Word: europeanate
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...agreed to hand over $235 million; it had been liable to pay up to $275 million, the total amount its Optimal funds subsidiary had withdrawn in the 90 days leading up to the December 11, 2008, collapse of Madoff's decades-long crime. Santander, the most exposed of the European banks involved with Madoff, with $3 billion lost, is still facing a class-action lawsuit...
...emissaries from war-wearied European countries gathered in the prosperous medieval town of Utrecht to work out a new balance of power. The Treaty of Utrecht didn't hold much longer than any of the other attempts over the subsequent three centuries to keep European nations from one another's throats. The most lasting peace forged among European signatories since then, in fact, is embodied in the European Union: 52 years and counting. Yet the citizens of Utrecht, along with the rest of Europe, appear all but oblivious to the European Parliament elections taking place between June...
...make it clear what is at stake. Instead, power is split among the big political groups - the conservatives, the liberals and the socialists - who rule largely by consensus. "This makes it difficult for people to see how their vote matters," says Karel Lannoo, CEO at the Centre for European Policy Studies think tank. "Since they do not do anything like elect a European government, they do not feel they can change anything...
Simon Hix, a professor at the London School of Economics and author of What's Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix It, observes that the elections tend to serve as referenda on national political issues rather than addressing European ones. "It's not a genuine contest for power at the European level," he says. (See pictures of London...
Indeed, voters in Utrecht seem more concerned by the antics of Dutch anti-Muslim populist Geert Wilders than they are with, say, the E.U.'s plan to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 20% by 2020. Wilders wants to abolish the European Parliament altogether. "Every voter who wants to signal that the European Union is good for nothing in its current form can do so by voting for Geert Wilders," he said. His PVV party, like other political outliers, is expected to benefit from mainstream voter apathy. The Trotskyite anti-capitalist movement of Olivier Besancenot could muster 10% of France...