The credible recent rumours that China is less than a week away from it’s first manned space flight appear to have stimulated some other potential space-faring nations. France and Russia have announced an accord en principle to launch manned Russian Soyuz craft from the ESA launch centre at Kourou in French Guiana. The [...]

[Nota Bene: Due to the deeply inane nature of JavaScript, clicking the "continue reading" link may not display images linked to posts. It doesn't work for me in Mozilla or IE. If you click on the permalink, you will see all the content.]
Reader Christophe Kotowski sends a link to today’s International Herald-Tribune (a.k.a. [...]

Via Crooked Timber and Mark Kleinman, I’ve just read this utterly stupid column from Forbes:
Europe’s Utopian Hangover
The EU is built on a fantasy–that men and women can do less and less work, have longer and longer holidays and retire at an earlier age, while having their income, in real terms, and their standard of living [...]

Today’s Le Monde points out the odd dichotomy in American policy towards “Old Europe.” It seems that the US has been playing nice with Germany and giving the French government the cold shoulder.

Read more… or Read more right here… »
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Two years ago today, I got off a Lufthansa flight from LAX to Munich and passed through Schengenland customs. I had originally been scheduled to fly on September 12, from San Francisco to Brussels via Frankfurt, but when it became plain that no one was going to be flying on September 12th, I called [...]

I’ve been trying to understand exactly what happened at the WTO ministerial conference in Cancun. That they’ve come apart is pretty clear, but there is a certain amount of ambiguity about why and who is to blame. The crux of the matter appears to be the “Singapore issues”, for which you can find [...]

There’s a good article in today’s Le Figaro (a conservative French national newspaper) about the recent summit on a European military project in Arcachon. It’s titled L’Europe militaire ? la crois?e des chemins, and it is pretty pessimistic about the whole project.
A l’actualit? d’une loi de programmation militaire tangible, g?n?raux, ing?nieurs, chefs d’entreprise, parlementaires [...]

“Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.”
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Today’s Brussels Metro (bilingual FR/NL - registration required), reports that Belgium’s social security budget deficit may pass the €2 billion mark in 2004, although the relevant Belgian minister claims that these figures are not definitive. The socialist union FGTB/ABVV wants to shift social insurance payments from being a payroll tax to an income tax, [...]

I spent this morning at the stadhuis - the city administrative centre - trying to find out what had happened to my immigration file. You see, my resident’s permit expires in a week, and my renewal application was filed on August 19th, when my work permit was renewed.

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