For your information, the tenth (sorry: “X”) Winter Paralympics begin today, also in Vancouver, Canada. Here’s the homepage. (By the way, if you do take a look and your eye happens to catch the headline to this article about the Torch Relay – actually, a YouTube video – be careful not to misinterpret: they’re not getting squeamish about the Relay, rather, the article is about the Relay reaching the town of Squamish, British Columbia.)

To mark the occasion, the German paper Handelsblatt features on its website this interview by a reporter from some Sports Information Service (German abbreviation SID) with the President of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC), the Briton Sir Philip Craven – who is apparently disabled himself, traveling around in a wheelchair, and also a past paralympic athlete of some note. By and large the transcript is rather humdrum – e.g. how did Sir Philip like the just-concluded Winter Olympics, which nation’s team does he expect to win the most medals at the Paralympic Games, and the like. But one exchange does stand out for me:

SID: “Turin 2006 [i.e. the last Paralympics] had no doping-cases. Do you think this will be different this time?”

Craven: “I hope not. We’re working together very closely with the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada)and continue to emphasize the educational aspect of this work. And it’s clear: If there should be cheaters, they’ll be caught and punished.”

I get it: There will probably be no doping-cheaters turning up at these Paralympic Games. And I have to say that I’m rather relieved to learn that.

One other thing: at the end of the interview the two discuss the recent application made by some snowboarding federation for snowboarding to become an official paralympic sport. Can somebody please explain (or draw a diagram) how paralympic snowboarding is supposed to work? If you e-mail me something, I promise I’ll add it to this post as an Update, with credit to you.

The memoirs of Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s supposed “Brain,” are now out. (Sigh . . . yes, I give you the link there to Amazon, even though they gravely miscategorized the work by not filing it under “fiction.”) The European reaction to this event is so far disappointing, in terms of any demonstrated willingness to call out pure hooey, bunk, baloney, poppycock for what it is, using any equivalent term in the local language.

We do have at least a start, with Marcus Ziener in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt of all places (The president’s eternal string-puller). He zeroes in (as does Rove in his book, apparently) on the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina – two of the George W. Bush administration’s biggest blunders, but not to hear Rove tell it. No, they were just unfortunate misunderstandings. Bush’s “Heck of a job, Brownie!” was nothing more than a gesture of morale support to a staff-member under pressure. And as for Iraq, the President was certain Saddam had WMD – he certainly would not have invaded the country at all had he known that he didn’t.

Up in his piece’s lede, Ziener makes the rather obvious observation that, with this book and the new publicity tour designed to sell it, Bush’s former leading political strategist is out to rehabilitate not only the reputation of the president he served, but also his own. Actually, it probably goes rather beyond that: when it comes to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rove (along with some other involved officials, especially former VP Dick Cheney) apparently feels the need to take some pre-emptive action to ward off a potential criminal indictment for conspiracy to torture – a crime against humanity all of us can recognize when we see it, and contrary both to the Geneva Conventions and US law. This lashing-out is what we see in his statement yesterday to the BBC in which he asserted he was even “proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists.” (You can click the video on that BBC page to hear the words come out of “Turdblossom’s” very mouth; for me, hearing his voice this morning was all I needed to quickly switch to some other radio station.)

And again, reaction in the European press is disappointing so far. (Of course, less time has elapsed since Rove went on the BBC.) What there is, is generally just a straight transmission of his remarks, suitably translated. At least we do have Lidové noviny of the Czech Republic (Waterboarding is not torture, assets former Bush advisor). Yes, the report itself (from the Czech news agency CTK) just passes on what Rove has to say. But some on-line editorial assistant has also shrewdly inserted counterpoint in the form of a brief YouTube video about waterboarding from Amnesty International. (Check it out, if you want: it’s not so very shocking, even as it makes the point.)

UPDATE: Look, I don’t intend to touch Rove’s book with a ten-foot pole. But if you’re interested, I do have to admit that it’s still available from Amazon (at that link I gave you at the top of the post) for $16.50 with free shipping and mishandling (h/t to late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon).

More on the Greek debt crisis from Naked Capitalism: German Paper Says AIG May Have Sold CDS on Greece. That German paper would be the excellent business-sheet Handelsblatt, and the full translation of the article into English which that blog’s proprietor requests in her post follows after the jump.

UPDATE: Correction! Looking at that original German piece, it clearly comes originally from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or FAZ – often called Germany’s own New York Times. I have noticed before how the two papers clearly have an arrangement allowing Handelsblatt to reprint certain FAZ material. Credit where it is due . . .
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There’s a fairly informative update on the situation in earthquake-struck Haiti now on the Handelsblatt site (although the piece is credited to the German press agency dpa). The headline-fact is indeed in the article’s headline: One million orphans in Haiti.

That one million figure is from a report from the EU Commission that was issued yesterday. Still, it’s also worthwhile here to go beyond the headline to look at the “fine print.” Haiti actually had around 386,000 orphans even before the quake struck last January 12, and the “one million” here also includes those who the authorities think have simply been separated from their parent(s) by events. And actually, the kidnapping of children for nefarious purposes (including being sold into slavery somewhere else) has long been a problem there; the chaos in the earthquake’s aftermath has only made it much worse.

On the bright side (and it’s a bright side that we need after that previous paragraph), UNICEF has announced that it is setting about immunizing 700,000 Haitian children against measles, diptheria, tetanus, and whooping cough. Also, as you probably have already heard, around 100 top pop-artists of past and present have gotten together to record a new version of “We Are the World,” with proceeds to go to Haitian relief, and the resulting single will be unveiled on the occasion of the Vancouver Winter Olympics opening ceremonies on February 12. But you may not know – because you probably didn’t notice – how everything came together so quickly to get that single made. That project, under the direction of legendary producer Quincy Jones, has actually been months in planning – not because someone was particularly clairvoyant about the disaster about to come, but because it was originally intended as a fund-raiser to help Africa, just like the original one back in 1985.

Sorry, I’ve got to end up with some more bad news from the Handelsblatt/dpa article: A French geologist, working in the US at Purdue University, recently went on the airwaves of the Haitian broadcaster RFM to warn that “[n]obody should be lulled into a false security”: he says yet another quake hitting that region is likely in the near future, with a Richter-scale strength of up to 5.5.

What’s going on with the Swedish automobile manufacturer Saab (owned by General Motors since 1989)? Is it to die, or not? Not even the correspondent for the esteemed German business newspaper Handelsblatt, Harold Steuer, can quite figure out what is going on, but he does give that his best try (The tangled game around Saab continues).

If you haven’t been keeping track, Saab is supposedly in line to die because GM is ready to pull the plug and shut it down: the mother company announced last Friday that it was ready to begin Saab’s “orderly wind-down” and named some liquidaton-partners it expects to hire to help with that. But not so fast: cars are still being produced at the plant in Trollhättan! They are new models, even! What is more, a take-over offer from the Dutch sports car-maker Spyker (actually, that company’s third such offer) was put forward last Friday. There is a similar offer outstanding from a consortium of the investment company Genii Capital (based in Luxembourg) and Formula 1 head Bernie Ecclestone, and also one from yet another consortium that includes former Swedish politician Jan Nygren and the former head of the German truck-maker MAN, Håkan Samuelsson. And GM has made it clear that it is still open to considering all such offers.

The union representing Saab workers are furious at the resulting uncertainty about the company’s future, calling the company’s behavior “inconsistent and shocking.” And then there’s a further rumor Steuer reports of Saab moving a factory to China to produce there the new 9-5 model and/or Buicks directly on behalf of General Motors.

What to believe, if anything? Steuer makes the sensible observation that the best thing to believe is the fact-on-the-ground, namely that a new model (namely that “9-5″ – maybe there even are plans to hire Dolly Parton as advertising spokeswoman?) is now starting production. So GM probably does not in fact plan to allow the company to shut down entirely just yet.

Rolf Benders has a interesting article today in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt (“Wall Street’s old rules”) that points out something important which nonetheless few of us (including certainly myself) have realized: this “Great Recession” that kicked off in 2007 has wreaked pure havoc on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

That is of course the mostly widely-watched stock exchange index, which additionally serves as the basis of numerous index funds as well as derivatives traded on the Chicago exchanges. But lately, as Benders points out, it has been all messed up. Those that determine the make-up of the elite 30 companies that make up the Dow don’t like to change that very often; there have been only 27 changes since 1976, and no changes made at all in the periods Nov. 1999 – Apr. 2004 and Nov. 2005 – Feb. 2008. But such stability also can be bad: it’s only recently that GM, AIG, and Citigroup were removed from the Index, i.e. long after it was clear in all three cases that catastrophic misfortune (to give a charitable interpretation) together with substantial government intervention were making any objective valuation of their outstanding stock’s value impossible. GM had been part of the Dow since 1923; now the only company left of the original 12 (from the beginning in 1896) is General Electric, which itself is not doing so well these days either. (The three kicked-out were replaced by Kraft Foods, Cisco, and Travellers Corp.)

The Index is too volatile; it’s not volatile enough; but forget all that, boiled down to its essence Benders’ complaint against the Dow is simply that it is composed according to the decisions of the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal. Here he has his own agenda, which is precisely to talk down the Dow and so talk up the DAX (or Deutscher Aktien IndeX, essentially the “Dow” or blue-chip index for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange). It’s true that the latter has had its composition changed 29 times already since it was created in 1988, so Benders is willing to call it “shameless” (schnöde) – but it’s at least also put together in a transparent way,* unlike the Dow which remains subject to the opaque and arbitrary whims of one particular editor.

Anyone in the know about the American securities markets has long known anyway that the Dow Jones Industrial Average inevitably gives a distorted picture of the state of the securities markets there. But Benders is living in his own fantasy-land – the one clearly marked “Off limits!” for serious business reporters of all stripes, German or otherwise – if he really believes that the DAX will take over the Dow’s place anytime soon as a closely-watched indicator. This issue transcends mere questions of the validity of one index’s composition versus another’s, in favor of larger issues like the world-wide impact of one country’s securities markets versus another’s. Ground-shifting changes along those lines in the future can certainly not be ruled out – no more than anyone should bet that the US dollar will remain the world’s reserve currency forever – but minor objections over one index’s “transparentness” versus that of some other index will hardly be the way that we all get there.

* Benders doesn’t specify in his article how the DAX is “more transparent,” but the claim is probably valid since it is automatically calculated from the current share-prices of whichever happen to be the 30 largest German companies in terms of order book volume and market capitalization.

For all the anticipation over the first official meeting, coming up on Monday, between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, there’s another very important event for the MidEast peace process starting today, in Cairo, that seems to be under the radar of most of the press. But not that of the German business newspaper Handelsblatt; it has put out a commentary (Why the Palestinians cannot unite), by one Abdel Mottaleb El Husseini, a free-lance journalist, on the conclave scheduled in Egypt between representatives of the two main organizations claiming to represent Palestinian interests, namely Fatah (of the West Bank, headquartered in Ramallah) and Hamas (of Gaza). (more…)

Now that all indications are that General Motors is heading for its own bankruptcy at the end of this month, in whatever specific form, this raises the question of what is to become of that firm’s several European subsidiaries, basically Opel in Germany, Saab in Sweden, and Vauxhall in the UK. As you would expect, there is widespread coverage of this issue in the German press. Particularly interesting treatments about the latest developments in the search for a solution are from Handelsblatt (GM pressures for nationalization of Opel) and Die Zeit (USA pressures Germany towards Opel nationalization). (more…)

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

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

It’s all a bit bizarre: Here at EuroSavant we consider the Economist’s on-site blog Certain Ideas of Europe to be something of a watered-down competitor, in that its (anonymous) writers evidently command a few European languages themselves and take advantage of that often to remark upon noteworthy articles in the European press (really only the French and the German). Yet in its own day-after Obama-Berlin coverage, what else does Certain Ideas of Europe choose to highlight out of reaction to Obama’s Berlin speech from the German Fourth Estate than a breathless piece from the Bild Zeitung (Britons: think The Sun; Americans: maybe The New York Post but – as we’ll see – with a bit greater tolerance for female nudity.) The blog entry is entitled Obama and the ‘BILD girl’. Wow – 27-year-old Bild reporter Judith Bonesky (stifle the puns!) finds herself together in the gym of the Ritz Carlton hotel with HIM! Oh, he’s much taller than she had expected! They exchange some “How are you?”s! Then he goes and starts hefting some impressively-big weights, in such a manly fashion, without breaking a sweat! Naturally, when it’s time for him to go (he’s got a speech to deliver), she grabs her chance for a smugshot with the candidate. (more…)

A great article-find for this day of the first Bush-Kerry debate! As the German newspaper Handelsblatt’s Gerald Seib puts it in the title of the latest contribution to his “American View” commentary series: How Can Anyone Vote for Bush? (more…)

On Thursday the new European Union Commission President José Manuel Barroso unveiled his scheme for dividing Commission portfolios among the commissioners named by the other 24 EU member-states (other than his own Portugal, that is). Not only did he do this a full two weeks before the deadline he himself had promised for presenting his portfolio distribution, by most accounts he did a rather good job with his decisions of whom to put where. As the Financial Times Deutschland put it, he rather skillfully reconciled the different goals of “fulfilling a wish for everyone, yet remaining the chief at the center, all while forming a competent team.”

German Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder (currently visiting Romania, among other reasons to visit for the first time the grave of his father, killed there in the Second World War), for one, is happy with what Barroso has come up with. This is despite the new Commission President’s evident shunting aside of pressures by the Union’s bigger countries to name a “supercommissioner” in charge of industry and economic affairs, i.e. one with authority over other commissioners. The Germans particularly thought that that would be appropriate for their own commissioner, Günter Verheugen, but it didn’t happen – or did it? This question constitutes the core of most German press coverage of the new Commission roster. (more…)

It looks like I’m on something of a German roll here – but maybe that’s OK, since I noticed that articles from the German press tended to get short shrift in EuroSavant recently. (For instance, click the category for Germany to the left and see what’s there for the month of July.) In any case, who could resist a headline like “Germany Must Become More American” (free registration required)? (more…)

You might not have heard about this; after all, it has nothing to do with Boston or John Kerry’s nomination, or his speech, or the Republican reaction. But other parts of the world do continue to have their own concerns. Believe it or not, in some cases these still involve the Second World War, for which 2004 contains the sixtieth anniversary of various of its events. In particular, Sunday was the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 against the Nazi occupation, and German Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder paid a visit to Warsaw to participate in the ceremonies. (more…)

John Kerry delivered his acceptance speech last Thursday night to bring the Democratic National Convention to its culmination, and the German press was certainly paying attention. But this should have been no surprise to readers of the Economist (subscription required), which this week reminds us how Germans massively dislike George W. Bush, and so are presumably very interested in the personality and prospects of the alternative candidate who can send him packing to Crawford, Texas. (That Economist article, unfortunately, also dwells on Germans’ current dislike for the US generally – but, like the country or not, they surely cannot be under the delusion that the result of November’s presidential election has no impact on them.)

Unfortunately, most of the articles I surveyed in the German press covering Kerry’s acceptance speech were happy to limit themselves to a mere “translation function,” i.e. explaining to their readers what Kerry said. Most disappointing was such a “translator” article in Die Zeit (Kerry Wants to Restore the USA’s Prestige), from which we ordinarily can expect better – and that article itself was borrowed from the German business newspaper Handelsblatt. EuroSavant readers presumably had plenty of opportunity to read in English what Kerry said, if they didn’t already see the speech on TV live, so such articles are not so useful.

Handelsblatt wisely chose to keep its higher value-added materials for itself, though, as we can see from its editorial on Kerry’s speech (Bridge-Builder Kerry) from correspondent Michael Backfisch. (more…)

Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan . . . yes, you remember that we also fought a war there, in late 2001 against the Taliban, mainly because they were sheltering Osama bin-Laden and his Al-Qaida organization and refused to give him up. To keep order in that war-torn and fragmented country, and to give its central adminstration headed by “Transitional Chairman” Hamid Karzai a chance to get started with rebuilding, since December, 2001, there has been a so-called International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) there, mainly in the capital city Kabul and surroundings. (more…)