Michael Moore gives us a thoughtful article about Joschka Fischer (and some priceless Fischer anecdotes) in Slate today. Before going any farther I should make clear that I refer not to the notoriously fat filmmaker but to Michael Scott Moore, an American novelist living in Berlin. Of his fatness or otherwise I am entirely ignorant.

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The Portuguese government has announced plans to reduce its fiscal deficit. The aim is to cut the deficit from an expected 6.2 % of GDP this year to below 3% - the theoretical maximum ceiling permitted under the EU’s growth and stability pact - by 2008. Most of the savings will come by [...]

Following the recent confirmation of the key contenders, we now have a date. Italy is to have elections on April 9 next.

You will all remember the Satin Pajama awards with great fondness, I trust. Lots of new blogs for everybody, staggeringly opulent prizes for the favoured few, and a juicy whiff of scandal into the bargain — good clean fun for the whole family.
Well, if you like that sort of thing, you’ll want to check out [...]

Gentle readers, as you may have noticed, following our recent move to a new hosting provider, afoe has been riddled with problems, both on the front and on the back end, making it rather diffictult for us to post, and sometimes for you to read and comment. Should you publish something online yourselves, be warned [...]

Meanwhile on the borderlands, SueAndNotU sends a reminder that Azerbaijan will be holding parliamentary elections on November 6. The country’s current president, Ilham Aliyev, essentially inherited the job from his father, who had also been Azerbaijan’s communist boss before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Add oil, ubiquitous corruption, the loss of nearly a fifth [...]

This is just to let everyone know that we are doing various things behind the Euro curtain right now: fiddling with our MovableType installation, evaluating a new design, and so forth. Most of it takes place in the dead of night, Central European Time. If you’re reading us in the late afternoon or early evening [...]

Is the new double-decker Airbus vulnerable to sudden drops in cabin pressure? That’s the kind of problem suspected in this summer’s crash of a Helios Airways plane that killed all 121 people on board.
The former chief engineer for the company that designed the microchips controlling the motors that runs the pressure valves thinks so. The [...]

It now seems to be more or less official: after Romano Prodi won a convincing 75 percent support among centre-left voters in what were effectively the first American-style primaries in Italian history, and Marco Follini resigned as leader of the Union of Christian Democrats (UDC) after a failed attempt to persuade his coalition [...]

As I noted last week, Hungary now seems to have lost the ‘anchor’ of a 2010 eurozone entry expectation. (see also this, and this ). As I am also indicating currency markets may well be driven at the moment by a combination of interest rate yield variations and expectations of future movements, and this may [...]