The Head Heeb: Call for papers
I’m pleased to formally announce a project that Sharon Howard and I have been discussing for some time: the first online symposium on the Old Bailey Session Paper database. The Old Bailey database is, quite simply, the largest primary source collection currently available online, with reports (and often complete transcripts) [...]

Wow! The FT today has a very long and extensive story about how the US military have been ‘placing’ stories in the Iraqi press. While I don’t disagree with the observation by one commentator in that “I don’t think that there’s anything inherently evil or morally wrong with it” in a war [...]

Following up on my Euromed post on Afoe, I see McKinsey have a report of Morocco’s potential as a services outsource base for the Spanish speaking and Francophone parts of the EU (registration required, but easy and worthwhile IMHO):
Morocco’s appeal includes wages for white-collar workers that are half those in France, a relatively high proportion [...]

Well, despite the fact that the eurozone finance ministers aren’t on board, and that the OECD doesn’t approve, Trichet and company will undoubtedly go ahead tomorrow with the first refi rate rise in 5 years. (I think important issues are involved here, so I’ll try and write something more substantial for Afoe tomorrow, when the [...]

Clay Risen’s article for TNR is probably an implicilyt responding to the Caldwell article I linked to earlier.

Wanting to fix our anti-spam hack, I noticed Strang’s blog, including the relevant post, has disappeared. As a public service, I reproduce the entry here.
[Removed. Read my own tutorial instead..]

This was unexpected.
Franco Frattini, the European commissioner for justice and home affairs, warned that any countries found to be allowing the CIA to operate the detention centres - part of a global secret gulag used to hold al-Qa’ida suspects and other “ghost detainees” - could have its voting rights suspended.
I don’t think it’s going [...]

I used to think that Euromed was simply the name of a train which rides the Barcelona-Valencia run. I was wrong. It is also the name colloquially being given to the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (aka the Barcelona Process) which was infact launched in Barcelona in 1995. As the blurb tells us, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership [...]

The results of the latest GfK’s consumer confidence survey are just in. The results are hardly a surprise. (Btw there is a good discussion of consumption in Germany in this post and comments):
Consumer confidence in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, fell for a second month in three as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government decided to raise [...]

The European Commission’s has just published the latest set of EU trade trade figures. Among the surprising details are that overall EU textiles imports were little changed. China textile importas, of course, rose - by 40% - but this was offset by a decline in 54.4% (from Burma) and 41.4% from the [...]