According to the Turkish news agency Hürriet Turkish Deputy prime Minister and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul spoke last night to the NTV news channel regarding:
“the recent wave of legal battles being held against Turkish intellectuals and a senior member of the European Parliament. Gul criticized the actions that were being taken under the controversial article [...]

It has now been a year and a half since I moved to France. I am not going to bore you with all the domestic challenges the move caused me, do not worry, but I need to mention this since I have only just begun to explore life in France. This post about France will [...]

It is surely welcome news to find the German citizenry content with Angela Merkel, and that this new found contentment is feeding into more positive views about immediate economic prospects. But oughtn’t we to remember that there is a thing called the first hundred days, and a phenomenon known as the ‘honeymoon period’.
There is [...]

Not as much as you might think, argues The Economist in a long, Christmas-special piece about French anti-Americanism (article freely available to non-subscribers) :
In one 2004 poll, 72% of the French had a favourable view of Americans, more even than in Britain (62%) or Spain (47%). Some 68% of those questioned in another poll [...]

Warren Sanderson & Sergei Scherbov had a very interesting article in Nature earlier this year (you can find the full article reproduced here on page 5). The article title really tells the story in itself: average remaining lifetimes can increase as human populations age. Put differently, we may be facing the interesting [...]

I have just read this (don’t miss the photo):
Constitution, enlargement and budget: Austria hopes to revive Europe with these themes and infuse it with “energy and confidence” when it takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union on January 1
Am I reading this aright, he says, scratching the dust from his sleep-ridden eyes. Aren’t [...]

Two bits of news this week appear to be unrelated. The interesting question is whether appearances are once more deceptive.
Firstly the US Treasury note situation:
At 6:23 am ET. the 10-year note yielded 4.393 percent while the two-year note yielded 4.396 percent.
Or as the FT puts it:
Yields on 10-year US Treasuries briefly fell below those on [...]

Now of course I cannot allow Edward to remain the only afoer offering our readers holiday greetings in an obscure Celtic tongue. And I’ll throw in a nice wee pressie to boot: nazis in disarray!
Back in September 2004 I wrote in a comment to a post about neonazi electoral gains in eastern Germany:
As many have [...]

Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda o Barcelona
Which is Welsh (the language of my childhood) for Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year from sunny Barcelona. Well, I just added the sunny part, since the sun is, right now, also rising.
Since I am not religious, and I am not really a dedicated fan of [...]

Last night I went to see the film Luther - which unsurprisingly enough is a biographical epic which focuses on the life and works of Martin Luther. I have always felt a strange attraction to Luther, not for his religion, but for the ‘here I am, I can do no other’ part. This post, however, [...]