This news is just in:
Police shot a man at a London subway station on Friday, a day after the city was hit by a second wave of terror attacks in two weeks. The circumstances of the shooting were not immediately clear, nor was the man’s condition….
Passengers reported a man ? described as South Asian ? [...]

Sorting through some old books yesterday, I came across one from Amin Maaloof that I hadn’t looked at in years. So I dusted it off, and started thinking about this post.
The English title of the book is “In the Name of Identity“, but the French title “Les Identit?s meurtrieres” (Lethal Identities?) or the Catalan [...]

The economic news from Italy continues to be grim. This week more negative data on consumer confidence and the trade deficit (the biggest since 1992, and it was of course in 1992 that Italy came flying out of EMU).

The ISAE research institute’s consumer confidence index fell to 100.9 in July from 102.9 in June, touching [...]

Obviously, convincing people of hari-kiri type economic policies simply to maintain the SGP (I say ’simply’, but I imagine you understand what I mean) was never going to be easy for a growth strapped Portugal. Well, the finance minister has just resigned citing ?personal and family reasons? as well as fatigue.
“A new Portuguese finance [...]

Well the German election is on, at least so far as President Koehler is concerned, now the only remaining hurdle is the constitutional court.

The Times has a pretty reasoned assessment of the state of play. We are still with the same two theories, the copycats, and the same group. I don’t like the copycat one since it seems to overlook some basic details. These attacks are not so easy to carry out logistically. Normally there is a high [...]

This is a big news day. China has just announced that it is going to come off the dollar peg currency arrangement. Well it’s not that simple, they have announced a 2% appreciation of the currency against the dollar, and that the renminbi will now float against a basket of currencies. In fact this [...]

The press and TV stations are begining to report a series of new incidents on the London underground. I use the word ‘incidents’ since things are so confused it is not clear what is happening. In one incident a rucksack apparently exploded, but the explosion was small. I will update as more [...]

This story today is worth a quick glance:
Mark McGowan went into the tiny backroom kitchen of a south London gallery three weeks ago and flipped on the cold water. He didn’t turn it off, and doesn’t plan to for an entire year.
“The Running Tap,” as it’s called, is McGowan’s effort to protest against wasted water [...]

Angela Merkel has an interview in the Financial Times today. Unfortunately the transcript is subscription only. This is a pity, since to some extent she defines the kind of Europe she would like to see:
In an interview with the Financial Times, Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democrat Union, on Wednesday issued a clarion call [...]