An op-ed guest writer for the New York Times opines:
SIXTY-FIVE years ago, in November 1944, the war in Europe was at a stalemate. A resurgent Wehrmacht had halted the Allied armies along Germany’s borders after its headlong retreat across northern France following D-Day. From Holland to France, the front was static — yet thousands of Allied soldiers continued to die in futile battles to reach the Rhine River.
One Allied army, however, was still on the move.
In a fit of timeliness, I have read the first volume of the report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (IIFFMCG), colloquially known as the Tagliavini report. The report drew attention when it was published at the end of September for its headline findings about the escalation of the conflict on 7-8 August 2008 and who bore the responsibility for them. But there’s a lot more in the first part. (The account of the conflict and the conclusions of the Mission are the first, 44-page volume of the report. Expert contributions comprise the second and much larger volume, while materials submitted by parties to the conflict comprise the still-larger third.)
Here are what I see as the key paragraphs:
Continue reading
From the assembled press, someone shouts a question, “Effective immediately?”
“I have been informed that such an announcement was prepared today, you should already have a copy. According to my understanding, that is immediately. Without delay.”
Twenty years ago this evening, Günter Schabowski gave an unrehearsed answer at a press conference, and thousands of East Berliners — and soon, many more thousands of East Germans — did not delay. The Berlin Wall was open.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus, after much hemming and hawing, signed the Treaty of Lisbon this afternoon. It is expected to enter into force on 1 December 2009. This success is undoubtedly the highlight of the Swedish Presidency, which made concluding ratification a top priority.
Prominent changes include more qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers, increased involvement of the European Parliament in the legislative process through extended codecision with the Council of Ministers, eliminating the pillar system and the creation of a President of the European Council with a term of two and half years and a High Representative for Foreign Affairs to present a united position on EU policies. The Treaty of Lisbon will also make the Union’s human rights charter, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, legally binding.
Now that that’s done, is everyone ready for the next round of enlargement?
File under “Who knew?” The Guardian reports that Rory Stewart has been selected as a candidate for the UK’s parliament from a safe (10,000 majority) Conservative seat. In one of those moves that makes me think that parliamentary systems are odd sometimes, one of his first actions will be to move so that he actually lives in the district he will represent. “I will be straight on to the estate agent in the morning,” the Guardian quotes him as saying. “I’m very much looking forward to living in the constituency and getting to know everybody.”
(Stewart’s been a soldier, a diplomat, a wanderer, a provincial governor in Iraq, a professor at Harvard and is currently a director of a significant charity helping part of Afghanistan, yet the Guardian web edition’s headline writer chooses to identify him as “Former royal tutor Rory Stewart.” What does that say about Britain? Or the Guardian? Or perhaps the Guardian’s perceptions of its audience?)
I would not have pegged the author of The Places In Between as a Tory, though on closer consideration I think he’s too much of a loose cannon an independent thinker to be much of a back-bencher at all. Anyone who drops everything to walk across Asia and spends the winter of 2001 walking across central Afghanistan is not likely to be fazed by a party whip. I haven’t yet read The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, which probably gives a better sense of how he’ll do in constituent service. Maybe he’ll turn out splendidly. Still, he’s had a decade of changing jobs every year or two, is he likely to settle down to work in Westminster? (On the other hand, I asked the same question about Bobby Jindal, with whom I have a passing acquaintance, and he’s still on the job.)
Four years ago, I was boggled to realize that astronomers had been finding planets around other stars at an average rate of one per month since the first exoplanet around a main-sequence star was discovered in 1995.
On Monday, scientists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced that they had found 32 new exoplanets in recent work. Moreover, that brings the total found to roughly 400. Instead of discovering a new planet every month, the average is now much closer to every two weeks.
What is the goal? The astronomers announced their findings at a conference titled, “Towards Other Earths: perspectives and limitations in the [Extremely Large Telescope] era.” The ESO instruments have led to the detection of 24 of the 28 known exoplanets with masses of less than 20 times the earth’s. The technology to spot earth-like planets around other stars is either on the drawing board or under construction. Key puzzles are now in how to characterize atmospheres around exoplanets, and how to deduce other characteristics of earth-like planets that the astronomers expect to find.
And in two weeks, astronomers will likely have found another planet around a different star.
Holy smokes. What will the man do for an encore?
From the BBC:
US President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel Committee said he was awarded it for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.
Reuters quotes from the citation (The Nobel servers are slammed and super-slow just at the moment):
“Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said in a citation.
Wow.
Well, I’m going to go way, way, way out on a limb and say that the grand coalition will continue after today’s German election. What do the rest of you think?
From the New York Times:
Ertugrul Osman, who might have ruled the Ottoman empire from a palace in Istanbul, but instead spent most of his life in a walk-up apartment in Manhattan, died Wednesday night in Istanbul. He was 97. …
Mr. Osman was a descendant of Osman I, the Anatolian ruler who in 1299 established the kingdom that eventually controlled parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Mr. Osman would have eventually become the Sultan but for the establishment of the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923.
He is survived by his second wife, and had no children.
Born in 1912, Mr. Osman was the last surviving grandson of an Ottoman emperor; his grandfather, Abdul Hamid II, ruled from 1876 to 1909. …
As a young man, Mr. Osman ran a mining company, Wells Overseas, which required him to travel frequently to South America. Because he considered himself a citizen of the Ottoman Empire, he refused to carry the passport of any country. Instead, he traveled with a certificate devised by his lawyer. That might have continued to work had security measures not been tightened after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2004, he received a Turkish passport for the first time.
Is there a pretender now?
Calculated Risk points out an interesting number in a Bloomberg report: A public authority will soon be managing a portfolio of bad non-residential real-estate loans whose nominal value is about half of Ireland’s GDP. Probably all sorts of shoes waiting to drop in commercial real estate markets across Europe.
Finance Minister Brian Lenihan will detail tomorrow how much Ireland will pay for about 90 billion euros ($131 billion) of real estate loans now crippling what as recently as 2006 was one of Europe’s most dynamic economies.
…
The National Asset Management Agency, known as NAMA, will buy 18,000 loans at a discount from lenders led by Allied Irish Banks Plc and Bank of Ireland Plc. The agency will manage the loans, which amount to about half of Ireland’s gross domestic product. … Most of the property-related loans of the biggest Irish banks are being taken over by the agency, excluding residential mortgages.
…
The office vacancy rate at the end of the second quarter was 21 percent in Dublin, compared with 8 percent in London and 10 percent in Berlin, according to CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. As many as 35,000 new homes are now vacant, estimates Davy, the country’s largest securities firm, up from 20,000 18 months ago.