Yes, it’s been a while: sorry. I’m scheduled to return to home-base in Amsterdam next weekend, where I’ll have the wherewithal to crank EuroSavant production back up to its old levels. Plus, these days, my Polish has never been better! Naprawde! You’ll soon be seeing explicit evidence of that on this site.

In the meantime, how about another Uday Hussein horror story? This one was originally published in yesterday’s Sunday (London) Times, but the Sunday Times requires that people take out an on-line subscription for people to be able to read its material. But, if you read Dutch, you can get the same story in today’s Telegraaf. (more…)

The big story over on this side of the Atlantic these days is the Dr. David Kelly affair blazing now in the UK. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been under pressure for weeks for supposedly misleading Parliament into approving Britain’s joining the Americans in war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, raising scary prospects of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which could strike Britain within 45 minutes. In particular, at the beginning of this month the BBC had issud a damning report, based on anonymous, inside information from a source within the government, that Blair’s administration had “sexed up” a “dodgy dossier” sent to Parliament to substantiate Iraq’s alleged WMD capabilities. (In other words, civil servants and/or politicians in Blair’s government had inserted language into that dossier that was much more alarmist than was justified, in order to bring Parliament around to Blair’s case for going to war – much in the same way that there has also been recent furore surrounding George W. Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union speech of last January that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger, an assertion which it now turns out was not even accepted as true by most of the Bush administration at the time.) Blair was certainly looking forward to a recent trip to the US (among other things, to address a joint session of the Houses of Congress) as a respite, a stay in a land where he is much more popular than in the country where he is actually Prime Minister. But no sooner had he left the US (to continue on to the West on an Asian trip) than the official who had been recently picked out as the likely “mole” who enabled the BBC to make its report – British biological expert Dr. David Kelly – was found dead near his home in Oxfordshire.

For the longest time – for far too long – the authorities who should have known better held off in identifying this death as the suicide that it was, and so kept alive the horrible prospect that someone had done away with the doctor out of concern for what more he could say to the press. But now we know that’s what it is, and the most recent news as of this writing has been the naming of Lord Hutton, a distinguished attorney and magistrate from Northern Ireland, to head the independent government inquiry into this affair. Crucially, the inquiry will have the narrow focus of the circumstances surrounding Dr. Kelly’s death – not the broader one of the completeness and truthfulness of the reporting to Parliament in the weeks leading up to the War in Iraq of Blair’s administration.

Naturally, this affair has generated reams and reams of reporting and commentary, especially within the UK but also elsewhere. Indeed, the concern that the populations of the countries of the Coalition might have been misled by the leaders about the urgency of going to war against Saddam Hussein is by no means confined to the UK or the US or exclusively to the other countries of the coalition. (In fact, in some of those countries – e.g. Poland – people are not much worried about the prospect at all.)
The Guardian offers a good selection of what various English-language newspapers – in the UK and abroad – are saying. As is the EuroSavant way, we’ll leave readers with that for English coverage, and instead examine the French press. (more…)

Belgium finally has that new government, after a month of negotiations between the various political parties following the general election of mid-May. And one of its first acts has been to put forward legislation which would replace the “law of universal competence” about which so much has been written in these web-pages – a somewhat extraordinary law which, back during its strapping youth, could be used by anyone, from anywhere, to bring suit in a Belgian court against anyone, from anywhere, for alleged genocide, violations of human rights, and that sort of thing. While it lasted, it provided for great political theater – with personages such as Ariel Sharon and Donald Rumsfeld wondering whether it was safe for them to even set foot on Belgian soil, and Belgium’s hosting of NATO headquarters thrown into doubt – but it has finally met its end – at least so it seems. (more…)

Perhaps a solution to the Italo-German tiff that has been the subject of recent €S entries was there all along, in Bundeskanzler Schröder’s very backyard – if he could have only thought of it in time. But it’s too late now: the Love Parade, that yearly festival in honor of techno-music and “Love” generally held in Berlin’s Tiergarten kicked off on schedule yesterday despite past threats to its very existence from the Berlin municipal authorities. An emergency (federal German) government allocation for flying Italian opinion-leaders up to the German capital to take part might have worked wonders for relations between the two countries. As the on-line photographs accompanying German press coverage make clear, instead of “blonde beasts” they would have encountered quite a few “blonde beauties,” ready to party (or, indeed, even “blond breasts”), with no other thought than to “invade” their own city park, and to a techno beat. (more…)

The Italo-German dispute continues (last covered in EuroSavant here), with calls throughout Europe (but especially from Germany) for Italian minister for economy and tourism Stefano Stefani’s resignation, and German Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder’s bold and steely determination to vacation this summer anywhere else than in Italy.

But that’s just the wrong attitude to take, Michael Naumann argues in his treatment of this whole controversy in the latest Die Zeit (entitled Die blonden Bestien – “The Blonde Beasts,” itself a sufficient shorthand for Stefani’s recent characterization of Italy’s summer German tourists). (more…)

Can we make a deal? There’s more news on the old Belgian “law of universal competence” front. I’m not sure whether my faithful EuroSavant readers are waiting out there with baited breath about new developments here – or whether this is just of interest to me. It’s reported in today’s on-line De Standaard; maybe I’ll give you that link and just a brief description, and then let those interested (and, of course, those who can read Dutch or can have the article translated) get into the issue further. (That not good enough? E-mail me! I’ll be very obliging!) (more…)

There has been further fallout from the Berlusconi-in-Strasbourg affair, as reported by those sharp-eyed newshawks at the Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen. You’ll recall that the remarks Italian prime minster Silvio Berlusconi addressed to German MEP Martin Schulz last week – something to the effect that he recommended Herr Schulz for a part in a new movie about a Nazi concentration camp – did much to sour current diplomatic relations between Italy and Germany.

Now those relations have taken another turn for the worse, to the degree that Italy may wind up losing one of its most famous guest-tourists this summer – namely Gerhard Schröder himself, who always goes to Tuscany summers when he can get away from the hustle-and-bustle of trying to put the German Federal Republic back on its feet economically. (more…)

More now about the verbal misstep committed by that right-wing politician last week in Strasbourg . . .

“Oh no – Berlusconi again?” you might moan. No, no: this time I’m talking about French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. It seems that at a meeting of the Council of Europe there Raffarin let loose with the following bon mot: La France n’en est encore sur le chemin de son paradis qu’au purgatoire, puisqu’il reste des socialistes. “France is not yet on the road to paradise but rather in purgatory, since there are still Socialists around.” (The Socialists are the main party in opposition in France; the Council of Europe has nothing to do directly with the European Union – in fact, it pre-dates it – but instead acts as a general, non-executive European political forum; see its website here.)

I found out about this incident in today’s New York Times (registration required), and, sure enough, from the way the Times described what was going on, it looked once again like a case of a joke – or people’s reaction to a joke – being taken too far. For example, according to Jean-Marc Ayrault, leader of the Socialist faction in the French National Assembly, “Mr. Raffarin no longer deserves the title of prime minister of the Republic.” So I decided to apply the EuroSavant treatment to it – let’s look at what the French on-line papers have made of it. (more…)

Today I arrive in Wroclaw, the city where dedicated EuroSavant readers will remember I spent about a week at the beginning of June, just in time to observe and report on the Polish EU accession referendum. This time I plan to stay a bit longer – oh, a couple of weeks. Among other goals, the plan is to work further on my advanced Polish, together with a dynamite tutor whom I found there last time. In the long run, this can only benefit my weblog postings, especially to those among you looking for a window into current Polish affairs, as I’ll be able to understand the Polish on-line press better and faster.

In the short run, on the other hand, residence anywhere other than in front of my trusty Dell-with-Chello-broadband-connection in Amsterdam degrades to some degree my weblog posting ability. For one thing, now when I work in front of a Internet-connected computer, the meter will be running. Granted, it will only be running in zloty terms, but nonetheless I won’t be able to escape that feeling in the back of my mind: the meter is running. What’s more – ready for a confession? – on rare occasions I do encounter the need to consult a dictionary to get the precise meaning of some key word or phrase in a given article; my stable of available dictionaries in Poland will necessarily be rather smaller. (Don’t talk to me about on-line language dictionaries; I haven’t come close to finding any that come near the capabilities of traditional bound volumes.)

Anyway, you had a taste of my “blogging from the field” a month ago. Maybe it wasn’t THAT bad – admittedly, I had an interesting central theme, i.e. the referendum, which I’ll largely lack now. (I presume – but maybe Poland will flood again, like back in ’97, when in fact I was also in Poland.) But I’ll keep the observations and the links coming. No reason to remove that EuroSavant bookmark yet.

Look, I’ve already devoted more attention on EuroSavant this week to Silvio Berlusconi than I prefer to do to any one subject or person. I am also well aware that I have not been too terribly respectful of the current Italian prime minster. For example, in my post yesterday I used the word “jackal” (but only in reference to the way certain photos of his face that on-line newspapers have posted make him look), as well as variations on the word “insult.” Plus, in that post and in the preceding one I tried to give at least a strong impression of the sort of legal shenanigans he’s been involved in in his country ever since he was elected for the second time to be prime minister there about two years ago.

Nonetheless, I’ve now had more time to think about (and discuss) just what Berlusconi did and did not do at the European Parliament speaker’s podium. So that I am not trying to be ironic (unlike the Man himself when he addressed German MEP Martin Schulz) when I say that I can understand his bewilderment at what happened. Leave the guy alone! This is getting way out of proportion! (more…)

I was hoping to move on to other subjects than the fitness of Silvio Berlusconi for the European Union presidency, but his insulting outburst yesterday while in the EU Parliament to present his president’s agenda naturally keeps me on this subject. And I was hoping to move on from reporting on the German press, which I’ve covered a bit disproportionally in the past several weeks, but it only seems logical and fair to report on reactions from the country whose MEP (Member of the European Parliament) was the target of Berlusconi’s insult, a defamation that touched on Germany’s sensitive Nazi past.

The incident took place in the debate after Berlusconi had made his “inaugural” address to Parliament. (more…)

It’s July 1, so the half-yearly presidency of the European Union changes hands again (for possibly the second-to-the-last time, if the EU Constitution, which changes this system, is ratified within the first half of 2004 as planned). Good-bye to Greece; ciao to Italy, specifically to Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minster. (more…)