We’re all back to work now, the Xmas and end-of-year holiday period is definitively passed, so it’s time once again to belly up to those nasty problems still leftover from 2010. For Europe, that means in the first instance the sovereign debt crisis, which now has a certain additional player, namely Belgium, by some accounts on a one-way trip to default city. For its debts are high – roughly equal, in fact, to national GDP – and there are no responsible adults around to do something about them. There haven’t been any of those since last June, for the country has been without a proper government since the elections then, and just recently set a new West European record for time spent in a government-less regime. Dr. Doom, for one, is not pleased:

Belgium is effectively on the way to political break-up. Will the political chaos lead to financial turmoil & banking/sovereign debt stress?

January 10, 2011 7:34 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Nouriel

Nouriel Roubini

. . . wait a sec – look, I’m actually not ready to deal with such issues! Please allow me here instead to join so many Belgians, both French- and Dutch-speaking, in just letting my mind fly very, very far away from any thoughts of state bankruptcy, to the refuge of young feminine beauty. Yes, as so many national media outlets were there to report, Justine de Jonckheere (below, and more pictures here) was chosen last Sunday as Miss Belgium 2011.

Quite apart from the event’s intrinsic appeal, the Miss Belgium pageant is certainly a tonic in these times because of its sheer status as one Belgian national institution that has not been ripped into separate French- and Dutch-speaking halves. Indeed, as La Libre Belgique points out, Sunday evening’s event, broadcast out of the casino in the sea-side (and thus Flemish) town of Knokke, was a killer TV-event. It actually attracted more than 1 in 3 of French-speaking viewers, while the Flemish audience-share, at around 15%, was also double what other top shows usually attract on a Sunday evening.

That’s all very nice, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no tension over the pageant’s results, considering so many native Belgians have such an interest in them. You can rest assured that, at any given time during the tournament, approximately half the country is encouraging – whether overtly or covertly – candidates from a French-Belgian (Walloon) background while the other half is rooting for the Dutch-speaking girls. It’s accepted that whoever wins needn’t necessarily know much about how to speak the country’s “other” language yet, but that one of her first duties (and those of the two runners-up) will be to start studying it to get up to a passable level of ability as soon as possible. Still, and as beautiful as she is, this year’s winner must have certainly induced a hard swallow among tournament officials, for her last name in particular – De Jonckheere – is almost at a slap-in-the-face level of Dutchness – most true French-speakers would have very little idea how to pronounce it! Nonetheless, year after year everyone is ready to accept any result – even that of 2008, when the winner was a Czech emigrée to Wallonia who could speak no Dutch at all – as long as the tournament process is, shall we say, free and fair.

The problem, dear readers, is that this year there are troubling signs that the Miss Belgium contest was anything other than that. For one thing, as La Dernière Heure reports, one contestant claims that the fix was in for Ms. De Jonckheere from nearly the beginning. Now, this whistle-blower is Maureen Lazard, a French-speaking contestant from Walloon Brabant, but she still alleges that Justine De Jonckheere had long been the favorite (in French: la chouchoute) of tournament director Darline Devos, for whatever reason, to the extent that everyone knew she was going to win and the selection process would be distorted to make that happen. (“Devos” is really a Dutch name – de vos, the fox, quite appropriate for a beauty-pageant director – so maybe that had something to do with it.)

Sour grapes from a loser – yes, that’s what all that sounds like. But there’s another, more serious allegation, this time reported in a Flemish newspaper, namely the “SHE” supplement to the Gazet van Antwerpen. Keep in mind that Ms. De Jonckheere is practiced in finding loopholes to rules – she’s a law student – and also that a certain weight in the decision about the winner is contributed by votes sent in from the general public as SMSs. SHE magazine cites evidence that the winner invested around €12,000 to buy telephone calling-cards to engineer a flood of incoming SMS votes in her favor. Again, the complaint has been lodged on behalf of – yes – another French-speaking contestant, a certain Lara Binet out of Liège, but the only answer tournament director Devos offers is that there could not have been any fraud, since she had monitoring personnel in place as votes were counted.

Sounds lame to me. And anyway: look at Justine’s picture again, at those shifty eyes! I have to conclude that the 2011 Miss Belgium Tournament has been tainted by scandal just when that sort of national institution that can truly draw the interests of the land’s Dutch- and French-speakers together was needed more than ever. There may still be the national football team; there may still be the national armed forces; but otherwise such institutions are falling by the wayside one-by-one, with grave implications for the country’s future and therefore for its solvency.

Next October 31 (a Sunday, of course) should be a rather interesting day indeed in Vatican City. According to articles in both Gazet van Antwerpen and De Tijd (the latter is actually Flanders’ main business/financial paper, but nevermind) two American victims of past sexual abuse at the hands of Roman Catholic priests will be organizing a march then on St. Peter’s Square.

They don’t intend to be alone there. Rather, the two (Bernie McDaid and Olan Home, who also challenged Pope Benedict XVI on priest sexual abuse during the latter’s visit to the US in 2008) have been busy recruiting other Catholic lay organizations to join them. Between those worshippers, other sexual-abuse victims, and reform-minded individuals showing up (including, hopefully, current priests), they expect to be leading a 50,000-strong demonstration seeking to show “that their Church is in terrible trouble.” McDaid and Home will also be pushing their own four-point reform plan:

1. Establish an independent commission to supervise how the Vatican deals with priest sexual abuse;
   
2. Screen seminarians, priests, and bishops effectively against this sort of behavior;

3. Involve lay influence in the selection of bishops;
4. Include mandatory instruction about sexual abuse at every seminary’s program of study.

You might be asking: “I know that these guys need some time to get the word out, but why are they waiting all the way until next October 31?” No, it has nothing to do with Halloween; October 31 is also historically famous as the day when, back in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, and so effectively kicked off the Protestant Reformation.

I guess that, even in death, the great Godfather of Soul got Tired of Standing Still – He Gotta Move On! Maybe he took one look at the temporary crypt at his daughter’s South Carolina house where they put his body and exclaimed “It’s Too Funky in Here!” Maybe he just knew that if he stuck around he would Get Ants in His Pants (And Want to Dance).

In any event, according to a new report in Belgium’s Gazet van Antwerpen (“Body of James Brown stolen”), administrators of his estate are now in a Cold Sweat, singing Lost Someone together in heart-breaking harmony. For Brown’s illegitimate daughter, LaRhonda Pettit, has come forth with an allegation that her father’s body is missing from where it was supposed to have been deposited after his Christmas Day 2006 death.

Pettit has another message, too: Give Me Some Skin! Not only does she know that the body is not there anymore, she knows why: because Brown was actually murdered, by people after his money. (The official cause of death was a heart attack.) So any proper autopsy of his remains – if they’re ever recovered – would reveal all that and get the law going in pursuit of the killers.

There you go, South Carolina police. What are you waiting for? Get Up Offa That Thing and go find Brown!

I’m sorry, but some of the “old media” over here on this European continent just don’t get it when it comes to Twitter. A current example is the Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen with its brief piece “Twitter is a pedo-paradise”.

At least those quotation-marks are in the original title, as if to show that the Gazet editors aren’t quite ready to fully endorse that opinion. Still, the first paragraph reads in its entirety: “The social-networking site Twitter is a cost-free and easy hunting-ground for child-molesters, experts say.” Their proof? One “on-line conversation” between a pedophile and his 13-year-old prey as published in the English newspaper The Sun – one that is thoroughly banal (13-year-old: “Are you trying to seduce me?” Pedophile: “No, not at all. I just want to more more about you.”) besides coming from a source of little more use to the general public than as an exhibitor of “Page Three girls” and none at all when it comes to factual presentation. Oh, and let me add: besides constituting but one instance (an “anecdote,” in scientific parlance) of alleged evil behavior, and one whose use completely misinterprets the Twitter’s technological essence at that. Yes, it is possible to use Twitter to send an “@reply” to communicate directly with someone – but then everyone who subscribes to you can read the message, and anyone can find it afterwards through search. And it is also possible to send a “direct message” to someone, that no one else can read – although that’s only when the two parties subscribe to each others feed, and tell me how that is possible in a case of pedophilia other than after the child-molester has already gained his victim’s confidence through entirely other means!

But what Twitter is really all about is not one-to-one communication, but rather broadcasting – it’s basically a broadcaster of 140-character-or-less messages. In this light, it’s ridiculous to paint it as some potential tool for pedophiles. This article is simply brain-dead, looking to attract attention through the cynical spreading of rent-an-expert pedophilia alarm. And that’s sad, among other reasons because presumably plenty of people (Belgians who are Flemish, mostly) read the Gazet van Antwerpen and believe what they find there, and so will come away with a mistaken negative impression of what has proven to be quite an innovative and useful communications tool.

From a brief piece in the Gazet van Antwerpen by Gunter Willekens we get the very interesting news that Belgium has some sort of advertising “ethics code” that prohibits Christmas-related marketing prior to November 1. Now that’s an interesting solution (although perhaps also a “European socialist” one, like universal access to health care) to the annoying phenomenon of “Christmas creep” whereby Christmas advertising and even public decorations appear earlier and earlier in the year throughout the Western World. This weekly feature, for instance (careful: it’s mainly about American football), has constantly tracked (and bemoaned) this “Christmas creep” and now reports that it has now started to be noticeable even in August! (Go to the link but then scroll down about a third of the way, to the heading “Christmas creep.”) This restriction is all the more impressive when you consider that in Belgium the big loot-accumulating day for children (oh sorry: the Christmas holiday) is not December 25 – although there is an Xmas celebration then, too – but earlier, on 6 December, St. Nicholas’ Day. And it is in fact that St. Nicholas (better known as Sinterklaas and pictured above) who plays the big Christmas sugar-daddy, not any “Santa Claus.”

That “ethics code” provision, then, basically amounts to a prohibition on displaying good ol’ Sinterklaas’ image on advertising materials before November 1. But Willekens’ article further reveals that toy retailers and the like this year are pretty desperate to move their Xmas goods and so have already started sending out their advertisements, handbills, and the like using the obvious loophole: they simply don’t include Sinterklaas. But they do include promises of savings of up to 20% off regular prices.

The Flemish Gazet van Antwerpen reminds us today that the Anne Frank House Foundation recently set up an Official Anne Frank Channel on YouTube.

Among the film-clips on display is one showing the only time Anne Frank was captured on video, as she watched from her family’s balcony the departure of the neighboring girl to her wedding. Naturally, this is before the Frank family had to go into hiding. In fact it is a little less than a year before they did so, and so the scene is at the apartment house elsewhere in Amsterdam where they lived a normal family life up to and a couple years into the German occupation, before moving to the famous achterhuis on the Prinsengracht to try to disappear and so evade a call-up from the occupation authorities for relocation to a “work camp” (which more often turned out to amount to transportation to a death camp in Eastern Europe; it was only Anne’s elder sister, Margot, who received this notice, but that was enough to drive the whole family into hiding).

The brief Gazet van Antwerpen article (no by-line) notes that another clip gives a video-tour of the achterhuis and was put on-line in celebration of the Anne Frank House Museum’s fiftieth anniversary, but it also seems that the entire YouTube channel was created only recently.

Fear not, all you thousands of EuroSavant fans, whether on Twitter, by RSS, or simply frequent direct visitors to the site! While I’m always on the look-out for news of quirky Euro-events that I can pass on to you (see, for example, immediately below), especially if they provide fertile breeding-ground for puns, I do also regularly treat the major news of the day when I can add to the discussion a new insight or perspective as gleaned from the European press.

As of this Sunday, the world’s burning news is of course the recent election in Iran, the apparent plot by the authorities in that country to steal it, and the people’s reaction thereto. Unfortunately, all of this is occurring so far over a weekend, which might be another dastardly trick by the current Tehran regime designed to limit take-up of the story by the regular European press, some parts of which do not work on Sunday at all (although there’s also word that the American MSM has been similarly slow off the starting-blocks). (more…)

Miley Cyrus refuses to eat her vegetables: I’m sorry if this message serves to disillusion any teener-readers of EuroSavant, but that’s what the Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen is reporting today in the “She” (i.e. women’s) section of its website. So maybe Hannah Montana is not such a goody-two-shoes after all! The exact quote out of Miley’s mouth in the Gazet: “I eat fruit but not vegatables. They look so funny. Most vegatables are green, and eating something green is simply strange. Too many filthy things are green.”

A number of the Flemish newspapers today are carrying the same brief article about an interesting approach to the job market currently being adopted in China. I might as well point you to the version in the Gazet van Antwerpen: Crisis drives Chinese massively to the plastic surgeon. Yes, operating under the assumption that the more attractive you are, the more you are likely to be hired, this piece tells how Chinese plastic-surgery patients are 40% more numerous now year-on-year. From a survey conducted at the Time Plastic Surgery Hospital [sic] in Shanghai, more than half of the people there for plastic surgery are motivated by considerations of finding either a new or a better job. Also: “most patients are women.”

Not to worry, though, because at least this Gazet van Antwerpen article provides its own antidote to those Belgians who might read it and think, “Yes, that’s a good idea!” For it is headed by a picture of an array of flesh-probing and -cutting tools indispensable to such procedures – yuck!

Here’s a tactic they don’t teach you in “Marketing 101” about how to re-package your product to help its appeal to skyrocket world-wide: as ammunition! If you have been following at all the continuing story of the Baghdad shoe-thrower, Muntadar al-Zaidi, you will have already heard about how the offers of money for those very two shoes that President Bush had to duck have reached very high figures, mainly from various wealthy Gulf individuals. But we lesser mortals can at least be content with purchasing a pair of the very same type of shoe which al-Zaidi used, available from the original Turkish manufacturer. This word comes today from the Belgian paper Gazet van Antwerpen – “Bush shoes” immensely popular with Americans. (In fact, the story happens to be placed within the “She” sub-section of GVA’s site, devoted to women-relevant subjects like “Fashion and Beauty.” You ask why? Shoes, man – women can’t get enough of shoes!)

Yes, the shoe-company (or -person, I don’t know; I’ve no facility in Turkish, it’s not a European language, sorry) is “Ramazan Baydan,” and it/he has already received more than 300,000 orders for that model and counting. The all-too-brief piece also reveals certain additional characteristics about them: made of brown leather, with a thick sole (ah, but does not one need a thick sole to reside in Baghdad these days?), priced at $42/€30 a pair. From the picture at the top (looks like a crowd of Indonesian protestors), we also see that the shoes are loafers (i.e. no laces), which makes sense from a weapons standpoint: better for deploying to one’s throwing-hand quickly, especially in that most-critical interval when you have already thrown one and hope to get the second one despatched as well before any bystanders or security personnel can react.

Sorry, no actual link or any other information other than “Ramazan Baydan” about where to go to get your own pair – time to head for Google! But it seems that very many Americans have already solved that puzzle and placed an order – thus the GVA article’s title.

UPDATE: Here you go! H/t to Bloomberg’s Mark Bentley, it turns out that the place to go for your “Bye-Bye-Bush” shoes is the Baydan Group. Fair warning: Even on their “English” site (to which the preceding link connects you, of course), they still use Turkish extensively.

Did you miss the commemoration on Saturday, the 22nd? No, I don’t want to refer here to the 45th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, but rather to something rather more happy and refreshing: the 40th anniversary of the release of the double-album “The Beatles” by the Beatles, known to one and all simply as the White Album. It seems also to be known to Pope Benedict XVI and his minions in the Vatican (either as the “White Album” or at least whatever that translates to in Latin), as the Holy See’s house-organ (not the musical kind) L’Osservatore Romano used the occasion as an opportunity publicly to forgive John Lennon for his remarks back in the 1960s that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” Unfortunately, I’m not able to find anything to that effect at that link for L’Osservatore Romano, which gives the English version, nor at any of the other editions, so we have to rely for this piece of news on an article in the Belgian daily Gazet van Antwerpen: Vatican forgives the Beatles for “bigger than Jesus” utterance. (Also unfortunately: John Lennon happens to be deceased.)

Yes, in that article the Vatican authorities are said to conclude that, in the final analysis, the “bigger than Jesus” remark was simply “a joke from a young man who was overcome by unexpected success.” So they’re willing to let bygones be bygones. Oh, and for that matter, the Gazet reports, Elvis was OK, too: the description of him from L’Osservatore Romano was of a “dear, sensitive young man.”

As I noted in this previous post, July 21 – yesterday – is each year the Belgian National Holiday: think along the lines, for example, of the 4th of July in the US. Except that yesterday in Belgium the occasion was more like America on 4 July 1860: then, Abraham Lincoln had just been nominated to be the Republican Party candidate for the upcoming presidential election in November, and it was evident that, while he had a good chance of sweeping the more-populated Northern states with his party platform forbidding any more slavery in US territories, nobody in the South would vote for him. Indeed, if he turned out to win the presidency nonetheless (which of course he did), there was very likely to be serious trouble, yet it was hard to think of any alternative scenario by which the presidency could be won by any of the other candidates, each of which were politicians backed by yet-narrower sections of the country. Likewise, there was precious little of any “national” nature to be celebrated in Belgium on its “National Holiday” yesterday, even as one can assume that any similar implicit prospect of violence does not apply in this modern case.

When last we left portly, avuncular old King Albert II, he had received Prime Minister Yves Leterme’s resignation but had yet to decide whether to accept it. (more…)

Today’s Gazet van Antwerpen has a brief report about a newcomer to that noted beer-land Belgium, namely the flagship brew of that other noted beer-land, the Czech Republic, whose citizens year after year stand at the top of international tables of per-capita beer consumption.

Of course, Pilsner Urquell has been for some years now under new, more-aggressive management from SAB Miller (formerly South African Breweries), which among other things has put it on the American market. But hitting the States, with that country’s generally watered-down, mass-consumption pseudo-beers (shunned by anyone in the know over on this side of the Atlantic), hardly compares to taking on the various noteworthy Belgian beers on their own turf. The GvA article speaks of Pilsner Urquel first seeking to gain ground in the Belgian café and restaurant sector, although it also says it expects to be assisted there by the Delhaize supermarket chain – originally Belgian itself, but also operating in the Czech Republic. The preliminary goal is selling 10,000 hectoliters in Belgium yearly within ten years.

Regular readers know that I am often in the Czech Republic, having lived there a number of years in the past, and I never recall ever seeing a Belgian beer for sale. In Hungary and in Poland, yes: there was often Stella Artois, and even Hoegaarden. But in the Czech Republic, to many Stella would simply have been superfluous. (Now, there’s plenty of Guinness, and even Kilkenny, in all those countries, but that’s mainly at the Irish pubs, and besides, everybody knows they are dark beers, and so in another league.) Will Pilsner Urquell seem equally superfluous within Belgium? The next time I’m in Antwerp I’ll try to see if I can find some and ask how it is selling.

Yes, I’ve managed to kick my recent Danish fixation. And yes, that EU Constitutional Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) got underway this past weekend, starting with a one-day EU summit meeting on Saturday attended by heads of state and/or heads of government of all 15 current EU members, the 10 members-states which will join the EU at the beginning of next May, and 3 other states slated to join somewhat later as well (namely Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey). They were welcomed by current EU President Silvio Berlusconi, who called for an “act of will” from out of the assembled delegations, to come up with a version of the Constitution acceptable to all by Christmas. As President, Berlusconi got to speak first, and got to speak a little longer, and he was followed by five minutes’ remarks from European Commission president Romano Prodi, then European Parliament president Pat Cox, then from leaders of each of the 28 national delegations. “After everyone had spoken, basically nothing had been said, much less discussed,” comments Die Zeit’s article on the proceedings, Strength-of-Will, At Least up until Christmas, which, although I’m indebted to it for many of the above details, I found otherwise disappointing in its low quotient of actual analysis.

Maybe it was just too early to be able to say anything truly profound. Those heads of state/government couldn’t hang around for long – they’re a busy bunch of Euro-men and -women – meaning that it was their representatives, generally the foreign ministers, who were left behind to roll up their sleeves and start getting into the details. I’ve found good coverage about this part – the rest of the story, so to speak – in a series of articles from the Belgian on-line Gazet van Antwerpen. (more…)

There has been further fallout from the Berlusconi-in-Strasbourg affair, as reported by those sharp-eyed newshawks at the Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen. You’ll recall that the remarks Italian prime minster Silvio Berlusconi addressed to German MEP Martin Schulz last week – something to the effect that he recommended Herr Schulz for a part in a new movie about a Nazi concentration camp – did much to sour current diplomatic relations between Italy and Germany.

Now those relations have taken another turn for the worse, to the degree that Italy may wind up losing one of its most famous guest-tourists this summer – namely Gerhard Schröder himself, who always goes to Tuscany summers when he can get away from the hustle-and-bustle of trying to put the German Federal Republic back on its feet economically. (more…)

There goes another one of my favorite weblog-entry subjects! The Belgian government is now in the process of modifying its infamous “genocide law” (formally known as “law of universal competence” – the law that used to allow criminal complaints from anyone, from anywhere, against anyone, from anywhere, whom they could charge with crimes against humanity) so that it more-or-less conforms to the sort of legislation most other countries have for the prosecution against those sorts of serious crimes. Crucially, with the changes that are now being added either the accuser or the accused must be of Belgian nationality or must have at least lived in Belgium for three years. (EuroSavant recently had the occasion to discuss this law, and the displeasure it was prompting among American officials, here.) (more…)