Crisis for European Union as trust hits record low; Future of driving; Seven stages of outrage in India; Destruction of Syrian minaret like 'blowing up the Taj Mahal'

1 Crisis for European Union as trust hits record low (Ian Traynor in The Guardian) Public confidence in the European Union has fallen to historically low levels in the six biggest EU countries, raising fundamental questions about its democratic legitimacy more than three years into the union's worst ever crisis, new data shows. Euroscepticism is soaring to a degree that is likely to feed populist anti-EU politics and frustrate European leaders' efforts to arrest the collapse in support for their project.

Figures from Eurobarometer, the EU's polling organisation, analysed by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a thinktank, show a vertiginous decline in trust in the EU in countries such as Spain, Germany and Italy that are historically very pro-European. The six countries surveyed – Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Poland – are the EU's biggest, jointly making up more than two out of three EU citizens or around 350 million of the EU's 500 million population.

The findings, published exclusively in the Guardian in Britain and in collaboration with other leading newspapers in the other five countries, represent a nightmare for Europe’s leaders, whether in the wealthy north or in the bailout-battered south, suggesting a much bigger crisis of political and democratic legitimacy.

2 Future of driving (Casey B Mulligan in The New York Times) Google and other innovators are working on vehicles that someday might drive themselves with little or no attention from human passengers. The vehicles of the future will have fast, observant computers that automatically communicate position and road conditions with other vehicles on the road.

Ssmarter driving will lead to more driving, because smarter driving reduces the cost per mile of vehicle usage. The end result of additional driving could be more traffic and more aggregate fuel consumption. These days, a driver has three main costs of the trip to consider: fuel consumption, vehicle wear and tear, and time and attention devoted to driving that could be for something else.

Households and business may also begin to use vehicles with no human passengers or drivers in order to move goods from one place to another and, by economizing on the human driver costs, they may want to move more goods than they do today. As people take on additional activities in their personal vehicles, they may also demand larger vehicles that necessarily require more fuel per mile.

Before driverless cars are adopted, a number of hurdles must be cleared. Some refinements in vehicle technology need to be resolved; insurance companies and state regulators must also figure out liability issues. But expect new driving technologies to increase the number of vehicles on the road.

3 Seven stages of outrage in India (Sidin Vadukut in Khaleej Times) There is a world beyond headlines and tweets. Stage 1: A mainstream media outlet —usually a TV channel but sometimes the web site of a newspaper, never the newspaper itself — reports some kind of criminality/corruption/inhumanity that has taken place somewhere in the country. Stage 2: Some news junkie somewhere picks up on this headline and tweets the living daylights out of it. The first wave of outrage is limited to blogposts and Facebook postings and such things. It is around this time that somebody makes a tasteless joke about the incident.

Stage 3: As the outraged posts pick up, a second layer of outrage explodes as people want to know “Why mainstream media is not reporting about this and instead focussing on stupid things like cricket.” Stage 4: The secondary outrage completely overshadows the first one. Some even suggest that media silence is a conspiracy. Stage 5: The media responds to these charges with the sensitivity of a passenger airplane full of schoolchildren crashing into a home for blind orphaned baby rabbits. The original outrageous incident is analysed to bits but from purely one angle: Who is responsible for this inhumanity? Broadly it ends with fingers pointed at the following: government, police, inadequate parenting, British colonialism, deviation from the original Vedic path, cultural depravity, shameful media and, finally but most importantly, Sunny Leone.

Stage 6: The outrage bubbles over into the real world. And by ‘real world’, I mean Delhi. The Internet clogs up with extremely erudite 15,000 word editorials on the issue that nobody reads but everybody tweets.  Stage 7: Finally, just when true revolution seems around the corner, the cold, hard palm of democracy comes crashing down on the wet, perspiring cheeks of youthful rebellion. As they slink back to their homes and colleges, their ears ringing, the government announces a series of far-reaching reforms that will be tabled before the next session of parliament. 

Bonus Stage 8: Parliament is adjourned for the forthcoming session due to unrest. “India is not a nation, but an egg-puff of karmic efflorescence that is heaving its bosoms,” Rahul Gandhi says at a CII conference. A new Starbucks opens in Chennai.

4 Destruction of Syrian minaret like ‘blowing up the Taj Mahal’ (Ryan Lucas in San Francisco Chronicle) The 11th-century minaret of a famed mosque that towered over the narrow stone alleyways of Aleppo's old quarter collapsed Wednesday as rebels and government troops fought pitched battles in the streets around it, depriving the ancient Syrian city of one of its most important landmarks.

President Bashar Assad’s government and the rebels trying to overthrow him traded blame over the destruction to the Umayyad Mosque, a UNESCO world heritage site and centerpiece of Aleppo's walled Old City. "This is like blowing up the Taj Mahal or destroying the Acropolis in Athens," said Helga Seeden, a professor of archaeology at the American University of Beirut. 

The Umayyad Mosque complex, which dates mostly from the 12th century, suffered extensive damage in October as both sides fought to control the walled compound in the heart of the old city. The fighting left the mosque burned, scarred by bullets and trashed. Two weeks earlier, the nearby medieval covered market, or souk, was gutted by a fire sparked by fighting.

With thousands of years of written history, Syria is home to archaeological treasures that date back to biblical times, including the desert oasis of Palmyra, a cultural center of the ancient world. The nation's capital, Damascus, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. The destruction of the minaret — which dated to 1090 and was the oldest surviving part of the Umayyad Mosque — brought outrage and grief.