The Netherlands to abandon law against insulting foreign heads of state-by Matt Payton

The Dutch government to abolish a law which prohibits anyone insulting the head of a friendly state.

Currently, this crime carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison.

This move by the Dutch government is in response to Turkey's attempts to prosecute German comedian Jan Böhmermann for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with an offensive poem on television.

 MPs from two Dutch liberal parties, People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and Democrats 66 (D66), called on the government to scrap the law - as was reported in the Dutch press.

Read more: The Netherlands to abandon law against insulting foreign heads of state | Europe | News | The Independent

Brexit: Obama gives powerful warning against Brexit - by George Parker and Jim Pickard

Brexit will also mean Schotxit which wants to stay in the EU

Barack Obama, Brexit, Britain, EU, Scotland. Boris Johnson, USA, Barack Obama has delivered a stinging rebuke to supporters of a British exit from the EU, saying that if the UK left the 28-member bloc it would go “to the back of the queue” in seeking a trade deal with Washington.

Standing alongside David Cameron in Downing Street, the US president delivered a clear warning that Britain would be less secure, less influential and less prosperous if it votes to leave the EU on June 23.

Challenging Brexit campaigners who had told the US president to stay out of the debate, Mr Obama said: “I’ve not come here to fix a vote, I’m offering my opinion. You should not be afraid to hear an argument being made.”

Quoting the poet John Donne, Mr Obama said: “No man is an island,” adding “even an island as beautiful as this one.” He said that influential nations in the 21st century did not “go it alone”.

Mr Obama’s backing for the prime minister’s campaign to keep Britain in the EU has infuriated some Brexit campaigners, who called the president “a hypocrite” who would never surrender US sovereignty to a body like the EU.

Boris Johnson, London mayor, suggested that the “part-Kenyan” US president harboured an ancestral grudge against Britain, dating back to animosity about the British empire.

In a powerful intervention, Mr Obama dismissed suggestions that if Britain left the EU it would be able to swiftly conclude a trade deal with Washington, sidestepping long-running EU-US trade negotiations.

“Maybe at some point down the line there might be a UK-US trade agreement but it won’t happen any time soon,” he said. Mr Obama said that the focus was on trying to do a deal with the EU and its 500m consumers.

Mr Obama said that Britain’s EU membership “does not moderate British influence in the world, it magnifies it”.

Note EU-Digest::  Boris Johnson comments about Mr. Obama make him sound very much like Donald Trump - except that Mr. Johnson comments also had negative racial undertones.

Euro-Sceptics nationalistic dreams of being able to go it alone are total nonsensical wet dreams in today's world of global inter-connectivity and power blocks. 

It certainly won't return Britain to its former glory days of being an Empire where the Sun never sets. 
  
Read more: Obama gives powerful warning against Brexit - FT.com

The Netherlands: Merkel lauds Turkey at her award ceremony in dealing with Syria refugee crisis - by Raf Caset

Despite increasing discord between the European Union and Turkey, German Chancellor Angela Merkel lauded Ankara's commitment to deal with the Syrian refugee crisis and said her weekend trip to the Turkish-Syrian border will be used to raise all contentious issues between the two sides.

At the end of a Netherlands-Germany summit, Merkel's Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte did raise tensions with Turkey again when he said his ambassador in Ankara would demand clarifications following reports that a Turkish consulate in the Netherlands was urging the Turkish community to report insults to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the nation.

"It is not clear to the Dutch government what the Turkish government wants to achieve with this action. It is not a good thing and our ambassador will ask for clarification from the Turkish authorities," Rutte said.
It was the latest in a series of wrangles with Turkey which have increasingly put the March 18 EU-Turkey refugee deal under pressure. The agreement allows irregular migrants to be sent back to Turkey while EU funds refugee projects there and grants Ankara other concessions.

The German government on Friday granted a Turkish request to allow the possible prosecution of a German TV comedian who wrote a crude poem about Turkey's president, an awkward decision for Merkel as she seeks Ankara's help in reducing Europe's migrant influx.

Merkel said that during Saturday's visit "all political issues will certainly be raised" with Turkish authorities.
Earlier, Merkel was honored Thursday for her leadership in a series of crises that have hit Europe in recent years, from the financial meltdown to the migration influx.

Rutte lauded Merkel as she was presented with the International Four Freedoms Award at a ceremony in the southern Dutch city of Middelburg.

In her acceptance speech, the German leader said the migration crisis "touches our European values in a special way."

She praised the EU's deal she helped to broker with Turkey on the return and admission of migrants, a key measure in the continent's efforts to stem the flow of people fleeing conflict, poverty and persecution.

"Too many people already lost their lives during their escape," Merkel said. "The EU-Turkey agreement therefore really didn't come soon enough. It is now important that we continue our efforts, especially when it comes to a fair distribution of refugees in Europe and a common approach against the roots of escape and expulsion."

Read more here: http://www.modbee.com/news/business/article73024032.html#storylink=cpy

Read more: Merkel lauds Turkey in dealing with Syria refugee crisis | The Modesto Bee

The Netherlands: Shell to slash 2,000 Netherlands jobs - by Janene Pieters

Shell is cutting some 2 thousand jobs in the Netherlands. The oil company aims to get rid of 15 to 20 percent of the abut 10 thousand employees working in Amsterdam and Rijswijk as part of a cost cutting plan to cope with the low oil prices, AD reports.

The company launched a voluntary departure scheme. Office staff with a salary of 75 thousand euros per year or higher can resign voluntarily for compensation. Employees can register for voluntary departure until July 1st.

According to union FNV, Shell is hoping to avoid an official reorganization with the voluntary departure scheme. “Shell first wants to see whether enough employees volunteer”, director Egbert Schellenberg said to the newspaper.

Employees working at the Pernis refinery and the petrochemical complex in Moerdijk do not qualify for the voluntary departure scheme as those two branches already face staff shortages.

Read more: Shell to slash 2,000 Netherlands jobs - NL Times

Brexit: Britons Will Be Poorer if They Leave E.U., Government Asserts - by Stephen Castle

Great Britain or Poor Britain?

The British government outlined the central argument on Monday it hopes will persuade voters to stay in the European Union, publishing a detailed economic analysis finding that Britons will be poorer if they quit.

The release of the publication by the Treasury, complete with complex algebraic calculations, is an important moment before a referendum, to take place June 23, on whether Britain should end more than four decades of integration and quit the 28-nation bloc.

Those who oppose a British withdrawal from the European Union, known as “Brexit,” say that it would inevitably lead to economic uncertainty and deter investment, and that it could complicate ties with the bloc, the country’s biggest trade partner.

On Monday, the government put a number on that claim, asserting that, under one midrange situation, annual economic output would be 4,300 pounds, around $6,100, lower per household if Britain left than if it stayed in the bloc.

.In any event, the chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, said at a speech in Bristol, England, that the country “would be permanently poorer if it left the European Union” because “we’d trade less, do less business and receive less investment.”

Mr. Osborne, who with Prime Minister David Cameron is campaigning for Britons to vote to remain, added: “The price would be paid by British families. Wages would be lower, and prices would be higher.”

Those advocating an exit, including dissenters in the governing Conservative Party, quickly dismissed the analysis. Andrea Leadsom, a government minister who used to work in the Treasury, called it “extraordinarily biased.”

The release of the document highlights the quickening tempo of the referendum campaign, which officially began last week.

And it precedes a visit to Britain this week by President Obama, who is expected, if asked, to endorse continued British membership in the bloc but to note that it is a decision for British voters.

Note EU-Digest: the other disaster that looms for Britain in case they leave the EU, is that Scotland has indicated they want to remain in the EU and will secede from the United Kingdam if they leave the EU.

Read more: Britons Will Be Poorer if They Leave E.U., Government Asserts - The New York Times

TTIP: U.S. Trade Policy: Populist Anger or Out-of-Touch Elites? - by Jeff Faux,

Nobody wants it except the
Corporate and Government elites

The presidential primary campaigns of both political parties have exposed widespread voter anger over U.S. global trade policies. In response, hardly a day has recently gone by without the New York Times, the Washington Post and other defenders of the status quo lecturing their readers on why unregulated foreign trade is good for them.

The ultimate conclusion is always the same – that voters should leave complicated issues like this to those intellectually better qualified to deal with them. So much for democracy.

Trade experts, according to Binyamin Appelbaum of the Times have been “surprised” at the popular discontent over this issue. Their surprise only shows how disconnected the elite and the policy class that supports it is from the way most people actually experience the national economy.

The United States has always been a trading nation. But until the 1994 North American Trade Agreement, trade policy was primarily an instrument to support domestic economic welfare and development.

Starting with NAFTA, pushed through not by a Republican president, but by the Bill Clinton in 1994, it became a series of deals in which profit opportunities for American investors were opened up elsewhere in the world in exchange for opening up U.S. labor markets to fierce foreign competition.

As Jorge Castañeda, who later became Mexico’s foreign minister, put it, NAFTA was “an agreement for the rich and powerful in the United States, Mexico and Canada, an agreement effectively excluding ordinary people in all three societies.”

For 20 years, leaders of both parties have assured Americans that each new NAFTA-style deal would bring more jobs and higher wages for workers, and trade surpluses for their country. It was, they were told, an iron law of economics.

What actually followed were outsourced jobs, wage declines, shrunken opportunities and rising trade deficits. The result has been a dramatic weakening of the bargaining power of American workers.

So it should come as no surprise when the large parts of the U.S. workforce now conclude that these trade deals may have had something to do with the redistribution of income from their pockets to the bank accounts of the top 1% who own and manage large multinational corporations.

Read more: U.S. Trade Policy: Populist Anger or Out-of-Touch Elites? - The Globalist

The Netherlands Economy: Vice crime pumps over €2.5 billion into Netherlands economy - by Janene Pieters

Criminal activities involving drugs, illegal prostitution, illegal gambling and similar crimes contribute about 2.7 billion euros to the Netherlands’ economy a year. That means that criminal activities account for about 0.4 percent of the Dutch economy, according to an estimate by Statistics Netherlands at the request of broadcaster RTL.

The estimated value of the criminal economy was 2.6 billion in 2010, which means that the growth does not seem to be very strong. Though Statistic Netherlands emphasizes that it should be noted that it is very difficult to make a reliable estimate.

According to Statistics Netherlands’ estimates, the added value of drugs and illegal prostitution increased somewhat, while money earned by illegal downloads providers decreased. Previous calculations showed that drug production and -trade accounts for 55 percent of the criminal economy, followed by prostitution with 21 percent. Illegal downloads and illegal gambling accounts for about 9 percent.

Read more: Vice crime pumps over €2.5 billion into Netherlands economy - NL Times