The two biggest climate catastrophes going on now – namely the floods in NW Pakistan and the drought/forest fires throughout Russia – both threaten to have serious follow-on political consequences from the perceived incompetence on the part of the governments involved when it comes to reacting to these disasters in time and with sufficient effort and resources. The main difference between them – other than their finding themselves at opposite extremes of the wet/dry spectrum – is that in Russia there is no organized opposition present to take advantage of the situation politically.

In Pakistan on the other hand, and particularly in that part of Pakistan affected by the floods which happens to border Afghanistan, you have the set of varying Muslim extremist elements loosely characterized by the label “Taliban” (and in some cases even “Al-Qaeda”). As an article in the German commentary newspaper Die Zeit now reveals, those Taliban are indeed moving to profit from the situation, offering $20 million worth of flood-relief assistance on the condition that the Pakistani government refuse all other aid coming from foreign countries, particularly America.

According to the article, US aid on offer already totals $35 million and that has also now been raised by another $20 million, with the prospect held out for even more if necessary. (And it will no doubt be necessary: Oxfam has termed these heavy floods a “mega-catastrophe,” while a UN spokesman called their collective impact worse even than the Asian tsunami of 2005 or this year’s Haiti earthquake.) Then again, there are good reasons for any impartial observer to favor the Taliban’s offer nonetheless: as the Zeit article details, the inundations make sheer access to the area very difficult, while many of the helicopters that are supposed to be available don’t work anyway. (The article does not explain why.)

For now, it’s a “donkey or on foot” situation for getting help to where it’s needed, and of course the Taliban are already there in the area and offering to assist with distribution as well – provided that authorities promise not to arrest their personnel! And then this other article on the subject from the Danish daily Politiken gives another good reason: you can be sure that much of any outside aid will ultimately go to the bank accounts of corrupt local officials rather than to the victims for whom it was intended, while that is less likely to be the case with the local Taliban.

National Press: Denmark, Germany

Tags: al-Qaeda, Die Zeit, floods, Pakistan, Politiken, Taliban

PressEurop yesterday came forward with an obscure piece of news from Poland that may nonetheless soon resonate internationally. Citing an article in that day’s edition of the mainstream Polish national daily Rzeczpospolita, they noted that no less than Polish ex-President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, his ex-premier Leszek Miller, and an “ex-head of intelligence,” one Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, were facing the prospect of going before a State Tribunal on war crimes charges stemming from the secret prison they allegedly allowed the American CIA to set up in their country back when the “War on Terror” was at its height, and which might well have been the scene for prisoner torture.

Good work, that, although the PressEurop editors did somehow miss within that Rzeczpospolita piece the credit that journal was willing to give to its arch-rival Gazeta Wyborcza for actually getting the scoop, in the form of this article which appeared the day before the Rzecz report. Also, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski was not “head of intelligence” but rather Minister of the Interior; and there is another ex-Minister of the Interior who is under investigation in this connection as well, one Krzysztof Janik.

In any event, the combined reporting from Poland’s two most-respected national dailies provides a fascinating glimpse into a story with explosive potential that still is being treated as a Top Secret matter by the prosecutorial authorities involved. As the Gazeta piece reminds us, the first indication the world had that something funny was going on in Europe was the reporting in the Washington Post of early 2005 that alleged the existence of CIA-run “black site” prison facilities in European countries. The Council of Europe then took that as a cue to investigate on its own, and soon concluded that such installations were in place in Romania, Lithuania, and Poland. When questioned at the time, Polish authorities were noticeably unhelpful, eventually admitting only that yes, there was an airport in the northeastern Polish wilderness that the government had made available for CIA flights. More »

National Press: Poland

Tags: Aleksander Kwasniewski, CIA, Gazeta Wyborcza, Leszek Miller, Poland, prison, Rzeczpospolita, torture

OK, we know that a serious border incident took place yesterday between the Israeli and Lebanese armies. It involved some sort of tree [sic], and four people died: two Lebanese soldiers, a Lebanese journalist who was with them, and an Israeli lieutenant-colonel. It seems the UN Security Council has even gone into session today to ponder things. But enough of all that – c’mon guys, who started it? Who was to blame?

You’ll get no credible answer asking the parties directly involved: each was quick to blame the other and to warn of “consequences” should anything further of this sort occur. Israeli officials even spoke of their troops being caught in an “ambush.”

No, the best bet for establishing further facts would seem to be finding some report from an on-the-scene but neutral observer. And we have one, from the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, namely Ulrike Putz and her article Observers puzzle over the background of Mideast firefight. I mean, “Ulrike Putz” sounds like a name you can trust, right? She’s a female, and of course she’s German, and I think those two things combined amount to a mark of journalistic objectivity as good as any other.

Plus, you don’t have to scroll down too far in her article to find bullet-points that lay everything out as clear as it can presently be ascertained:

• Where exactly was that infamous tree at the center of all this: on Israeli or on Lebanese territory? A UN spokesperson is willing to confirm that it was on the Israeli side.
  
• So who opened fire first? We get UN testimony again on this: the Lebanese did. Then the Israelis naturally reacted, but by throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, e.g. artillery, combat helicopters. But I understand Israelis tend to do that in the face of a provocation.
  
• OK then: Why did all this happen? Well, there are some clues. You’ll note that among the casualties was a Lebanese journalist – well, what was he doing there just at the right place and time to watch something interesting happen? Also, according to Israeli sources the Lebanese brigade commander responsible for that sector is a Shi’ite with rather extreme anti-Israeli attitudes. So the suggestion is that he had just been waiting for an excuse to open fire on the IDF, operating entirely under his own authority. (Yes, I realize that with this analysis Frau Putz seems to go over to the Israeli side. But assessing motivations is the hardest task of all, and that’s the only source where she can get her information.)
  

Interestingly, up to now it has not been the Lebanese Army that the Israelis have felt they needed to worry about, but rather Hezbollah fighters. After all, they’re the ones that have the missiles to fire into Israel, and that month-long war there back in the summer of 2006 was really with them. So after the incident was over and the bodies removed, the real concern was that Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, would be annoyed enough with the incident (although it did not directly involved any of his personnel) to start attacking Israel again. Indeed, Nasrallah made a long and aggressive speech last night, in effect telling the Israelis not to try anything like that again or they’ll be very sorry, but that was as far as he went – so far.

Similarly, Frau Putz reports that the Israelis also seriously considered reacting to the incident by unleashing a general bombing campaign against Lebanese Army positions, but then decided not to. But don’t sit back and relax yet: this piece in today’s L’Express (with a couple interesting pictures of deployed IDF equipment) reports that both sides (meaning Israeli and Lebanese) are moving more troops up to the border.

National Press: France, Germany

Tags: Der Spiegel, Hezbollah, Israel, L'Express, Lebanon, UN

Enough of the levity (see previous). It’s time to get serious – even “apocalyptic.” Specifically, The apocalyptic cost of the collapse of the Eurozone, a recent entry on the blog of Libération’s famed Brussels correspondent, Jean Quatremer.

That article basically calls attention to a recent, publicly-available and English-language study from ING Bank (main writer: Mark Cliffe) entitled “EMU Break-up: Quantifying the Unthinkable.” It’s quite an eye-opener, and Quatremer has performed quite a public service in calling his readers’ attention to it. For the “unthinkable” when it comes to the euro has become quite a bit less so this year, including the two “unthinkable” extremes between which Cliffe structures his report’s analysis: 1) The departure from the Eurozone of Greece (only), and 2) The collapse of the whole thing, with the current member countries simply reverting to their currencies of prior to 1999. Both developments, and various others in-between, have increasingly been raised as distinct real-world possibilities, and not just as horror-scenarios but also as measures to be induced deliberately (particularly the ejection of Greece) as punishment for the fiscal failings of various naughty governments. More »

National Press: France

Tags: euro, financial crisis, Greece, ING, Jean Quatremer, Libération

I’m afraid I now have to add my voice to those others critical of the Obama administration. But my particular objection concerns an issue not extensively raised heretofore: his spy-exchange policy.

The inspiration here comes – as it so often does these days – from a tweet:

The reference is to this article in the Swiss paper 24 Heures about ancient Cuban strongman Fidel Castro recently emerging in public to rail against his old bugbear, the US. Turns out the authorities there have been holding an American businessman for eight months now, whom they are still “investigating.” How convenient: maybe to get him back the US government would be willing to exchange five already-convicted Cuban spies, namely the so-called “Cuban Five” who were dispatched to Florida to infiltrate Cuban exile organizations, one of whom was then found guilty of “conspiracy to commit murder.”

Any six-year-old marble-trader (not to mention The Doors) could tell you what’s wrong with that deal: they want five of ours for just one of theirs! And why would Fidel believe that the US would even consider such an unequal transaction? Because no less than a month ago the Obama administration did accept precisely that in sending ten suspected spies back to Russia in exchange for only four in return! Shortly thereafter, VP Biden tried to downplay this disparity by asserting that “[w]e got back four really good ones.”

But anyone can see that that is far from true. In fact, all you need to do to disprove Biden’s assertion is examine the case of but one of those Russians, Anna Chapman (which, strangely, is precisely what Biden and his talk-show host Jay Leno then proceeded to do!). From the considerable value-added that has been derived from her already – like this, and also this – it’s clear that, in fact, Ms. Chapman alone should have been worth the return of ten of our own spies from Russian jails – at least.

But apparently Obama has rather less trading-savvy than any man-on-the-street, so the Russian spy exchange went through and Anna Chapman was gone – oh so irretrievably gone! That’s what makes Fidel think he can dangle a similarly lopsided sort of deal in front of US authorities and that they’ll go for it as well, but this sort of soft-headedness in the spy-horse-trading market has got to stop!

P.S. Interestingly, the latest English-language coverage I’ve been able to find so far on this Cuban spy issue, like this recent piece from the Associate Press, completely misses the agent-exchange point by focusing instead on Castro’s characterization of the treatment of one of those imprisoned Cuban spies by US authorities as “torture.”

That’s ridiculous! The United States does not “torture” – not like they do on the island of Cuba! Why, I can distinctly remember the last President, George W. Bush, saying precisely that.

National Press: Switzerland

Tags: 24 Heures, Anna Chapman, Barack Obama, Cuba, Cuban Five, espionage, Fidel Castro

The Belgian paper La Dernière Heure just featured on-line a great article about an eye-catching educational development in South Korea: My teacher . . . is a robot. Yes, eleven robots are already in place in South Korean elementary schools, and that country’s government apparently intends to have all such public schools equipped with them by 2013.

They look human, of course (the one in the picture at the top of the article looks female; maybe they all do), but in human terms they are relatively small-sized (can’t intimidate the little ones) and dressed in bright colors. And their function does actually involve teaching, mainly that of languages where they perform interactive exercises like vocabulary drills.

As you would hope (or maybe as you would fear), they are programmed to be able to understand human emotions as well as language, and to respond appropriately. Or at least to those situations which their programmers were able to predict: journalist Kahine Benyacoub reports that they still occasionally are faced with some language, emotion, or general situation that just does not compute, in which case they boguer, meaning they act like their software has hit a bug. (Does someone from the principal’s office have to come in to reset them?)

And then there’s this quote that Benyacoub pulls out, from Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Science: “The computer scientists’ intentions are not to replace flesh-and-blood teachers, but to aid them with the development and instruction of the child.” Sure they are: as is indicated in the piece’s last paragraphy, however, battle-lines are already being drawn with the teachers’ unions over whether this new phenomenon is really such a good thing for all humans involved.

National Press: Belgium - Wallonia (French-speaking)

Tags: education, La Dernière Heure, robots, South Korea

Did you know that Russia has its own high-speed railway? A recent tweet pointed this out:

It links to this article in the French newsmagazine L’Express, with an accompanying photo-montage. So it’s true: the special train service is called the “Sapsan” (Сапсан), Russian for “peregrine falcon,” and has operated since last December on the classic Moscow-to-St. Petersburg route (and only there, so far; that particular route has been in service since 1851). Its Siemens-built trains, with top speeds of 250 km/hour, link Russia’s two premier cities in only three hours, forty minutes.

There are some notable things about the Sapsan, quite apart from its limited route. (It’s relatively new, after all.) As the reader realizes from the photo there at the top of the article, it operates on ordinary tracks, unlike some high-speed services in Europe (e.g. in France, the Netherlands) which use custom-built tracks which can be fenced off. Quite apart from technical considerations, in Russia such security measures are probably called for, given that country’s infamous plague of alcoholism; as things stand, the Sapsan amounts to yet another executioner (more deadly-efficient than other trains, due to its extraordinary speed) of the many drunks who wander onto the rails at the wrong time every year (almost 3,000 in 2009). More »

National Press: France

Tags: L'Express, Russia, Sapsan, trains

Today is “Stress Day” – the day when the results of the “stress test” exercises performed on all major European banks will be released after the end of the European business day (but right in the middle of the American business day!). The Financial Times column Alphaville has a handy round-up of articles on the subject, compiled by Gwen Robinson. The most comprehensive guide – perfect if you’re still unsure of what these “stress tests” are all about and have some time – is by far the contribution from Anne Seith of Der Spiegel. (Rest assured: it’s in English. As for Alphaville itself, better enjoy that while it’s still free and available to all!)

Then there is the report by Anne Michel in Le Monde, also cited in the FT Alphaville round-up. Why is everyone so stressed about these “stress tests”? Mainly because banks can only “pass” them or “fail” them, and failure could carry a high price in terms of loss of investor confidence, for starters. Indeed, the impact is likely to be even greater than it was for the ten banks (out of nineteen tested) which “failed” during the American “stress test” exercise carried out back in May, 2009, for banks that fail by definition need recapitalization and there is a dwindling number of European governments still able to provide that. It’s notable, as Mme. Michel points out, that European authorities have staged such “stress tests” twice before, namely dry runs in August of 2009 and April of this year with a more limited selection of banks, whose results have never been made public.

But this time it’s serious, and all results will be released publicly. Naturally, everyone would love to jump the gun and get word of at least some of the results before they’re released to the unwashed masses (there’s potentially money to be made, for one thing). Mme. Michel does her best to oblige. It looks like all the French banks involved – namely BNP Paribas, Société générale, Crédit agricole and BPCE – have passed the test. Indeed, the failures are expected to come only from the usual suspect nations: Spain, Greece, and Portugal. Oh, and Germany, too – but the one German laggard is likely to be the Hypo Real Estate Bank, which already got into so much trouble back in 2008 that the German government fully nationalized it. (Note that this last bit does not come from Mme. Michel’s article, but from another of my on-line sources.)

Going back to the star banking pupils from France, such seeming across-the-board success inevitably raises questions as to the stress tests’ legitimacy. The article does go into some detail about how the tests’ parameters have been toughened up to include some degree of sovereign debt default, placed on top of a posited recession of 3% negative economic growth lasting over a year-and-a-half. But will this go far enough to convince the markets that all this has been a worthwhile, bona fide exercise? That is probably what most EU officials and bank executives are stressed-out about most of all.

National Press: France, Germany, United Kingdom

Tags: Der Spiegel, financial crisis, Financial Times, Le Monde, stress tests

France remains one place where they take literary culture – and so its central element, the novel – seriously. People still read there. But that doesn’t mean that that country remains immune to the steady march of progress, which these days can only refer to consumer electronics and telecoms. In the French newspaper Le Figaro, Margaut Bergey surveys some recent innovations that threaten to redefine the very nature of what we mean by literature.

In part, the value-added from Mme. Bergey’s piece comes simply from the specifics she provides. I had vaguely been aware of a novel having been published wholly via Twitter, but didn’t know anything more specific. Turns out it was called The French Revolution, by Matt Stewart, and, sure enough, just over a year ago (starting on Bastille Day 2009, appropriately enough) it was “published” in the form of 3,700 tweets. Here’s that Twitter-feed’s site, but by this point you (together with me) are a bit too late: that particular collection of tweets constituting the novel is no longer available, so you’ll have to buy it from Stewart’s site here. More »

National Press: France

Tags: Android, iPad, iPhone, Le Figaro, literature, Twitter

Sorry: this has nothing to do with doing-over the financial crisis of late 2008-2009 to get another chance to deal with it right, even only as it hit Belgium. Rather, I noticed from a piece by Bert Broens in that nation’s business newspaper De Tijd that two of the biggest domestic banks, KBC and Dexia, will have undergo so-called “stress tests” all over again right after they thought they were done with all that.

What these “stress tests” are all about is an auditing exercise whereby banks’ balance-sheets are subjected to a standard scenario positing a business downturn, meaning theoretically that more people would not be able to pay back their loans, there would be lesser demand for new loans, and the like, and so you see how the bank would do in such a situation – first of all whether it would even stay solvent and so survive (at least without receiving some sort of state aid). And, as stated, both these Belgian banks already did the exercise and came through it with OK results. But the whistles have sounded and the competitors are being directed back to their starting-blocks to do it all again, and for a good reason: those previous stress tests did not include checking for any situation in which government bonds held by the banks might not be fully repaid. That’s rather an important omission: we’re talking in particular Southern European (or PIGS, if you like) government bonds here, and KBC Bank alone has €60 billion worth of them in its portfolio.

How then could anyone have considered the previous stress tests, which did not account for those public obligations, anything but a waste of time? Well, many cynics (or call them analysts) have felt that the real purpose of such tests was in the first place as a propaganda exercise meant to return a comforting “All OK!” for each such bank tested to calm investors’ and markets’ fears. This whole “stress test” idea was taken over in the first place from the American financial authorities, who performed them on the big American banks in spring-summer of last year, and ongoing coverage particularly from the Naked Capitalism financial weblog not only blew the whistle on that American exercise but also has found serious flaws in the European stress tests happening now. In fact a major complaint (also put forward in a related financial blog here) about the validity of the European tests was their alleged failure to take into account such sovereign risk.

Broens’ piece shows that that at least is not happening in Belgium, although he doesn’t say why, like who decided to make these exercises a bit more bona fide and call back KBC and Dexia to do them “right.” His language is in the passive tense – “in the meantime it has been decided to expand the test” – although one first guess would have to be the Belgian financial authorities.

UPDATE: A new entry on Naked Capitalism tacitly concedes that these European “stress tests” will in fact include banks’ exposure to sovereign debt in their calculations. It then goes on to sketch the great worry resulting from that: What happens when these more-honest tests reveal that too many banks in fact stand in need of more capital, possibly from governments which in many cases are no longer in a position to provide the same?

National Press: Belgium - Flanders (Dutch-speaking)

Tags: Belgium, De Tijd, Dexia, financial crisis, KBC, stress tests

They’re gone now, Les Bleus, the French national football team. Today they arrived back in Paris, and star attacker Thierry Henry even headed straight to L’Elysée Palace to give his own explanation to President Nicolas Sarkozy of what went on down there in South Africa that produced such a shambles.

Time now for the tournament to move on, which it has done already with, among other things, England’s narrow 1-0 victory over Slovenia and Landon Donovan’s last-minute goal for Team USA which sent them on to the sudden-death Round of 16 and sent the Slovenians packing for home. For any of those with a more morbid outlook, though – those who tend to linger long while passing the scene of a horrific accident by the side of the road, say – Grégory Schneider of the French paper Libération has some behind-the-scenes details of what happened with the French, including the precise wording of Nicolas Anelka’s to-his-face characterization of his coach during half-time of the France-Mexico game (Get ready: Va te faire enculer, sale fils de pute! It’s pretty bad.) that got him sent home and was the immediate cause of all the trouble. More »

National Press: France

Tags: France, Libération, Nicolas Sarkozy, Raymond Domenech, Thierry Henry, World Cup

Remember the Hand of Henry? You do if you’re Irish. That refers to the blatant handballs committed by star Barcelona striker Thierry Henry, playing last month on the French national team in a World Cup playoff game, that enabled the winning goal to be scored and sent the French to South Africa instead of the Republic of Ireland. These fouls were evident enough to the millions watching the match on TV, but not to the crew of officials actually in charge of the game, and this result which robbed the Irish of their World Cup 2010 participation was allowed to stand.

Now down in the Southern Hemisphere, the French team isn’t doing very well and will probably fly home after only the three games of the tournament’s first round, but that is not the point. The point is rather the continued refusal by FIFA officials (i.e. from the international football organization in charge of the World Cup) to install any sort of modern technology (e.g. televised replay review) to ensure that officiating travesties like what happened to the Irish can never happen again. This only ensures, of course, that such a thing will happen again, at least one more time, and this during that organization’s signature event that draws the sustained attention of billions of spectators from all over the world – a substantial portion of whom tune in to cheer on their own nation’s team.

Sure enough, another such travesty has come along on cue, namely the denial yesterday to the United States team of a perfectly-valid third goal which would have capped a tremendous rally from a 2-0 deficit by half-time with a glorious win. Instead, the US team earned a 2-2 draw, which gave them a mere one point towards advancing further in the tournament rather than the full three to which the victory they deserved would have entitled them. More »

National Press: Uncategorized

Tags: FIFA, football, USA, World Cup 2010

The reviews are streaming in now of President Obama’s Oval Office address to the nation last night about BP and the catastrophic oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico – including those originating over here on the Atlantic’s East side, even though only extreme Obama-junkies or else paid political reporters stayed awake into early Wednesday morning to actually watch it live.

It was apparently a rather long speech, with a panoply of various points within it that one can choose among to emphasize – also, if desired, the sheer fact that it was delivered from the Oval Office, something that is generally supposed to denote an especially serious occasion, as Viktoria Unterreiner points out writing for the German paper Die Welt. Still, the title of her piece is “Obama declares the end of ‘cheap oil’,” and that is one aspect of the President’s address that certainly has attracted particular attention over here. Namely: Can America – the land of the Chevy Corvette and Route 66 – really wean itself from cheap oil, even while spurred on by tarred beaches and dying pelicans? Unterreiner is herself doubtful; she notes that, after Obama made that declaration, “he however became no more concrete” about how to go about it. Perhaps a start would be his CO2/climate bill – but that’s currently in “suspended animation” (im Schwebe-zustand) in the Congress. More »

National Press: Denmark, Germany

Tags: Barack Obama, Berlingske Tidende, Die Welt, oil-spill, Poul Høi

Here’s something you can keep in mind for background as you watch today’s World Cup 2010 Group B game between Argentina and Nigeria (the “Super Eagles”), courtesy of the Nigerian journalist Ikechukwu Osodo writing in Berlin’s Tageszeitung (Where money rules over the playing-field).

Even as the very day of their opening match has arrived, Nigerian preparations are still incomplete in one important respect, Osodo writes, namely in the financial realm. It’s taken for granted that the players will win some sort of money-bonus from the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) should they succeed in defeating Argentina – but, again, match-day has arrived, and by this point that is hardly sufficient anymore. The way things in Nigeria work, it seems, money has a way of getting lost along the way if it is not pinned down exactly, so that the players really want to know now how much money they can gain, and for what: not just for winning the game, but possibly also a certain sum for each goal, maybe another to whomever might be voted Man of the Match, and the like.

The team coach, recently-hired Lars Lagerbäck from Sweden, is reportedly out-at-sea on this whole matter, as he well might be over something so alien to his Scandinavian cultural assumptions. As for NFF President Sani Lulu Abdullahi, even as he indicated himself willing to “show” the players their prizes before the game, his accompanying remarks could not have set too many minds at ease:

We know that it’s not about money. Each player wants to play at the World Championship and give his best, and our players of course made it clear that for them at this tournament it does not come down to money. But the money could offer an incentive to gain three points [i.e. to be the winning team].

Rather weaselly words, to Nigerian ears. It’s also a shame that we fans are not likely to get any news update – in any language – in time just before the game to learn how things turned out. We could try some big new social-media campaign to agitate to get financial rewards listed on TV just before kick-off, I suppose, right along where the starting line-up is displayed, but I suspect such a suggestion would not go down too well with FIFA officials.

National Press: Germany

Tags: Die Tageszeitung, Nigeria, World Cup 2010

What is to become of General Motors’ European subsidiary? The European auto-market is overcrowded with suppliers, that’s clear; Opel needs a guarantee of money, from someone, in order to stay on its feet financially and be able to compete. Yet the source from which the company thought it could gain the guarantee it needed – the German government – has been growing cool to the idea in light of the many new demands on its money from elsewhere (e.g. Greece). Long-time readers will know that I’ve been covering Opel’s recent travails more-or-less consistently; you can update yourself on the situation from my last blogpost on the subject here.

But now firm decisions are finally being made in this matter by the German authorities – or at least are seeming to be made. For those interested, and with the required German language skills, the ongoing saga can even be followed fairly closely on the @Deutschland_ Twitter-feed. I know: it’s that sort of thing that you are glad to leave for me to do instead, and I’m pleased to oblige. (One caveat: @Deutschland_ only follows material from the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.) But for now, let’s go “over the jump” to this blogpost’s full article, since a couple of tweets from that @Deutschland_ feed need to make an appearance. More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: @Deutschland_, Angela Merkel, CDU, Der Spiegel, FDP, General Motors, Germany, Opel, Rainer Brüderle

You might have become aware late last week of a brief kerfluffle involving the new Hungarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It didn’t involve Orbán directly, however, only some figures closely associated with him, such as another top figure in his FIDESZ political party, Lajos Kósa (mayor of Hungary’s second city, Debrecen), and Péter Szijjártó, his government spokesman, who together spread the word to the world at large that the Hungarian budget deficit was actually rather higher than previously reported and that their country could soon find itself in a simlar fix as Greece. This quickly led to a mini-financial panic breaking out the world over – including in Far Eastern markets, which suffered price-losses – at the thought that the EU suddenly had another fiscal basket-case member-state to deal with, one that moreover had already had a joint EU/IMF bail-out back in 2008.

“Sorry – did we say that? We weren’t really serious” was roughly the reaction from that same Hungarian government once they realized the wide-ranging storm their comments had unleashed. Clearly, the amateurs were now in charge within that government’s highest reaches, and you can get a quite informative treatment of the incident – with pictures of the major protagonists – from the realdeal.hu weblog. There writer Erik d’Amato makes a convincing case that all this was simply an attempt by the new government to position itself politically to impose some austerity measures in its upcoming budget, albeit one that went spectacularly awry.

But such incompetence cannot go unremarked upon for long, and as the Danish daily Politiken reports (Hungarians go off on top politicians’ mysterious pronouncements) feedback has now started to arrive. For one, the economics editor of one of the major national dailies, Zoltán Baka of Népszabadság, called last week’s pronouncements “completely idiotic.” The IMF chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, also told the Associated Press that, in his view, there is “no basis to be worried” about Hungary’s fiscal situation. Other European finance ministers, however, couldn’t be bothered to offer an opinion: they are busy these days trying to find a solution to the ever-weakening euro, whose recent downward course last week’s Hungarian mini-fiasco only served to accelerate.

National Press: Denmark

Tags: euro, financial crisis, Greece, Hungary, IMF, Politiken

A brief mention here of an article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw that just might represent something quintessentially Dutch. It’s actually in the paper’s Groen! (“Green!”) section, which makes a lot of sense since it’s mainly a report – on the website of a major national newspaper, mind you – about the fortunes of a pair of common waterfowl, specifically two coots. Reporter Koos Dijksterhuis’ lede:

The coots had already been busy for weeks with the defense of their nest. Every presumed enemy was driven away with elan by a fierce flapping of wings. Finally the family swam around, but with seven chicks.

And so on, continuing to the depiction of an idyllic family meal. But it’s hardly all sweetness and light. There’s mention of parent coots even pecking their young to death if they find them too much trouble, but in this case things don’t come to that. Instead, Dijksterhuis notes that none of the seven chicks are to be seen after only five days, victims of one predator or another. Especially suspicious as culprits are the sea gulls (specifically, black-backed gulls), which have even been known to hunt young coot chicks in pairs: the first swoops over, prompting the chick to dive in panic, but then the second is there to snatch it when it resurfaces.

Dijksterhuis goes on to note that he sees many more such gulls than he can recall in the past. Is it because of the prey of this sort that they can find inland, or something else? Anyway, note well that this piece – labeled natuurdagboek or “nature diary,” so that it seems to be part of a series – appeared the very same day as nationalwide elections were happening here in the Netherlands. The “printing” capacity of the Internet is truly without limit.

National Press: Netherlands

Tags: coots, Netherlands, sea gulls, Trouw

The Danish commentator on American affairs whose writings I have discussed numerous times before, Poul Høi, has a new column up on the Rand Paul phenomenon (Rand Paul: The Revolution begins now; note that Høi may now seem to have switched to another publication, Ugen, which means “The Week,” but in reality that’s just the new on-line weekly of his long-time newspaper employer, Berlingske Tidende).

Høi turns out to have some interesting things to say, despite the fact that he might as well be describing a space alien, so far apart are Paul’s libertarian political views and those prevailing in Høi’s native Denmark, land of 25% value-added tax and the world’s highest income tax. He sets up the Republican situation in Kentucky as a straightforward struggle between Rand Paul on one side (“pitchfork Republicanism”) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (he of the “polished floors”) on the other. That’s because Paul is not really of the Republican Party, although he did just win its nomination for Senate in Kentucky – he’s really a creature of the Tea Party, what Høi calls “a fundamentally conservative grassroots movement.” More »

National Press: Denmark

Tags: Berlingske Tidende, Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, Poul Høi, Rand Paul, Republican Party, Tea Party

The word came in earlier this morning on the @Deutschland_ Twitter-feed that I follow for EuroSavant purposes (it’s only in German):

The tweet refers to an interesting article in Der Spiegel, Economic crisis accelerates dying-out of hospitals, and normally is something I would gladly re-tweet.* But then I realized that, when it comes to news about any European country’s health system, I owe my readers a bit more than that in view of the couple of posts I wrote on that subject in the recent past, especially one on the same German system that astute readers will have perceived as particularly heavy in its irony. More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: Der Spiegel, Germany, health care

Economic coverage in Europe continues to be dominated by the plight of the euro and of the Greek government. In a way, that’s too bad, because there are plenty of other simmering problems which lose the spotlight when crises pop up elsewhere – even though that hardly means that their own situation has been resolved. One such remaining problem is the question of what to do about Opel, the European-based subsidiary of General Motors which got into trouble last year more-or-less because its parent company actually had to declare bankruptcy (on 1 June 2009) and be restructured, with a majority ownership share going to the US Government.

Reviewing my own Opel coverage on this blog, I have to confess to also being guilty of that “follow-the-spotlight” syndrome, in that my last Opel post, on September 14 of last year, came prior to the latest and most intriguing development in that saga. That happened in November, when GM decided to go back on an agreement that had been reached two months before with the German government to sell off Opel to a consortium led by the Canadian auto parts-manufacturer Magna. Yes, that deal was suddenly canceled, so it was back to the status quo ante: Opel remained a GM subsidiary and the German government could resume worrying about how much in subsidies to let GM extort against the threat of shutting down some or all the Opel plants in Germany and thereby throwing thousands out of work. (Then again, at least it had seemed back in September, before GM reneged on the deal, that the German government had found a solution to keep Opel going, and it was that timing that was the most important consideration – there was a nationwide election held in late September 2009, after all!) More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: auto industry, Focus, General Motors, Opel

Who knows? It’s seems more possible than it has been before – even in the Netherlands, with its softer-than-usual policy towards such things as marijuana – after an opinion piece (Save the country, allow drugs), co-written by some local political notables, appeared yesterday in the leading quality newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad. Among the article’s nine co-signatories, the ones that stand out above the rest are probably Dr. Els Borst-Eilers and Ms. Hedy d’Ancona, both former national Ministers of Health, and most definitely Prof. Frits Bolkestein, former Dutch Eurocommissioner, former Minister of Defense, and one of the most influential politicians on the national scene in the last twenty years.

Even here, such a policy suggestion is highly controversial and, in view of the high-profile names attached to it, it immediately provoked comment within the Dutch press – from within the NRC itself, of course, but also in the form of a press-agency treatment available in other newspapers, among which Trouw (Bolkestein wants to legalize all drugs). More »

National Press: Netherlands

Tags: drugs laws, Frits Bolkestein, Netherlands, NRC Handelsblad

A quick mention here of the interesting recent article from the Amsterdam weekly De Groene Amsterdammer about the evolution and impact on Danish politics of the Dansk Folkeparti, or Danish People’s Party. That’s the main anti-immigrant party there, which nonetheless in the mere 15 years since its founding has attained a powerful and even respected position within the edifice of Danish politics, as the article describes very clearly.

But just don’t take my word for this, even if you can’t read Dutch. In fact, I first became aware myself of this piece from an English translation posted on the Presseurop site. There’s just one main discrepancy that I can see, though. That Danish People’s Party: why would De Groene Amsterdammer happen to be writing about them just now? Silly – there’s a general election about to occur here in the Netherlands on June 9, and one of its biggest sub-plots is how favorable the results will turn out to be for the PVV or Party for Freedom, which, yes, is the main anti-immigrant party in this country. Indeed, the lede to De Groene Amsterdammer’s piece cites the Dansk Folkeparti as “a beautiful source of inspiration” for Geert Wilders, the PVV’s leader.

On the other hand, the Presseurop piece makes no mention at all of the PVV! I must ask: why? Because English-language-only readers should not have their intellects burdened further with an additional consideration such as this? Because it would just not be “politically correct,” due to the PVV’s shady reputation in many circles, to mention what is – after all – the really sole motivation for why this particular article appeared in De Groene Amsterdammer at this particular time? I hate to break it to the Presseurop editors but, although the Dutch and the Danish feel quite a bit of common cultural make-up between them, the Dutch (at least) are not terribly interested in the details of the Danish political system or its workings for most of the time!

National Press: Netherlands

Tags: Dansk Folkeparti, De Groene Amsterdammer, Geert Wilders, immigration, presseurop, PVV

One key factor affecting the entire ongoing Eurocrisis was known to cognoscenti as “NRW” – short for Nordrhein-Westfalen, the German state whose local elections on May 9 did much to influence both the nature and timing of Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel’s response to the grave threat to the euro and even the EU arising from the Greek financial problems. That is well and good, but those same NRW elections at the same time had another rather different significance for a separate voting bloc, one not necessarily so interested in the mere potential for collapse of the common European currency. These citizens are overwhelmingly young and male; they usually converse in Java and C++ as easily as in their native German; and they vote for the German Pirate Party, whose disappointing results in that same ballot saw its share of the overall vote drop to 1.5% from the full 2% share it had enjoyed during last Fall’s nationwide election.

You might recall that this political organization, like all the off-shoots of the original Pirate Party in Sweden, takes for its purpose advocacy mainly for Internet-related issues such as copyright reform, digital civil rights, and the prevention of Internet censorship. Philip Kuhn of Die Welt recently sat down with party leader Jens Seipenbusch for a brief interview in the wake of those poor electoral results. More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: Die Welt, Germany, Internet, Jens Seipenbusch, The Pirate Party

. . . mainly to include the 500+ million European Union! That at least is the message of Libération Brussels correspondent Jean Quatremer in the lastest post on his Coulisses de Bruxelles, UE (=”Brussels Corridors”) weblog, entitled “Barack Obama, the president of the European Council (Potec).” The basic assertion Quatremer wants to make here is that Obama should get the main credit for the bold/desperate €750 billion emergency aid package that European leaders cobbled together last Sunday night – just after voting in the crucial Nordrhein-Westphalen German state election had closed but just before Asian markets started trading again on the Monday morning of a new week, you understand.

Sure, the President was nowhere near Brussels at the time. Still, in Quatremer’s view it was the key telephone calls he placed to the main decision-makers – mainly France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel, of course – that made sure something big and decisive would happen. And then it seems he also gave a call on Monday to the Spanish premier, Zapatero, to persuade him to buckle down with some serious government cost-saving measures (that included lowering public employees’ salaries and cutting pensions), and he may have similarly bent the ear of Portuguese premier Socrates as well. More »

National Press: France

Tags: Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, EU, financial crisis, Jean Quatremer, José Zapatero, Libération, Nicolas Sarkozy

In case you haven’t heard – maybe you’ve just been too busy with your status updates – Facebook has come under considerable fire lately for its apparent loose attitude towards security and users’ privacy. Maybe you also haven’t heard about the four NYU students who managed in a relative flash to raise tens of thousands of dollars for their project to create an open-source alternative to Facebook called “Diaspora*.” (Yes, with that asterix at the end; further information about their project here.)

But here at EuroSavant our job is to inform you of things that you may not have heard about from the Eurosphere. So had you heard that your great-uncle in Germany also doesn’t want you using Facebook? Well OK, maybe he’s not really your great-uncle, he just looks like he should be, as you will realize if you surf to the recent interview with him in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose rather sensationalist title I have borrowed for the title of this post out of similarly sensationalist motivations. Actually, he’s probably someone worth listening to even more than any great-uncle in Germany: he’s Ernst Pöppel, renowned professor of psychology at the University of Munich. More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: Facebook, FAZ, Internet

I’d like to expand a bit on the article from Le Monde that I linked to in one of my tweets today. I’d also like to try out the new facility Twitter has made available to embed tweets, thusly:

Oooooh, looks pretty good! (Feel free to write me to ask how to do it!)

Anyway, the immediate point of that piece is contained in its title: Israeli government announces that it wants to relaunch construction in East Jerusalem. The Netanyahu government had previously conceded a brief suspension of such construction, but only as a sort of fig-leaf measure in response to heavy pressure it was getting from the US – because, of course, any such construction in East Jerusalem, territory conquered in battle that the rest of the world will not concede is owned by Israel in any way, sounds the death-knell for what are supposed to be peace negotiations with Palestinian representatives. More »

National Press: France

Tags: Elie Yishai, Israel, Jerusalem, Le Monde, settlements

Just like mushrooms popping up after spring rainfall (at least as they do here in Northern European climes) comes a new journalistic phenomenon: some pre-planned world-scale event occurs in China (e.g. the 2008 Olympics, the recent opening of the Shanghai World Expo) and is immediately followed by articles in the American press taking a bemused look at the stumbles of the Chinese as they try to come to grips with the English language, efforts that produce something usually termed “Chinglish.” The latest instance of this is a recent article in the NYT together with the almost-indispensable accompanying slide-show displaying some prime Chinglish examples (e.g. “Slip and fall down carefully”).

It’s often pretty funny stuff. Then again, another thought may come to anyone inclined to think about such things a bit more deeply. (And/or to those quick to take offense – or are these two cohorts actually one-and-the-same?) Could it be that the “paper of record” of one great civilization is, in effect, mocking the citizens of yet another for their well-intentioned struggles in navigating the former’s language? When, in fact, relations between these two great civilizations are of possibly the most crucial importance to world peace as well as progress on most other global-scale problems (e.g. environment, trade, financial regulation)? More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: China, Chinglish, Die Welt, English language, New York Times

You’re surely all aware of the big current European story: that minor matter about saving the euro from tremendous speculative pressures on its currency, in light of a threatened Greece sovereign bankruptcy which threatens to drag down further other vulnerable EU sovereign borrowers as well. As always, my policy in approaching this topic is to consider only those non-English-language articles which add something to the discussion that my readers are not likely to have already seen elsewhere in the English-language press. So I admit I haven’t provided much coverage as yet, other than the translation of the French Finance Minister interview yesterday/below.

Then again, that’s also a little disingenuous; a unique viewpoint on virtually any European economic or political issue is almost always to be had from L’Humanité, the organ of the French Communist Party. Naturally, those folks have also been glad to hold forth on the new measures and funding facilities arising from last weekend’s Eurozone crisis meetings over the Greek debt problem, as we see in the piece by Bruno Odent provocatively entitled Euro: the plan aimed at saving the hostage-takers. More »

National Press: France

Tags: EU, financial crisis, Greece, L'Humanité

The finance blog Naked Capitalism today linked to a current article of high interest which happens to be available only in a foreign language, in this case French. I’m referring to the interview with French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde in the business newspaper Les Echos – newsworthy at any time, but of crucial interest appearing just now.

This is not the first time this has happened on Naked Capitalism, but my intent here is certainly not to scold. In many of those previous instances I have been happy to step in and provide a translation of the article in question on this site, and I do the same below after the jump with the Lagarde interview. The piece’s lede is “‘There’s a determination to construct a new edifice, to reinvent the European model,’ declared the Minister of the Economy in an interview with Les Echos.” (Interviewer’s questions are in bold.) More »

National Press: France

Tags: Christine Lagarde, euro, Eurozone, financial crisis, Les Échos

Going to Berlin in the next month or so? Looking for a unique tourist experience? Here’s one that comes not out of some guidebook, but rather from no less than Die Zeit: the lobby-tour, a tour of the German capital from a lobbyist’s point-of-view.

These tours are run by Lobby Control (site only in German), a lobbyist-tracking NGO which, as the site’s headline reads, is “Active for Transparency and Democracy.” According to the Die Zeit piece, Berlin has it’s own “Iron Triangle” of lobbyists, actually a sort of Iron Trapezoid, running from the Reichstag to the Friedrichstrasse S-bahn station to the Gendarmenmarkt to Potsdamerplatz (respectively the NW, NE, SE and SW corners). Through it runs majestically the famous avenue Unter den Linden, unfortunately now known among many capital cynics as Unter den Lobbyisten – “among the lobbyists.” For €10 per person (cheap!), one of Lobby Control’s guides will take a group on a roughly 2 1/2 hour tour through this territoriy, stopping at 15 different locations to give a brief presentation (probably only in German) about each: trade association offices, PR agencies, and think-tanks, of course, but also such places as eateries and beer-halls where the heavy political back-slapping really goes on – such as the Ständige Vertretung restaurant on the River Spree, where the tour starts out. More »

National Press: Germany

Tags: Berlin, Die Zeit, Lobby Control, lobbying