Get your hands on a real fistful of Euros - Europe’s first transnational lottery starts selling tickets today in Britain, France and Spain

Reports on Schroeder’s resignation in English: BBC CNN WaPo

Gerhard Schr?der has resigned the chairmanship of the SPD, handing the reins to Franz M?ntefering (Der Spiegel; link in German). The latter is regarded as to the left of Schr?der (though much less so than Oskar Lafontaine), not to say more popular with the party base.

David has been suggesting that I might be a gloomy person, so I’d like to try and kill that idea stone dead, and quick as a flash, with an extraordinarily optimistic post about a key EU topic: Turkey.

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Now here’s an interesting one. (And please note that in keeping with recent Fistful tradition - as identified by Ms T - I am putting a question mark before the title). Pascal Lamy is reportedly considering a discussion paper which proposes allowing countries to impose import bans on products from other countries that do not [...]

Far left nationalism - Harry Hatchet on why the British left parties are refusing to be part of the Party of the European Left

Once upon a time, there was a large, intellectually hegemonic, somewhat totalising ideology rooted in a heterodox school of economics. Its advocates proposed to make massive changes to the structure of society and claimed that only such a revolutionary realignment could alleviate the contradictions and failures of the existing order and save the world [...]

I don’t know if he had Europe specifically in mind, but this is the message from Singapore’s finance minister Lee Kuan Yew in this interview in the latest issue of Yale Global Online. As he puts it:”If you’re not driven by profit, and do what the communists used to, which means price equals cost [...]

The British police have banned over 2000 people from travelling to Portugal this summer, in an effort to keep Euro 2004 hooligan free.

News in today might suggest that far from obsessing ourselves with the current plight of the US economy, our attention might be better directed rather nearer home. Reading off from the results of the latest Purchasing Managers Index survey which appears in todays Financial Times, the services sector is growing, but employemnt in it isn’t. [...]