Tomorrow, 30 June, marks the formal end to the six-month term of the Czech Republic as European Union president, as Sweden takes over the next day for the second half of 2009. In reality, though, the Czech presidency effectively came to an end a bit earlier than that, namely on March 24, as Kilian Kirchgeßner points out in his analysis of that presidency for the Frankfurter Rundschau (Well, it wasn’t a complete flop). For that was the day that the Czech Civic Democratic (ODS) government, headed by premier Mirek Topolánek, was booted out of office in a vote of no-confidence by the lower house of the Czech parliament.

Check out that article title again (with whose translation I promise I took only very slight liberties), though: could someone kindly e-mail to me the German expression for “damn with faint praise”? Kirchgeßner’s purpose here is clearly to bend over backwards to cast the Czech presidency in the best-possible light. His piece’s very first sentence (i.e. after the lede) is “Probably no country has encountered such hostility during its EU presidency as the Czech Republic,” going on to cite all the EU and other national officials (especially the French) who cast doubt on the Czechs’ very competence to handle the assignment, and who continued to cruelly snipe at them thereafter – mostly behind-the-scenes, of course. What is more, it turned out to be a tough time to take up the job, what with the world financial crisis, Israel’s attack into Gaza, new disputes about ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, etc. – oh, and also the latest installment of the perennial Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute, which actually gave the Czechs the opportunity to mediate effectively and so chalk up an early success to their credit. (more…)

. . . er, yes, I know that Michael Jackson died, I’m just trying to see whether I can hold off having to write about that. Though if I get any more e-mail requests, I guess my hand will be forced.

For now, though, I’d rather discuss the Clean Energy and Security Act, otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey bill after its leading Congressional sponsors, that was passed in the US House of Representatives yesterday by a narrow 219-212 vote. This is the legislation that would move the US towards a “cap and trade” approach to regulating greenhouse-gas emissions. One key to understanding the push for such a law is clearly the issue’s whole international aspect: the rest of the world rather expects the United States to embark on something of this sort, whether it is Europe that already is further ahead in its environmental legislation or it is China and India who are definitely behind, but looking on to see whether there will ultimately be American inaction that can justify their own.

That’s why it is good to see an article in the authoritative French newspaper Le Monde such as the one just written by Corine Lesnes. Obama launches his green revolution, she proclaims in the piece’s very title, which features at the top an oddly hagiographic photo of Obama standing in front of what seems to be an early-American wilderness mural, perhaps during a visit to the Department of the Interior. (more…)

You’ve surely heard about it, if you’re reading this from the other side (i.e. the Western) of the Big Pond, and word has spread over to us here on the European side as well: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, missing for six days, turned out not to have gone hiking in those Appalachian Mountains that he loves so well, as his office staff claimed, but instead jetted down to Buenos Aires to meet with a local Latin lover there – supposedly employing all those five days (left after you subtract travel time) to put an end to the relationship. This the governor tearfully acknowledged to the world at a bizarre press-conference yesterday.

Who better to look to for a first take on all this than the French? (Other than the Argentinians, but this weblog is called EuroSavant). For that we can go to L’Express’ correspondent in the States, Philippe Coste, and his blog-entry The governor and his labrynth. You might recall – although it was more than ten years ago – that the French, in particular, were mystified by the whole to-do around the Monica Lewinsky affair and President Clinton’s impeachment; powerful French politicians, all the way up to past President François Mitterand (and for that matter – who knows? – even president-at-that-time Jacques Chirac), had routinely kept mistresses on the side, but these had always been kept decorously hushed-up, in keeping with the French electorate’s acceptance of and lack of interest in such things. (more…)

Don’t worry, we’re not talking here about Mir Hussein Mousavi: The Flemish daily De Standaard is now reporting that one of the three defeated candidates in the 12 June Iranian presidential election, Mohsen Rezaei, has now withdrawn his official complaint of “irregularities” in the conduct of that balloting, as announced today by the official Iranian news-agency IRNA. Rezaei is quoted thusly: “The political and social situation in the country and security have become more important than the election.”

Could this be a sign that the authorities have succeeded in quieting down the opposition and convincing the country to forget about that election, accept Ahmadinejad, and just go back to work? Probably not; Rezaei is identified in that Standaard article as the “conservative presidential candidate,” i.e. the one closest anyway to the current government establishment. Juan Cole implies that, in the true tally of the 12 June votes, he probably came in dead-last.

The popular Czech daily Mladá fronta dnes shows how determined it is to stay on top of key events, wherever they might be occuring in the world, with its recent article Pow to the nose! And where’s the ring? Pair from New York wed in a state of weightlessness.

Yes, it’s the story of that wild-and-crazy guy-and-gal from Gotham who recently set a mark of some sort by becoming the first (known) pair in history to marry in zero-gravity. They achieved this by arranging for the ceremony to go down (so to speak) in the 27-meter cargo-cabin of “G-Force One,” the Boeing 727-200 owned by a company that enables people to experience weightlessness – for more-extended periods than, say, on a roller-coaster – by constantly diving while in flight. Apparently the bride, one Erin Finnegan (“Erin Finneganová” in Czech) had been to too many boring weddings and so let her imagination take flight when it came to contemplating the details of her own.

Naturally, it’s not like MFD got any sort of scoop here; a wacky human-interest story like this one is sure to get its share of English-language press-coverage as well, as the wedding ceremony duly did in other places like the New York Daily News, the Telegraph (UK), and the Daily Mirror (also UK). But comparing the coverage, I’d have to say that the (unattributed) Czech reporter/rewrite-man did a very good job indeed. Regarding that “Pow to the Nose!” (Bum do nosu! in Czech) from the title, for example, the MFD article (only) quotes Finneganová about the climactic kiss at the ceremony’s end as follows: “Noah rather socked me on the nose. I thought I was going to bleed.” It also exclusively adds the interesting detail that the bride relied, not on heavy hairspray, but actually on wires for her coiffure to keep it well-behaved during the ceremony’s twists and turns. (Props to the Telegraph, though, for this vital detail: “His wife [i.e. Finneganová] wore a designer wedding dress with trousers to protect her modesty during weightlessness.” I was wondering about that.)

Oh, and MFD has three excellent photos of the ceremony on the article’s webpage itself, accompanied by this excellent supplementary photo-series.

So now Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has made his long-awaited speech, on Friday, making it clear that any further street demonstrations would draw a ruthless crackdown by the security forces. And those further demonstrations, which nonetheless took place over the weekend, have duly resulted in pitched street-battles, with many among the protestors (and innocent by-standers) killed and wounded. What happens next?

Andreas Relster, writer for the Danish opinion newspaper Information, certainly has no idea. Still, at least he has that forum in which to raise the subject, and can resort to a strategy of canvassing the opinions of every Iran-expert out there whom he can get to respond to his inquiries. This is essentially the method behind his current piece, Iranian mirage. (more…)

The Iranian national football (i.e. soccer) team caused some comment during their World Cup qualification game against South Korea last Wednesday when a couple of them wore green wristbands, apparently as a gesture of support to the opposition movement behind Mir Hussein Mousavi. They wore them at least during the first half of the match, which ended in a 1-1 tie that took Iran out of World Cup qualification; the wristbands were gone as the players emerged on the field for the second half.

Now there is a report in the Dutch newspaper Trouw that some form of punishment is headed the team’s way. No less than the Iranian parliament today demanded an explanation from the Iranian football association and threatened the team with sanctions of some kind.

On the other hand, this news report, while somewhat short, nonetheless manages to mention twice that the Iranians were playing against Japan, when it was really the South Korean team. Should we therefore believe anything else it says? I recommend “Yes,” as Trouw is really usually among the better of the Dutch dailies. For what it’s worth, this piece is sourced to the Dutch national news agency ANP, anyway.

UPDATE: Yes, you better believe: via Andrew Sullivan’s weblog, word comes from the Guardian that four of the six players who dared to wear the green wristbands have been “retired” from football.

French Prime Minister François Fillon is a geek, and he’s proud of it. He was quick to declare his “geekness” in an interview he gave to the tech magazine SVM (“le mag!”), which appears in July/August 2009 issue. That link provides some of that interview – in French of course – but only part of it, as SVM naturally wants you buy “le mag” to be able to read it in its entirety.

But we don’t have to do that, since Benjamin Ferran of Le Figaro picked up on Fillon’s declaration, and in a recent article examines more closely Fillon’s alleged geeky credentials. As a good first step, he defines his terms: what is a “geek,” anyway? For that, he turns to France’s Secretary of State for the Digital Economy, currently one Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who states that geeks are persons “that you don’t want to cross” because they can spend “8 to 20 hours in front of a screen,” something which “gives them that light tan.”

Well . . . it’s at least fair to say that Ferran would have been better-off turning to the prime minister himself for a definition, as his in-depth examination of Fillon certainly shows that the latter was not just just whistling Dixie when boasting about his tech know-how to SVM. Among other things, Ferran notes that Fillon speaks knowledgeably in that interview about “RSS feeds” (his reader of choice is Newswire) and of the “open-source CMS software Drupal“; he reads on-line “the sites of the biggest French, English, and American newspapers” (including, nota bene, the Journal du Geek); he was surfing the Internet as early as 1993, using the original NCSA “Mosaic” browser; and as for equipment, he carries both an iPhone 3G and a Nokia E61i, and he has worked with over thirty computers over the years, starting with the “Toshiba T2100 portable.” (He probably means here instead the Toshiba T1000.)

On the other hand, while he now uses Apple equipment (specifically, two MacBook Pros and an iMac), he only made the PC-to-Mac switch six months ago; for many, that marks him as a hopeless computer dilettante. And anyway, as Ferran points out (implicitly kicking aside the expert contribution to the debate from Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet cited above), many people’s definition of “geek” necessarily include heavy involvement in computer games. On that subject, Fillon does not utter a word, other than in his revealing response to an interview question about whether his eight-year-old son Arnaud is into such things: “Unfortunately, yes! DS, Playstation and Wii. My wife is trying to supervise that.”

A bit of attention now, if you please, to the FIFA Confederations Cup, the tournament of national teams currently going on in South Africa. Of course, a rather bigger tournament, namely the World Cup itself, is scheduled to take place a year from now in that same country, in those very same stadiums as are being used now. As such, then, this Confederations Cup tournament is useful to the world governing football organization, FIFA, as a “trial run” for that much more important 2010 event; among the problems that have cropped up so far is that of the half-empty stadiums, suggesting either a lack of enthusiasm for football among South Africans (highly unlikely) or else inappropriate ticket-pricing.

And then there are the vuvuzelas. Perhaps, you may ask, that’s the nickname of the team and/or the supporters of one participating nation? No, those are the cheap plastic trumpet-like things that many fans are using to set up an ear-splitting racket to accompany the game they are watching live – devices which “remind one of the wind instruments heralds used at tournaments in the Middle Ages,” according to an article on this vuvuzela problem in the Frankfurther Rundschau.

Yes, when blown they apparently emit a dreadfully loud noise, which the FR article describes as “deafening” and an “elephant sound.” They have already prompted some public complaints among players and even from Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, FIFA president, who admitted to the press “They do make a lot of noise. FIFA is quite concerned about the noise, that also can constantly be heard in the TV [broadcasts].” On the other hand, the fundamental fact remains that FIFA explicitly approved the vuvuzelas for this Confederations Cup, so the players and everyone else will just have to endure them (perhaps with the aid of earplugs?) throughout. But for next year? Despite the ringing in his ears, Blatter seems not inclined to change the policy for 2010, either: “When you go to Africa,” he observed, “it’s simply loud. I have always said: football is drumming, rhythm, dancing.”

And whether elephantine or not, that sound is music to the ears of German businessmen Frank Urbas and Gerd Kehrberg. They’re still back in Düsseldorf, but they gained the license to manufacture and sell these vuvuzelas to European fans headed for the World Cup next summer.

Famous American director Woody Allen, fresh from picking up $5 million from a lawsuit he won last month against American Apparel for violation of privacy (they used without permission an image of him from Annie Hall), is now visiting Paris and so has things French on his mind. For one thing, while summer of ’09 will find him filming “a serious comedy, not frivolous” mostly in London, he already intends to spend the following summer in Paris on another movie project entirely. That’s far enough ahead that either the story and other details for that work have not been worked out and/or he simply prefers not to reveal them yet. Still, during a stop there this week to promote his latest work, Whatever Works, he made clear his choice of leading lady: as the French newspaper Le Figaro reports, he dreams of filming current French First Lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

This he declared at a press conference in the French capital in response to the question of who he would film if he could choose anyone in the world. “Without a shadow of a doubt,” he replied, “Carla Bruni! I’m sure she would be marvelous. She has charisma and she has the capability of always showing herself to her public to best effect, and I could give her any role.”

In fact, as the article’s author (identified only as “C.J.”) points out, Bruni has already appeared in a couple of films – but only in cameo roles – such as the ’90s works “Paparazzi” and “Catwalk.” (The article helpfully links here for the full list of her appearances, but be aware that this list also includes television. For movies, scroll down to where that list starts with “17. Paparazzi.”) Then again, she has also clearly demonstrated her disinclination to allow her status as France’s First Lady from preventing her from getting involved in anything that might catch her fancy, such as releasing another album of songs shortly after her marriage to the French president. In any event, Allen will have a perfect opportunity to follow this up – if he’s truly serious – as he is scheduled for a private visit this weekend to the Elysée Palace, France’s White House.

The German press has lately also taken to covering events in Iran in a big way. First a couple of informative articles from the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, both from reporter Wolfgang Günter Lerch: here you’ll find a handy diagram (title: “Who has authority in Iran”) showing the formal structure of governmental power in Iran; helpfully, the most important Machtzentren, or “power-centers,” are outlined in red. They are, from left-to-right, the Guardian Council (twelve persons total, made up of six religious personnel and six jurists/legal experts); the Supreme Spiritual Leader, which is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (in English spelling); and the State President, which is still our good friend Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad. Then you also have this interesting article, entitled “Fragile state of many peoples,” about Iran’s ethnic and religious make-up. (If you visit, do be sure to click to check out the fantastic color-map at the upper-left.) We tend to think of Iran as Shiite and Persian/Farsi, but only the Shiite part is really true (90% of the population); the Persians make up only about 50%, followed by ten other ethnic groups, of which the Azeris are the next-largest. They are to be found in the northwest (near neighboring Azerbaijan, naturally), speak a different language that is close to Turkish, and boast a capital city, Tabriz, that is the home-town of presidential challenger Mir Hussein Musavi. (more…)

The well-respected German opinion newspaper Die Zeit is now reporting that a spokesman for German Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel has announced that she is planning to visit President Obama in Washington on Thursday and Friday next week (25-26 June). The main items on the agenda are said to be coordinated preparation for the upcoming G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy (8-10 July) and the Mideast peace process – oh, and yes, what is happening in Iran, as well. (more…)

Fear not, all you thousands of EuroSavant fans, whether on Twitter, by RSS, or simply frequent direct visitors to the site! While I’m always on the look-out for news of quirky Euro-events that I can pass on to you (see, for example, immediately below), especially if they provide fertile breeding-ground for puns, I do also regularly treat the major news of the day when I can add to the discussion a new insight or perspective as gleaned from the European press.

As of this Sunday, the world’s burning news is of course the recent election in Iran, the apparent plot by the authorities in that country to steal it, and the people’s reaction thereto. Unfortunately, all of this is occurring so far over a weekend, which might be another dastardly trick by the current Tehran regime designed to limit take-up of the story by the regular European press, some parts of which do not work on Sunday at all (although there’s also word that the American MSM has been similarly slow off the starting-blocks). (more…)

The leading Flemish daily De Standaard brings curious news today about a fire last night that broke out in a peanut-processing factory in the town of Sint Maartensdijk. The main damage: 200 tons of savory, crunchy raw material. (No person was injured.) What’s curious here is that, according to the fire department spokesman, burning peanuts are particularly tricky to extinguish. That’s because they burn very slowly, so it takes time to be sure that they’re completely out, i.e. that there’s no remaining bit of fire that can get to work on any near-by unburned material to get going again. So the process generally takes two or three days, and the first step involves spreading the burning peanuts out over a large surface to in fact starve the burning parts of any more fuel.

Another notable issue about this report is why it happens to appear in a Flemish (i.e. Belgian) newspaper. That’s not just a macadamic question, since Sint Maartensdijk itself is in the Netherlands, not in Belgium. Now, it’s true that the town is down in the southern part of the Netherlands, only a little over 20 km from the Belgian border, so you might speculate that what set the Flemish reporters off running was that mysterious, delicious smell of roasted peanuts detected by residents of those border regions. But no, the article explicitly notes that “[t]he surrounding area was little disturbed by the fire. There was little wind, so most of the smoke went directly upwards.”

All I can conclude here, for now, is that De Standaard has simply confirmed its reputation as Dutch-speaking Belgium’s premier newspaper with another demonstration of the comprehensiveness of its coverage of notable, and even semi-notable, public events. It’s also true that there has been no coverage of this incident yet that I can find from the Dutch press – i.e. that of the country where the fire actually took place – but that fact is easy to explain: it happened Saturday night and, out of long-standing (Calvinist) custom, Dutch newspapers simply do not publish on Sundays.

One element in a new spending bill now agreed to by both the US House and Senate is a provision which would provide a US Government voucher of up to $4,500 to Americans to trade in their old automobile for a new one – preferably one more fuel-efficient. It does seem that, as things have proceeded through the legislative process, the motivation of stoking domestic demand for new automobiles has plainly won out over the initial environmental reasoning behind the measure, but at least it does seem pretty guaranteed that the former aim will be accomplished. That much we know from the experience in the country that implemented this idea in the first place, and Birgit Marschall and Martin Kaelble of the Financial Times Deutschland point out that this Abwrackprämie, or “scrapping premium,” is namely a German fiscal innovation. (more…)

The Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad brings us the news today that, at a meeting of the EU Social Affairs Council, both German and Austria have chosen to continue to keep their labor markets closed to citizens from eight fellow EU countries which happen to be in “Eastern Europe”.*

This is disappointing for all true EU-believers, since “Freedom of Movement,” including that for the purpose of going to another member-state to work, is supposed to be one fundamental principle of the EU, fully accessible to all new citizens upon their country’s joining. Still, things used to be worse. Almost all the 15 member-states already in the Union at the time of the 10-nation expansion of 1 May 2004 imposed restrictions on the ability of the new EU citizens (except those from Malta and Cyprus) to come take jobs in their countries; Sweden, the UK, and Ireland were the only exceptions who truly lived up to their EU principles fully. (more…)

The Kindle – Amazon.com’s answer to the electronic book-reader – is now winning influential converts over on this side of the Atlantic. This includes Nikolai Thyssen of the Danish commentary newspaper Politiken – although you have every right to doubt that just from looking at the title of the article he has just written about it, The wolf in Kindle-clothing. Rest assured, though, that after spending one month and six e-books with a Kindle he is ready to concede that the electronic book breakthrough that experts have been predicting for decades is finally upon us.

The main reason for this, he declares, is Amazon’s “e-ink” technology, which succeeds in making the Kindle’s screen behave just like the regular ink-on-paper we are all used to from time immemorial: you can read a Kindle directly in sunlight, and, indeed, in the evening you better have some external source of light available somewhere nearby, as usual. But another reason the Kindle seems to have some momentum behind it is that, just like the iPod with iTunes, this content-delivery device comes with an on-line store already stocked with many thousands of bits of content for sale – this time e-books, of course, of which Amazon offers 300,000 and counting – many of which you can certainly assume that you would be interested in reading, if you are into books at all in the first place. And you can even beam them into your Kindle, after purchase, wirelessly. (more…)

Miley Cyrus refuses to eat her vegetables: I’m sorry if this message serves to disillusion any teener-readers of EuroSavant, but that’s what the Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen is reporting today in the “She” (i.e. women’s) section of its website. So maybe Hannah Montana is not such a goody-two-shoes after all! The exact quote out of Miley’s mouth in the Gazet: “I eat fruit but not vegatables. They look so funny. Most vegatables are green, and eating something green is simply strange. Too many filthy things are green.”

So reads this report from the Dutch daily De Volkskrant: the South Korean armed forces, starting in 2010, will take delivery of GBU-28 laser-guided bombs specifically designed to penetrate solid earth and/or concrete with their explosions. They have particular reason to find munitions like this useful – no, not to destroy hardened North Korean nuclear weapons sites (at least nothing like that is being publicly discussed) but rather to deal with the very many underground tunnels, most near the North-South Armistice Line, in which the North Koreans are known to be storing weapons and ammunition in support of any invasion of the South.

This development was recently revealed by an official at the South Korean Ministry of Defense. Of course, because of the recent North Korean nuclear explosion and rocket test-flights, and the accompanying heightened bellicose rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang, tensions are currently very high along that Armistice Line.

That’s the title of a book, by Jeremy Stangroom and Ophelia Benson, due to be published this week, in English, by the London-based academic publishing company Continuum. Spoiler alert: the authors conclude that the answer must be “Yes,” since according to their analysis most of the world’s major religions are anti-women.

So far, so provocative, but the explosive element in this mixture – as you might expect – is the inclusion of Islam in this scrutiny. In fact, an examination of Islam’s attitude towards women, and the Prophet Mohammed’s in particular, makes up a large part of the book. This raises the prospect of another worldwide boiling-over of Muslim rage in reaction, such as that which followed the publication in late 2005 of the infamous “Danish cartoons” and the earlier release, in 1988, of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Interestingly, I don’t see any treatment of the new book anywhere in the Danish press – save in an article by Tobias Stern Johansen (New book: Prophet Mohammend was misogynistic) in the Danish Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad.

But yes, even in Johansen’s brief treatment there is plenty of inflammatory material about Islam forthcoming in Stangroom and Benson’s book. It examines especially closely the Prophet’s relations with his third wife, Aisha, who reportedly was only nine years old when they married, and goes on to report modern-day incidents of supposed contempt by Islam towards woman such as the infamous girls’ school fire of 2002 in Saudi Arabia, when the students were not allowed by the religious police to flee a burning building because they could not do so while continuing to keep their entire bodies covered in public, as religious law demands. Johansen’s piece does also include a link to the fuller treatment of the book’s publication in the London Times, including a more-thorough description of how Continuum knows that it is courting the usual threats and danger by publishing it, but is determined to go ahead and do so anyway.

If you are at all any regular reader of this weblog, then you presumably are interested in what is going on with and what is being written about in the European press. And, as of Tuesday of last week, you’re in luck! For no less than the European Commission (working together with a “media consortium” which I assume is called “Courrier International”) has since that point had on-line a new European press site called presseurop.eu.

You can read presseurop’s somewhat bureaucratic editorial charter here, but the basic idea seems to be to pick out a selection of interesting articles from a wide spectrum of the European press and – rather than commenting on them and printing translated extracts as needed (if any) – instead actually translating them in full into a wide range of other European languages and then making them available on the website, on separate pages for the separate languages. For the record, those languages, beside English, are Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, and all you need to do to adjust the language with which you view the website is go to the drop-down box in the upper right, underneath the “RSS feeds” link. (more…)