Western European News Digest

British Use Financial Crisis To Move Against America

Nov. 6 (EIRNS)—"The decision makers at Citi, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and the rest will adopt an 'America first' attitude when defending their turf," and if they do, London will suffer, complained Daily Telegraph city editor Damian Reece, who argues that, "This is the moment for Citi to take all the pain it needs to take." Elsewhere in the same rag, imperial mouthpiece Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argued that some $2 trillion of subprime and Alt-A debt is "worth far less than book value" and "a cascade of defaults will inevitably follow," and that America must now pay a price for "mortgaging the nation."

These statements reflect the duplicity that earned the British Empire the sobriquet Perfidious Albion, as they occur within the context of an all-out British assault on the very concept of American nationalism.

While Sarkozy Dines at White House, France Goes on Strike

Nov. 7 (EIRNS)—While French President Sarkozy was eating "Lafayette Heritage," a dessert served to him at the Bush White House, France was increasingly in a mass-strike ferment, reports the newspaper of the LaRouche movement in Paris, Nouvelle Solidarité.

Since the beginning of November:

1. French fishermen went on strike for lower diesel fuel prices, and quotas;

2. The CFDT trade union federation announced that it will join the national railway strike planned for Nov. 14, with the possibility that the Paris transportation union and the energy sector unions will join;

3. Workers at oil giant Total blocked several oil depots, demanding wage increases;

4. Several universities are blocked by far-left student unions, contesting the new statutes of universities that will become "autonomous" (financial self-government and choice of teachers).

London Underground Returns to Public Control

Nov. 7 (EIRNS)—In a statement yesterday, Britain's leading transport labor union RMT welcomed the decision of Transport for London, TfL, a publicly-owned firm of the municipality of London, to take over two-thirds of the city's underground. This decision followed the failure of Metronet, the group that had privatized and then run down the subway system during the past years.

"Two-thirds of London Underground's infrastructure work will be coming back under public control where it belongs," said RMT general secretary Bob Crow, adding, "However, a third of the network's infrastructure remains in the hands of Tubelines, whose sole reason for existence is to take as much money as possible out of the industry. We warned and campaigned against the PPP from the start."

Proposed: National Space Program for Germany

Nov. 8 (EIRNS)—In his keynote address to an international congress on space research and technology, which opened in Berlin yesterday, Johann-Dietrich Wörner, director of the German Space Agency, DLR, called for a return to "grand visions" in space affairs, calling for a discussion about a revival of manned missions.

Wörner also called for a national German space effort, to begin with a series of unmanned missions to the Moon. A detailed proposal for a first lunar probe is being prepared at the DLR now, to be put on the government's agenda for decisions next Spring. The probe would involve sending a set of high-precision cameras, laser devices for spectroscopy, and related systems to an orbit of 50 kilometers distance from the lunar surface, and will arrive no later than 2012.

The next phase would involve landing rovers on the Moon for exploratory missions, and a third phase, to begin some time between 2015 and 2020, would land an unmanned research laboratory. For all missions, cartography and search for minerals would be at the center. Wörner also said that one should not rule out German manned missions in the future.

MI5 Sounds Terror Alert in Britain

Nov. 5 (EIRNS)—With the image of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, no doubt, before him, Jonathan Evans, the new head of Britain's MI5 (their version of the FBI), gave the keynote speach to the assembled Society of Editors conference today. Clearly trying to whip the British press into line, Evans did his best to paint an image of a "terrorist under every rock," saying that today's threat is "the worst in MI5's 98-year history." After citing alarmist statistics, and asserting that al-Qaeda was targeting "the children," Evans declared that, although their numbers have increased to almost 4,000, MI5 could not do it alone. To win the fight against terrorism "requires a collective effort in which government, faith communities, and wider civil society [e.g., the press] have an important part to play," he said.

Round of Kosovo Talks Ends Without Progress

Nov. 6 (EIRNS)—A new round of talks to resolve the future of Kosovo ended yesterday at the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, mediated by the Contact Group troika of diplomats from the EU, the U.S.A., and Russia. This is an issue around which London hopes to blow up relations between Washington and Moscow, and no progress was made in the talks, according to the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The Kosovo Albanians again announced their intention to declare independence unilaterally, shortly after negotiations are scheduled to end on Dec. 10.

Another Video-Game Addict Turns Suicide-Killer

Nov. 8 (EIRNS)—"I am prepared to fight and die for my cause." Sound like a terrorist suicide bomber from Southwest Asia? Guess again. This is the statement of the latest teen suicide bomber, 18-year-old Finnish student Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who, on Nov. 7, entered Jokela High School, shouting, "Revolution! Smash Everything!" and killed seven students and the principal, before shooting himself.

Auvinen followed precisely the modus operandi of all previous school suicide bombers, such as Cho Seung-Hui of Virginia Tech this year, and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine High School in 1999. Millions of youth today are being programmed to have these thoughts, by, as the killer's own Internet "profile" documents, and as LaRouche PAC has exposed, a British imperial psychological warfare operation, to create suicide bombers and stone-cold killers through the "entertainment" and computer game industry (see InDepth for "The LaRouche Show: MySpace, Facebook Turn Youth Into Cyber-Fodder for New Hitler Movement").