Everybody (well; nearly everybody) is aghast at revelations that US troops have been routinely torturing Iraqi detainees. One predictable consequence of the scandal is a return to that much-loved hypothetical, ‘Should torture be permitted where the information it may produce could save innocent lives that are in real, imminent danger?‘.

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Worried grumbling is a bit of a national sport here in Germany, and let me just say as a spectator that the game has rarely been as good as it is right now. Tune in any Sunday night to Christiansen for an action-packed match. Or, if you haven’t the time, let me give you a [...]

Ageing populations ‘will create crippling debt’: at least this is how one of today’s Financial Times headlines reporting on the latest Standard & Poor’s assesment of OECD sovereign debt dynamics has it.
In fact the article says S&P argue that:
“industrialised countries face crushing debt burdens - greater even than those during the second world war [...]

As the rest of Europe wonders if the French elections prove the old adage that in all countries the government lies to the electorate, but in France the electorate lies to the government, John Kay in the today’s FT offers reasons why the French voted as they did. Basically France is a nice country to [...]

In its assessment of the debacle for Chirac/Raffarin in this weekend’s French regional elections the German newspaper S?ddeutsche Zeitung asked one pretty pertinent question:
“‘are European societies capable of stomaching unpleasant reforms?’ ”
Certainly the evidence would seem to make it a fairly reasonable question to ask. Sunday’s elections have been billed as a victory for [...]

Pondicherry is in the news. The former French colony, handed over to India in 1954, has just become the lastest cause celebre in ‘the great outsourcing debate’.
Under the evocative title: Once they were French colonies, now they call back NewIndpress has a piece today on this very topic.

Says Joel Ruet, a researcher with the [...]

Well, well, this was hardly unexpected. In fact the reality may well be that this time there is plenty of smoke but no fire, since Siemens has announced it has no concrete plans to move 10,000 jobs abroad. Indeed much of the noise at present may emanate from a threat to move as a negotiating [...]

South Korean manufacturing giant Hyundai has picked Slovakia as the site for a new $870m (?466m) car plant, one of the biggest deals in the car sector this year. The factory, which will open in 2006, is intended to produce up to 200,000 vehicles a year under Hyundai’s Kia brand. The north [...]

Remember this debate about the relative living standards of Sweden and Alabama? One little commented result of the euro, krona and pound?s rise against the US dollar over the last two years is that measured in current exchange rates European countries? income per head now compares rather more favourably against the United States.

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Actually the Scotsman puts it like this: “Enlargement of the European Union in May will bring the world?s fastest-growing area of HIV infection on to the doorstep of the EU, United Nations experts warned today.”
Which pretty much scandalises me: how can you turn a human tragedy into a eurosceptic thing, for gods sake? The problem [...]