The Financial Times is running this story this morning:
“Britain is coming under pressure from the European Commission to say when it will honour its 25-year-old promise to go fully metric, converting miles to kilometres and pints to litres.G?nter Verheugen, EU enterprise commissioner, says he wants clarity on the issue, claiming he is facing pressure from [...]

Coincidences never cease to surprise me. Last Friday I mentioned the work of Brookings analyst Fiona Hill on Afoe. Well today she writes in the FT (with Sara Mendelson) alerting us to the continuing problems of the North Caucasus and our continuing neglect (subscription only unfortunately).
This week, the one-year anniversary of the hostage siege and [...]

Tell me why I should be bothered about ‘x’. This is an agument you often hear when proactive policies are proposed in connection with looming problems. Well a good example comes to mind today. The arrest in June on a Belgrade railway station of Abdelmajid Bouchar, a Moroccan, wanted by Spanish police for alleged involvement [...]

In a post back in May about the bloody repression in Uzbekistan I noted that Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin was suggesting that US troops should be withdrawn immediately (I didn’t agree if you read the post). Well he seems to have got his way, and the reasoning behind the Uzbekistan parliament decision is of [...]

Back briefly to the July 7th London bombings. Many details still remain to be clarified, but bit-by-bit things are falling into place. The Chemist, for example, turns out to have been wrongly suspected. On the other hand, the suicide issue may well be finally receiving confirmation. The Guardian is running a story which suggests the [...]

Or if not the bus, certainly the bus driver. According to the latest UK Home Office estimates almost a quarter of a million (232,000) Central and East European workers have arrived to work in Britain over the past year, and everyone seems very content. Which has to lead you to ask: didn’t the German [...]

Earlier this morning I read this intriguing paper by US researchers Robert Drago & Amy Varner. The title of the paper is “Fertility and Work in the United States: A Policy Perspective” and it addresses the important issues of gender equality and the historical trend towards declining fertility in the United States. Now while I [...]

The name of the late Ester Boserup came into my mind during a recent discussion in comments. The Danish economist - who is well respected by specialists, but perhaps insufficiently well known outside the ‘inner circle’ - had some pretty interesting views on global population, agriculture and technology. One of her central themes is that [...]

China is getting worried about the impact of the internet on one of its national passtimes:
China on Tuesday introduced an ?anti-online game addiction system? intended to protect players from the mental and physical perils of spending too much time in front of computers.
The system, which will encourage players to play less by cutting the benefits [...]

I don’t think this is ‘getting shot from both sides’ material, I think this is a question of post, and pull up a chair (or per llogar-hi cadires as we say in Catalan). When the loony right meets the looney left. Robertson vs Chavez. I don’t even need to write a post, since Tim Worstall [...]