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By T.J. English
$18.45
By Daniel Ellsberg
$101.79
$20
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AP / Bela Szandelszky
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The red sludge that, in the words of one official, extinguished all life in Hungary’s Marcal River has now reached the blue Danube, the second longest river in Europe. The disaster began at a waste reservoir in western Hungary where 33 million cubic feet of toxic material began its long spill, reaching more than 6.5 feet high in places.
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Flickr / Marty Portier (CC-BY-SA)
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The State Department has warned Americans traveling to and living in Europe that the entire continent faces a heightened risk of terrorist attack. Authorities fear that al-Qaida is planning something like the 2008 Mumbai shooting spree that killed 166 people.
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AP / Henny Ray Abrams
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The good news is that the U.S. stock market has enjoyed its “strongest September in 71 years” thus far this month, according to The Wall Street Journal. The bad news is that September ain’t over yet, and that hopeful trend didn’t quite last through Monday.
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By William Pfaff — The relationship between Western Europe and the colonies that became the United States was complicated from the beginning. The situation reversed, it is now Europe that tires of America’s imperial wars.
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U.S. Army / Sgt. Derec Pierson
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By William Pfaff — “Transformation” is the new military buzzword, meaning reorienting the military institution for “the complex insurgencies” that “planners say will dominate the 21st century.” Robert Gates, the U.S. secretary of defense, was quoted as saying that Afghanistan provides the “laboratory” for this change.
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Flickr / Tinou Bao (CC-BY)
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The French Senate voted 246-1 Tuesday to make it illegal for women to wear garments that cover their entire faces. The measure, if greenlighted by a constitutional body, will affect only a few thousand people, but its implications for religious freedom and women’s rights have attracted international interest.
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Flickr / TheArches (CC-BY)
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Anti-tax organizers in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe are getting advice and assistance from the same well-funded astroturf groups that helped launch and control the tea party movement on this side of the Atlantic.
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Flickr / Indi Samarajiva (CC-BY)
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A little more than 10 years ago, Sweden adopted a radical approach to prostitution. Rather than punish women who sell their bodies, Sweden publicly outs the men who pay for sex. The result is a 50 percent reduction in street prostitution, reports the Christian Science Monitor.
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AP / Mark Lennihan
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By Steven Hill — Why have economists been so wrong so often? Certainly theirs is a tough job, since the global economy is a complex creature. Yet it turns out that their measuring sticks are woefully inadequate. Indeed, they aren’t even sure what to measure.
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Illustration based on an image by Bearas (CC-BY-SA)
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By William Pfaff — The excellent second quarter export and growth results reported by Germany have set that country at an increasing, and increasingly dangerous, distance from the other members of the European Union.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Norman Birnbaum — Walter Kendall Myers, a former Foreign Service officer, has been sent to prison for life for espionage on behalf of Cuba. Did he knew anything at all that could remotely be termed “secret”?
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Flickr / jimg944 (CC-BY)
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By William Pfaff — Possibly the most fashionable theme in current discussions of the future is whether China will replace the United States as the leading world power.
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By William Pfaff — The European Union deliberately has chosen not to challenge the United States as a military or political superpower. This is convenient for most and saves Europe a great deal of money. It is prudent, since no one knows what the U.S. would do if the Europeans undertook a role that challenged American primacy.
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By David Sirota — Though the Reagan zeitgeist created the illusion that taxes stunt economic growth, the numbers prove that higher marginal tax rates generate more resources for the job-creating, public investments that sustain an economy and create incentives for businesses to grow.
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Flickr / nomadic f-stops
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Anti-Muslim sentiment in Spain is getting enshrined into law, with legislation banning the burqa being passed in villages across northeast Spain, legitimizing xenophobic views in the Catalan region where most communities have few if any Muslim inhabitants.
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AP / Alik Keplicz
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Poland’s presidential election is finally under way following the death of the country’s last president, Lech Kaczynski, in a plane crash two months ago. Acting President Bronislaw Komorowski was the favorite going in, expected to defeat the late president’s twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
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Zeitgeist Films
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By Richard Schickel — “Jud Süss” may be the most odious movie ever made. And now we have a talking-heads documentary about it, “Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss,” the work of Felix Moeller, in which the children and grandchildren of the film’s director, Veit Harlan, are invited to comment on the patriarch’s noxious work.
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Flickr / MichalFoto (CC-BY-ND)
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By John Feffer —
Turkey has ambitions beyond the Middle East and the means to get there.
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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In a metaphorical walk around the debt crisis block, Greece’s prime minister has said he believes his country is “turning the corner” as economic recovery efforts by the ransacked country may have started to pay off.
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Flickr / campusprogress_blog
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A European contraceptive that works as a five-day alternative to the “morning-after” pill may be coming to American shores, but a thorny debate surrounding the drug’s chemical similarity to the RU-486 abortion pill raises some politically charged questions for the FDA.
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AP / Mikhail Metzel
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By Ivo Mijnssen and Philipp Casula —
Russia has come a long way, but geopolitics in Eastern Europe are still overshadowed by a mutual distrust rooted in World War II.
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AP / Jae C. Hong
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Google said it will hand over wireless network data that was collected by fleets of vehicles shooting photographs for the search giant’s Street View mapping service as it tries to resolve a privacy row with European regulators.
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AP / Gregory Bull
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With a good degree of exasperation, Haiti’s president has been forced to remind the international community that only Brazil has paid in full on its promised aid following the earthquake that devastated the country in January.
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Wikimedia Commons
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A new kind of specter is haunting Europe: debt. Hungary’s new prime minister is reported to have said that there is only a slim chance that his country will evade a Greek-style debt crisis, a comment that sent domestic markets into a tizzy and saw the Hungarian currency drop more than 2 percent.
Posted on Jun 4, 2010
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AP / Petros Giannakouris
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By Chris Hedges — Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out.
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Flickr / Council of Europe
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The German Parliament has approved a series of measures allowing the country to provide up to $184 billion in loan guarantees in a package aimed at stabilizing the euro and helping support those European nations that are mired in debt.
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AP / Daniel Roland
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The Icelandic volcano isn’t the only problem blowing over from Europe, judging by Thursday’s dismal stock market dive, touched off in part by problems in the euro zone as well as homegrown concerns about the American government’s plans for financial regulation.
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By William Pfaff — The European Union doesn’t know where it stands at this moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling.
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Petar Pismestrovic, Kleine Zeitung, Austria —
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Flickr / Rogério do Amaral Ribeiro
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Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge made famous for probing into abuses committed under dictator Gen. Francisco Franco and for going after notorious international figures like Osama bin Laden and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, has been suspended in preparation for a trial in which he is accused of overstepping his authority. The court case comes after a wave of complaints from far-right groups.
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Flickr / Ranoush. (CC-BY-SA)
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It isn’t an outright ban—yet—but the French parliament agreed unanimously (except for 30 protesters who walked out) to condemn the face veil worn by some Muslim women as “an affront to the nation’s values of dignity and equality.”
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Flickr / jpellgen
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After the Dow’s freaky dip last week, Monday’s news that the U.S. stock market was closing in on its biggest day in terms of gains this year might just boost some spirits on and off the trading floor.
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Fake news by Andy Borowitz —
Finance ministers from 16 EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.
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By William Pfaff — The present crisis of the European Union was inherent in the creation of the institution itself.
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Flickr / Andres Rueda (CC-BY-ND)
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The once-mighty euro, a currency that humbled American tourists in its day, has sunk to a 13-month low against the dollar. Greece’s impending bailout apparently isn’t settling nerves in the eurozone, which includes other major economies that look a little wobbly as of late.
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Flickr / faz the persian
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This is the story of George Rekers, a Baptist minister and prominent anti-gay activist who recently took a European sojourn with a young man who said, on his Rentboy.com profile, that he’s “up for anything.” Well, how about a trip to London and Madrid with a card-carrying member of the Christian right?
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Flickr / Hector Lopez-Berges
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With all the focus on job losses here at home, we sometimes forget how the economic crisis—which originated in the U.S.—has affected other countries. Official figures in Spain, for example, show that that country’s unemployment rate has hit 20 percent, highest in the eurozone.
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By William Pfaff — Large and firmly implanted bureaucratic organizations are almost impossible to kill, even when they have no reason to continue to exist, as NATO has not since the Soviet Union, communism and the Warsaw Pact all collapsed.
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Flickr / Somebody on This Earth
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Every year on April 24, Armenians around the world commemorate what they call “Genocide Remembrance Day” in honor of the 1.5 million Armenians who died in the genocide from 1915 to 1923.
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Peter Broelman, Australia —
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AP via latimes.com
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Many grounded travelers and some airline industry officials disagreed with the halting of air travel across much of Europe last weekend due to the ashy work of Iceland’s now-infamous Eyjafjallajokull volcano, and now it’s looking like some flights will be gearing up for takeoff on Tuesday.
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bbc.co.uk
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A volcano under the Eyjafjallajoekull (got that?) glacier in Iceland spewed a hefty cloud of ash into the air Thursday, turning airports across Europe into no-fly zones and leaving stranded travelers little hope of taking off until midday Friday or later.
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Flickr / U-g-g-B-o-y-(-Photograph-World-Sense-)
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The 16 nations that use the euro have just revealed an aid package of up to $40 billion in an effort to stem the Greek financial crisis. Finance ministers see the offer as a “step of clarification” for markets and a boost for the faltering euro.
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By William Pfaff — Today’s European crisis was precipitated by Greece acting with possibly reckless honesty, and Germany behaving badly.
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aquamarinepower.com
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Hoping to become the “Saudi Arabia of tidal energy,” the Scottish government is offering 10 million pounds to spur innovation in wave power. Some say the incentive is unnecessary, since private companies are already racing to figure out the best way to generate electricity from the ocean.
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Flickr / FreeCat
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They served whale at a Santa Monica sushi restaurant. But where are the shock, horror and hidden cameras when the sashimi comes out? Tuna are rapidly vanishing from the Earth’s oceans. An effort to ban the export of Atlantic bluefin tuna just failed at a U.N. meeting, because the countries that sell the animals as food are worried about their fishermen.
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AP / Petros Giannakouris
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In an effort to save the Greek economy, and by extension the euro itself, eurozone countries—the 16 European Union states that use the common currency—have agreed on a multibillion-euro bailout that also will impose financial austerity measures on Greece.
Posted on Mar 12, 2010
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By William Pfaff — There is a lot of money to be made by big international banks in impoverished small, and even medium-size, countries in times of world crisis.
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Flickr / Martin Beek
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Moammar Gadhafi has had it up to here with Switzerland. First they arrest his son on charges of beating up two servants at a luxury hotel. Then they pass a pretty horrible law banning mosque’s minarets. Now, Gadhafi has called for a holy war against the country, a move which has received almost universal denouncement.
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Quelle Surprise! Haiti on the Mend
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