While EU politicians over at Davos have been mulling over the possibilities of Turkey’s membership of the EU, Kofi Annan apparently has things much clearer. In a speech to the European parliament he bluntly told MPs that Europe needs migrants to ensure a prosperous future and that Europeans should stop using immigration as a [...]

I don’t know enough to make any major comments about this story, but it’s the sort of thing that should interest our readers.
A trade dispute between the US and the EU escalated today as Brussels asked the World Trade Organisation for authorisation to retaliate against an illegal US trade measure.
The EU is seeking to impose [...]

Following Scotts recent post in the mailbox we have Amitai Etzioni drawing our attention to a piece he wrote on the same topic in the International Herald Tribune. His key point seems to be that it is important to “utterly reject the multicultural notion that we should abolish societal identities to accommodate the sensibilities [...]

Maybe
“A few days before 25 European Presidents and Prime Ministers met in Brussels to try to ratify a constitution, former French President Val?ry Giscard d’Estaing had dire words of warning. Failure to approve the 265-page text, of which he had been the principal author, would be a disaster for the cause of a united Europe: [...]

In the US presidential elections the big news of the week must be the endorsement of Howard Dean by Al Gore. A somewhat smaller, but still interesting, development - although this isn’t exactly new, but simply new to my attention - is the fact that someone has created an Economists for Dean weblog. [...]

David is right. Islamist terrorism has now finally reached Europe for real.
Not just because the tragic terrorist attacks against the Neve-Shalom and Beth-Israel Synagogues took place in the undisputedly European part of Istanbul. Not just because the fear of a rising tide of al-Qaida triggered fundamentalist terrorism could once again lead to a round [...]

Near-simultaneous car bombs exploded outside two Istanbul synagogues filled with worshippers Saturday, killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 300. The government said the attack had international links, raising suspicions that the al-Qaida terror network was involved.
This is tragic, revolting and frightening, frightening because it gives us another indication that the al-Qaida network [...]

George Bush has apparently just announced that he will decide whether to lift steel tariffs “within a reasonable period of time.” He’s been offered an easy way out by Pascal Lamy, according to the Washington Post. He can simply declare, as Lamy has, that the US steel industry has restructured, the policy succeded, [...]

Brad DeLong today quotes from a piece from the Wall Street Journal (the rest being locked in pay per view) about yesterday’s WTO decision to uphold its earlier finding that US steel duties of up to 30%, imposed last year to protect US steel producers restructuring, are illegal because the US never proved that their [...]

I was thinking about writing a piece on the reports of a European Commission poll of 7,500 Europeans that says Israel is ‘the greatest threat to world peace’ but British blogger Harry Hatchet has said pretty much what I would have done, and probably much more clearly.
Innocent Israeli civilians have been murdered in discos, bars [...]