Despite having read mountains (appropriately) of reporting on the Turkish-Kurdish-Iraqi crisis, I haven’t read anyone who has tried to answer the big question - why do the PKK seem to be doing everything possible to provoke the Turks into invading Iraq after them?
You’d think this was a pretty vital issue; who wants to be blitzed, [...]

Jean Quatremer claims that the exit polls are showing the Civic Forum 10 points ahead of the Kaczynski Kidz; which could mean a knockout win.
More, as they say, as we get it.
Update, 2351GMT: Hell yeah. Jaroslaw Kaczynski has admitted defeat; Civic Forum coming in with a wet sail. As mentioned in comments, an unexpectedly large [...]

We’ve been tracking the US hard-right’s increasing take-over of British Eurosceptic rhetoric for some time; first it was Tom Tancredo who thinks there’s a secret plot to replace the dollar with the “Amero”, now it’s Ron Paul who’s scared of the “North American Union”. The major difference is that he makes an explicit link:
“The world’s [...]

After Spain’s post-national elections, Poland is shaping up to be another case of post-national democracy in Europe: the Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk turned up in London this weekend to launch a campaign swing pitching for the votes of thousands of Polish expatriates. The polls suggest the Poles are quite narrowly divided; the contribution of [...]

is updated in this post from Ingrid Robeyns.
America’s founding fathers didn’t want the capital to be in New York or Virginia, so they invented Washington, DC. The EU’s founders didn’t their headquarters in France or Germany and chose Brussels. Whether there’s a lesson in there is hard to say.

Adam Tooze, who (it says here) is a senior lecturer at Jesus College, Cambridge, has a book out; The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. It is getting some very good reviews, and this one will be no different. Tooze’s thesis is that the Nazi German economy was a more [...]

Physics Today has a very interesting, and refreshing, online article (hat tip Sargasso) on Islam and science that ties in neatly with AFOE’s review of Olivier Roy’s latest book Secularism confronts Islam. The article is written by Pervez Hoodbhoy, nuclear physics professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. As usual, I shall give our [...]

The flipside of the European dream is that by its nature, the vision of “non-imperial empire” as Barroso calls it is a powerful encouragement to the paranoid imagination. Curiously, the vision remains much the same across different paranoid styles; almost uncannily so.
In Britain, a surprisingly large number of people in the Conservative Party - not [...]

Well, the financial markets are happy at any rate. The Turkish stock market jumped 5% on Monday while the lira closed at a two-year high against the US dollar. Tayyip Erdogan (leader of the victorious Justice and Development party, the AKP) was also a happy man: “The new government will bring peace and stability” he [...]

Eurozone Watch has two articles about Germany and Italy that offer support for an optimistic view of the European economy. For a start, Sebastian Dullein argues that a comparison of Germany today and the US after the early 90s recession shows that Germany might be on the brink of a productivity surge. Dullein argues that [...]