Free Republic

The German government is ending a contract with Verizon over fears the company could be letting U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdrop on sensitive communications, officials said Thursday. The New York-based company has for years provided Internet services to a number of government departments, although not to German security agencies, said Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate. […] German authorities were particularly irked by reports that the NSA had targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel. Berlin has also proposed building more secure networks in Europe to avoid having to rely on American Internet companies that manage much of the electronic traffic circulating the globe. …

One of the main problems of the EU is an inherent one: it is a problem of being constructed in a particular way as well as behaving in a particular way. The EU suffers from a lack of self-reflection and the idea of not “knowing oneself”. The EU also suffers from a denial of failure: its official discourse claims it is on the right track. The EU does not question what it has done so far and why it went wrong. The EU has a cognitive problem that puzzles many of us. The Christian Churches may ask for more room...

The European Commission on Tuesday (24 June) laid out plans on how to boost the EU’s military and defense industries. It wants to create a single market on defense, make it more profitable, and intensify and merge research with the civil sector. […] The EU’s €80 billion Horizon 2020 research program would be used to help fund dual-technology projects. It also wants to develop a new program to explore the potential benefits of EU-funded research projects. Among the ideas is to create drones capable of carrying out both civil and military operations. …

UK prime minister David Cameron is to force EU leaders to vote on whether to appoint Jean-Claude Juncker to become the next president of the European Commission at a summit later this week. […] A vote would be unprecedented. Traditionally, EU leaders decide on the leader of the EU executive by consensus following a formal discussion. Cameron has argued that Juncker, a former prime minister of the Grand Duchy and veteran of more than twenty years of EU summitry, is too federalist and will be unable to reform the EU, in the wake of election results which saw a surge...

A Polish magazine said Sunday it has obtained recordings of a conversation in which Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski says the country’s strong alliance with the U.S. “isn’t worth anything” and is “even harmful because it creates a false sense of security.” In a short transcript of the conversation, a person identified as Sikorski by the magazine Wprost tells former finance minister, Jacek Rostowski, that Poles naïvely believe the U.S. bolsters their security. Using vulgar language, the person argues that such beliefs are nonsense, and that the Polish-U.S. alliance alienates the Russians and Germans. There has been no official confirmation that...

A group of banking chiefs, insurance bosses and entrepreneurs are urging Prime Minister David Cameron to protect businesses from European Union bureaucracy and plans to tax financial institutions. […] Cameron is anxious to show euro-skeptics in Britain, where anti-EU sentiment is high, that he is fighting for the country’s best interests. …

Since signing the Oslo agreement in 1993, Israel has made a series of astounding concessions, which did nothing but produce further Palestinian demands for even more far-reaching concessions. Indeed, as Jonathan Tobin rightly points out (Commentary, June, 16), the claim that “Israelis have blocked all other paths for the Palestinians except violence…is, to put it bluntly, a lie. It is the Palestinian Arabs who have consistently and repeatedly rejected offers of peace and statehood…” In an opinion piece “Terror apologists blame Israel for abduction”, Yedioth Aharonot’s Ben Dror Yemini, echoed Tobin’s assessment. …

The European Union is closing a loophole that allows companies to shift their profits between different country divisions to avoid taxation. […] EU officials say tax fraud and firms’ aggressive cross-border tax avoidance schemes cost the bloc’s governments an estimated €1 trillion ($1.3 trillion) a year. …

Increasing numbers of French Jews are leaving for Israel, citing dim economic prospects and a sense of being caught between an increasingly influential far right and militant Islam. More than 5,000 are on track to leave this year, the most since after the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel, seeing the influx as a success, is doubling down on its efforts to attract Europeans, planning to dedicate $29 million over two years to bring in new immigrants. France has the world’s third-largest Jewish population after Israel and the United States—about 500,000, according to rough estimates in a country that has outlawed...

The EU’s anti-fraud office OLAF will have to ask permission to enter the offices of elected and appointed members of the EU institutions under proposals by the European Commission. “For all the other staff, Olaf will continue to work as it has up to now,” European Commission spokesperson Emer Traynor told this website on Wednesday (18 June). […] The commission wants to create a so-called Controller of Procedural Guarantees. OLAF investigators will first have to ask the Controller’s permission before entering the office of a European Commissioner, an MEP, or a minister at the EU Council. Everyone else, including staff...

The European Union expressed alarm Wednesday at recent violence against Muslims in Sri Lanka in which three people died and more than 50 were injured, and urged the government to ensure that the rule of law is upheld. […] Hard-line Buddhists hurled gasoline bombs and looted homes and businesses in attacks Sunday evening in several towns in southwestern Sri Lanka. The attacks were led by a mob from Bodu Bala Sena, or Buddhist Power Force, which rails against the country’s Muslim minority. …

Germany’s defense minister Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday the country could play a bigger military role in UN peacekeeping operations. […] “We have key capacities and capabilities which other nations do not have,” she said after meeting deputy Secretary-General of the UN Jan Eliasson. …

The EU has urged Israel to keep working with Palestinian authorities in order to help get back three teenagers kidnapped in the West Bank. It said in a statement on Tuesday (17 June) it “encourages continued close cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian security services to ensure the swift release of the abductees.” It added that “such acts can only undermine international efforts to encourage a resumption of peace negotiations.” …

German Chancellor Angela Merkel assured Brazil on Sunday that she will do her utmost to bring to a successful end the 15-year-old negotiation of a free trade deal between the European Union and South America’s Mercosur trade bloc. Merkel, stopping in the Brazilian capital on her way to see the German soccer team play in the World Cup on Monday, said Germany and Brazil, the two largest economies in Europe and Latin America, had much to gain from more trade and investment. […] Brazil, a regional powerhouse that is seeking more trade to boost its stagnant economy, feels it is...

Russian firm Gazprom is stopping gas supplies to Ukraine after talks on a new price broke down in the small hours of Monday (16 June). It said in a statement published at 10 am Moscow time—its deadline for Ukraine to pay almost $2 billion of old debt—that it is switching to “prepayment for gas supplies … Starting today, the Ukrainian company will only get the Russian gas it has paid for”. It added that Ukraine has not made prepayments for June. The situation does not mean immediate shortages for Ukraine or for EU countries which get Russian gas via Ukraine,...

Germany’s president says his compatriots shouldn’t always reject deploying the military to help resolve conflicts as he underlines calls for the country to take more international responsibility. […] President Joachim Gauck told Deutschlandfunk radio in an interview broadcast Saturday that he understands Germans’ longstanding reluctance to take a leading international role, but the country is now a “solid and reliable democracy.” He said that in defending human rights and innocent lives “it is sometimes necessary to take up arms.” …

Dead workers in Germany have a right to any annual leave which they’ve failed to claim at the time of their death, Europe’s top court ruled on Thursday. In a case brought by a widow from North Rhine-Westphalia, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled she was entitled to money from her dead husband’s employer for the holiday he had failed to claim. The dead man, named only as Mr. Bollacke, worked for the retailer K+K from August 1998 to November 2010, when he died. …

People in Northern Ireland are older and more likely to be atheist and divorced than their neighbors in the Republic. A new census report systematically compares life in the two jurisdictions for the first time, highlighting key differences and similarities in religion, lifestyle and work. […] Marriage and living together are both slightly more common in the Republic while splitting up and lone parenthood are more common in Northern Ireland. Nearly one in 10 adults in Northern Ireland is divorced or separated—which is nearly twice as many as in the Republic—and 37% of northerners are single compared with 42% of...

… Some German business leaders have been loud in urging Chancellor Angela Merkel not to support harsher sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine. But polls and interviews underscore another factor putting pressure on Berlin to pursue a softer line: a populace that has grown so distrustful of the U.S. that it is skeptical of following Washington’s lead in a geopolitical conflict. Among Germans, “the overwhelming feeling in the Ukraine crisis is that for the Russians—but also for the Americans—it’s about own interests and not the interests of the people in Ukraine,” says one of Germany’s top pollsters, Manfred...

European Union and Arab League countries agreed Wednesday to cooperate against the terror threat posed by home-grown radicals who return home from conflicts in the Middle East, following a deadly attack on a Jewish site in Belgium by a suspected jihadi. […] Many European authorities fear that home-grown jihadists who travel to Syria and other conflict zones will come back with skills and the will to carry out terrorism. Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders described returning foreign fighters as a “huge challenge.” …