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Having spent weeks talking amongst themselves about the chronic and dangerous rise of youth unemployment in Europe (as we warned here), the Center of planning and Economic Research in Greece has proposed a controversial measure. As GreekReporter reports, the measure includes unpaid work for the young and unemployed up to 24 years old, so that companies would have a strong motive to hire young employees. "Unpaid" work sounds a lot like slavery to us... but it gets better; the report also suggested "exporting young unemployed persons." No comment... Europe's youth unemployment problem is epic - 24.4% of Europe's under-25 population...

First published on Raymond Ibrahim site. By Enza Ferreri The issue of taqiyya – the religious permission, indeed virtue, of Muslim deception to infidels for the good of Islam – is such a uniquely crucial aspect of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially, like in the West, when the former are a minority and the latter a majority, that there have been at least a couple of trials in Europe revolving around it, one recent and the other current. In May 2013 there was a legal case in Italy in which a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood,...

In virtually every generation anti-semitism somehow finds new and unique ways to grab the imagination of people’s base prejudices. Witness the resurgence of neo-Nazi activity in parts of Eastern Europe. Here are countries where anti-semitism grew to maniacal proportions that led to the wholesale genocide of six million Jews. However, in recent attitudinal surveys, in countries such as Poland, 75 per cent of those surveyed indicated intolerance towards Jews. Even in Germany, where neo-Nazi extremism has been fought vigorously and seems to have waned, a survey conducted by the EU agency for Fundamental Rights showed fully 61 per cent of...

Welfare spending in Britain has increased faster than almost any other country in Europe since 2000, new figures show. The cost of unemployment benefits, housing support and pensions as share of the economy has increased by more than a quarter over the past thirteen years – growing at a faster rate than in most of the developed world. Spending has gone up from 18.6 per cent of GDP to 23.7 per cent of GDP – an increase of 27 per cent, according to figures from the OECD, the club of most developed nations. By contrast, the average increase in welfare...

European UnionIf you are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the "economic collapse", just open up your eyes and look at what is happening in Europe. The entire continent is a giant economic mess right now. Unemployment and poverty levels are setting record highs, car sales are setting record lows, and there is an ocean of bad loans and red ink everywhere you look. Over the past several years, most of the attention has been on the economic struggles of Greece, Spain and Portugal and without a doubt things continue to get even worse in those nations. But in 2014 and...

The EU's reputation as a model of environmental responsibility may soon be history. The European Commission wants to forgo ambitious climate protection goals and pave the way for fracking. German Chancellor Angela Merkel blocked stricter exhaust emissions during her re-election campaign to placate domestic automotive manufacturers like Daimler and BMW. This kind of blatant self-interest, EU officials complained at the time, is poisoning the climate. Now it seems that the climate is no longer of much importance to the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, either. Commission sources have long hinted at a move away from ambitious climate protection goals....

Tourism, as anyone with a passport can tell you, has become a very big business, particularly in places that no longer thrive in the customary practices of industry and commerce. Take Genoa, for instance, one of Europe’s largest cities along the Mediterranean coast and still the grandest seaport in all Italy, whose bright and shiny brochures advertise an array of attractions from castles to cuisine, beaches to basilicas. There is even a museum or two containing works by such great Flemish masters as Rubens and van Dijk. Then, having slaked one’s appetite for art, one can always wander through...

Question: What happens when you forcibly implement an overly ambitious plan to overhaul your entire energy infrastructure by ridding yourself of both nuclear power and coal, instituting on outright ban on hydraulic fracturing and hence natural-gas exploration, and relentlessly subsidize politically preferred forms of so-called “green” energy that investors and consumers aren’t choosing to use of their own volition?Answer, via Bloomberg: Across the continent’s mining belt, from Germany to Poland and the Czech Republic, utilities such as Vattenfall AB, CEZ AS and PGE SA are expanding open-pit mines that produce lignite. The moist, brown form of the fossil fuel packs...

"Night March of the Serbian Army" French WWI postcard Aleksandra's Note:As a lovely, sparkling snow falls steadily over Chicagoland on this last day of 2013, December 31st, it seems most appropriate to pay tribute to those Serb military forces and civilians who embarked on a now legendary exodus from Serbia in the late fall and winter of 1915/1916 southward through Montenegro and Albania to the coast of the Adriatic Sea. The Great Serbian Retreat, also known as the "Albanian Golgotha", was an extraordinary human event in the history of the 20th Century. Though it was a retreat, seen by the...

Sunday, December 29, 2013 A Left-Wing America Stands Alone Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog American progressives like to think of their country as backward and reactionary compared to Europe. And they have never been more right than now when Europe and the rest of the First World have gone right while America under Obama has been left back. In America Alone, Mark Steyn envisioned the United States as a beleaguered hope in a dying West. Seven years later, American politics are much less healthier than those of the rest of the free world. America does stand...

Out of office for more than three decades, Helmut Schmidt has strong views about the state of the European Union that he helped to forge out of the tough economic conditions of the late 1970s and early 1980s. "The state of Europe is problematic. European institutions are not really functioning any more. Why? Because of a lack of leadership." Schmidt says he is concerned about the "enormous, outlandish" debts of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Ireland and about the lack of jobs for the young. "We need a better coordination of fiscal policies. We need more solidarity in order to...

The Czech Republic’s environment ministry has come under fire for ordering 1,000 pairs of male and female underwear adorned with images of endangered animals as part of an end-of-year budget splurge. The environment ministry will use the beaver and cormorant pants as promotional materials for its Czech Nature campaign, which aims to encourage people to take an active role in environmental protection. With allegations of frivolous government spending on pants filling the press, the underwear spat even overshadowed controversy surrounding the environment ministry’s purchase of 130 new cars for its ministerial fleet.

A leading American think-tank has concluded President Yanukovych's $15 billion deal with Russia will boost the Ukrainian economy while the Association Agreement with the EU would have left it "mired in a new recession". The Atlantic Council's verdict on the Ukraine's two short-term options - Europe or Russia - is definitive. Senior Fellow Adrian Karatnycky says the E.U. deal would have left Kiev paying $3-4 billion a year more for Russian gas with trade shrinking up to 1.7% per year as Russia, its biggest trading partner, imposed "legitimate" trade restrictions. On top of this concludes Karatnycky, Ukraine would have been...

Turkey and the EU are scheduled to sign an agreement on Monday that the two sides say should clear the way for the lifting of visa restrictions and the repatriation of illegal migrants as well as making headway in an often difficult relationship. The signing in Ankara of the deal for Turkey to readmit migrants and the beginning of talks on visa-free travel comes amid other indications of ties improving. These include the recent resumption of EU membership negotiations after a three-year pause and a visit to Brussels next month by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister. But many Turkish officials...

“Religious fundamentalism is not a marginal phenomenon in Western Europe,” concluded a December 9, 2013, press release of the Berlin Social Science Center (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung or WZB) with respect to European Muslims in particular.  The social survey results from six West European countries supporting WZB’s conclusion present troubling questions concerning Muslim immigrant integration into free societies in Europe and beyond.As a WZB Discussion Paper explained, the WZB-funded Six Country Immigrant Integration Comparative Survey (SCIICS) involved a 2008 “large-scale telephone survey.”  Respondents were “Turkish origin” and “Moroccan origin” people “who came during the guest-worker era” pre-1975 or their descendants.  SCIICS surveyed both groups in...

The right hand and its fingers are stretched downwards along the body, while the left hand performs a “salute” movement on the opposite arm. Sound like an aerobic exercise for beginners? According to anti-Semitism researchers, it is actually a clear anti-Semitic symbol, a modern Nazi salute, spreading among Jew haters across Europe. In recent months, the researchers warn, anti-Semites have been taking advantage of the lack of public awareness of the new “salute” and taking pictures of themselves performing the salute in particularly symbolic and sensitive places around the world like the Treblinka extermination camp, the Western Wall plaza and...

KIEV, Ukraine — Protesters in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, toppled the city’s main statue of Lenin on Sunday and then pounded it into chips with a sledgehammer as a crowd chanted and cheered. The destruction of the statue was a cathartic moment in the biggest day of demonstrations so far against President Viktor F. Yanukovich’s turn away from Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians filled the streets of Kiev on Sunday, first to hear speeches and music and then to fan out and erect barricades in the district where government institutions have their headquarters. Carrying blue-and-yellow Ukrainian and European...

A middle-aged woman lies on a rug, propped provocatively on one elbow; spread out next to her is a gigantic catfish. A young man in a wifebeater and bandana wields an AK47 in his right hand and a vacuum cleaner in his left. A skinny ninja poses in front of a rug on a wall… Welcome to the world of Russian dating. Or rather, to the internet’s version of Russian dating sites. Buzzfeed’s latest detour into the wacky world of kerraaazy Russia™ has been something of a viral hit: 28,000 Facebook shares may not be a record, but it’s...

One of the things that has struck me as strange about the debate over Ukraine and its now-delayed association agreement with the EU is the assumption that integration with Europe automatically leads to rapid economic growth. The Serious People who debate these sorts of issues habitually contrast the rapid progress that Ukraine will make if it signs up with the EU with the “stagnation” that it will get if it integrates with Russia. Here, for example, is what Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, the quintessential Serious European, said recently in the Financial Times: “ But very few can believe that...

We're not out of the woods yet on Immigration 'Reform' (Amnesty) - not by a long shot. Dodged all the bullets so far? Yes, but there's more on the way. United States Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue is either bluffing about the hand of cards he's got, or he's been promised something by the pack of traitors we have yet to purge on the GOP side of the aisle. However, I have identified some trends, not just here, but internationally, that if persistent, may render further attempts at flooding sovereign nations with new waves of wage destroying migrants, null...