Did you know that Barack Obama’s first visit to Europe as US President actually begins tonight? I didn’t know that, but that’s only one of the interesting facts you can pick up (if you read Dutch) from Frank Poosen’s preview of the president’s visit published today in the Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad (The Obamas tear through Europe).

Yes, the US first couple (and the rest of their 500-person entourage) fly into London’s Stansted airport (misspelled in the article) sometime tonight, to be then helicoptered promptly to their hotel in London proper. Poosen adds that up to six helicopters will be taking off from Stansted at roughly the same time, each heading to London by a slightly-different route – it’s a helicopter shell-game designed to befuddle any terrorist stationed just outside the airport with an anti-aircraft missile, you see. (more…)

A number of the Flemish newspapers today are carrying the same brief article about an interesting approach to the job market currently being adopted in China. I might as well point you to the version in the Gazet van Antwerpen: Crisis drives Chinese massively to the plastic surgeon. Yes, operating under the assumption that the more attractive you are, the more you are likely to be hired, this piece tells how Chinese plastic-surgery patients are 40% more numerous now year-on-year. From a survey conducted at the Time Plastic Surgery Hospital [sic] in Shanghai, more than half of the people there for plastic surgery are motivated by considerations of finding either a new or a better job. Also: “most patients are women.”

Not to worry, though, because at least this Gazet van Antwerpen article provides its own antidote to those Belgians who might read it and think, “Yes, that’s a good idea!” For it is headed by a picture of an array of flesh-probing and -cutting tools indispensable to such procedures – yuck!

Here in the Netherlands we also have a prominent financial sector, dominated by a handfull of internationally-operating banks (e.g. ABN Amro, ING, even Rabobank) for which the value of the assets of any single one alone exceeds the national GDP. It follows that developments here over the past six months or so have more-or-less echoed the more-prominent financial travails in, say, the US or Great Britain: overindulgence in promising new asset-classes – often involving American real estate – which then turn out to be “toxic,” concerns over solvency, government injections of capital through one means or another, and in general some rather poor performance on the part of financial executives when it comes to sober risk analysis and maintaining their institutions’ very financial viability.

What is also not missing from the Dutch experience is the phenomenon that has gotten much of the American and British public exercised in recent weeks, namely that of financial executives walking away with huge monetary bonuses in the face of what is commonly understood as the meaning of “bonus” (“paid over and above base salary to reward extraordinary performance”) and the glaring absence of any merit that would justify them. (more…)

The post-1989 Czechoslovak/Czech governmental system is a parliamentary one, with a (mostly) ceremonial president as head-of-state, and so there occurred yesterday in Prague that system’s occasional occupational hazard: the current government, headed by Premier Mirek Topolánek, was voted out in a vote of no-confidence. Topolánek’s coalition government had always existed with just a bare majority in the Czech chamber of deputies (lower house), made from three different parties, willing to support it, and this time it was apparently the defection of four such deputies from his own ODS party that sealed the government’s fate.

Of course, under ordinary circumstances few of us outside of the Czech Republic would care: the Czechs could just be left alone, as usual, to go forward under the terms of their constitution and find themselves a new government. And indeed, there was no mention of these events in Prague when I checked this morning (Central European Time) at the New York Times, the Times of London, or the Guardian, although the Washington Post did have a report. But these are not normal circumstances, among other reasons because the Czechs currently hold the presidency of the European Union. In fact this is a very bad time for such a thing to happen, for at least two reasons: (more…)

In the market for a new automobile? Didn’t think so, even though it’s the “world’s cheapest car” that I’m talking about here, reported on by the Dutch De Volkskrant. But the Nano, manufactured in India by Tata Motors and finally ready to be offered for sale starting today, is not really targeted at the vast majority of this weblog’s readers in any event: only a 625cc engine, hand-cranked windows like in the days of yore, not even any power-steering option. The price is $2,000 apiece (that’s presumably US dollars), and the whole idea is naturally to position the Nano as an “entry-level” vehicle for those parts of the world where vehicle-ownership levels still lag behind Western standards.

Reading the Volkskrant article, it’s hard to escape the impression that this whole project has been a bit star-crossed from the beginning – quite apart from the larger, and highly-debatable, question of whether the world in the year 2009 really needs a new variety of mass-produced, internal-combustion-engine-powered vehicle. Sales were supposed to start back last October; no, it wasn’t the storm of international financial chaos raging back then that held up the Nano’s unveiling, but rather the unexpected closing of a factory in East India that was supposed to assemble the things, as local farmers protested against the loss of agricultural land its existence entailed.

As things stand, the replacement factory – over in the west of India now – is still gearing up, so the supply of new Nanos is going to be limited for a while. Industry analysts quoted in the article estimate that it will take five to seven years before this new line will be profitable for its parent company. While even the presumed sales by that point will still account for only a small part of Tata Motors’ turnover, you have to admire the audacity of Ratan Tata, the Indian industrialist behind the Tata Group conglomerate: again, neither the short-run (in view of the world’s current economic condition) nor the long-run (environmental concerns over the burning of fossil fuels) would seem to favor this initiative.

. . . and now back to our regularly-scheduled coverage of depressing news from the current economic crisis. The latest development is the Congressional Budget Office’s report, released yesterday, maintaining that the US Government actually faces budget deficits and total indebtedness amounting to even higher unbelievably-large numbers than the unbelievably-large numbers presented under President Obama’s budget proposals.

The respected German daily Die Welt promptly picked up on this news to come out with its own article: Congress expects highest deficit of all time. What we should look at first here is the German word for “deficit” itself, used in that headline: Fehlbetrag, derived from the verb fehlen, “to err, sin, blunder” – so a “blunder-amount,” if you will. That pretty much sets the tone, right there; even before the reader’s eye gets to the inserted photo of an earnest President Obama – i.e. while it is still reading the lede – it gets assaulted not only by enormous numbers ($1.8 trillion/€1.3 trillion deficit for 2009, $9.3 trillion debt by 2019) but also by the accompanying loaded descriptions (“record total,” “without precedent,” “a debt-mountain”). Then the remainder of the relatively short piece fills in the remaining horrific details, like that such deficits would amount to over 4% of US GDP – “a value that experts term untenable.” US Budget Director Peter Orszag is quoted as conceding that a 5% deficit (getting close!) would truly be unbearable, even as he also maintains that the CBO’s estimates are unduly more pessimistic than the administration’s proposals. (more…)

Need a little bit of good recession-related news? Maybe even something with “rejoice” in the title? We get that from the mainstream Czech daily Lidové noviny, reporting on recent Škoda auto sales: Germans fall in love with the Fabia, Škoda rejoices. Yes, Škoda’s Fabia (pictured here) was the second-most-sold automobile in the German market in February, 2009, behind only that perennial favorite the VW Golf. At 9,190 units sold, Fabia sales were triple what they had been only the previous month, while sales of the Octavia also improved enough to push that sister Škoda model (more of a luxury auto, I believe) to 19th place on the auto-sales hit-parade of what is of course a very competitive German market. One important result of all of this is that Škoda has cancelled the plans it had to go to a four-day work-week until the end of June; the five-day work-week (meaning five-day pay for personnel) will stay. (more…)

It was inevitable: ex-president George W. Bush was never going to do the decent thing and just stay home and keep quiet, you have to know that he would eventually start looking around to see if anyone was willing to offer a healthy chunk of change to hear him speak. As Denmark’s Politiken now reports (Bush makes an appearance to pay for a new house), the first venue to do so turned out to be in Calgary, Canada. Let me give you journalist Flemming Ytzen’s lede:

A jocular American ex-president gives a talk for the first time since the transition-of-power in January: his new house needs to be paid for.

Note that this “gotta pay for the house” schtick is not Ytzen trying to be snarky; rather, Bush himself brought up that particular meme at the event, trying to be jolly for the audience, and added “I just bought a house in the fall. I might be the only American who dared to buy a house in the fall of 2008.” Hyuk-hyuk.

He also let slip that “I am flattered that there are people at all who want to listen to me,” and whether or not this was another attempt at humor, it rather hits the Truth nail straight on the head. But as Ytzen notes in his piece, it’s probably not so surprising that the Canadian state of Alberta would offer the venue for Bush’s first public-speaking engagement: it’s supposedly known as the “Northern Texas” for its oil industry and is Canada’s most conservative state. But that did not stop a group of protestors from gathering outside the event itself anyway, holding banners with slogans such as “Canada is no Bush-land!” and “Throw a shoe at him, make him go away!”

The event’s organizers did not care to disclose how much the ex-president was paid for the appearance, although admission for what was billed as “Conversation with George W. Bush” did cost a cool C$3,100 (= $2,441 or €1,857) per person. For anyone who cares, it seems Bush’s inevitable book will be shaped around his “12 hardest decisions.” Despite what people were paying, he declined while in Calgary to go into any further detail about which decisions those were.

UPDATE: And what would any George W. Bush public appearance be without at least one accompanying malapropism? Scott Horton from Harpers has the details here. The Politiken article did not mention this (the English vocabulary at issue was maybe too advanced); I had read of Bush’s “authoritarian” comment elsewhere, but not from the European press.

Two recent reports in German (on-line) publications suggest that Pope Benedict XVI is due shortly to find life there at the Vatican to be a bit more difficult.

The first comes from Der Spiegel: Ratzinger authorized text for a right-extremist book. “Ratzinger” is of course the surname the present Pope was born with; this report concerns an article published back in 1997, when he was merely Cardinal Ratzinger. That piece appeared in an edition of the monthly magazine Aula called “1848 – Heritage and Mandate,” published by an Austrian right-extremist organization that a few years earlier had ignited controversy there by publishing a denial of the Holocaust. His secretary at the time, a Vatican official named Clemens, did provide permission in writing to Aula to publish the Cardinal’s article, even though a spokesperson for the Vienna archdiocese tried to deny this. Aula had previously been the house-organ publication for Austria’s Freedom Party, the one headed by the notorious (and late) Jörg Haider, but had been cut loose by that party at the time of the Holocaust controversy.

We’ll see if this story gains any further traction – after all, it was only this Clemens guy, rather than Cardinal Ratzinger himself, who can be shown as committing the mistake of dealing with these right-wingers. Still, this controversy comes at a bad time, considering the recent fuss over Benedict XVI revoking the excommunication of the English bishop, and Holocaust-denier, Richard Williamson.

And then there is the coming blow to the Pope’s holy pocketbook, reported by Matthias Oden in the Financial Times Deutschland (Thou shalt not run riot). (more…)

I almost missed it, but here is the article I had been waiting for about the big question now confronting the German government. With Opel allegedly only having about a month’s worth of cash left – should it stay or should it go? We have recently touched upon this affair here, although that previous treatment was shaped around the emergence of an Opel fan club whose members certainly see both a notable past as well as a promising future as perfectly good reasons for the German State to intervene to help see the car company through.

Wolfgang Münchau, of both the Financial Times and Financial Times Deutschland, although evidently German himself, clearly does not class himself among that group of Opel fans. His commentary piece is cheerily entitled Have a good trip into bankruptcy!, and he begins it with the generic tale of what has happened to him at many a rent-a-car stand in Germany: sorry, the friendly lady behind the counter informs him, but we’re all out of our VW, Mercedes, and BMW models for you to choose from, how about that Opel there in the corner? Münchau says that, at such times, he is always sorely tempted to simply rent a bicycle instead.

OK, so it’s evident from the start that Opel can expect no favors from this particular FT/FTD columnist. Unfortunately, the analysis that ensues about why the German government should just stay hands-off and let the firm go meet its demise is precise and mostly incontrovertible. Opel does not embody any sort of key technology that would need to be preserved by keeping the firm alive. (Actually, although Münchau does not bring it up, even if Opel did possess some snazzy proprietal technology, it would inevitably be owned by the parent company, GM. More on this below.) And its closing would not overwhelmingly hit any particular region or industrial sector, he writes. (I have my doubts about the former; Rüsselsheim, a German city in Hesse near Frankfurt and the Rhein and Main rivers where the main Opel factory-complex is housed, would become quite a forlorn place if Opel were to shut its doors.) (more…)

It’s the old conundrum of the dog chasing a car in the street: What do you do once you actually succeed in catching it? Now it seems the German government has run into the same problem regarding the nine Somali pirates its navy recently captured on the high seas off the east coast of Africa. The answer it has come up with is – contrary to what one might have expected – not putting them on trial, as the Frankfurt Algemeine Zeitung reports (Somalis not to come before court in Germany). The decision fell on the prosecuting authorities of the German city/federal state of Hamburg, presumably because the maritime courts there have jurisdiction over things happening on the high seas involving Germans, and they concluded “after weighing all interests as well as under consultation with four federal ministries, no more public interest exists in prosecution.”

Spokesman Wilhelm Möllers further asserted that within Kenya “minimum standards for the carrying-out of a punitive process” are assured, so it looks like the German military authorities will simply sail into a Kenyan port and turn over the prisoners to authorities there.

The German Defense Ministry – surely one of the four ministries cited above which was consulted in this decision? – is keeping a stiff upper lip for now, saying “nothing at all” has changed in their naval operations off the Somali coast as a result of this ruling, so the German frigate Rheinland-Pfalz will remain there (and in fact is due shortly to escort a ship from the World Food Program). Still, you have to wonder what sort of “justice” those captured pirates can expect in Kenya – keep in mind that their organizations are already in possession of millions of dollars in ship-ransom money, and I’m not necessarily suggesting they’ll use some of that on lawyers – and, therefore, what the ultimate point is of that Western naval presence off of Somalia if this is all they can look forward to achieving.

“Sssssshhhhhh – keep it down, will ya? That’s exactly what Rush Limbaugh together with just about the rest of the Republican Party have been loudly declaiming these past few weeks, and we all know that is hogwash. Who is this guy who is piling on this organized campaign of slander against the President?”

Actually, it’s Josef Joffe, one of the publishers of the prestigious German weekly commentary newspaper Die Zeit, who in a new article (title: “The Monster Budget”) calls Obama a “social democrat,” i.e. in the European style. OK, he actually doesn’t call Obama a “social democrat” directly, but instead writes about the “social-democratization” of America that he detects Obama is aiming for on the evidence of the Federal government budget that he just submitted to the Congress. His lede reads “Barack Obama’s proposed budget drives expenditures, debts, and taxes to new heights.” It all sounds like we still might prefer to keep Rush Limbaugh in the dark about this, don’t you think? (Do you remember if Rush understands any German?) (more…)

Remember Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia-Herzegovina – where brave Hillary Clinton landed while under gunfire while trying to visit US troops in 1996? Except that she wasn’t remotely under fire, etc. Well, I’ve got bad news: Hillary’s on-again, off-again relationship with Truth is creeping back to the latter, if we can credit today’s New York Times article about the “gag gift” Clinton brought along to break the ice at her first meeting as Secretary of State yesterday with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

What it was, was a red plastic button labeled “peregruzka” (that’s presumably перегрузка), which was supposed to be a “reset button” for US-Russian relations, a phrase Vice-President Biden had used in that context a month ago at the annual Munich Security Conference. “We worked hard to get the right Russian word,” Hillary said as she gave it to Lavrov. “Do you think we got it?” To which Lavrov replied, “You got it wrong.” (more…)

The French newsmagazine Le Point today has some bad news for those French students who were looking forward to some extra time out in the bracing springtime air, away from the books: the site faismesdevoirs.fr announced yesterday that it was shutting down – one whole day after it first opened! The clue to what this site was supposed to do is in its very name: fais mes devoirs is French for “do my assignments,” and indeed this was a site set up to take care of the homework of lycéens et collégiens, thus high-school and university students, in exchange for payment of between €5 and €30. (Presumably per assignment; you also get a handy idea of the helpful attitude of this site from the tag-line on its logo, which translates to “You won’t get there . . . we are [already] there!”)

But no, Le Point reports that “the site had provoked criticism from the national Ministry of Education, teachers unions, and parents.” (I wonder why? Come on people, one doesn’t become a successful businessperson and get to own a McMansion without knowing how to delegate!) And then it basically passes on to readers the apologetic message now to be found on the faismesdevoirs.fr website, which we of course can just go inspect for ourselves. Posted at 18.00 hours yesterday evening (Fri., 6 MAR 2009), the brief note from a “Stéphane,” labeled as the “founder of faismesdevoirs.fr, is curious in its own right. The original idea of his team of collaborators was a noble one: “to make available an innovative pedagogical tool to Internautes.” (That’s a remarkable French term, perhaps cognate to “astronaut,” referring simply to “people who use the Internet.”) But then at some point – Stéphane does not specify when or how – they realized that “the site runs counter to our own values,” since it “can contribute nothing” to efforts to make “future generations better than present generations” (which, for example, think up schemes for things like earning money by doing students’ homework for them – Stéphane does not write that, that’s my own contribution). And then this: “New technologies should serve to better us and not to assist us.”

A curious postulate, that, Stéphane. So in science class it’s back to the slide rule? Or not even that? What about fingers? Frankly, this farewell note reminds me of the sort of defendants’ statements issued out of those Chinese “reeducation camps” of the 1960s, or the Communist show-trials of the 1930s and 1950s. Just how closely does that French Ministry of Education work together with, say, French military intelligence and their “special” interrogation methods?

Any chance that you stopped by the newspaper-shop ‘t Patje in Brugge, Belgium, sometime late last year to buy a ticket in the National Lottery? Because someone who bought a ticket there won the prize for the drawing held back on 31 December – a cool €1.16 million! As the prime Flemish daily De Standaard reports, no one has stepped up to claim this prize yet, and the 20-week grace-period they are allowed in which to do so is now half-over.

Never before has a winner made the Lottery authorities have to wait this long, which (according to the article, at least) is actually making them nervous that they might have to just throw the money back into the pot if no one turns up. “We’re going to do everything to find the winner,” declares Lottery spokeswomen Ann Publie to the paper.

By the way, I searched in vain for any mention of this story within the French-language Belgian press. This led me to wonder whether this lottery organization, despite the “National” in its name, was perhaps only something for the Flemish part of Belgium. But no, it appears it is Nationale in fact, contributing each year millions of its proceeds to both the Flemish and French states/communities. (That’s €36.8 and €24.52 respectively; I interpret those sums to be set as proportional to those communities’ respective populations. It even devotes a much-smaller sum to the German community.). I guess in the first instance that this lack of French coverage simply comes down to the fact that the winner is known to have bought his/her winning ticket at that newsstand in Brugge (which you may know as “Bruges”), well within Flanders – but still, this does not reflect particularly well upon cross-community solidarity.

The big news the past week on the international relations front was President Obama’s “secret letter” he had hand-delivered to Russian president Medvedev last month. In it, he supposedly suggested – or at least hinted at – a possible deal whereby the US would stop the planned deployment of an anti-missile system with the radar installations in the Czech Republic and the actual anti-missile missiles in Poland, in return for Russia’s assistance in stopping the alleged drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

Even if nothing ultimately comes of it, this move certainly denotes some new thinking being applied to both Russo-American and Iranian-American relations. Then again, what about the Czechs and the Poles? As is so rightly pointed out in that NYT article (the one I link to above), in those countries “leaders invested political capital in signing missile defense cooperation treaties with the United States despite domestic opposition.” (more…)

Book of Joe has an interesting spotting from the Italian newsweekly Oggi of a human reproduction researcher there, Dr. Severino Antinori, who claims in an interview to have cloned three children ten years ago for an Eastern European family.

I contributed with a translation of what was to be found behind the “editorial” link on the original post from yesterday, which turned out instead to be a rather concerned letter to Oggi from a leading Italian figure in the realm of bioethics. So €S fans can delight in not only a link to this weblog which Dr. Stirt was kind enough to place within the later entry, but even our snazzy EuroSavant logo!

And a hearty welcome to all the visitors from Book of Joe who have headed over here to check us out!

I’ve had this editorial in the Frankfurter Rundschau by Mario Müller (title: “Every man for himself”) held off to the side for a couple days until I could find the chance to address it adequately, because it reminds us of a simple but bald fact that we would all do well to remember: state aid to help the auto industry survive, or even an individual auto company, is precisely protectionism, plain and simple. So many of the heads of government circulating around the world today piously declaring “Protectionism! No indeed, we can’t allow that,” if they nonetheless are willing to extend financial support to their countries’ auto interests, are simply the usual sort of political hypocrite that we have all come to know rather too well.

Given that such pronouncements were apparently the main output coming out of the otherwise disappointing special EU summit last Sunday over the economic crisis, we probably need to include under that “hypocrite” rubric President Sarkozy of France. Chancellor Merkel of Germany potentially belongs there, too, depending on what she decides to do about Opel in particular, and decision time is coming very soon now that GM has indicated that that division will run out of money in a month. It probably would also include the leaders of some other EU members who themselves have more recently built up a thriving auto sector – like the Czech Republic and Slovakia – except that those governments simply don’t have the money to spend on any such thing. And sad to say, it could also include Barack Obama – again, depending on what he decides to do about the new requests for mega-money from GM and Chrysler.

They don’t like being hypocrites, of course, but from Obama on down the political impulse to supply some assistance to your national auto manufacturers is usually pretty overwhelming. So let’s follow along with Müller why that’s really not the thing to do. As he points out, blatant and ham-handed instruments of protection, like tariffs assessed at the incoming port or airport, while still prevalent, are no longer so much in vogue. Instead, governments (yes, even those within the EU, where it is supposed to be a completely open market) pursue their protectionism in more subtle ways, such as giving native companies certain tax breaks, or awarding subsidies – which is precisely the aid that the auto-makers from the US to France to Germany are asking for. Quite simply, this provides native firms with an unnatural advantage, enabling them to sell their wares for less and/or to gain a greater profit by doing so even though they probably are not the most-efficient producer. Meanwhile, of course, it’s the taxpayer who is paying for this dubious privilege of shifting production to a less-efficient producer.

Again, all of this will likely butter no parsnips when it comes to the political decisions whether to accede to the auto firms’ calls for help, as economically-distorting as such subsidies can be shown to be. It’s at least refreshing to be able to get such a public reminder of the point in the (on-line) pages of a major newspaper in a country whose economy is dominated by the auto industry to an even greater extent than it is in the US.

There’s a quite curious article available right now on the website of Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. Perhaps I’ll just give you the lede:

Finally independent from Mama: Poland’s former head of government Jarosław Kaczyński can undertake his own money-matters from now on – he has opened his first account in his own name.

That’s right, for many years previously – ever since he had money of his own that he needed to bank, one presumes – he has used his mother’s account. He continues to live with her, at age 59, and has never married – which almost goes without saying, for you don’t live with mother when you have a wife, even in Poland, when you are currently the chairman of one of the country’s main political parties and previously served not only as prime minister but as chief-of-staff to Lech Wałęsa when he was Poland’s first democratically-elected president.

(By the way, Kaczyński also has a law degree, was a prominent activist in the Solidarity trade union in the 1980s, and boasts an identical-twin brother, Lech, who is Poland’s current president. Oh, and Lech and Jarosław were child-actors way back in the day, starring in a Polish fairy-tale film in 1962.) (more…)

Did the New York Times editors really begin a paragraph in a collective editorial on the website today with “Whomever [sic] the recipients are, they should be investigated . . .”? It appears that they did (it’s the eighth paragraph down).

Shocking! Look, my intent here is certainly not to fire a rhetorical volley against the mainstream media (MSM), of which the NYT is of course the foremost representative. (That would anyway be outside the remit I have set for this weblog, namely “Commentary on the European non-English-language Press” . . . oops, looks like it’s too late for that now!) It’s clear that EuroSavant critically depends on the MSM, although usually its foreign-language variant, for the very justification of our existence. (I would expect that the relationship be viewed as commensal rather than parasitic.) I definitely wish the NYT and all its MSM brethren well, whether they are of direct use to this weblog or not. It’s just that one defense of their continued existence has been their higher standards, of reporting, of accuracy – of proofreading, too. Yet on this evidence it seems that cutbacks on staff at the Grey Lady have reached the point where they don’t even have a copy-editor available to review their leaders, or at least one familiar with the difference between the subjective and objective cases.

(Hat-tip to Talking Points Memo, who nonetheless either did not feel it incumbent on themselves to insert a “[sic]” after the offending “Whomever” or else somehow also did not notice it.)

UPDATE: Aha! I just happened to look again at the offending NYT editorial a week later, on Tuesday 10 March, and that “Whomever” has been corrected! Of course, there is no indication anywhere by the NYT editors that they actually changed anything in this piece after it first appeared on their website, other than that vague statement at the bottom that “A version of this article appeared in print . . .” BTW, just in case you don’t believe me that “Whomever” was there originally, you can check out the quotation of that editorial in Talking Points Memo, where it remains.

In the ongoing chronicle of winners and losers from the current economic difficulties, while there is an overwhelming preponderance of the latter, it is interesting to see McDonalds among the former, actually reporting increased sales over the past year. As the nutrition-professor’s quotation in that linked article says, “It’s cheap and full of calories, and you know what you are getting.”

The same thing is happening over here in the Netherlands, it seems – although not necessarily with McDonalds. As an article by Wouter Keuning now appearing in De Volkskrant puts it in the headline, Dutchman fights through the crisis with bitterbal and kroket. Not familiar with them? To cook up these two quintessentially-Dutch delicacies (found nowhere else) you essentially take blobs of animal fat (usually from beef) – and fry them! The basic difference is that the bitterbal is small – of 3-5 cm diameter – and the kroket is somewhat larger and more cylindrical in shape. The most notable manufacturer of these is the Amsterdam firm Van Dobben (which Keuning identifies as currently reporting particularly improved sales-figures, just like McDonalds), and you can check out their website if you still need help in visualizing what we’re talking about here. (That’s a kroket in a bun in the center there, and the bitterballen are those round things on the plate to the right. But watch out, because if you click to go further into the site you’ll find that everything is in Dutch.)

It has long been shown in opinion surveys that it is these two delicacies which Dutch people living outside Holland’s (or Flanders’) borders most miss from their lives back home, where in most cities you can usually quickly satiate any craving for them at a near-by fast-food-in-the-window-type outlet (such as pictured; photo credit Kees Jonker, from Flickr). But now it is also apparent that this is the sort of food that Dutch people still back home are down-shifting to financially, now that money for many has become somewhat too tight for a visit to a restaurant. And for the sheer comfort of it as well (perhaps recalling Mama’s bitterballen?): the financial director of Royaan, a firm which works with Van Dobben to distribute such concoctions, is quoted that “I think that people in these times are looking for a bit of solace in this sort of product.”

That’s one theory, but I can think of another. Obviously, these chunks of deep-fried pieces of fat are tremendously unhealthy to eat on any regular basis over the long- and even medium-term. Could their sudden increased popularity rather bear witness to a sort of widespread death-wish among the Dutch population, to some drastic loss of confidence in the utility of a long, healthy life? (And I pose the same question when it comes to McDonalds’ improved sales, for that matter.)

Just in case it might be of interest, here is the article on the Obamas’ choice of a White House dog from the Financial Times Deutschland. Yes, that’s right: the article in the Financial Times Deutschland about the Obamas’ dog. (It’s entitled “There will always be more dogs”.)

Actually, if you’re willing to concede that a serious business newspaper like this is supposed to be reporting about dogs in the first place, the article (by Anja Rützel) is faintly amusing. As we all know by now, the First Pet is to be a Portuguese water dog, but Ms. Rützel lightly casts doubt upon what she clearly regards as a somewhat weird choice: “A properly-trimmed water dog looks like he has wrapped a bed-side rug around himself and is wearing to the rear some very tight stockings.” Then again, such dogs apparently have webbed feet and have been known to save drowning people – is the White House planning to cut payroll by doing without a lifeguard for the swimming pool?

Ms. Rützel also briefly examines the names for the dog brought forth so far (and immediately rejected) by Michele Obama. She claims “Frank” has been hailed by the election committee of Germany’s governing SPD party (whose candidate for Chancellor in the elections this year will be Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier – get it?), but could ultimately prove problematic during international negotiation sessions at the White House. (“Heel, Frank!” the President might brusquely command.) As for “Moose,” she comes up with the (not-so-original) thought that this name might just tempt Sarah Palin to shoot the dog out of a helicopter.

All visitors to Prague will eventually encounter Vítkov Hill (pictured here), which forms one part of the boundary between Prague 8 (Karlín, on the south bank of the Vltava river, to the left side here) and Prague 3 (Žižkov). You can’t miss it because 1) It’s a massive, stand-alone hill near the center of town covered almost entirely by trees, and 2) At its western end (that is, closest to the city center, that we can see here), it features a massive equestrian statue – the largest in the world – of Jan Žižka, the one-eyed general of the Hussite Wars.
Just beyond that statue is another gigantic building, the National Mausoleum, intended to be the resting- (and exhibition-) place for the remains of Czechoslovakia’s leadership throughout the glorious thousand-year epoch of Communist brotherhood that was supposed to have been inaugurated by the coup d’état in Prague culminating on 25 February 1948. Much like Lenin in Red Square, the mummified body of the leader of that coup , Klement Gottwald, was in fact exhibited at the National Mausoleum from shortly after his death in March, 1953, until 1962 – when it had reached such an advanced state of decay due to the mishandled mummification process that it had to be cremated.
To the outside observer, there is an important clue there in the gaping contrast between the ostentatious facilities built to celebrate Gottwald’s legacy and the ultimate messy disposal of his remains – although the Czechs themselves long ago dismissed him as merely a stooge for Stalin, affording him little to no respect (unless required to by their position) even back when he was the country’s president. Now, just after the commemoration of the 61st anniversary of that coup, comes an article in the largest-circulation Czech broadsheet newspaper Mladá fronta dnes disclosing that things were even worse than most Czechs had assumed: for most of his presidency, Gottwald was in fact a serious alcoholic completely incapable of carrying out his presidential functions. (more…)

Parallel to the ongoing drama in the United States over the survival of two out of the “Big Three” automakers – whether to give GM and Chrysler the new money they have come back to the federal government to ask for, or just to cut off what looks like a never-ending money-drain but thereby administer a severe economic shock to the American Midwest – European auto-makers are also having a difficult time in the current economic climate, and so there has been discussion about various bail-out plans (and implementation of a few) over here as well. Of course, that comes as no particular surprise when the European auto-maker in question is actually a subsidiary of one of those American firms that are seemingly in terminal decline, such as is the case for Saab in Sweden (a GM subsidiary, which has already filed for bankruptcy protection) and Opel in Germany (full name “Adam Opel GmbH,” also belonging to GM, in fact since 1929 except during World War II, when its facilities were bombed instead). With Opel reported ready to run out of cash within a few months, the pressure is on to find some solution to save the firm, particularly given the fact that, as a foreign facility, GM is likely to afford it low priority as it scrambles to save its core operations in the US. Indeed, the current preferred solution is to detach Opel from its parent company entirely, possibly at that point to form a new multinational car company around it and Saab and Vauxhall (another GM brand, based in the UK). But that would be a complicated and contentious operation, given that GM is still the formal owner of not only the physical plant but other essential things like the trademarks and many technology-patents.

Nonetheless, it seems that a popular groundswell of sorts has arisen insisting that some solution be found to save the firm, one that goes beyond the Opel employees and shareholders who would be directly hurt by a shut-down, according to an article by Harald Blum in Der Spiegel (The Hour of the Fans). The lede tells me something that I didn’t really know, and still wonder whether I should believe: “Autos from Opel are for many grey and dull – yet hardly any other German auto-brand has the same loyal followership.” As proof Blum points to the website rettetOPEL.de (rettet Opel itself is German for “save Opel”), where you can find four separate 500-slide slide-shows of sentimental pictures sent in by Opel-owners of their cars and/or Opel-typical tableaus. And you do have to wonder: is anything similar happening in response to the seeming death-throes of General Motors or Chrysler, or at least in honor of any of those firms’ individual brands?

Of course, Blum’s claim about Opel’s “loyal followership” is still hard to credit when you remember that it is German cars that we are talking about here: I daresay that BMW, or Porsche, easily inspire at least a similar fanaticism among their owners, but then neither of those is (yet) in the same financial trouble as Opel. Still, he also uses his article to remind us of that auto-maker’s glory days: of the Rekord, for example, the long-time best-seller nicknamed “the Reliable,” or the GT, a sports car which provided a riding-thrill said to be second only to actually flying, and others. But he is also honest enough to make note of the firm’s disappointing recent performance, starting really right after it pioneered in the introduction of the catalytic converter in the early nineties (but such “green” features have never really been powerful arguments to buy any car), when its model-design lost its previous distinctiveness (its “identity”) and its market share dropped from 20% to around the 7% it enjoys today – “thereby lying under that of its arch-rival Ford, which especially rankles true fans.”

So why act to save it? you could therefore ask. The Ford German subsidiary regularly sells more cars and therefore, like Ford, Inc. itself, has managed (so far) at least to stay out of trouble enough to not have to ask for government money. Well, as Blum explains at the end of his piece, recent Opel models have been earning rave reviews from professional auto-testers and auto-magazines, so things seem to be looking up on the design front. And there are those thousands of Opel fans. But is all that enough?