So we’re in the new era of the Swedish presidency of the European council.  Insh’allah this will be the last country presidency under the rotating system once all that Lisbon messiness is sorted out.  The Swedes have the advantage of taking over from the politically hobbled Czech presidency and they begin with a slick website [...]

The Russian judge was unimpressed by both the technical merits and the artistic program of the UN resolution to extend the observation mission in Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 0.0 all around, or Géorgie, nul point.
Since 1993, UN observers had worked both sides of the lines to keep tabs on troop movements [...]

In case you’re wondering why there’s such an rightwing dominance in the first place (and it’s pretty much always been that way in parliament elections): Some countries aren’t polarized between a leftwing block and a rightwing block, which has meant nonsocialist parties are dominant.
Some, like Benelux countries and Finland, have centrist supermajority coalitions and [...]

By some wonderful magic, all media reports of an event tend to go with the same storyline, often kind of off. The storyline after the elections was “The right and anti-immigrant parties win big.”
Figuring out if it was accurate took some work, because some parties, for example the Tories and the Italian Democratic Party, plan [...]

So the pattern seems to be that incumbent parties did well in three large countries where television news apparently isn’t as independent as you’d wish (Spain, Italy and France) and collapsed in every other country.
(Correlation isn’t always causation.)

Possibly not the best result for a sitting government.
(That’s how British people do understatement, right?)
It also shows at least one of the perils of writing headlines. UKIP did well in 2004, so this result gains them one additional seat in the European Parliament. The Conservatives, who placed first, also gained only one seat, as did [...]

The antiliberal collective have a good data thread going on; it’s been interesting listening to the BBC Radio feed on one brain interface and reading actual data on another, an experience that reminds just how conventionalised the news experience is. Based on the numbers, it looks like the EPP-ED parties have held their own and [...]

Rendard Sexton, writing at fivethiryeight, offers a handy intro to next month’s elections to the European Parliament. The comments are well informed and also offer corrections to minor missteps in the post.
For aficionados, the main value is a link to efforts from a global communications company to forecast the outcome. The short version: little difference [...]

I have just been reading Misha Glenny’s McMafia. It is excellent; an intelligent tour through the criminal landscape that emerged since the late 1980s, driven by a combination of globalisation, un-globalisation, technical change, and the usual things that fertilise big crime. We hear about the early history of the modern Russian mafia, how the UN [...]

As Paul Krugman recently pointed out, one of the central points they made in the latest IMF World Economic Outlook was that recessions caused by financial crises tend to get resolved on the back of export-lead booms, with countries normally emerging from the crisis with a positive trade balance of over 3 percent of GDP. [...]