EU Medicines Oversight Body: Spain offers to host EU medicines agency after Brexit - by Ciaran Giles

Competition is heating up among European Union countries hoping to reap some of the benefits of Britain's exit from the EU, with Spain joining the list of nations bidding to host the bloc's medicines oversight body.

Health Minister Dolors Montserrat told a meeting of business representatives and journalists Thursday that Spain believes the Mediterranean port city of Barcelona is the ideal place to house the headquarters of the European Medicines Agency when it relocates from London.

Barcelona has offered its multicolored, aluminum-and-glass Agbar skyscraper as the headquarters. The city was runner-up when London was chosen as EMA headquarters in 1992.

The Netherlands and Portugal are also among several countries presenting bids for the lucrative oversight body. The Portuguese government said Thursday it would propose the capital, Lisbon, which is already home of the EU drug agency and the EU maritime safety agency.

The medicines agency, employing about 900 people, is one of the biggest EU institutions with an annual budget of more than 300 million euros ($325 million).

The EU is also expected to relocate the European Banking Authority as part of Brexit. It isn't known when the bloc will decide on where each body's new headquarters will be.

The EMA evaluates, supervises and monitors medicines developed for use in the EU and coordinates with around 1,600 companies.

Read more: Spain offers to host EU medicines agency after Brexit - ABC

French Presidential Elections: EU MEPs act to strip Le Pen of immunity in fake jobs case

Le Pen and Putin during their recent meeting in Moscow

The European Parliament launched a procedure to lift immunity of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen on Wednesday (26 April) over claims she misused funds.

The assembly's president Antonio Tajani announced that a request from French judges had been forwarded to its legal affairs committee. The process is scheduled to begin in June.

The move comes as Le Pen, an anti-EU politician who has been an MEP since 2004, campaigns for the second round of the French presidential election on 7 May.

French judges requested her immunity be lifted at the end of March over claims of undue payments to members of her National Front (FN) party.

The parliament alerted the EU's anti-fraud office, Olaf, in 2015 after it discovered that about 20 people paid as assistants to FN MEPs were also listed as working at the party's headquarters near Paris.

According to a report leaked by French media earlier this year, Olaf found that Le Pen signed work contracts for her bodyguard and her head of cabinet assistant. It said the contracts could constitute a "misappropriation of funds, or fraud and use of fraud".

Last September, Le Pen was asked by the parliament to repay €339,946 to cover the salaries of the two assistants.

Paris judges opened a case against the FN over embezzlement, organised fraud, forgery, and undeclared work. They searched the party's headquarters in February.

Le Pen's head of cabinet, Catherine Griset, was charged a few days later.

According to Le Monde newspaper, judges found a document that could prove that the FN established a system to fund the party with EU parliament money.

"In the coming years, we can manage only by making large savings thanks to the European Parliament and if we obtain additional transfers," FN treasurer Wallerand de Saint Just wrote in a note to Le Pen, according to Le Monde.

On Thursday, the AFP press agency said parliament told judges the cost of the alleged fake jobs between 2012 and 2017 was €4,978,122.

Le Pen has denied any wrongdoing and said that the case was "persecution by political opponents".

She has so far refused to comply with court summonses, but losing her immunity would oblige her to obey.

The EU parliament already lifted her immunity in an unrelated case in March. She is under investigation in France after posting on Twitter, in 2015, pictures of men being tortured and killed by the Islamic State (IS) militant group, to protest against the comparison between IS and her National Front party by a journalist.

Le Pen, who came second in the election first round on Sunday, wants France to leave the euro and has promised to organise a referendum on the country's EU membership.

Read more: MEPs act to strip Le Pen of immunity in fake jobs case

French Presidential Elections: Can France's 'new man' prevail?-by Trudy Rubin

 Trudy RubinTrudy RubinThe final vote for the next French president, on May 7, will not only be critical for all of Europe but will have a major impact on the United States.

Despite their country's political and cultural differences from America, the French are going through an election upheaval that is amazingly similar to the convulsion that produced Donald Trump. The country is split between the winners from an open, globalized society and the losers who feel abandoned by traditional politicians.

On Sunday, in a first-round ballot with a field of 11 candidates, voters rejected mainstream parties of left and right, along with a host of independent candidates. The top two choices for a runoff were a political novice, Emmanuel Macron, who heads a new centrist party and supports an open society, closely followed by the populist, immigration-bashing nationalist, Marine Le Pen.

The polls show Macron ahead by 20 percent, yet - in these strange times - the outcome is far from certain. Should Le Pen pull an upset, we could see the collapse of NATO and the European Union and a further surge of populism on the continent.

In conversations this week with the current French ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, and a former French ambassador Pierre Vimont, I heard serious concerns about the likely results.

"I would bet yes for Macron," says Araud, who was in Philly speaking for the French-American Chamber of Commerce and at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. But then the ambassador listed his caveats.

Le Pen appeals to those who have been hurt by free trade agreements or automation. "It's not by chance that Hillary Clinton lost in the [U.S.] rust belt," he says, "and Marine Le Pen has done well in the French rust belt." Moreover, says Araud, the problem goes well beyond the issue of trade. "Ahead of us we have more automation, so how do we retrain a 45-year-old truck driver? We are facing a real problem that may worsen.

"As in America, the result in Europe is that we increasingly have dual societies, where 50 percent are quite comfortable and confident, and the other part of the population is suffering, with their income stagnating and dropping. They are looking for scapegoats, like immigrants."

This new political climate has helped Le Pen overcome the long-standing French distaste for the neo-fascist origins of her National Front Party. She has disavowed the party's anti-Semitic founder, her father, who advanced to the second round in 2002 presidential elections but then lost 80 percent to 20 percent.

Araud fears that Le Pen could win "because Macron is an unknown quantity and he will need people from the left and right to vote for him." That poses a problem which may look familiar to Clinton's supporters. In the first round of voting, third place with 20 percent of the ballots went to a far leftist with a certain resemblance to Bernie Sanders; many French Berniacs, including young activists, say they will never vote Macron, while some may switch to Le Pen.

Some voters for the fourth-place candidate, from France's conservative Republicans Party, may also vote Le Pen. And many disgruntled voters may stay home.

So the future of Europe depends on this: whether the 39-year-old Macron, a banker whose only political experience was a brief stint as economics minister for the current socialist government, can convince enough French voters that he offers new answers for a divided country.

Note EU-Digest: We can only hope the French voters contraruto the US voters will vote with their head,  and not vote for candidate Le Pen who is not only supported by Putin and Trump, but who, with her convoluted ideas, could also destroy France and the EU.

Read more:Can France's 'new man' prevail?

Germany: Ivanka Trump gets booed, hissed at during Berlin event – by Annie Karni

Ivanka Trump arrived in Berlin Tuesday morning armed with facts and figures to recite at what was expected to be a high-brow international summit to discuss women entrepreneurship, alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But on her first international trip as an official representative of the United States, the first daughter was put on the spot about her father’s attitudes toward women, booed and hissed at by the crowd, and grilled by the moderator about what, exactly, her role is in President Donald Trump’s administration.
“You’re the first daughter of the United States, and you’re also an assistant to the president,” the moderator, WirtschaftsWoche editor-in-chief Miriam Meckel, said.

“The German audience is not that familiar with the concept of a first daughter. I’d like to ask you, what is your role, and who are you representing, your father as president of the United States, the American people, or your business?”

It was an aggressive opening for the first daughter, who was seated next to Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and one seat down from Merkel. Queen Maxima of the Netherlands was also a participant on the W20 panel. And it appeared to put her on the spot.

She did not define what her new role as a senior White House official entailed, but said that she cared “very much about empowering women in the workplace” and defined her goal as enacting “incremental positive change. That is my goal. This is very early for me, I’m listening, learning.”

But she was booed and hissed at by the majority-women audience at the conference when she lauded her father for supporting paid leave policies. “I’m very proud of my father’s advocacy,” she said, calling him “a tremendous champion of supporting families and enabling them to thrive.”

Meckel, the moderator, pushed her to address the vocal disapproval from the audience.

“You hear the reaction from the audience,” she said. “I need to address one more point — some attitudes toward women your father has displayed might leave one questioning whether he’s such an empower-er for women.”

 She defended her father from her vantage point of loyal daughter — a familiar crouch from when she was confronted by uncomfortable questions about her father on the campaign.

A private meeting with Merkel, a privilege normally reserved for the most senior foreign representatives, was not on Ivanka Trump’s agenda.

And despite the insistence of the White House that Ivanka Trump was invited to attend the panel by Merkel in her role as a senior White House official a  German government spokesman also stressed that, contrary to reports that Merkel had personally asked Ivanka Trump to attend the conference, she was in fact invited by two women’s groups organizing the event.

“The Chancellor didn’t invite her,” spokesman Georg Streiter said during a press briefing on Monday. Streiter added that after Merkel’s “pleasant discussion” with Ivanka Trump in Washington, she signalled to the organizers that she would welcome Ivanka Trump’s participation.

Read more: Ivanka Trump gets booed, hissed at during Berlin event – POLITI

French Presidential elections: Parties in France Unite Against Marine Le Pen

Marine Le Penn is expected to have great difficulty in overcoming the united opposition of all other French mainstream political parties now united against her in support of Emmanuel Macron, the Centrist Candidate

Read more: Parties in France Unite Against Marine Le Pen - The New York Times

Suriname: A struggling country's past and future shaped by Alcoa and its aluminum - by Rich Lord and Len Boselovic

Suriname: The Brokopondo dam at Afobaka

The following excerpts come from a lengthy and fascinating  report in the US Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Pulitzer Center , describing the Multi-National Aluminum Company of America's exploitation of  Suriname's (a former Dutch colony on the North East Coast of South America) natural resources (bauxite deposits) since 1916. 

It must be noted that several governments, especially in Latin America and Africa, have been receptive to the negative images and have adopted hostile policies towards MNCs. 

However, a careful examination of the nature of MNCs and their operations in the Third World reveals a positive image of them, especially as the allies in the development process of these countries.

Even as MNCs may be motivated primarily by profits to invest in the Third World, the morality of their activities in improving the material lives of many in these countries should not be obscured through miss-perceptions and negative publicity usually circulated by corrupt local governments.

"It electrified this South American country even as it drowned a jungle, so the 1.2-mile-long dam Alcoa built here to harness the Suriname River is more than stone and turbines. It’s a symbol, in this tropical land of 560,000, of progress, trauma and a global company’s ability to dominate a little country’s landscape and society.

Now the Alcoa Corp. is leaving Suriname, and the Afobaka Dam’s future rivets everyone from the capital’s dealmakers to the forest’s subsistence farmers.

In a country just north of the equator that would fit within a combined Pennsylvania and West Virginia — a country that’s already in a downturn locals call “the crisis” — Alcoa’s decision to permanently end mining and refining has delivered a resonating blow.

Alcoa, the aluminum company founded in Pittsburgh in 1888 that eventually spanned six continents, set up shop here in 1916 when it found bauxite beneath the jungle floor. Cutthroat conditions in the global aluminum market compelled a shutdown in November 2015.

Halfway through that century, Alcoa finished the dam, flooding a forest people’s heartland but also jolting a plantation-based economy into the industrial age. Alcoa created mammoth mining and refining sites and raucous river towns, building a middle class while toughing out a nation’s independence, civil war and an unstable government.

Alcoa found in Suriname, circa 1916, “an almost forgotten and impoverished Dutch colony … which had to look forward to a future without a glimmer of hope,” according to a glossy, celebratory magazine the company produced in late 2014.

It was a land of subsistence farms and wild rubber extraction, plus “colonial plantations” producing cocoa, coffee and sugar. In Alcoa’s first half-century there, the company mined bauxite to the east and south of the capital and sent it abroad, by boat, for processing.

In 1958, the company, the local minister-president and the Dutch governor agreed on a plan to power an ore-to-aluminum industrial complex and signed the 75-year Brokopondo Agreement, named for the town just north of the proposed dam site.

From 1959 through 1965, Alcoa built the Afobaka Dam, and in Paranam a refinery to turn bauxite into alumina, and a smelter to convert that to aluminum ingots. The plans were crafted “on the drawing table of Alcoa’s Engineering Department in Pittsburgh,” according to a company history of the project.

The lengthy Brokopondo Agreement contained just one sentence about the 6,000 people living in 43 villages just upstream of the dam — leaving it to the government to “remove the population, the buildings and other property from the reservoir area.”

The lengthy Brokopondo Agreement contained just one sentence about the 6,000 people living in 43 villages just upstream of the dam — leaving it to the government to “remove the population, the buildings and other property from the reservoir area.”

The 1958 agreement gave Suriname’s government a fraction of the dam’s cheap electricity priced at 0.4 cents per kilowatt hour. But circumstances changed in 1999 when Alcoa closed the smelter, a big user of the dam’s electricity.

Although many say the smelter’s small size and environmental issues were the reasons for the shutdown, there was a nagging suspicion among some that Alcoa had another motive.

Henk Ramdin, Suralco’s general manager until retiring shortly before the smelter was shuttered, said many employees at the time believed the company could make more money selling the power than it could making aluminum.

“They didn’t say it openly, but I could feel it,” Mr. Ramdin recalled.

An Alcoa spokesman wrote that such decisions are based on “a comprehensive evaluation of market conditions, regulatory certainty, and capital requirements,” but declined to be more specific.

The dispute over the dam and electricity pricing came to head in October 2015, when Alcoa and Suriname’s current minister of natural resources signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding outlining proposed terms for Alcoa’s departure.

Alcoa agreed to clean up its mines and industrial sites to U.S. standards, to consider eventual mining of bauxite in western Suriname, and to give the dam to the country’s government at the end of 2019 — 13 years before the Brokopondo Agreement ended ".

For the complete report click here: A struggling country's past and future shaped by Alcoa and its aluminum | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

France: Tight race for the Elysee Palace - by Bernd Rieger

French voters will be going to the polls this Sunday with the memory of Thursday's deadly attack in Paris still fresh in their minds. All candidates, from left to right, cancelled their final campaign appearances following the incident. They are all calling for police and investigative authorities to be boosted.

The right-wing populist Marine Le Pen accused the Socialist government of having failed in the fight against Islamic terrorism. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in his turn accused Le Pen of exploiting the terror threat for the purposes of her campaign.

Surveys indicate that, after the fear of economic decline, voters are most worried about security and the threat posed by terrorism. There are no opinion polls recent enough to have measured voter sentiment following the most recent attack, which targeted police officers in the heart of Paris.

The state of emergency imposed in France after the Islamist attacks in Paris in November 2015 is still in force.

The race for France's presidency is wide open. The latest polls predict that four candidates out of the 11 candidates have a realistic chance of advancing to the decisive May 7 runoff. Two candidates, far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, who founded a new party, have both been touted as favorites for the last several weeks. Some polls give Le Pen a slight edge; others give it to Macron. It is a neck-and-neck race. But far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon and conservative Francois Fillon, the only representative of an established party, also have a decent chance of advancing. The two are just 2 or 3 percentage points behind front-runners Le Pen and Macron. That is well within the margin of error for such polling.

Election researcher Stephane Wahnich warned in a recent DW interview that nothing was certain. "We have many undecided voters in France. About a quarter of all voters have said that they will not decide until election day. That means that we are asking people who they will vote for even though they have yet to make up their minds." Wahnrich complains that France's voting public is no longer stable. "Our society is radically changing. This makes it difficult to come up with reliable projections. When you consider that fact, you have to conclude that opinion polls for this election are completely overrated."

Far-right populist Le Pen lost out in the first round of France's last presidential election in 2012. This time it seems certain that she will advance to the runoff. The ruling Socialist party of departing - and extremely unpopular - President Francois Hollande is playing no role whatsoever in the election. That is also something completely new in French politics. The country's political left is more divided than ever before. On the other hand, the rise of far-left politician Jean-Luc Melenchon, who is especially popular among young French voters for his radical anti-EU slogans and calls for 100 percent taxation on the rich, is rather astonishing. Melenchon utterly rejects globalization and free-trade: "All trade deals that devastate the signatory countries must be stopped."

Read more: Tight race for the Elysee Palace | Europe | DW.COM | 22.04.2017