Alas, it had to happen. You know how it goes, when an attractive American woman suddenly comes into prominence . . .

Yes, that’s right: Hugh Hefner wants Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin to pose for Playboy. Somewhat bizarrely, this tidbit of news comes up in two Flemish newspapers: in the leading newspaper-of-record De Standaard and in Het Nieuwsblad – as well as in OK! magazine, the American celebrity-rag to which Hefner originally contributed his comments. These include (translated back from the Dutch) “I can’t describe it exactly, but a beautiful woman with glasses simply has something special.” The Flemish publications dutifully mention to their readers that Palin finished second in the 1984 Miss Alaska competition, but I think most of us already knew that, having been reminded most forcefully by the recent surfacing on YouTube of Palin’s swimsuit-competition promenade during that event.

Note: The text about this in both Flemish newspapers turns out to be identical. However, it might be intriguing to note that De Standaard puts it in its Beroemd en Bizar section (“Famous and Bizarre”), while Het Nieuwsblad files it under “Glam & Gossip” (in English).

The impact of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s recent interview with CBS’ Katie Couric – widely considered to have been a disaster, even within GOP ranks – seems not yet to have been felt over on this side of the Atlantic. (Or – who knows? – perhaps some of those answers she gave that were judged incoherent at the time actually do make some sense when translated into other languages.) Rather, judging from the weight of press coverage, the media over here is fascinated instead with the YouTube video recently unearthed showing her in 2005 at the church she attended, Wasilla Assembly of God, standing by the pulpit to be blessed against “witchcraft” by a visiting Kenyan pastor named Thomas Muthee – a few months before she went on to win the Alaska governorship.

Black magic will not threaten Mrs. Palin is the headline of the leading Polish daily Rzeczpospolita (no byline given) (more…)

“Thank God for the crises. They have brought America’s presidential candidates closer to us than they would like.” That is the verdict of former Die Zeit US correspondent Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff on how the latest US financial crisis has let us all see Messrs. Obama and McCain, namely under pressure and with their hair down. That evaluation comes at the very end of his recent article (In the headlights of the crises), and the conclusions he draws, at least, rather differ from what one would ordinarily have been led to expect. (more…)

Financial disaster; terrorists; war: could we briefly change the channel here, to something a bit less world-shaking, a bit more ludicrous? Even if that means taking up for discussion a subject distinctly “out-of-season,” like Christmas in July . . .

. . . or the Eurovision Song Contest in September. That extravaganza happens every year like clockwork the third week of May, of course, and this weblog (if actively being written at the time) has always had something to say for the occasion – usually of a mocking nature, it must be admitted. My last treatment of the contest, however, in May of 2004, a post entitled “Eurovision Gerrymandering,” went beyond mere ridicule to point out the obvious voting-patterns evincing inter-country cooperation and log-rolling which was resulting in completely bogus, ridiculous, and incompetent acts coming out at or near the top simply because of their nationality.

But all is not lost! Finally there has been a change to the Eurovision voting rules that should help address this problem, pointed out last week in the Financial Times Deutschland by Stephan Radomsky (»Moscow Calling«). (more…)

The big news today is the Bush administration’s proposed $750 billion+ plan to address current turmoil in the US financial markets by giving the Treasury Department authority to purchase bank assets. Even as this is being written, hearings are taking place before the US Senate’s Banking Committee featuring the two main agents of the American government’s rescue plan, namely Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke.

As befits this blog’s name, though, we like to take a Euro or at least international perspective on things whenever we can, and there are certainly such angles to this story. In fact, the two I can detect are attractively symmetrical. On the one hand, Treasury Secretary Paulson announced that foreign-owned banks active in the US capital markets will also be eligible to exchange faltering financial assets for American cash via the proposed “bail-out” facility. On the other, administration officials are starting to look to foreign treasuries to contribute funds towards this bail-out.

As the New York Times reports today, that effort does not seem to be doing well in its early going. (more…)

The Danish business newspaper Børsen, while naturally covering tightly this week’s enormous travails in the American financial establishment, also has found at least some on-line pixel-space for one tertiary effect: there are some mighty interesting souvenirs coming on the market via eBay (Buy a piece of finance-history on eBay).

For instance? Consider the exquisite Lehman water-pitcher on offer: the seller comments “[Lehman] Administrative Director Dick Fuld told me that this pitcher cannot be smashed to pieces, but he also said that about our loan-business two months ago. Caveat emptor, I would say.” Bids started at 99¢ but later reached $20.50 for the item, the newspaper reports. Or you can also bid to become the proud owner of a Lehman-brand fire-safety hat (brand-sikkerhedshat). “Become the owner of a piece of financial history,” the seller implores.

Information is Denmark’s leading mainstream commentary newspaper, and now its writers have responded to the recent report of President Bush approving American military actions within Pakistan without any need for permission from or warning to the Pakistani authorities with a pair of analyses: USA moves the terror-war to Pakistan, by Graham Usher, and USA’s war against terror lies in ruins, by Martin Burcharth. (more…)

Eight years for marriage, that’s what the Belgian French-language paper La Dernière Heure wrote about in a recent article. No, that’s not the average duration of matrimony in Belgium, that’s as in a marriage for a girl of eight years of age, united in connubial bliss with a man in his fifties (Married at eight years? The judge “gives himself some time to reflect”). (more…)

On this seventh anniversary-day of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the top news-story is probably the joint appearance at Ground Zero by the two main US presidential candidates. In addition to whatever they may have to say, the occasion will be worth savoring for the all-too-temporary respite it should provide in the ugly partisanship that has prevailed as of late (e.g. the utterly-contrived “lipstick-on-a-pig” contretemps). I hope to be able to cover foreign observations of and reactions to that Ground Zero ceremony in this space sometime in the coming days.

For today, though, I think that it would be suitable to turn our attention to the supposed ultimate source of that al-Qaeda attack, and also the first target for retribution by US forces in its aftermath. That is of course Afghanistan, or specifically al-Qaeda as embedded within a Taliban host environment. Actually, putting it that way shifts the proper focus a slight bit from Afghani territory per se to the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan lying along the Afghani border. These are hardly “federally administered,” they are in fact a region completely out of the control of the Pakistani government, where various varieties of “neo-Taliban” and Muslim fundamentalist forces are based (including, it is thought, what is left of al-Qaeda), and from which these forces sally forth to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.
(more…)

Yes, today is that much-anticipated day when the $9 billion machine switches on at the facilities of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), located in the neighborhood of Geneva and the Swiss-French border: much-anticipated because of the insight the LHC is supposed to provide into the universe’s original “Big Bang,” but also because of the possibility that some scientists have pointed out that its atom-smashing risks creating a black hole that could suck in the Earth and turn it inside-out.

Except that today is really not LHC Day at all, as Lewis Page writing at The Register (motto: “Biting the hand that feeds IT”) steps in to point out, even making that message his piece’s title. (more…)

The Nouvel Observateur has an interesting report today: Survey: Obama the preferred candidate in 22 countries. “Twenty-two countries out of how many?” you may ask. Actually, that’s all the countries the BBC World Service ran this survey in: twenty-two of them, and among 22,531 respondents in all. (To be honest, I couldn’t find anything about this on the BBC World Service website, even though these results are supposed to be published today.) On average, 49% of respondents preferred Obama, while 12% preferred McCain (and yes, 39% had no opinion). Further, on average 46% of resondents thought that Obama’s election as president would help improve America’s relations with the rest of the world, while 20% thought that of McCain’s being elected.

I know: All that doesn’t matter a bit. America might get most of its oil from outside its borders; it might overwhelmingly be foreign money which funds the federal budget deficit, the debts (and therefore the continuing existence) of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and the countless other debt obligations of American private business and all levels of US government; but it doesn’t follow that there is any need for – as one colonial writer put it long ago – a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, or for any concern about improving America’s relations with the rest of the world.

(By the way, the maximum polling-difference between Obama and McCain that that BBC World Service recorded was 82% – in Kenya, of course. The minimum was 9%, in India.)

UPDATE: What’s more, opinion pieces like this one (in English, from The Guardian), which seem to bear the message “Elect Obama as your next president, or else!”, naturally can have no other effect (if indeed they are noticed at all) than to erode Obama’s support among American voters further. After all, as its writer Jonathan Freedland rightly points out, “that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the ‘candidate of Europe’ and making him seem less of a patriotic American.” Still, it is a viewpoint well worth checking out.

His “wonder-weapon”: that would be Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, whose personality dominated the Republican National Convention last week, and who apparently has much to do with the McCain campaign lately coming up neck-and-neck in the opinion polls with Obama.

That’s at least how Marc Pitzke, New York correspondent for Germany’s Der Spiegel, assesses the situation (Palin-effect turns forecasts on their head). He even maintains that the Obama campaign is now in Alarmstimmung – i.e. in a state of alarm – as the final, and toughest, 58-day period of electioneering up to November 4 gets underway. (First, however, there will be a brief non-partisan interlulde as both candidates appear on Thursday at New York City’s “Ground Zero” for a 9/11 anniversary commemoration.) (more…)

In the midst of all the fierce “anti-Eastern-elite” rhetoric issuing forth from this past week’s Republican National Convention, there she stood: Cindy McCain, wife of the Republican presidential candidate, in a series of designer-name outfits with matching bejeweled accessories, part of her recent fashion move to “crisper, more contemporary dresses with richer colors.”

The irony there was unmistakable, and I’m hardly the first or the only one to comment on it. But I’d prefer to bring up the more impartial judgment of Le Monde writer Corine Lesnes (that’s a woman’s name) and her article At the McCain’s, she’s the boss. (more…)

The “surge” has succeeded, we are all told. Iraq is now a much more peaceful place; the government of Nuri al-Maliki is now in good shape, they say, increasingly able to take over the task of providing internal security with its own native forces. But “they”? “They” is primarily those with an interest in pushing the image of a peaceable Iraq today as a way somehow (and finally!) to justify the expenditure of thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Americans wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars since March of 2003. In other words, “they” is namely the Bush administration, and also the McCain presidential campaign – and the credibility of at least the first of those has been running on empty for quite some time.

No, far better to seek a judgment on the current state of Iraq from experts with a higher quotient of objectivity. One long-standing authority is Juan Cole, professor at the University of Michigan and both Arabic- and Farsi-speaker, mainly through his weblog Informed Comment. He recently offered his own summing-up of where we are now: “The level of violence at this moment in Iraq is similar to what prevailed on average during one of the 20th century’s worst ethnic civil wars [the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990]! It is still higher than the casualty rates in Sri Lanka and Kashmir, two of the worst ongoing conflicts in the world.” On the other hand, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins has to know something about conditions in Iraq, from where he reported from 2004 to 2006. (He also has a book coming out soon about that, The Forever War.) In a recent e-mail interview (The Progress in Iraq is Remarkable) he asserts that much of the improvement of conditions in Iraq is “astonishing,” that “parts of [the country] are difficult for me recognize,” although “the calm is very fragile.”

A large part of the basis for optimism is the hand-over last Monday of responsibility for the security of Anbar province to the Iraqi government, which Filkins himself reported on for the NYT. This is also covered by Rainer Hermann of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (From sanctuary for terrorists to model province), who adds some telling details. (more…)

So Hurricane Gustav, while bad, was hardly as bad as first feared. That means that the Republican national convention is now back on, as of yesterday, at full force – or at least at as full a force as they can muster while belatedly and unexpectedly putting things back in motion for what is now a three-day assembly. Philippe Remarque is there on the scene in St. Paul, MN for De Volkskrant (a Dutch newspaper, of course; yes, Remarque may have an ultra-French name, but he’s a Dutch reporter), and reports (Republican convention: more whites, less dancing) that the contrast he finds there with last week’s Democratic convention in Denver is like night and day. (more…)

It looks like Tom-Jan Meeus, the US-based blogger for the Dutch Daily NRC Handelsblad, is closely following the on-going saga of John McCain’s vice-presidential pick – him along with just about every other US reporter with enough strength left to pick up a pen. Still, in his blog entry of yesterday (Three videos with Palin to keep) Meeus does fulfill a valuable “consolidation” role. You’ll find there not only the Vogue cover with the very flattering shot of the Alaskan governor (important note: it is not real, only Photoshopped) but also three embedded YouTube videos offering varied perspectives on her background. There is her address of earlier this year to the AIP (that’s the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party); an interview she did with a rather animated and self-important anchor for CNBC, in which she asserts that any investigation by the Alaska state legislature into her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan would be “cool” because she has “nothing to hide,” and lets slip her ignorance about just what it is that US vice-presidents do; and then an Anchorage local TV news segment from back in 1988 featuring sports anchor Sarah Heath, that lets you judge her sports-related enunciation and pronunciation abilities as well as her skills at reading off of an on-camera teleprompter.

Oh, Meeus also provides some good links to other on-line Palin stories. (For example: McCain Hires GOP Operative Who Helped Smear Him in South Carolina in 2000.) The articles linked to are always in English, but of course his description of the links is in Dutch.

Why are Russian forces presently still occupying big swathes of vital Georgian territory, seemingly in defiance of the cease-fire brokered by EU president Nicolas Sarkozy and signed by both the Russian and Georgian governments? (I say “seemingly,” because I’ve read reports that, in the negotiations leading up to that cease-fire agreement, the Russian side managed to have language inserted that gave them some leeway to keep hold of some of that territory if in their judgment it was necessary for use as a buffer for their defense of South Ossetia.) One possible reason, that Gazeta Wyborcza raises today (Russian Army not completely subordinate?), is that the Red Army might not have been completely under the control of its political masters during its incursion into Georgia.

This specter of a renegade Red Army is a scary one, particularly for Poles, although the Polish daily does not claim any original research here. Rather, the article is devoted to recasting into Polish a report on this subject from yesterday’s Financial Times – to which, if you’re interested, I’ll just let you switch over here since it’s written in good Queen’s (business) English. Highlights are the way the Russian troops kept going even after the cease-fire was signed (with the military brass ticked off that their leaders in the Kremlin would not let them finish the job, i.e. destroy the Georgian army), and how they even set about establishing a police force for the occupied Georgian city of Gori – not really a military force’s task, quite apart from it’s being a clear sign of intent to stay there for a while – before that political yank-on-the-leash finally came down and they were ordered to evacuate Gori (but only to positions just outside).

“Georgia – again?” Well, yes. What else would there be? The Republican National Convention? Coming up (we think). Sarah Palin? Not today, but definitely stay tuned on that one, it could turn spectacular. Hurricane Gustav? The European viewpoint there is probably not too interesting, even if we might be somewhat honored by the choice of that quintessentially (Central) European given name for bestowal on the storm. My best sense of the EU’s official position on Gustav – gathered from that extensive trawling through the various national presses that I do for you on a continual basis – is that it’s taken to be a bad thing, definitely.

Actually, developments on the Georgia story do keep on coming, especially if you take the unpleasantness there of last month (not at all unreasonably) as a proxy for the new Eurasian balance-of-power that conflict suddenly revealed to the world. Today is when the EU heads of government are due in Paris to meet on a European response (if any) to Russia’s recent behavior. Looking ahead last Friday, the Berlin correspondent for Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, Bartosz T. Wielinski, put forth a mostly pessimistic outlook on what could be accomplished (What the Union can do to Russia on Monday). (more…)