normblog: The normblog profile 142: Geoffrey Chaucer

What would you do with the UN? > Ich wolde heale the grete schisme bitwene Rome and Avignon.

BBC News explains

Eddie Campbell interview in comics form.

He’s the greatest.

Do gyms breed terrorists?

The three cells appear to have had at least one thing in common, though—their members’ immersion in gym culture. Often, they met and bonded over a workout. If you’ll forgive the pun, they were fitness fanatics. Is there something about today’s preening and narcissistic gym culture that either nurtures terrorists or massages their self-delusions and desires? Mosques, even radical ones, emphasize Muslims’ relationships with others—whether it be God, the ummah (Islamic world), or the local community. The gym, on the other hand, allows individuals to focus myopically on themselves.

Prodi’s majorities in Parliament are still slim, and factional infighting is likely to remain Florentine, but Berlusconi’s political fortunes continued to float away in municipal elections just passed.

The municipal elections held in Italy from May 28 to 29 did not offer Berlusconi the revenge he was seeking. Massimo Giannini, the daily’s deputy editor, looks at the results and at a missed opportunity for the former prime minister. “The revenge, the dirty trick, the stiff uppercut, whatever the precise lexical nuance, Berlusconi’s political sally has failed. The municipal elections as an instrument of grass-roots ‘Jacquerie’ that was supposed to definitively deprive the centre-left government of its legitimacy - this strategy did not work. … And the 15 million Italians who went to the polls did not change the result of April 9 to 10 [legislative elections]. Much to the contrary. … The centre-left no longer has an alibi; it now has no choice but to govern. It can count on a new base: the roughly three million young people who massively voted for it.”

From La Repubblica via Eurotopics

An establishment voice casts further doubt on whether French elites see possible progress in the European Union

Jacques Julliard, the weekly’s deputy editor, explains in an interview with François Sionneau that he does not see how the constitution could return to the agenda. “Projecting five to 10 years into the future - the most that is possible - I am frankly not that optimistic about Europe’s political hopes. We have fallen too far behind. We must also remember that an enormous gap exists between the motivations that pushed people to vote ‘no’ - reasons having to do with domestic politics which may be legitimate - and the consequences of this ‘no’, which transcend domestic politics and are not remediable in the short term. The world’s major dates with destiny will proceed without Europe. Large European countries will participate, but not as a Union.”

From Le Nouvel Observateur, via Eurotopics.

The Union’s energy is now mostly coming from the east, but will it be able to overcome blockages from the old members in the west?

The New York Times’ Jeff Z. Klein decided to go to Germany early so he could tell his travelling countrymen how to best organize their trip to and through Germany during the football world cup next month. Now he’s all figured it out, and it’s easy: If You’re going to “The World Cup’s World Class Party“, start in Cologne, he says,

“… where the spirit is welcoming and properly fixated on fussball.

“The World Cup is not really for us here,” said Christian, a 40-ish punk musician who was watching the German Cup Final in a tiny bar on Weidengasse. “It’s for all the people coming from around the world.”

Raising his glass of whiskey and laughing he added, “And we’ll be right here ready to show everyone a good time.”

Bastards.

The German government admitted Monday that the Federal Intelligence Service had recruited and spied on journalists from 1993 until as recently as last year.

“The government regrets the incidents,” said Ulrich Wilhelm, the government spokesman after he had been bombarded with questions during the Monday regular news conference.

Wilhelm said the Chancellery had ordered the Federal Intelligence Service to stop such activities following a string of allegations emerging over the last few days that the agency had recruited journalists to spy on their colleagues.

The parliamentary controller’s committee, which monitors the activities of the intelligence services, will hold a special session Tuesday amid calls by the German Association of Journalists and the Association of Newspaper Publishers for a “rigorous investigation.”

As expected

Not that “qualified” I don’t think. Once you’ve gone this far, turning them down isn’t politically viable. They might get a bunch of embarassing transitional arrangements instead.

My semi-informed uniformed view is that waiting until 2008 would have ultimately been better for them, though a longer wait would have been counterproductive.

The European Commission gave a qualified yes Tuesday to Romania and Bulgaria joining the European Union on Jan. 1, but it delayed a final decision until October to try to pressure the Balkan countries to make greater inroads in fighting corruption and in judicial reforms.

The EU’s executive body said it did not want to dissuade reform-minded governments in both countries by delaying an entry date. But Olli Rehn, the EU expansion commissioner, warned that the two nations still needed to address shortcomings in their judicial systems and that their entry into the world’s largest trading bloc was not yet assured.

“Unless the countries take immediate corrective action, they will not be ready” in January, Rehn told a packed chamber of European deputies in Strasbourg. “If serious concerns remain, we will not hesitate to use the safeguards we have at our disposal,” he added, alluding to the EU’s power to delay the countries’ entry until 2008 or to withhold EU aid, even after they join.

Controversial “Dutch” politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose true surname is Magan and not Ali, is reported to move to the United States where she will be working for The American Enterprise Institute. She is currently embroiled in a scandal because she had lied about her past to obtain a Dutch passport:

Hirsi Ali said she came clean about the lies she told to get asylum when she joined the Liberal Party (VVD) in 2002. Yet prominent VVDer (and now EU Commissioner) Neelie Kroes described Hirsi Ali as a person who had lived through five civil wars in Somalia. This was not true as Hirsi Ali lived in Kenya for over 10 years before coming to the Netherlands.

A spokesperson for the VVD said the party had been aware that Hirsi Ali lied about her name and date of birth when seeking asylum. This was not seen as a barrier to her joining the party or becoming one of its MPs.

These lies, in short, were already public knowledge. Way back in 2003, for example, the BBC published a story on Ayaan Hirsi Ali/Magan with the correct version of the facts, including her move to Kenya and stop-over in Germany.

The truly salient part of the story is, however, this:

Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk said on Friday that Hirsi Ali need not worry about facing repercussions for what she did 14 years ago. But she repeated she would have deported Hirsi Ali if she had been the minister back in 1992. “I don’t like lies,” Verdonk said on Friday.

Remember, Verdonk now plays tough on illegal immigrants. Yesterday evening, Monday 15th, Verdonk is reported to have made a phone call to Hirsi Ali, her colleague in the VVD party, saying that Hirsi may very well not be Dutch after all because, in 1997, she lied about her application for Dutch citizenship… Gotta love politics.

BTW, Hirsi Ali has declared to be shocked by all this, in The New York Times.

UPDATE, Saturday May 20th: Verdonk stated that Hirsi will get her Dutch passport back. The Dutch news story can be found here. Apparently they want to keep the VVD from splitting into two camps because of this affair. Huge pressure was piled on VVD member Verdonk to compromise and retract her earlier decision to strip Hirsi of her Dutch citizenship.