OK, we know that a serious border incident took place yesterday between the Israeli and Lebanese armies. It involved some sort of tree [sic], and four people died: two Lebanese soldiers, a Lebanese journalist who was with them, and an Israeli lieutenant-colonel. It seems the UN Security Council has even gone into session today to ponder things. But enough of all that – c’mon guys, who started it? Who was to blame?

You’ll get no credible answer asking the parties directly involved: each was quick to blame the other and to warn of “consequences” should anything further of this sort occur. Israeli officials even spoke of their troops being caught in an “ambush.”

No, the best bet for establishing further facts would seem to be finding some report from an on-the-scene but neutral observer. And we have one, from the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, namely Ulrike Putz and her article Observers puzzle over the background of Mideast firefight. I mean, “Ulrike Putz” sounds like a name you can trust, right? She’s a female, and of course she’s German, and I think those two things combined amount to a mark of journalistic objectivity as good as any other.

Plus, you don’t have to scroll down too far in her article to find bullet-points that lay everything out as clear as it can presently be ascertained:

• Where exactly was that infamous tree at the center of all this: on Israeli or on Lebanese territory? A UN spokesperson is willing to confirm that it was on the Israeli side.
  
• So who opened fire first? We get UN testimony again on this: the Lebanese did. Then the Israelis naturally reacted, but by throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, e.g. artillery, combat helicopters. But I understand Israelis tend to do that in the face of a provocation.
  
• OK then: Why did all this happen? Well, there are some clues. You’ll note that among the casualties was a Lebanese journalist – well, what was he doing there just at the right place and time to watch something interesting happen? Also, according to Israeli sources the Lebanese brigade commander responsible for that sector is a Shi’ite with rather extreme anti-Israeli attitudes. So the suggestion is that he had just been waiting for an excuse to open fire on the IDF, operating entirely under his own authority. (Yes, I realize that with this analysis Frau Putz seems to go over to the Israeli side. But assessing motivations is the hardest task of all, and that’s the only source where she can get her information.)
  

Interestingly, up to now it has not been the Lebanese Army that the Israelis have felt they needed to worry about, but rather Hezbollah fighters. After all, they’re the ones that have the missiles to fire into Israel, and that month-long war there back in the summer of 2006 was really with them. So after the incident was over and the bodies removed, the real concern was that Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, would be annoyed enough with the incident (although it did not directly involved any of his personnel) to start attacking Israel again. Indeed, Nasrallah made a long and aggressive speech last night, in effect telling the Israelis not to try anything like that again or they’ll be very sorry, but that was as far as he went – so far.

Similarly, Frau Putz reports that the Israelis also seriously considered reacting to the incident by unleashing a general bombing campaign against Lebanese Army positions, but then decided not to. But don’t sit back and relax yet: this piece in today’s L’Express (with a couple interesting pictures of deployed IDF equipment) reports that both sides (meaning Israeli and Lebanese) are moving more troops up to the border.

Enough of the levity (see previous). It’s time to get serious – even “apocalyptic.” Specifically, The apocalyptic cost of the collapse of the Eurozone, a recent entry on the blog of Libération’s famed Brussels correspondent, Jean Quatremer.

That article basically calls attention to a recent, publicly-available and English-language study from ING Bank (main writer: Mark Cliffe) entitled “EMU Break-up: Quantifying the Unthinkable.” It’s quite an eye-opener, and Quatremer has performed quite a public service in calling his readers’ attention to it. For the “unthinkable” when it comes to the euro has become quite a bit less so this year, including the two “unthinkable” extremes between which Cliffe structures his report’s analysis: 1) The departure from the Eurozone of Greece (only), and 2) The collapse of the whole thing, with the current member countries simply reverting to their currencies of prior to 1999. Both developments, and various others in-between, have increasingly been raised as distinct real-world possibilities, and not just as horror-scenarios but also as measures to be induced deliberately (particularly the ejection of Greece) as punishment for the fiscal failings of various naughty governments. (more…)

Did you know that Russia has its own high-speed railway? A recent tweet pointed this out:

It links to this article in the French newsmagazine L’Express, with an accompanying photo-montage. So it’s true: the special train service is called the “Sapsan” (Сапсан), Russian for “peregrine falcon,” and has operated since last December on the classic Moscow-to-St. Petersburg route (and only there, so far; that particular route has been in service since 1851). Its Siemens-built trains, with top speeds of 250 km/hour, link Russia’s two premier cities in only three hours, forty minutes.

There are some notable things about the Sapsan, quite apart from its limited route. (It’s relatively new, after all.) As the reader realizes from the photo there at the top of the article, it operates on ordinary tracks, unlike some high-speed services in Europe (e.g. in France, the Netherlands) which use custom-built tracks which can be fenced off. Quite apart from technical considerations, in Russia such security measures are probably called for, given that country’s infamous plague of alcoholism; as things stand, the Sapsan amounts to yet another executioner (more deadly-efficient than other trains, due to its extraordinary speed) of the many drunks who wander onto the rails at the wrong time every year (almost 3,000 in 2009). (more…)

Today is “Stress Day” – the day when the results of the “stress test” exercises performed on all major European banks will be released after the end of the European business day (but right in the middle of the American business day!). The Financial Times column Alphaville has a handy round-up of articles on the subject, compiled by Gwen Robinson. The most comprehensive guide – perfect if you’re still unsure of what these “stress tests” are all about and have some time – is by far the contribution from Anne Seith of Der Spiegel. (Rest assured: it’s in English. As for Alphaville itself, better enjoy that while it’s still free and available to all!)

Then there is the report by Anne Michel in Le Monde, also cited in the FT Alphaville round-up. Why is everyone so stressed about these “stress tests”? Mainly because banks can only “pass” them or “fail” them, and failure could carry a high price in terms of loss of investor confidence, for starters. Indeed, the impact is likely to be even greater than it was for the ten banks (out of nineteen tested) which “failed” during the American “stress test” exercise carried out back in May, 2009, for banks that fail by definition need recapitalization and there is a dwindling number of European governments still able to provide that. It’s notable, as Mme. Michel points out, that European authorities have staged such “stress tests” twice before, namely dry runs in August of 2009 and April of this year with a more limited selection of banks, whose results have never been made public.

But this time it’s serious, and all results will be released publicly. Naturally, everyone would love to jump the gun and get word of at least some of the results before they’re released to the unwashed masses (there’s potentially money to be made, for one thing). Mme. Michel does her best to oblige. It looks like all the French banks involved – namely BNP Paribas, Société générale, Crédit agricole and BPCE – have passed the test. Indeed, the failures are expected to come only from the usual suspect nations: Spain, Greece, and Portugal. Oh, and Germany, too – but the one German laggard is likely to be the Hypo Real Estate Bank, which already got into so much trouble back in 2008 that the German government fully nationalized it. (Note that this last bit does not come from Mme. Michel’s article, but from another of my on-line sources.)

Going back to the star banking pupils from France, such seeming across-the-board success inevitably raises questions as to the stress tests’ legitimacy. The article does go into some detail about how the tests’ parameters have been toughened up to include some degree of sovereign debt default, placed on top of a posited recession of 3% negative economic growth lasting over a year-and-a-half. But will this go far enough to convince the markets that all this has been a worthwhile, bona fide exercise? That is probably what most EU officials and bank executives are stressed-out about most of all.

France remains one place where they take literary culture – and so its central element, the novel – seriously. People still read there. But that doesn’t mean that that country remains immune to the steady march of progress, which these days can only refer to consumer electronics and telecoms. In the French newspaper Le Figaro, Margaut Bergey surveys some recent innovations that threaten to redefine the very nature of what we mean by literature.

In part, the value-added from Mme. Bergey’s piece comes simply from the specifics she provides. I had vaguely been aware of a novel having been published wholly via Twitter, but didn’t know anything more specific. Turns out it was called The French Revolution, by Matt Stewart, and, sure enough, just over a year ago (starting on Bastille Day 2009, appropriately enough) it was “published” in the form of 3,700 tweets. Here’s that Twitter-feed’s site, but by this point you (together with me) are a bit too late: that particular collection of tweets constituting the novel is no longer available, so you’ll have to buy it from Stewart’s site here. (more…)

They’re gone now, Les Bleus, the French national football team. Today they arrived back in Paris, and star attacker Thierry Henry even headed straight to L’Elysée Palace to give his own explanation to President Nicolas Sarkozy of what went on down there in South Africa that produced such a shambles.

Time now for the tournament to move on, which it has done already with, among other things, England’s narrow 1-0 victory over Slovenia and Landon Donovan’s last-minute goal for Team USA which sent them on to the sudden-death Round of 16 and sent the Slovenians packing for home. For any of those with a more morbid outlook, though – those who tend to linger long while passing the scene of a horrific accident by the side of the road, say – Grégory Schneider of the French paper Libération has some behind-the-scenes details of what happened with the French, including the precise wording of Nicolas Anelka’s to-his-face characterization of his coach during half-time of the France-Mexico game (Get ready: Va te faire enculer, sale fils de pute! It’s pretty bad.) that got him sent home and was the immediate cause of all the trouble. (more…)

. . . mainly to include the 500+ million European Union! That at least is the message of Libération Brussels correspondent Jean Quatremer in the lastest post on his Coulisses de Bruxelles, UE (=”Brussels Corridors”) weblog, entitled “Barack Obama, the president of the European Council (Potec).” The basic assertion Quatremer wants to make here is that Obama should get the main credit for the bold/desperate €750 billion emergency aid package that European leaders cobbled together last Sunday night – just after voting in the crucial Nordrhein-Westphalen German state election had closed but just before Asian markets started trading again on the Monday morning of a new week, you understand.

Sure, the President was nowhere near Brussels at the time. Still, in Quatremer’s view it was the key telephone calls he placed to the main decision-makers – mainly France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel, of course – that made sure something big and decisive would happen. And then it seems he also gave a call on Monday to the Spanish premier, Zapatero, to persuade him to buckle down with some serious government cost-saving measures (that included lowering public employees’ salaries and cutting pensions), and he may have similarly bent the ear of Portuguese premier Socrates as well. (more…)

I’d like to expand a bit on the article from Le Monde that I linked to in one of my tweets today. I’d also like to try out the new facility Twitter has made available to embed tweets, thusly:

Oooooh, looks pretty good! (Feel free to write me to ask how to do it!)

Anyway, the immediate point of that piece is contained in its title: Israeli government announces that it wants to relaunch construction in East Jerusalem. The Netanyahu government had previously conceded a brief suspension of such construction, but only as a sort of fig-leaf measure in response to heavy pressure it was getting from the US – because, of course, any such construction in East Jerusalem, territory conquered in battle that the rest of the world will not concede is owned by Israel in any way, sounds the death-knell for what are supposed to be peace negotiations with Palestinian representatives. (more…)

You’re surely all aware of the big current European story: that minor matter about saving the euro from tremendous speculative pressures on its currency, in light of a threatened Greece sovereign bankruptcy which threatens to drag down further other vulnerable EU sovereign borrowers as well. As always, my policy in approaching this topic is to consider only those non-English-language articles which add something to the discussion that my readers are not likely to have already seen elsewhere in the English-language press. So I admit I haven’t provided much coverage as yet, other than the translation of the French Finance Minister interview yesterday/below.

Then again, that’s also a little disingenuous; a unique viewpoint on virtually any European economic or political issue is almost always to be had from L’Humanité, the organ of the French Communist Party. Naturally, those folks have also been glad to hold forth on the new measures and funding facilities arising from last weekend’s Eurozone crisis meetings over the Greek debt problem, as we see in the piece by Bruno Odent provocatively entitled Euro: the plan aimed at saving the hostage-takers. (more…)

The finance blog Naked Capitalism today linked to a current article of high interest which happens to be available only in a foreign language, in this case French. I’m referring to the interview with French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde in the business newspaper Les Echos – newsworthy at any time, but of crucial interest appearing just now.

This is not the first time this has happened on Naked Capitalism, but my intent here is certainly not to scold. In many of those previous instances I have been happy to step in and provide a translation of the article in question on this site, and I do the same below after the jump with the Lagarde interview. The piece’s lede is “‘There’s a determination to construct a new edifice, to reinvent the European model,’ declared the Minister of the Economy in an interview with Les Echos.” (Interviewer’s questions are in bold.) (more…)

It’s often claimed that French farmers are quick to take to the streets – in the best French Revolutionary tradition – whenever they feel their interests threatened. And that is true, and has been for decades. But it’s only recently that video technology has evolved to the point where the blog-reader can be taken along for the ride almost as if s/he is right there.

L’Express writer Aurélien Chartendrault (Now, doesn’t that name convince you right there that we’re talking about things French? That’s a “he,” by the way.) hitched a ride yesterday on the tractor of farmer Nicolas Combes, one of 1,200 farm-vehicles invading Paris’ city streets in a protest-action of around 10,000 corn and grain farmers unhappy about the prices they’re getting for their produce. The resulting video is below; in it, M. Combes gets the only speaking part and uses it mainly to go on about how he feels he can barely make a living anymore, and apparently also about some pointy-headed officials who are trying to get him to farm without using pesticides.

But here it’s best to leave all that stuff aside – indeed, best if you can’t understand French, although his enunciation is perfectly fine and without accent – so you can just concentrate on the sensation of riding through the Parisian scenery in a tractor-convoy.

Mon tracteur à Paris
Uploaded by LEXPRESS. – the latest news content.

What comes next? Inevitably something like “Grand Theft Tractor,” in a Paris setting – soon available for PSP, Wii and the XBox 360!

Whoops, there’s another problem one sometimes is face with while trying to procure medical attention over in this continental “health care paradise” – at least in France, as Le Monde reminds us. You can probably guess it: your doctor can go out on strike, as it seems French GPs are doing this very day on a nationwide basis.

Closely related to that is that, again in France but likely elsewhere in Europe as well, your doctor is likely to belong to some sort of union. In fact, there are several French doctors’ unions, and they all have called for a strike today. Their grievance? They basically want the price doctors are allowed to charge for a consultation to rise to €23 (=$30.50); it seems the current price is €22. If that is all they’re getting angry about . . . citizens trapped in many other more privately-based health-care systems where a doctor’s visit tends to cost much more than €23 can only look on in envy.

If something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck . . . then it’s a duck, right? OK. Now how about if something looks like a North Korean attack (South Korean frigate explodes and suddenly sinks), is where North Korea attacks (the doomed ship was in disputed waters), and fits right into a long history of North Korean attacks – is it a North Korean attack?

As this article by Sébastien Falletti in Le Figaro demonstrates, maybe not – even though South Korean authorities did take emergency measures in reaction to Saturday’s sinking of the Cheonan, President Lee Myung-bak calling an urgent meeting of national security advisors at his “crisis bunker.” At least the only aggressive military response was that of yet another South Korean naval vessel opening fire on a suspicious approaching aerial threat that appeared on its radar – which turned out only to be a flock of birds. (more…)

Remember how, only a couple short months ago, the election for Edward Kennedy’s old Senate seat was lost by the Democrats, and suddenly nothing in politics that people had thought to be sure was so sure anymore in the face of that supposed voters’ anti-Establishment revolt? This particularly applied to health care reform, which up to that point had been laboring slowly through Congress, but had already been passed by both chambers, in two different versions that still needed to be reconciled. With the Massachusetts Senate result, though, even many of that legislation’s greatest supporters were nonetheless ready to throw that effort overboard entirely or at least drastically scale back its ambition.

A similar thing has just happened in France, following regional elections there last Sunday which resulted in heavy losses for the governing UMP party of President Nicolas Sarkozy. Two days afterwards, French premier François Fillon announced that his government was dropping the idea of a carbon tax, something it had previously been developing with a view towards putting it in the tax code on 1 July. And there is reason to believe that this concept is certainly more permanently dead than US health care reform turned out to be; for one thing, as Claire Guélaud reports in Le Monde, the main French organizations representing employers and entrepreneurs broke out in rejoicing at Premier Fillon’s announcement. (more…)

The Reverend Hans Küng is a Swiss Catholic priest, although of the renegade sort, who has been expressly forbidden by the Catholic Church to teach its theology. For more than forty years he has been somewhat of an outspoken radical on religious topics, most especially when it comes to the doctrine of papal infallibility, which he has repeatedly written to condemn.

These days, though, the Catholic Church has rather larger problems than the question of whether the Pope is ever able to make a mistake, most especially a raft of priest-pedophile scandals ranging from the USA to Ireland, and now in Germany as well. In an opinion piece appearing now in the authoritative French newspaper Le Monde (translated from German), Küng comes forward with a straightforward solution: To fight the pedophilia, let’s abolish priest celibacy.

Of course, the Roman Catholic establishment will have none of that. In his article, Küng carefully lists – and then controverts – three assertions coming from Rome in reaction to these pedophile scandals: 1) That they are not actually the result of the priestly vow of celibacy; 2) That the scandals represent no sort of truly systemic failure within the Church; and 3) That, in any case, bishops have taken adequate measures in response. America, Ireland (yes, even such a Catholic country of around 18 centuries of Church history as Ireland), now Germany: of course it is a systemic failure! And while, yes, celibacy cannot be the exclusive cause of this behavior on the part of so many priests, it is fairer to say that the twisted and strained Catholic attitude towards human sexuality of which celibacy is but one aspect surely plays a big part. (As for the bishops: their record of rather covering-up than dealing forthrightly with pedophile scandals cropping up under their jurisdictions is clear.)

Küng really goes after the whole concept of enforced celibacy for priests here; he examines both Scripture itself as well as Church history to shoot down the very idea, pointing out that nothing of the sort was actually required of priests until the tenth century, when celibacy was mandated by Pope Gregory VII while influenced by a certain circle of monks (who themselves were celibate, but by their own choice). Plus, even back then, when both the spiritual and temporal power of the Catholic Church had reached its height (and the First Crusade was about to be launched), this new measure still touched off major protests among priests in Italy and in Germany.

I’ve already mentioned the bishops and their “hush up” policies towards the pedophile incidents. But Küng also reminds us that, after a certain point in time, all pedophile cases were referred to the office within the Vatican known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where such centralized handling apparently helped them to be buried all the more effectively. A certain Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was in charge of that particular office starting in 1981 – until he was chosen as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005! It turns out that Küng and Ratzinger have something of a common personal history, as they were colleagues for a time back in the early 1960s when they both worked as advisors to the Second Vatican Council. But this latest article – in such a high-profile publication as Le Monde – is certain not to do much to improve their relations, nor to soften Küng’s official treatment from the Vatican.

UPDATE: Küng’s article has now made its way to the blog of The New York Review of Books in a proper English translation.

Over on the financial blog Naked Capitalism today there are some very interesting links concerning the seemingly nefarious role Goldman Sachs has played in the recent past with the Greek government, that government’s attempts to both hide its debt and to find ways to fund it, and with the Eurozone in general.

The headline link is to a very revealing blogpost by Jean Quatremer, Brussels/European correspondent for the French newspaper Libération – but the link is only to the French original. Herewith my translation of that, after the jump, complete with the links Quatremer uses within his piece (other than when they go to Wikipedia or to general homepage sites): (more…)

Let us now talk about Iran and nuclear weapons. Why? How about because the annual Munich Security Conference got started today and will run through the weekend, and, from a European perspective at least, that is currently the leading security issue.

But wait . . . here’s maybe a better reason to talk about Iran: the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung is now reporting that that country has a design ready for atomic warheads. The newspaper hints heavily that this revelation is its exclusive scoop; according to information it has managed to obtain, the key to Iran’s efforts was a certain Russian nuclear expert, present in that country from the mid-nineties to the year 2000 (or maybe all the way to 2002), and whose work in developing a certain high-speed camera process was crucial to the Iranians being able to fashion a so-called two-point implosion system for setting off the nuclear explosion. Now the Iranians have the blueprints they need to develop bombs that in fact would be small enough to fit comfortably on the medium-range Shahab-3 missiles they possess. Supposedly, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency know about this new development and concede that the warhead design would certainly work. (It was in fact an IAEA document that was the source for the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s revelations.) (more…)

President Obama faced a hard challenge with his State of the Union address to Congress of yesterday evening, given his recent series of political setbacks. That his speech came off well nonetheless is not just the conclusion picked by post-speech polling, but also one shared by observers from the French press, despite the discourse’s inevitable emphasis on domestic affairs. (This US-focus did not stop the French on-line papers from uniformly offering embedded videos of the entire speech, some even dubbed into French, so their readers could take a look at it themselves.)

Noteworthy reaction flowed promptly in two articles from that pillar of the French journalistic establishment, Le Monde. One of them (Obama’s words: work, economy, and Americans; no byline) literally offers at its head a “word-cloud” of the speech’s most-frequent terms (actually, their French equivalents) and then, by way of analysis, a hyper-short summary of his essential message: “Don’t panic.” Yes, it’s true that the president’s emphasis was much more on the economy and creating jobs, rather than on that health care reform legislation that still sits tantalizingly close to final passage. But what was of far more interest to Le Monde’s writer here was those foreign policy topics to which Obama gave short shrift, as he only briefly discussed Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, skimmed China, Russia, Germany, India, the Koreas, and said nothing at all about Pakistan or the Israeli-Palestinian peace-process! (Nor about France, come to think of it.)

A companion Le Monde article (Obama like in the first days; also no explicit byline) notes how surprisingly sprightly Obama appeared before the assembled Congress (“with a rediscovered insolence and combativeness”), just like in the old days, oh so long ago, when he was eating John McCain’s lunch on the campaign trail. This writer also issues a fitting, if cynical summary of the president’s economic message: focus on jobs this year (an election year); focus on reducing the deficit only the year after that.

For its part, the conservative paper Le Figaro contributes a lengthy review of Obama’s SOTU speech from its Washington correspondent, Laure Mandeville (Employment, Obama’s priority for 2010). I’m pretty sure “Laure” is a French woman’s name, for Ms. Mandeville not only mentions Barack’s feistiness (“more resolute and offensive than ever”) but also gets in a reference to Michelle’s couture (she was wearing a jupe bouffant violine – some sort of fancy skirt). At the same time, she captures well the lecturing, lightly-scolding tone prevalent especially in his speech’s second half, and directed largely at the Republican opposition, reflecting his greater theme of “we [i.e. the country] just can’t go on like this!”

Bonus: The judgment on Obama’s SOTU speech is also out from the foremost Danish expert on American affairs, Prof. Niels Bjerre-Poulsen of the Copenhagen Business School (as reported by Ritzau, so it’s pretty much the representative Danish journalistic view; actually published in this instance in the opinion newspaper Information). With this excellent speech, opines the good professor, Obama once again showed his strong side to the nation: that is, in speech-making, in this case in a tight situation and with many contradictory points to make. But the resulting goodwill will only last so long, and it takes much different political skills to translate such fancy words into concrete results. We still have to see if the president is similarly gifted with those latter.

What’s Chinese for “Starbucks”? Did you catch the news about how China is now the world’s biggest exporter in absolute terms, having recently eclipsed Germany? Or how the Middle Kingdom is very close – almost there, 9 out of 12 months last year – to passing the US as the world’s largest car market?

Now Isabelle de Foucaud of the French newspaper Le Figaro weighs in with another upcoming China milestone: The Chinese soon [to be] kings of consumption. “Soon,” but not really right away; her lede:

Chinese households are earning more and saving less. In consequence, Credit Suisse estimates that the Chinese could dethrone the United States at the first world-rank of consumption around 2020.

Yes, this pronouncement is based upon a survey that Credit Suisse recently did towards the end of last year among 2,700 respondents in eight major Chinese cities. In particular, this showed that Chinese personal saving rates have fallen from 26% in 2004 to 12% last year.

Where does all that newly-free income go? For now, the report says, it’s going to real estate and to cars, but it’s also starting to go into consumer goods, too. “The big international brands are rubbing their hands” in glee about this, writes De Foucaud, but they need to be careful: Chinese companies are getting ready to challenge foreign firms for these new consumers’ Yuan across-the-board, including in the high-tech and luxury sectors where up to now they have been absent.

From my reading of recent macroeconomic commentary, this increase in consumer spending is a quite healthy development towards “re-balancing” the recession-struck world economy, so it can’t come soon enough (indeed, in this perspective 2020 looks rather too far off). On the other hand, the strong economic growth that is behind these developments is also making China more into a nation of “haves” and “have-nots,” i.e. with top-earners enjoying much more income growth than the rest, and this itself is a dangerous development in traditionally-egalitarian Chinese society.

“Cold enough for you?” I know: a trite thing to say. Everyone knows already that it’s cold: Europe, North America, Asia. Better if someone could tell us why, and what we can do about it!

Comes now Pierre Le Hir, writing in Le Monde, with a bit of explanation (Why the Northern Hemisphere suffers under cold waves). According to his account, this winter’s extraordinary cold is the product of one key variable, together with another aggravating factor. That variable is NAO, or North Atlantic oscillation, which is the weather-pattern determined by the intensities of the low-pressure center usually somewhere around Iceland and the high-pressure center usually around the Azores. If NAO is positive, then winds coming into Europe carrying warmth stored by the Atlantic are strong, resulting in a mild winter; if it’s negative, they are weak, resulting in cold.

Naturally, right now NAO is negative. Then there is that aggravating factor, of which you have heard before: El Niño, defined as abnormally-high surface-water temperatures in the Pacific. Starting from last summer the El Niño phenomenon has been elsewhere than where it usually is found (more mid-Pacific than near to the South American coast). This helps to make things yet colder in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in North America. In fact, author Le Hir reports that the weather establishment still does not regard the cold experienced so far this winter in Europe to be particularly outside of the realm of expectation – for all of the deaths (22 in the UK) and various disruptions to transport in France and some other countries that the article goes on to list.

Oh, and as to that second point: We can’t do anything about it.

Get ready for more trouble on the European Muslim-relations front: Le Monde reports today that one French legislator, Jean-François Copé, has expressed his intention to introduce legislation forbidding the wearing of a veil in “places open to the public,” to be punished by a hefty €750 fine, also applicable to people “who oblige a women to wear a full veil”. He proposes this in an interview to appear in the issue of the right-wing magazine Le Figaro to be published over the coming weekend; Le Monde has simply managed to blow the whistle early on what is presumably the most news-worthy component of that piece.

This matters because Copé is head of the group of parliamentarians in the French National Assembly that belong to the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) which is also President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party – and because it would seem that the European political scene could use a break from this sort of measure in the wake of the referendum in Switzerland last November that forbade the building of minarets there. Strangely, in his interview Copé also mentions that his proposed law would incorporate “a period for dialogue of six months between the date of application of the law and the date of promulgation to permit a phase for discussion and mediation with the concerned persons.” That seems a strange way to proceed – legislate first, discuss later – and is unlikely to salve the feelings of the Muslim inhabitants of the country against whom this law clearly is aimed.

I first caught sight of this news-piece from an on-line article in L’Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party. I know, sad but true – but L’Humanité to me is nothing more than just another entry in my “France” RSS feed, I swear! And anyway, somehow the same thing has also been covered on-line on the Fox News site (but not more mainstream sources, like the Washington Post or even the New York Times), working from a Reuters report (which the Fox editors actually kept strictly factual – no vituperations against the President here at all!). Anyway, it seems that President Obama took advantage of the meeting he had in the Oval Office with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, prime minister of Spain, on 13 October to ask him to tell his foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, to pass along a personal message to Cuba – actually, to “the Cuban authorities.” The message was basically that the US was working to improve relations with the island-nation, but “if they don’t take steps too, it’s going to be very hard for us to continue.”

Perusing L’Humanité will further inform you – as looking at the Fox News article will not – that the paper that originally broke this story, appropriately enough, was Spain’s El País. So let’s go there and take a look: we can also handle the Spanish beat here on EuroSavant, though we don’t do it often. (more…)

One noteworthy French media institution which I don’t deal with at all on this site is the Chained Duck, or Le Canard Enchaîné, a “satirical weekly” newspaper that comes out each Wednesday, and which has a long history going back to 1915. I don’t deal with it partly because its unique brand of journalism – similar to the late-lamented British magazine Punch, but with even more of a political bite – by its very nature is highly idiomatic, but mainly because its website indeed looks much like you would expect a website to have looked like in 1915, if there had been websites then.

To some extent that publication’s non-approachability is a shame, because its reporters do perform some serious journalism (before twisting it up in the house humor-style) and achieve scoops. Fortunately, no less than France’s own “grey lady” of journalism, Le Monde, considered Le Canard’s latest revelation to be worth taking up and passing along on its own pages (When the Elysée practices piracy).

First off, you need to know that the Elysée Palace is where the President of the French Republic lives, so that these days Elysée basically means “Nicolas Sarkozy” the way “White House” means “Barack Obama.” And it does seem that Président Sarkozy has engaging in a bit of piracy lately, or at least his people have. A documentary was shown on French television this past summer about him (actually, the evening before Bastille Day); it was part of a series called À visage découvert, or “With discovered face,” produced by Galaxie Presse. He must have liked it, because his office shortly thereafter asked Galaxie Presse to send along fifty DVD copies of the show for them to distribute further. It turned out, however, that they ended up distributing at least 400, and each such DVD carried the mark not of Galaxie Presse, but rather the seal of the President of the Republic along with the accompanying highly-ironic and minatory text “Audio-visual service of the president of the Republic – All rights reserved (photos and video).”

Further investigation by Canard reporters revealed that the Director of Galaxie Presse, Michel Rager, certainly had never been informed of the Elysée’s intentions to play a bit of a “loafs-and-fishes” game with the original fifty DVDs his company had provided – for free. The real point here, of course, is that France in recent years has taken the lead within Europe in instituting legal penalties against the illegal downloading and copying of digital materials; as the reaction from reader “Pirate” that Le Monde puts off to the right side of this piece points out, the illegal-copying action of the president’s office is supposed to bring criminal penalties of up to three years in jail and a €300,000 fine. The word “hypocrisy” in French, by the way, is easy enough for anyone to remember: hypocrisie.

We all know about surveillance cameras (a.k.a. CCTV, or closed-circuit television). They’re supposed to protect us against crime, but they have a big problem: no one is really watching them, most of the time. That means that, at best, such cameras may have value after-the-fact in providing recorded video evidence (for submission to a trial, say), but do little to alert people when a crime is being committed or to send immediate help – or indeed, some reports say, even to deter crime.

All this notwithstanding, the UK is the world’s CCTV paradise, with by some accounts 1.5 million cameras in operation in various public spaces there. The problem remains of monitoring all those cameras sufficiently to be able to fully draw on the technology’s supposed benefits. Doing that with computers is one technique that is coming along, one that supposedly is not the answer yet, although doubtless it will be soon. In the meantime, articles in both Le Monde (Yoyeurism rewarded in Great Britain) and in the Nouvel Observateur (One society proposes to reward informants) have now drawn their respective readerships’ attention to a new private initiative in the UK called Internet Eyes (“Catch a criminal online”; “Become a Viewer for FREE”), where the essential idea is to get volunteers to watch these cameras, through the Internet, in the hopes of spotting crime as it happens and alerting the authorities for a cash reward. Go on and click through to check out the site: just like that girl you see there, you could soon be sitting back in the evening on your coach, relaxing with your laptop as you scan for criminals! Note in particular that, listed just below the heading “Typical event notifications include:” is “Anti social [sic] behavior” – defined by whom?

Anyway, any of you who are interested can simply head to this piece in the (London) Times to read a more lengthy treatment, in English of course, with many more details (including the assertion in the picture-caption up top that Britain in fact has 4.2 million CCTV cameras operational). The French input to all this is simply that those two publications from the Continent tipped me off to this story to begin with. Indeed, I’m otherwise rather disappointed in them for what is really in both cases a spare, “just the facts” treatment of Internet Eyes – the only hint of opinion comes in each article’s title – when you really would expect more contemplation of what this all means from the mainstream press of such a philosophically-inclined and intellectual land.

(Gee, you’re right: I’m more-or-less guilty of the same offense, including saving my most intense opinionating for this post’s title. I can only respond that I still don’t know what to think about it all. I do really hate the CCTV cameras, but then again, examination of that Wikipedia page about them started me contemplating the 1993 murder of that two-year-old Liverpool boy by two ten-year-olds, a crime that leaned heavily on CCTV footage for its solution.)

After French/Polish director Roman Polanski’s arrest last Saturday night as he was trying to enter Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival where he would accept an award, the first public reactions from his countries of citizenship expressed outrage. More substantively, both the French and Polish foreign ministers issued a joint appeal to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to intervene, which she declined to do.

Now almost a week after the fact, however, attitudes seem to be changing about the case, to Polanski’s detriment. Jan Cienski of the Global Post has a pretty good summary of how that is occuring in Poland, while Doreen Carvajal and Michael Cieply of the New York Times posit the same development in France. (The NYT editors themselves take up the attitude to the case that seems to prevail throughout the American continent: Polanski must be returned to the US to face justice.)

A trip through the on-line French press does turn up indications that the tide has turned against the Oscar-winning director. (more…)

Once again Asia/Oceania has been hit by a devastating tsunami, or killer tidal-wave series. This time it was Samoa and American Samoa that were afflicted (as well as other neighboring islands, such as Tonga), and it looks like no one was able to be warned in time about what was coming from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.

It’s all very bad, but at least the devastation wasn’t as widespread as at the time of the last big tsunami emergency, that one that hit India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia shortly after Christmas back in 2004, right? Actually, there have been a number of other tsunamis since then, and a helpful article from the French newsmagazine Le Point provides a handy list (and reveals the interesting fact – interesting to me, anyway – that the French term for this disastrous phenomenon is raz-de-marée, which they also use for “landslide” in the political sense):

• Indonesia, 17 July 2006: An undersea earthquake creates a tsunami that hits the southern coast of Java and kills 654.
  
• Samoa (again!), 28 September 2006: Only a “light tsunami” this time, no word of any casualties.
  
• Russia, Japan, and USA, 15 November 2006: An underwater earthquake among the Kuril Islands (northeast of Japan, administered by Russia) causes a tsunami that hits the northernmost major Japanese island of Hokkaido. It’s a weak one, though, although apparently at the same time strong enough to go clear across the Pacific to cause some seaside damage at Crescent City, CA (just under the Oregon border).
  
• Solomon Islands, 2 April 2007: Three coastal villages devastated, 52 people killed when a tsunami hits the westernmost of the Solomon Islands.
  
• Japan, 11 August 2009 (just last month!): A tsunami hits “the center of Japan,” so presumably the main island of Honshu, but it’s a light one and only a few people are lightly hurt.

And then there’s yesterday’s serious incident around Samoa. I suppose the lesson is that, if you live anywhere near Southeast Asia (even in Crescent City, CA), you had better stay tuned in on-line to that Pacific Tsunami Warning Center website, but still keep your surfboard handy and/or your running-shoes on your feet for when the waves turn out to move faster than the warning.

Readers of this weblog – a smallish, hard-core elite, to be sure, but we’re trying to do something about that – will have known the news already, but last Thursday President Obama came out in public to announce that his administration did not intend to proceed with the planned deployment of anti-ICBM missiles to Poland and supporting radar to the Czech Republic. Reaction to the decision was swift and vociferous, both for and against, domestically and internationally. Presseurop has a good survey of that reaction in the Eastern European press, although I feel that it tends a slight bit too much to the alarmist side. It seems many of those newspaper headline-writers have forgotten how fundamentally unpopular the American deployment was among ordinary Czechs and Poles; in this light, Obama’s cancellation of the program per se is not so regretable, but rather the considerable trouble both governments had to take to gain the political approval for their participation, now all achieved for nothing.

Not to worry, though, because French president Nicolas Sarkozy praised Obama’s move as an “excellent decision,” and the editors at Le Monde make it clear that they agree (Hand extended). Yes, the proposed deployment was going to be expensive, for a weapons system about which there remained significant doubts that it ever would actually be able to do what was designed for. But don’t forget the diplomatic dividends, either, Le Monde reminds us. These mainly involve Iran, which is supposed to start multilateral talks with a range of western countries starting on October 1; Obama’s action sends them a message of “good will and realism.” And Russia? Obama’s gesture was directed there to an even greater extent, but Le Monde’s editors unfortunately do not expect to see any corresponding gesture from the Kremlin anytime soon.

By the way, mention should also be made of the announcement by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, noted in Le Monde’s news coverage of the American announcement, that the “SM-3″ missiles which are now to be the replacement anti-missile system will be deployed in turn from 2015 in Poland and the Czech Republic. First of all, that is a bit over-determined: mainstream US news reports put it instead that deployment of those missiles to those countries is but a possibility. And that’s a good thing, too: recall that the original ten defensive rockets that were to be intalled in Poland were designed to counter Iranian missiles of intercontinental range. Poland presumably is a good spot to deploy those – just take a string to your globe to check out the great circle route from Iran to the USA – but that is probably not also the case for defense against the short- and medium-range missiles which are now assumed to be the only Iranian threat for many years to come. In light of this, these suggestions that Warsaw and Prague will eventually get their missiles after all have to be regarded as sheer political bull-headedness – “We won’t let anyone tell us we can’t station missiles in Eastern Europe!” – rather than anything based on considerations of military effectiveness.

Obama gave his big Health Care speech to a joint session of the US Congress early this morning (Central European Time). Let’s take a look at some material about that from the national press of France, the country which, it is widely admitted, has much to teach the Americans about how to run a national health care system.

We first need to consult the French paper-of-record, and that is still Le Monde, which provides initial coverage in a piece jointly credited to it, the AFP news agency, and Reuters (Obama’s big oral exam on health) and put on-line only a couple of hours after the event itself. Graphically, the article stands out due to the two YouTube videos embedded within it, which feature no dubbing or subtitles or any other concessions to French-only readers but which of course include that electric passage when the president was loudly heckled (Vous mentez!, he shouted – or would have, in French, if he had had any bit of class) by South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson. The main insights of note here come at the very beginning – Barack Obama joue le tout pour le tout, or “Barack Obama is going all-in,” in poker-speak – and at the end: the piece remarks that Obama knows he needs to achieve something this year, as it will be even harder to do so next year, an election year. (more…)

She’s known mainly for being ultra-polite and proper, God bless her, but even Queen Elizabeth II reached the point at the end of last year when she couldn’t restrain herself anymore from asking, while visiting the London School of Economics, “How could no one have foreseen it?” “It,” of course, was the catastrophic banking/financial breakdown that had come to its terrifying climax the previous September – almost one year ago now – and plunged most of the world into grave economic troubles, her own sovereign realm definitely not excepted.

Putting Her Majesty’s query in another form, How did economists get it so wrong? Or, if you like: What were they thinking? Whichever way it is stated, the issue is no doubt a complicated one, not to mention rather embarrassing for that profession of economists from which one might still assume that the best answers might ultimately come. And by now they are coming: the previous two hyper-links, in fact, take you directly to major pieces on the evident failure of modern economics by Paul Krugman (in the New York Times Magazine) and by Francis Fukuyama (together with Seth Colby).

But all of that is in English and so readily accessible. (Well, you’re going to have to subscribe to The American Interest if you want to read all of the Fukuyama/Colby piece, but the Krugman is all there and is really a “must-read.”) For our EuroSavant purposes, let’s consider instead an analysis piece just out in the French newspaper-of-record Le Monde by editor-in-chief Frédéric Lemaître: The crisis puts back into question economists’ knowledge and status. (more…)

Today we go from yesterday’s discussion of the implications of the melting ice in the Arctic Sea to . . . the Arctic Sea. But hold on: the “Arctic Sea” I’m talking about this time is not the geographical area, but rather the freighter (Maltese-registered; Russian crew) which has recently been at the center of a bizarre tale, having been hijacked just off Sweden on July 24 and which then proceeded seemingly to traverse the English Channel (one of the more-crowded stretches of water in the world) undetected, only to finally be found and captured by Russian warships weeks later in the Atlantic, near the Cape Verde Islands off the West African coast. If needed, you can refresh your memory from this Reuters report, and you might also consider an additional Associated Press report about a “Russian maritime expert,” now having fled Russia for fear of his life, who raised the possibility that the ship’s cargo could very well have included things a bit more interesting than just the Finnish wood listed on the manifest – like maybe weapons, for example. (more…)