Iraq is over with now, basically; what with the elections that took place today, in a seemingly peaceful and successful manner, little remains for the US involvement there but a withdrawal of forces. But some of those forces, rather than heading home, will instead be diverted to Afghanistan, about which the Obama administration has made clear its intentions to devote on the order of an additional 30,000 American troops – both for the reinforcing effect they are expected to have there per se and as a gesture of increased commitment that can be used to cajole the NATO allies to increase their own contributions of men and matériel to that front.

But things may not necessarily follow that simple script. There is certainly resistance in Germany, for example, to the idea of sending any more of its soldiers to Afghanistan, or even to allow a redeployment of the ones that are already there to areas of the country where they could be more useful in suppressing the Taliban (and so where, by definition, they would be more exposed to actually taking casualties). As for the Danes, they do already have around 550 troops operating in the more-dangerous south part of the country and have suffered 22 killed-in-action since the Danish military’s initial deployment to Afghanistan in 2002. And now we encounter on the pages of Denmark’s leading commentary newspaper, Information, probably the Obama administration’s worst nightmare in this regard: an opinion-piece from a leading Danish writer asking “Why are we in Afghanistan?” (more…)

The leading French daily Le Monde today has a striking editorial, in the form of an open letter to Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, from the French writer Jean-Moïse Braitberg. That double first-name amounts to what in English would be “John-Moses,” so this is someone of the Jewish faith, in fact someone whose grandfather died in the gas chambers of Treblinka and of whom other relatives also perished during World War II in various other Nazi camps. The name of his late grandfather, Moshe Brajtberg, is even enshrined at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, but now M. Braitberg is publicly writing the Israeli president to have it removed. “I ask you to accede to my request, Mr. President, because what has happened in Gaza, and more generally the fate given to the Arab people of Palestine for sixty years, disqualifies Israel in my eyes as a center for the memory of the evil done to Jews and thereby to all of humanity.”

He goes on:

You see, since my childhood I have lived within an entourage of survivors from the death-camps. . . . It was necessary, they taught me, that these crimes never resume again; that never again could a man, due to his belonging to an ethnic group or religion despised by others, be scoffed at while trying to assert the most elementary rights such as a dignified life in safety, without being shackled but with the light, however distant, of a future of serenity and prosperity.

Nonetheless, all that M. Braitberg writes that he has seen from Israel over decades towards the Palestinians has been “violence, spilled blood, confinement, incessant controls, colonization, [and] despoiling.” But what about the rockets that Hamas incessantly launches at Israel? What about the suicide bombers? “What I will say to you is that my feelings of humanity do not vary according to the citizenship of the victims.”

Then further:

On the contrary, Mr. President, you guide the destinies of a country that claims not only to represent Jews collectively, but also the memory of those who were victims of Naziism. It’s that which concerns me, and which I find intolerable. By preserving at the memorial of Yad Vashem, at the heart of the Jewish State, the name of my nearest relatives, your State keeps my family-memory a prisoner behind the barbed-wire of Zionism to make it a hostage of a self-proclaimed moral authority that each day commits the abomination that is the denial of justice.

So he wants his grandfather’s name removed. It’s all fairly powerfully – and, of course, publicly – expressed, not that Israeli officials will bother to take any notice. Still, together with the new accusatory Internet meme – “The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany” – it is clear that Israel is harvesting the whirlwind that she sowed with her December attacks into Gaza.

Even amid the general euphoria last Election Day at the gaining of America’s highest office by an African-American, there was still a sprinkle of rain on that parade. (Here at €S we are always on the look-out for the rain on the parade!) Do you remember? It was right on November 5, the day after, that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev offered his own form of congratulations by announcing that Russia intended to deploy short-range missiles (presumably nuclear-capable) to Kaliningrad, that little piece of Russia lying on the Baltic Sea, to the West of Lithuania – and just to the North of Poland, where the US still has signed a treaty paving the way for it to install an anti-missile system, controlled by radar itself stationed within the Czech Republic. Russia has always been sore about that anti-missile system, apparently fearing that it is aimed against itself some way and/or that the deployment would hinder her own capability to sway/intimidate her former satellite states in Eastern Europe, so that this deployment to the Kaliningrad enclave threatened to become the start of a Cold War-like missiles confrontation.

Now a somewhat more reassuring word comes from Germany’s paper-of-record, the FAZ: Russia stops rocket-deployment in Kaliningrad. The article cites the Russian news-agency Interfax as quoting a unnamed member of the Russian General Staff to the effect that this step was taken “since the new American government seemingly is distancing itself from forcing through the setting-up of parts of the planned anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.” (more…)

The Polish daily Rzeczpospolita gave word yesterday: Israel prepares for Pope’s visit, due to occur in May.

You might ask, why wouldn’t Israel start preparing for a visit by Pope Benedict XVI if that is to come in May? Well, just to refresh your memory, just over the weekend the Pope withdrew the previous excommunications of four bishops, one of whom – a certain British-born Richard Williamson – is on record as recently as just last week as denying that millions of Jews were killed in the Nazi gas chambers.

And this is by no means the first incident tending to estrange world Jewry with the Vatican under Benedict XVI’s stewardship. For a couple of years now there has been a dispute over Pius XII, who was Pope during the Second World War. There have been indications from within the Roman Catholic Church that it would like to declare him a saint. On the other hand, his behavior during the war was at the least rather controversial, particularly when it came to his reluctance to take any steps (including mere public denunciations) in response to the reports he received, early and often, about Germany’s murderous actions towards Jews. And then, only earlier this month, the cardinal who is president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, a certain Cardinal Renato Martino, publicly termed the Gaza Strip a “big concentration camp” in the wake of the Israeli military offensive there. Now, this weblog is certainly willing to admit that Cardinal Martino’s characterization is probably accurate, but you can also see how it strikes the completely wrong tone with many partisans of Israel. And now it looks like the rabbis in Italy – the highest-profile rabbis when it comes to the Vatican – are withdrawing in protest from certain planned inter-faith celebrations.

If you are aware of this background, then it’s really somewhat surprising that the current Pope’s planned visit to Israel in the Spring is still on. Frankly, this pattern of recent events strongly suggests that there is yet more to come in this baleful syndrome of mutual alienation, so that betting on that visit to go through after all may still not be a wise thing to do. The shine might be off of it already for Benedict XVI; the highlight of John Paul II’s visit to Israel in 2000 was his visit to the famous Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, but Rzeczpospolita reports that the Yad Vashem Institute itself issued an outraged condemnation of Williamson’s return to the Vatican fold, so that same invitation may not be forthcoming in May.

Happy Australia Day, mate! It’s the down-under version of, say, the Fourth of July, and because of the topsy-turvy character of Southern Hemisphere seasons those characters down in Oz get to celebrate it in the same nice hot weather we Northerners usually get to celebrate the Fourth, Bastille Day, etc. Nonetheless, it’s perfectly possible to celebrate Australia Day here in Amsterdam (just not in anything even resembling warm weather) and I hope to be able to get away later on to do that.

Yet, as always, we like to be somewhat contrary here at EuroSavant, so that – even though this lies admittedly outside this weblog’s usual remit – I have below for your consideration an interesting video (English-language) I came across on Reuters. Check out the title. I know: it’s hard to believe. The mere thought of such a ban seems so very contrary to the associations we usually attach to the concept of “Australian,” no? But the brief interviews recorded on this clip should leave you with the impression that it all is but a tempest in a teapot. (“Tempest in a C-cup”?) And the beach footage is inspiring.

Anyway, this just gives me the excuse to try an embedded video, something this site has never tried before. Oh, and if you don’t get the reference in the title to “white pointers,” then you’re obviously just not Australian.

“I’m addicted to it,” President Obama reportedly told his interviewers on CNBC recently when they asked about his Blackberry. Still, could he be allowed to have it? The two presidents America has had so far during the Digital Age of e-mail and Internet – Clinton and Bush Jr. – famously had nothing to do while in office with e-mail and were never seen toting a mobile telephone. The concerns had to do both with the law (e.g. the obligation to preserve any written communications and the legal standing any messages might have) and with routine communications security.

On that latter point, at least, there might not be that much to worry about, according to a recent analysis in the German newsmagazine Focus (Blackberry security: The enemy in the telephone). The lede:

In contrast to his predecessors, US President Barack Obama may make use of a smartphone – but within strict limits. How insecure are Blackberry & Co.?

Not as insecure as you may fear, as it turns out, and that from German experience. As the article relates, back in June 2005 the auto-producer Audi decided to ban Blackberry use among its employees out of fears of industrial espionage by its competitors. The company was particularly concerned about the fact that all Blackberry e-mails are routed through the servers of RIM, the device’s Canadian manufacturer. But RIM was able to persuade Audi that this traffic was encrypted in such a way that even RIM itself could not break the code and read any messages – even if directed to do so by some government authority. Later, in response to a pronouncement by the German Office for Information Technology Security (in German, the BSI) that the Blackberry was too vulnerable for use by government officials who had to send secure communications, RIM managed to gain for its equipment a Common Criteria security certificate, basically meaning that a process of independent testing (presumably by the Standards Council of Canada) confirmed the Blackberry’s adherence to a very strict set of international security standards – strict enough, in fact, that Common Criteria certification was routinely recognized as good enough for any equipment to be allowed for German government use without further question. Late last year the prestigious German Fraunhofer [Research] Institute also was willing to certify the security of the Blackberry’s encryption, to a 24-million-year-before-cracking standard.

Alright, but what if the President loses his “Obamaberry”? (President Bush Jr. famously lost the watch off his wrist in an adoring crowd of Albanians, after all.) That’s also not really a problem; off-the-shelf commercial products are available today to mere-mortal users for powerfully encrypting the data on the machine, and no doubt US Government experts can take that at least one step further. (Plus, there is not supposed to be that much contact information on the machine in the first place, since it’s only supposed to be used for communication with engste Bekannte – “closest intimates.” Although I suppose Disney and various other youth-marketeers would love to get a direct line to Malia and Sasha.) The same considerations can be applied to the prospect of bugging, as well as spam and malware.

Here’s a solution for dealing with hard times, from Germany’s Die Zeit: Game of chance: Rush on Lotto-shops – 25 million euros has its attractions. The lede:

The prospect of winning the Lotto-jackpot of 25 million euros has led to a rush on the sales-points in many places in Germany. Lotto-players file through the tobacco-shops and Lotto-shops one-per-second.

The report comes from on-the-scene in Stuttgart, mainly because the last big German Lotto winner – picked up a €4 million prize last 20 December – came from there. To win that €25 million you have to get the seven numbers picked exactly right; if no one does that in four further drawings, then it will be split among all those who pick at least six numbers correctly for the next drawing.

The article also passes along comment from Klaus Sattler, press-spokesman of the Deutscher Lottoblock that runs these lotteries: “It’s a misconception that people in hard times turn increasingly to games of chance.”

Heard the latest? Barack Obama actually is descended from Dutch ancestors! And that word comes from a French source, namely Libération, which a few days ago, at the time of the inauguration, came out with Batavian rumor: Is Barack Obama of Netherlands origin? (“Batavian” is simply a historical adjective meaning “Dutch.”) However, that Libération article does make reference to an article from last November in the Dutch (tabloid-quality) newspaper De Telegraaf (The Dutch roots of Obama), which itself further references an even-earlier article in De Volkskrant (of February, 2008) as well as another investigation into the subject on a Dutch history website.

Fine, but what’s the point? The point is this: Barack Obama’s great-grandfather might have been a Dutchman resident in Kenya. The surname “Obama” is supposedly not really that common there in the land of origin of Barack Obama Sr. Indeed, it rather seems quite close to “Obbema,” a typical surname from Friesland, which is a section of the Netherlands along the North coast that still has its own language (Frisian), a different history, and even a slightly-different culture. This small detail prompted the family-lineage-researcher Koen Verhoeven to go discover records of a certain Jelle Obbema, from Friesland, who sometime around 1870 went to seek his fortune in Kenya, and in fact made it big there in the peppermint trade. While making all this money, Jelle still found time to chase the native women, but, as all these accounts make plain, “he took his responsibility,” i.e. to support those children he sired and to give them his last name. One of these was a son named Sjoerd-Bark, in the Frisian custom of giving children double names (as in “Geert-Jan”). The thought is that this Sjoerd-Jan was later connected to Barack Obama Sr. – the similarity of their given names (“Bark” – “Barack”) is supposed to make that connection.

To my mind, it is there that this tale loses its credibility, since “Barack” is well-known to be derived from the Arabic root for “to bless” or “to be blessed.” (Compare the president of Egypt: Mubarak. And remember that the transmission of Arabic influence into Kenya would have come via Swahili, that common East African language – an official language in Kenya, along with English – which gleaned much of its vocabulary from Arabic.) Still, as these Dutch articles point out, Jelle Obbema and the relatives he left behind in Friesland were all impressive athletes, although this in the field of ice-skating rather than basketball. And then there is inscription to be found under the Obbema family coat-of-arms: Ja, wy kinne!, which naturally means “Yes we can!”

Yes We Can! Barack Hussein Obama is now 44th president of the United States!

Time to assess reactions to that historical event from over on this side of the Atlantic. I’m tempted just to see what the Netherlands press has to say, particularly because of the great cover on today’s editions of the local quality free paper, De Pers: The black Jesus has landed! (Careful with that link: it will download for you the PDF of the entire issue.) “And now Barack Obama, since yesterday the new boss of the world, must really get to work,” the headline continues. “He is being looked to for carrying out wonders for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

I like that sort of irreverent, tongue-in-cheek attitude (at least I think that’s what the De Pers editors intended there), but let’s briefly survey instead coverage from the French press, to which it seems I traditionally turn first in the wake of some significant global event. (more…)

We always like to go against the grain here at EuroSavant, so today – the historic day of Barack Obama’s inauguration as 44th president, note that coverage here of reactions to that event begins tomorrow – let’s take a look at an opinion piece from the German Frankfurter Rundschau, authored by Arno Widmanm, entitled Obama’s helplessness. Here’s the lede: “The historical event was the election. Once in office, the new president of the United States will be able to bring about less change [or Change, if you like] than many have dreamed about.”

Isn’t that what so many of us are worrying about even as we witness, each in our own way, the inauguration delirium now playing out in America’s capital city? That Obama: as Widmann is glad to put it, “The United States has in him one of the most intelligent, alert, and communication-gifted presidents in its history.” I mean, just go read his books, and compare them to other politicians’ tired, ghost-written literary output! (more…)

Here’s another retrospective analysis of the George W. Bush years that I have come across, this time from one of the foremost USA-experts within the Danish journalist ranks. I refer here to Martin Burcharth, correspondent in America since 1996 for the Danish weekly commentary newspaper Information; his piece is entitled An obsessed Bush read each morning about new terror threats.

The key element of Burcharth’s analysis here, as he assesses the two Bush presidential terms, is the radical change brought to the course of that presidency by the attacks of September 11, 2001. (more…)

So now Israel has unilaterally decided to stop bombarding the Gaza Strip. Gee – why just now? Could it have anything to do with the inauguration of an entirely-new American administration on Tuesday? And could the timing of whole episode from the attacks’ very beginnings on 27 December be somehow connected to a desire to take advantage of the “hands-off” attitude of top American leaders while Israel still could?

For all the evident excitement about Inauguration Day, people need to stay on the alert on Monday, tomorrow: Pardon Day. That is the last day of George W. Bush presidential power, and so surely the day he will issue a set of shocking and unprincipled pardons to protect himself and his underlings from, among other things, war crimes charges. Isn’t this clear? Doing so at any point before would have spoiled the effect of (and probably increased the volume of flying shoes at) his rather pathetic “farewell tour” of self-justifying interviews and press conferences. So stay tuned.

Oh, and Obama has a fresh foreign policy crisis waiting for him as soon as the inauguration euphoria winds down. Yes, it’s Gaza too, but I’m referring more here to North Korea’s new “all-out confrontational posture” towards South Korea (the latter’s military is now on high alert) together with its claims to have procured enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons.

UPDATE: Well now, on the question of further pardons it looks like I was wrong!

As we near Barack Obama’s inauguration, it naturally becomes time to look back and assess George W. Bush’s eight-year tenure as American president. (Check that: it’s time first to gather up one’s courage and brace oneself, and then look back in anger.) One such assessment that I can recommend comes in a 17-minute video from the UK’s Guardian newspaper. The Guardian is well-known for its political positioning somewhat to the left, and thus for its long record of hostility to Bush. Still, that video presents discussion from not only Mike Tomasky, the Guardian’s American editor, but also a couple of personalities you might find more credible, namely David Plotz, editor at Slate (on-line) magazine and Adrian Wooldridge, American editor for The Economist. (The fourth and final panelist is Sarah Wildman, from the New York Times. A quick consultation reveals that she is mainly a travel writer there, occasionally contributing pieces on the arts.)

But what about, say, the Dutch? Fortunately, we can now discover their valedictory attitudes towards George W. Bush, and that even from the “People’s Newspaper,” De Volkskrant (Netherlanders give Bush a 4.7).

That’s right, as a final over-all grade ol’ George gets a 4.7, but keep in mind that is on the customary Dutch academic grading-scale of 0 (worst) to 10 (best), where you usually need a 6 to pass. This comes from a survey among 500 Dutch respondents over 18 conducted by the firm Synovate, which further reveals the curious paradox that, while 73% are willing to characterize the departing American president as “friendly,” 71% call him “untrustworthy.” When it comes to free association (i.e. what immediately comes to mind when you hear a word), most of the respondents think “Iraq” at the mention of his name. It further emerges that you are a better bet to dislike him the more educated and older you are, and the more to the left you are on the Dutch political spectrum (also if you are female). Of the various policies associated with his name, these Dutch judge approvingly only his reaction to the September 11 attacks. Everything else they disapprove of, especially his attitude towards climate change.

Finally, the survey-participants were asked what sort of going-away present they would be willing to give. Among the responses: a course in self-knowledge, a week spent among the poor, and “a kick in the ass.”

This is a bit off of my normal beat – or not, if you count on me to point out the best of the European on-line press.

New tendencies in lingerie:

L’EXPRESS.fr Styles took its camera to the avant-première of the International Salon of Lingerie that will take place from 18 to 21 January at the porte de Versailles. How to wear the corset? Is the string dead? Responses to these crucial questions in pictures.

There then follows a two-minute video – no nudity, but definitely some beautiful women. (Foot-fetishists also get their moment of bliss.) And they often break out into some nice, feminine French!

The funniest sort of scandal erupted this past week in Brussels, in connection with the brand-new (and first-time) Czech presidency of the European Union. Have you heard of this? The New York Times has its account here. It had to do with a huge sculpture that the Czech government commissioned for erection at the building that houses the European Council, one that – as you would expect – was supposed to reflect in some way upon on the EU and its member-states. But the Czechs made a key mistake in entrusting the task to the (Czech) artist David Černý. As the sculpture was set up over the weekend, for completion by Monday, it soon became clear that there was something very wrong; by the time the dedication ceremony was supposed to happen on Thursday, yesterday (and it did), controversy was flying thick and fast.

What were the Czech authorities in charge of EU relations thinking? Černý, after all (whose last name simply means “black”), has always been notorious, it’s accurate to say, rather than just “famous” within the Czech cultural world, bursting onto that scene in 1991 by painting the tank constituting a Soviet war-memorial in Prague a shocking pink color in one daring night-time raid. Although he was briefly arrested for that, that pink tank became a metaphor for the wacky, world-turned-upside down ambiance of the Czech Republic, and Prague in particular, in the years immediately after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution.” Barely pausing to catch his breath, Černý went on to produce a series of additional eye-catching works of sculpture, a few of which you can appreciate on his Wikipedia page. Those “tower babies,” for example: you can pick them out crawling all over the gigantic TV tower, itself located in the Prague 3 district, from much of the rest of the city. And that “riding a dead horse” statue is mighty big and impressive in its own right – look for it at the internal shopping-and-movie-theater-area located within the Lucerna building at the corner of Wenceslas Square and Vodičkova Street (a magnificent building once owned by Václav Havel himself, built by his father – also named Václav Havel). (more…)

Now that the German government has finally ditched its initial stance of taking only perfunctory measures in reaction to the economic crisis and has instead launched its own expensive stimulus program (as we discussed in the very last post, just below), it’s understandable that there would be some new Teutonic curiosity about how other countries are coping – I mean, now that Angela Merkel’s government has ceased writing everyone else off as a bunch of free-spending Nervous Nellies. So Die Zeit takes up the comparative economics assignment in fine style with a captioned picture-series entitled “Ways out of the crisis,” and dealing with the approach to recession-relief taken by seven of the world’s main nations, one page per country (pages 8 & 9 just have supplementary content).

Those without a facility in German will of course only be able to fully savor each page’s accompanying photo, which in each case presents a scene out of a soup-kitchen or other poor-relief facility in the respective country. Oh, and if your eye should happen to catch sight of the various numbers mentioned in the texts to the right, you will need to remember that Billion (plural: Billionen) in German actually denotes what Americans would call trillion; it’s Milliard in German (plural: Milliarden) that is “billion.” Note that I will, as usual, use the American terminology.

Otherwise, you can be sure that each country discussed (in order: USA, Russia, Brazil, the UK, France, China, and Japan) is taking active, although varying, measures to counteract the economic crisis. The prize so far goes to China which, when central government outlays are added to additional monies released for provincial governments, has committed to around €1.5 trillion in spending, or 2/3 of current Chinese GDP. Then again, they started earlier (the first major stimulus plan was announced in November), and they can afford it more, holding around €1.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. And it does seem that conditions there – except for foreign trade volume – are already starting to turn up. The US, in stark contrast, at this point according to the article can still point only to Barack Obama’s still-inchoate plans for an stimulus package of around €600 billion (no mention is made of recent suggestions to devote some of that to tax-cuts, and yes, the article cites it in terms of euros), which still will raise the federal budget deficit to 11% of GDP. So the Die Zeit editors here are ignoring the $350 billion of the TARP program already spent, as well as that stimulus-money (remember that?) that Congress spread around to all tax-paying citizens last spring – but, come to think of it, there’s not much room to object to them doing that anyway.

Notable mentions elsewhere in this article include the unique aspect of Russia’s relief approach which, other than devoting reserves to support the value of the ruble, features direct money-grants in State assistance to an eligible list of over 300 businesses. (What’s Russian for “corruption” again? How about продажность – “prodazhnost.”) And the brief entry on France points out that the public debt there has now risen to around 4% of GDP, i.e. above the 3% level that all euro-zone members, including also Germany, are supposed to keep below.

UPDATE: Regarding China, others are not so sanguine: Chinese Economy Faces 2009 “Hard Landing,” from Bloomberg (noticed at naked capitalism).

It’s over: they caved. Maybe some of us had been looking forward to a real-world macroeconomic experiment with Germany boldly carrying the banner for that strain of economic opinion – that is still out there, loud and boisterous – according to which massive government spending is the wrong way to counter the current economic crisis. But now, with the €50 billion Konjunkturpaket II it just announced, the German federal government has hopped on the mega-spending bandwagon with everybody else. It seems it’s just too hard, even for Germans, to be prudent and thrifty in front of the voters when you face a general election later in the year.

The FAZ gives a good summary of what is involved – as you would expect from the FAZ: The main points of the Konjunkturpaket: Car turn-in premium, debt-limitation, and rescue-shield – and at its core lies the usual combination of infrastructure investment and tax-cuts, just this time auf deutsch. Most of the infrastructure investment will go into schools; to help the auto industry, people will get a payment of €2,500 if, upon buying a new car, they turn in their old one; and there will be set up to assist small businesses finding it hard these days to get credit a counterpart to that “Soffin” we’ve discussed here so much lately, i.e. the government-run fund for bailing out troubled banks. (more…)

Hey everybody, remember Joe the Plumber? Of course you do, because ever since Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher of Holland, OH – not a licensed plumber, actually – confronted candidate Barack Obama in October about the effect of his tax plan on small business, you haven’t been able to avoid him. His latest ploy to further elongate his allotted 15 minutes of fame is to get himself hired by Pajamas TV to go report on the Israel-Hamas conflict.

It’s really too juicy of a target for any self-respecting media commentator to refuse. Even Hans Hauert of Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung can’t help but issue some remarks, in “Joe the Plumber” becomes war correspondent: A plumber in wartime.

You had thought the Germans could not do irony? Maybe you’ll pardon me an extended translation of Hauert’s first couple of paragraphs: (more…)

Interesting news today of a slightly bizarre nature (and not for the first time) from the leading Dutch-language newspaper in Belgium, De Standaard: Airbus wants to deliver the next Air Force One. (De Standaard duly credits this story to the French newspaper Le Figaro, but I couldn’t find it there on-line.) The American military is getting ready to open the procurement process for airplanes to replace the two Boeing 747-200’s that currently constitute the fleet for Air Force One, the President’s airplane. And Airbus is preparing to participate, and even thinks it has a good shot at landing the contract.

The American authorities actually have in mind purchasing three planes to replace that current pool of two, although they won’t have to be delivered and ready for use until 2017. Initial submissions as to how the competing manufacturers would modify the planes that they make so as to accommodate the American president’s unique telecommunications and security needs are due by 29 January, and Airbus is busy preparing its documents.

It’s true, as the article points out, that the American authorities have already contracted to replace the helicopters tasked for presidential transportation (a.k.a. “Marine One”) with machines from AgustaWestland, an Italian-British joint-venture. However, you have to go to the Marine One Wikipedia page to learn that those helicopters will actually be produced in the USA under license by Lockheed Martin. (Right, it’s Wikipedia that says that, but this press-release from Lockheed Martin seems to confirm it, if you remember that the “Marine One” helicopters are to be designated as “VH-71.”) What do you think are the real chances that the contract for something as high-profile as Air Force One would go to the Europeans? For that matter, what do you think are the real chances that the American government will be in a position to pay for anything when the airplanes are due to be delivered in 2017?

It now looks like an agreement is in place to let Russian natural gas shipments to the West resume with independent monitors from the European Union in place, but those have been blocked completely since Thursday (8 January) and it will take about a further three days to resume full service. In the meantime, unfortunately, the continent has suffered under a bitter cold spell, so that the political pressure from freezing constituents has already reached the breaking-point – I wouldn’t really call it the “boiling-point” – in Slovakia. As a number of press outlets report, among which Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel, Slovak premier Robert Fico announced at a Saturday evening televised press conference that his country would bring back on-line the atomic reactor at Jaslovské Bohunice that it had just shut down before the end of 2008.

Gee, why did the Slovaks go and close that reactor in the first place a few weeks ago? Namely because doing so, and doing so permanently by the end of 2008, was a provision in the accession agreement by which the country became a EU member-state back in 2004 in the first place. With the Jaslovské Bohunice reactor we’re talking in fact about the very first nuclear reactor in the former Czechoslovakia, whose construction began back in 1958 although it first went into operation only in 1972. Naturally, then, it’s a reactor built in the Soviet style, which in the light of such incidents as Chernobyl raised safety concerns to such a degree that the EU insisted that Slovakia eventually shut it down. (more…)

Ah yes, as I observed in a post a few days ago, when it comes to state funds made available to prop up failing banks, the German bank bailout demand is low. But “low” does not have to mean “non-existent,” and in fact on Thursday the German government made use of the Sonderfonds Finanzmarktstabilisierung (“Special Fund for Financial Market Stabilization,” or Soffin) it had established to provide Commerzbank with €10 billion in exchange for taking up a 25% ownership stake. More precisely, of that €10 billion €1.8 billion actually buys that equity quarter-stake while the remaining €8.2 billion goes to a “silent participation” that gains no voting rights. By the way, at roughly the same time Commerzbank also took advantage of that other facility offered by Soffin – namely State debt guarantees – to bring in another €5 billion in new capital via a guaranteed bond-issue.

If you were to use your imagination to put yourself in the German federal government’s place – say, if you were a German taxpayer in whose name all this money was being spent – you might very well wonder what those civil servants in charge of the Soffin were thinking by accepting in exchange for the lion’s share of that €10 billion amount a mere “silent participation.” After all, it’s clear that insisting on a 100% active participation would have resulted in the purchase of the entire bank, with money to spare. (Do the math: that €1.8 billion bought a 25% interest, yet constituted not even 25% of the €10 total spent.) Instead, the remainder of that money gains for the government the “silent participation” that is in effect a loan, charging 9% interest. (more…)

Hungry for some sort of financial news now, at the beginning of a brand-new year, that’s actually good, that reflects things flawlessly going ahead according to plan? How about this: As of 1 JAN 2009 Slovakia adopted the euro as its currency, just as the European Central Bank (ECB) and various other responsible Euro-authorities had authorized it to do last May. That’s right: Slovakia – I mean, who even knows where that place is? It was only a separate country as of 1 JAN 1993, yet it has beaten out (among others) its former big-brother state, the Czech Republic (which could be said to date back to Greater Moravia of 833 AD if you’re willing to stretch the affiliations a little bit), and Poland (dating from 966 AD) to the safe-haven of the euro. And make no mistake: these days the euro-zone is definitely the sort of currency safe-haven that all sorts of countries still standing outside it (e.g. Poland, Denmark, Iceland) wish that they were within, given the demonstrated weakness of numerous small-state-currency regimes.

Against this background, it’s amusing to take a look at comments from the Czech press. (more…)

Let me start here with a quick apology to my €S readers: I know that the subject dominating the headlines these days is the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip, so I am overdue in bringing up for discussion on this forum some apposite article in the non-English-language press that supplies a piquant perspective on the tragedy unfolding there. And “overdue” I will have to continue to be, as I have yet to find a piece that truly qualifies for that treatment, unless you are willing to count my indirect approach to the Mid-East in the form of my previous discussion of what is possibly – but probably not – a little-known source of EU leverage over Israel.

I’ve got another indirect take for you here: Questions of leverage apart, has the question crossed your mind as to why on earth there appear to be two EU delegations heading to Israel to try to influence things there, namely the one headed by the Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg and the one with French president Nicolas Sarkozy? Seems rather inefficient, no? Still, it all becomes perfectly logical in light of the fear and loathing felt across the EU at the accession – brought about simply by the requirements of the EU calendar – of the Czech Republic and Václav Klaus to the EU presidency for the next six months. To these observers, the contrast between what they fear from the Czechs and the admirable activism that marked France’s just-completed term at the presidency is so agonizing that they simply can’t let go – and thus you see, in effect, both “before” and “after” versions of EU diplomatic delegations in the MidEast.

This fear of what the Czechs may bring to the EU at what has turned out to be a crucial period, both for its internal affairs and its external relations, is real. Quite apart from the beginner’s mistakes you can expect from a small country undertaking the presidency for the first time, there is great worry over Klaus’ controversial stands on various EU issues and how they might serve to gum up the works still further. (A broad segment even of Czech opinion shares these concerns, by the way. I’ve got to see if I can find an article or two out of the Czech press about that to discuss.) But today there comes a most interesting opinion piece in the Financial Times Deutschland, by Nils Kreimeier (Witch-hunt in Prague), that bravely takes up the unconventional view that maybe Václav Klaus is not someone to worry much about but rather is the sort of personality that the EU should welcome. (more…)

The German newsmagazine Focus has today another one of those “only in America” pieces, about how you just can’t keep a true wheeler-dealer down. The title is Best deals with an embezzler-of-billions and the lede: “He’s under house arrest and has to wear an electronic ankle-bracelet. And yet: On the Internet portal Ebay [sic] the alleged embezzler-of-billions Bernard Madoff is ringing the cash-register.”

When you think about it, who would want to pass up the opportunity to acquire some historic flotsam from what is shaping up to be the biggest act of financial fraud of all time? The article speaks of fleece (if you’ll pardon the expression) jackets, mousepads, umbrellas, binoculars, and other stuff that Madoff has made available for sale on-line, all of it emblazoned with the “Madoff Securities” logo. There was even a t-shirt on offer for a time with Madoff’s smiling face on it and a caption below: “Trust me.” Maybe it’s not too late to head over to the eBay website yourself to see what’s what – I’ll give you the link, but leave it to you to work the site’s search-engine to find out what’s left.

It’s a New Year, and now time for us all to head back to work. But I did want to call forth to the light an interesting article of 31 December 2008 from the Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung about the experience so far with the structures the German government put in place last fall to prop up its banks (Few banks seek State protection).

FAZ reporter Manfred Schäfers gives an interesting outline of the monetary amounts and structure involved there. First the former: the German government is ready to issue bank-guarantees in the amount of around €400 billion (the exact amount is unclear because Schäfers mentions two different figures even within the confines of this relatively-short article) and is making available an additional €80 billion in outright capital-injections. The program, run out of the federal Finance Ministry, is the Sonderfonds Finanzmarktstabilisierung (meaning “Special Fund for Financial Market Stabilization,” abbreviated as Soffin), headed by a three-person committee of banking worthies that includes Gerhard Stratthaus, former Finance Miniser for the state government of Baden-Württemberg and Schäfers’ main information source. Strangely, the participation on that committee of two other named individuals, who are supposed to be Stratthaus’ colleagues, is still up in the air.

I guess that’s OK, though, because the point of the article is that Soffin’s agenda is not really chock-full. “Up to now we’ve got 15 applications,” Stratthaus reveals, “and most [financial] institutions are interested in the guarantees.” Of those that are seeking a chunk of actual money – i.e. a piece of the €80 million budgeted for capital injections – their requests to this point add up only to less than €15 billion, and other indications point to Commerzbank as responsible for €8.2 billion out of that alone. (more…)