Timed to coincide with Republic Day on October 29, Turkey launched a massive transportation project: the opening of a railway tunnel underneath the Bosphorus Strait that has taken almost 10 years to construct. Marmaray (from the word Marmara, or the Sea of Marmara, and Ray – the word for rails) joined the old European and new Asian parts of Istanbul with underwater commuter trains. And so the dream of an Ottoman sultan from a century and a half ago was fulfilled.
Marmaray should help to relieve the densest Istanbul traffic. Travel time between the Asian and European sides of the Bosphorus will be reduced from half an hour (by ferry) or even an hour and a half (sitting in traffic on the bridges) to just four minutes. The first underwater tunnel to connect two continents in the world will carry 75,000 passengers an hour and almost 1 million passengers a day.

The lengthy U.S. economic recovery is accompanied by growth in economic indicators across the board, including in sales of motor vehicles, which have reached record levels. In order to keep pace with the increased demand, all assembly line facilities in the United States have maxed out their manufacturing capacity and are today producing more cars than ever before. In the first half of 2013 alone, 5.7 million cars were manufactured in the U.S., exceeding the same period last year by 5.9%. In addition, the American auto manufacturing capacity is beginning to return home from China.

Employees at the Pilsen Steel Mill are back to work, having stopped production in the middle of June. Half of the 900 plant’s employees are back at the machines again and the other half will resume within the next month. Full production is planned to start in late November. This was all possible thanks to financial support from the KKCG Investment Group, owned by billionaire Karel Komarek.

Since the mill shut down, the Czech press has been circulating a lot of rumors about the plant going bankrupt, which the Pilsen management has been trying in vain to refute. “The Czech investment group gave us a loan in early October, with which we re-started production,” said Pavel Ratislav, Director of Human Resources for Pilsen Steel. “Production is now gradually gaining momentum. All workflows are controlled by the creditors’ committee which sanctions important changes.”

There is a growing clamor in the Eurozone from those who believe that the euro is overvalued, and that this is blocking the competitiveness of European products on world markets.

Arnaud Montebourg, a French government minister, said in late October that the euro should decline against the dollar by about 10%: “Ten percent is not even a devaluation, but just a correction of the exchange rate, in order to better reflect the reality of the Eurozone.” European Commissioner for Industry Antonio Tajani, according to Le Monde, agrees: “The euro is too strong now,” but stresses that he is only expressing his personal opinion and not the official position of the European Commission.

French President Francois Hollande already warned in February of the danger of an excessively strong euro. Speaking before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, he said that fiscal policy needed to be changed in the Eurozone, to make the majority of the participating countries less vulnerable to foreign exchange fluctuations. However, these proposals were not supported at that time, not least because of the position of Germany, whose exports benefit from the strong euro.

In January 2014, European Union members will be required to open their labor markets for citizens of Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the EU in 2007. The potential migrants are already being perceived as a threat to the countries of Western Europe. As an example of the consequences of an open labor market, politicians are abolishing the restrictions on free movement for citizens from the EU-8 countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Hungary).

Eight Eastern European countries received the right to work without limitations in all EU member countries on May 1, 2011. As a result, between April 2011 and January 2012, according to statistics from the European Migration Center (EMC), the number of labor migrants from the EU-8 countries to Germany rose by 48,000 and reached a record number of 271,000. For comparison, in previous years and for the same period from April to January, the number of migrants decreased on average by 10-20,000 because of the seasonality of most of their jobs. A major proportion of migrants – nearly 66% – are Polish citizens.

An aging population and rise in unemployment have brought to light a new negative trend: Social contributions from the working population are no longer enough to pay benefits to pensioners – at least not in the amounts they have grown accustomed to.

Politicians are calling this phenomenon one “worthy of attention,” while pensioners are calling it “a catastrophe.” The first to sound the alarm was the province of Tarragona, where there were 262,550 working people and 154,144 pensioners in 2012. It has always been considered that the ideal ratio was 2:1 – two working people to one pensioner. In Tarragona, that figure is 1.7:1, which has already generated a budget deficit of €250 million per year. The province’s average pension is €826. Tarragona, like the rest of Spain, is accustomed to living well.