They’re getting impatient out there in the outside world for Obama – real impatient. Last week’s attacks in Mumbai only made this situation worse, to the point that India’s crisis has somehow become Barack Obama’s crisis. This we read even in the normally-sober Financial Times Deutschland, in an article by Washington correspondent Sabine Muscat: “Evil prophecy for Obama.” The lede: “He is not yet president. And still the attacks in India are the first test of the foreign-policy man Barack Obama.”

In truth, this “Barack Obama’s first foreign policy test” has been a red-hot label looking for something to which to affix itself ever since he won the election, if not even before. For one thing, remember the remarks on the campaign-trail by Joe Biden – comments apparently not particularly welcomed by the Obama campaign – about how there surely would occur some international crisis early in the new administration, one deliberately engineered to test the new president’s resolve. As Muscat points out, this “evil prophecy” was also a line White House press spokesperson Dana Perino was pushing – for obvious partisan purpose – just before the election, and it was certainly part of John McCain’s own pitch, implicitly if not explicitly. In these early-transition days, then, it would not have taken much of an unpleasant nature, happening anywhere in the world, to turn into “Obama’s first foreign challenge,” with all eyes swiveling to Chicago to see what he intended to do about it. (more…)

It’s a cliché, but oh-so-true: as we all try to make our way in these hard economic times, it’s those little luxuries that have to fall by the wayside. (And all on-line content has to start showing banners or Google-ads or start eking out revenue some other way . . . oh wait . . .) One of the most (in)famous of those “little luxuries” on the American scene over the past two decades has been Starbucks’ offerings of lattes, frappuccinos, and the like, and, accordingly, that flagship American coffee-chain has lately been taking it squarely on the chin in financial terms, and recently announced plans to close 600 of its shops in the US.

That fiscal trajectory, from top-of-the-mountain to down-in-the-dumps is all-too-familiar in these times – does it remind you, say, of Citibank? Perhaps it won’t be too much longer before even Starbucks will stand in need of an espresso-bailout.

That may very well be on the horizon, in fact, and this time from a private and foreign source, as we read on the on-line site of the German weekly Focus: Coffee-farmers want to buy Starbucks. (more…)

Did you miss the commemoration on Saturday, the 22nd? No, I don’t want to refer here to the 45th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, but rather to something rather more happy and refreshing: the 40th anniversary of the release of the double-album “The Beatles” by the Beatles, known to one and all simply as the White Album. It seems also to be known to Pope Benedict XVI and his minions in the Vatican (either as the “White Album” or at least whatever that translates to in Latin), as the Holy See’s house-organ (not the musical kind) L’Osservatore Romano used the occasion as an opportunity publicly to forgive John Lennon for his remarks back in the 1960s that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” Unfortunately, I’m not able to find anything to that effect at that link for L’Osservatore Romano, which gives the English version, nor at any of the other editions, so we have to rely for this piece of news on an article in the Belgian daily Gazet van Antwerpen: Vatican forgives the Beatles for “bigger than Jesus” utterance. (Also unfortunately: John Lennon happens to be deceased.)

Yes, in that article the Vatican authorities are said to conclude that, in the final analysis, the “bigger than Jesus” remark was simply “a joke from a young man who was overcome by unexpected success.” So they’re willing to let bygones be bygones. Oh, and for that matter, the Gazet reports, Elvis was OK, too: the description of him from L’Osservatore Romano was of a “dear, sensitive young man.”

The website Politico came out yesterday (fittingly, a Sunday) with an article noting that President-elect Obama has yet to attend church – any church – since he won the election. His two predecessors did manage to do that as they waited to take office – George W. even headed to services while the 2000 election results were completely up in the air in recounts and litigation, poor fellow – but Obama has instead chosen to spend his Sunday mornings at the gym.

A Dutch paper this morning picked up on this story, and naturally it was the Nederlands Dagblad, an explicitly Christian newspaper: Obama waits on going to church. (No sign of the story, though, on the website of that other Dutch Christian newspaper, the Reformatorisch Dagblad.) Their coverage (from the “foreign editor”) for the most part repeats that of Politico, although they also obliquely justify why it might be that the Obama’s have not yet found their new church-home, by mentioning that which church they might choose is currently the subject of feverish speculation equal to that which attended the choice of Sidwell Friends as their daughters’ new school. And they quote an unnamed Obama staff-member reassuring us that “The Obama family attaches much worth to religious experience in a church.”

As anyone who knows their mustard appreciates, Dijon mustard has long been the finest, the tangiest – really, the most mustardy – of condiments; has been, in fact, since mustard first started to be manufactured in Europe back in the mid-18th century. That label “Dijon” derives from the name of the city in eastern France, towards the Swiss border, where this particular mustard has been produced since that time, and has been protected by law since 1937.

Unfortunately, that “protection” was attached to the special technique for making the mustard, not to the place itself. As the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung now warns us (Dijon mustard becomes homeless), soon Dijon mustard will not come from Dijon anymore. (more…)

Arrrr mateys, I’ve suffered yet another keel-haulin’! I don’t know whether Christian Semler of Berlin’s Die Tageszeitung (which abbreviates itself on-line to “taz.de”) actually took notice of my recent series of piracy-blogposts (amounting to something of a mini-pirate craze, I’ll admit), but in any case he attempts to throw some cold water on my whole “James-Bond-fights-pirates” notion in his piece Crisis-Sea without Romanticism.

“Everybody loves the skull-and-crossbones,” he begins – hey, think of Errol Flynn, think of Johnny Depp! But we need to realize, he continues, that these pirates operating off of the Somali coast are not “desperate fisherman” (verzweifelte Fischer) but rather “a professionally-run business, run by gangsters and financed by serious businessmen.” (more…)

These are weird times; governments around the world are doing some strange things, generally in response to urgent budgetary pressures. You might have read in the New York Times about how the Australian navy is about to let its sailors go off on a two-month leave – the report was even on the homepage of that newspaper’s website for a time. And now word comes from the Dutch newspaper Trouw: Athens government to free half of its prisoners.

(It’s true that articles of this sort referencing happenings in another European country would usually cause me to go to that other country’s on-line press to seek more first-hand reports there, but in this case all I can do is plead “It’s all Greek to me!”)

That’s around 6,000 convicted criminals that the Greek authorities are planning to release, pending approval by parliament, according to an announcement by Sotiris Hatzigakis, the Greek Justice Minister. But there may be another 1,500 added to that if he also is allowed to institute another measure reducing the allowable duration of what the Trouw report (credited to the ANP press agency) terms “temporary custody,” which I interpret to mean pre-trial detention – so at least many of those added 1,500 may not be actual lawbreakers.

Why do they want to do this? Overcrowding. If 6,000 is the half, then that means that there are around 12,000 inmates in Greek jails, which the article reports have an official capacity of only 7,500. And how can they be sure that the jails won’t just fill up to bursting again? Well, it seems that drugs laws in Greece are somewhat stricter than the EU norm. (Who would have thought it?) “In the long run,” as the Trouw article puts it (op de lange termijn), the parliament is supposed to take up the task of adjusting those laws accordingly.

The CEOs of Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) made their pilgrimage to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, to make a plea for their own bailout from the federal government. You’d have to say that their show was a flop; media coverage afterwards included accusations of “tone deafness”, together with particular scorn for the fact that the execs had each traveled to Washington to beg for public money on their company private jets.

The foreign press was watching this performance, too, and from the pages of France’s leading newspaper Le Monde, Dominique Dhombres did not even need any mention of the private jets to quite effectively skewer the auto-bosses with an article entitled Ask for pardon? Out of the question! (more…)

Avast Daniel Craig! Avast Marc Foster (film director)! Avast the Broccoli family! And especially avast to the corps of James Bond scriptwriters! Move out smartly! Quantum of Solace, the 22nd and latest entry in the long-running James Bond series of movies, may have set a box-office record (at least for James Bond films) in its opening weekend, but now is not the time for the powerful Bond movie juggernaut to be resting on its laurels. Somali pirates are running rampage, having just captured their biggest prize yet, a fully-loaded supertanker, and the adventure-movie possibilities are just endless!

“They have the most beautiful women, the fastest autos and the best weapons.” Now, doesn’t that sound like the sort of challenge to Bond and his equipment supremo, the enigmatic Q, that just cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged? That quote starts off coverage of this Somali pirate phenomenon in an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel (“The pirates have hit the jackpot!”). (more…)

Large breasts are not a malady: that’s what we literally read as the headline of an on-line Der Spiegel article. (Yes, of another article from Der Spiegel; what we have here again is the dreaded serendipity effect, where I just happened to chance upon yet another interesting on-line article – it helps a lot when their headlines/links have particularly eye-catching language – as I originally zeroed-in on the Somali pirates piece that is the subject of the blogpost above.)

Well, who ever said that they were? Certainly no man, that’s for sure. But that’s not the point here; that headline would have been better phrased as “Large breasts are not an official malady,” that is, are not what a given nation’s national health system recognizes as something that it should step in to fix without charging the (unfortunate?) carrier of same. Here it is the German national health system that we’re talking about, of course, and Der Spiegel is simply passing along word of a decision from the Social Court of the German state Hesse that, if a certain anonymous woman (born in 1971) wants to go under the knife to have the size of her breasts reduced, she’s going to have to pay for it herself. (more…)

American beauty pageant organizers and participants, attention please! Time to break out the briefing-books! There is now a trend over on the European side of the big ocean that insists upon seeing from contestants at such events both beauty and brains – at least a bare minimum, please. This is originating from none other than Belgium, as we see from a report from that French-Belgian newspaper La Dernière Heure (A future unpolished Miss Belgium?). (more…)

German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück is currently in Washington, attending that “G20” summit that is supposed to restructure the international financial system – i.e. to bring about a “Bretton Woods II” – to deal with the current world-wide economic troubles. But after this weekend he’ll not be back at his Berlin office long before he’ll face yet another economic summit, reports the German business newspaper Handelsblatt: Steinbrück calls Opel-Summit.

That’s “Opel” as in “Adam Opel GmbH,” the German-based daughter auto-making concern of General Motors. As you can imagine, it’s currently in financial trouble; this past week it directed its own appeal for help to the German government (actually governments, see below). And so, in more-or-less mirror-image to the issue the US government is now having to confront, Germany is also now taking up the same dilemma: should its auto-makers be bailed out to save the many thousands of jobs dependent on them? Or would that be throwing only the first installment of massive monies to an industry that is anyway doomed with no future? (more…)

The following post is meant as a public-service “heads-up” message to one Ms. B. Spears.

Britney darling: I know that China is high on your list of tour destinations – “exploding market,” “millions of rabid fans,” and all that. But it looks like you’ll just have to cross it off. The authorities there seemed determined to seriously cramp your style. I mean it: forget about it.

This we learn today from an article in Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel, entitled Peking wants to punish “playback-singing.” What is this are they talking about? Yep, you guessed it: lip-synching. That’s could be a strict no-go soon, punishable by Chinese law as “fraud towards the public” (Betrug an der Öffentlichkeit, although I suspect the Chinese use yet another phrase for official purposes). In fact, the Chinese Culture Ministry is considering making not only lip-synching but also instrument-synching (or whatever you call pretending to play your instrument against the pre-recorded sound of it playing the required tune) against the law. (more…)

Here’s something you’ll be glad to hear: the Netherlands stands ready to assist with the mooted closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay that the Obama transition team is reported to be working on. As reported in the Dutch Christian newspaper Nederlands Dagblad (“Help US close cell on Cuba”), Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen stated “I hope that the closing of Guantánamo Bay will be one of Obama’s first deeds. We want to actively support him with that.”

Great! So does that mean, for example, that the Netherlands will be willing to take in some of the 250-or-so prisoners who remain? You know, probably some of them are actually terroristic nasties, but nasties whom US authorities will nonetheless have problems ever prosecuting because of how some of the evidence against them was gained (i.e. by torture). So while it’s conceivable that about the only thing that can eventually be done is to set them free, quite often their native countries don’t really want to have them back.

Well . . . not so fast. The good Foreign Minister will first need to consult with his colleague, the Justice Minister: “I want to take a look with Hirsch Balin [that’s the Dutch Justice Minister] how they can get a trial in accord with our norms and values.”

As long as we’re still covering the various reactions to Obama’s presidential victory of last week, let’s be sure not to miss the musings of Berlingske Tidende’s Poul Høi, who in his reporting and now in his own blog Amerikanske Tilstande (= “American Conditions”; here is the homepage), has had interesting things to say about the US – inspired by his on-the-scene reporting – for a number of years now. And in reaction to this historical election result he doesn’t come up short: his latest post is even entitled Obama and Sambo.

(Maybe I should have just stolen that title to make a more eye-catching heading for this blogpost, but I decided against it. By the way, the only other European columnist I can think of that I would want to watch specifically for any reaction to the election would be Agnès Giard, sex-blogger for France’s Libération, whom I have certainly covered before. But it seems politics generally lie outside of what she regards as her journalistic remit; the article she happened to post right after the election was actually entitled Declaration of love to the zombies. So there you have the link, although I’m not going to deal with that one, you’ll have to read the piece in French yourself. But no, rest assured that it has nothing to do with any politician, whether American or not.) (more…)

Don’t get too alarmed: it happened back in January, 1968, when a US B-52 bomber with four nuclear bombs on board crashed a few miles from an airbase near Thule, Greenland – then, as now, a self-governing province of Denmark. The first real problem was that there weren’t supposed to be nuclear weapons there in the first place, as the Danish had only approved the base for use in monitoring for a possible Soviet ICBM attack on the US over the North Pole, not as having anything to do with nuclear weapons themselves. And secondly, only three of those bombs were recovered from the crash site, but US authorities kept quiet about that, instead maintaining that all the weapons had been destroyed in the crash. In reality, three months later they sent a submarine to the area to look some more for the weapon, but with instructions for the officers in charge to lie about their mission to the Danish authorities, stating instead that they were there simply to survey the sea-bottom. (more…)

The ramifications of Obama’s electoral victory last Tuesday are still percolating through the European political consciousness, if the steady supply of commentary in the media there is any indication. We surely would not want to miss, for example, the just-issued commentary from L’Humanité, the organ of the PCF, the French Communist Party, which in its (web-)pages asks United States: Change of an Era? (more…)

For all the deluge of advice that the Obama transition team is receiving from every quarter, publicly and privately, about what the goals should be for his new administration, it’s obvious to all that addressing the precarious state of America’s economy has to be priority #1. (Yes, even over puppy selection.) The President-elect made that clear himself in his radio address yesterday, stating “I want to ensure that we hit the ground running on Jan. 20, because we don’t have a moment to lose.” Actually, maybe not even that: waiting all the way until next January 20 increasingly seems some sort of quaint constitutional anachronism in the face of what seems to be the accelerating decline in the American economy.

(As in, for example, Paul Krugman here: “Any way we can get current management at Treasury to take early retirement, and get the new guys in right away?” But remember that, until Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term in office, American presidents were in fact inaugurated on March 4 of the year following that in which they were elected. That four-month delay proved to be very dangerous a couple of times, most notably in 1861, when seven Southern states had seceded from the Union before Abraham Lincoln could take office, and in 1933, when FDR ascended to the presidency following a series of catastrophic bank-runs.)

For one thing, if they wait until next January 20 to do anything, General Motors may already be gone. That at least is the message from Jens Nymark in Denmark’s business newspaper Børsen: General Motors can be finished this year. (more…)

“[T]his is a major issue,” President-elect Barack Obama noted in his first post-election news conference yesterday. “I think it’s generated more interest on our Web site than just about anything.” He was speaking, of course, about the pressing personnel decision for his incoming administration: what sort of quadruped is to be appointed as First Dog? America’s allies clearly share his concern; it’s the subject of an article in no less than the Financial Times Deutschland (The animal for the president, by Anja Rützel). The lede: “Barack Obama promised his daughters a whelp. What that says about the new president and means for all of us.” (more…)

One of the occupational hazards of having just won the presidency, I suppose, is the tidal wave of advice, from parties near and far, that immediately crashes over you. Here’s a counselor who might make Barack Obama sit up and take notice, if he could ever hear word of what he has to say: yes, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran. We learn about Mahmoud’s suggestions to Barack courtesy of the French press agency AFP, as published in an article in the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro: Iran: Obama should opt for pacifism.

These words of wisdom, obviously issued in reaction to Obama’s election, were actually conveyed through Ahmadinejad’s press spokesman, Ali-Akbar Javanfekr, speaking on al-Alam, an Iranian TV station. (Which is why Obama will never hear of them. By the way, in the article AFP incorrectly calls the TV station “Arabic”; if you’re curious, you can peruse its English-language website.) (more…)

It’s Obama! Let’s take a broad range of European editorial responses to his historic presidential victory and look at each briefly in turn – using what we could even call the Andrew Sullivan format, but with translation. (more…)

The excitement is mounting . . . in less than a day we should all know who the 44th President of the USA will be! That is, unless we come up against another vote-counting disaster such as occurred in the state of Florida back in 2000, Patrick Sabatier reminds us in his article for the French news-magazine Le Point: The four lessons of an historic campaign. Thanks for that, M. Sabatier, and unfortunately what you foresee could well come true, what with the unprecedented flood of voters expected to show up at the polls today, even after the similar throngs that flocked to the early-voting sites opened by some (but by no means all) states.

If we do get some sort of definitive result out of the day’s proceedings, Sabatier points out that it can only turn out one way, if you pay attention to the pollsters and other experts, namely a victory for Barack Obama. So why not go ahead and offer “four lessons” out of the American electoral campaign, as seen from a French perspective? Although, that said, Sabatier at the same time does take care to factor the possibility of a surprise McCain victory into his conclusions. (more…)

Tired of all the US election news? (“Obama, McCain, Obama, Palin, William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi . . .” and on and on.) Well, today is the day before Election Day 2008: here at EuroSavant I just can’t stop now – and you can be quite sure that I’ll be monitoring foreign coverage of the results later this week as well. Just be patient, all of this will soon pass . . .

In the meantime, you have the occasional foreign article about the US elections that you rather wish did not have to be there, like what we see today in the main Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes: You’ll be arrested at the polls, leaflets mislead American voters. The lede:

In the last hours before the presidential elections American voters are being flooded with dirty tricks. Misleading e-mails go to Americans, disquieting telephone calls occur, and people find under their doors slanderous pamphlets. Their purpose is to dissuade people from voting, to mislead and confuse them. A part of these tricks this year have a racist flavor due to Barack Obama’s dark skin.

The article (no by-line given) proceeds to give a pretty good list of the various don’t-get-out-the-vote schemes that have been uncovered so far; some of them I hadn’t even heard of yet. (more…)

Back to the subject of Iceland, which holds the doubtful distinction of occupying the current financial crisis’ leading-edge of economic suffering. As the FT recently reported, that country’s monetary authorities have now had to raise interest rates for the Icelandic krona to a record 18% as one condition for receiving what is still a “proposed” $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. The future will seemingly bring a 10% contraction of the economy there, with simultaneous 8% unemployment and 20%-plus inflation.

I’m afraid I do not possess the skills in Icelandic to start investigating that country’s on-line press to look deeper into this mess that way. But there’s at least some interesting coverage from the Czech Republic’s leading general-interest quality daily, Mladá fronta dnes, in the form of an article Alarmed by the crisis, a third of Icelanders consider moving out of the country. (more…)