Britain: Brexit damage to economy will outweigh modest wage gains, says study - by Anushka Asthana and Larry Elliott

Damage to the economy caused by Brexit will more than offset the modest wage gains for British-born workers in low-paid jobs caused by cutting net migration to the tens of thousands a year, a study has found.

A report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank said there would be a small pay increase to native-born employees in sectors such as security and cleaning if there was a big cut in the number of workers arriving in Britain from overseas.

But it estimated that these benefits would fail to compensate for the reduction in real incomes caused in the short term by the higher inflation triggered by a falling pound, and in the long term by a slowdown in the economy’s growth rate.

The Resolution Foundation also warned that achieving the government’s target of cutting annual net migration from more than 300,000 to the tens of thousands would present serious challenges for companies that rely on low-paid migrant workers – and could force some of them out of business.

Immigration was a significant factor in the referendum campaign, with a sizeable number of those who voted to leave the EU citing it as reason for supporting Brexit. Early last month, Theresa May, then home secretary, said the government had received a clear message from the electorate and needed to control the numbers of people coming into the UK from the EU.

Spain islamic terrorism: Spanish police arrest two men in Girona accused of financing ISIS

Spanish police arrested two brothers in the northern city of Girona accused of helping to fund the so-called Islamic State's operations in Syria and Iraq, the interior ministry said on Wednesday.

The two Moroccans, aged 22 and 32, and who have not been identified, diverted funds from Europe to pay for the transfer of members of the militant group into conflict zones, the ministry said.

They are charged with financing terrorism, collaboration with a terrorist group and indoctrination, sent money to Islamic State administrators operating under false identities, it added. A search of the two men’s homes was later carried out.

Interior Ministry sources said that a third brother was involved in the funding, but is believed to have died fighting in Syria. The three had used false identities provided by ISIS.

Police say the supposed false identities are part of ISIS’s international fundraising network.

The death of the one of the brothers in Syria, who had travelled to the country with his wife and children to join ISIS, did not end their fundraising activities in Spain. Authorities say they used recent legislation to tackle money laundering in order to trace the international money transfers the cell was making.

This is the first time Spanish police have been able trace remittances to ISIS, establishing that the money was put at its disposal and used primarily to fund recruiting costs.

Spain increased its anti-terrorist alert to level 4 on June 26, since when the Civil Guard has extended its investigations into suspected ISIS cells. An Interior Ministry spokesman highlighted the importance of preventing ISIS from recruiting and fundraising in Europe.

Note EU-Digest: Government officials in all EU coutries are advised to encourage anyone who believes he is aware of someone ot an organization recruiting or fundraising for Daesh, also known as ISIS to immediately report this to the palice

Read more: Spain islamic terrorism: Spanish police arrest two men in Girona accused of financing ISIS | In English | EL PAÍS

Britain Terrorism: Anjem Choudary: Islamic Hate preacher finally jailed for Isis-related terror offences

Britain's most notorious hate preacher Anjem Choudary is finally behind bars after being convicted of inviting his followers to support Islamic State terrorists.

The 49-year-old lawyer turned radical cleric has for two decades been the spiritual guide for UK extremists including Lee Rigby killer Michael Adebolajo, Isis executioner Siddhartha Dhar, and hate preacher Abu Hamza.

Through his organisations, Muslim4UK and Al-Muhajiroun (ALM), Choudary has been a constant thorn in the side of British authorities, defending terrorist atrocities while promoting an ideology of hate.

Choudary has played a "significant" role in recruiting Muslims to the extremist cause, police say, inspiring many of the 850 Brits who have headed to Syria since the establishment of the so-called Islamic State.

Read more: Anjem Choudary: Hate preacher jailed for Isis-related terror offences | Crime | News | London Evening Standard

US Presidential Elections: Full Transcript of Donald Trump Foreign Policy Speech

Donald Trump

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump delivered a speech from Youngstown, Ohio this afternoon, during which he discussed his plan for defeating ISIS.

During his remarks, Trump declared that the United States is at war with radical Islam and that any country that opposes ISIS should be considered an ally.

Trump also blamed the rise of ISIS on President Obama and on Hillary Clinton, saying that their policies allowed the terrorist organization to flourish. Finally, Trump expanded upon his controversial Muslim ban, proposing a suspension of visas to countries that he described as “exporters” of terrorism.

He also proposed an ideological test to ensure those entering the country adhere to certain principles.

Click on the link below for the full transcript of Donald Trump’s August 15th speech, via the campaign’s website.

READ: Full Transcript of Donald Trump Foreign Policy Speech | Heavy.com

The Netherlands: Efteling theme park in the Netherlands is like stepping back in time to a magical world - by Anna Melville-james

The entrance to Efteling

The thought of visiting a theme park on a busy national holiday is enough to turn most parents into a quivering wreck.

So I feared the worst when I headed across the North Sea with my five-year-old daughter to the Netherlands for a bank holiday Monday trip to the popular Efteling attraction.

But my luck was certainly in that day – unknown to me, the UK and the Netherlands do not share the same bank holiday dates, so Claudie and I had the park to ourselves.

Efteling is one of the world’s oldest theme parks and a place I had wanted to visit for a long time. 

It seemed different from the new breed of mega parks with their ever-faster rollercoasters, and instead harks back to a gentler age.

It was rumoured to have inspired Walt Disney to create Disneyland – although that is now largely relegated to myth. 

Efteling opened in 1952 and was entertaining families long before Mickey and Co – and it has maintained its popularity ever since.

Unlike Disney, Efteling, just to the north of Tilburg, is low-key, something that begins with actually finding that the park is located in a dense forest.

We had travelled first to Brussels by Eurostar before a quick connecting service dropped us outside the front gate.

From 2017, Eurostar’s new direct Amsterdam service means you could easily mix a city break with a day trip to the park.

Once inside Efteling, it all felt like a stroll through a beautiful park that just happens to have a rollercoaster in the middle.

First-time visitors should start with the pagoda, a chinoiserie folly that rises above the canopy to show you the whole park.

At ground level Claudie drew up her ride wishlist and commandeered one of the free trolleys for me to pull her in, as piped music floated over the boating lake.

We hit the 1950s miniature train, pedalling engines through the mock Dutch countryside, followed by the mini-waltzer and a toy car circuit.

We then toured the enchanted elf worlds on the Droomvlucht – the dreamflight ride – through a land of castles and fairy tales.

There are faster thrills too, including the new 60mph Baron 1898 ride and the Python rollercoaster.

By early afternoon it was time to stop and admire the park’s luxuriant tulips and leafy boughs, themselves a fairytale of red squirrels and bird boxes.

In the oldest area, the Marerijk, the forest frames a trail of classic tales such as Rapunzel, Pinocchio and Rumpelstiltskin reconstructed from the nostalgic drawings of illustrator Anton Pieck.

You won’t recognise all the characters: Mother Holle and Langnek are definitely aimed at the local crowds.

But there’s something soothing about their quirkiness.

This lack of pressure also applies to merchandise – I only saw one toy store, and food kiosks sell chips with mayonnaise, rather than drinks in movie tie-in cups.

As Claudie and I sat in the sunshine, we giggled at an animatronic gnome. It was a simple pleasure. But at that moment the world was magical. 

Read more: Efteling theme park in the Netherlands is like stepping back in time to magical world | Daily Mail Online

The Press: Rigging the Coverage
 - what you see is not what you get

Coverage about the breakdown of the partial ceasefire in Syria illustrated the main way corporate news media distort public understanding of a major foreign policy story. The problem is not that the key events in the story are entirely unreported, but that they were downplayed and quickly forgotten in the media’s embrace of themes with which they were more comfortable.

In this case, the one key event was the major offensive launched in early April by Al Nusra Front — the Al Qaeda franchise in Syria — alongside U.S.-backed armed opposition groups. This offensive was mentioned in at least two “quality” U.S. newspapers. Their readers, however, would not have read that it was that offensive that broke the back of the partial ceasefire.

On the contrary, they would have gotten the clear impression from following the major newspapers’ coverage that systematic violations by the Assad government doomed the ceasefire from the beginning.

Corporate media heralded the ceasefire agreement when it was negotiated by the United States and Russia in February, with the Los Angeles Times (2/3/16) calling it “the most determined diplomatic push to date aimed at ending the nation’s almost five-year conflict.” The “partial cessation of hostilities” was to apply between the Syrian regime and the non-jihadist forces, but not to the regime’s war with Nusra and with ISIS.

The clear implication was that the U.S.-supported non-jihadist opposition forces would have to separate themselves from Nusra, or else they would be legitimate targets for airstrikes.
But the relationship between the CIA-backed armed opposition to Assad and the jihadist Nusra Front was an issue that major U.S. newspapers had already found very difficult to cover (FAIR.org, 3/21/16).
U.S. Syria policy has been dependent on the military potential of the Nusra Front (and its close ally, Ahrar al Sham) for leverage on the Syrian regime, since the “moderate” opposition was unable to operate in northwest Syria without jihadist support.

This central element in U.S. Syria policy, which both the government and the media were unwilling to acknowledge, was a central obstacle to accurate coverage of what happened to the Syrian ceasefire.

This problem began shaping the story as soon as the ceasefire agreement was announced. On Feb. 23, New York Times correspondent Neil MacFarquhar wrote a news analysis on the wider tensions between the Obama administration and Russia that pointed to “a gaping loophole” in the Syria ceasefire agreement: the fact that “it permits attacks against the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate, to continue.”

MacFarquhar asserted that exempting Nusra from the ceasefire “could work in Moscow’s favor, since many of the anti-Assad groups aligned with the United States fight alongside the Nusra Front.” That meant that Russia could “continue to strike United States-backed rebel groups without fear … of Washington’s doing anything to stop them,” he wrote.

On the same day, Adam Entous of the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama’s “top military and intelligence advisers don’t believe Russia will abide by a just-announced ceasefire in Syria and want to ready plans to increase pressure on Moscow by expanding covert support to rebels fighting the Russia-backed Assad regime.”

For two of the country’s most prominent newspapers, it was thus clear that the primary context of the Syria ceasefire was not its impact on Syria’s population, but how it affected the rivalry between powerful national security officials and Russia.

Note Almere-Digest: not only the Syria news is rigged by the media, but also most of the news, depending on who pays the salaries of the journalists writing the story, and the policies of the corporate media conglomerate they work for . 

Read more: Rigging the Coverage of Syria – Consortium

Europe's Refugee And Political Crises: Will the US Own Up to Its Role In the Destabilization Of The World?

EU  relationship with USA

Until last summer, the refugee crisis in Europe was quietly and intentionally hidden from most Americans' view.

It took 3,771 deaths in the Mediterranean last year - and a photograph of a lifeless, drowned Kurdish child named Aylan Kurdi - for coverage to hit the American press.

By that time, 3,000 people were arriving every day to Lesbos, and many thousands more to the other Greek islands.

The irony of this ignorance should be obvious: the United States stands at the center of this disastrous situations given their military involvement in the Middle East and around the world, which has resulted in refugees being out of their homes, over mountains, around border crossings, through Turkish prison cells and onto crowded, dangerous boats.

From Libya to southern Afghanistan, US interventions and occupations have led to further destabilization, violence and, in almost all cases, civil wars.

A longer trail of complicity that stretches back to the four decades of economic and military support that the United States has given to the Arab dictatorships challenged in the 2011 Arab Spring, and to similar support given in that same time period to a number of insurgencies that dovetailed with US foreign policy objectives.

 One such group, the insurgency of the Afghan Mujahideen, fought a decade-long guerrilla war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

Those who came to fight in Afghanistan from abroad, many of whom received US military and economic support either from Congress or the CIA, hatched a postwar strategy of insurgency across the Arab and Muslim world, which resulted in a civil war in Algeria that took 120,000 lives. Meanwhile, other smaller rebellions caused significant fighting across the Maghreb, in northern Pakistan, Yemen, Chechnya, Albania and beyond.

The group now known to the world as ISIS was created in this period by a Jordanian Mujahideen veteran named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Originally launched in Jordan, the all-but-failed organization was given a second lease on life in post-invasion Iraq, where a destabilized and fractured society made fertile soil for the hyper-sectarian ideology of Zarqawi, who helped turn anger at the US occupation into a civil war against Shiites.

The sectarian state originally put in power in Iraq by the United States escalated divisions in the country, helping fuel the other side of the 2005-2006 civil war while pushing a large, disenfranchised Sunni population further toward the open arms of groups like ISIS.

A focus of the US "surge" in 2007 was working with Sunni militias to turn against this tide, but that strategy only lasted until the Iraqi state took control of the Sahwa program (Awakening Councils, or Sons of Iraq) as US troops withdrew and quickly dismantled them.

Against a backdrop of electricity shortages, water contamination and continued political destabilization, ISIS, which had by then entered into the north of Syria to take advantage of the civil war there, re-entered the picture with its dramatic capturing of Fallujah, Ramadi and other key points in Iraq's Anbar Province.

ISIS may be the most menacing face of Syria's civil war, but the multifaceted war includes a range of other groups, most notable the Assad regime itself, but also groups like the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra and the Free Syrian Army, a "moderate" group originally formed by deserters from the regime's military. And while a civil society-based revolutionary movement continues to defend the small spaces it has been able to hold, a pipeline of US, Gulf and European money providing various factions with weapons that have helped prolong the bloodshed has helped shatter the hopes and dreams of those who first took to the streets in 2011. Though the US Congress recently canceled the public program backing such rebels, the much larger CIA program remains in operation.

Alongside the US funding, US allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pumped weapons, logistical equipment and soldiers into Syria to support various factions fighting in the civil war, mainly those linked with the Supreme Military Council of Syria, which includes the Free Syrian Army and other anti-ISIS, anti-Assad groups. These groups, as well as the Kurdish peshmerga (from Iraq but often fighting in Syrian Kurdistan) and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), are often supported by bombings of the US, EU (NATO) countries, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Canada and Turkey.

On the other side of that war, Russia and Iran have sustained financial and political support to the four-decade-old Assad regime, helping defend its authoritarian police state from an array of forces fighting against it. In October 2015, Russian air support joined in the fight to secure Russia a seat at the negotiation table and to bolster Assad's position in power. Though Russia announced in mid-March that it would begin withdrawing forces as a long-needed cease-fire takes effect, fighting targeting Islamist groups unaffected by the cease-fire continues in Aleppo, Syria's largest city and its financial center.

Popular protests have exploded in almost every corner of the world, drawing comparisons to the revolutionary period of 1968. It's hard to analyze this wave of uprisings and protest without crediting the revolutions in the Arab world as the first spark that caught.

Those who inspired the world now face a severe wave of repression, with Syria as one of the most shocking examples. Over 11 percent of the population has been killed or injured since the start of the revolt, and over 20 percent have fled the country. Syria has become the single largest source of refugees in the world. The second largest? Afghanistan.

The Arab allies of the United States, fully involved in the war, have taken in an astoundingly small number of refugees from Syria, with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in last place, with zero. 

The United States, with its massive economy and "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" rhetoric, pledged last year to take in a mere 10,000 refugees for fiscal year 2016 - that's .015 percent. So far, that number has only reached a little over 1000.

Considering the extent to which US money has been spent killing people and destroying infrastructure in these countries -- for each of the 1,700 Syrian refugees accepted into the country last year, the United States spent an estimated $375,000 financing and arming various factions in the civil war -- it's far beyond an oversight that the United States' borders are almost impossible for refugees from the region to enter. Even those who worked as interpreters for US soldiers in Iraq regularly make the dangerous crossing to Greece, unsupported by the governments they risked their lives to assist.

The reality is that the United States is politically unwilling to help. Its wars of political and economic self-interest have always centered on a US perception of success and have always utilized a rhetoric of liberation to achieve long-sought foreign policy objectives. It has left those whose lives have been turned upside down across the Middle East -- the people it claimed to be liberating when it invaded their homes -- to fend for themselves in Europe or drown in the picturesque waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

The message of the US is now crystal clear: "Your liberation only matters when we need to justify our wars."

Unfortunately the EU will pay, as it already is experiencing, a heavy price for blindly following, agreeing and participating in these disastrous US adventures in the Middle East and other places around the world.

This is not anti-Americanism, it is a statement of fact, ehich most cowardly corrupt politicians  and the corporate controlled press don't dare to mention.

Where are the European politicians who dare to speak out? It is high time for a EUXIT out of this destructive US embrace,  before this fragile European Union completely falls apart.

EU-Digest