While Benjamin Netanyahu heads to the White House later today for his first official meeting with President Obama, is anyone listening to the Israeli Armed Forces Radio? At least the ANP, the Netherlands national press agency, is listening, and it provides the information that enables the Algemeen Dagblad to report on what is going on under the radar back in the Middle East while the American and Israeli heads of government have their discussions.

Whether the Israeli Armed Forces Radio broadcast in question is an explicit advertisement or not is unclear, but its point is to announce the opening of registration to purchase one of twenty new houses in Maskiot, a Jewish settler colony in the occupied West Bank. In fact, as we learn from its very own Wikipedia article, Maskiot is so deep into the West Bank – it’s way over on the other side from Israel, right on the Jordan river, for Heaven’s sake – that past attempts to expand it have drawn the publicly-expressed ire of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the British government, and even George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Where is the public anger now? Clearly this sort of thing, in addition to being a direct slap in the face to the Palestinian Authority, is tremendously counter-productive to the sort of two-state solution and peace negotiations which are the main elements of the desired American approach to achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Does Netanyahu really remain unaware of this as he heads to meet with President Obama over precisely such measures, or is he just breathtakingly cynical?

EuroSavant belatedly caught up with the Knut-the-polar-bear story last December here. I observed then that Knut’s life seemed to be careening along the path usually only followed by Hollywood child film stars (e.g. family tragedies; cover shoots; problems with excessive weight).

Sure enough, as the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reports today, the struggle over the Knut-millions is now occupying the courts. Those millions are of course the millions of euros that the (at one time) cute little abandoned polar bear earned for the Berlin Zoo, through the flood of visitors he inspired, souvenir sales, those above-mentioned photo-shoots, and the like. The point of the news-piece is that the Newmünster Zoo (up in northern Germany, which owns Knut’s father and therefore claims an ownership interest in Knut) has now run out of patience with attempts to come up with some agreement with the Berlin Zoo to split up this Knut-money – they’re heading off to the federal court (Landgericht) in Berlin to settle this, as of tomorrow. And step one is to demand that the Berlin Zoo make an accurate accounting of just how much they have earned off of the erstwhile polar bear baby. That amount is alleged to be around €6 million.

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…)

Did I go to sleep and miss a couple of months? Is it already “silly season” – those depths of summer when real news is so scarce that radio time, newspaper pages, and weblog entries must be filled instead with the trivial and inane (if hopefully amusing)?

Well, you should know by now that you can count on EuroSavant for that sort of thing every so often. The latest bit is from Japan, as reported by Belgium’s Het Nieuwsblad within – surprisingly! – the “.biz” business section of its website: Bra stimulates women to seek a man.

Yes, it seems the Land of the Rising Sun has somewhat of a demographic problem, in that its women are increasingly disinclined to marry, preferring to devote themselves to their careers. Now the lingerie company Triumph International has come to the rescue, with its new “Husband Hunting Bra” (available on the Japanese market only, for reasons which will soon become obvious). It’s a bra, all right, but the star attraction here is the digital clock built in on an extension underneath the garment’s supporting sections. There are two set of numbers there that count down; I assume that they represent months and days, for the idea here is that the bra’s owner sets herself a deadline for catching a man, programs it into the digital clock, sets it going, and so has a constant prod to action there on her chest. How to stop the clock? I’m glad you asked: above that clock-section, in the sweet spot between the cups, there’s a slot just big enough to accommodate the insertion of one engagement ring. Upon such an insertion, the clock mechanism stops.

Those Japanese do sometimes inspire the darndest things, don’t they? Oh, and Triumph has even taken care to discourage any sort of pre-marital hanky-panky, in that below the clock part you have printed in big Japanese characters a message which according to the Niewsblad article reads “In search of a husband.” Imagine taking a girl home, getting to third base with her – and recall that the Japanese are very into baseball – and encountering that! Maybe at this point you’re suspecting that I made all of this up, but be my guest and click through to the article: even if you know no Dutch, you’ll find there, appropriately enough, a set of two illustrations showing what I mean, as displayed by a rather cute young Japanese model.

It looks like World Bank released an interesting publication a few weeks ago, the “Global Monitoring Report.” Jørgen Steen Nielsen of the Danish commentary newspaper Information has got it covered, albeit with a title for his review-article that the World Bank bureaucrats would never have dared to formulate themselves: The Chinese saved up for the American binge. Likewise, Nielsen’s lede would probably have not passed muster with the World Bank editors:

The large developing country [i.e. the PR of China] through its loans financed the overconsumption in the USA that launched the global recession and now forces millions in undeveloped countries into unemployment, hunger, and extreme poverty, said the World Bank.

How many millions exactly? The report does provide these numbers: 55-90 million more people in undeveloped countries driven into extreme poverty, 50 million in addition to that made unemployed, and the ranks of the world’s chronically hungry growing to over one billion. China did this (that’s the implication Nielsen draws out from the report) by recycling its dollar earnings from exports to the US through the amassing of incredible quantities of US Treasury debt – $696 billion by the end of last year, now grown to $744 (out of a total amount of foreign-owned US Government debt obligations of $3.1 trillion).

Again, this is probably not the slant that the writers of this report originally intended. It seems clear that their point was rather to warn how the UN’s Millenium Development Goals are in danger of not being achieved by the target date, which is 2015. You probably don’t remember this (I don’t either), but back in September, 2000, there was a “Millenium Summit” held at the UN’s headquarters in New York City, the largest gathering of world leaders in history as of that date, when those leaders committed their countries (192 states in all) to certain anti-poverty/anti-disease goals. But now, the report writes, “it is improbable that most of the eight global goals agreed to can be achieved – among these the goals having to do with hunger, child- and childbirth-mortality, education and progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other serious diseases.” In particular, the report writes off entirely sub-Saharan Africa’s chances of achieving these goals.

I already noted somewhat obliquely (admittedly in a very tangential manner: it’s the link down at the bottom of that post to the Poland in the EU weblog, under “UPDATE”) that the Czech EU presidency just organized and hosted in Prague a so-called Eastern Partnership summit – intended to improve EU relations with various ex-Soviet nations still under the shadow of the Russian Bear, including Ukraine and Belarus – and hardly anyone from the EU side showed up! As a “summit” it was supposed to be attended by all member-state heads of government. But I guess the EU is not yet that sort of organization where they send burly men to fetch dignitaries physically when their absence at an official event is noticed (nor is it likely ever to be), for only one head of government was there: Angela Merkel. (And of course a head of state – namely Václav Klaus, but note the distinction – acted as host; more on that below.) No Gordon Brown; no José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero; apparently no Donald Tusk, either, even though this Eastern Partnership is something originally proposed by Poland. No Austrian Chancellor, either (his name is Werner Faymann, BTW), and indeed nobody higher there for Austria than her EU ambassador, despite that country’s multiple interests (indeed, you could say its very location) in the East.

And no Nicolas Sarkozy. What vital functions did he have on his official schedule yesterday, when that Prague “summit” was wound up and the Eastern Partnership agreement signed without his participation? (more…)

You might have heard about an incident earlier this week when some man (an American citizen) managed to swim across the lake guarding one side of the compound in Rangoon, Burma where dissident leader (and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate) Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house-arrest for over 19 years. It seems he even stayed there for a couple days; it was only when he tried to swim back out the way he came that the Burmese police captured him, after which 20 officers then paid a visit to the compound, probably just to see what was going on, to question the residents there (basically Suu Kyi and her assistants) and check whether the guy had left anything behind. But that event was fairly widely-reported, including most certainly in the English-language press.

What I find more interesting is this article in France’s Nouvel Observateur (co-credited to the French news agency AFP) about Aung San Suu Kyi herself: she is not doing very well these days. First of all, she is 63 years old; I suppose that is an age when it is still possible to be in pretty good shape, except that being confined as essentially a prisoner of the dictatorial government of what is a very poor country is probably pretty much the opposite sort of environment to that which you would need to remain fit and healthy. (The article also notes that she refuses to accept the food sent in to her by the government.) According to the spokesman for her political party, the National League for Democracy (abbreviated as LND), Nyan Win, she can’t eat anymore, her blood pressure is low, and she suffers from dehydration. (And it is interesting that all this is coming out now; obviously this has something to do with the lake-swimmer’s visit, if only in the sense that journalists managed to contacted spokesman Nyan Win for comment on that incident and then asked follow-up questions about her current situation in general.)

The article mentions that, formally, the order putting her in house-arrest is supposed expire at the end of this month. Still, there can be little doubt that, one way or another (like a simple extension to the order), her status will be little changed after that point. The bigger question is whether she will even still be alive by then. And another one: What happens when she does die? Recall that August-September 2007 already saw widespread anti-government protests, with a prominent role played by Buddhist monks, sparked by nothing more than a government decision to remove subsidies on the price of various fuels.

Ah yes: Miss World! Miss Universe! Miss What-Have-You! They all raise loads of money and attract widespread media-interest. And did you know that they even have a beauty pageant for young misses in Saudi Arabia? Indeed they do, in the capital Riyadh; the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad is kind enough to report on this today (Miss Pageant in a niqab).

That reference to the niqab – namely the veil over the face worn by Muslim women – and for that matter to Saudi Arabia should warn you, though, that what is going on here is somewhat different from the normal template. Take “beauty”; in Saudi Arabia, it’s all about inner beauty, you see, which is good since naturally no sort of evening gown – much less bikini – competition could ever be allowed.

So how do they judge that? Apparently the whole evaluation-process takes ten weeks, and is conducted by a panel of all-female judges – and that last bit alone tells you quite a lot. What is examined is things like respect for elders and how contestants respond when asked about how they “discover their inner force.” There’s even a “bring-your-Mom-to-the-contest” day, during which contestants are evaluated as to their respectful interaction with their own and everyone else’s mother. At bottom as a fundamental consideration, as you might expect, is any given candidate’s fealty to “Islamic values.”

Not likely to be a top-ten television hit, then, either in the rest of the world or, I dare say, within the Kingdom itself. On the other hand, there’s some serious money involved: the woman with the “most beautiful soul,” as the AD puts it, walks away with a prize of $2,600. And that prospect has attracted this year a field of some 200 contestants.

UPDATE: What do you know: It looks like even the Saudi beauty pageant has fallen victim to scandal! Yes, topless photos have been discovered of the winner – you can even see her entire forehead.

[Cymbal crash] I wish I could take credit for that one. But no, it’s from Jay Leno.

The Czech government of Mirek Topolánek – having lost a vote of confidence in the lower house of the Czech parliament at the end of March – is now on its way out the door. The new caretaker government headed by the former head of the Czech National Statistical Office, Jan Fischer, has submitted all the names of its ministers to Václav Klaus, the Czech president, and so is ready to take over. But what of the EU presidency, which after all the Czech Republic has had entrusted to it ever since the beginning of this year? That has largely been given up for lost, according to the Washington correspondent for the Czech Republic’s leading business newspaper, Hospodářské noviny, Daniel Anýž (Sad end to the presidency, USA summit postponed).

Let me take care to note here that that “sad end” cited in Anýž’s title does not refer to now, i.e. the first week of May, but rather indeed to what was supposed to be the “end” of the Czech presidency according to the calendar, namely the end of June. Anýž already knows that that is going to be sad, mainly because that was when the usual semi-annual US-EU summit was supposed to happen, this time in Washington, but the Americans have now let it be known that they want to postpone it to sometime in the fall, when the Swedes will be EU president. Now, you might well say that the Czechs already had their US-EU summit, and in Prague, which happened over the weekend of 4-5 April, following on from the London G20 summit during President Obama’s European trip. But that was officially an “informal” meeting; the US-EU get-together in Washington was really supposed to happen, as it always does, in June. But it won’t.

Meanwhile, Anýž notes that the phrase “Czech EU presidency” seems to have disappeared entirely from the American media. And he quotes an analyst from the German Marshall Fund (in Washington) that the Czechs basically lost three months off of their presidency by the change-of-government, and that leaves hardly enough time for any member-state to accomplish the desired EU agenda with which it would have started its presidency. At least the Czechs did take the ratification process for the Lisbon Treaty all the way up to the point where it only needs the president’s signature; this ensures at least “sad might-have-been” status in the eyes of fellow EU citizens, whereas a failure of ratification would have marked them as something considerably worse.

UPDATE: Here’s another cost of switching your government in the middle of your term as EU president: you stage summits and hardly anybody important bothers to show up.

Notice anything different today? Do you feel that edginess in the air? OK, those of you reading this from outside of Europe are probably too far away to get the full effect, but what about all you Europeans? After all, as the Czech daily Lidové noviny writes, “All of Europe is following along today with tension to see whether the Czech Senate ratifies the Lisbon Treaty which is supposed to reform the EU.”

OK, maybe the local Czech press is overstating somewhat the general interest in what the Senate has before it (although the Czech Senate Press Office does report the presence today of seventy journalists and eleven foreign film-crews, including one even from Hong Kong.) Still, the fact remains that, three months after the lower house of the Czech parliament approved the Lisbon Treaty, today the vote is to be held to see whether the upper house does the same (which is required, of course, along with the presidential signature, for the Czech Republic formally to approve it). (more…)

Die Zeit today brings doleful news: Germany has a relapse! What the unnamed journalist (no by-line) is referring to here specifically is what he calls the “Maastricht Criteria,” according to which EU member-states are supposed to keep their government budget deficits to 3% of GDP or less. (That’s OK as a name, but it would be more accurate to call this requirement part of the Stability and Growth Pact that was agreed to as a pre-condition for the establishment of the euro.) Sure enough, the European Commission now calculates (in a report released today) that the German debt this year will amount to a full 3.9% of GDP – and next year even 5.9%! And all this, the Die Zeit article notes, just two years after Germany had managed to get itself out of the Commission’s bad graces (actually, out of a full-scale official EU “penalty process”) for violating this rule!

Well, to offer a quick bit of economic analysis: No sh–, Sherlock! (more…)

Maybe it’s Euro-giddiness from the recent warm and sunny spring weather: this weblog seems to be building up a thread on the subject of soft-drug use and its combating by local authorities. A few days ago I discussed here the new pot-sniffing mini-chopper the Dutch authorities had come up with to locate and destroy marijuana farms. Now I’ve run across an interesting article in the Danish press about Copenhagen’s famous drug-peddling “Christiania” quarter.

For those not in the know, “Freetown Christiania” is a small section of the Danish capital, a former military-barracks area, which was occupied by squatters beginning in 1971, who soon declared themselves to be self-governing there. Naturally, the local and national authorities have never conceded any sort of full independence; rather, a set of extraordinary agreements has been worked out over the years that divides the functions this neighborhood can undertake for itself (including paying taxes for public utilities and trash-removal) and those which the Danish authorities are still responsible for. Still, it is commonly assumed that those authorities would much prefer to shut the “Freetown” down at some point and return it completely to local and national Danish law, just like any other neighborhood in the country, if only some way could be found that would not bring with it massive, messy civil resistance from the residents.

One particular bone of contention between “Christianites” and the authorities has precisely been recreational drugs. (more…)