Zone 3- Euro-Americas Summary Week # 110

Week # 110 - Dated 5-12 March, 2010
WESTERN EUROPE
A British court has barred a far right, anti-immigrant political party from accepting new members until it stops discriminating against nonwhite people. The British National Party was ordered last year to scrap its whites-only membership rules to comply with race relations laws. The party voted last month to change its constitution so that black and Asian people could join, but critics said the changes were too vague.
Meanwhile a British Airways computer expert was charged Thursday with plotting suicide bombings — including one he allegedly planned to carry out himself. Prosecutor Colin Gibbs alleged that Bangladesh-born Rajib Karim deliberately sought a job with the airline in order to further an unspecified terrorist conspiracy.
The foreign ministers of Turkey and Sweden condemned last week a vote in the Swedish parliament that defined the early 20th-century killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.
Irish police have released three of the seven people arrested last week in connection with an alleged plot to murder a Swedish cartoonist over a drawing depicting the Prophet Mohammad.
The Vatican rallied around Pope Benedict last week, dismissing suggestions he had tried to cover up priestly child abuse in Germany.
RUSSIA & THE BALKANS
The situation in Afghanistan and NATO-Russia relations dominated last week’s talks in Warsaw between Polish President Lech Kaczynski and visiting NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. While commenting that NATO was crucial for the safety of the region and the world, Kaczynski also supported the view that Russia should not be admitted to NATO.
The European Parliament has condemned the recent imprisonment of activists of a Polish minority organization (Union of Poles) in Belarus. Parliament has also demanded that all independent internet news sites and forums closed by the authoritarian regime of President Aleksander Lukashenko be allowed to function.
The Czech Social Democrats (CSSD), the leading opposition Parties, have been running a campaign promising a comprehensive tax reform according to which ordinary people will not have to pay for the Global Economic crisis, and companies and the rich should be taxed to maintain a generous welfare system.
Slovakia's language law has generated a new debate regarding the status of minority languages in Europe. “A Challenge for Europe” conference, at the Parliament's Brussels premises was intended to highlight the issue. According to estimates, around 40m people regularly speak over 60 non-recognized European languages in the EU. The question of Ukraine giving official status to the Russian language has become a matter for heated debate since Viktor Yanukovych was elected president in February on the back of strong support in the mainly Russian-speaking east of the country.
According to most recent opinion polls, Hungary’s Socialists will face a crushing defeat in an election to be held in April the two right-wing political parties will gain majority votes. According to analysts this sharp decline in support for the Socialists, who have ruled Hungary for eight years, is mainly because of their inconsistent economic policies and corruption scandals. Their fate may mirror the near demise of the Polish left in 2005.
Russia has signed an agreement with India to build up to 16 nuclear reactors for power stations. In striking this deal, Asia’s third largest economy is reaffirming old cold war ties.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev held talks with King Abdullah II of Jordan on the Middle East settlement and the implementation of joint economic projects. The wide range of bilateral relations is swinging from defense cooperation to humanitarian interaction.
Poland's Finance Minister has criticized the International Monetary Fund for advising European governments last year to expand their borrowing and spending because due to that IMF advice, some European governments had increased their public debt burden to unsustainable levels.
Hungarian industrial output increased from a year earlier in January for the first time since the global economic crisis hit the country in the autumn of 2008. Hungary, which was the first European Union country to secure International Monetary Fund support during the crisis, saw its deepest economic decline last year for nearly two decades. Meanwhile Standard and Poor's on Friday lifted Ukraine's debt ratings from a level deemed vulnerable to default.
The proposed law aiming at mandatory displays of love for the nation and elevating the nation's patriotic spirit have been met with resistance in Slovakia. The law, if signed by the president, requires students in state-run schools to listen to the national anthem before class each and each classroom to be fixed with a slide of state symbols ranging from Slovakia's flag, the coat of arms, and the text of the constitution's preamble and the words of the national anthem.
Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom signed last week the amendment to the criminal code that now considers holocaust denial illegal.
US/CANADA
An indictment against a suburban Philadelphia woman accused of recruiting jihadist fighters online and moving to Europe to try to kill a Swedish artist has surfaced as a rare case of an American woman aiding foreign terrorists, authorities say, and shows the evolution of the threat of terrorism.
Meanwhile U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates raised the possibility that some of the U.S. forces involved in the Afghanistan surge could leave the country before President Barack Obama's announced July 2011 date to begin withdrawal.
The White House last week announced a "summit on entrepreneurship" to build economic ties with the Islamic world, as part of President Barack Obama's outreach to Muslims.
According to activists, the rate of tuberculosis among Canada's 55,000 Arctic Inuit people is catastrophically high and much more must be done to combat the lung disease.
LATIN AMERICA
Last week Argentine President Cristina Kirchner lost her Senate majority. Senators switched allegiance and voted to put anti-government lawmakers at the heads of 13 of the Senate’s 25 committees, giving them effective control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 2005. Also her choice to head the central bank was rejected by a key committee.
Spain, current EU presidency holder, has sent Argentina a strong message it doesn't want the European Union involved in any kind of mediation initiative over the British drilling for hydrocarbons in the waters of Falklands.
US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton's one-day visit to Brazil last week was dominated by the Iranian nuclear program. President Lula said he did not want Iran to develop nuclear weapons and would raise the issue in a visit to Tehran in May.
Brazil’s economy may overheat as too much foreign investment flows into the country, said Luciano Coutinho, president of state development bank BNDES.
Mexico's capital city handed out its first licenses for same-sex marriage, allowing gay couples to marry legally, and also adopt children and receive government benefits—changes that pit the city's progressive government against a more conservative country that surrounds it.
According to recent reports Venezuelan State-run Oil Company Petróleos deVenezuela (Pdvsa), in association with a Belarus company, is searching for new fields for the production of hydrocarbons in an area of 1,930.5 square miles in the state of Apure, southwestern Venezuela.
Venezuela's highest court has reinstated an opposition mayor, just one week after it annulled his election and replaced him with a supporter of President Hugo Chavez.
Meanwhile the number of homicides in Venezuela rose last year to 16,047, compared with 14,589 in 2008, according to a report by the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, or OW, which names impunity and corruption as the chief causes.
Venezuela ranked 174 among 183 countries in the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, a product of the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. The study found that domestic economy decreased by 2.8 points since last year, and entered the category of "restricted" economy, while it remains in the same ranking.
AUSTRALASIA
Royal Dutch Shell and PetroChina joined forces for a 2.96 billion US dollar bid for Australia's Arrow Energy last week, hoping for a bigger slice of the country's booming liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector. §

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