Free Republic

Euroskeptic deputies were denied several of the European Parliament’s top committee posts on Monday (7 July), as the assembly’s centrist groups joined forces to shut them out. The committees elected chairpersons and vice-chairpersons using the “D’Hondt method” on the relative sizes of the EU assembly’s seven political groups. Twenty one of the 22 committee chair posts, and the vast majority of the 88 vice-chair roles, were uncontested and elected by acclaim. However, the conservative EPP, center-left S&D and liberal ALDE groups on the petitions committee joined forces to reject Eleanora Evi, a member of the euroskeptic EFDD group from Italian...

US President Barack Obama has said he will not spy on EU leaders or conduct economic espionage, but will continue snooping on ordinary US and EU citizens.He made the pledge in a TV speech on Friday (17 January) in reaction to the Edward Snowden leaks. “I’ve made clear to the intelligence community that unless there is a compelling national security purpose, we will not monitor the communications of heads of state and government of our close friends and allies,” he said. “We do not collect intelligence to provide a competitive advantage to US companies or US commercial sectors,” he added....

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned on Tuesday that failure to win the battle against youth unemployment could tear Europe apart, and dropping the continent's welfare model in favor of tougher U.S. standards would spark a revolution. If U.S. welfare standards were introduced in Europe, "we would have revolution, not tomorrow, but on the very same day," Schaeuble told a conference in Paris. In recent weeks Germany, wary of a backlash as many in crisis-hit European countries blame it for austerity, has taken steps to tackle unemployment in the bloc, striking bilateral deals with Spain and Portugal. "We have to...