Free Republic

Britain is already a lame duck within the EU’s internal governing structure and is losing influence “by the day” in Brussels, even before David Cameron holds a referendum on withdrawal. This self-isolation has upset the European balance of power in profound ways, leading ineluctably to German hegemony and a unipolar system centered on Berlin. […] Such is the verdict of Roman Prodi, the former Italian premier and ex-president of the European Commission. […] “Germany is exercising an almost solitary power. The new presidents of the Commission and the Council are men who rotate around Germany’s orbit, and above all there...

Password guessing The U.S. intelligence community has launched a multi-year research project to develop a superconducting computer, awarding its first contracts to three major technology companies.IBM, Raytheon BBN and Northrop Grumman won the contracts, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity said Wednesday, without disclosing financial details.If it works, the Cryogenic Computer Complexity (C3) program could lead to a new generation of superconducting supercomputers."The energy demands of today's high-performance computers have become a critical challenge for the Intelligence Community that the C3 program aims to address," IARPA said in a statement. Such computers use massive amounts of energy.Competition from Europe, Japan...

The EU's top human rights court on Thursday ordered France to pay thousands of euros to Somali pirates who attacked French ships for "violating their rights" by holding them an additional 48 hours before taking them before a judge. The Somali pirates were apprehended on the high seas by the French army on two separate occasions in 2008 and taken back to France for trial. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said that French authorities should have brought the pirates before a judge "without delay" when they arrived on French territory after being held at sea. The EU’s top...

Mr Gorbachev said there was still time to defuse the standoff between Moscow and the West, as he and his western counterparts had done during the Perestroika period. “Now there are once again signs of a Cold War,” he said in an interview with Tass, the state-owned news agency. “This process can and must be stopped. After all, we did it in the 1980s. We opted for de-escalation, for the reunification (of Germany). And back then it was a lot tougher than now. So we could do it again.” Mr Gorbachev, 83, who has run a civil society foundation since...

PUNGESTI, Romania — Vlasa Mircia, the mayor of this destitute village in eastern Romania, thought he had struck it rich when the American energy giant Chevron showed up here last year and leased a plot of land he owned for exploratory shale gas drilling. But the encounter between big business and rural Romania quickly turned into a nightmare. The village became a magnet for activists from across the country opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Violent clashes broke out between the police and protesters. The mayor, one of the few locals who sided openly with Chevron, was run out of...

The Russian markets opened on December 1 to a catastrophe. The price of Brent crude oil fell below $70 a barrel, causing the ruble to drop heavily yet again. There had been some signs that the Russian currency was beginning to claw back some of the ground lost this year, but another step-down in the price of oil to below the psychologically important $70 level kicked the legs out from under the nascent rally. Against the dollar, the ruble exchange rate had dropped 9.3% by midday, taking it below the key RUB50/$ for the first time. You’d have to go...

Katya Golubkova and Vladimir Soldatkin, Reuters November 27, 2014MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's most powerful oil official Igor Sechin said in an interview with an Austrian newspaper that oil prices could fall below $60 by mid-way through next year. Sechin, chief executive of Rosneft, Russia's largest oil producer, also said U.S. oil production would fall after 2025 and that an oil market council should be created to monitor prices, the same day the OPEC cartel met in Vienna and left its output targets unchanged. "We expect that a fall in the price to $60 and below is possible, but only during...

Every central banker knows the importance of trust. In a world of fiat currencies--bank notes backed by nothing other than more bank notes--shoppers and firms must have confidence that cash will retain its value in order to hold it. That trust is being tested in Russia, where the rouble has fallen 23% against the dollar in the past three months. Such a plunge inevitably brings inflation in the form of more expensive imports, a worry given that consumer prices in Russia are already rising at over 8% a year. Yet in recent weeks there have been creeping signs of something...

Energy-rich Russia's currency extended Friday its slide into record low territory and the government lowered its crucial oil price forecast in the wake of OPEC's decision to leave its output target unchanged. The ruble shed another 1.6 percent against the dollar and stood near the 49.35 mark in evening trading on the Moscow Exchange. It gave up the same percentage point and was valued at almost 61.55 against the euro -- also a historic low. The beleaguered currency has been trying to find its footing ever since the OPEC cartel decided on Thursday evening not to cut back production to...

Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Turkey on Monday will have trade and energy issues at its heart, but is not expected to bridge deep differences over Syria and Crimea. The two issues have tested a relationship usually kept on track by mutual economic advantage: Russia is Turkey's main energy supplier, and Ankara is Moscow's second biggest trade partner after Germany. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has strongly criticized Russia's backing for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And Turkey has strong links with the Muslim Tatar population of Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in March. With Erdogan and Putin set to...

Technology is cheaper and West doesn’t use oil to fund a welfare state Give Saudi Arabia credit: Whoever sets oil-production policy for the desert kingdom has guts. Unfortunately, the sheiks have made what’s likely to become a sucker’s bet.You know this part already, but the 12-nation Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries last week declined to cut production, sending Brent crude oil futures tumbling to their cheapest point since 2009. The Saudis appear to be spoiling for a fight, trying to find out exactly how cheap oil must be to force surging U.S. shale-oil production to seize up like an...

Tomas Hirst December 2, 2014Russia's Economy Ministry has downgraded its GDP forecast for the country in 2015 from 1.2% growth to a 0.8% contraction. In other words, the country is falling into a recession. The net amount of foreign capital expected to flow out of the country in 2014 has been revised sharply upward to $125 billion (up from $100 billion), while the projection of net outflows for next year has also been increased, to $90 billion from $50 billion. The independent Russian news agency Interfax reports Deputy Economic Development Minister Alexei Vedev as saying that the downgrade reflects the...

Russian Ruble Takes a Nosedive as Oil Price Drops MOSCOW — Dec 1, 2014, 6:29 AM ET By NATALIYA VASILYEVA Associated Press Russia's ruble hit a new all-time low on Monday, dropping about 5 percent as declining oil prices and the conflict in eastern Ukraine weigh on the country's economic prospects. The Russian currency traded at 52.75 rubles against the dollar in morning trading Monday after shedding 15 percent in the previous week. The ruble was also down 5 percent against the euro. Battered by low oil prices and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, the ruble has been declining throughout...

The decline in the price of oil, Western economic sanctions against the nation following its invasion of Ukraine, and the collapse of the Russian rouble that resulted, has decimated Russia's economy. Now Russian GDP has shrunk so much it is no longer the world's eighth largest economic power, according to The Telegraph. Instead, Putin's Russia is now carries roughly the same economic weight as ... Spain: Russia has lost its ranking as the world’s eighth biggest economy, shrinking in just nine months from a $2.1 trillion petro-giant to a mid-size player comparable with Korea or Spain. For the past several...

Russia’s central bank is trying to resist a brutal assault on the ruble, but any respite is bound to be short-lived. The Central Bank of Russia waded into currency markets Monday as the ruble plunged to levels not seen since the 1998 financial crisis that triggered a devaluation and government debt default. Like the Canadian dollar and the Norwegian krone, the Russian currency has been under extreme pressure amid the collapse in oil prices. The ruble plunged as much as 6.5 per cent Monday, hitting a record low against the U.S. dollar before retracing some its lost ground to close...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday Western sanctions have not halted Russia's support for separatists in Ukraine but have damaged the Russian economy, which is now projected to slide into recession next year. A senior State Department official, accompanying Kerry to a NATO meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels, said he would talk to allies about imposing further sanctions on Russia if pro-Moscow separatists do not cease violence in Ukraine. Kerry told a news conference Russia could avoid further sanctions by agreeing to steps towards ending backing for the rebels, who seized mainly Russian-speaking areas of eastern...

With its slogan “Out with the racists, in with the feminists,” the party has broadened traditional feminist values to also fight discrimination on the basis of race, sexual identity and physical disabilities.

Stockholm (AFP) - Sweden's Social Democrats look set to reclaim power after eight years in opposition, according to an early exit poll which predicts the far right will make historic gains in Sunday's general election. The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats could double their seats in parliament as some in the nation of 10 million known for its liberal asylum rules express frustration with a growing influx of refugees. .... An electoral gain for the Sweden Democrats and their dapper 35-year-old leader Jimmie Aakesson would confirm a Europe-wide trend of soaring popularity for populist right-wing parties. The eurosceptic Alternative for Germany, which...

Sweden's Social Democrats and their centre-left allies are poised to return to power after defeating the centre-right government, in a general election that also resulted in strong gains for the anti-immigration party. With all but two voting districts tallied on Sunday, the Social Democrat-led bloc won 43.8 percent of the vote while the ruling centre-right coalition, led by the Moderate Party, gained 39.3 percent. But the anti-immigration far-right Sweden Democrats were celebrating large gains as the party won 12.9 percent of votes cast - more than doubling the 5.7 percent of votes won in the 2010 election. "Sweden friends, party...

Background: The anti-Islamist party of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) recently made huge success in national elections. Despite the fact that Swedes drive around in $35 000 Volvos and build even larger homes for themselves than other rich people like Americans and Australians do, something obviously is rotten in this neighbor state of Denmark and it's not surströmming (google it!). Sooner, it's a failed policy on immigration. Anyhow, this is the analysis of former (Socialist or at least Social Democratic) PM Persson who once expressed doubts about the numbers of non-Western immigrants Sweden has let in. The article: "Former Swedish Prime...