Well people are already busy positioning themselves in the face of what seems like an increasingly possible ‘no’ vote in France on Sunday. Yesterday it was Giscard D’Estaing, today it is the turn of the current EU president Jean-Claude Juncker. His basic point, if French and Dutch voters don’t say ‘yes’ the first time, then [...]

The owner of a satirical magazine sued for publishing drawings of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s head on the bodies of animals accused the premier of intolerance on the opening day of his trial Tuesday.
Erdogan has done things like this for a while now, but I haven’t seen any mention of it in the [...]

Brad Plumer on the relation between the size of government and growth, and an irony.
Henry Farrell on why he’s more optimistic than he has been in a long time about the European experiment.
Laura Rozen prints native readers thoughts on the referendums in France and Belgium.
Eulogist on the EU and the constitution.
Col Lounsbury on why he’s [...]

I know that web statistics are inherently unreliable. I have seen server statistics that differ from each other to an extent it raises important epistemological questions. However, in the blogosphere, sitemeter figures are the most common currency - and by that standard, we at afoe at some point earlier today welcomed our 400,000th unique visitor [...]

Brad Delong has a post on the Euro, and Dave at Macroblog has a couple of relevant posts (and here) . In particular he has an extended extract from the Martin Wolfe article on the Euro and Italy, plus he reproduces a useful graphic showing how ’sovereign spreads’ in Italy Greece and Portugal declined dramatically [...]

Last week, the Swedish finance minister said that we should consider allowing immigration of labor. (Link in Swedish) This has long been demanded by the right-wing opposition, but the Social Democrats were against it, partly because of opposition from the unions. This is just a trial baloon, not a shift in policy, and is unlikely [...]

This is a very intelligent move:
Between the rock of the French and Dutch referenda and the hard place of the looming early elections in Germany, Turkey has reiterated its determination to seek full EU membership. Ankara has also named its chief EU negotiator.
Turkey’s 38-year-old chief EU negotiator Ali Babacan is a founding member of the [...]

Well here’s one more reason some people might have for wanting Turkey as an eventual member of the EU:
It is 42 inches wide, 1,090 miles long and is intended to save the West from relying on Middle Eastern oil. Nothing has been allowed to stand in its way - and it finally opens today…
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“A car bomb exploded in the Spanish capital on Wednesday, injuring three people, 45 minutes after a Basque newspaper received a warning in the name of Basque separatist group ETA, police said.”
Reuters One Hour Ago
Thankfully no-one was killed. On this occassion there seems little doubt who was responsible. This bombing follows recent controversial moves by [...]

A right royal row is brewing at the ECB. Basically the old guard theorists of the ‘one size fits all’ monetary policy are being challenged by more pragmatic observers of day to day realities. For the moments it is the politicians who are making the running (but there are plenty of competent economists in Germany [...]