At least I’m not the only one.
Good discussions here, here, here, here and here.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Though not a square-root vegetable, at least not a square-root or death vegetable when you get down to it at the Brussels bargaining table.
The Kaczynski twins are providing some sparks in the run-up to this summit, and they are every bit as ham-handed as noted below and by Henry over here. One level of the [...]

The German newspaper whose web site is now marginally better organized reports that Germany will offer a legal means to regularize the residence status of people who have lived in the country for several years without having, shall we say, dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s at the local immigration office. State [...]

As big-media Matt says, it’s all over the net already, but the question of whether Bush’s watch was stolen in Albania is a convenient hook to link to this hilarious but tasteless guide to what various groups of Europeans think about one another. Albania is near the end, in the Balkan section.
I have a friend [...]

Not that there will be one every day. From a 1940s-vintage American army training manual, in reference to Iraq:
There are also political differences in Iraq that have puzzled diplomats and statesmen. You won’t help matters any by getting mixed up in them.
HT: Lots of people, but especially here. PDF of the manual.