MEPs are soon scheduled to debate a new ‘Common Circus Policy’. This is following the publication of a report: “new challenges for the circus as part of European culture”. Apparently MEPs agree that circuses should be referred to as part of Europe’s cultural heritage, but tend to disagree on whether they should include presentation of [...]

U.K. jobless claims rose for an eighth consecutive month in September, extending the longest period of increases in almost 13 years, “as growth in Europe’s second- biggest economy slows”. This adds just a little more evidence to the fact that all is not necessarily currently all for the best in the land of John Stuart [...]

I like this title. I have, I unashamedly admit, lifted it straight from NTC research (where it was in any event hardly the most creatively original of headers). I like it since it seems to run counter in spirit to all those admonishing lectures we are currently getting about the dangers of ’secondary inflation’ and [...]

Hungary converted itself into the latest country to join the line of EU members awaiting chastisment for failing to enforce budgetary discipline after it became clear that its deficit for 2005 could be almost double official forecasts.
Joaqu�n Almunia, EU monetary affairs commissioner, told European finance ministers Hungary’s deficit this year was projected [...]

Both of you.
John Barry, author of Rising Tide a rather timely book about flooding and New Orleans and of The Great Influenza a rather timely book about the 1918 pandemic, will be half of a panel about hurrican Katrina at Politics & Prose bookstore this Friday at 7pm. The store is at 5015 Connecticut Ave [...]

As we all know raising the participation rates of older workers is both essential and a core component of the Lisbon Agenda, so here’s a timely report from the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society comparing policies directed towards older workers in the UK and Germany. More salacious material to stimulate all you [...]

I’m probably the last blogger still reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, and chances are good that I won’t take on the third part, The System of the World, immediately after finishing the second, The Confusion. Not because the books aren’t good, just that it is a lot to read consecutively.
The good news is that the [...]

The FT has a piece on the growing tensions within the Republican tent over Iraq.
If we quit now, said Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, in a speech at Princeton University last month, we will embolden every enemy of liberty and democracy across the Middle East. We will destroy any chance that the people of [...]

The International Energy Agency have just published their forecast for oil demand next year, and its more of the same, with the emphasis on more.
Global oil consumption is expected to increase by 1.75m barrels a day next year to total 85.2m b/d, suggesting that a recent fall-off in demand is temporary… For 2006, the [...]

Brad Setser has a post today on Kate Moss, not provoked by her evidently economically intriguing modelling properties, but due to the Kate-Moss-thin credit-spreads which Bloomberg’s William Pesek refers to in this article. What really turns Pesek on it turns out isn’t Kate Moss at all but the possible existence of links between [...]