Nikolaj Nielsen | Brussels | May 23

euobserver - National Roma integration strategies submitted by member states to the European Commission fail to fully assess the needs of Europe's largest minority.

Speaking to reporters in Strasbourg on Wednesday (23 May), EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding said the desperate situation of Roma is "a wake-up call for leaders."

EU leaders in June 2011 had backed a European Commission plan to end the centuries-old exclusion of the continent's 10 to 12 million Roma minority. Most live in Bulgaria, followed by Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. Access to education, jobs, healthcare and housing are among the four policy priorities.

I always find it both amusing and frustrating when American national security analysts decide they're going to pontificate on NATO and Europe. Try as they might, it seems impossible for them to see the issue in any other than a highly polarized, American exceptionalist, way. Take my friend Michael Cohen at the national Security Network, writing today:

the biggest problem with NATO funding (and this has been true for quite some time) is not that President Obama is undermining the alliance with defense cuts here at home, but rather that America's NATO allies refuse to fully pony up their share of NATO's defense budget. And why they should they? Indeed, as long as NATO funding is used as a political football then the United States will continue to be played for a sucker by the Europeans who know that for all our complaining about their lack of financial support for the military alliance . . . we're never going to pull the plug.

At some point, it's worth asking whether this makes any sense at all. Why should the US be responsible for underwriting European security (and in turn the European welfare state), especially when European countries face not a single legitimate military threat to their well-being? Moreover, it Europeans don't think it's important enough to spend their own money on their own security why should America? Now granted, the Europeans are a little short on cash these days, but then so is the United States. But of course as the House of Representatives reminded us recently - as they eviscerated key social safety net programs to restore cuts made to the defense budget -- you can't put a price tag on a huge American military that does little to keep America safe and underwrites the security of other countries.

In Romney's statement he noted "NATO is a testament to the fact that the price of weakness is always far greater than the price of strength." If anything it's increasingly becoming a testament to how divorced from reality our own national security debate has become. The new American weakness is apparently when you don't let key European allies take enough advantage of you.

Now there are exactly two unarguable facts in all that: that Europe refuses to pony up its share of the NATO budget and that European countries face not a single legitimate military threat to their well-being. Do you think the two might be connected?

Look, from a European point of view - and I don't mean the poodlish yes-men in London - the NATO budget may be agreed to by all parties but it is set to an American agenda and only agreed to after a lot of American arm-bending. It funds an organization which has outlived its original purpose, surviving now only to give a modicum of cover to American military adventurism - which is why the US will "never pull the plug". NATO only survives because the costs that would be imposed by America on any European nation who withdrew would be greater than the status quo.

It is ridiculous to suggest that European allies are "taking advantage" of the US or that the US is "underwriting European security" while admitting that there's no threat to Europe needing all that money spent on it. But Michael isn't the only smart American making the same logical mistake this week, to say nothing of what gets said by the not-so-smart hawks over on the Right.

P.S.: Is America sure it wants a well armed Europe? Remember the last time it was true? The US spent the next thirty years guaranteeing Europe's security partly so that Europe (Germany) wouldn't have to stand up seriously continental-sized armed forces itself. And if it does, why does it keep trying to put its own spanner in the works of a European Defense Force and other intra-European defense pacts?

John O'Brennan cuts to the heart of the Eurozone crisis, outlining the political consequences of issuing aloof, one-size-fits-all austerity requirements from afar:

The European crisis is as much a crisis of politics as economics. The current paralysis of the Greek political system demonstrates the point very clearly. EU policy has actively contributed to this crisis by effectively sealing off discussion of the political problems thrown up by austerity.

Budgetary policy is at the core of traditional democratic politics in Europe but the management of the euro zone is increasingly being effected not through democratic institutions but via a centralised and depoliticised form of technocratic fiat. The “stability” narrative has triumphed over the need for legitimacy as the crisis in Europe has deepened.

Ivan Krastev, the eminent political scientist, argues that we have now arrived at a point where national governments have politics but are no longer in control of policy, including budgetary policy, which is moving via the fiscal treaty and other measures to the EU level.

On the other side of this divide the European Union has policies but no politics, since decisions are increasingly being made by technocratic managers rather than directly elected representatives of the European public. The euro zone crisis has thus amplified an existing problem – the absence of both a European citizenry and a transparent European level political process.

The whole thing. Read.

h/t RCW.

Chicago | May 21

AFP - NATO leaders launched Sunday the first phase of a US-led missile shield for Europe and sought to appease Russian anger over the system by renewing an invitation to cooperate.

President Barack Obama and his allies declared an "interim capability" at a Chicago summit, putting a US warship carrying interceptors in the Mediterranean and a Turkey-based radar system under NATO command in a German base.

The alliance insists that the shield is not aimed at Russia and aims to knock out missiles that could be launched by enemies such as Iran, but Moscow fears the system will also serve to neutralize its nuclear deterrent.

"We have invited Russia to cooperate on missile defense and this invitation still stands," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a news conference.

"We will continue our dialogue with Russia and I hope that at a certain stage Russia will realize that it is in our common interest to cooperate on missile defense," he said.

Besides the ironic title, I guess it explains why Putin refused to go to Chicago.

The Guardian's Helena Smith talks to Greek leftist leader Alex Tsipras:

Tsipras, who turns 38 in July, wants me to know that the war is not personal. The enemy is not Berlin, until now the biggest provider of the monumental rescue funds keeping the debt-stricken economy afloat. "It is not between nations and peoples," he says. "On the one side there are workers and a majority of people and on the other are global capitalists, bankers, profiteers on stock exchanges, the big funds. It's a war between peoples and capitalism … and as in each war what happens on the frontline defines the battle. It will be decisive for the war elsewhere."

Greece, he says, has become a model for the rest of Europe because it was the first country to fall victim to the enforcement of hard-hitting "growth through austerity" policies pursued in the name of resolving the crisis.

"It was chosen as the experiment for the enforcement of neo-liberal shock [policies] and Greek people were the guinea pigs," he insists.

"If the experiment continues, it will be considered successful and the policies will be applied in other countries. That's why it is so important to stop the experiment. It will not just be a victory for Greece but for all of Europe."

Even the old capitalist robber-barons understood that the way to get wealthy was to create wealth for all while making sure you kept the lion's share. Neoliberal austerity policies are just asset stripping under a false banner.

Not sure exactly when I said it, but I did predict that Greece would exit the Euro. I also said that it should leave the Euro sooner, rather than later and do so on its own terms. Now elite opinion has decided it's okay for Greece to exit. Mostly because the neoliberals have already raped the economy there. You heard it here first.

Howard Schneider & Anthony Faiola | May 14

WaPo - Political deadlock in Greece rattled world markets Monday, reviving fears that the fractious Mediterranean country could spurn an international bailout, abandon the common European currency and risk a fresh round of world economic turmoil.

European stock indexes fell, with Greece’s market now at a 20-year low, while the euro currency continued a recent decline against the dollar. U.S. stocks also fell.

Tsipiras has given up on trying to form a coalition to govern Greece. There was more than a bit of added pressure from eurocrats.

In Brussels, a EU official told AFP news agency that Greece would receive a $5.4bn loan as expected on Thursday, but a further $1.29bn would be held back until Monday.

Eurozone officials who met on Wednesday evening "decided to leave the decision on disbursement of [$1.29bn] to the Eurogroup on Monday", said the source, referring to the eurozone finance ministers.

The political uncertainty pushed markets and the euro down, as fears resurfaced of Greece quitting the eurozone before the year is out.

...Speaking in Berlin on Wednesday, Angela Merkel, German chancellor, stressed that EU countries that have signed the bloc's fiscal pact for greater budgetary discipline must stick to what they have agreed.

"Everyone must stick to the things we have agreed. Twenty-five countries have already ... signed the fiscal pact," she said in remarks seen as directed at both Greece and France, whose president-elect, Francois Hollande, has also said he wants to renegotiate the deal.

Now the mandate passes to the PASOK leader to have a try, and then on to a presidential call to form a unity government. It's unlikely either of those attempts will work so we're looking at new elections sometime soon after May 17. Tsipiras' party has to be favorite to come out ahead in those now as he's obviously expressing the will of the people best. Even the leaders of the outgoing coalition that signed off on the agreement with the IMF and the EU have started to suggest that the deal would have to be reopened.

I alluded yesterday to the elections in Greece, in which the EU plan to bailout the nation in exchange for austerity measures to be put in place was symbolically rejected and a new government elected.

Well, it's more than symbolic now.

A Greek political party leader who has vowed to rip up the terms of Greece’s international bailout was handed the mandate to try and form a government after Antonis Samaras of New Democracy failed to forge an agreement.

Louis Klarevas explains why at FP magazine:

Despite these gains on the right, though, the biggest winner was SYRIZA, on the left, which with a jump from 5 percent to 17 percent went from the periphery of Parliament to the mainstream. As a result, SYRIZA is in a position to offer Greek society something it has not seen since the 1960s: a viable third party.

Greece's left would have even been in the majority had its two other major left-wing parties -- KKE and the Democratic Left (DA) -- been willing to join forces with SYRIZA heading into the elections. The two parties secured 8 and 6 percent of the vote, respectively, which when combined with SYRIZA's 17 percent would have given the left an insurmountable 31 percent. Their disagreements, however, paved the way for ND to earn first bite at governance, while leaving KKE and DA marginalized as power brokers.

...Under Greek law, if the first-place party cannot form a government within three days, the mandate goes to the second-place party. (The third-place party also gets a shot, if necessary, three days after that.)

That said, there's no reason to panic just yet. Even if SYRIZA earns the mandate and manages to somehow seize the reins of power, the changes in Greek policy will hardly be "radical," as the Coalition of the Radical Left's name misleadingly implies. The party's young, charismatic leader, Alexis Tsipras, has made it clear that he has no intentions of withdrawing Greece from the eurozone, let alone the European Union. Instead, we should expect a more nuanced approach to economic revitalization, which would likely include an aggressive renegotiation of the bailout terms currently in place between Greece and the "troika" composed of the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF, as well as a demand for more public investment in lieu of loans.

If this scenario plays out, expect Ireland, Spain and Portugal in particular to be watching what happens closely and emulating the Greeks if things appear to go well for them in facing down the German-led neoliberal banking autocracy. France enters into such renegotiations as one of the big kids on the block and one which isn't yet in such a desperate hole. Greece's Tsipras is more likely to become the impromptu leader of the second-line EU nations than Hollande.

Update Greek conservative leader Antonis Samaras has admitted his failure to form a coalition government and handed back the mandate to the Greek president. So now it's Alexis Tsipras' turn to try.

Christopher S Rugaber | Washington | May 7

AP - The head of the International Monetary Fund is calling for indebted European countries to reduce spending only gradually to avoid further slowing their economies.

Christine Lagarde says in a speech in Zurich that countries should avoid cutting too steeply when their economies are contracting.

Governments "should not fight any fall in tax revenues ... caused solely because the economy weakens," she said.

Greece and other European countries have been trying to reduce their debt loads as a percentage of their economies. When they have cut deficits, their economies have shrunk. That makes it harder to reduce their deficits as a percentage of their economy, which some have agreed to as part of an international bailout.

Austerity should be "gradual and steady," Lagarde says.

Really, what changed her mind?

Francois Hollande scratched out a victory over Nikolas Sarkozy yesterday in the French elections.

I say "scratched out," because a three point victory over a wildly unpopular president is not exactly a drubbing, but it's also not exactly a close call.

Sarkozy showed himself to be a canny political card player. There was, for example, “l'ouverture” – Sarkozy's carefully-targeted effort to dismantle the Socialist Party by recruiting some of its brightest lights into Sarkozy's new right-wing government as ministers and senior officials. This cut the Socialist Party's leadership off at the knees, demoralized its membership, appropriated some of its best talent, reframed Sarkozy as a big-tent president who would govern for all the French – and left him perfectly free to pursue his policies exactly as he intended to do, validated by some of his most dangerous opponents. Demonstrating, as has occurred many times in politics in many countries before and since (in Britain, in the fate of the Liberal Democrats, for example), that weaving opponents into your team is an excellent way to defeat them.

Belgian and Swiss news sites have leaked exit polls embargoed in France until after the election, which show Hollande winning the French presidential election with around 53 percent of the vote.

Update Sarkozy has conceded.

Fortune's Cyrus Sanati writes about Wall Street's fears for a "small-s socialist" France at CNN Money:

Hollande has said that he would shake things up once he gets in power and would not toe the line with Germany or anyone else. That means anything is on the table, including agreements Sarkozy had carefully worked out with his European counterparts in taming the sovereign debt crisis. In addition, Hollande seems bent on really sticking it to the banks. He is no fan of the City of London and Wall Street and has openly criticized them for the role they played in the financial crisis. "My enemy is not another candidate, it is not a person, it has no face, it is the world of finance," Mr. Hollande said in January. He clearly has an axe to grind, but he may be getting ready to slice off his own hands.

Before he goes after his enemy, Hollande will need to make good on some socialist policies, which could have spillover effects on the rest of the eurozone. He says he will raise the minimum wage, cancel scheduled spending cuts, hire back thousands of government workers and roll back the retirement age from 62 to 60. He also wants to increase government spending to sponsor large infrastructure projects - all in a bid to spur economic growth.

To pay for this, Hollande wants to tax France to death. Anyone making more than a million euros a year will see their tax rate go from 45% to a mind-blowing 75%. He'll then stick it to the banks, raising their taxes by 15%. In addition, he wants to implement a financial transaction tax, which could have dire consequences on France's already weak financial sector. The tax would hurt high frequency trading, wiping out a major profit center for some hedge funds and banks that operate in France. It would also hurt the competitiveness of France's broker-dealers in executing transactions.

Excuse me while I play a lament on the world's smallest violin. A million Euros is about $1.3 million a year in income so a tax rate of 75% would leave only a paltry $325,000 for caviar and champagne, not enough to feel really hedonistically rich compared with the average French wage of $54,000 a month. Meanwhile, all the evidence of growth and recovery from the 2008 crash seem to show that, yes Matilda, governments really are better at stimulating recovery by targeted spending than relying on trickle down from the wealthocracy. As for complaining about tighter regulation on the greedy bankers who got us all into this mess then demanded the poor pay to get them out - “C’est vraiment des conneries!”

Update 2 Joe Weienthal at Business Insider takes a calmer tack on a Socialist France:

The fact of the matter is that there's no example in Europe, yet, where the bond market has rewarded austerity. Take Spain: It recently announced fairly severe reform plans, and yields just shot higher. So there's really no reason to care much about French domestic policy at this point.

What matters in the Eurozone is Eurozone politics and ECB policy. So for example, what has worked (to some extent) have been the ECB's 3-year LTROs, which have certainly calmed the banking system down. And what might work is a move towards greater establishment of transfers, fiscal union, and Eurobonds. And on that stuff, Hollande is on the right side.

So forget his domestic policies. They're not at the crux of the matter, and there's no reason to think that his course will make a huge difference one way or another. Just focus on Hollande as a force to breakup the Merkozy establishment, and perhaps take Europe away from the current destructure policies, which have exacerbated the debt crisis, while also further pushing countries deeper into recession.

Indeed, the Hollande-Merkozy dynamic is now the key to the future course of the Eurozone.

Mansur Mirovalev | Moscow | May 3

AP - Russia's top military officer has threatened to carry out a pre-emptive strike on U.S.-led NATO missile defense facilities in Eastern Europe if Washington goes ahead with its controversial plan to build a missile shield.

President Dmitry Medvedev said last year that Russia will retaliate militarily if it does not reach an agreement with the United States and NATO on the missile defense system.

Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov went even further Thursday. "A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens," he said at an international conference attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.

Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov also warned on Thursday that talks between Moscow and Washington on the topic are "close to a dead end."

U.S. missile defense plans in Europe have been one of the touchiest subjects in U.S.-Russian relations for years.

Moscow rejects Washington's claim that the missile defense plan is solely to deal with any Iranian missile threat and has voiced fears it will eventually become powerful enough to undermine Russia's nuclear deterrent. Moscow has proposed running the missile shield jointly with NATO, but the alliance has rejected that proposal.

Makarov's statement on Thursday doesn't seem to imply an immediate threat, but aims to put extra pressure on Washington to agree to Russia's demands.

Jennifer Peltz | May 1

AP - A hotel maid's sexual assault lawsuit against Dominique Strauss-Kahn can go forward to trial, a judge ruled Tuesday, rebuffing the former International Monetary Fund leader's diplomatic-immunity claim.

Bronx state Supreme Court Justice Douglas McKeon's ruling kept alive the civil case that emerged from a May 2011 hotel-room encounter that also spurred now-dismissed criminal charges against Strauss-Kahn, then a French presidential hopeful. The episode was the first in a series of allegations about his sexual conduct that sank his political career.
..
Strauss-Kahn resigned his IMF job days after his arrest, and he didn't assert immunity from the criminal prosecution; his lawyers have said he was focused then on trying to exonerate himself. The lawsuit was filed about three months later.

Strauss-Kahn argued that he was immune from the lawsuit because of his former IMF job. Invoking an American sports metaphor to strike down Strauss-Kahn's argument, McKeon noted that the lending agency's own rules limit its official's immunity to things they do in their official capacities, and that Strauss-Kahn had resigned his post by the time he was sued.

"Mr. Strauss-Kahn throws (legally speaking, that is) his own version of a `Hail Mary' pass by asserting that once he was arrested and confined to a New York home as a condition of bail" he was covered by a treaty allowing departing diplomats reasonable time to leave the country before their immunity expires, McKeon wrote.

"Strauss-Kahn cannot eschew immunity in an effort to clear his name only to embrace it now to deny Ms. Diallo the opportunity to clear hers," the judge wrote.

Fredrik Dahl | Vienna | Apr 30

Reuters - China called on the United States and Russia - which hold the vast majority of the world's nuclear warheads - on Monday to make further "drastic" cuts in their atomic arsenals.

A senior Chinese diplomat also told a meeting in Vienna that the development of missile defense systems which "disrupt" the global strategic balance should be abandoned, a possible reference to U.S. plans in Europe that have angered Russia.

A new U.S.-Russian arms reduction treaty will cut long-range, strategic nuclear weapons deployed by the two Cold War-era foes to no more than 1,550 on each side within seven years after it came into force in February 2011.

But they still have by far the most nuclear arms - a fact stressed by the Chinese representative on the opening day of a two-week conference to discuss the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a 1970 pact to prevent the spread of atomic bombs.

China, Britain and France are the other three recognized nuclear weapons states. But the size of their arsenals are in the low hundreds, well below those of the United States and Russia which have thousands of nuclear warheads. read the rest!

Explosive allegations by a French left-wing newspaper have incumbent president Nicholas Sarkozy on the defensive going into the second round of the elections there. India's Economic Times has a good English breakdown of the story.

PARIS: Moamer Gaddafi's regime agreed to fund French President Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 election campaign to the tune of 50 million euros, a news website reported Saturday, publishing what it said was documentary evidence.

The 2006 document in Arabic, which website Mediapart said was signed by Gaddafi's foreign intelligence chief Mussa Kussa, referred to an "agreement in principle to support the campaign for the candidate for the presidential elections, Nicolas Sarkozy, for a sum equivalent to 50 million euros."

The left-wing investigative website made similar assertions on March 12, based on testimony by a former doctor of a French arms dealer alleged to have arranged the campaign donation, which Sarkozy slammed as "grotesque."

It was not stated that any Libyan money was actually handed over.

Back in March, Sarkozy had said in response to those earlier allegations: "If he had financed it, I wasn't very grateful". Indeed.

Jennifer Welsh | Apr 26

MSNBC - They moved north and mingled with hunter-gatherers, new genetic research finds

An analysis of 5,000-year-old genetic material from preserved human remains found in Sweden suggests that people moving from southern to northern Europe spread agriculture across that continent long ago.

In addition to agricultural know-how, the intrepid farmers brought their genes: They interbred with hunter-gatherer communities to create modern humans living in Europe today.

"Genetic variation of today's Europeans was strongly affected by immigrant Stone Age farmers, though a number of hunter-gatherer genes remain," study researcher Anders Gotherstrom, of Uppsala University in Sweden, said in a statement.

The results of this study, to be published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, match up well with previous archeological evidence of farming in Europe.

It's been a long time since the UK saw polling figures that show Labour with a double-digit lead over the Conservatives, 43 to 31, with that representing a swing of over 120 seats in the London Parliament.

The fact that Britain has just slumped into a double-dip austerity-led depression, with the Tories taking away the nation's bus fare to work, doubtless has a lot to do with those figures, as austerity cuts have propelled an overall swing Leftwards across Europe. France's Socialist candidate Hollande is expected to win the presidential election's run-off vote there on May 6th, ending a long run of rightwing supremacy dating back to the early 1980s. In Greece, The Netherlands and across Europe, the Left is seeing a revival as the elite backs debt-reduction measures that unfairly penalize the poorest while the richest still don't pay their share.

A recent report by the Scottish Trade Union Council was entitled "Yes, the time has come to say 'we told you so'". A spokesman for the STUC told Scottish television:

"We believed the decision to force rapid austerity on a weak economy was unnecessary and irresponsible.

"We argued that the lessons of economic history are unequivocal: when unemployment is high, the output gap large and interest rates already close to zero, public investment is required to grow the economy and get people back to work.

"Austerity would undermine recovery in the private sector directly through the loss of Government contracts and indirectly as jobs were lost and wages squeezed.

"Unemployment would remain higher for longer than necessary and the human, social and economic costs would weigh on society for decades. Society's most vulnerable would be hit hardest as benefits and services were lost or cut."

And that's exactly how it came to pass.

Your facepalm of the day, courtesy "a senior member of Germany's Pirate Party," via Der Spiegel:

Martin Delius, parliamentary floor leader of the Pirates in the Berlin city parliament, told SPIEGEL: "The rise of the Pirate Party is as fast as that of the NSDAP between 1928 and 1933." NSDAP refers to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Nazi party.

But wait -- there's more:

The Berlin politician is the second in his party to make a controversial comment involving Nazis in recent days. Hartmut Semken, the regional party leader for the city-state of Berlin, last week argued strongly against expelling members who espouse far-right views. He argued that the last party that had enjoyed "huge success" with the persecution of people was the Nazi party, Semken also apologized.

You may recall that, during the Bush administration, when Nicolas Sarkozy won election as French president, conservatives were all righteous about the demise of liberal-- they called it "socialist"-- Europe and how even France had seen the light.

It was used to bolster everything from the war on terror to the dismantling of Social Security.

So I wonder what they'll make of this?

Francois Hollande charged back into campaign mode Monday with momentum on his side to capture France's presidency, after the Socialist won the most votes in the first round of voting that put him into a runoff with conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.

The first round of the French presidential elections today left Socialist Francois Hollande the winner by 27.5% to 26.5% over incumbent conservative Nicolas Sarkozy. The two now head for a run-off on 6th May with Hollande expected to win, returning only the second left-wing French president since the founding of the Fifth Republic. Hollande's policies include instituting a 75% tax rate for on income above 1 million euros ($1.32 million) to pay for job creation policies and withdrawing French troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year. Early polls show Hollande ahead of Sakozy by as much as 10% for the second round

The Guardian has a nice profile of Hollande who it describes as "France's Monsieur Normal"; a man of the people who spends every Saturday in his local cafe, sipping coffee and meeting his constituents in an informal setting.

France looks set to turn left a little, with most predicting a Socialist victory in the coming Presidential election. I say a little because the French Socialist party isn't really all that socialist anymore after making a conscious decision to turn away from calling itself the party of the workers and becoming more like the liberal base of the US Democrat Party.

New polls published yesterday suggested that Mr Hollande, 57, was leading the field of 10 candidates in the first round with up to 29 per cent of the vote. He had extended his lead over Mr Sarkozy to between two and four points. In voting intentions for the two-candidate, second round on 6 May, Mr Hollande now leads the President by a "landslide" margin of 14 to 16 per cent.

In a series of damning, private remarks, reported by the Le Canard Enchainé newspaper, senior members of President Sarkozy's government said that defeat now seemed inevitable.

"The carrots are cooked," the Prime Minister, François Fillon, was quoted as saying. "[Sarkozy's] strategy of campaigning on hard-right issues was a serious mistake." The former centre-right prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, was reported to have said privately: "There is no chance of us winning."

The bigger story of the election really is that the French hard-right seems to have a core constituency that it cannot grow beyond a certain number while the coalition to the left of the Socialists, the Left Front, has seen its support grow to around parity with the hard-right from essentially nowhere. Skyrocketing income inequality and austerity budgets as globalized capitalism failed to cope with the economic crisis along with a newly-remembered aversion to foreign adventurism have fuelled that rise, which I expect to see mirrored in other European nations in one of the continent's long-period political swings.

Eric Schmitt | Washington | Apr 15

NYT - Despite widespread praise in Western capitals for NATO’s leadership of the air campaign in Libya, a confidential NATO assessment paints a sobering portrait of the alliance’s ability to carry out such campaigns without significant support from the United States.

The report concluded that the allies struggled to share crucial target information, lacked specialized planners and analysts, and overly relied on the United States for reconnaissance and refueling aircraft.

The findings undercut the idea that the intervention was a model operation and that NATO could effectively carry out a more complicated campaign in Syria without relying disproportionately on the United States military. Even with the American help in Libya, NATO had only about 40 percent of the aircraft needed to intercept electronic communications, a shortage that hindered the operation’s effectiveness, the report said.

Ed Vulliamy | Apr 15

The Observer - Colombian leader uses Summit of the Americas to call for radical review of international policy on drugs

The government of Colombia pushed on Saturday for the most far-reaching change to policy on drugs since US president Richard Nixon declared war on narcotics four decades ago.

Hosting the sixth Summit of the Americas, for which 33 leaders of the hemisphere's 35 nations – including President Barack Obama – have assembled in Cartagena, President Juan Manuel Santos proposed the establishment of a taskforce of experts, economists and academics to analyse the realities of global drug addiction, trafficking and profiteering, with a view to a complete overhaul of strategy.
...
Last week Colombia announced the results of research which shows that only 5% of profits from Colombia's drug trade remain in the country. Hhundreds of billions of dollars of drug money finds its way, said Rodríguez, into "the distribution networks in the consuming countries, and the international banking system".

The "real value of the drugs", said the ambassador, "is not added in the countries of production, but once the product is moved – mainly to the US and Europe. And it is therefore clear that more must be done to fight international money-laundering of drug profits by the banking community."