As various places are reporting, Barroso is now saying he needs more time to secure the European Parliament’s assent to his Commission. Faced with the prospect of a majority of MEPs voting to reject the entire Commission, he’s taken this unprecedented step, handing a significant victory to Parliament.
According to the German newspaper whose web site [...]

I think Kerry will be the best US president since Truman.

Earlier this month, we noted that the end of the Orthodox mourning period for the victims in Beslan might bring rapid reprisals for the attack. Hasn’t happened.
This is not to say that there won’t ever be reprisals, just that the worst fears have proved unfounded. And frankly, the North Caucasus can use all the good [...]

In Sunday’s Washington Post, the often-astute Timothy Garton Ash argues:
If President Bush is reelected, many Europeans will try to make the European Union a rival superpower to the United States.
Led by French President Jacques Chirac, they will find the main justification for further European integration in counterbalancing what they see as irresponsible, unchecked American power. [...]

I don’t think Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, was entirely mistaken when he mentioned in a BBC radio interview (2:35 min real audio) on Wednesday that “[i]f you want to learn how the traditional Prussian goose-step works, you have to watch British TV, because in Germany, in the younger generation - even in my [...]

While most observers still expect a compromise between incoming Commission president Barroso and those groups in the EP which threatened to block his entire team over the Buttiglione row - Mr Barroso will meet with leading MEPs tomorrow -, according to EUPolitix.com’s press review, the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita reports that Rocco Buttiglione may “resign” today [...]

We ought not let an anniversary like the 50th birthday of the Centre Europ?en pour la Recherche Nucl?aire go unmentionned. Like many non-EU European institutions, involvement often extends beyond the frontiers of the continent. Besides its 20 European members (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, The [...]

Over on Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell comments on the istitutional implications of the Buttiglione affair. While we are shocked to learn that The Economist does not like the recent self-confident behavior of the European Parliament with respect to the Commission hearings, Kieran Healy - duly apologetic - makes a fair point in the comments thread [...]

Earlier this month, when Edward wrote

The alarm shot was given by Dalls Federal Reserve President Robert McTeer when he declared in a speech in New York last week that whilst overseas investors now ?finance? the US current account gap, ?theoretically some day that process will come to an end, the flows will turn against us [...]

In every relationship, it is said, there’s one who does the running. And certainly in a special relationship. This is at least how many British Parlamentarians must have felt after being told that the US government has asked the British military to redeploy several hundred soldiers from the relatively safe British-led occupation zone in the [...]