Frelections: roundup
The day after, some French election blogging. A somewhat ambiguous photo from the Sarkozy rally – he’s despairing, she’s…not. Sarkozy gets made to eat his Flamby, an allusion to Francois Hollande’s...
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Can This Really Be Europe We Are Talking About?
In recent days I have been think a lot, and reading a lot, about the implications of Greece’s recent election results. At the end of the day the only difference this whole process makes to the ultimate...
View ArticleNHS in “worse than unlimited budget for single patient” shock
The Wall Street Journal Europe uncorks an instant classic in explaining the longevity of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi: Karol Sikora, a leading cancer specialist who examined Megrahi shortly...
View ArticleEurovision 2012
If the Russian grandmothers don’t win it, something’s wrong. That is all. Update: Wall St. Journal is liveblogging. Sign of the end times? Also #eurovision on Twitter is home of the best commentary.
View ArticleIMF signals nervousness about Eurozone exposures
Yesterday, with most of the world already in weekend mode, the IMF website carried a link to an item entitled Fiscal Safeguards. There is no explanatory text with the link. Going into the very brief...
View ArticleECB board member: Euro-bashing is Anglophone overload
Germany’s man at the ECB, Jörg Asmussen, in a speech about monetary policy communication today: For the euro area and the ECB, the situation is even more peculiar, because the influential...
View ArticleSome French links
Here’s a really interesting piece about French interior minister Manuel Valls and the network of friends around him from his days as a student activist. They include Alain Bauer, Nicolas Sarkozy’s...
View ArticleKurds
A serious Iraqi newspaper is saying openly that it may be time to give up the Shia-Kurdish alliance that has run Iraq since Saddam, and let the Kurds move on to independence. Shots fired at an Iraqi...
View ArticleOf fish, flowers, AKs, offshore banking, and now horsemeat
The horsemeat scandal has taken an unexpected, and possibly very significant, turn. So the Cyprus company controlled by Dutch meat merchant Jan Fasen, who was caught last year passing off South...
View ArticleWe still owe it to them, and blaming private companies will not do.
Back in 2007, the Danish army withdrew from Iraq. The government originally tried to avoid accepting Iraqis who had worked for the Danes as refugees, despite the fact that they were in grave danger of...
View ArticleEdward Snowden and the Political West
Germany is the theatre in which the consequences of Edward Snowden’s disclosures are being played out. Why is this? Obviously, privacy and data protection are especially sensitive in Germany. After the...
View ArticleBang!
Oh well, here it is: yes, Virginia, the BND shared enormous amounts of surveillance material with the NSA, both from their military SIGINT group deployed with the German army in Afghanistan and from,...
View ArticleSpies for Europe.
We’ve suspected for some time that the French and German governments’ refusal to take part in the Iraq war had something to do with their access to independent overhead imagery satellites. Briefly,...
View ArticleTheir fibres are radioactive.
It’s been a bit All Snowden, All The Time on this blog. I think it makes sense to read the story as a European one, though. Here’s a little more. From Snowden Part One: Snowden: As a general rule, so...
View ArticleSecurity tactics
Regarding the headline here: US and UK at odds over security tactics as row escalates something comes to mind. The signals intelligence alliance between the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand...
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Q&A: The Catalan Way explained
Why are Catalans taking part in a human chain this Wednesday? The Catalan newspaper Ara has produced a series of questions and answers in English which should explain everything you want to know about...
View ArticleIt can be done.
The P5+1 talks were, as we blogged, very close to an agreement between the US and Iran. Just not close enough, and we’ll meet again in the third week of November – in a week’s time, that is. It can be...
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Send the envoy
There could only be one song for this post*. I had “Iran follow-up post” on my to-do list, but I wasn’t expecting the follow-up to be basically “dealio!”. The US statement is here, which carefully...
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The FT could not be more wrong about Brazil and the Internet.
The FT is worried about the Internet, and specifically what the Brazilians are up to with it as a result of the Snowden disclosures. Could Brazil's anger at US spying fracture the web? The FT is...
View ArticleI saw the wall Mr Gorbachev tore down.
In October 1989, I was in Berlin for the first time. Small town boy, big city lights. We flew with Pan-Am back then. The airline also doesn’t exist anymore. I caught about the last possible glimpse at...
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