Skip to main content

Home/ Geopolitics Weekly/ Group items tagged Italy

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Pedro Gonçalves

Calls grow within G8 to expel Italy as summit plans descend into chaos | World news | g... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...g8-considers-expelling-italy

Italy G8 Silvio Berlusconi

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 07 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Preparations for Wednesday's G8 summit in the Italian mountain town of L'Aquila have been so chaotic there is growing pressure from other member states to have Italy expelled from the group, according to senior western officials.
  • In the last few weeks before the summit, and in the absence of any substantive initiatives on the agenda, the US has taken control. Washington has organised "sherpa calls" (conference calls among senior officials) in a last-ditch bid to inject purpose into the meeting.
  • "For another country to organise the sherpa calls is just unprecedented. It's a nuclear option," said one senior G8 member state official. "The Italians have been just awful. There have been no processes and no planning."
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "The Italian preparations for the summit have been chaotic from start to finish," said Richard Gowan, an analyst at the Centre for International Co-operation at New York University.
  • The behind-the-scenes grumbling has gone as far as suggestions that Italy could be pushed out of the G8 or any successor group. One possibility being floated in European capitals is that Spain, which has higher per capita national income and gives a greater percentage of GDP in aid, would take Italy's place.
  • "The G8 is a club, and clubs have membership dues. Italy has not been paying them," said a European official involved in the summit preparations.
  • Critics say Italy's Berlusconi government has made up for the lack of substance by increasing the size of the guest list. Estimates of the numbers of heads of state coming to L'Aquila range from 39 to 44."This is a gigantic fudge," Gowan said. "The Italians have no ideas and have decided that best thing to do is to spread the agenda extremely thinly to obscure the fact that didn't really have an agenda."
  • Silvio Berlusconi has come in for harsh criticism for delivering only 3% of development aid promises made four years ago, and for planning cuts of more than 50% in Italy's overseas aid budget.
  • The heavy criticism of Italy comes at a time when the future of the G8 as a forum for addressing the world's problems is very much in question. At the beginning of the year the G20 group, which included emerging economies, was seen as a possible replacement, but the G20 London summit in April convinced US officials it was too unwieldy a vehicle.
  • The most likely replacement for the G8 is likely to be between 13- and 16-strong, including rising powers such as China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, which currently attend meetings as the "outreach five" But any transition would be painful as countries jostle for a seat. Italy's removal is seen in a possibility but Spanish membership in its place is unlikely. The US and the emerging economies believe the existing group is too Euro-centric already, and would prefer consolidated EU representation. That is seen as unlikely. No European state wants to give up their place at the table..
Argos Media

Italian Court Upends Trial Involving C.I.A. Links - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...12italy.html

Italy US Extraordinary Rendition CIA Niccolo Pollari Abu Omar

shared by Argos Media on 12 Mar 09 - Cached
  • In a decision that seriously weakened the most high-profile prosecution in Europe involving the seizure of terrorism suspects, Italy’s highest court ruled Wednesday that Italian prosecutors had violated state secrecy in their case against American and Italian intelligence operatives. The decision by the Constitutional Court was a blow to a case of extreme political delicacy between Italy and the United States, in which 25 operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency, an American Air Force colonel and several Italian intelligence officials are charged with the seizure of an Egyptian terrorism suspect in 2003. The Americans are being tried in absentia.
  • The ruling did not throw out the original indictments, but it deemed inadmissible much of the evidence on which the case had been built, including material seized from Italian and American intelligence operatives.
  • The suspect, Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, an imam known as Abu Omar, was seized on the streets of Milan in an instance of what has become known as extraordinary rendition, in which terrorism suspects are sent for interrogation to other countries, some of which use torture. Prosecutors contend that the defendants, who include the former head of Italian military intelligence, kidnapped Mr. Nasr, took him to American military bases in Italy and Germany, and eventually to Egypt
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The former head of Italian military intelligence, Niccolò Pollari, once said that he would call Mr. Berlusconi as a witness. Mr. Pollari’s lawyers have said that higher-level officials made the decision to cooperate with American intelligence operatives.
  • According to lawyers for the prosecution, the court deemed inadmissible files that had been seized from the Rome apartment of an Italian intelligence operative, the Italian news media reported. The court also threw out some testimony from an Italian police officer who said he had participated in Mr. Nasr’s seizure at the request of Robert Seldon Lady, who was then the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief in Milan. But the ruling appeared to admit evidence gathered from wiretaps of intelligence operatives, which the Italian government had filed motions to dismiss.
Pedro Gonçalves

Parma mayor becomes Italy's most-watched politician | Reuters - 0 views

uk.reuters.com/...ly-parma-idUKBRE84Q01U20120527

Italy EU Five-Star Movement

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 27 May 12 - No Cached
  • Pizzarotti's leap to fame comes thanks to the grassroots Five-Star Movement, led by comedian Beppe Grillo, which dealt a stunning blow to the parties that have governed Italy for the past two decades in this month's local elections.
  • The movement, which was created just three years ago and relies extensively on the Internet, has become the country's second most popular party with more than 18 percent support and more than half of Italians would consider voting for it, according to opinion polls.
  • Something like an Italian Michael Moore, Grillo's language is irreverent and outlandish. He uses the most vulgar Italian swear words without hesitation, and awards his political rivals colourful nicknames.Monti is "Rigor Montis," and former Premier Silvio Berlusconi is the "psycho-midget". Italy's established parties are dead, he says, and their leaders are "zombies, vampires, mummies".
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The bear-like Grillo, who sports a beard and a mop of tangled white hair, says Italy should dump the euro, devalue the lira, and force foreign banks to accept debt payments - at a loss - in the new currency.
  • Pizzarotti chooses his words carefully and does not swear. Instead of attacking rivals, he talks about finding "common ground". He sidesteps the question of the euro, saying he is not an economist."We do different jobs," Pizzarotti said of the movement's leader. "He's our loudspeaker, he shakes up people's consciences. He is like a plough that shifts the earth. We are the ones planting the seeds."
  • Grillo refuses to call the movement a party, and bans his candidates from going on TV talk shows. The Internet, his blog and social networks are the movement's main means of communication.It accepts no public campaign financing, unlike the millions of euros pocketed by the established parties every year, funding itself instead from the proceeds of Grillo's stand up shows, and sales of books, videos and T shirts. Pizzarotti spent just over 6,000 euros ($7,500) on his entire campaign.
Pedro Gonçalves

BBC NEWS | Europe | Gaddafi making first Italy visit - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8092535.stm

Lybia Italy Muammar Gaddafi

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 10 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is due in Rome at the start of his first visit to Italy, Libya's former colonial ruler and now its biggest trading partner.
  • He is also due to address a group of 700 women at Rome's concert hall, having requested a meeting with prominent Italian women from the fields of business, politics and culture. He held a similar meeting on a visit to Paris in 2007 with 1,000 selected women guests, who were told he wanted to "save European women."
  • this is his first visit to Italy since he took power in a coup in 1969, following Italy's 30-year occupation of Libya.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Since independence the Italian language has been effectively banned in Libya, she says, while Italian settlers were expelled soon after Col Gaddafi took power and barred from ever returning. Italy's brutal occupation of Libya, when tens of thousands of Libyans were forcibly moved to concentration camps, was not easily forgotten, she says. But in the past few years the relationship has flourished and even turned to friendship.
  • And last year Rome agreed to pay Libya $5bn (£3bn) in reparations for the misdeeds of colonial times.
Pedro Gonçalves

Silvio Berlusconi hits back at criticism over G8 summit | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...lusconi-g8-summit-preparations

Italy G8 Silvio Berlusconi

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 08 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Silvio Berlusconi has attempted to fend off allegations that preparations for the G8 summit have been so chaotic that Italy's membership of the group was being called into question.The Italian prime minister said a report in the Guardian, citing senior western officials as saying the US had taken the lead in managing the agenda for the summit, was "a colossal blunder by a small newspaper".
  • "I hope that the Guardian is expelled from the great newspapers of the world," said the foreign minister, Franco Frattini. "What the Guardian says is a joke – nonsense."The defence minister, Ignazio La Russa, suggested a boycott of the paper because of the report.
Pedro Gonçalves

Whatever euro's fate, Europe's reputation savaged | Reuters - 0 views

uk.reuters.com/...putation-idUKBRE85F03P20120616

EU Europe US China

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 17 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Whether the euro lives or dies, the chaotic way Europe has tackled the crisis could undermine the region's geopolitical clout for years to come and leave it at a distinct disadvantage in a rapidly changing world.
  • "The Europeans are completely consumed with a battle to save the euro zone," says Ian Bremmer, president of political risk consultancy Eurasia Group. "It's a deep and ongoing crisis bigger than any they've experienced in decades... it's an environment where European leaders could hardly be expected to prioritise anything else."That could leave the continent being increasingly sidelined as emerging powers - not just the BRIC powers of Brazil, Russia, India and China but other states such as Turkey, Indonesia and South Africa - grow in importance.At the very least, it could undermine the ability of the continent's leaders to persuade the rest of the world to take them seriously on a range of issues, from trade to the importance of democracy and human rights."Europe probably isn't going to stop preaching to the rest of the world," says Nikolas Gvosdev, professor of national security studies at the US Naval War College. "But it's much less likely that others are going to be inclined to listen."
  • At the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, European states suffered the indignity of being outside the room when the final deal was struck between the United States and emerging powers. In the aftermath of the euro zone crisis, it's a position European leaders may simply have to get used to.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • for the rest of the world, it's not just the continent itself that is rapidly losing its shine. The whole European political model - generous welfare systems, democratic decision-making, closer regional integration and the idea of a currency union as a stabilising factor - no longer seems nearly as appealing to other, still growing regions.
  • "If the euro dies, it will mark the end of the European experiment in forging closer financial and political integration. But it will also have wider international implications."
  • Chellaney argues the demise of the euro might help secure the primacy of the dollar - and therefore perhaps of the United States itself - for years to come.But others believe a European collapse would be a sign of things to come for the US as well.
  • "The health of the euro or the EU, for that matter, will have a marginal impact on gold and power that is tending any way towards Asia, especially China,"
  • Washington takes the potential threat of Europe's unravelling very seriously. In the short-term, the Obama administration is clearly concerned over the electoral fallout should the crisis in Europe cross the Atlantic before November's presidential election.But in the longer term, whether the euro survives or not US planners are beginning to face up to the fact that the continent will likely be poorer and rather more self-centred than Washington had hoped.
  • While Britain and France took the political lead in Libya last year, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates complained European NATO forces were in fact almost entirely dependent on US munitions, logistics and other backup.
  • But the change in European thinking and the additional defence spending Washington called for now looks all but impossible in this time of austerity.
  • "It's doubtful any future US Defence Secretary is even going to bother to make that kind of pitch," says Gvosdev at the US Naval War College. "We'd hoped Europe could take the lead in some parts of North Africa as well as the Balkans and Eastern Europe. That now looks very unlikely."
  • Washington's military "pivot " towards Asia, he said, had been based in part on the assumption that Europe would remain stable and wealthy and the US now had little or nothing to worry about on its North Atlantic flank. A weakened Europe could make US planners much less confident of that, particularly if China extends its influence.
  • Beijing has upped its investments in Europe in recent years, including major port projects in Greece and Italy.
  • Some waning of Europe's international influence was always likely, experts say, with an ageing population chewing up ever more resources and emerging economies inevitably growing faster. But the current crisis could supercharge its decline. Whether the continent's leaders realise that, however, is another matter.
  • "Europe's main source of influence (should) be the success of its political and economic model in providing high living standards and democratic freedoms," says Jack Goldstone, professor of international affairs at George Mason University near Washington DC "If the current crisis undermines both of those as well, Europe will look like a rather weak, badly run system of ageing and economically stagnant states. Irrelevance awaits."
Pedro Gonçalves

BBC News - 'Iran arms runners' held in Italy - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8546870.stm

Iran Italy

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 03 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Nine people, including both Italians and Iranians, have been arrested or are being sought by Italian police on suspicion of trafficking arms to Iran.
  • Police said "some are believed to belong to the Iranian secret services".
  • Italy is Iran's biggest trading partner in the European Union. But it has been among the countries leading calls for tougher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme.
Pedro Gonçalves

BBC NEWS | Africa | Italy and France 'failing Africa' - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8094401.stm

Italy France Bono One Africa Poverty G8

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 11 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Anti-poverty group One, set up by rock star Bono, said Italy had actually cut aid to Africa despite making ambitious pledges at a 2005 economic summit. And it accused France of reducing its aid targets and cutting its aid budget.
  • n 2005, the G8 pledged to increase aid to Africa by $25bn (£15bn) by 2010 - more than doubling the 2004 level of aid to the continent.
Pedro Gonçalves

The European dream is in dire need of a reality check | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...dream-badly-need-reality-check

EU Europe

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 26 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • In every one of the big European states, trust has gone into "a vertiginous decline". Five years ago, no country, not even Britain, showed more than half its voters hostile to Europe, and most were strongly supportive. Now, according to the EU's own Eurobarometer, distrust runs at 53% in Italy, 56% in France, 59% in Germany, 69% in the UK and 72% in Spain. The EU has lost the support of two thirds of its citizens. Does it matter?
  • "Anti-Europeanism" was growing across Europe even before the credit crunch – witness the Lisbon treaty referendums. It is reflected in the rise of nationalist parties and is rampant even among such one-time EU loyalists as Spain, Italy, Greece and Germany. As the head of the European Council on Foreign Relations, José Ignacio Torreblanca, said of yesterday's poll, "The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor or debtor country … citizens now think their national democracy is being subverted."
  • Dreams make dangerous politics, and when they require the imposition of "yet more Europe" against the run of public opinion, they are badly in need of a reality check. The new requirement that the EU (in this case Germany) imposes budgets on indebted states goes far beyond anything domestic voters seem likely to tolerate.Barroso's dream is becoming the vision espoused by the Columbia professor of European history István Deák, who demanded last year in the New York Times "a new imperial construct" as the only alternative to save the continent from a "revival of tribalism". To Deák this new empire was "a sacred task … an almost religious goal: a new European faith that belongs to no church".
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Even a majority of Germans are now anti-EU, and a third want the deutschmark back.
  • Cameron and the sceptics therefore need to be constructive to be plausible. They need to argue for a European Bretton Woods, to write off bad debts and recalibrate regional economies by returning to revalued regional currencies. They need to propose European institutions that respect national politics and character, not just grab more power to the centre. There needs to be a sceptics' vision of Europe.Closer European union was an answer to war. After that it offered an answer to communist dictatorship. In both it could claim success. Finally, at Maastricht in 1992, it flew too near the sun. It pretended that one currency traded within a single politico-economic space could overcome economic diversity and yield a common wealth. It overreached itself. In refusing to recognise this failure, Barroso and his colleagues now risk jeopardising even Europe's earlier successes.
Argos Media

BBC NEWS | Europe | Crowds march against Naples mafia - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7957269.stm

Italy Mafia Cosa Nostra 'Ndrangheta Camorra Sacra Corona Unita

shared by Argos Media on 22 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Thousands of Italians have marched through Naples in one of the largest anti-mafia protests of recent years. Police said 100,000 people gathered for the protest, held annually on the first day of spring.
  • They called for more police action against mafia clans, who have killed more than 900 people in recent decades.
  • Organised crime in Italy is dominated by four mafia clans: Sicily's Cosa Nostra; the Camorra around Naples; Calabria's 'Ndrangheta; and the Sacra Corona Unita, in Puglia. The Italian authorities have hit the Cosa Nostra hard in recent years, says the BBC's Mark Duff in Milan, but other groups maintain their grip and have seen their influence spread. The global economic downturn has also thrown up fresh money-making opportunities for the mafia - such as lending cash to credit-starved businessmen.
Pedro Gonçalves

Authorities Rule Iran Election 'Healthy' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...27iran.html

Iran Iran Elections 2009 Iran Guardian Council G8 Ayatollah Shirazi

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 26 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Despite new international criticism, the Iranian authorities showed no sign Friday of bending to domestic or foreign pressure, insisting that the disputed presidential vote on June 12 was the “healthiest” in three decades.
  • The uncompromising words emerged as the Group of Eight countries, including the United States, mounted a fresh broadside Friday saying they “deplored” the post-election violence and demanding that the “the will of the Iranian people is reflected in the electoral process.”
  • However, he is a member of the influential Assembly of Experts and his threats seemed likely to further intimidate protesters whose presence on the streets has dwindled in the face of the deployment of security forces in large numbers.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Ayatollah Khatami is not regarded as a high-profile figure, so it was not clear how much weight his words carried.
  • At Friday prayers at Tehran university, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami referred to the demonstrators as rioters and declared, “I want the judiciary to punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson.” Reuters quoted him as saying demonstrators should be tried for waging war against God. The punishment for such offenses under Islamic law is death, Reuters said.
  • The authorities have repeatedly dismissed the opposition complaints. In remarks quoted on the official IRNA news agency on Friday , Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, a spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council charged with vetting elections, said the panel had “almost finished reviewing defeated candidates’ election complaints” which the council said earlier numbered in excess of 600.“The reviews showed that the election was the healthiest since the revolution,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said. “There were no major violations in the election.”
  • on Friday, at a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of Eight in Trieste, Italy, a joint statement said they “deployed post-electoral violence which led to the loss of lives of Iranian civilians” and urged Iran to respect human rights, including freedom of expression.” Along with Japan and Russia, the G-8 includes the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Britain.It called on Iran to “guarantee that the will of the Iranian people is reflected in the electoral process” but it said the door must remain open to dialogue with Tehran in its contentious nuclear program, news reports said.
  • The joint statement was a compromise between some European countries seeking a hard line, and Russia, whose foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, was quoted as telling a news conference in Trieste that while Moscow wanted to express its “most serious concern” over use of force in Iran, “we will not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs.”
  • In another indication of the depth of divisions that remain, a senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, called for “national conciliation.” “Definitively, something must be done to ensure that there are no embers burning under the ashes, and that hostilities, antagonism and rivalries are transformed into amity and cooperation among all parties,” he said in comments posted on the state-run Press TV Web site.
Pedro Gonçalves

Misery for social democrats as voters take a turn to the right | Politics | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...eu-elections-social-democrats

EU European Parliament Germany France Poland Netherlands Hungary Hans-Gert Pottering

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 08 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Europe's mainstream centre-left parties suffered humiliation last night when four days of voting in the EU's biggest-ever election concluded with disastrous results for social democrats.
  • With the social democrats licking their wounds and the centre-right scoring ­victories whether in power or in opposition, the other signal trend of the ballot was the breakthroughs achieved by extreme right-wing nationalists and xenophobes.
  • In the EU's biggest country, Germany, returning 99 of the parliament's 736 seats, the Social Democrats (SPD), the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's grand coalition, sunk to an all-time low, with 21% of the vote.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Less than four months before Germany's general election, last night's outcome augured well for Merkel's hopes of ditching her grand coalition in favour of a centre-right alliance with the small Free Democrats, who made the biggest gains, from six to more than 10%.
  • Next door in Austria, the chancellor and leader of the Social Democrats, Werner Faymann, led his party to its worst ever election result, just over 23%.In both countries, the Christian democrats won comfortably, but Merkel's Christian Democrats and her Bavarian CSU allies were six points down, on 38%.
  • France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, claimed triumph with 28% for his UMP party to the Socialists 17%, the first time a sitting French president has won a European election since the vote began 30 years ago.
  • In Italy, the centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi also did well, despite his marital breakdown and scandals over parties at his Sardinian villa, while in Spain the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero also lost the election to conservatives.
  • In Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic, the centre right won the elections, with stunning defeats for the left in certain cases.
  • Following on from the triumph of Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam campaigner, who came second with 17% in the Netherlands on Thursday, the hard-right and neo­fascists chalked up further victories .
  • The anti-Gypsy extremists in Hungary, Jobbik, took three of the country's 22 seats; in Austria two far-right parties mustered 18%, and extreme Slovak nationalists gained their first seat in the European parliament.
  • Anti-Brussels candidates and Eurosceptics also won more seats in Denmark, Finland, Austria, and the Czech Republic.
  • With the jobless numbers soaring amid the worst economic crisis in the lifetimes of European voters, the centre left is clearly failing to benefit politically in circumstances that might be expected to boost its support.
  • Estimates of the new balance of power in the 736-seat assembly suggest that the centre right will have around 270 seats to the socialists' 160, a much wider margin than predicted.
  • Hans-Gert Pöttering, the outgoing president, or speaker, of the European parliament, stressed that Europeans "want" the parliament, but conceded that that desire would not be reflected in the turnout.
  • The damning popular verdict on that assertion, however, was the lowest turnout in 30 years. It was estimated at around 43%, compared with 45% last time, and 62% in Europe's first election in 1979.
Pedro Gonçalves

Awkward photo? There may be more to come as Colonel Gaddafi visits Rome | World news | ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...gaddafi-visit-italy-berlusconi

Italy Lybia Silvio Berlusconi Muammar Gaddafi

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 11 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Berlusconi has had more than a little trouble lately with embarrassing photos. So it must have been with a sinking ­feeling that he watched the Libyan leader descend the aircraft steps with another one pinned to his chest.The photograph Gaddafi wore to several of the ceremonies on the opening day of his visit did not show young women in underwear by Berlusconi's poolside, let alone a former Czech prime minister in the altogether. But it was discomforting for his hosts all the same: it showed the Libyan resistance leader, Omar Mukhtar, the "Lion of the Desert", on the day before he was hanged by ­Italian colonialists in 1931.
Pedro Gonçalves

Crisis for Europe as trust hits record low | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...trust-eu-falls-record-low

EU Europe Eurosceptics

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 26 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • "The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor, debtor country, euro would-be member or the UK: everybody is worse off," said José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the ECFR's Madrid office. "Citizens now think that their national democracy is being subverted by the way the euro crisis is conducted."
  • The most dramatic fall in faith in the EU has occurred in Spain, where the banking and housing market collapse, eurozone bailout and runaway unemployment have combined to produce 72% "tending not to trust" the EU, with only 20% "tending to trust".
  • In Spain, trust in the EU fell from 65% to 20% over the five-year period while mistrust soared to 72% from 23%.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The data compares trust and mistrust in the EU at the end of last year with levels in 2007, before the financial crisis, to reveal a precipitate fall in support for the EU of the kind that is common in Britain but is much more rarely seen on the continent.
  • Five years ago, 56% of Germans "tended to trust" the EU, whereas 59% now "tend to mistrust". In France, mistrust has risen from 41% to 56%. In Italy, where public confidence in Europe has traditionally been higher than in the national political class, mistrust of the EU has almost doubled from 28% to 53%.Even in Poland, which enthusiastically joined the EU less than a decade ago and is the single biggest beneficiary from the transfers of tens of billions of euros from Brussels, support has plummeted from 68% to 48%, although it remains the sole country surveyed where more people trust than mistrust the union.In Britain, where Eurobarometer regularly finds majority Euroscepticism, the mistrust grew from 49% to 69%, the highest level with the exception of the extraordinary turnaround in Spain.
  • "Overall levels of political trust and satisfaction with democracy [declined] across much of Europe, but this varied markedly between countries. It was significant in Britain, Belgium, Denmark and Finland, particularly notable in France, Ireland, Slovenia and Spain, and reached truly alarming proportions in the case of Greece," it said.
  • Aart de Geus, head of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German thinktank, also warned that the drive to surrender more key national powers to Brussels would backfire. "Public support for the EU has been falling since 2007. So it is risky to go for federalism as it can cause a backlash and unleash greater populism."
Pedro Gonçalves

EU meeting on Iran oil embargo set for January 23 | Reuters - 0 views

uk.reuters.com/...iran-oil-idUKTRE8090P720120110

Iran Oil EU Economy

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 10 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Diplomats say the embargo could take several months to start because some EU capitals want a delay to reduce any shocks to their already sluggish economies.EU countries have proposed "grace periods" on existing contracts of between one month and 12 months to allow them to find alternative suppliers before implementing an embargo.Greece, which depends heavily on Iranian crude, is pushing for the longest delay, the diplomats said. Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany wanted a maximum grace period of three months.
  • Iran is the second largest producer of oil, after Saudi Arabia, among the 12 countries in OPEC, producing around 3.5 million barrels per day.EU countries buy nearly 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of Iran's 2.6 million bpd in exports, making the bloc collectively the largest market for Iranian crude, rivalling China.The three biggest EU importers have serious debt problems. Greece imports a quarter of its oil from Iran, Italy about 13 percent and Spain nearly 10 percent.
1 - 20 of 37 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page