Yes, there was that giant Charlie Hebdo march yesterday in Paris, as well as in many other cities, but times remain tough for newspaper staffs (in physical security terms, that is – quite apart from their long-term economic prospects):

“Le Soir, things are going to blow up on your editors” is what it reads there, which was followed down the telephone-line by “You guys don’t take us seriously!” OK, so it’s a bomb-threat, called in yesterday afternoon (Sunday) to the downtown Brussels offices of Le Soir (“The Evening”) when probably most of those present would have preferred marching in Brussels own Charlie Hebdo solidarity demonstration but had to work instead.

Can’t newspapermen and -women catch a break these days? I mean, the offices of the Hamburger Morgenpost were also firebombed yesterday – yes, after that paper had reprinted some Charle Hebdo cartoons in a show of solidarity.

I don’t think Le Soir had done even that, but that seems not to have been the issue in that case. For as that De Morgen piece goes on to report, the police managed to arrest someone for that bomb-threat the same day, some fifty-two-year-old from out of the “extreme left” who in fact had been convicted for actually blowing up a telephone-booth (remember those?) in order to intimidate in Brussels back in 1999.

The good thing about this story is that the Le Soir staff, when ordered to evacuate on Sunday afternoon, simply took their laptops to a local hotel and resumed their work, as you can see from their tweet:

The swine flu’s a-coming, it’s a coming! There’s no ignoring it now, not after today’s front-page story, top-of-the-fold and complete with color-coded maps, in the Washington Post. “‘The virus is still around and ready to explode,’ said William Schaffner, an influenza expert at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine who advises federal health officials. ‘We’re potentially looking at a very big mess.'”

Wow. You may wonder, as I did: “OK, we had swine flu in the spring, and now they say it’s going to come back soon. Where has it been off to in the meantime?” The answer: in the Southern Hemisphere! It’s winter there now, so I guess it has something to do with cold weather – although it has stuck around to an alarming degree nonetheless in the UK. That could be a function of the rather “un-summery” (i.e. cool, cloudy, rainy) summer we’ve mostly had here so far in Northern Europe.

Turning back to the Northern European press – i.e. to something you may not be able to just read yourself – the French-language Belgian paper Le Soir has picked up on those reports that we discussed here earlier about swine-flu cases being discovered that are resistant to Tamiflu. Once again with Le Soir, the article includes a brief mention of how “The Roche laboratory [maker of Tamiflu] had indicated that it expected a 0.5% rate of resistance to its antiviral [drug] according to results from clinical tests,” and that makes me see red. That’s just marketing propaganda; how can they truly know how widespread the resistance to their drug will be through “clinical tests”?

Here’s what Le Soir has that’s new about the swine flu, however (although they tend to call it the “Flu A/H1N1,” which seems standard for French media): the Tamiflu used to combat it also induces undesirable side-effects in children – “important” effects, according to the article, effects “quite a bit more than the preliminary studies done to get the medicine approved allowed us to guess.” This is evident from the unpleasant experiences of pupils at one particular elementary school in England where they all were given Tamiflu after it was found that one of them had returned from a vacation to Mexico with the swine flu virus, and it obviously argues against that kind of preventive prescription of the drug.

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…)

Don’t look now – but Belgium is once again in a governmental crisis. Prime Minister Yves Leterme yesterday evening (Monday, 14 July) submitted his resignation to King Albert II, after having served in that capacity for thirteen months. You’ll recall that Leterme – leader of the Flemish political party Christen-Democratisch en Vlaams (CD&V) – had been the compromise candidate for prime minister in the first place, voted in by the kaleidoscope of Dutch-, French-, and German-speaking parties of the Belgian political landscape pretty much in desperation after nine months of haggling after the latest national elections of June, 2007. July 15 (i.e. today) was the deadline he had set to be able to present a new plan for re-structuring Belgium’s governmental structure. It seemed that the deadline was coming up fast and little to no progress on forming such a plan had been made. So Leterme resigned. The Economist weblog “Certain ideas of Europe” is keeping on top of developments with an summary entry Time to dissolve Belgium?. (more…)

The animal-rights activists are up in arms again. As the French-language Belgian newspaper Le Soir reports, this time the targets of their ire are the the snake-men of Marrakesh, of that city’s Jemaa el-Fna [sic] Square. More specifically, it’s the Montpellier, France-based GEOS (Groupe d’Etudes et d’Observation pour la Sauvegarde des animaux savages) that is raising a ruckus, not against any sort of bio-engineered hybrid snake/men, but rather against those Moroccan snake-charmers. They are accused of mishandling their reptiles; the international appeal from the GEOS reads “Tourists, turn away from the unworthy spectacle of these mistreated animals, or even better go to express your indignation to the police-office near Jama el-Fina Square!” And hey, as of this morning (Friday, 8 Feb.) their petition already numbers more than 200 signatures!

The decisive EU summit in Brussels this weekend to work out a final text of a Constitutional Treaty failed to achieve that aim. As had been expected, the principal stumbling-block was the question of the voting regime to be used for passing measures within the Council of Ministers by a “qualified majority”; both Poland and Spain stuck firmly to their demand that the current voting system, inaugurated by the December, 2000 Nice Treaty, be retained, while other states – principally the EU’s two biggest players, Germany and France – were equally as adamant that a new “double majority” system, proposed in the new Constitution, be implemented. But there were other points that had to be left for later resolution as well, as we’ll see. (more…)

Did you think that the supersonic transport Concorde was going the way of the dodo bird, now that both the airlines that sponsored its development and ran trans-Atlantic Concorde flights for years (Air France and British Airways) have announced that they are retiring the plane? Not so. (more…)