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US to store passenger data for 15 years
The personal data of millions of passengers who fly between the US and Europe, including credit card details, phone numbers and home addresses, may be stored by the US department of homeland security for 15 years, according to a draft agreement between Washington and Brussels leaked to the Guardian.
The “restricted” draft, which emerged from negotiations between the US and EU, opens the way for passenger data provided to airlines on check-in to be analysed by US automated data-mining and profiling programmes in the name of fighting terrorism, crime and illegal migration. The Americans want to require airlines to supply passenger lists as near complete as possible 96 hours before takeoff, so names can be checked against terrorist and immigration watchlists.
The agreement acknowledges that there will be occasions when people are delayed or prevented from flying because they are wrongly identified as a threat, and gives them the right to petition for judicial review in the US federal court. It also outlines procedures in the event of anticipated data losses or other unauthorised disclosure. The text includes provisions under which “sensitive personal data” – such as ethnic origin, political opinions, and details of health or sex life – can be used in exceptional circumstances where an individual’s life could be imperilled.
The 15-year retention period is likely to prove highly controversial as it is three times the five years allowed for in the EU’s PNR (passenger name record) regime to cover flights into, out of and Read more…
EU Ministers OK $110.8 Billion Portugal Rescue
European Union finance ministers cleared the way for Portugal to receive 78 billion euros ($110.8 billion) in aid, making it the third euro-area country to fall back on official loans.
The EU’s two bailout funds, the European Financial Stability Facility and European Financial Stabilization Mechanism, will each provide one-third of the assistance, while the International Monetary Fund will contribute the rest, the EU said in a statement after a unanimous vote in Brussels today.
Finance ministers called Portugal’s planned budget cuts “ambitious but credible,” according to the statement. The aid program will run for three years.
Portugal follows Greece and Ireland in requesting a bailout from the EU and International Monetary Fund. Politicians are struggling to convince investors that 256 billion euros in aid to the three countries will be enough to stamp out Europe’s debt crisis and prevent the euro region’s first restructuring.
Portuguese Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said before the meeting he was confident of approval because “all the issues that we had to clarify were clarified.” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble had also been upbeat about Portugal’s aid request.
The meeting was clouded by the May 14 arrest of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Read more…
IMF Says Europe’s Debt Woes Could Spread
The International Monetary Fund is warning that the governmental debt problems in Greece, Ireland and Portugal could spread to other European countries that employ the euro currency and also to the emerging economies in eastern Europe.
In its semi-annual report on the European economy, the IMF said Thursday that officials so far have been able to contain the continent’s debt contagion to the three countries on Europe’s geographic periphery. But the Washington-based financing agency said there “remains a tangible downside risk” of debt problems spreading. It said European nations will have to make “unrelenting” efforts to contain their financial problems.
The IMF said weak banking systems remain a threat to the financial health of the 17 nations where the euro is the common currency. It said the reduction in the number of banks in Europe is proceeding too slowly and that greater financial integration on the continent is needed.
Greece and Ireland reluctantly accepted bailouts from the IMF and their European neighbors last year and now Portugal is Read more…
Timeline: Greece’s debt crisis
Here is a timeline of economic events in Greece since 2010:
Jan 2010 – Greece unveils stability program on Jan 14, saying it will aim to cut its budget gap to 2.8 percent of GDP in 2012 from 12.7 percent in 2009.
Feb – Greece must refinance 54 billion euros ($66.6 billion) of debt, with a crunch in Q2 as more than 20 billion euros becomes due and market yields for Greek debt soar.
March 5 – Package of public sector pay cuts and tax increases is passed to save an extra 4.8 billion euros. VAT to rise 2 percentage points to 21 percent; state-funded pensions frozen in 2010.
April 11 — Euro zone finance ministers approve 30 billion euros ($40.67 billion) emergency aid mechanism for Greece.
April 15 – Greek parliament passes law that seeks to tackle tax evasion and shift tax burden to higher earners.
April 22 – Eurostat says Greece’s 2009 budget deficit is 13.6 percent of GDP, not 12.7 percent as reported earlier.
April 23 – Prime Minister George Papandreou asks for activation of an EU/IMF aid package. Read more…
Grains Wilt in Dry Europe as England Posts Its Hottest April in 352 Years
Dry, warm weather in Europe may reduce global wheat stockpiles already expected to fall 7.6 percent in the year that ends on May 31, the biggest decline since 2007. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
Dry weather in France and Germany and England’s hottest April in at least 352 years are threatening crops across the European Union, producer of a fifth of the world’s wheat.
About 20 percent of average rain fell in the U.K. in April after a dry March, further reducing soil moisture, the Home- Grown Cereals Authority, an industry group, said in an e-mailed report. European wheat and rapeseed crops are “in jeopardy” after an “incredibly dry” April, according to agricultural weather forecaster Martell Crop Projections.
Dry, warm weather in Europe may reduce global wheat stockpiles already expected to fall 7.6 percent in the year that ends on May 31, the biggest decline since 2007. Food prices reached a record in February, driving 44 million people into poverty, and wheat consumption may rise to an all-time high this year. The world “cannot afford” for Europe’s crop to be diminished, Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, said last month.
“The world needs a bumper crop in all grains from the U.S. and from Europe and from Canada or we are in trouble,” Dennis Gartman, an economist and author of The Gartman Letter, said today by e-mail. “The winter wheat crop here is in trouble, and the spring wheat crop in the Dakotas and the Canadian prairies may be very badly delayed and therefore in Read more…
Why Is the U.S. Bankrolling IMF’s Bailouts in Europe?
humanevents
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund held their spring meeting April 14 to 18 in Washington, D.C. Both financial titans were created after World War II to foster economic cooperation and development around the globe. With 16.2% of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shares, the United States is the largest shareholder among the 187 nations who belong to the fund—even though its managing director has always been a European.
Remote to most Americans, the IMF has been in the headlines recently because of its role as one of the financial rescuers of three European nations whose economies collapsed last year. Under Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (the former French finance minister, who is considered the leading Socialist candidate for president of France in 2012), the IMF has joined with the European Union to sculpt bailout packages for Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. Coupled with loans from the EU, the price tags on the bailout packages come to $157 billion for Greece, $122 billion for Ireland, and most recently, $116 billion for Portugal.
Obviously, these are quite substantial packages for the three economically devastated countries. They will become very relevant to U.S. taxpayers when they realize that, because we are the largest single contributor to the organization, and with Spain and Italy now Read more…
Europe is facing the worst drought in century
Traditional Easter fairs in the east and the north of the Netherlands have been cancelled because of the risk of fires posed by the extraordinarily dry weather affecting northern Europe. In the eastern half of the country, one of Europe’s biggest traders, outdoor family barbecues, smoking and camp fires are a strict no-no.
In the Swiss canton of Zurich, officials began moving trout this week from the river Toess before their habitat dried up. This year threatens to bring “one of the most significant droughts since 1864,” the year when records began in Switzerland. The drought in western Switzerland over the last 12 months is as severe as those recorded in 1884 and 1921. Several cantons have also imposed bans on lighting fire in and close to forests. A grass shortage could also lead to a Read more…
Surging Food Prices Could Thrust Millions Into Poverty In Emerging Europe: World Bank
WASHINGTON, April 16 (Bernama) — The recent price hikes in food and energy could push more than five million people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia into poverty, reports the China’s Xinhua news agency, quoting World Bank’s official.
Yvonne Tsikata, the director for Poverty reduction and economic management of the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia region said: “The poorest people in the region will suffer the most from the high food and energy price inflation, which reduces their purchasing power’.
She said that the region’s poor often spend half of their income on food, and Read more…
Ancient Tablet Found: Oldest Readable Writing in Europe
Marks on a clay tablet fragment found in Greece are the oldest known decipherable text in Europe, a new study says.
Considered “magical or mysterious” in its time, the writing survives only because a trash heap caught fire some 3,500 years ago, according to researchers.
Found in an olive grove in what’s now the village of Iklaina (map), the tablet was created by a Greek-speaking Mycenaean scribe between 1450 and 1350 B.C., archaeologists say.
The Mycenaeans—made legendary in part by Homer’s Iliad, which fictionalizes their war with Troy—dominated much of Greece from about 1600 B.C. to 1100 B.C. (See “Is Troy True? The Evidence Behind Movie Myth.”)
So far, excavations at Iklaina have yielded evidence of an early Mycenaean palace, giant terrace walls, murals, and a surprisingly advanced drainage system, according to dig director Michael Cosmopoulos.
But the tablet, found last summer, is the biggest surprise of the multiyear project, Cosmopoulos said.
“According to what we knew, that tablet should not have been there,” the University of Missouri-St. Louis archaeologist Read more…
EU to ban cars from cities by 2050
The European Commission on Monday unveiled a “single European transport area” aimed at enforcing “a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers” by 2050.
The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.
Top of the EU’s list to cut climate change emissions is a target of “zero” for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorries in the EU’s future cities.
Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission, insisted that Brussels directives and new taxation of Read more…
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