face his toughest challenge, and the world will be watching.

Canadian Prime Minister designate Justin Trudeau takes part in a press conference at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa, Canada, 20 October 2015. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party beat the incumbent Conservative Stephen Harper in the the 42nd Canadian general election held on 19 October, with 184 confirmed seats. EPA

Justin Trudeau: Natural born Prime Minister

13ANALYSISNEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

by AlexAndros KoronAKis & iliAs roubAnis

Since November 1st, 50,000 people have arrived in Greece; since January

2015, 700,000 people are esti-mated to have transited through Greece, that is, more than the population of Luxembourg. The scale is immense, and the Euro-pean Commission has been wor-king very closely with the Greek authorities to alleviate some of the pressure. Greece had been sluggish to request, and use EU assistance, but on Thursday, December 3, Greece activated three emergency mechanisms to address the refugee crisis the scale of which is unseen since WWII.

At the end of the Justice and Home Affairs Council on Fri-day, European Commissioner for Migration and Home Affairs, Dimitris Avramopoulos, stated that:

“Yesterday important developments have taken place in Greece, I commend these developments, which triggered the Civil Protec-tion Mechanism, requested a RABIT deployment from Frontex, and reached an agreement with Frontex on its land border with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Cyprus has been the first to respond to Greece’s call for civil pro-tection – I call on all other Member States to quickly follow suit. And not just on this, but also in sending their staff and border guards to Frontex for deployment and support in Greece.”

Civil Protection Mechanism

First, Greece activated the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. This Mechanism can mobilize in-kind assistance, including modules (teams and equip-ment), shelter, medical supplies and other non-food items, as well as expertise. The assistance thus far requested from Greece amounts to the needs of a small city: 20 buses, 26 ambulances, 17 mini vans, water pumps, ge-nerators, over 800 heated con-tainers for families, hygienic equipment, 1,000 beds, 1,500 tents, heaters, 100,000 slee-ping bags, raincoats, woolen

blankets, etc. The Greek go-vernment was late in the game to activate the civil protection mechanism, and get European help to deal with the problems at hand, because a conclusive needs assessment was being carried out by the government which seemingly took months.

In such circumstances EU member states provide assi-stance, and the Commission co-finances the transport of relief items and experts to the country in question. In this case, the European Commis-sion has stepped up with the maximum 85% co-financing en-visaged for such circumstances. Even though Greece is the most burdened member state, it was the fifth country to activate this mechanism, following Hungary and Serbia (September), Slove-nia and Croatia (October).

Frontex in GreeceSecondly, Frontex and

Greece have now agreed upon a common operational plan to help in registering and finger-printing migrants at the FY-ROM border. According to the Greek government spokeswo-man, Olga Gerovasili, this is the third time Greece requests the help of Frontex since Septem-ber. Thus far Frontex is assisting the Greek authorities in the Ae-gean islands mainly in border control operations, that is, ope-ration Poseidon Sea in which the agency engages 16 vessels and two helicopters. About 195

officers are said to be helping with collect intelligence about people smuggling networks and there is some engagement with registration of refugees.What will make a significant difference is that Greece has now submitted a formal reque-st for the deployment of Rapid Border Intervention Teams (RABIT) to provide border guard support at its external borders, in the Aegean islands, for a limited period of time.

For such operations, Frontex draws funds, technical and hu-man resources from across the EU 28.

That mechanism has only ever been activated before, in 2010, in Greece, when 700 bor-der guards were deployed along the borders with Turkey for six months.

Jean Asselborn, Minister of Immigration and Asylum of Luxembourg, said that “All Member States today reaffirmed their commitment to Schengen … The deployment of a RABIT operation in Greece will be very important in this respect.”

For such operations, Frontex draws funds, technical and hu-man resources from across the EU 28. Frontex will thus imme-diately deploy across the border with FYROM;

The mechanism has only ever been activated once before — in 2010 — again in Greece, when 700 border guards were deployed at the land border with Turkey for six months.

Greece to stay in Schengen

For weeks or even months there was a looming discussion in Brus-sels, with certain member states suggesting that Greece’s member-ship of the Schengen Zone should be suspended.

European interior ministers met at the Justice and Home Af-fairs Council on Thursday and Friday, and in a turn of events, EU sources told New Europe that use of Article 26 of the Schengen Borders Code was not discussed, contrary to expectations. Indeed, on December 1st, the Luxem-bourgish Presidency distributed a paper to delegations in order to prepare a debate on Schengen for Friday’s Justice and Home Affairs Council. The Presidency propo-sed that the Council “invites the Commission” to activate Articles 19 and 26 of the Schengen Bor-ders Code to “reintroduce border control” and, thereby, to “exclu-de” Greece from Schengen. That is not an non Jean Asselborn, sta-ted that,

“Ministers agree that if, after the six months limit on internal border controls expires, and we see that there is still a serious and persistent deficiency at the external borders, then we need a com-mon European framework to continue having internal border controls beyond the six months.”In talking about Article 26,

Asselborn said that “The pre-

sidency was not targeting any country, North, South, East, West,” and that “It is not legally possible to exclude a Member from the Schengen area.” On Schengen, European Commis-sioner for Migration and Home Affairs , Dimitris Avramopoulos stated at the press conference after the Council that Schengen can be an important part of the solution:

Despite the difficulties that we’ve experienced with the refugee crisis, Schengen is not the problem. On the contrary, we should use its tools and make it part of the solution. This can only happen through the proper implementation of the rules, but also through the reinfor-cement our border controls, mutual trust and informa-tion exchange.I have said it before, and I repeat it again: it is precisely by applying the rules, by using the system, that we ensure the safety of our citizens. We should focus on strengthening and improving Schengen, not breaking it down. In parallel to our upcoming proposal for a European Border Gu-ard, we are also exploring the possibility of a proposal to amend the Schengen Bor-ders Code to allow for syste-matic checks of EU citizens at the external borders – as requested by the Council last time round.For weeks or even months

there was a looming discussion in Brussels, with certain member states suggesting that Greece’s membership of the Schengen Zone should be suspended.

Europeanisation of borders

On December 15th the Europe-an Commission will unveil plans for a European Border and Coast Guard.

Clearly, the spillover effect of the asylum crisis from Greece to the rest of the Schengen Zone brought to the fore the issue of border management, an issue at the heart of sovereignty. The functional logic that drives the project of European Integration is historical marked by succes-sive institutional crises. The re-sult was never quite “inevitable,” it required leadership and com-promise.

At the 3233rd Justice and Home Affairs Council: Mr Etienne SCHNEIDER, Luxembourg Minister of Internal Security; Mr Bernard CAZENEUVE, French Minister for the Interior; Mr Dimitrios AVRAMOPOULOS, Member of the European Commission; Mr Thomas DE MAIZIERE, German Federal Minister for the Interior; Ms Theresa MAY, UK Secretary of State for the Home Department. EUROPEAN UNION

Greek borders become the EU’s borders

14 EnErgy & climatE NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu

6-12 December , 2015

T he Breakthrough Energy Coali-tion, which was launched in Paris at COP21, is a global group of private

investors that will take the risks that allow early-stage energy companies to get innova-tion out of the lab and into the marketplace.

Bill Gates announced the group uniting the efforts of other richest entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos who have pledged billions of dollars of investment in “patient, flexible risk capital” to bring riskier new clean energy technologies to market.

Zuckerberg wrote in a post at his social media site that he is joining “Bill Gates in launching the Breakthrough Energy Coali-tion to invest in new clean energy technolo-gies. Solving the clean energy problem is an essential part of building a better world. We won’t be able to make meaningful progress on other challenges -- like educating or con-necting the world -- without secure energy and a stable climate. Yet progress towards a sustainable energy system is too slow, and the current system doesn’t encourage the kind of innovation that will get us there faster”.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition will invest in ideas that have the potential to transform the way we all produce and consume energy. “As leaders prepare for the UN Climate Change Conference: in Paris this week, we hope this will encourage more partners to make innovation a priority in the

fight against climate change,” the Facebook founder wrote.

The group said it would invest in com-panies that have the best chance to make reliable zero-carbon energy available to everyone at an affordable price. The Break-through Energy Coalition is made up of more than 25 investors from 10 countries. It is launching in conjunction with Mission Innovation, an international effort of more than 15 governments.

“The world needs widely available en-ergy that is reliable, affordable and does not produce carbon. The only way to accom-plish that goal is by developing new tools to power the world,” Breakthrough Energy Coalition said in a statement. “That innova-tion will result from a dramatically scaled up public research pipeline linked to truly patient, flexible investments committed to developing the technologies that will cre-ate a new energy mix. The Breakthrough

Energy Coalition is working together with a growing group of visionary countries who are significantly increasing their public re-search pipeline through the Mission Innova-tion initiative to make that future a reality,” it added.

Brian Deese, US President Barack Oba-ma’s senior adviser on climate change who announced the private-public sector initia-tive to reporters in Washington, said, “more capital at the early stage is going to drive the breakthroughs that will drive costs down”.

Gates was also due to appear alongside US President Barack Obama, Prime Min-ister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande who will launch the Mission Innovation initiative at UN climate summit in Paris on November 30.

The US, France, India and 17 other countries will announce they will double the $10 billion they collectively spend on clean energy research and development in the next five years, shining a spotlight on role of technology in any climate agreement reached in Paris.

US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said securing support for more R&D funding might remain a challenge in a Republican-dominated Congress. Republicans have vowed to push back against Obama’s climate agenda by withholding funds the admin-istration pledges in Paris for climate aid to poor countries.

China’s apparent oil demand rose 7.9% in October from a year earlier to 10.97 million barrels per day, according to the Platts China Oil Analytics report on the latest Chinese government data, released on December 3.

Growth in China’s apparent demand was driven by rising demand for gasoline, jet fuel/kerosene, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and fuel oil. Demand for gasoil de-clined by 3.4% year over year.

China’s refinery throughput in October averaged 10.46 million barrels per day, up 1.6% from a year earlier, data from the coun-try’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed November 11.

Meanwhile, China’s net imports of oil products surged 51% year on year to 503,000 barrels per day in October, driven by strong inflows of LPG, fuel oil and naphtha, accord-ing to data from the General Administration of Customs.

During the first ten months of this year, China’s total apparent oil demand averaged 11.11 million barrels per day, an increase of 7.5% from the same period of 2014.

Platts China Oil Analytics, an on-line platform for supply/demand and trade data, said it expects China’s oil demand to rise by 585,000 barrels per day or 5.6% year over year in 2015.

“We are maintaining our view that ap-parent demand growth in 2016 will ease to under 2% on the back of slowing economic growth momentum,” said Platts China Oil

Analytics senior analyst Yen Ling Song.Gasoil is the most widely consumed oil

product in China and demand has been hit in the last three years because of declining economic growth. Apparent demand in Oc-tober fell 3.4% year over year to 3.37 million barrels per day.

Stocks of gasoil fell nearly 14% in Octo-ber from September to an estimated 65.56 million barrels, according to Platts calcula-tions based on Xinhua’s China Petroleum Stockpile Statistics.

“The drop in stocks indicates that actual gasoil demand may have been higher than 3.37 million barrels per day,” said Platts As-sociate Editorial Director for Asia Oil News Mriganka Jaipuriyar.

Up to 70% of the fuel is used in the trans-port sector while the remainder is used by various sectors, including construction, farming and fishing, industrial heating and to power machinery.

Apparent demand for gasoil rose 2% over January to October to 3.54 million bar-rels per day.

Demand for LPG surged 40.2% year on year to 1.35 million barrels per day. The growth was led by continuing demand for imports from two new propane dehydroge-nation plants.

So far this year, apparent demand for LPG has gained 23.3% year over year to 1.24 million barrels per day. LPG imports over January-October have surged 73.92% year

over year to 367,000 barrels per day.Apparent demand for gasoline rose

14.6% year over year to 2.7 million barrels per day with January-October demand rising 11.2% to 2.68 million barrels per day.

According to Xinhua’s China Petrole-um Stockpile Statistics, gasoline stocks fell 0.97% year over year at the end of October to 49.62 million, the Platts calculations based on Xinhua’s China Petroleum Stockpile Sta-tistics showed.

“With gasoline exports likely to have been maintained at around 160,000 barrels per day in November and December, appar-ent demand is expected to have risen to 2.74

million barrels per day over the two months, bringing year-to-date apparent demand of 2.7 million barrels per day, a near 10% in-crease from 2014,” Song said.

Apparent demand for fuel oil in October rose 13.8% year over year to 821,000 barrels per day, and demand over January-October rose 16.9% year over year to 948,000 barrels per day. Net imports of fuel oil rose 41.5% year over year to 529,000 barrels per day over January-October, led by a jump in imports of petroleum bitumen blend. Data from the General Administration of Customs showed that bitumen blend imports in October surged 153.4% year over year.

China oil demand grows 8% year-over-year in October

Exterior view of the Ravenswood Generating Station, which uses natural gas, fuel oil and kerosene to power its boilers, in Long Island City, New York, US. The Breakthrough Energy Coalition said it would invest in companies that have the best chance to make reliable zero-carbon energy available to everyone at an affordable price. EPA/JUSTIN LANE

Cars go through slow moving traffic at a main road in Beijing, China. Apparent demand for gasoline rose 14.6% year over year to 2.7 million barrels per day with January-October demand rising 11.2% to 2.68 million barrels per day.EPA/ROLEX DELA PENA

Breakthrough Energy Coalition to boost carbon-free technologies

15EnErgy & climatENEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

Oil price drops as OPEC reportedly raises its output ceiling

A t a meeting in Vienna, the Or-ganization of Petroleum-Ex-porting Countries (OPEC)

agreed to raise its output ceiling to 31.5 million barrels per day on December 4, Reuters quoted OPEC sources as say-ing in what appeared to be an effective acknowledgment of existing produc-tion.

Oil futures slumped on December 4 after OPEC reportedly boosted its production ceiling.

Brent crude LCOF6, -1.78% the global oil benchmark, fell 90 cents, s or 2.1%, to $42.94 a barrel on London’s ICE Futures exchange. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, West Texas Intermediate futures CLF6, -2.68% dropped $1.15, or 2.8%, to $39.91 a barrel.

Oil prices were lifted on December 3 by news that OPEC-kingpin Saudi Arabia would propose a production cut if non-OPEC members, such as Russia, also adhere to the cut. But on Decem-ber 4, Saudi Arabia’s Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said, “it is baseless that there is a Saudi coordinated proposal to cut output”.

Most market participants had ex-pected OPEC to stick to its ceiling of 30 million barrels a day.

“Saudi Arabia had spare capac-ity and has been selling more oil to its customers and increasing its market share,” Independent energy consultant

Manouchehr Takin told New Europe on December 2.

He noted that while US shale pro-duction has fallen due to declining in-vestment, major projects that begun when oil prices were high have con-tinued developing despite the recent slump. “We have the shale oil in the United States down while the major super projects are still there and we will have more oil,” Takin said. “All this ex-citing news that Saudi Arabia has won the war, that cutting investment will cause a shortage in supply, that’s five-six years ahead. In 2016 we will not have this effect. Supply is more than demand and the inventories are high. There is too much oil in the market. In 2016, if OPEC doesn’t do anything, oil prices will remain low,” he said.

On December 2, oil dropped close to levels last seen during the financial crisis, after data showed a big increase in US crude stockpiles for the latest week, adding to the global oil glut. Ac-cording to the US Energy Information Administration, US crude inventories rose 1.18 million barrels last week. The strong US dollar also weighed on oil prices.

Iraq and Saudi Arabia have in-creased output close to record levels, while Iran is gearing up to increase its exports when sanctions are lifted next year. Riyadh has been pumping oil in an effort to push out rival producers

and increase market share, regardless of the weak oil price. Global oil markets have been swamped by near-record oversupply, leading hedge funds to amass one of their largest positions bet-ting on further price falls.

Russia is also pumping at record levels of above 10 million barrels a day. Moscow and Riyadh have pivoted their focus to Asian markets. The battle for market share in the east has forced sur-plus Saudi barrels into the European oil market, where Russia has traditionally been the biggest single supplier.

Meanwhile, reports that Turkey is creating obstacles for Russian naval ves-sels traveling in the Black Sea to Syria through the Turkish Straits has raised concerns. The Bosporus and Darda-nelles are the Russian naval forces’ only direct access point to the Mediterra-nean and a primary shipping lane for Russian oil exports.

“There is some oil coming from the Caucasus through the Bosporus as well as the Russian tankers and that maybe an issue if this standoff between Russia and Turkey would become more seri-ous it may have an effect on the actual physical on the market. Now it’s psy-chological,” Takin said. “We have so much oil in the market so there would not be a shortage. But it would have an adverse effect for the Russian oil exporters and the Russian companies. They would lose money.”

Cyprus says French energy company Total has renewed its license to search for oil and gas in waters off the eastern Mediterranean island nation’s south-ern coast for another two years.

Deputy government spokesman Victoras Papadopoulos said the gov-ernment approved the renewal agree-

ment on December 3. Papadopoulos said under the terms of the deal, Total’s search area — or block — would be smaller. He didn’t specify how much area Total cedes back to the govern-ment.

Total went ahead with the deal de-spite disappointing results from an ini-

tial round of exploratory drilling.The area where Total is licensed

to search is situated north of Egyptian waters where Italian energy company ENI announced in August that it had discovered what it called the “largest-ever” gas deposit ever found in the Mediterranean Sea.

Total renews Cyprus offshore gas search deal

Participants attend the start of the 168th OPEC Conference in Vienna, Austria, December 4, 2015. EPA/HERBERT PFARRHOFER

With Washington’s Blessing: Greece Wants To Be Hub

For East Med, Caspian GasATHENS – The major gas discoveries in Israel, Cyprus and Egypt have completely changed regional geopolitics and energy supply in the Eastern Mediterranean, Ener-gean Oil & Gas Chairman CEO Mathios Rigas told New Europe.On December 8, Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi will visit Greece where he will attend a summit meeting with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades on December 9.“These huge quantities of gas that have been found will be looking for a market – and naturally this market is Europe and we have to find a way to bring this gas into Europe via Greece and make Greece an energy hub,” Rigas said on the sidelines of a conference by the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce on December 1.Greece can be an entry point for the rest of Europe via the Trans Adriatic pipeline (TAP) and the Interconnec-tor Greece Bulgaria (IGB). “These are very important and strategic projects that need to happen in order to get Greece connected with the rest of Europe because at the moment Greece is completely isolated. Greece is a very small market,” Rigas said, adding that it can improve its consumption through investments and growth. “Any gas could come through Greece. We need to have LNG [liq-uefied natural gas]; we need to have pipelines; we need to have a number of different suppliers in order to be able to have security of supply for the Greek economy,” Rigas said.US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Athens on De-cember 4 where he applauded the Greek government for moving forward on TAP and IGB that will bring Azeri gas to Europe.Meanwhile, Rigas warned that unless all Greek political parties understand that energy is the area where there has to be consensus and the country adopts a national strat-egy, it’s going to be extremely difficult to create a concept of a Greek energy hub.He also noted that LNG is the obvious solution for ex-porting gas from Cyprus and Israel. “The pipeline that has been discussed - the East Med - is a very ambitious project with a lot of technical and commercial difficul-ties. LNG is the obvious solution. Of course, there is a lot of politics involved because there is a discussion for a pipeline through Turkey; there is a discussion about LNG terminals. There are no LNG terminals at the mo-ment that are available. Egypt’s terminals will be full with the gas that has been found in Egypt and more infrastructure is required in order to bring this gas into Europe,” Rigas said.Italian ENI’s discovery of the massive Zohr gas field off the Egyptian coast is a game-changer for Cairo and the Mediterranean in terms of energy stability. “Up to a few years ago, Egypt was talking about importing gas from Is-rael. Now Egypt has enough gas for its own use and will be exporting gas,” Rigas said. “We have not fully explored the East Med. We still have Greece to explore and I think Greece is country that has a lot of potential we haven’t yet tapped.” KGeropoulos@NEurope.eu follow on twitter @energyinsider

by Kostis Geropoulos

16 ARTS & CULTURE NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

by Colleen Barry, associated Press

Giuseppe Verdi’s rarely staged early masterpiece “Giovanna d’Arco” (“Joan of Arc”), which opens the

La Scala season on Monday, seems to have particular present-day resonance, recount-ing the story of the French patron saint who was inspired by God to fight for her country and came to a premature death.

But the opera house’s principal con-ductor, Riccardo Chailly, said in an inter-view that the production doesn’t try to make a political statement, but is rather an intimate story about a fraught father-daughter relationship.

“I don’t see any political implications,” Chailly told The Associated Press ahead of the traditional Dec. 7 opening gala, one of the biggest events on the European cul-tural calendar. “I do see one thing which is extremely contemporary, which is the conflict between the daughter and the fa-ther. It is something which goes on forever since human beings have been born.”

The return of Verdi’s seventh opera to La Scala after an absence of 150 years comes just weeks after the Paris attacks struck at the heart of Western culture and with La Scala itself identified as a possible target for attacks. For the first time ever, guests, including titans of culture, busi-ness and politics, will pass through metal detectors as part of enhanced security. La Scala’s general manager, Alexander Perei-ra, has expressed confidence in the addi-tional measures.

“I don’t even want to start worrying,” Chailly said. “Because it is beyond my powers to know or to control it.”

Pereira and Chailly, who will take over as La Scala’s musical director in 2017 af-ter concluding other commitments, de-cided two years ago to open the 2015-16 season with “Giovanna d’Arco,” an artistic and musical choice made as they set out

to make Italian opera more central to La Scala’s repertoire.

In Verdi’s take on the historic tale, Joan of Arc’s father is a dominant presence as he expresses his fears that his daughter’s pu-rity has been compromised by a romantic relationship with Charles VII. Russian so-prano Anna Netrebko sings the title role, alongside tenor Francesco Meli as Charles and baritone Carlos Alvarez as Giovanna’s father, Giacomo.

Chailly said one reason “Giovanna d’Arco” is so rarely performed is its diffi-culty, in terms of both the music and the staging.

“The music is very complex. But the producer has to deal with a very, very spe-cial context to this story, which has a lot to do with nightmares, dreams, visions, invis-ible battles. This complexity of the mind and the soul of Giovanna, to be staged and to be believable, is quite a complicated as-pect to realize,” he said.

La Scala is wrapping up a year of ar-tistic and managerial transition. Pereira, an Austrian who took over management last year, got off to a rocky start after be-ing accused of conflict of interest over pro-duction contracts made with his previous employer, the Salzburg Festival, with city officials reacting by cutting short his con-tract to one year. But the dispute was re-solved and the board later confirmed him through 2020.

Pereira said he has secured “an impor-tant amount” of funding from abroad -- he won’t say how much -- but that has includ-ed establishing a Friends of La Scala fund-raising organization in the United States. He also has reached out to the theater’s future audience, creating targeted shows especially that brought 35,000 children to La Scala last year. Sales this season in-creased to 38 million euros ($41 million) from 31 million euros in the previous sea-son, he said.

Italian soldiers patrol around the Duomo in Duomo Square Milan, Italy. EPA/MATTEO BAZZI

Intermezzo Kruisstraat 227, Tremelo 016 53 78 00 info@brasserie-intermezzo.be

If you hanker some good “old fashioned” values - and lovely food to match - you should make a beeline for this terrific brasserie. It‘s run by Rebecca and Sabastien De Keyser who very much put the emphasis on providing a family-oriented environment, friendly service and excellent value for money.It doesn‘t pretend to be 5-star but this is, all the same, a place where you‘ll not leave disappointed. The extensive a la carte offers everything from relatively simple croque monsieur and waffles to top-class game and steak. There’s also a monthly-changing suggestions list which, for December, features delicious dishes such as lamb shank with honey sauce, chicon gratin and goose

liver. Unlike a lot of restaurants, mussels, like chicon another great Belgian tradition, are served all year round.The friendly couple also own another brasserie in nearby Mechelen which enjoys a different, more tourist-oriented, clientele.At this 90-seat eatery, though it’s all about catering for locals, including families and, just as is the case with the mouth-watering cuisine, it does not disappoint with a very good children’s menu and even a great kids‘ outdoor playground.Yet another plus is that a full service is provided, be it just a snack or 4-course meal, until quite late.Tremolo is the home of Father Damien, the famous Belgian missionary who helped leprosy victims and there’s a museum nearby dedicated to his memory. If you find yourself in this part of the country don’st forget to call by this place. A former ice cream parlour, it‘s certainly got the competition licked!

La Scala opens new season amid enhanced security

Resto Bites

17Art & Culture NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

V isitors have until the 29th February 2016 to visit the

Picasso.mania exhibition at Paris’ Grand Palais, which focuses on the master’s lega-cy and his influence on con-temporary art. Picasso.mania draws special attention to the turning points of Picasso’s career, from his famous ‘Blue

Period’ to his ‘African Pe-riod’, Cubism, and the works he produced in the 70’s, to-wards the end of his life.

The exhibition features over 400 works, including 101 Picasso masterpieces, notably studies for Les dem-oiselles D’Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937), along with works – paintings, films,

sculptures, videos, graphic arts, installations and pho-tos – by 75 well-known in-ternational artists who’ve been widely influenced by the master. Visitors will be pleased to admire works by postmodern Norwegian artist Erró, Chinese art-ists Zeng Fanzhi and Yan Pei-Ming, American artists

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons and Faith Ringgold, British artist David Hockney, and Benin artists Romuald Hazoumè and Leonce Raphael Ag-bodjelou, among others.

Didier Ottinger, Assis-tant-Director of the Centre Pompidou co-curated Picas-so.mania with art historian Diana Widmaier-Picasso, the artist’s granddaughter, who supervised the loans of rare works belonging to private collectors and the Pi-casso family.

The exhibition decrypts the ‘Picasso myth’, the artist’s stature as a genius of the 20th Century, whose contribu-tion to art equalled Einstein’s to science. This ‘giant’ of modern art, who, at age 13, was already an artist in his own right, and had assimi-lated the great masters at 16, demonstrated an immense talent in all plastic arts, from painting, to sculpture, to printmaking, to ceramics, set design and even costume design for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Although Picasso, who remained faithful to mod-ern figurative art and refused to give in to abstraction,

was criticised by the artis-tic avant-gardes in the 60’s, while Marcel Duchamp was thrust into the limelight, the rediscovery of his latest works in the 80’s revealed his role as a precursor of contemporary art, especially Pop art or ‘Bad Painting’.

Indeed, Picasso’s paint-ings remain the most expen-sive artworks in the world today – his Women of Algiers, (Version O) reached a world auction record when it was

sold at Christie’s in New York for $179 365 000 last May.

More importantly, the immense symbolic value of Picasso’s art is so universally recognized, that the tapestry reproduction of his Guer-nica, which adorns the Secu-rity Council chamber at the UN’s New York headquar-ters, acts a totem of peace.

ErróHommage à Picasso, 1982

Antibes, Musée Picasso, dépôt du Centre national des arts

plastiques depuis 1985© Adagp, Paris 2015 Photo CNAP / Yves Chenot

© Rmn-Grand Palais Poster, Paris 2015 / Gjon Mili/The LIFE Premium Collection/Getty Images

© Succession Picasso 2015© Adagp, Paris 2015

Roy LichtensteinWoman with Flowered Hat

[Femme au chapeau fleuri], 1963© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein New York / ADAGP,

Paris, 2015

Chéri SambaPicasso, 2000

Private Collection© Chéri Samba

© Adagp, Paris 2015

Pablo PicassoMinotaure à la carriole, 6 April, 1936

© Succession Picasso 2015 /Private Collection / photo Patrick Goetelen© Adagp, Paris 2015

Louise Kissalkissa@neurope.eu

All images, Courtesy of RMN Grand Palais, Paris

 

18 EuropEan union NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

Portugal’s new Prime Minister Antonio Costa said on December 2 he intends to free the country’s middle-class from “suffocating taxes” as part of his plan to relaunch the economy, despite fears the belt-loosening could bring back the eurozone country’s debt problems.

Easing the austerity measures imposed after a €78 billion bailout four years ago will put more money in Portuguese pockets and bring a fresh spurt of growth, AP quoted Costa as telling the Parliament in his first policy speech.

Costa has been an opponent of the high taxes, pay cuts and pension freezes that have remained in place despite last year’s end of Portugal’s bailout recovery program. Eurozone leaders, however, are watching carefully to see whether debt-heavy Portugal strays off the path of fiscal consolidation.

“This government will not serve Europe against the Portuguese,” Costa said, though he has vowed to abide by eurozone fiscal discipline.

Costa took office two weeks ago after assembling an anti-austerity alliance with the Communist Party and radical Left Bloc to unseat a center-

right minority government that won October’s general election.

Costa promised to restore government workers’ pay that was cut, raise the minimum salary from €505 a month to €600, slash restaurant sales tax to 13% from 23%, and reduce the 3.5% surtax on everyone’s monthly pay,

though he didn’t say by how much.Costa has provided few details on

how the government plans to pay for all that. He has said the government plans to make savings — for example, by eradicating hospital infections, which cost the public health service some €300 million a year.

Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa (C), flanked by Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva (R) and Secretary of State for Parliamentary Affairs Pedro Nuno Santos during a Plenary Debate, Lisbon, Portugal, December 3, 2015. EPA/TIAGO PETINGA

ITALY|AUTO INDUSTRY

Fiat Chrysler shareholders approve Ferrari spinoff Fiat Chrysler shareholders have overwhelmingly approved the spinoff of supercar maker Ferrari into an independent company. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne, who is also Ferrari’s chairman, confirmed on December 3 that Fiat Chrysler’s remaining 80% stake in Ferrari will be distributed to its shareholders. The Italian-American carmaker sold a 10% stake in Ferrari last month on Wall Street, raising $893 million. It will distribute the rest of its shares for Milan trading on January 4. Ferrari will be controlled by Exor SpA, the Agnelli family holding company, and Piero Ferrari, founder Enzo Ferrari’s son, who retains a 10% stake. The spinoff will help Fiat Chrysler reduce debt and fund growth, while Marchionne plans to transform Ferrari into a luxury goods company. Shareholders voted in Amsterdam, Fiat Chrysler’s legal home.

ITALY|REFUGEES

Rome urges quicker refugee relocations across Europe Italy hopes the slow pace of relocating asylum-seekers to other European Union countries will quicken. So far, only 133 of 40,000 asylum-seekers have been resettled from Italy, with the first departing in October. Interior Ministry official Riccardo Mattei said on December 1 that “mutual trust” must develop between sending and receiving countries for the EU programme to succeed. He expressed hope that the number of asylum-seekers Italy relocates to other countries will double in the next few weeks. Another ministry official, Simona Spinelli, dismissed that fears terrorists might use the relocation program to move between countries, saying the refugees undergo criminal background and fingerprint checks.

CYPRUS|PEACE TALKS

Kerry says peace in reach as hopes for Cyprus deal riseUS Secretary of State John Kerry visited Cyprus on December 3 where he met with Greek Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci separately. “It’s become clear that the ground is really shifting,” Kerry, who is playing only a supporting role in the negotiations, said after meeting President Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci separately. “Tangible progress is being made,” Kerry said. “And I am more convinced than ever that a resolution to the longstanding division of Cyprus is within reach.” “We believe this is Cyprus’ moment,” he told reporters in the divided capital of Nicosia. Cyprus split in 1974 when Turkey invaded the country after a Greece-backed coup. Tens of thousands fled in each direction, and the island has been divided into Greek and Turkish parts ever since. In the past four decades, would-be peacemakers from the US, United Nations and European Union all have attempted to end the ethnic schism. All have failed. The plan is to create a federation of two zones with parallel systems, and Anastasiades and Akinci are supposed to meet three more times in December. Their teams are negotiating every day. Last month, Akinci said an accord was possible by mid-2016. Areas under the recognised government’s control already are in the EU. A deal would bring the Turkish side into the bloc. Kerry, who comes with a mixed mediation record, is trying to nudge the process along.

PORTUGAL|ECONOMY

Costa promises tax relief for middle class

The Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) said it is pleased to announce that Snam S.p.A. will shortly join TAP’s shareholding by acquiring a 20% stake in the project from Statoil.

The news follows Statoil’s announcement this morning that it has agreed to sell its shareholding in TAP, by which it will divest its 20% interest stake in the project. Statoil and Snam have agreed to undertake the transaction provided certain

conditions are met. The transaction is expected to close by end 2015.

Fol low ing closing , TAP ’s shareholding will be comprised of BP (20%), SOCAR (20%), Snam S.p.A. (20%), Fluxys (19%), Enagás (16%) and Axpo (5%).

“I am delighted that Snam S.p.A. will join the TAP project,” TAP Managing Director Ian Bradshaw said.

“The TAP joint venture has always been open to new strategic partners

and I will be very pleased to welcome Snam S.p.A. to TAP. This continues our successful joint venture model that has brought producers, midstream players and gas buyers together to develop this important project. Having Snam in the project will continue to enhance TAP’s strategic position as a truly European project that will transport a new source of gas to the continent’s energy markets,” Bradshaw said.

Snam to join TAP shareholdingITALY| ENERGY

Spain‘s Constitutional Court on December 2 rejected a Catalan regional parliament resolution setting a road map for independence from Spain by 2017.The court ruling said the resolution adopted Nov. 9 by the Barcelona-based parliament violated five articles of the country’s 1978 constitution and articles of the region‘s own statute.The ruling followed a challenge of the resolution by the Spanish government in Madrid. The resolution was seen as one of the most serious confrontations facing the Spanish state in recent

history. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy welcomed the decision, saying it made those “who believe in Spain, national sovereignty and the equality of Spaniards, very happy”.Pro-secession parties who pushed the resolution hold a slim majority in the Catalan regional parliament following September regional elections but the region of 7.5 million people is evenly divided over splitting with the rest of Spain. Catalonia represents nearly a fifth of Spain‘s economic output.The acting Catalan regional

government has said it intends to press ahead with the desire expressed in the resolution. It argues that the resolution is a political one with no legal standing and that the court cannot rule against a parliament’s political will.The resolution authorised the incoming regional government to begin work on a Catalan constitution and to establish tax-collecting and security systems. It also exempted it from being forced to heed Spanish institutions, including the Constitutional Court.

Spanish court rejects Catalan independence SPAIN| CATALONIA

19EuropEan unionNEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 December , 2015

An arms dealer in the German town of Magstadt allegedly sold weapons to the terrorists behind the November 13 attacks in Paris. But some weapons may have been bought in Slovakia.

The Wall Street Journal reported on November 27 that a store in the basement of a Soviet-style building in the western Slovak town of Partizánske has been selling deactivated weapons and replica Nazi uniforms to private collectors or for use as movie props.

As reported in The Slovak Spectator, the shop in Partizánske has also been a source

for weapons that, according to European security officials, were later reactivated and used by jihadists in at least two terror attacks in Europe: the attack on the Charlie Hebdo editorial staff at the beginning the year and also the failed attempt on a train, prevented by off duty US Navy officers.

Slovak security forces are investigating. However, the link between the detained

German man currently in custody in Stuttgart and the arms used in the attacks has not been officially confirmed yet, Slovak newswires wrote, citing the Reuters newswire.

Sweden’s economy is performing well, with growth set to remain strong in the near term, but the housing market is in trouble and unemployment is rising among some groups, reported the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Speaking to IMF Survey at the launch of the IMF’s regular health check of the Swedish economy, mission chief Craig Beaumont said Sweden needed to address the structural problems in housing and labour markets to help sustain growth and stability. He also said Sweden’s high priority given to further improving gender equity.

As regards housing prices, Beaumont said they have been rising very quickly, hitting an annual rate of 18% recently, and by over 20% in Stockholm and Gothenburg.

“Sweden needs to increase competition in the construction sector, for example by improving how municipalities sell land and approve construction plans”.

Asked about unemployment, Beaumont told IMF Survey there is a relationship between unemployment, what’s happening in the housing market, and household debt.

“If we look at overall unemployment, at 7.25%, it’s lower than in many European countries. But when you look more closely

you see that low-skilled people have a 19% unemployment rate and people born in countries outside Sweden a 16% unemployment rate,” he added.

“So, if you look at the whole picture, reforms of the housing market that cool that market off can also help reduce unemployment and stem household debt.” Based on past experience on the pace of

integration “the unemployment rate could rise to about 8.5% by 2020, and remain elevated for some years before declining,” he said.

The IMF called for looser laws concerning the hiring of less-qualified workers to offset the barrier into the labour market posed by high entry-level wages in the Scandinavian country.

Worries in Sweden of a possible housing bubble. EPA/MAURITZ ANTIN

Weapons used in Paris attacks may have come from Germany or Slovakia

Slovakia| TerroriSm

Holland will make migrants and refugees to sign a contract agreeing to uphold Dutch values or pay a fine of up to €1,250 and have their residency revoked. As reported by the UK’s Sunday Express, this new migrant scheme will now be rolled out after successful trials across 13 local councils in the past year.

Migrants will be monitored to see if they uphold other people’s freedoms as well as participate and integrate in society - for example, learning to speak Dutch. The tough measures come as the Netherlands joins other European countries in a widespread crackdown on the ‘open borders’ policy of

the EU, reported the newspaper. For instance, Hungary has erected a barbed wire fence along its borders and both Sweden and Germany.

As for the Dutch social affairs minister, Lodewijk Asscher wrote to MPs that the government was “committed to reducing the number of refugees”. He also described the rush of migrants into the country as a threat to jobs and housing and admitted the migrants’ different culture was a concern. So far 1.5 million migrants entered the European Union illegally in 2015, the European Council’s president Donald Tusk announced on November 29.

Migrants forced to promise to uphold country’s valuesNeTherlaNdS| migraTioN

laTvia|Tax

latvia’s high-income earners slapped with solidarity taxA controversial tax on high salaries – the so-called solidarity tax – was approved by legislators in Latvia and will come into effect in 2016. As reported by The Baltic Course, the new tax law passed with a majority vote of 56 to 13, with ruling coalition MPs voting in favour of the bill and the opposition voting against. Based on the new law, the solidarity tax will be levied on the part of highly-paid employees’ salary exceeding the ceiling for mandatory social security contributions. Under the current legislation, the ceiling is €48,000 a year or slightly more than €4,000 a month, but it is going to increase next year. According to The Baltic Course, the rate of the solidarity tax has been set at 34.09%, of which 23.59% will be paid by the employer and 10.5% by the employee. The government expects the solidarity tax to provide €40.9m in additional budget revenues in 2016 and €46.095m annually in 2017 and 2018.

FiNlaNd|CooperaTioN

Finnish pm backs France in crisis management operationFinland’s Prime Minister Juha Sipilä has confirmed his country’s participation in crisis management operations following the terrorist attacks in Paris. After meeting with French President Francois Hollande in Brussels on November 29, Sipilä said: “I gave an initial response about how Finland can respond to their requests – we’ll get back to them in Finland next week”.“These Finnish measures are mainly crisis management operations, and it is also what France has requested. For example, Mali is on this list, the list of requests,” Sipilä added, referring to a request for assistance in Mali, where French troops are involved in anti-terrorist operations.As reported by the newspaper Yle, France has also requested assistance for anti-terrorism campaigns in Iraq and Syria, where it is said to be preparing for a military intervention.However, current laws in Finland prohibit overseas military campaigns. Current legislation allows the country to participate only in United Nations and European Union crisis management operations.

polaNd|FiNaNCe

poland’s finance minister says spike in social spending can cut deficit

Poland’s new government should prioritise increasing social spending over lowering the budget deficit, Finance Minister Pawel Szalamacha told Reuters in an interview on December 1.“It would be difficult for us to endanger our credibility with the citizens only to squash the deficit in the short term, in particular when cutting the deficit weakens the economy,” Szalamacha told Reuters.On December 2, government announced this year‘s budget deficit would rise nearly 4 billion zlotys ($992m) and could marginally exceed the EU‘s 3% ceiling.

SwedeN|eCoNomy

IMF on Sweden’s economy, housing and unemployment

Polish Finance Minister Pawel Szalamacha attends for a cabinet meeting in Warsaw, Poland, 24 November 2015. EPA/RADEK PIETRUSZKA

20 Around the world NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 december , 2015

A United Nations monitoring group examin-ing terrorist groups in Libya warned Islamic State is expanding and could further extend its power through local alliances.

As reported by CNN, outside Syria and Iraq, Libya has proved to the most promis-ing ground for Islamic State expansion. IS entrenched its control of the former Gad-hafi stronghold of Sirte in recent months and over a hundred miles of coastline bordering the city. The group also retains a presence in

eastern Libya where it is in a pitched contest with al-Qaeda affiliated groups.

The report will increase concerns in European capitals about the potential threat IS poses Europe from Libya in the wake of the Paris attacks, and the pivot by the group towards international terrorism, reported CNN.

The southern islands of the European Union are just a few hundred miles away from the Libyan coastline. More than

100,000 migrants are leaving Libya on boats for Europe annually, according to UN sta-tistics. According to CNN, however, Libya may not offer quite as fertile territory as Syria and Iraq. The UN report notes that “while the group is benefiting from the appeal and notoriety of IS in Iraq and Syria, it is only one player among multiple warring factions in Libya and faces strong resistance from the population, as well as difficulties in building and maintaining local alliances.”

Twitter is preferred when communicating on social media for the supporters of Islamic State in the United States, according to the findings of a new survey published on December 1. The study, which was conducted by George Washington University’s Program on Extrem-ism, examined dozens of terrorism cases and presents new details on the behaviour of Is-lamic State sympathisers in the country. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the suspects are typically younger than terrorism defendants of the past, active on social media and overwhelmingly male and US citizens.At least 56 people in the US have been arrest-ed on charges related to Islamic State this year. This is the largest number of terrorism-related arrests in a single year since the 2001 attacks of 9/11. What is more, there are active investiga-tions continuing in all 50 states, according to law-enforcement officials. Twitter received 2,436 information requests from US law enforcement in the first half of 2015, nearly double the number of requests from the same period a year ago, according to the company’s semi-annual transparency report.According to the Wall Street Journal, popular posts from the U.S. accounts include discus-sions about Islamic State’s military victories and photos of deceased militants.

A Libyan militia advances during clashes with rivals near Bir al-Ghanam, 90 km north of Tripoli, Libya. EPA/STR

Libya|isLamic state

UN warns of Islamic State expansion in Libya

Usa|isLamic state

Islamic State sympathizers in US prefer to tweet

21Around the worldNEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 december , 2015

On December 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin focused on the need to pool global efforts in the fight against terrorism following the at-tacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt.

“We must leave all arguments and disagreements behind and make one powerful fist, a single anti-terror front, which would work on the basis of in-ternational law under the aegis of the United Nations,” he said at his state-of-the-nation address.

“That means no shelter to bandits, no double standards, no contacts whatsoever with any terrorist or-ganisations, no attempts to use them for some selfish goals, no criminal, bloody business with terrorists.”

Without naming the United States, he accused Washington and its allies of turning Iraq, Syria and Libya into a

“zone of chaos and anarchy threaten-ing the entire world” by supporting change of regimes in those countries.

Putin specifically targeted Turkey, accusing it of “allowing terrorists to earn money by selling oil stolen from Syria”. “For that money the bandits are recruiting mercenaries, buying weapons and staging cruel terror at-tacks aimed against our citizens, as well as citizens of France, Lebanon, Mali and other countries,” the Krem-lin leader said.

He accused Turkey of a “treacher-ous war crime” in downing a Russian

warplane at the border with Syria. “Allah must have punished Turkey’s ruling clique by depriving it of sense and reason,” Putin said.

“We will remind them not just once about what they have done, and they will feel sorry about it more than just once,” Putin said without spell-ing out what other actions Russia may take. “But if anyone thinks that after committing a treacherous war crime, the killing of our people, they will get away with (the ban on imports) of tomatoes or some restrictions on construction and other industries, they are deeply mistaken.” Putin also said that Russia should brace itself up

for a possibly long period of low com-modity prices and foreign sanctions. He urged the government to tighten its budget policy and improve the oil-rich nation’s business climate.

Putin said that Russia’s economic situation was “difficult but not criti-cal”. He said however that some in-dustries, including construction, car-making and light industry, were in

“the risk zone”.The deficit of the federal budget

for 2016 should not exceed 3% of gross domestic product, Putin said. He said that at the same time tax terms for local businesses should not change.

Putin calls global efforts in the fight against terrorism

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his annual address to the Federal Assembly in St George’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow, Russia, December 3, 2015. EPA/ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN POOL

RUSSIA|DIPLOMACY RUSSIA|TOURISM

Amid regional turmoil, Israel woos Russian tourists Israeli officials said on December 3 they are launching an outreach campaign to lure Russian tourists. The campaign was prompted in part by the recent bombing of a Russian airliner over Sinai and Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane. Russia has responded by suspending flights to and from Egypt and imposing sanctions on Turkey that include a ban on the sales of tour packages. Both countries normally attract several million Russian tourists each year. Israeli Tourism Minister Yariv Levin says he hopes to see a Russian influx, beginning even in the next few weeks.

RUSSIA|HUMAN RIGHTS

US court to put Russians on trial in Magnitsky-related case A US federal court will hear the first US case connected to an alleged Russian fraud scheme exposed by lawyer Ser-gei Magnitsky, AP reported. Magnitsky died in a Moscow prison in 2009 after accusing Russian officials of stealing $230 million in tax rebates. The Russian presidential coun-cil on human rights said he was beaten and denied medical treatment. The US later enacted a law named after Magnit-sky that allows for sanctions against Russians considered human rights violators. The New York Southern District Court on January 6 will begin hearing a case brought by the US Justice Department against Prevezon Holdings, which is owned by the son of a former Russian government official. The Justice Department accuses Prevezon of us-ing $2 million connected to the fraud scheme to purchase Manhattan real estate.

UKRAINE|ENERGY

Putin opens Crimean ‘energy bridge’ Russian President Vladimir Putin has traveled to the capi-tal of Crimea to open an electricity connection with the Russian mainland, 10 days after the peninsula lost power coming from Ukraine. After Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014, it began building an underwater electricity cable system to the peninsula from Russia’s Krasnodar re-gion. The urgency of the project intensified after electricity pylons in Ukraine were blown up on November 22, leaving Crimea largely without power. Russian news reports said Putin traveled to the city of Simferopol late on December 2 to inaugurate the delivery of Russian power. The first phase is to reach its full 200-megawatt capacity by early January and a second phase of identical capacity is to go online later in December, the reports said.

SERBIA|SECURIT Y

Serbia calls for urgent solution to the problem of migrantsOn December 3, Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said in his opening speech at the 22nd Ministerial Coun-cil of the OSCE in Belgrade that there is no better place to talk about cooperation and security than in Belgrade, around which approximately 100 wars were fought and which was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. The Prime Minister appealed to the Ministerial Council of the OSCE to adopt at the Belgrade conference joint conclusions and recommendations for addressing the problem of migrants.

Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic thanked visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry on December 2 on the support to Serbia’s European path.Speaking to the press at Vila Bokeljka before the beginning of his meeting with Kerry, Vucic said that Serbia is honoured that such an important meeting, such as the OSCE ministerial

meeting is being held in Belgrade.“We are grateful for America’s support to Serbia on its European path and we are grateful on increasingly good bilateral relations we are building,” the Serbian premier said.He underlined that Serbia is trying to maintain stability, security and economic progress in the country and

the region as well. “We see that as one of the most important conditions for the development of all countries of this part of Europe,” Vucic said. Kerry, who was attending the 22nd OSCE Ministerial Council, expressed absolute support to Serbia on its European path and congratulated Vucic on the way he leads Serbia towards that goal.

SERBIA|EU AFFAIRS

Washington supports Serbia’s European path

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lav-rov has called for immediate lifting of an economic blockade of pro-Russian rebel-held eastern Ukraine.

Lavrov, speaking at an Organization for Security and Cooperation meeting on December 3, said that the blockade by the Kiev government “cannot be justified

by anything”. Ukraine clamped down on the rebel-held parts of the Donetsk region and the neighbouring separatist Luhansk region with the blockade, in-cluding freezing of business contacts.

The Kiev government has had no control over parts of eastern Ukraine since pro-Russian separatist rebels be-

gan fighting government forces in April 2014. An armistice signed in the Belarus capital Minsk in February has regularly been violated.

Lavrov says Moscow is “convinced that the prospects for peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine are realistic and have no alternative”.

UKRAINE| DIPLOMACY

Russia calls for lifting of east Ukraine blockade

22 Around the world NEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 december , 2015

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif met Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani on the sidelines of a United Nations climate conference in Paris on November 30. The two men discussed the resumption of peace talks between the Kabul administration and the Taliban. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Sharif offered to support an Afghan-led peace process from which Afghanistan had distanced itself as a result of an upsurge in violence in the country over the summer. The goal is to end the long -running war.According to analysts, this is the first step toward mending bilateral ties, which is essential for the Pakistan-brokered peace talks to resume. The peace process is being actively encouraged by the United States and China,

with the hope that talks with the Taliban can be resuscitated in the next few weeks, according to the newspaper.“Both leaders agreed to work with all those who would enter such a process as legitimate political actors and act, alongside the Afghan government, against those who refuse to take the path of peace,” said the statement from Sharif ’s office. There was no immediate response from the Afghan side. The Wall Street Journal, however, quoted a senior Afghan official saying that in Paris, the two leaders would discuss “Pakistan’s essential support to our peace efforts in Afghanistan”.The Taliban leadership, which is based in Pakistan, has long been accused of backing the insurgents as a proxy for its interests in

Afghanistan, a charge it denies. According to The Wall Street Journal, Kabul has made clear it believes that the Pakistan-based Taliban leadership can be pushed into talks by Islamabad when it chooses. Pakistan acknowledges that it has influence over the Taliban, but insists it can’t order them around.

It’s official. Shareholders in the Washing-ton-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) voted to add China’s yuan to the elite basket of global currencies.

As reported by The Guardian, this is a big boost to Beijing’s global economic ambitions.

China will become the fifth member of the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDR) currency alongside the US dollar, the Japa-nese yen, sterling and the euro.

Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, said on November 30 that including the yuan in the basket was an important mile-stone in integrating China into the global financial system.

“It is also recognition of the progress that the Chinese authorities have made in the past years in reforming China’s mon-etary and financial systems. The continu-ation and deepening of these efforts will bring about a more robust international monetary and financial system, which in turn will support the growth and stability

of China and the global economy,” she said.

However, CNBC reported that the de-cision to include the yuan was a political decision.

Author Gordon Chang told CNBC the yuan cannot be considered freely usable because it cannot be converted into other currencies without restrictions. He said Lagarde was determined to include the yuan in the basket in a bid to prod China toward establishing full convertibility for its currency.

“I actually think what Lagarde did — and this is just a real speculation on my part — she realised how bad things are in China, so what she decided to do was to throw China a lifeline,” Chang told CN-BC’s “Squawk Box.”

China’s economy is likely growing well below the government’s official 6.9% rate and even Citigroup’s projection of 4% in the absence of stimulus spending, Chang said.

Islamic State is threatening to attack India in a new book titled Black Flags that was released online by Islamic State on December 1.

“The Islamic State would now expand be-yond Iraq and Syria”, Black Flags states. “It would now expand into… India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan [and several other countries]”.

As reported by The Indian Express, this is the first time Islamic State offers an analysis of the political situation in India. It notes that “a movement of Hindus is grow-ing who kill Muslims who eat beef. The people who fund these organisations want to grow a huge following of Islam-haters who can turn into potential recruits for

future wars in their countries”.Black Flags also states that India’s Presi-

dent Narendra Modi is “a right wing Hindu nationalist who worships weapons and is preparing his people for a future war against Muslims”.

“They have a political wing for the propa-ganda to get more recruits, and armed militias who can start a terror campaign against their number 1 enemy – the Muslims,” the book states.

According to The Indian Express, the book also says that future Islamic State bat-tles “will rage in every country, and this is why there is over one and a half billion Muslims in the world. They will fight the New World

Order in every land and every place. The peak of this war against the New World Order will be the battle against al-Dajjal (the Antichrist)”.

Islamic State’s strategy, according to the book, is to “do hit-and-run tactics and then go into hiding so [the world] can waste mil-lions or billions of euros on 100,000+ police, investigators, and it can shut down its major cities and lose its money”.

The book also states that future attacks “will make groups in the West attack Islam and the Muslims in Europe forcing Muslims in the West to pick up weapons and start to fight back to defend themselves too. Then a jihad will begin in Europe like it did in Iraq, and this book gives guidance.”

Chinese yuan becomes a global currency

International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde announced IMF is adding China’s renminbi, or Yuan, to the currencies that the Washington-based crisis lender uses as a measure of value, alongside the dollar, euro, yen and pound sterling. EPA/STEPHEN JAFFE

Members of the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) present suspected militants allegedly involved in criminal activities in the area, after their arrest in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, 01 December 2015. EPA/GHULAMULLAH HABIBI

China |CurrenCy

afghanistan| taliban

Pakistani, Afghan leaders talk peace in Paris

india| islamiC state

Islamic State threatens India in new manifestoindia|energy

India can start importing Australia’s uranium Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bish-op has announced that India can begin importing uranium from Australia im-mediately under the Australia-India nu-clear cooperation agreement.As reported by The Economic Times of India, the pact permits Australian companies to commence commercial uranium exports to India and pro-vides the framework for “substantial new trade in energy” between the two countries. “The supply of Australian uranium will help India meet its rapidly grow-ing electricity demand and improve the welfare of its people. The administra-tive arrangements have been signed and uranium exports can begin im-mediately,” Bishop’s office said in a statement. Australia has about 40%of the world’s ura-nium reserves and exports nearly 7,000 tonnes of yellow cake uranium annually. The agreement was signed during a state visit to India by Australia’s then prime minister Tony Abbott in Sep-tember 2014. According to The Economic Times, In-dia has two dozen small reactors at six sites with a capacity of 4,780 MW, or 2% of its total power capacity. But it is planning to increase its nuclear capacity to 63,000 MW by 2032.

23Around the worldNEWEUROPEwww.neweurope.eu6-12 december , 2015

Nigeria|Biafra

New calls for Biafra independence grow in NigeriaNigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, who is struggling to boost the country’s economy and combat the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast, is now facing a new challenge: a protest movement in southeastern Nigeria calling for an inde-pendent state of Biafra.As reported by the Reuters news agency, such calls have become common since the leader of the group, 27-year-old Okoli Ikedi, who represents in Enugu, the region’s main city, was arrested in October. His arrest prompted thousands in the oil-producing southeast to join demonstrations in recent weeks calling for his release.“They want to make us economically poor. They believe the only way to control us is to increase our suffering,” said Ikedi in a trembling voice, adding that his group, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), wants a referendum. The group points to basic problems to support its demands for an independent Biafra, on which presidential spokesman Garba Shehu declined to com-ment, adding that he was not aware that the government was doing anything on the is-sue, reported Reuters. In a separate report, the BBC notes that the last few weeks have seen thousands of young people trooping to the streets of southern Nigeria to protest about the continued detention of a leading Biafra activist, Nnamdi Kanu, who is based in the United Kingdom.

Ethiopia is set to boost export revenue to $16bn, up from the current $3bn, over the next five years in order to become a lower middle-income country by 2025.

As reported by The East African, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn made two key changes in his cabinet. First he appointed Yacob Yala as trade minister. Secondly, he replaced Finance Minister Sufian Ahmed with Abdulaziz Mohammed.

The former trade minister, Kebede Chane, was reportedly sacked for failing to achieve export targets.

According to The New African, Ethiopia’s growth plan seeks to open up key areas of the economy as the country shifts from its reliance on agriculture. Ethiopia plans to reduce the agricultural sector contribution to the GDP by 4 percentage points in the next five years, from the current 40%, in favour of manufacturing and industry. Its current GDP stands at $55.7bn.

The plan includes the privatisation of public entities and an Industrial Park programme aimed at attracting foreign investors. Communication Affairs Office Minister Redwan Hussein was quoted

by The New African as saying that the economic transformation will be achieved by emphasis on the manufacturing sector

during the five-year period.“We are looking at enhancing the

transformation of the domestic private

sector to enable them to become a capable development force in our GDP. Special emphasis will be given to the domestic private sector, especially those who would like to invest in the manufacturing sector. This initiative will be enhanced through incentive packages and creating a favourable environment for doing business,” he said.

According to the World Bank, Ethiopia’s economy has had an average growth of 10.8% per year between 2003 and 2013, compared with the East Africa average of 4.8%. The growth has been driven by the expansion of services; the agricultural sector accounts for most of this growth, while manufacturing performance was relatively modest.

According to The New African, Ethiopia is also planning to construct a railway to the Port of Tadjoura in Djibouti. In October, Ethiopia became the first sub-Saharan African country to have a light railway system when it unveiled the $475m Addis Ababa electrified light railway network.

In the energy sector, the country plans to increase electricity generation fivefold to 17,000MW, and increase access to 90% of the population.

Ethiopia sets course for five years of economic growth

Matti Multiplex building (R), Ethiopia’s first three screen movie theatre complex is pictured on 03 March, 2015 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. EPA/MIKKO PIHAVAARA

ethiopia|ecoNomy

French soldiers active in Rwanda in 1994 should be put under investigation on suspi-cion of complicity in the genocide, according to the International Federation of Human Rights and other rights organisations. More than 800,000 minority Tutsis and politi-cally moderate Hutus were killed in a three-month rampage by ethnic Hutu extremists in 1994 while the world largely stood by, re-

ported the Reuters news agency.An ally of the Rwandan government that ruled before the genocide, France stayed away from last year’s 20-year commemoration after rebel-turned-president Paul Kagame renewed ac-cusations of a direct French role in the killings. According to Reuters, the rights groups now say they have obtained documents showing the French army in late-June 1994 abandoned

hundreds of Tutsis who were slain days later in the hills of Bisesero in western Rwanda. “Certain elements of the French special forc-es with a clear mandate to halt the massacres were stationed about 5km as the crow flies from the crime scene with all the information, communications and equipment needed to mount a life-saving operation instantly,” the rights groups said in a statement.

In response to news that three top athletics officials from the national federation Athletics Kenya (AK) were accused of siphoning sponsorship money, the country’s sports ministry on December 1 announced that all state payments to athletes will be made electronically.

Under the new e-payment measure, all salaries and payments will be easily tracked, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).“Once all data has been profiled, the complaints of players not being paid their allowances on time will be a thing of the past,” Richard Ekai, the ministry’s principal

secretary, its most senior civil servant, told AFP. As reported by the news agency, the international IAAF ethics commission on November 30 announced the provisional suspension of the Kenyan athletics federation president and two other top officials in the “interests of the integrity of the sport”.

KeNya|corruptioN

Kenya combats corruption with e-payments

rwaNda|geNocide

Rights groups call for investigation into French army’s ‘complicity’ in Rwanda genocide

With more than half of Africa’s population expected to live in cities by the year 2050, a gathering in South Africa on November 29 is exploring new models for urban Africa.Hundreds of city officials from across Africa gathered for the seventh Africities Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, to discuss the future of urbanisation on the con-tinent, according to the Associated Press (AP).

“What has worked yesterday, might not work today,” said Jeff Radebe, South Africa’s Minis-ter in the Presidency responsible for planning, as he opened the five-day meeting.As reported by AP, Radebe warned that if de-velopment does not match population growth, future cities will face more crumbling infra-structure and social unrest.Another key topic for the meeting is climate

change. Among the delegates was Deputy Mayor of Paris Patrick Klugman, who de-scribed the French capital as “arguably the most African city outside of Africa” because of its high population of African immigrants.Speaking ahead of the climate talks, scheduled to begin in Paris on November 30, Klugman said environmental sustainability is key to building future African metropolises.

South africa| Securit y

Security, climate key topics at conference in South Africa

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In the wake of the Paris attacks, China called for the world to support its own efforts to fight terror in Xinjiang, reported CNN.“China is also a victim of terrorism, and cracking down on ETIM [Turkestan Islamic Movement] should become an important part of the international fight against terror-ism,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.China blames violence on Islamic militants, led by ETIM, which the United States De-partment listed as a terrorist organization in 2002 a year after the September 11 attacks. According to CNN, however, many analysts dispute its characterisation as an Al-Qaeda or Islamic State-style group. They say that much

of the civil unrest inside Xinjiang is carried out by individuals or small groups, rather than an organised militant group.According to Sophie Richardson, China di-rector at Human Rights Watch, the problem now is the death toll in China’s counterterror-ism campaigns which is “deepening scepti-cism about Beijing’s tactics and goals”. “Violence aimed at terrorising the population is always utterly deplorable, but it does not shield the government's response from scru-tiny,” she added. “If China truly has nothing to hide, then it is past time to allow United Na-tions experts, independent journalists, diplo-mats, and other observers free access to the region to examine all such incidents.”

As reported by CNN, a raid in November by Chinese paramilitary forces killed 28 sus-pects accused of a bloody September attack on a coal mine. According to Radio Free Asia, seven were women and children. State media said the officers flushed them out of a cliffside cave in Xinjiang – home to the mainly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group – with flamethrowers. China was quick to blame Uyghur separatists for the attack on the main. Uyghur exile groups and human rights activ-ists say repressive religious policies and eco-nomic marginalization have provoked much of the recent unrest. They add the education system undermines use of the Uyghur lan-guage, reported CNN.

6-12 December , 2015Once Upon A Time In Athens...

Alexis Tsipras, took a small turn towards Europe

| 1144

Does China have a terrorism problem?

Earlier this year the Thai junta rejected a new constitution and forestalled a return to democracy until mid 2017

and as a result Europe and much of the world expressed a strong concern for the future of Thailand’s democracy. The Euro-pean Parliament has also expressed con-cern, and as such extended an invitation to former Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawa-tra, to address the European Parliament on the political situation in the country. The invitation, dated Oct 7, was co-signed by Elmar Brock, chairman of the EP Commit-tee on Foreign Affairs, and Werner Langen, chair of the panel for relations with South-east Asia and Asean. The invitation led to a strong reaction from the Thai government, who did not even stop short of: (1) suggesting the invitation was fake, (2) suggesting that it was being set up, (3) slamming the Parliamentarians for not communicating only through the official channel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and (4) expressing their dislike of the fact that the government had not been invited.

Now the Thai Supreme Court has de-nied this request to Shinawatra, and is set to remain in country until the end of her trial, a move which .

Not the first timeThis is not the first time that Shinawatra has been denied the right to leave Thailand, as she had lodged a request February of this year that was also denied. Shinawatra’s at-torney stated in February that this was a politically motivated decision, and it seems likely that this most recent decision was also for political purposes.

Brok, Langen respond with letter to Thai Ambassador to EU

Furthermore, New Europe has seen and can verify the authenticity of an additional letter sent by MPs Brock and Langen to the Thai ambassador days prior to the rejection of Shi-nawatra’s request to address the Parliament.

The letter extends an additional re-quest to allow the Thai government to tell its side of the story, and explains that the original letter they sent to Shi-nawatra is in fact authentic. Given that this letter was sent prior to Shinawatra’s

travel denial, combined with its content lends credit to the belief that denying Shinawatra the right to speak to the Eu-ropean Parliament is a political decision set to further strain the country’s rela-tionship with the EU.

Relations with EU strainedThe lack of a return to democracy in Thailand has been highly disturbing to EU policymak-ers, and the decision by MEPs Elmar Brok and Werner Langen to send a letter to former PM Shinawatra has been echoed by official statements from the European Parliament going as far as declaring the coup illegal:

“(The European) Parliament expresses its concerns at the “deteriorating human rights situation in Thailand following the illegal coup of May 2014″ and urges the Thai authorities to lift repressive restrictions on the right to liberty and the peaceful exercise of other human rights,”

This group statement has been backed up individuals statements from MPs such as Ryszard Czarnecki who while addressing the entire Parliament stated:

Thailand which used to be one of the East Asian economic ‘tigers.’ Thailand must hear very clearly a strong demand on part of the European Parliament that democracy must be reinstated there which the country deserves…We should not only monitor the situation in Thailand up close, we should indicate that our economic cooperation may actually be hinged on Thailand’s cooperation with human rights

Thai Junta prevents Yingluck Shinawatra from EU Parliament address

Paramilitary policemen guard around the railway station after a deadly attack by a group of knife-wielding men in Kunming, in southwest China's Yunnan province, 02 March 2014. EPA