A growing row inside the European Union has led one member-state leader to question whether the Netherlands are “truly committed” to the Brussels-led project, hinting that the Dutch should “be left out” of EU deals. Portugal’s Prime Minister Antonio Costa has stunned fellow EU leaders after raising the idea of leaving the Netherlands out of EU agreements. The astonishing remarks implies that the Netherlands could be kicked out of the European Union, amid growing outrage at the coutnry’s conduct in the latest coronavirus response talks. The Netherlands held up the talks after blocking demands from Italy, Spain and France for so-called ‘corona-bonds’ where the EU would issue joint shared debt to help finance a recovery.

Mr Costa spoke after the EU reached an agreement for a £430bn rescue package for countries hit hardest by the pandemic.

He said the Netherlands’ attempt to block economic support to fight the coronavirus raised questions about their future in the European Union.

The Portuguese leader said: “If under these conditions it’s not possible for Europe to ensure a common response to this challenge, this is a sign of great concern for those who believe in Europe.”

Mr Costa went on to question whether “there is anyone who wants to be left out” of the EU or eurozone.

He added: “Naturally, I’m referring to the Netherlands.

“There is at least one country in the euro zone that resists understanding that sharing a common currency implies sharing a common effort.”

Following the EU deal, Dutch Finance Minister Wopke Hoekstra boasted that his side had won the argument, saying the Netherlands is and “will remain opposed to eurobonds”.

At the virtual summit, EU ministers rejected the demand to share out the cost of the crisis by issuing corona-bonds.

Mr Hoekstra said he was “very satisfied” with the outcome on the talks, tweeting that “there won’t be any eurobonds” and telling Dutch TV stations “sometimes you have to put your foot down.”

He said he feared that corona-bonds would enable rampant, uncontrolled spending in southern European countries hardest hit by COVID-19, the cost of which northern countries would be required to share.

However, Italian Prime Minister Guisepe Conte has again warned he could refuse to sign off on the final deal until there were what he described as “adequate measures” on the table – likely a reference to coronavirus bonds.

Mr Conte described the 500 billion euro deal which the ministers unveiled as “still insufficient”.

The French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire hailed the agreement as the most important economic plan in EU history.

It is not the first time Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa has exchanged furious insults with his Dutch counterparts.

Last month, Mr Costa called the Netherlands “repugnant” for their refusal to compromise with EU member-states. 

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1267873/EU-Netherlands-Portugal-threat-Brussels-eurozone-coronavirus-corona-bonds-latest

As the crisis deepens, it has emerged the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has not cut her exorbitant salary yet – despite many European parliamentarians already already giving a percentage of their pay to charities working on the Covid-19 frontline.

Ms von der Leyen’s salary increased by just under €560 to €28,461 a month on her first working day in the top job in Brussels last December.

When this is matched with her tax-free allowances, she is likely to be making around €33,400 (£29,340) a month.

The 61-year-old officially took over from Jean-Claude Juncker on December 1.

Italian MEP Antonio Maria Rinaldi told Express.co.uk: “Italian parliamentarians and many MEPs cut their salaries in order to give a percentage to charities working on the pandemic frontline.

“I would really like the European bureaucracy to do the same.

“However, even Ursula von der Leyen has not done anything about it, despite receiving an exorbitant salary.

Mr Rinaldi added: “Even if she decided to cut her salary 20percent, she would still have more than enough money to buy her groceries.

“She earns around €33,000!

“Sadly, right now, many European citizens cannot say the same thing.

“It is a slap in the face of poverty.”

The EU has been heavily criticised for being slow and ineffective with its coronavirus response.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1267836/eu-news-coronavirus-europe-coronabonds-eurozone-ursula-von-der-leyen-spt

By Andrea Widburg

In 2009, the European debt crisis revealed that the European Union, unlike the United States, was not a united republic composed of somewhat independent nation-states. Instead, it was, as it had been since Roman times, a collection of warring tribes that occasionally made common cause. Somehow, though, the EU stuck together.

In 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the EU to floods of Muslim refugees from the Middle East and Africa, the EU took another hit to its unity. The core Western nations reluctantly accommodated the onslaught, but the Central European countries, remembering centuries of Islamic rule, ignored the EU’s open border mandates and closed their borders to the Muslim invaders.

In 2016, British citizens had enough and voted to pull out of the EU. On January 31, 2020, even as COVID-19 was following the path the migrants paved in 2015, Britain finally left the EU. The EU bureaucrats in Brussels sneered that Britain would never recover.

Now, in April 2020, it looks as if it’s the EU that won’t recover. COVID-19 is killing it.

Politico has published an article detailing the myriad missteps by the individual European nations and the EU itself in response to COVID-19’s spread through the continent.

Despite trying to cast some blame on Trump for closing America to European flights, it’s evident from the article that the problem lies deep within the EU itself. It’s being eaten alive because the individual nations will cling to their national interests and because the EU bureaucracy is incapable of reacting quickly to a rapidly changing situation.

The article has too many details to yield to an easy summary, but the highlights are clear: In the beginning, the EU was focused on climate change and the Middle East. As the virus ramped up, the various ministers were much more concerned by events in their own countries than in the EU as a whole. In this regard, America has a tremendous advantage, which is an executive who is dedicated to the nation’s welfare rather than the welfare of any individual state.

The authors say that part of the problem in some countries (i.e., Germany, Italy, and Spain) was that their healthcare systems – all of which are socialized – were decentralized, with control at the regional level. In other words, these countries had the worst of all worlds: The local systems weren’t talking to each other and, as is the case for all socialized systems, they were still proceeding in the usual way: Slowly and with the rationing that is inevitable with socialized medicine.

Additionally, the politicians who rotate through the EU wanted to do spectacular things and were uninterested in the nitty-gritty of disease control. More than that, the politicians reflected strong national biases and couldn’t ignore the crises within their borders. Again, unlike our federal system, which is headed by a dedicated president, there was no single leader whose focus was the entire EU.

While the ministers were fussing about African testing capacities, COVID-19 was spreading. Because nobody was taking COVID-19 seriously, carnival week in February went ahead as usual, with people traveling widely throughout Europe, carrying the disease with them. Meanwhile, as carnival died down, the situation on the border between Greece and Turkey distracted the EU and the individual European nations, for Erdogan had announced that he would unleash onto the EU the Middle Eastern migrants in Turkey.

In the beginning of March, perhaps in response to the EU’s disorganization and perhaps in response to age-old instincts, the various EU countries began to act as stand-alone nations, rather than parts of a federation. France (of course) was the first to announce that nobody was getting its personal protective equipment. Other nations followed suit.

In Spain, the leftist government encouraged people to turn out for the Women’s Day march, a crowded, chaotic event. Many in the Spanish government got COVID-19 there. When things went sour in Italy, none of the EU nations would help, showing again a decided lack of unity for a Union. And now that Italy and Spain are seeking affordable financial support, the rich EU nations are rejecting their pleas.

American leftists used to assure Americans that the EU was the future. It had everything: sophisticated European culture, advanced wokeness, and socialized medicine and industries. What they forgot was the, despite being a coherent continent, Europe was never a coherent culture. This divisiveness grew as the EU kept adding member states from outside Western Europe’s geographic and cultural core.

Between the EU’s inevitable descent into being the usual moribund bureaucracy and the fact that ancient nations turn inward when threatened, the EU’s break-up is beginning to seem inevitable.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/its_possible_that_the_european_union_wont_survive_covid19.html

Former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, penned an open letter in a German newspaper to defend his country’s demand for Corona crisis assistance from the EU.

He said “Money always went from Italy to the EU, not the other way around.” And added: “We never asked if this money went to finance the German underworld.” His remark comes in the wake of a German news headline stating: “The mafia in Italy is waiting for EU money.”

Salvini’s open letter was published as a response to the headline in German daily Die Welt.

The discord started when the newspaper in an article affirmed, in an uncompromising way, its opposition to the introduction of Eurobonds.

Salvini writes: “Dear Die Welt, I saw with amazement your current title that speaks of a mafia that expects money from Europe. I would like to remind your readers, who deserve balanced information: Italy has been a net contributor of the European Union since 1989.”

Since then, the Italians have paid a total of 81 billion euros to the EU budget. Italy has also done its part with the saved funds, paying over 57 billion in various capacities. “As studies of German universities document, including the ESMT of Berlin, in many cases, including that of Greece, 95 percent of the funds paid by countries like Italy were immediately transferred to creditor banks, including the German ones.”

Also, the decision of Chancellor Angela Merkel to involve private investors in the rescue of Greece, has allowed Germany to finance itself at negative rates and to attract capital in search of a safe haven. The Leibniz Institut in Halle has shown that thanks to this move Germany has benefited from around 100 billion capital inflows, taken from the financial markets or other member countries.

“Finally, I would like to remind you that since the beginning of the crisis Germany has been violating the rule that limits the foreign surplus to 6 percent. The success of the German export companies, for which we congratulate you, however, means that the German economy thrives at the expense of other countries, which are its customers, and which therefore should be treated with respect.”

Basically Salvini makes it known that the billions never came to Italy from the EU, either via the EU budget or via saved funds, but rather in the opposite direction: from Italy to Europe. “And we never asked if they went to finance the German underworld. Instead, we are left with some curiosity as to who finances, and for what reasons, the many NGO ships that ferry illegal immigrants to the Mediterranean.”

He concludes: “We would be happy to read in your newspaper an investigation on this problem, perhaps based on facts and not on insults, to understand a little more about a phenomenon that occurs in violation of national and community laws and which concerns and it hurts everyone, starting with the immigrants themselves.”

freewestmedia.com/2020/04/11/salvini-pens-open-letter-to-merkel/

With well over a half-million confirmed cases of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Europe, a growing number of regional medical authorities have begun issuing guidelines and protocols that call for hospitals to prioritize younger patients over those who are older.

In Italy and Spain, the two countries most affected by the coronavirus pandemic in Europe, doctors in overwhelmed intensive care units have for weeks been making life or death decisions about who receives emergency treatment. The new protocols, however, amount to government directives that instruct medical personnel effectively to abandon elderly patients to their fate.

In addition to the ethical questions raised by the rationing of healthcare according to age, the denial of medical attention to the elderly, many of whom have paid into the social welfare system all their lives, also casts a spotlight on the shortcomings of socialized medicine in Southern Europe, where austerity measures imposed by the European Central Bank have resulted in massive budget cuts for public healthcare.

In Spain, the regional government in Catalonia, an area hit hard by the coronavirus, issued a confidential protocol which effectively advises that elderly people afflicted by the coronavirus should die at home.

In documents leaked to several Spanish media outlets, the Catalan Emergency Medical Service (Servicio de Emergencias Médicas, SEM) instructed doctors, nurses and ambulance personnel to inform the families of older patients suffering from coronavirus that “death at home is the best option.”

The document stated that dying at home was more humane as it avoids suffering: patients can die while surrounded by their families, something that is not possible in overcrowded hospitals. The protocol also advised medical personnel to avoid referring to the lack of hospital beds in Catalonia.

The recommendations, endorsed by the Council of Physicians’ Associations in Catalonia (Consejo de Colegios de Médicos de Cataluña), stated that patients over 80 years of age should not be intubated and be offered only “oxygen mask therapy.” The guidelines recommended that patients over 80 who are suffocating be administered “comfort treatment with morphine to alleviate the sensation of dyspnea.”

SEM also advised healthcare professionals to optimize medical resources in the current emergency situation and “avoid admitting patients with little benefit.” Medical personnel were asked to reserve the material “for those patients who can benefit the most, in terms of years of life saved.”

The Catalan Minister of Health, Alba Vergés, denied that the directive discriminates against elderly patients. SEM medical director Xavier Jiménez also denied it, but he admitted that the document exists. “All we are doing is offering patients the best option for their situation,” he said.

Elsewhere in Spain, the Madrid-based Spanish Society of Intensive and Critical Medical Care (Sociedad Española de Medicina Intensiva, Crítica y Unidades Coronarias, SEMICYUC) recommended that maximum therapeutic efforts should be reserved for younger people with more possibilities of survival. If there is a shortage of hospital beds, people over the age of 80 or those with Alzheimer’s disease should be denied treatment.

In Italy, a document prepared by a crisis management unit in the northern city of Turin also proposed that coronavirus victims aged 80 or older or those in poor health should be denied access to intensive care if there are not enough hospital beds.

In a document leaked to the British newspaper The Telegraph, the civil protection department of the Piedmont region, stated:

“The criteria for access to intensive therapy in cases of emergency must include age of less than 80 or a score on the Charlson Comorbidity Index [which indicates how many other medical conditions the patient has] of less than 5.

“The growth of the current epidemic makes it likely that a point of imbalance between the clinical needs of patients with COVID-19 and the effective availability of intensive resources will be reached.

“Should it become impossible to provide all patients with intensive care services, it will be necessary to apply criteria for access to intensive treatment, which depends on the limited resources available.”

A Piedmont health councillor, Luigi Icardi said:

“I never wanted to see such a moment. It [the document] will be binding and will establish in the event of saturation of the wards a precedence code for access to intensive care, based on certain parameters such as potential survival.”

In the Netherlands, doctors have been accused of trying to ration scarce beds in intensive care units by advising elderly patients suffering from COVID-19 to waive hospital treatment, according to the Reuters news agency.

Dutch MPs raised concerns after senior citizens complained about receiving calls from doctors. MP Henk Krol, who leads the 50PLUS party for seniors, warnedagainst age discrimination:

“One octogenarian is not the same as another. There are eighty-year-olds who are fit and running marathons, and there are fifty-year-olds who are in ill health.”

Health Minister Hugo de Jonge denied that the doctors’ calls were official government policy. He told Reuters that “advanced care planning” discussions between general practitioners and patients with serious medical conditions were not unusual:

“This is standard practice for doctors. We call it advanced care planning, it means having the conversation with people about ‘what you would want to happen if you get sick.’

“Patients can then say, ‘if it gets to the point where I need a ventilator, where I need to go into the ICU, I would prefer not to do that.’ That is a possibility, but those conversations are not based on the age of patients.”

In a March 15 interview with the Dutch television program WNL Op Zondag, Marc Bonten, a microbiologist at the University Hospital of Utrecht, said:

“What is the best way to serve humanity? Aspects such as who has the greatest chance of surviving an admission to intensive care will come into play. It’s up to the doctors to see who has the best chance of survival.”

Back in Spain, Óscar Haro, director of a motorcycle racing team, described in a viral YouTube video how his elderly father died from coronavirus after being denied a respirator because of his age:

“My father started working at the age of 14 until he was 65. He never asked for anything. On March 18, he needed a respirator to avoid dying and was denied…. This is the Spain we have. My father’s generation built this country, its reservoirs, roads, agriculture, working 14 hours a day, coming out of a postwar period. And they are being left to die.

“I do not understand how a person like my father, who has been working all of his life, contributing to social security in this country, could die because there are no respirators, because he was unable to receive treatment, because of regulations which state that with people older than 75, it is no longer interesting to take care of them and they are left to die. We are leaving to die a generation that built this country.

“We are saying that we have incredible social security, when healthcare personnel do not even have gloves to wear. This morning they had no robes or masks. I do not understand that my father, who has been together with his wife since the age of 15, was not allowed to say goodbye to her.”

Meanwhile, Ivan Calle Zapata, a football coach in Martorell, a municipality in Catalonia, wrote about how he lost his paternal and maternal grandparents to coronavirus:

“My 82-year-old grandmother and 71-year-old grandfather did not die from #COVID-19, they were LEFT TO DIE. @salutcat [Catalan health authorities] denied them respirators and admission to the ICU, just like other older people in Catalonia. Following is an open thread, for them, and for all the broken families:”

Faced with growing public outrage over the lack of treatment for the elderly, the Spanish government on April 3 issued a statement in which it said that denying healthcare to the elderly was unconstitutional:

“In case of extreme scarcity of healthcare resources, older patients should be treated under the same conditions as the rest of the population, that is, according to the clinical criteria of each particular case. Accepting such discrimination would lead to an underestimation of certain human lives due to age, which contradicts the foundations of our Rule of Law, in particular the recognition of the equal intrinsic dignity of every human being.”

The government’s statement does not have legal effect, which means that regional governments in Spain are not expressly prohibited from ending the practice of denying healthcare to the elderly.

The scarcity of healthcare resources in Spain and Italy, the two European countries most affected by the coronavirus pandemic, can be directly attributed to a decade of austerity measures.

During the European debt crisis in 2011 and 2012, when many Italian and Spanish banks were on the brink of collapse, Northern European countries imposed strict budgetary conditions in exchange for bailouts. As a result, government spending on public healthcare was drastically reduced.

In Spain, the government in April 2012 unveiled austerity measures designed to slash 65 billion euros from the public deficit by 2014. The cuts, imposed by the European Central Bank, reduced Spanish spending on public healthcare by a whopping 10%. Spain’s then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy explained: “These measures are not pleasant, but they are necessary. Our public spending exceeds our income by tens of billions of euros.”

In November 2019, two months before the coronavirus first appeared in Spain, the Spanish government revealed that nearly 700,000 patients were on a waiting list for surgeries. Nationwide, patients had to wait on average 115 days to receive surgery; in Catalonia, patients had to wait nearly six months; in Madrid, patients had to wait for six weeks.

A similar scenario occurred in Italy, where the government cut billions of euros in spending for public healthcare since 2012 in exchange for bailout monies from the European Union.

Many economists have said that Italy and Spain should never have joined the euro, the single currency used by 19 of the 27 Member States of the European Union, because by doing so they lost their monetary sovereignty: they lost the ability appreciate or depreciate their currency to manage their economies and respond to economic shocks.

The severity of the coronavirus crisis in Italy and Spain, where elderly patients are being allowed to die for the benefit of the young, is due in large measure to the austerity measures associated with their membership in the eurozone. The large numbers of dead, especially among the elderly, appears to be the price that Italians and Spaniards are paying to be part of a monetary union which they never should have joined.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15870/coronavirus-elderly-abandoned

Donald Trump is getting pummeled from one end of the country to the other for the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic.

But compared to what’s going on in some parts of Europe, Trump comes out looking pretty good. In fact, the top scientist in the EU has just resigned his position, saying, “I have seen enough of both the governance of science, and the political operations at the European Union.”

The head of the European Research Council, Mauro Ferrari, got tired of running into a brick wall when he proposed ways to address the health crisis.

The Hill:

EU Commission spokesman Johannes Bahrke  confirmed to The Associated Press that Ferrari resigned, effective immediately.

Ferrari said his rejected proposal would have provided scientists around the world with resources and opportunities to fight the pandemic, including diagnostic tools and science-based behavioral dynamic approaches to replace “the oft-improvised institutions of political leaders.”

Ferrari said he will return to the “the frontlines of the fight against COVID-19, with real resources and responsibilities, away from offices in Brussels, where my political skills are clearly inadequate, and again at the true service of those who need new medical solutions.”

Like any true bureaucrat, the EU defended itself against this attack by citing impressive, but meaningless numbers.

A spokesperson for the European Commission defended the research council’s response to the pandemic.

The spokesperson told the Financial Times that 50 ongoing or completed European Research Council projects were contributing to the response to COVID-19 and said the EU is backing 18 urgent research and development projects and financially supporting German company CureVac’s work on a possible vaccine.

Who cares about how many projects the EU is funding? Which projects? What are they studying? Obviously, the research and development projects being backed by the EU aren’t helping anything. Italy, a nation of 60 million people, has lost more people to the virus than the U.S., which has 320 million. Spain has slightly fewer fatalities at 15, 500 than the U.S. death toll of 16,700. Spain has 47 million people.

The EU is presently squabbling over how to fund the massive bailout that will be needed to get the continent’s economy moving again. But the notion that they have done a better job in combatting the virus is bogus. If they had, there would be far fewer infections and deaths per capita than the U.S. Spain has an astonishing 300 deaths per million citizens. Italy has 283. The U.S. is ranked 11th at 39.39 deaths per million.

Perhaps anti-Trump hysterics should count their blessings.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/top-eu-coronavirus-scientist-resigns-saying-he-has-lost-faith-in-the-system-itself/

Years ago it was still said that there would be no muezzin call in Germany. So times are changing. City after city must now endure the oriental noise. Also in this video from Mönchengladbach the police is missing again, who allegedly take tough action against violations of the ban on gatherings because of Corona.

politikstube.com/moenchengladbach-auch-hier-jetzt-der-muezzinruf-und-keine-einhaltung-der-kontaktsperre/