The fumes are billowing thick and hot in Berlin. The two parties that make up Germany’s governing coalition are at a standoff. J?rgen Trittin, the Green environment minister, plans to introduce emissions trading, and wants to achieve an initial reduction in emissions by 2007. Economics minister Wolfgang Clement of the SPD wants no reduction in [...]
Last year, reading around a bit to try to come to grips with Islamic terrorism, and the mindset that drives it, I read Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples. Published in 1998, it’s a bit of a seqel to Among the Believers, which was written in the wake of Iran’s revolution of 1979 [...]
Reuters points out that owning a single share of Eurodisney, the long time ill-fated European branch of Disney, may have been one of the best investments in recent European economic history. Shareholders attending last Thursday’s annual meeting were rewarded with two tickets, a Lion-King toy, and a restaurant voucher. Just the tickets, currently priced at [...]
Just a quick follow up to my recent post on German outsourcing. I fear the issue rather got lost in an interesting, if secondary, topic in the comments section. One reader was, however kind enought to draw this article to my attention.
The German firm Siemens will move most of the 15,000 software programming jobs from [...]
Italian consumer confidence has remained near a 10-year low in March in the wake of the Madrid terrorist bombings. In fact the bombings may have hurt sentiment in Italy more than the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. according to a statement from the government-funded Isae institute. The confidence survey, which [...]
Well, well, this was hardly unexpected. In fact the reality may well be that this time there is plenty of smoke but no fire, since Siemens has announced it has no concrete plans to move 10,000 jobs abroad. Indeed much of the noise at present may emanate from a threat to move as a negotiating [...]
William Pfaff, a writer who wrote about European-American relations and the challenges of perceived unchallenged US global leadership well before the Iraq induced and war-blogged “transatlantic rift”, may have indeed listened to Carly Simon when he wrote his not too favorable review of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s election year foreign policy summary “The Choice: Global Domination or [...]
Daniel Davies has the last word on Spanish “appeasement” of terrorists.
Feed: A Fistful of Euros