Gentle readers,
we have moved the complete afoe installation to another host over the weekend. As updating nameservers can take up to 72 hours, some readers might experience accessibility problems until Wednesday morning.
As you’re reading this, you’re lucky and not among them.

While we at Afoe may be suffering from intermittent service interruptions, the EU seems to have arrived at what is being described as a ‘fair and share’ agreement with the Chinese over the trapped clothing products.
Which may well be described as a made to measure, just in time, solution, since while Tony Blair is waxing [...]

The German election campaign is cranking up to as close to a throbbing wave of intensity as you are likely to find in modern Germany. Very soon, Chancellor Gerhard Schr�der is going to take on the CDU’s Angela Merkel in a televised debate. Merkel has always had to do it tough in the CDU, as [...]

Gentle readers,
due to ongoing heavy server engineering there is an increased possibilty that afoe will not be accessible for a limited amount of time on Sunday, September 4, 2005.

We are so used to reading analysts reports of how intelligently Al-qaeda avails itself of the news media to advance its cause that perhaps we are becoming numb to some underlying realities. Maybe a big part of the supposed Al-qaeda success comes from shooting-yourself-in-the-foot blunders from people on our own side (obviously those responsible for [...]

As Edward suggests below, the macroeconomic effects of Katrina are just now becoming known, much less felt or sorted out.
One item that will be much more widely reported is that in addition to all of the petrochemical industry located there, New Orleans was the linchpin of the Port of South Louisiana. The port is [...]

Apart from the human tragedy dimension, the events which are unfolding in and around New Orleans will have an economic impact which in a globalised world can ripple through each and every economy. Fears that gasoline shortages could produce a recession in the US are going the rounds. James Hamilton of Econbrowser probably has [...]

While EU foreign ministers are tucked nicely away in Newport (my paternal grandmother was born there) for their ?Gymnich? summit at which trying to get Turkey accession negotiations off the ground on October 3 will be one of the top priorities, and while MEPs pass the buck to the Commission and the Council on the [...]

Today is our second anniversary.

While I was setting up a live sparring match between George W Bush and Tim Worstall over at New Economist I realised that George made his original provocative remarks on a show called Good Morning America. This put me back in mind of an old Steve Goodman song (Arloe Guthrie or Willy Nelson version, it’s [...]