EUR-Lex, the EU’s web gateway to legal documents now also offers provisional access to the official legislative journals of all member states (via handakte.de)
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Downing Street says – A new weblog reporting the official briefings made by the British Prime Minister’s office
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The Boston Globe has uncovered the (truly) European roots of J.F. Kerry. Sueddeutsche Zeitung picks the subject up… “I hope you don’t write that Kerry was a Sudeten-German…” (in German).
Italy’s No-Growth Update
OK I’m on a roll, so I’m going to stick my neck out. This slide in the Italian confidence index apparently surprised the ‘experts’. Well it shouldn’t have surprised Fistful readers who have been following what I have been saying. Clearly these confidence indexes are not the last word in sliced bread. But they do mean something, and Germany’s Ifo index just turned in another bad reading too.
Ever since Parmalat, I have been asking one simple question: will Italy ever grow again? Of course, the simple answer is possibly it will: never say never. But will it ever get back to vigorous growth: this I doubt. I am even half asking myself if we will see positive numbers in more than say 50% of the forthcoming quaters. Remember, if my demographic thesis has any predictive power it should be precisely here in Italy that the Titanic starts to take in water. Parmalat was simply the iceberg. Of course my thesis could always be wrong. Any takers?
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Mischievous Constructions – a new blog from Michael Brooke, brother of The Virtual Stoa‘s Chris
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Confident of victory in the March 14th election, Russian President Putin has declared the resignation of the Prime Minister and his cabinet
Let’s Go To Bulgaria
Actually just after my Chinese visitor dropped by I received a Bulgarian one, my former ‘research assistant’, young Bulgarian anthropologist Yassen Bosev. And what did Yassen want? To tell me to Forget India, Let’s Go To Bulgaria. Only trouble was, I had some bad news for him: India’s minister of Disininvestment and Technology, Arun Shourie, already got there first. Why does everyone think Indian president Kalaam was in Bulgaria on his first overseas visit late last year?
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Going Into Business
“Madam Wang Haiyan, who runs a pre-school class from her home, reckons that she would have been earning half of what she is now and be less happy to boot if she had stayed in her job at a state-owned firm. “
Any one else round here old enough to remember Dustin Hoffman’s ‘Little Big Man’, with the character who insisted on riding his horse back to front? I feel a bit like that sometimes: with my back-office for India and China right here in Barcelona. Of course this makes life pretty surreal, people waltz in on the messenger at all times of the day and night: from all the strange corners of the planet.
This morning it was the turn of one of my ‘sources’ in China: he came in over the messenger to tell me he’d left his job. He has had a ‘new’ idea. He is going to set up a company to do guess what? Outsourcing. He is dead set on it since he tells me he can get university graduates in China to work for him for ‘just’ 150 dollars a month.
Actually in his case no one is going to accuse him of destroying western jobs: he wants to design and put up websites for Western clients who want to sell to Chinese customers. We might well ask ourselves however, if he is succesful in this how long it will be before he leverages his position to start offering those websites in more distant climes. And good luck to him.
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It’s expensive, but we’re rich!
Remember this debate about the relative living standards of Sweden and Alabama? One little commented result of the euro, krona and pound?s rise against the US dollar over the last two years is that measured in current exchange rates European countries? income per head now compares rather more favourably against the United States.
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Is France’s Center Falling Apart?
Asks John Rossant.
He writes that this incident
On Jan. 31, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited a Paris shopping mall to win support for the center-right in upcoming elections. Within minutes, a group of youths — most of North African background — began hurling insults. Sarkozy, a potential presidential candidate, was chased until he reached a police station.
and this one
Later, in the Burgundian town of M?con, First Lady Bernadette Chirac attended a benefit concert for children’s hospitals. All went smoothly until a Franco-Israeli chanteuse named Shirel began a song about Jerusalem. According to those present, up to 30 Arabs in the audience suddenly began screaming epithets: “dirty Jew,” “death to the Jews.”
were too common occurrences to rate much national media attention.
After more examples and arguments, Rossett concludes:
The school system is increasingly ill-adapted to the multicultural and multi-ethnic nation France has become. Underfunded universities are prompting an unprecedented brain drain. And the arrogance of the big political parties is alienating voters. A recent example is the government’s support of former Prime Minister Alain Jupp?, head of the ruling party, after his conviction on corruption charges.
With few public figures to respect, North African kids often figure they’ve nothing to lose if they join extremist movements. At the other end of the spectrum, plenty of native French are ready to ditch the old doctrines of moderation for something nastier. With regional elections due on Mar. 21 and 28, polls already are showing important gains for extremist parties — and losses for the center-left and center-right coalitions that have long held the reins of power. Given the current climate in France, it’s hard to be surprised — and hard not to be discouraged.
I don’t know enough to say, but it’s worrying.