This doesn’t look like it’s going to be a good week for GWB, with the Valerie Plame affair far from resolved, some blog attention is now moving back to the issues raised at the time of the arrest of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan (any connection with Mohammed Barbar?) in the Pakistan more or less [...]

Of course the accidental is important in history. The latest example would be how electoralist needs are going to impinge on Italy’s attempts to turn its economic crisis round. A year, at least, may well be lost on false promises and inaction. And as if that weren’t enough, the trifecta may be delivered by ‘terrorist-attack [...]

Despite warnings from Otmar Issing that “The outlook for price developments has got decidedly gloomier since June”, the situation is far from uniform and far from clear. Yesterday Italy’s national statistical office, ISTAT, announced that annual inflation dropped in June to 1.8%, from 1.9% in May. This was Italy’s lowest annual reading since 1999. [...]

We’re working on the comment problem. Thanks for your continuing patience as we try to get it sorted out.
Update: Looks like it has something to do with the DBI and DBD::mySQL Perl modules of the Cpanel. My more technically adept colleagues are in touch with our hosting provider. I’m just crossing my fingers and wishing [...]

Controversy continues to surround the problem of assessing non-combatant casualties in time of war. The Swiss based Graduate Institute of International Studies has just published its latest annual small arms survey where it suggests some 39,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of combat or armed violence since the start of [...]

Well the Times seems to have the main scoop today. As suggested in my post on suicide bombers yesterday, it is important that they have been identified, but much of the ‘upstream work’ may not be so immediately productive. Police do seem to have a lead from the CCTV images at Luton in that [...]

Alright, that’s not a particularly clever headline. I know you have probably read it a couple of hundred times in the course of the last years if you at all opened the sports section of your newspaper of choice in the month of July. But with only days left to the official retirement of Lance [...]

While the entire world is admiring Londoners for their ability to not let the terror destroy their way of life, while London mayor Ken Livingston is taking the Tube each morning, because not doing so would prove the terrorists strategy right, the British government is reinforcing its ongoing quest to get hold of as much [...]

French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that in the light of what has happened in London France is reintroducing European Union border controls. There is a clause within the Schengen Agreement which allows for controls to be reinstated and Sarkozy said that this had been activated by France. The decision is described as [...]

Sunday’s Washington Post had an article by one Anne Dumas that’s been blogged here and there, provocatively titled What’s American and Envied by France?. It starts with a rather shocking assertion that has, unsurprisingly, been quoted in a lot of the bloggage:
[N]ot a single enterprise founded here in the past 40 years has managed [...]