Turkey - Mine disaster: PM Erdogan 'now with blood on his hands' under pressure after deadly mine explosion

The prime minister's critics mobilized even as the search for survivors and victims of the coal mine accident in the western town of Soma gathered speed.

Opposition parties and unions called rallies against the government in several cities across Turkey. In some regions, students have gone on strike. The DISK union spoke of the "massacre" of the workers in Soma - a term that has made the rounds.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government has declared three days of national mourning and sent Energy Minister Taner Yildiz to Soma to coordinate rescue operations. The minister had little to do but to announce the ever-rising number of casualties. "We're losing hope," he admitted on Wednesday (14.05.2014) morning.

PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan "blood on his hands"

The government stands accused mainly of having neglected the supervision of the coal mines in the wake of their privatization over the past few years. There are not enough state inspectors for the mines and mere weeks ago, Erdogan's ruling AKP party rejected a motion by the opposition to look into security deficiencies at the Soma mine.
Government opponents claim 22 people have died in fires in the coal mine since September 2012.

Erdogan's government faces allegations that it risked the health and lives of miners as a result of unilateral employer-friendly policies. Energy Minister Yildiz inspected the Soma mine last year, and praised investments in costly security systems for the employees that, it turns out, were insufficient.

"This is what it comes down to: The government ignored all warnings concerning the Soma mine, and the workers are paying the price," Murat Yetkin, a well-respected editorial writer, said on the website of Turkey's "Radikal" newspaper on Wednesday.

On Turkish social networks, people have been calling for the respective government ministers to step down. Several spontaneous demonstrations were reminiscent of the anti-government protests last year in Istanbul's Gezi Park.

In the city's Levent business district, students and other protesters waving black flags demonstrated in front of the Soma-Holding mine operator's offices and sprayed the word "murderers" on the building in blood-red paint. Students gathered for protests at Ankara University, and more demonstrations were planned for the evening. The CHP opposition party has demanded a special session of parliament, while several unions called for nationwide strikes and protests on Thursday.

Note EU-Digest: in most democratic countries after an accident of this magnitude has taken place the PM and the minister of the ministry governing the industry where such a major accident has happened would step-down. This is not the case in Turkey, where instead of stepping down, Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who now has blood on his hands, is even planning to run for President in the next Presidential elections.


Read more: Erdogan under pressure after deadly mine explosion | Europe | DW.DE | 14.05.2014

Eurovision 2014 Song Festival: The Netherlands emerges as major rival to UK at Eurovision

The United Kingdom has seen Molly rise to become the favourite to win Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest in Copenhagen but a new rival for the title emerged during last night’s first semi final.

The Netherlands’ entry Calm After The Storm’, sung by The Common Linnets has caused a major stir in Denmark.

It sailed through in the semi final and has seen its odds cut from 100/1 outsiders to 7/1 overnight.  A week ago, the song was written off as a 250/1 rank outsider.

The Common Linnets are Ilse DeLange and Waylon, a male-female duet with a country music background. The song is perhaps the most simple ever seen at the Eurovision Song Contest. It has just three chords and the first half of the song is shown in a single camera take.

The Eurovision Song Festival celebrates its 60^th Birthday next year, and rather than thinking about retirement, the contest is stronger than ever, pulling in a staggering 180million television viewers. It is the most watched music event in the world.

There are still some storm clouds ahead for The Netherlands though. Of the ten songs to qualify from last night’s semi final, seven were ballads. There is still stiff competition from Armenia and Sweden in the genre and Malta also have a country song which is tipped to qualify from tomorrow night’s semi final.

One thing we do know is that the Eurovision Song Contest reputation for cheese and irrelevance is dying fast.

It is quickly becoming a showcase for musical talent, quality music and a great night’s television.

Read more: Eurovision 2014: The Netherlands emerges as major rival to UK at Eurovision | Metro News

Germany not satisfied with US assurances over NSA spying on EU Citizens

The chancellor of Germany spoke alongside United States President Barack Obama on Friday about the National Security Agency's surveillance practices for the first time in the US since she voiced concerns last year about leaked NSA operations.

A joint news conference Friday afternoon at the White House Rose Garden in downtown Washington, DC between the two primarily concerned the escalating situation in Ukraine, but both Pres. Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel also discussed the NSA in the wake of disclosures that last year propelled the secretive American spy agency into the international spotlight.

Although Merkel has adamantly spoken out against the NSA's surveillance practices in the months since those disclosures first surfaced last June, Friday's meeting at the president's home marked her first visit to the White House since.

After both Obama and Merkel made prepared remarks at the Rose Garden about the Ukrainian crisis, the American president took a moment to put aside queries from the press and instead bring it upon himself to address the tensions between America and Germany that have worsened as a result of the NSA leaks.

Read more: Germany not satisfied with US assurances over NSA spying — RT USA

Ukraine: It’s Not All Russia’s Fault - by Balázs Jarábik

Ukrain political and ethnic crises

The crisis in eastern Ukraine is far from over.

On Monday, the moderate mayor of Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, was shot while riding his bicycle. Pro-Russian separatists have seized another government building in the region, and some are holding hostage a group of European military observers. The United States, convinced the chaos is all being driven by Moscow, slapped new sanctions on top Russian officials Monday, and the Europeans will probably go along.

To understand what’s driving this crisis, though, it’s necessary to look at the region the way its residents see it, not just the way it appears to the outside world.

The dominant Western narrative is all too familiar: It’s good guys vs. bad guys. Russian aggression against Ukraine and covert backing for separatist groups are the main sources of conflict, creating a very real danger that southeastern Ukraine may soon erupt into full-scale war or split off and join Russia.

Throw in the kidnappings of journalists, targeted killings of local politicians and residents and renewed Ukrainian military operations against the separatists, and the whole region appears to be in flames—and it’s all Moscow’s doing. As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry put it over the weekend, the Kremlin is behind the “distraction, deception and destabilization” in eastern Ukraine.

Unfortunately, the real story is much more complicated, and it has as much to do with the murky nature of Ukrainian politics as it does with Russia’s blatant meddling. On one level, the clashes in eastern Ukraine are just the latest battle between the country’s powerful and fractious oligarchs, for whom business interests—not the fate of Ukraine—are always priority number one.

The good news is that the separatists are actually quite isolated, according to recent accounts by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine. Even Kerry, despite his stern rhetoric, has indicated that fewer than 30 buildings have been occupied. And a recent poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that the majority of southeastern Ukraine’s residents do not favor joining Russia; 70 percent want to remain in Ukraine, and only 15 percent support secession; 60 percent do not approve of armed separatists seizing government buildings.

There is no doubt that Russia has been trying to destabilize Ukraine in the wake of the annexation of Crimea and that both sides could yet tumble into full-scale military conflict. But Russia is not the only factor shaping public opinion toward the central government in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.

From the outside, the Kyiv government is usually depicted as a band of selfless reformers. In fact, the differences in how it is perceived across the country are vast, with 78 percent of western Ukrainians but only 16 percent of easterners registering their approval in one recent poll.Easterners (and southerners, for that matter) see a cabinet dominated by former prime minister and current presidential candidate Yulia Timoshenko and her Fatherland political party, whose base of support is in the pro-European west of the country. Both the Party of Regions and Vitaly Klitchko’s UDAR party refused to join the government, leaving it dangerously low on eastern support.

The importance of looking beyond simplistic narratives also extends to politics at the regional level. When the Kyiv interim government appointed steel magnate and local oligarch Serhiy Taruta as governor of Donetsk, a major city close to the Russian border, he encountered strong local opposition, and the Donbas region, which includes Donetsk and Luhansk, soon became the main hotbed of separatist activity. Why? Many experts point to the influence of Ukraine’s richest businessman Rinat Akhmetov, who reportedly holds considerable sway over Donbas’s economic life, not to mention the activities of local law enforcement and municipal officials.

In Ukraine, political power almost always translates into control of property. The business elite of southeastern Ukraine is not prepared to surrender to a Kyiv government it sees as an instrument of Timoshenko (an old-school oligarch in her own right), and is likely using all means at its disposal, including the separatist card, to make its point.

The May 25 presidential election is the next big test, pitting Timoshenko against Petro Poroshenko, a prominent businessman who has held many senior posts in previous Ukrainian governments. A Timoshenko victory would spell trouble for the region’s business elite. Thus, the separatist unrest, which has put the actual viability of the elections in jeopardy, may be a hedging tactic by local oligarchs.

Ukrainian political insiders believe that Timoshenko’s control over the interim government in Kyiv has set off enough alarm bells that many oligarchs are pooling their resources and backing Poroshenko. (There is some evidence that Poroshenko and Klitchko traveled to Vienna in late March to hammer out a deal with Dmitro Firtash, a prominent Ukrainian oligarch who was recently indicted by U.S. law enforcement and is fighting extradition on racketeering charges.) After all, various Ukrainian oligarchs helped bankroll the Maidan movement, the protests that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in February, because they were angry with the Yanukovych “family” for squeezing them out of lucrative businesses. They certainly do not want to see Timoshenko install herself as the top dog and make their lives miserable.

The unseemliness of Ukrainian politics certainly makes for strange bedfellows. In this instance, it has put some Ukrainian oligarchs on the same side as Vladimir Putin and against Timoshenko, who has long been rumored to be on good terms with the Russian president. Both the Kremlin and these oligarchs have an interest in undermining the current government in Kyiv. The Kremlin and the oligarchs may have their own distinct reasons for doing so, but both see the separatist card as a source of extra leverage.

Read more: It’s Not All Russia’s Fault - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

EU Elections: "An EU of multinationals, of harmonization – makes people uneasy. People like difference and identity." - by Jon Henley

EU:  Multinational Lobbyists have taken over

The Foire aux Fromages et aux Vins in Coulommiers, an attractive town on the undulating Brie plateau an hour east of Paris, is a fabulously French affair: a monumental marquee, hordes of happy visitors and more than 350 stalls laden with Gallic bounty.

Among the cheeses are tomme from Savoie, crottins de chèvre from Aveyron, and great roundels of brie from nearby Meaux, alongside case upon case of chablis, Pouilly-Fumé, Nuits-Saint-Georges. And today, in amiable conversation with a local cheesemaker, there is Aymeric Chauprade, academic, author, consultant, and leading candidate in the European elections for Marine Le Pen's freshly fumigated Front National.

Here's the problem, explains an immaculately suited Chauprade, who besides degrees in maths and international law has a doctorate in political science from the Sorbonne: all this – he gestures around him as the throng prods, nibbles, squeezes, swills and swallows – is at risk.

"American farmers and 'big food' will rule; our regulations and standards will count for nothing," Chauprade continues. "This is an EU that has no respect for national specificities; it's an EU of bureaucrats, of ever greater normalisation, in the service of big banks and corporations. It is not the EU we want."
Understandably, this message plays well here. But not only here.

Across the EU, insurgent parties from right and left are poised to cause major upset, finishing at or near the top of their respective national votes. As a result, rejectionist parties look set to send their largest contingent of anti-European MEPs ever to the European parliament: perhaps 25% of the assembly's 751 members. (Down from 766 in the current parliament.)

Disillusion with the EU, certainly, is at record highs across the continent. The surveys are unequivocal: 60% of Europeans "tend not to trust" the EU now, against 32% in 2007; in 20 of the 28 member states a clear majority feels the EU is going "in the wrong direction"; for the first time, Eurosceptics outnumber supporters by 43% to 40%.

"In our analysis, the real turning point came in the late 1980s, when the big industrialists started laying down the plans for the future of Europe," says Dennis de Jong, a leading MEP from the impeccably leftwing but fiercely Euro-critical Dutch Socialist party. "Until that moment, the EU seemed like a logical post-war development. But industry, not ordinary people, has driven much of what's happened since, from opening internal borders to the euro.

This EU – the EU of multinationals, of harmonisation – makes people uneasy. People like difference. They like identity."

Read more: The enemy invasion: Brussels braced for influx of Eurosceptics in EU polls | World news | The Guardian

European Elections: Candidates spar in live EU TV debate

With flashes of wit, much earnestness and a certain reluctance to go for the jugular of their opponents, four candidates for the European Commission presidency broke new ground on Monday night by holding a live televised debate designed to drum up public interest in the May 22-25 elections for the European parliament.

If social media are one measure of that interest, the debate may have worked. Halfway through the 90-minute programme, broadcast from the Dutch city of Maastricht, an organiser announced that 10,000 tweets a minute were coming in.

The harder question to answer is whether any candidate did enough to convince potential voters that the elections will truly make a difference in a EU blighted by a long recession, mass unemployment and a squeezed welfare state.

Although the debate never turned nasty, Ska Keller, the Greens candidate, got in a sharp jab at Jean-Claude Juncker, the centre-right candidate, when she accused him of “presiding over a tax haven” during his time as prime minister of Luxembourg. An indignant Mr Juncker rejected the charge and managed later to slip in the image-softening remark that one reason why he favoured a EU-wide minimum wage was that he remembered his father’s tough life as a steelworker.

Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who is the centrist, liberal candidate, turned his fire on José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing Commission president, saying Mr Barroso had never taken a decision without first flying to Berlin and Paris to get the green light. “The Commission needs to lead,” he thundered.

He also put Mr Juncker on the spot by challenging him to explain why his centre-right group still included Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, who caused outrage last weekend by suggesting Germans denied the existence of Nazi concentration camps. But Mr Juncker hit back with the succinct sentence: “I was sickened by the statements of Mr Berlusconi.”

Martin Schulz, the centre-left candidate, made a valiant effort to distinguish himself from the other three by repeating on several occasions that he was against a Europe of “banks and speculators”.

When the debate moved on to Europe’s insurgent far-right parties, he spoke with some passion in saying he found it “unimaginable” as a German that “a Nazi party could sit in the European parliament and make propaganda for the party of Adolf Hitler”.

Read more: Candidates spar in live EU TV debate | Brussels blog

Benefits of EU Membership: Czech economy would be in the tank without EU membership

If the Czech Republic was not a member of the European Union, its gross domestic product (GDP) for 2013 would be 12 percent lower than it was, the Czech state secretary for European affairs, Tomáš Prouza, said at a business forum during the visit of European Council President Herman Van Rompuy to Prague.

Prouza presented the results of an economic study that several important economists have prepared for the Government Office.

"If we were not an EU member, could not take advantage of the single market and had no revenues from the Cohesion Policy, Czech GDP for the past year would be some 12 percent lower than it was," Prouza said.

"If we were not in the EU, there would have been almost no change in the level of incomes of Czech citizens vis-à-vis Western Europe in the 18 years since 1995," he added.

If the Czech Republic was a eurozone member, the revenue of the Czech economy would increase 25 billion Kč to 60 billion Kč annually, and domestic GDP would be between 0.6 percent and 1.2 percent higher.

"If we became a eurozone member in 2007 like Slovakia did, the contribution would be some 270 billion Kč," Prouza said.

The study puts the direct cost of eurozone membership, that is the potential contribution to the European Stability Mechanism, at 35 billion Kč.

The study shows that during EU membership, the Czech economy has gained 770 billion Kč. Without the internal market, its GDP would be 2.5 percent lower and unemployment 1.5 percent higher.

"If it were not for the internal market, if the barriers that were here before our entry to the EU stayed in place, the higher costs, lower trade volume, smaller exports and lack of foreign investments would have deprived us of some 100 billion Kč annually and another 75,000 people would be jobless," Prouza said at the business forum.

Since 2004, EU membership has brought 3.1 trillion Kč to the Czech Republic. The membership thus brought more than the Czech economy produced in 2004: some 300,000 Kč per person.

Read more: Czech economy would be in the tank without EU membership - PRAGUE POST | The Voice of Prague