Is that there won’t be a compromise under the Italian Presidency. I remeber hearing a few weeks back that the Irish government has been making plans to finish up the IGC’s business during its six months at the helm.
How much of the current worry is due to Berlusconi’s initial fumbles? Six months disappear awfully [...]

One thing that I’ve often heard in a half decade or so living and working in Europe is that Americans have no sense of place. Sometimes the idea is asserted that crudely, sometimes equally crudely in a different form: America is too young to have real history, thus Americans have no sense of history and [...]

Slate has a delightful piece on the board of Black’s company, Hollinger International. It seems the directors, such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle, had little serious business experience and basically rubber-stamped Black’s plans.
Daniel Gross writes, “Most of these more or less honorable folks were basically idle directors. They showed up at meetings, ate lunch, [...]

More bombers struck in Istanbul, killing the British Consul General and, at present reports, 25 others, with more than 450 injured.
Will there be more bombings in Istanbul?
Turkey already withstood suicide attacks by the PKK during that group’s campaign for Kurdish independence, and later after the capture of PKK leader Ocalan. Political and criminal bombings [...]

Not long ago, I asked Where’s Publius?
Today’s Frankfurter Allgemenine reports:
The European Convention Talks Back
Appeal to the Intergovernmental Conference
Modeled on the “Federalist Papers”
Call by 63 Parliament Members
Brussels, Nov 13. Four months after the end of the EU Reform Convention, members of the body that was entrusted with working out a draft constitution are attempting to exercise [...]

File this one under People Who Ought to Know Better. Odder than the fact of the argument is the frequency with which I see it.

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DON’T STRETCH EUROPE’S PROMISED [...]

Twelve golden stars on a deep blue field. Soon to fly alongside the national emblems in twenty-five states, with more than a dozen more conceivable in the medium term. Why should hundreds of millions of citizens want to join their futures to this project?
Are Europe, and its Union, just shorthand for peace and prosperity? Normality? [...]

The reluctance of EU countries, particularly France and Germany, to contribute to rebuilding Iraq certainly reflects their governments’ policies and their publics’ preferences. The Washington Post reported that the EU will contribute $256 million, and that US contributions will be roughly $20 billion. That’s more than 78 time as much. While the final figures may [...]

1978
Pierre Trudeau
Val?ry Giscard d’Estaing
Helmut Schmidt
Giulio Andreotti
Takeo Fukuda
James Callaghan
Jimmy Carter
Leonid Brezhnev
John Paul II

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2003
Jean Chretien
Jacques Chirac
Gerhard Schr?der
Silvio Berlusconi
Junichiro Koizumi
Tony Blair
George W. Bush
Vladimir Putin
John Paul II
The headline is from the Polish [...]

“When the proposed Constitution issued from the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia on September 17, 1787, Alexander Hamilton foresaw that opposition to it would be great, and though he thought the document would probably be adopted he couldn’t be sure. Three members of the Convention, all of them prominent, had refused to sign it, and others, [...]