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The start of the business week on Monday saw impacts of the “Black Friday” lunge at European creditworthiness, by a leading US credit ratings firm.
The company, Standard and Poor’s, down -graded nine members of the 17-member Eurozone group, in its Sovereigns Ratings List, on 13.1.12. … Read More »
Silvio Berlusconi, the mercurial former Italian Prime Minister, forced from office under gathering clouds of scandal in mid-November, says he is “still on track”, not out of the political game. … Read More »
Street protests in Russia for better standards of democracy have continued to spread to more places in the country and to grow, one Moscow crowd estimate getting up to 100 000.
A prime resource for the movement is that they can focus on a single, high-profile target, the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, as he campaigns for election as President on 4.3.12. … Read More »
The push will be on in the New Year to extend the powers of the European Union, in the hope of it dealing better with challenges like the debt crisis.
More in the short-term, with the threat of a general recession, new efforts will be focused on setting up the permanent guarantee fund, the European Stability Mechanism, by mid-year; and on the possible issue of joint European bonds, guaranteed by governments in a group.
Disputes will go beyond immediate action, to wider ideas of what “Europe” should be, whether a collection of states, or a closer union more on the federal plan. … Read More »
MEMOIR: Thousands have turned out in Prague for the state funeral of the former President Vaclav Havel. He was the leader of the dissident movement and massive street protests that commenced the transition of Czechoslovakia from communist state to membership of the European Union.
Lee Duffield prepared this memoir: … Read More »
COMMENTARY: The murder of innocents in Norway by a zealot identifying with the extreme right, called Anders Breivik, has caused some disassociation and position-taking by the so-called “new nationalist” parties in several European countries. These, like the Wilders party, PVV, in the Netherlands, or the Sweden Democrats, have made sudden electoral gains, on the back of campaigns against mass immigration, especially if Islamic. (See EUAustralia Online: “Finland vote latest in Euro-nationalist trend”, 22.4.11; “Voting: tense count in Sweden, 22.9.10; “Wilders, horse-trading …”, 5.9.10).
They have been at pains to point out that the Norwegian gunman, if singing from some pages in their songbook, was an isolate; that they concentrate on legal parliamentary politics; that they have broken their links with a fascist past, or, in cases like the Netherlands, never had such a past; and that they do not sympathise with, let alone provide any infrastructure for terrorist activities. While police in Europe have been taking a prudent look at some of the rhetoricians and associations on the radical right, few accusations have actually been made that these new parties condone egregious violent crimes. (Criticism in the liberal press is rather that extreme ideas will feed into the fantasies of weak types, and the insane).
Haydn Rippon, a doctoral researcher studying the new nationalist movement, prepared this appraisal. … Read More »
The business week that ended on Friday (5.8.11) saw stock markets slump, the European debt crisis getting worse, and widespread fears of a failure of economic recovery on both sides of the Atlantic. … Read More »