Though creationism does rear its ugly head from time to time in Europe, it is largely a fringe phenomenon. Unlike in America, even most religious Europeans accept evolution as an obvious fact, viewing the biblical creation stories (yes, there’s more than one) as, at most, poetic metaphor. So it’s easy for us over here to [...]

Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates Carvalho Pinto de Sousa will need all of his namesake’s wisdom, and none of his taste in last drinks, as he takes over the rotating presidency (careful, the page has an annoying soundtrack) of the European Council this weekend.
Chancellor Merkel’s quiet persuasion has brought the EU much closer to a [...]

Remember when Labour couldn’t win an election and the UK’s Conservatives made much of their reputation as “the natural party of Government”? Remember when all that changed? Eppur si muove.
Daniel Davies got the timing almost exactly right when his model showed that the greatest gap between the incentive for MPs to keep Blair and to [...]

PwC was auditor for what was then one of Russia’s largest oil companies, Yukos. The Russian government took a serious disliking to Yukos and its then-president Mikhail Khodorkovsky, eventually putting the company effectively out of business (with key bits sold off to state-owned or state-controlled companies) and Khodorkovsky in jail. Now the Russian government is [...]

Something is afoot in Latvia. According to the latest Eurostat data on annual wage costs, in the first quarter of 2007 wages in Latvia were up by an astonishing 32.7% when compared with the first quarter of 2006 (for a simple graph of the course of Latvian wages since 2001 try this) . Without knowing [...]

Germany has tossed a Holocaust denier into prison, and the American Christianist right is all outraged about it. Or so PZ Myers tells me; it’s telling that I had to learn about this from him, as this hasn’t been a big story here at all.
As you probably know, it is illegal in Germany to deny [...]

The dismal weather notwithstanding, the family and I headed out to the Waldstadion this weekend to take in a football match. Now how on earth, you’ll have asked yourself straight away, could we have seen a football match at this time of year? The answer is simply: it wasn’t football, it was ‘football’.

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The treaty is basically the constitution minus some symbolic things (and an exemption from the Fundamental Rights for the Brits.) Henry Farrell had it right a couple of days ago.

This is a quite substantial set of changes. It should be presented to people so that they can vote on it (and taken off the [...]

From Bloomberg, via Calculated Risk and Brad DeLong:
“How many other hedge funds are holding similar, illiquid, esoteric securities? What are their true prices? What will happen if more blow up?”
When London owes its place as financial capital of the world at least in part to a slightly looser regulatory structure than New York, and things [...]

No smoke signals from Brussels, but that isn’t surprising.
I suppose the various issues could be kicked down the road another six months and still be sorted out in time for the elections to the European Parliament in June 2009. That would leave a smaller window for ratification in the second half of 2008 and the [...]