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 [...]

Doug and Elliot Oti brought up the subject of European free riding in the comment’s to Doug’s latest post.
Let me pose this hypothetical. After his landslide win in 2004, president Kuichinik, slashes the US military budget to a third of its current size.
Do you think the European countries would feel compelled to raise [...]

The reluctance of EU countries, particularly France and Germany, to contribute to rebuilding Iraq certainly reflects their governments’ policies and their publics’ preferences. The Washington Post reported that the EU will contribute $256 million, and that US contributions will be roughly $20 billion. That’s more than 78 time as much. While the final figures may [...]

Well it certainly seems to have gone eerily quiet over here. Meantime the Intergovernmental Conference has been working its weary way onward. Perhaps it’s a measure of the magnitude of the boredom that no-one has felt sufficiently inspired to get down to writing about it. This definitely hasn’t been the case with fellow blogger Eurosavant, [...]

OK here’s a post about Spain that’s all in English. Juan informed comment Cole has a piece about the assasination of the Spanish intelligence officer in Bagdhad yesterday. Cole argues that Bernal may have been singled out in an attempt to get at Spain, who may be seen as a ’soft’ target. Support for Aznar’s [...]

EU unilaterally blocking Russia’s entry into the very very multilateral WTO.
How many poles is this multipolar thing going to have, anyway?
+++
Putin Doesn’t Like EU Terms for Entry
October 9, 2003
By Natalya Shurmina
YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin sharply
criticized European Union “bureaucrats” on Thursday for pressing the
country to raise domestic energy prices as a condition [...]

It might not be the obvious comparison, but Scott’s ponderings about the state of transatlantic breast relations and the state of French feminism made me remember another Franco-analogy that recently crossed my mind: I believe the current relationship between many countries, certainly in Old Europe, and the US of A has a lot in common [...]

Tip of the blog cap to David, who points out that Der Spiegel believes a blackout in part of the United States is a sign of a superpower at the edge of chaos, while a blackout across almost all of Italy (those lucky Sardinians!) is a sign of trees falling in a forest.

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It seemed like a good idea, but it just didn’t work out that way…
Belgian War Crimes Law Undone by Its Global Reach
Cases Against Political Figures Sparked Crises
Belgium decides that not every nut with an ax to grind should be able to sharpen it in the Belgian justice system. That’s just as well.