You poor, sweet darlings . . . Let that be a lesson, never get mixed up with the big-time boys!

We’re talking here about the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), ready to go to court in London against Goldman Sachs, accusing it of taking on the LIA as a client, only to turn around and hoodwink it in a derivatives deal.

According to the Fund, which controls $60 billion, the bank is said to have “profited in an abusive manner from the LIA’s weakness” and to have pushed it to enter into nine derivatives transactions, with among others Citigroup, EdF [= Électricité de France], Santander and ENI [the Italian state petroleum company], with the goal of obtaining “substantial profit margins” from a total value of one billion dollars . . .

Due to the [economic] crisis, these transactions “lost almost all of their value” and expired in 2011, but the Fund estimates that Goldman Sachs nonetheless succeeded in obtaining a profit [i.e. for itself] of 350 million dollars.

What can one say here? For one thing, this case is being put forward for actions dating back to 2006, i.e. back when Qaddafi was Libya’s dictator, and I doubt there is anyone left ready to shed too many tears for his sake. What’s more, it seems Goldman plied the key Libyan decision-makers with expensive gifts, including luxury visits to Monaco.

Still, this sort of account cannot but reinforce the impression that Goldman operates on some variation of Groucho Marx’s old saw “I wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would accept me as a member,” only here it is “Anyone who would willingly be our customer must be rather stupid, so let’s take them to the cleaners!” Don’t take my word for that impression: that is exactly what has inspired so much resistance to Goldman’s current proposal that it purchase an ownership share in Denmark’s national energy company.

The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi are almost upon us, and it’s safe to say that the overwhelming feeling for outsiders is one of trepidation. That the Winter Games will take place in an area usually designated geographically as “sub-tropical” is but humorous; that they will be located within a region where Russia has been struggling since the fall of the Soviet Union with violent local independence movements is a much more serious proposition. And the violent groups that will want to disrupt the Olympics were clever in sowing such fear by their twin attacks around Christmas in the near-by (by Russian standards) city of Volgograd, which killed a combined total of 34 people.

The Dutch are no slouches when it comes to winter sports, so there will be a sizeable contingent from the Netherlands at the Sochi games, together with an official visit by King Willem Alexander and Queen Máxima, Premier Mark Rutte and other high officials. Will those representatives be safe there? The newspaper Trouw tries to set its readers’ fears at ease today with an article entitled The Netherlands will keep a close eye on Sochi security.

The author (uncredited; from the Dutch press agency ANP) hardly aids his/her own cause with a column-heading that reads “Possible attacks.” Still, what’s notable here is not what the Netherlands is doing, but the listing of some of the security provisions some other nations will be taking.

• The Americans: They have posted two Navy ships just offshore in the Black Sea – the better to start evacuating American citizens should things start to go haywire onshore.
• The French: They are actually sending special anti-terror police along to guard their athletes. And not just one variety, but two: the GIGN, “specialized in ending hostage situations” (OK, that’s a relief), and the RAID*, “an elite corps of the national police.”

Sadly, once you read about those steps the Americans and French are taking, the corresponding Dutch measures cannot help but strike you as rather inadequate. They include an official warning from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that everyone needs to be careful:

. . . it turns out that possible attacks in Russia, above all in city centers and South Russia, must be taken into account. You are advised when traveling in Russia to be extra-vigilant, above all at locations such as bus- and train stations, airfields or when traveling with public transport.

Oh, and if you do get into trouble, the Dutch Embassy will be open 24/7! Of course, that is way off in Moscow; but there will also be a “consular window” available at the Holland Heineken House there in Sochi.

Don’t worry, it goes on, “[c]alamity plans have been coordinated and scenarios worked out.” So if there is violence at the Winter Olympics, the Dutch government will at least be able rather easily to imagine what is happening!

The point? Is it that the Netherlands – and every other country sending substantial numbers of its athletes to the Games, for that matter – should emulate French or American practice and send along, in effect, para-military bodyguards? No, it’s that things have reached the point – resulting from the ill-considered (and almost certainly corrupt) decision to put the 2014 Winter Games here in the first place – that such worries are arising at all.

* A brilliant acronym, you’ll surely agree! It actually stands for Recherche, d’Assistance, d’Intervention et de Dissuasion – Investigation, Assistance, Intervention and Dissuasion.

In the immortal words of English hip hop artist Mike Skinner (better known as The Streets):

I think you are really fit
You’re fit – But my gosh don’t you know it

Sorry, but that’s just what first came to my (highly cultured, don’t worry) mind when I first saw the below, thanks to re-tweeting by Le Figaro:

His papacy is not even one year old (that will occur on 13 March), but already Pope Francis has been flying high in the world’s esteem. And while I won’t go so far as to accuse Vatican officials of leaving their confines in the Holy See to find some local graffiti artists to plant that particular illustration on a local wall, it’s probably safe to say that the Pope and his officials have reason to be satisfied with their efforts so far to put this new Pope’s personal stamp on the office.

Another reflection of this – and going further with the Le Figaro connection – is the piece published today in that newspaper, “Pope Francis is more popular than Obama in the Internet.” Now, how are you supposed to decide who is more popular than whom on the Internet? Apparently it’s a function of how often people search for your name on Google and how often you are mentioned on the Web overall. The Pope ranks high in those two metrics (1.7 million and 49 million, respectively), although he does not top all individual markets. In Italy, where he lives, there are more Google searches for Silvio Berlusconi; in Argentina, where he is from, there are more (surprisingly) for the Italian comedian and anti-Establishment politician Beppe Grillo. And among world youth, His Holiness must take a back seat when it comes to these metrics to One Direction and Justin Bieber.

Then again, why is this subject even coming up? Examining the Figaro article closely, it’s clear that it has been touched off by a recent report on Pope Francis’ popularity from the Aleteia news service, which bills itself as “The news of the world from a Catholic perspective”!

That must give one pause. Look, it’s true that His Holiness made it to the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and that’s not nothing (although it’s less than it was). Still, remember that he has people working to make such things happen for him; remember also that when, say, HTC is suddenly the mobile telephone everyone is talking about, that fact stems from more than just that particular product’s qualities. But my gosh don’t you know it . . .

OK guys: Get your minds out of the gutter, and rest assured that this piece from the Flemish paper De Morgen is entirely on the up-and-up.

Yes, that’s “Captain Pussy” (civilian name: Yvonne Cunha, 28 years old at the time, must be of Portuguese extraction) sitting there in the cockpit of a Boeing 707, in a picture taken forty years ago. Her sitting there is no joke, either: yes, it’s a publicity photo, but not one of some stewardess called forward to look pretty in the cockpit. She was the pilot! Sure, not the only pilot in charge of flying that airplane (for the defunct Trans European Airways – TEA), but definitely the first female commercial pilot in Belgium.

So this piece takes advantage of what is roughly the 40th anniversary of her becoming a pilot to look back on how times have changed. For one thing, the early 1970s were clearly a rather politically incorrect time: TEA had just started operations, and as a publicity stunt they were looking for “a woman and a black” to make into pilots. Still, it was very tough to fight against the prevailing stereotype that placed her to the rear as a stewardess rather than up front flying the plane. For one thing, when she finally became a pilot they had no uniform to issue to her: she had to make her own. And yes, when she finally had gained enough seniority to be in charge of flights, she became known far and wide as “Captain Pussy,” on her way to accumulating more than 25,000 flight-hours.

One thing she never did, though*, was fly as part of an exclusively female set of pilots in the cockpit. “The bosses said there had to always be a male co-pilot or captain present on any flight. With two females the passengers would get too nervous, they thought.” Nowadays – and perhaps you didn’t realize this, just as I did not – all-female crews of pilots are not uncommon at all.

* OK, another thing she may not have ever done – but who knows? – is join the “Mile High Club” – but I thought I asked you gentlemen right at the very start to keep your minds out of the gutter? Anyway, if you want to know about that, you’ll just have to get in touch with her.

You may know that notorious whistle-blower Edward Snowden conducted an interview last Friday in which he responded to questions submitted to him on Twitter. Or you may not: what a surprise, any coverage of that was hard-to-find on the main US Internet media outlets.

That’s not the case in Germany, where they just LOVE Edward Snowden and can’t get enough of his doings and pronouncements. In fact, German Snowden-mania went on to reach a peak of sorts shortly thereafter.

OK, tief in die Nacht, or “deep into the night”: the exclusive Snowden interview (filmed in Moscow, of course) shown in the name of the ARD, which is the German national association of public broadcasters, did start at 23.00 hours on a Sunday night. Yet, as this piece in the Süddeutsche Zeitung describes, executives at Germany’s first public television channel pulled out all the stops to ensure a sizeable audience, such as scheduling it in the period after the Sunday evening news and just after a six-person panel-discussion show at which Snowdon (“Hero or Traitor?” – with a former US Ambassador to Germany present to argue for the latter) was topic #1.

That having been accomplished – and viewer figures were around 2 million – afterwards they have turned rather protective of their vaunted “world exclusive.” If you click through the tweet to go to the SZ article, you immediately see the YouTube video of the interview, but you can’t watch it (nor on YouTube itself) because the ARD has taken care to restrict it geographically, likely only to viewers in Germany.

On the other hand, this SZ article provides a link to a transcript of the interview (only in German, of course), and the piece itself is itself a précis: it summaries what it views as the highpoints, eleven of them. (more…)

Bohuslav Sobotka: this 42-year-old fellow (to the left) is going to be the new Czech Prime Minister as of this upcoming Wednesday, and you can read a fairly good introduction to the man in the GlobalPost (via Agence France-Presse). Yes, in the Czech Republic top politicians are often quite young – public personalities above a certain age are often discredited by what they did during the bad old days – and it’s good to get the political scene there somewhat back to normal, after a 2013 that saw a caretaker PM in place whom nobody wanted, after the previous head of government had to resign in a corruption scandal.

From that GlobalPost piece we learn things about Sobotka such as that he likes science fiction and is even said to have a sweet tooth. Yet a couple of passages strike a strange tone: “known for being short on charisma but long on integrity” or his declaration in an interview “I would like politics to be a bit more matter-of-fact in the future.”

Specifically, these things sound rather odd to anyone who has followed The Fleet Sheet’s Final Word (a free, English- or Czech-language, Monday-through-Thursday daily comment on Czech politics) for any length of time. There, Bohuslav Sobotka has long been known as “Suitcase Sobotka,” an indication of his preferred method of accepting illegal money – in the past, at least, such as when he served as the Czech Republic’s Finance Minister from 2002 to 2006 under three successive Social Democratic prime ministers.

Is this the same guy? He is! A rather ominous sign for his own prime minstership, one would think. And one would think correctly, as we read in today’s Final Word:

By our count, three Czech PMs have left office as a direct result of some sort of financial scandal (Václav Klaus, Stanislav Gross [under whom Sobotka was Finance Minister], Peter Nečas [the last properly-elected PM before Sobotka]). What sets new PM Bohuslav Sobotka apart from these three, as well as from the other seven Czech PMs, is that a potential financial scandal is hanging over him before he takes office.

The exact nature of that scandal is unimportant here. (You can read further if you’re curious.) The point, basically, is that the Czech Republic is a rather corrupt place, and its citizens know it, which results in a constant stream of new “reform” parties emerging at elections claiming to want to do something about that. The latest is “ANO 2011” (ano in Czech means “yes”), founded and dominated by the Czech Republic’s second-richest man, Andrej Babiš, who of course is in line to become Sobotka’s Finance Minister.

It’s a sad situation. But at least you can realize that this new Czech government is destined to no good end. And you read it in the Final Word – or, at least, here – first.

I stand corrected – for this:

Yes, for a while there it seemed like we would be able to look forward once again to following the madcap exploits of that ragged but plucky band of ex-Somali coastal fishermen who one day – with a little help from the flood of small arms of every conceivable description to be found in that war-torn land – came up with rather bigger and more lucrative prey to go after on the high seas. Maybe we would even get to see Tom Hanks in action once again, in crusty old sailor mode, in a sequel to last year’s American-ship-gets-hijacked movie. (Or maybe Hollywood would not particularly let mere facts get in the way of such a sequel, if the original turned out to be enough of a financial success.)

That was not true though: the Marzooqah was not captured by Somali pirates – or by any pirates – a week ago. I only discovered this by putzing around a bit on my Twitter-feed and clicking once again on the underlying article from the Volkskrant that had originally announced the news.

That article has been revised – drastically. Yes, a bunch of men were seen rushing onto the Marzooqah that evening, but those were not pirates, those were Eritrean soldiers! It took an announcement to that effect the next day by a spokesman from the European anti-pirate mission to clear up the confusion.

Just why it was that those soldiers were rushing onto the Marzooqah was not explained by that spokesman. I guess some people were rather worried that the ship had been or was about to be hijacked. Getting jumpy! – when in reality, as this revised piece now points out, in 2013 there were only 7 pirate attacks on shipping in that general area, and none of those was successful. The 2014 counter has likewise been reset back to zero.

Did you know that the largest energy company in Denmark (76% owned by the Danish State – for now) is named DONG (formerly Dansk Olie og Naturgas A/S)? That’s just the tasty opening tidbit to an interesting tale currently resounding within that country’s halls of power, as reported on the webpages of Denmark’s public broadcast company, DR (formerly known as Danmarks Radio).

The problem is, DONG needs money for further infrastructure investments. Fortunately, it seems to have found an outside investor willing to purchase an ownership stake. Unfortunately, that investor is rather too “outside,” as in from “outside” the country.

In today’s European Union that should not really be any sort of issue. Cross-border investments are supposed to be able to proceed unimpeded; indeed, public tenders are to be awarded blind to the nationality of the bidding companies (as long as they are from EU member-states).

Still, especially when it’s about the company that heats so many national homes – and in a cold Scandinavian climate – it’s natural to have a preference for business dealings with fellow nationals. That preference is further sharpened here from the fact that it’s no less than Goldman Sachs who is the foreign party lined up to do the investment. And wouldn’t you know it:

One of the [deal’s] points of criticism is that Goldman Sachs has placed the investment in a tax haven, so the State would lose tax receipts in connection with payment of dividends from profits.

The Vampire Squid doesn’t miss a trick!

OK, but the tale does not end there: four Danish pension funds have now collectively come up with the money to make the investment instead. But the problem is that their bid might simply be too late, maybe: it’s hard to interpret the rules here.

In any case, the Danish Finance Minister, Bjarne Corydon, will chair a meeting on Tuesday to make a decision. Goldman Sachs representatives likely expect things to be all arranged then, but Minister Corydon – and even the Danish PM herself, Helle Thorning-Schmidt – are getting pressure to go with the pure-Danish alternative, however last-minute. This lobbying is coming in particular from the Danish People’s Party, (in)famous for its generally ultra-nationalist policy stances and general contempt for the EU, but for all that still quite influential within Danish politics.

While hardly the most enthusiastic EU member-state, Denmark still has a good record for keeping to the rules. Here, though, the argument for national chauvinism seems strong, considering the counterparty.

On Twitter, it’s always possible – if you’re obsessed enough to keep a close eye, or are at least blessed with serendipity – to pick up the occasional golden nugget that passes everyone else by. Like this one, for example:

Viviane Reding is one of the EU Commission’s Vice Persidents, but her specific remit is Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship. It would therefore appear that she is doing a bit of freelancing beyond that portfolio, not that that phenomenon is unknown among EU Commissioners.

What’s remarkable here instead is her message, as appeared a few days ago in the relatively obscure business paper Deutsche Mittelstands Nachrichten (or “News for German Medium-Sized Firms”). Are you worried about poor people from elsewhere in the EU (read: Romania and Bulgaria) coming to your countries to “steal” jobs and freeload on your social welfare provisions? Reding asks. Well, the real problem here, she says, is those “generous welfare systems” themselves: cut them back, she says, and problem solved! Moreover, the problem would be solved by the member-states doing what they should do – i.e. cutting back – and not by the EU, whose problem it isn’t anyway.

Now, this is something new. Indeed – although Ms. Reding would undoubtedly deny any connection – it’s something that philosophically is straight out of the contemporary American Republican Party, whose partisans in Congress have done rather well lately to reduce food stamps (i.e. food assistance) and cut off extended unemployment benefits for US citizens. But, back in our European context, those Western European social welfare edifices, built up over the decades since the Second World War, are usually immune to criticism – at least from those outside the national borders. (more…)

Granted, this is not something particularly calculated to arouse your sympathy, but Le Monde tells us today how the famed French hard alcohol company Rémy Cointreau – the result of a merger in the early 1990s between Rémy Martin and Cointreau – has fallen on hard times.

Sales down 18.9% in IVQ 2013, down a total of 12.3% over the last three quarters of last year.

What seems to be driving most of this is a notable collapse in sales of the firm’s flagship Rémy Martin cognac: down 21% in that same April-to-December period. But it’s the hint as to why this is happening – contained in a link embedded within this article to another piece behind the Le Monde paywall – that is interesting. For sales are collapsing above all in China, where it seems a bottle of Rémy Martin is almost standard currency when it comes to “convincing” a local official to take some action in your favor. In other words, Rémy Cointreau is facing collateral damage from the People’s Republic’s current anti-corruption drive!

Look, don’t they teach these things at INSEAD, say? One must diversify one’s worldwide clientele of corrupt officialdoms! After all, there are so many to choose from!

Gold: it’s not just for money anymore. Actually, it’s not much about money anymore! Yes, people always watch the gold price, but that’s more about gold as a commodity subject to price speculation. And gold remains a central bank reserve asset into which such national authorities can dip when they want to intervene in the currency markets – again, by selling their gold-as-commodity in order to gain supplies of the currency they want to strengthen – but they will sooner do that using reserves of other foreign currencies they have accumulated.

This is a far cry from those long-ago days of the gold standard, when the value of a nation’s currency was determined by the precise amount of actual gold it claimed to represent, so that balance of payments surplusses and deficits were settled by transfers of gold from one central bank to another. There was a dirty little secret there, however: it was rare that the gold was actually physically transferred when settling such national accounts. It’s heavy stuff, after all, and thus costly to ship, especially when you factor in the extra need for security. Plus, you could never rule out the trade winds reversing next year – so to speak – so that deficit country became surplus country and the gold would then have to be shipped back the other way.

No, it was much easier just to slap a new ownership-label on a certain section of a pile of gold sitting safely and cozily in some certifiably safe place – the vaults of the New York Federal Reserve, say, or a similar place in London, which has long been the center of the world’s gold market anyway and the source of the daily gold fixing that sets its price.

However, that may not be good enough anymore:

This brief piece from Germany’s Huffington Post reports how the Bundesbank’s official in charge of transatlantic relations, Philipp Mißfelder, has demanded that all of his institution’s gold be shipped back to German physical control by the year 2020. Apparently, that has already occurred with the German gold that used to be held in Paris – note how we’re only allowed to find out about this after it already happened – and now Mißfelder is demanding a repatriation of the 674 tons of Germany’s gold in New York and London.

One has to wonder: Why this? Why now? Granted, it’s always a better feeling to have a valuable asset like that – even if less important than it was before – under your own lock-and-key, unseizable by others barring invasion, yet, again, the trouble and costs involved in that physical transportation are such that things were run up to this point in such a way as to avoid them entirely. It’s true that Germany itself is a bit safer of a place, now that it is not divided in two anymore with Warsaw Pact armies massed just on the other side of the inter-German border, but then that has been the case for over twenty years.

What it comes down to is Trust, right? And what sort of recent cellphone-listening, snooping-on-citizens* developments have we seen lately to throw Trust into question?

* Recall that this has involved both the US and the UK, the former operating from the privileged position of its embassy, allotted by the Berlin authorities upon reunification a high-status location right beside the Reichstag.

Things looked bleak for Patrick Van den Kieboom of Edegem, in the Antwerp suburbs. He had imbibed around three glasses of his region’s renowned beers – and who could resist that, on a Saturday night? The problem was that he had then taken the wheel to drive himself and his wife home, and was stopped on the road at a drunk-driver checkpoint.

The key to what happened then is in that word “bijrijder” – yes, “by-rider” or passenger: the officer came up and asked not Mr. Van den Kieboom but rather his wife whether she had been drinking – No – and then had her breathe into the little device. She passed easily, and they were soon on their way again.

The explanation is simple. Van den Kieboom’s car he had bought from a South African who had shipped it to Belgium – it was to Commonwealth standard, whereby the driver sits with the wheel on the right side! But as usual, the Belgian highway officer had come up on the left side as the car was stopped on the right-hand side of the road!

To make the incident even more surreal, his wife even got a BOB keychain for her good behavior! (As pictured; BOB = Bewust Onbeschonken Bestuurder, basically “designated driver,” and the catchy leitmotif for anti-drunk driving campaigns in both the Netherlands and Dutch-speaking Belgium.) Let’s hope they saw sense and switched around soon afterwards to let the wife actually drive – and that no one with authority within the Belgian police reads De Telegraaf (and note, it’s a Dutch, not Belgian, paper)!

Remember when beer was just beer? (No? OK, maybe you’re not old enough.)

Jesse Frederik of De Groene Amsterdammer does, though, although from the mini-vignette of him that we see at the top of the column to which the above tweet links he doesn’t seem to be that old himself.

Beer was not always a branded article. From surveys among retailers just after the Second World War [remember, this is written within a Dutch context], it was apparent that only ten percent of customers ever asked for a specific brand. Beer was beer, and nothing more!

Ah, but things eventually changed. “Brand consciousness arrived only when brewers realized that marketing, the selling of illusions, could show consumers differences where there weren’t any.” Beer from Heineken – the company which turned out to be most successful at this new game by far – became perceived as the social tipple, Amstel (a brand later purchased by Heineken) as the “people’s beer,” Hertog Jan as “chic.” Physically, though, they had only minor differences if any.

So what did we get? Lots more marketing expenses among brewers, and of course an explosion in Dutch beer consumption over the years – from ten liters per year in 1950 to 86 in 1980. “The glass of beer, once a brand-less product, comparable to sugar, became a great vehicle for solving all your problems.”

Except that we know it only sometimes seems to solve our problems, and then only for limited times, before the hangover sets in. (more…)

Oh, did he ever spend a long, long time stuck on that Pacific island, with prospects for rescue always so distant and remote. Still, he managed to hold out for many years, and all that while to be a source of support and strength for those stuck there with him, and perhaps that’s what we should recall now as we mourn his death.

Wait . . . you say you completely agree with me about the Professor? From Gilligan’s Island? Sorry, my friends, I know everyone – in the US, at least – is talking about Russell Johnson. But here I’m afraid you’ve run once again into one of the favorite tricks of any columnist, the Think-it’s-about-one-thing-then-it-turns-out-to-be-another gambit.

Or, if you like:

The “islander” I’m talking about – and the Philippines are after all a bunch of islands – is LT Hiroo Onoda of the Imperial Japanese Army, recently dead of a heart attack at 91, who was one of that crazy band of left-behind soldiers who got the word much too late that Japan had surrendered, and who himself only stopped fighting and came out of the jungle some 29 years after the war’s end, in 1974. And even after he was discovered there by an outsider – the Danmarks Radio piece says it was by a Japanese “hippie” – he refused to actually lay down his arms until his superior officer in the War, a Major Taniguchi who in the meantime had become a bookstore-owner, came to the Philippines jungle to order him to do so.

This is quite a character, although take a look at the full head-shot featured at the top of the piece from De Standaard. Doesn’t he look like the kindly old Japanese granddad-in-law you always wanted to have? (more…)

All those of you not feeling quite right in your skin, torn by that compulsion to “cross the road” – well, at least if you’re in the Netherlands you’re going to have to find some other medical institution to be your conduit and crossing-guard, according to a recent report.

Yes, those looking for a sex-change operation will not be able to avail themself for a quite a while of the Free University Medical Center (VUmc; if they have not already made such arrangements, of course), located in South Amsterdam. That’s simply because the place is swamped: 400 adults and 200 children approach it yearly for that sort of procedure, but it can’t handle that traffic and has put a stop to any new admissions. Unfortunately, it has been conducting 85% of such operations nationally.

Actually, the problem is money: the VUmc would need €10 million annually even to handle that usual 600, but gets only €3 million from insurance companies. (Heaven forfend that any of these people pay for such an operation themselves! Actually, it’s rather eyebrow-raising that such procedures are in fact covered by the private health insurance that makes up the Dutch health care system.)

This has created another oppressed minority: the “transgenders” who now can’t get the change made (or have to look elsewhere to get it done; and/or – *gasp* – who have to pay for it out of their own stylishly metrosexual pockets). Naturally, there’s an advocacy group for these people, called Transgender Netwerk Nederland. (Go ahead, click and check it out: I’ve linked to their English site.) As TNN director Elleke Alink points out, “If they had announced a cessation of treatment for some other patient group, everyone in the Netherlands would surely have protested. What’s at issue here is a relatively small group, but consisting of patients who are in some cases having a hard time of it.”

That’s the name for the spirit of divine retribution in Greek mythology, we are told, which exacted its vengeance against those exhibiting hubris, another classic mythological concept.

Nemesis is now knocking on the door of the British government, specificallly the British Ministry of Defense, as is apparent from revelations over the past weekend from the Süddeutsche Zeitung:

Abu Ghraib, it would seem, was no isolated incident; if these allegations hold true, then the British Army was itself engaged in the systematic torture of Iraqi prisoners – although not at Abu Ghraib, it had built its own prisons of horrors, most nearer to Basra. This included death while in captivity:

The 26-year-old widower Baha Mousa died after two days in British captivity. The autopsy reported 93 injuries – abrasions, lacerations and broken ribs. Listed cause of death: suffocation.

“A regrettable, isolated incident,” was the explanation for this from the British authorities. Others beg to differ, specifically the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), with offices in Berlin, which has teamed up with the Birmingham-based human rights law firm Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), in particular to prove not isolated but systematic mistreatment of detainees in British custody in Iraq to the satisfaction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. They’ve brought together testimony from 109 former prisoners, with complaints spanning various time-periods within 2003-2008, and at differing locations – which would seem to tend towards the “systematic.” (more…)

It’s a whole ‘nother world over there, another culture, but among the public holidays they celebrate over in Thailand, New Year’s Day is one of the few a Westerner would be able to recognize. Perhaps then we can assume that today marked a similar “back-to-work-from-the-holidays” day there, meaning that anti-government protestors went back to work as well on what they called “Black Monday” to press their political demands by blocking key interesections and generally bringing normal life in Bangkok to a halt.

It’s just that things have not really turned out that way, as the reporter-on-the-scene for the Danish newspaper Politiken, Claus Blok Thomsen, recounts. (And note Bangkok is 7 hours ahead of GMT, Monday’s events there are now done.)

“The demonstrators have in any event not succeeded in closing down Bangkok,” he writes.

Traffic is functioning normally in most places, and one can in fact get around in the city. . . . So far the mood has been very relaxed. I have just been down to see the location, Silom Road, where the demonstrators have set up. There are crowds of people. One can best characterize the mood as a mix of a popular festival such as Roskilde* and a demonstration. There is loud music, people walking around with funny glasses in the Thai national colors, and there are foodstands and tents where people can spend the night.

Perhaps that’s only natural in a tropical paradise, on a day when it was 28°C with no precipitation. But that may perhaps also explain why Thai street demonstration campaigns never seem to end.

* That Roskilde reference is to Northern Europe’s biggest rock festival, occuring this year 29 June – 6 July just south of Copenhagen. Buy your tickets today!

UPDATE: OK, maybe fun time’s over. “Dozens wounded in Bangkok as a grenade explodes at a demonstration.”