This anniversary guest post is from the brilliant John Emerson.
“It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
`By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me ?…..
He holds him with his skinny hand,
`There was a ship,’ quoth he.
`Hold off ! unhand me, grey-beard loon !’….
(Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner”)
“I alone have escaped [...]

Will there or won’t there be an eleventh hour agreement on the new EU budget. Tony Blair is clearly burning the midnight oil, but the foreign ministers did not seem to be unduly impressed:
EU foreign ministers’ talks on the 2007-2013 budget ended after less than a minute on Monday (12 December), with the UK set [...]

The Guardian today has a short profile on Angela Merkel, while the FT looks at some of the proposals which may well form part of the SPD campaign manifesto. Far be it from me to worry about ’sting the rich’ tax proposals, but as far as I can see the main isssue is getting Germany [...]

There’s a fair amount of talk again this week about the various government deficits and what to do with them. Earlier in the week the FT had a piece about the current state of play with the US deficit whilst the Economist is busy musing one more time over the ongoing saga of the [...]

For some reason, I stopped covering the constitution when I started AFOE. Since Cosmocrat has been on hiatus for two months, and Henry Farrell after joining CT generally restricts himself to subjects the US bloggers care about, there’s barely been any informed discussion of these things in the blogosphere, that I know of. That’s a [...]