Brexit on hold?: May Unbowed by Ruling Pledges to Hold to Brexit Timetable - by Thomas Penny and Kit Chellel

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May pledged to stick to her Brexit timetable after a court ruled that she needs Parliament’s permission to begin negotiations.

The government immediately said it will appeal the decision, adding that it believes the legal process will allow Britain’s exit from the European Union by mid-2019. The prime minister’s spokeswoman, Helen Bower, said plans to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty by the end of March remained unchanged.

“The British people made a decision in the referendum and it’s the job of the government to get on with delivering the decision of the British people,” Bower told reporters in London on Thursday. “Parliament will have a role to voice its views through debates.”

The pound -- the worst-performing major currency of 2016 -- rose to a three week high against the dollar on the ruling even as lawmakers said it didn’t call into question the decision to quit the EU.

Read moreMay Unbowed by Ruling Pledges to Hold to Brexit Timetable - Bloomberg

The Netherlands: Geert Wilders, 'Fewer Moroccans,' and the Question of Hate Speech - by Uri Friedman

In March 2014, during a rally in The Hague, Geert Wilders asked his supporters whether they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands, where Dutch Moroccans constitute 2 percent of the population. “Fewer, fewer!” the crowd chanted. “Then we will arrange that,” the Dutch politician responded, flashing a smile. The remarks lasted only seconds, but they launched a years-long legal battle that resulted, this week, in a trial. Wilders is facing charges of deliberately insulting a group of people based on their race and inciting discrimination and hatred against them.

Over the next few weeks, the trial will revolve around one question, The Wall Street Journal reports: “Is the right of free speech for politicians absolute, or should it be restricted to protect against discrimination?”

Here’s the video when Dutch prosecutors claim Wilders’s free speech veered into hate speech.

Note Almere-Digest: You might like Wilders or you may hate him, but to qualify the above speech as a hate speech, rather than a derogatory political speech, is somewhat far fetched, specially for a nation which respects the right of 'freedom of speech". 

Read more: Geert Wilders, 'Fewer Moroccans,' and the Question of Hate Speech - The Atlantic

Alternative Energy - Windfarms: The Advantages of Floating Wind Farms - Beth Day Romulo

Floating Windfarm Platforms

Clean energy engineers in the United States have been working on a project to make offshore wind farms financially and environmentally viable. At the moment, all offshore wind turbines require a fixed platform, which is built into the seafloor. But floating turbines with anchors would offer more flexibility as to where wind farms could be placed.  

Dr. Habib Dagher, the executive director of the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center, is testing an experiment, which simulates conditions that full-scale floating wind turbines might face off the Maine coast, at an installation near Monhegan Island, in 360 feet of water. For 18 months in 2013 and 2014, a small operating version of the wind farm sat in water off Castine, Maine, sending electricity to the grid. This experiment proved that the technology worked. Now, Dr. Dagher’s team is using the data collected to confirm the final forms of the wind farm.

Conventional offshore wind development, which has its foundation deep beneath the ocean floor, are popular in Europe, but energy companies in the United States are just starting to use offshore turbines. Statoil, a Norwegian oil and gas company, is already developing the first commercial scale floating wind farm off the coast of Scotland.

In the US the Obama administration recently released an updated offshore wind plan, which identifies the floating structures as important in fighting climate change. More than half of the US offshore wind capacity is in deep water. Since floating wind farms are more expensive to build than land-based ones, cost has been obstacle to development.

Dr. Dagher said that if all went well, his team could have two full scale turbines pumping electricity into the Maine grind by 2019, and larger commercial farms starting construction in the Gulf of Maine by the mid 2020s.

Read more:nThe Advantages of Floating Wind Farms » Manila Bulletin Newsbit

Middle East: The War in Syria is out of control: The War in Syria Cannot Be Won. But It Can Be Ended - by  Phyllis Bennis

We need a powerful Global movement demanding an end to the war in Syria. The United States and to some extent the global antiwar movements remain largely paralyzed. There are some campaigns responding to specific congressional and other war moves, with some particularly good work against US support for Saudi Arabia. But as a movement, we seem unable to sort through the complexity of the multi-layered wars raging across Syria, and unable to respond to our internal divisions to create the kind of powerful movement we need to challenge the escalating conflict.

It was easier during earlier wars. Transforming public consciousness, changing US policy—those were all hard. But understanding the wars, building movements based on that understanding, that was easier. Our job was to oppose US military interventions, and to support anti-colonial, anti-imperialist challenges to those wars and interventions.

In Vietnam, and later during the Central American wars, that meant we all understood that it was the US side that was wrong, that the proxy armies and militias Washington supported were wrong, and that we wanted US troops and warplanes and Special Forces out. In all those wars, within the core of our movement, many of us not only wanted US troops out but we supported the social program of the other side—we wanted the Vietnamese, led by the North Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front in the South, to win. In Nicaragua and El Salvador, we wanted US troops and advisers out and also victory for, respectively, the Sandinistas and the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front). In South Africa we wanted an end to US support for apartheid and we also wanted the African National Congress to win.

The solidarity part got much harder in Afghanistan and especially in the Iraq wars. We stood in solidarity with ordinary Afghans and Iraqis suffering through US sanctions and wars, and some of our organizations built powerful ties with counterparts, such as US Labor Against the War’s links with the Iraqi oil workers union. And we recognized the right under international law for an invaded and occupied people to resist. But as to the various militias actually fighting against the United States, there were none we affirmatively supported, no political-military force whose social program we wanted to see victorious. So it was more complicated. Some things remained clear, however—the US war was still wrong and illegal, we still recognized the role of racism and imperialism in those wars, we still demanded that US troops get out.


Now, in Syria, even that is uncertain. Left and progressive forces, antiwar and solidarity activists, Syrian and non-Syrian, are profoundly divided. Among those who consider themselves progressive today, there is a significant though relatively small segment of activists who want their side to “win” the war in Syria. Only a few (thankfully, from my vantage point) support victory for what they often refer to as “Syrian sovereignty,” sometimes adding a reference to international law, and only sometimes acknowledging that that means supporting the current Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. (It should be noted that international recognition does not necessarily equal legitimacy; the South African apartheid regime was internationally recognized for decades.) A larger cohort wants to “win” the war for the Syrian revolution, the description they give to the post–Arab Spring efforts by Syrian activists to continue protesting the regime’s repression and working for a more democratic future. There is a deep divide.

Among those who want the Syrian regime to remain in power and the anti-regime opposition to be defeated, some base their position on the belief that Syria leads an “arc of resistance” in the Middle East—a claim long debunked by the actual history of the Assad family’s rule. From its 1976 enabling of a murderous attack on the Palestinian refugee camp of Tel al-Zataar in Beirut by right-wing Lebanese backed by Israel, to sending warplanes to join the US coalition bombing Iraq in 1991, to guaranteeing Israel a largely quiet border and quiescent population in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, to its role in interrogating and torturing outsourced US detainees in the “global war on terror,” Syria has never been a consistent anti-imperialist or resistance center.


Outside forces are fighting for various regional, sectarian, and global interests that have little or nothing to do with Syria—except that it is Syrians doing the dying. Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting for regional hegemony and for Sunni versus Shi’a dominance; the United States and Russia are fighting for global and regional positioning, military bases, and control of resources; secular versus Islamist forces fight for dominance of the anti-Assad front; Turkey was fighting Russia (until recently, when it seemed to settle its differences with Russia before invading northern Syria, where now it is primarily going after the Kurds); the United States and Israel are fighting Iran (unlike in Iraq, where the United States and the Iranian-backed militias are on the same side in a broad anti-ISIS front); Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar vie for dominance among the Sunni monarchies; and while Turkey is fighting the Kurds, progressive Syrian Kurds are challenging the more traditional peshmerga of the Iraqi Kurdish regional government.


It is up to us to build a movement that puts forward what an end to this murderous war could look like, as part of a movement to end the US “global war on terror” overall, and support the refugees created in its wake. The military alternatives now being debated will not end the war, and they do not protect vulnerable populations either. There is no military solution. It’s time we rebuilt a movement based on that reality



To read the complete report click here:  The War in Syria Cannot Be Won. But It Can Be Ended. | The Nation

NATO has outlived it's purpose and it's present anti-Russian rhetoric and moves are dangerous

Provocative statements and  moves by NATO
 could lead to Nuclear war

Alan Kuperman, a Harvard academic, argued some time ago that NATO intervention in Libya extended the war by a factor of 6 and increased the death toll 7 to 10 times; given that Libya is now a failed state, torn apart by warlords, we can safely say that these estimates were too conservative.

President Obama has privately called the situation in Libya a “shit show”. Only last month a report from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Parliament found that the humanitarian justification was an insufficient pretext and based on falsehoods, the supposedly limited intervention led “ineluctably” to regime change, and that the (British) government, and by implication other participating Western powers, did not seriously consider diplomatic alternatives to military action.

Twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO is back flexing its muscles as if nothing had changed since the days of the Soviet Union. Defense ministers from the enlarged, 28-member organization agreed recently to strengthen the alliance’s “forward presence” in Eastern Europe. If their new policy is endorsed at a summit in Poland this summer, NATO will begin deploying thousands of troops in Poland and the Baltic states, right up against Russia’s borders.

In other words, the Western alliance will redouble its military commitment to a Polish government whose right-wing, anti-Russian, and autocratic policies are so egregious that even the stanchly neo-conservative editorial page of the Washington Post saw fit to condemn the new leaders’ encroachments on democracy and the rule of law.

Most Americans are unaware that NATO’s policies, reaffirmed by the Obama administration, view nuclear weapons as a “core component” of the alliance’s capacity to repel even a conventional attack on one of its member states.

An accidental clash of forces, perhaps triggered by military exercises gone awry, could potentially lead NATO to use its nuclear weapons against Russian troops on Poland’s borders. Or, just as catastrophically, it could prompt Russian forces to attack NATO’s nuclear stockpiles preemptively.
Either scenario could trigger a much wider nuclear war.

The British television channel BBC Two explored such a scenario, involving Latvia, in a chilling “war game” film that aired earlier this month.

European countries, including, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain and France all have US stockpiles of Atomic bombs (totalling more than 200 bombs)  and would probably face immediate nuclear destruction  if a war broke out.

The EU Commission and Parliament don't seem to be aware, or at least do not openly comment about it, that this NATO sable rattling against Russia which has been initiated by the US and supported by most, if not all, Eastern European countries is not the appropriate way to carry out a productive dialog  with Russia.

It is not only bad policy, but worse, it could lead to nuclear war.

EU-Digest    

The Netherlands - Almere, one of Europe's newest and most modern Cities celebrates it's 40th anniversary

Almere - Europe most modern city celebrates its 40th anniversary

From the moment of its establishment in 1976, Almere has been one of the fastest growing cities in Europe.

It was initially developed as a suburban area in the east of Amsterdam, however, it has grown into the status of being Holland’s most exemplary new town.

In just 40 years it has attracted over 200,000 residents and approximately 17,000 businesses.

Almere is the largest city in the province of Flevoland and now also the seventh largest city in the Netherlands.

This November Almere celebrates it's 40th anniversary.

Almere-Digest congratulates the Municipality and Citizen's of Almere!

Almere-Digest

The Netherlands: Dutch 'JFK' aims to thwart far-right's election hopes

Jesse. F.Klaver a bright and rising Dutch politician

Some refer to him as the Justin Trudeau of Dutch politics, to others there are echoes of a young John F Kennedy.

But Green party leader Jesse Klaver is on a mission to put his own stamp on the Dutch political landscape as an antidote to rising right-wing xenophobia ahead of next year's elections.

As the only child of an absentee father of Moroccan descent and a Dutch-Indonesian mother, Mr Klaver, 30, knows what it's like to grow up in The Netherlands as an outsider.

The Dutch parliament's youngest ever party leader, Mr Klaver was raised mainly by his grandparents in social housing, in a sprawling flatlands suburb of the southern city of Roosendaal.

Unlike "what certain politicians will lead you to believe, The Netherlands is an immigrant country," Mr Klaver told AFP referring to his political arch-foe, Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders.

"I am a product of that immigration," added the curly-haired, olive-skinned Klaver, who took over the party helm last year.

His campaign for the March 2017 polls will focus on stopping what Mr Klaver calls "the right-wing wind that's blowing through all of Europe".

Immigration is just one of the many topics on which he and Wilders - his adversary with the blonde-bouffant hair - frequently cross swords in the parliament's lower house in The Hague.

Next week, Mr Wilders goes on trial on charges of hate speech and discrimination for having said at a campaign rally a few years ago that he wants "fewer Moroccans" in the country.

So it's no surprise perhaps that Mr Klaver says: "I am completely, and on all aspects, in disagreement with Geert Wilders".

Mr Klaver first rose to prominence in 2009 when he was elected at only 23 to become the youngest-ever member of the influential Social and Economical Council of The Netherlands, which advises government and parliament on key policy.

Six years later, he was elected unopposed as the leader of GroenLinks (the Green-Left party), which has been haemorrhaging voters since a disastrous 2012 campaign in the previous elections.

From garnering only four seats in that vote, the latest opinion polls from the Dutch Peilingwijzer website show the party could now capture between 11 and 15 seats.

"The 'new kid on the block' has given the party new energy," the NRC Handelsblad daily wrote recently.

With Wilders's Freedom Party (PVV) and the Liberals (VVD) of Prime Minister Mark Rutte running neck-and-neck in the polls at around 25-29 seats, the young Klaver could well emerge in a "kingmaker" role in next year's elections.

He has already called for closer cooperation between Dutch leftwing parties like Labour, the progressive D66 and the Socialist Party, seeking to form a powerful bloc against any potential government led by Mr Rutte's Liberals, who will need a majority coalition to reign in the 150-seat house.

"I want my country back," says Mr Klaver.

Often compared to Canada's liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to whom Mr Klaver bears a striking resemblance, the young Dutch politician himself names John F Kennedy as his biggest inspiration.

Even his full name, "Jesse Feras Klaver" echoes the initials of the famous US president, who was shot dead in Dallas in 1963.

Kennedy "was a man who said you should stand by your norms and principles," said Mr Klaver, who has several pictures of a youthful Kennedy on his walls alongside those of his own wife and two young sons.

He subscribes to many of the ideas of celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty - the author of an unlikely bestseller on capitalism - including that globalisation has created an unequal society and an unequal concentration of wealth. And he was behind an invitation to Piketty to address the Dutch parliament in 2014.

"We need to make Europe work for everybody, not just for a small group of rich people who have been lucky and are just getting richer," Mr Klaver said.

And he is reminded every morning of his mission as he clasps his coffee mug, engraved with JFK's words: "One person can make a difference, and everyone should try".

Read more: Dutch 'JFK' aims to thwart far-right's election hopes, Government & Economy - THE BUSINESS TIMES