EU-DIGEST

"If the US Congress is responsible for punishing or shaming foreign regimes for evil acts, why are we not condemning China for its current actions toward the government and people of Tibet? Why are we not passing resolutions condemning the daily cyber attacks against U.S. commercial and governmental computer systems conducted by the Chinese? Why is there no bipartisan condemnation of the numerous shell corporations that have been formed in the U.S. with the fact concealed that these corporations are operatives of the Chinese military? (Now these corporations can contribute as they see fit to U.S. political races thanks to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.) No resolutions are in the works about China's manipulation of the value of its currency to the immediate detriment of the U.S. and other countries.

Oh, I forgot that China is the US banker. It allows us in America to continue down the road to our own economic ruin. Without China, our politicians would have to deal with our debt albatross without the option of pushing the pain onto future generations.

This may explain the resolution against the Ottoman Empire. It no longer exists. Congress can cloak itself with the halo of moral outrage without risking its catnip of borrowed money or campaign contributions."

The meeting comes amid tension in US-Sino relations, with disputes simmering over US arms sales to Taiwan, claims of Chinese cyber-spying and trade deals.

China, which views the Dalai Lama as a separatist, has warned the meeting will undermine relations.

The US, while moving carefully on the issue, dismissed the fears as needless.

For more The World from Berlin: 'Good News at Last From Europe' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

During its debate, MEPs expressed anger that the Parliament was only presented with the deal after the fact and was not consulted during the making of it.

"Parliament's right to consent should not be used as a retrospective tool", said UK MEP Timothy Kirkhope. "We are finally getting assurances from Council and Commission [on data protection issues] but we now need some time before proceeding further in our considerations." The MEPs urged the EU and US to come to a deal that offered better privacy protection and constituted a better deal for the EU. MEPs reiterated that any new agreement must comply with Lisbon Treaty requirements, and in particular the Charter of Fundamental Rights."

"Council has not been tough enough on data protection" said Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, who was the Parliament's rapporteur on the issue. She said that "the rules on data transfer and storage provided for in the interim agreement were not proportionate to the security supposedly provided," according to the statement.

German MEP Martin Schulz said in the Parliamentary debate that the deal was "a mistake and EU governments … thought they could get away with such a poor agreement, which is not in line with fundamental rights", he said. "How will data be retained, how will it be stored, can I have access to it, when it is going to be deleted? … This is a bad agreement that we simply cannot sign up to."

The European Commission, which brokered the rejected deal with the US, has told the Parliament that it will adopt a new set of draft guidelines in the coming weeks. Those guidelines "will address the European Parliament and Council's concerns [and ensure] the utmost respect for privacy and data protection," said the Parliament statement.

Note EU-Digest: This is good news for democracy in Europe and an indication that the EU Parliament is not a rubber stamp Parliament anymore. They are doing what they are supposed to do - protecting the citizens of the EU. It is also important for the US to realize they should do a better job at coordinating their own security resorces (as was proven during the recent airline terrorism event in Detroit involving a Delta aircraft coming from Amsterdam) before they infringe on other countries privacy rights.

Google’s dominant share of the search landscape puts it in a unique position. For many consumers, Google is the internet, or at the very least Google is the start page of the internet and doorway to the rest of the virtual world. For most web publishers and site owners, Google is responsible for the lion’s share of their traffic. In some cases Google can account for 60-90% of a website’s overall site visitors. For an ecommerce website getting traffic from Google can be the difference between making a healthy profit or going out of business.

Google has cornered the market on traffic. They control who is listed on the organic side and set pricing, some times at astronomically uncompetitive levels, for paid advertisers. It has become a Google world and there wasn’t anything you could do to change it. Google operates in a market without government intervention, oversight or regulations.

Google is taking very aggressive steps to retain the market share that they fought to achieve. By giving away free services like GMail, Google Reader, and Google Analytics, they price competition out and keep users locked into their offerings and their integrated search engine.

But Google isn’t stopping there. Now they want all your data.

New initiatives like personalized search, and web history seek to gain a deeper level of access to your private world and all of the websites you visit. Google ‘bookmarks’ gives them access to the sites that you think are important, noteworthy or worth revisiting. Simply put - Google wants to mine your personal data and life to find out as much as it can about you. They want to learn how to market to you more effectively, and how they can extract the most profit from you.

Despite a crippling recession and tight credit markets, the American wind power industry grew at a rapid pace in 2009, adding 39 percent more capacity. The country is close to the point where 2 percent of its electricity will come from wind turbines.

While that is still a small share, it is up from virtually nothing a few years ago. Continued growth at such a fast pace could help the nation lower its emissions of the gases that cause global warming, The New York Times’s Jad Mouawad writes.

The American Wind Energy Association, in its annual report to be released on Tuesday, said the amount of capacity added last year, 9,900 megawatts, was the largest on record, and was 18 percent above the capacity added in 2008, also a banner year.

For more: Wind Power Grew 39 Percent Last Year - DealBook Blog - NYTimes.com

The oil and gas industry breaches, the mere existence of which has been a closely guarded secret of oil companies and federal authorities, were focused on one of the crown jewels of the industry: valuable “bid data” detailing the quantity, value, and location of oil discoveries worldwide, sources familiar with the attacks say and documents obtained by the Monitor show.

The companies – Marathon Oil, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips – didn’t realize the full extent of the attacks, which occurred in 2008, until the FBI alerted them that year and in early 2009. Federal officials told the companies proprietary information had been flowing out, including to computers overseas, a source familiar with the attacks says and documents show.

The data included e-mail passwords, messages, and other information tied to executives with access to proprietary exploration and discovery information, the source says. While China’s involvement in the attacks is far from certain, at least some data was detected flowing from one oil company computer to a computer in China, a document indicates. Another oil company’s security personnel privately referred to the breaches in one of the documents as the “China virus.”

Let's hope Europe won't reach the state the US is in. Maybe its time to include in advertisements for fast food, similar to what they do for tobacco and alcohol, that fast food can cause obesity, which can kill you?

Will it fly, probably not, because the food industry lobby will probably kill any action in that direction.

Obama wants to reduce soaring Medicare costs through an overhaul of the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system, but his reforms are bogged down in Congress.

The world expectantly awaits word from its most powerful man, Barack Obama who delivers his State of the Union address on January 27. On that day, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy will make a keynote speech at Europe’s most prestigious annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, of global political, business and civil society leaders.

The only significant American personality at the World Economic Forum’s Davos meetings will be Lawrence Summers. This continues the Obama White House snub to the World Economic Forum (WEF), a Swiss body whose mission is to “improve the state of the world”. During the Bush presidency, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and numerous Cabinet members, attended Davos.

Sarkozy, who has pretensions to European leadership, is the top draw at Davos this year. He has cooled to Obama in recent months despite being the most pro-American French President in half a century. Other political glitterati at Davos will include the Presidents of Brazil, South Korea and South Africa. The Prime Ministers of Canada and Spain will also attend.

Note EU-Digest: Have the Davos meetings outlived their time or have they always been a "talk fest" platform for the International financial sector to impress on the world political leadership that they know what is best for the Hlobal economy. Given what we know today this is not the case, so why don't we concentrate on the G20 meetings instead as an alternative.

Things look uncertain for the Democrats. With control of the White House and both houses of Congress, the party in power appears unprepared to lead at times, and unable to make good on its 2008 campaign promises. But there is opportunity in times of crisis, and the Obama administration just got a badly needed wake-up call, a "come to Jesus" moment, if you will. The future still looks bright for the Democrats, provided they take a number of important steps:

Google's clash with China is about much more than the fate of a single, powerful firm. The company's decision to pull out of China, unless the government there changes its policies on censorship, is a harbinger of increasingly stormy relations between the US and China.

The reason that the Google case is so significant is because it suggests that the assumptions on which US policy to China have been based since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 could be plain wrong. The US has accepted - even welcomed - China's emergence as a giant economic power because American policymakers convinced themselves that economic opening would lead to political liberalisation in China.

If that assumption changes, American policy towards China could change with it. Welcoming the rise of a giant Asian economy that is also turning into a liberal democracy is one thing. Sponsoring the rise of a Leninist one-party state, that is America's only plausible geopolitical rival, is a different proposition. Combine this political disillusionment with double-digit unemployment in the US that is widely blamed on Chinese currency manipulation, and you have the formula for an anti-China backlash.

"China will still strictly adopt a policy of openness and offer a good investment environment," Yao said. "We emphasize that foreign companies including Google should all follow international standards and respect local law and regulations and local culture and customs to shoulder social responsibility."

The loss of such a high-profile company would be an embarrassment to communist leaders, who want to make China a technology leader. But the ruling party sees control over information as critical to maintaining its monopoly on power.

U.S.-Chinese ties are periodically strained by disputes over trade, human rights and U.S. support for self-ruled Taiwan, claimed by Beijing as its own territory. But the two sides maintain dialogue in a series of forums and say they want constructive relations.

The White House applauded Google's announcement that it would stop censoring search results in China and might close its China-based Google.cn site after hacking attacks on its Gmail email service. But other companies appear unlikely to follow suit and challenge China's Internet controls.

Note EU-Digest: China should understand "it takes two to tango".