Yesterday’s Le Monde has a distrubing piece on the profanation of a Jewish cemetery in Lyon, blogged here a few days ago. According to the Lyon police, evidence at the scene links this crime to the murder of a young North African man last week.
Le lien entre la profanation du cimeti?re juif de Lyon [...]

I note that today’s New York Times has an article on the recent upsurge in Neonazi attacks in France, focusing on Alsace-Lorraine and the simultaneously anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant character of these movements. This was covered a couple days ago here on AFOE.
Does someone at the Times read us? Probably not. I suspect [...]

August is traditionally a dead month for news. Government is on vacation. Lots of businesses slow down. And it’s too hot for political violence. Only heathen insurgents from warm countries actually stir in August. As the major journals turn increasingly to junior reporters and stringers while the A-team hits the [...]

Yesterday’s profanation of a Jewish cemetery in Lyon has, once again, put French race relations into the news in bad light. There’s a good reason for that. French race relations aren’t much to brag about. I notice, however, that for all the bloggers - not to mention Ariel Sharon - who think [...]

Just a brief follow-up on yesterday’s post on Alan Greenspan. Sleeping on it I have the feeling that for blog posting I may suffer from the failing of trying to complicate things too much, or at least of trying to say too much at once.
Really there were two central themes, and since they are a [...]

Really it doesn’t seem to be such a big deal, to add or not to add (0.25% to the Federal Reserve’s overnight funds rate), and in some ways probably it isn’t. But at the same time I can’t help feeling that Sir Alan faces tomorrow one of the most difficult decisions of his whole term [...]

Russian writers have long been honored as wise men and secular prophets, but by pioneering literary detective fiction here, Grigory Chkhartishvili has overturned some traditions of Russia’s literary world.
Chkhartishvili - who writes under the pen name Boris Akunin - is best known for a series of 11 thrillers set in late 19th-century Russia, each featuring [...]

Germany’s latest unemployment figures were released last week: 4.36 million unemployed, 126,500 more than in June, and 6700 more than in July 2003. The rate rose 0.3 percent to 10.5 percent for the country as a whole; 8.4 percent in the west and 18.5 in the east.
A local Berlin paper, whose search page appears not [...]

As if the Italians hadn’t got enough to worry about at the moment (what with the latest round of economic data being predictably poor : growth is slowing down, industrial production is falling, consumer confidence is plumbing the depths). Now comes news that the Italian government is heading for conflict with some leading European airlines [...]

Interesting piece in the FT today about the imagined consequences of the new German “Hartz IV” laws. These laws will among other things reduce non-means-tested unemployment benefits to one year’s duration. The measure forms part of the package of labour market ’structural reforms’, and personally I see little to argue with here.
The interesting part relates [...]