The Italian government finally agreed the details of the new penison reform yesterday. Curiously, it does not need to go to parliament for approval. Getting government agreement had not been without difficulty, and again interestingly enough it won’t come into effect for two years, giving next year’s incoming government plenty of time to [...]

Well, for once some news is good news. Also, it seems to confirm what I always suspected: people and cultures do change, they do ‘move on’, even if sometimes it seems they do so impossibly slowly.
Change in Northern Ireland may be so slow it appears imperceptible, but the writing is on the wall for one [...]

Morgan Stanley’s Eric Chaney has what I consider to be a very sensitive and perceptive analysis of the economic backdrop to the French urban unrest:
Turning to economic causes, many analysts have pointed to mass youth unemployment as the main cause of the political unrest in low-income suburbs. The numbers are striking: the French [...]

Here’s a post form Reflections on European Democracy that I’ve been meaning to link to for a while.
What I am saying is that the rants of people like Kaczyński, Marcinkiewicz, Lepper, and others against communists and gays are nothing new. They form a direct line with the authoritarian independent pre-war republics and with the communist [...]

Saturday over at European Tribune says:
In the past few days, everyone talked about Franz Müntefering’s resignation as SPD chairman. I did, too. That is why I nearly missed one of the most important news in German politics for months (or maybe even years):
SPD and CDU/CSU have agreed on the most contentious points of federal reform. [...]

Following the recent confirmation of the key contenders, we now have a date. Italy is to have elections on April 9 next.

It now seems to be more or less official: after Romano Prodi won a convincing 75 percent support among centre-left voters in what were effectively the first American-style primaries in Italian history, and Marco Follini resigned as leader of the Union of Christian Democrats (UDC) after a failed attempt to persuade his coalition [...]

The scandal of recent days surrounding the ‘policing’ of the EU’s southern frontier in Ceuta and Melilla continues. Yesterday Spanish TV was full of images and reports from a group of 500 or so Africans who were bused and dumped in the desert hundreds of kilometres from reasonable sources of food ands water. The EU [...]

The FT reports that as the Fazio affair drags on, and doubts about the future course of the Italian government deficit continue to linger, Berlusconi is suffering notably in the opinion polls:
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, was dealt a blow on Monday when an opinion poll showed a collapse in support for his Forza Italia [...]

This story today is worth a quick glance:
Mark McGowan went into the tiny backroom kitchen of a south London gallery three weeks ago and flipped on the cold water. He didn’t turn it off, and doesn’t plan to for an entire year.
“The Running Tap,” as it’s called, is McGowan’s effort to protest against wasted water [...]