Of course, I could be accused of only latching-on to the data that suits me, and it is true that there has been some reasonably optimistic reporting about the German economy of late: we had the German IFO index, and there was the apparently world cup driven consumer confidence index rise. So todays news that [...]

…The Satin Pajamas have been delayed because of the webhost migration and some other unforeseen things. The voting will begin soon, within a week at least, so I’ll bump this post again.
‘Tis the season of blog awards, among them our own European Weblog Awards or Satin Pajamas.
Last year I wrote: The purpose of the awards [...]

This post has one sovereign virtue: apart from in the current sentence it will not refer, either directly or indirectly, to the Catalan Statute. The topic it does deal with however is probably equally vital for the future of Spain. The issue is Spain’s housing boom, and the role of immigration in fuelling it. Two [...]

As the Quartet of would-be Mideast peacemakers meets in huddled session, and as Angela Merkel does some plain talking, another closely related issue is going the rounds today (and this, and this):
“In a demonstration on the West Bank, members of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened Danes in the area and told them to leave immediately, [...]

I don’t intend to make this a long post. I think we’ve already explored most of the issues, (and here, and here), but I do feel we need to be vigilant about what is happening on a day to day basis in Iran. This story seems to confirm the general picture I’d been forming:
Clashes erupted [...]

Gentle readers, the 2006 Satin Pajama voting period is approaching and we have a couple of great things in the afoe r&d pipeline, which we will tell you more about soon. But for all this we needed a less error prone server. So we’re on the road again, and thus, there’s a certain probability you [...]

The Novelist Walks - Why did Turkey drop the charges against Orhan Pamuk? By Hugh Eakin

Germany’s Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb, Germany) now publishes a nice, daily, free round-up of the European press. It’s by no means comprehensive, and thank goodness or it would be impossibly long, but I like the eclectic selection of papers and topics. Today brought items from Czech, Austrian, Francophone Swiss, German, Francophone [...]

Regionalist tensions in Spain, murderously cold weather and French nuclear stroppiness are all important enough in their way, I suppose, but let’s not lose sight of what truly matters: Bayern Munich move ahead to the semi-finals of the DFB Cup. It will be scant comfort to Tobias, I fear, that his boys from Mainz 05 [...]

A couple of weeks ago I posted here about how a senior officer in the Spanish army - Lt. Gen. Jose Mena Aguado - had been placed under house arrest for insinuating that the Spanish military might have a responsibility to intervene in defence of the Spanish Constitution if the new Catalan Statute of Autonomy [...]