In which the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the German newspaper whose website has meanwhile gotten much better, interviews Edward. He says things such as
“Um das zu erreichen müssen Preise und Löhne für Jahre um 6,5 Prozent fallen.”
and
“Denn die Unverantwortlichkeit der spanischen Regierung gefährdet andere Europäer. Gefragt ist Führungsverhalten in [...]
An op-ed guest writer for the New York Times opines:
SIXTY-FIVE years ago, in November 1944, the war in Europe was at a stalemate. A resurgent Wehrmacht had halted the Allied armies along Germany’s borders after its headlong retreat across northern France following D-Day. From Holland to France, the front [...]
In a fit of timeliness, I have read the first volume of the report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (IIFFMCG), colloquially known as the Tagliavini report. The report drew attention when it was published at the end of September for its headline [...]
From the assembled press, someone shouts a question, “Effective immediately?”
“I have been informed that such an announcement was prepared today, you should already have a copy. According to my understanding, that is immediately. Without delay.”
Twenty years ago this evening, Günter Schabowski gave an unrehearsed answer at a [...]
Czech President Vaclav Klaus, after much hemming and hawing, signed the Treaty of Lisbon this afternoon. It is expected to enter into force on 1 December 2009. This success is undoubtedly the highlight of the Swedish Presidency, which made concluding ratification a top priority.
Prominent changes include [...]
File under “Who knew?” The Guardian reports that Rory Stewart has been selected as a candidate for the UK’s parliament from a safe (10,000 majority) Conservative seat. In one of those moves that makes me think that parliamentary systems are odd sometimes, one of his first actions will be [...]
Four years ago, I was boggled to realize that astronomers had been finding planets around other stars at an average rate of one per month since the first exoplanet around a main-sequence star was discovered in 1995.
On Monday, scientists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced that [...]
Holy smokes. What will the man do for an encore?
From the BBC:
US President Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel Committee said he was awarded it for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.
Reuters quotes from the citation (The Nobel [...]
Well, I’m going to go way, way, way out on a limb and say that the grand coalition will continue after today’s German election. What do the rest of you think?
[...]From the New York Times:
Ertugrul Osman, who might have ruled the Ottoman empire from a palace in Istanbul, but instead spent most of his life in a walk-up apartment in Manhattan, died Wednesday night in Istanbul. He was 97. …
Mr. Osman was a descendant of Osman I, the Anatolian [...]
Calculated Risk points out an interesting number in a Bloomberg report: A public authority will soon be managing a portfolio of bad non-residential real-estate loans whose nominal value is about half of Ireland’s GDP. Probably all sorts of shoes waiting to drop in commercial real estate markets across [...]
Osama bin Laden is still at large.
The best work of art about September 11, 2001 is still John M. Ford’s poem, “110 Stories.”
Edward’s commentary, from 2004.
[...]Turkey and Armenia are tantalizingly close to opening diplomatic relations, and may re-open their border — which has been closed since 1993 — by the end of 2009.
The BBC says,
They are to hold six weeks of domestic consultations on the move [to have diplomatic relations] after which their parliaments [...]
What happens on a Wednesday night if you’re one of the city’s most wired people, an avid Twitter and Facebook user, plugged in with non-governmental organizations, with a penchant for visiting like-minded folks in other European cities? In most cities and countries, not much remarkable: meeting friends, tweeting or sms’ing [...]
Over at another blog, I was asked what I thought about Obama’s visit to Moscow, how it was playing in Tbilisi and what it meant for Georgia. Here are my two tetris’ worth:
Saakashvili is pleased that the only explicit area of disagreement mentioned between the US and Russia was Georgia; [...]
“This is a book about Germans and Jews, about power and money. It is a book focused on Bismarck and Bleichröder, Junker and Jew, statesman and banker, collaborators for over thirty years. The setting is that of a Germany where two worlds clashed: the new world of capitalism and [...]
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle [...]
Suddenly, an event manager in London is having a very bad night. Fifty sold-out shows to refund.
Just at this moment, the O2 Arena page reads, “Michael Jackson - THIS IS IT!” I bet it won’t for much longer.
[...]The Georgian opposition is generally described as a loose alliance, united mainly in their distaste for current president Mikhail Saakashvili and their somewhat greater distaste for Russian domination. In the latter they are in harmony with the vast majority of Georgians, while the former is not so clear. But they [...]
The Russian judge was unimpressed by both the technical merits and the artistic program of the UN resolution to extend the observation mission in Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 0.0 all around, or Géorgie, nul point.
Since 1993, UN observers had worked both sides of [...]
For a banned demonstration called off by the opposition candidate, this looks pretty big. New York Times says “hundreds of thousands,” i.e., more than came to see Obama in Berlin.
Government apparently continuing to try to crack down on media. Much information still coming out, but verification in the [...]
Tehran tense, says CNN. Unrest challenges Iran’s republic, says the BBC headline writer, choosing understatement. The reporter, Jon Leyne, is less restrained: “As demonstrations against the Iranian election result continue, the situation in Tehran is becoming unpredictable and potentially explosive.”
The story got close to a third of [...]
Story on the geopolitical angle from Foreign Policy today. And it’s better than any story you’re likely to find in a major newspaper, too.
[...]Possibly not the best result for a sitting government.
(That’s how British people do understatement, right?)
It also shows at least one of the perils of writing headlines. UKIP did well in 2004, so this result gains them one additional seat in the European Parliament. The Conservatives, who placed first, also [...]
From Brad DeLong:
The key irrationality [causing the present crisis] was a private-sector failure on the part of the shareholders and top managements of the banks to make sure that their traders had an appropriate stake in the long-run survival of the bank and not just in constructing a portfolio that [...]
As media furiously refrain from speculating, it’s odd to be hoping that a lightning strike, an electrical malfunction, or some combination of both was responsible for the crash of an Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean last night while en route from Rio de [...]
What’s Chinese for cultural destruction?
Over the next few years, [Kashgar] city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of [the city's Old Town, a] warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced [...]
Rendard Sexton, writing at fivethiryeight, offers a handy intro to next month’s elections to the European Parliament. The comments are well informed and also offer corrections to minor missteps in the post.
For aficionados, the main value is a link to efforts from a global communications [...]
It’s that time of year again, and this time all of Europe — except plucky Georgia! — turns to the Third Rome Moscow, home of Eurovision 2009.
In years past, we’ve amused ourselves to no end with the song contest. Here are posts at least as good as some years’ [...]
Just a few short weeks after the end of World War I on the Western Front, Poland and Soviet Russia started fighting again, skirmishing on their poorly defined border that built into full-scale invasions over the next year. Davies’ book White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 tells [...]
The EU Health Commissioner recommends avoiding non-essential travel to Mexico, and the first case of this variant of swine flu in Europe has been reported in Spain. The WHO has already got its Emergency Committee working; they had their first meeting on Saturday. And the Organization’s web site [...]
Armenia and Turkey have agreed on “a comprehensive framework for normalisation of their bilateral relations,” according to a joint communique from the two governments. “Within this framework, a roadmap has been determined,” they said. Details and initial reactions here, here, here and here.
The timing is significant, [...]
Once upon a time, before it became the Paris edition of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune published its late sports editor Dick Roraback’s ode to baseball’s opening day each year.
Under the fold, “The Crack of the Bat.”
(The fifth stanza is current again, after reflecting a [...]
On April 9, 1989, Soviet troops put down a demonstration in Tbilisi calling for the restoration of Georgian independence. As Thomas Goltz puts it in Georgia Diary:
This time, however, the local garrison of Soviet army conscripts usually called upon to maintain order was replaced by paratroopers, and when they moved [...]
The coalition led by Mirek Topolanek was forced out of power last night after losing a confidence vote in parliament, 101-96, over its handling of the economy.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another time in the last 10 years that a government has fallen [...]
Though it does have some relevance to the financial crisis, a brief item from the gentleman who brought you the immensely useful crazification factor:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish [...]
You may have known them already:
The Russian word for train station, voksal, is related to the London neighborhood of Vauxhall.
It is considered bad luck in Georgia to take out the trash at night; it is a sign of throwing money away.
In Tbilisi, the Armenian ambassador’s official car was parked [...]
From Michael Lewis’ justly-praised and widely-recommended story of the financial crisis in Iceland
the financial stuff eventually overwhelmed the fish.
He’s in the midst of explaining how fishing guys discovered a currency carry trade and just kept at it. More broadly, though, there are a lot of places where the financial [...]
Because it’s not like the rest of politics stops so that Europe can reach a consensus on the economic crisis.
President Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help [...]
For a small break from Brussels and the economic crisis:
Nothing fades so quickly or so tackily as a Soviet resort.
One of the lighter observations (on p. 139) from The Spirit-Wrestlers by Philip Marsden, a journey across southern Russia and the Caucasus in search of various religious non-conformists who [...]
Hot off the wires, the US contraction is larger than expected.
Gross domestic product contracted at a 6.2 percent annual pace from October through December, more than economists anticipated and the most since 1982, according to revised figures from the Commerce Department today in Washington. Consumer spending, which comprises about [...]
A handy chart in English from Dutch business newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Clickable map covers the EU-27 and includes debt, growth, unemployment, budget deficit and latest credit outlook.
[...]And what to do with them.
But what about the talent part? On the whole, this indispensable leadership and insight has made a smoking ruin of every company they were allowed to play with! Let’s take Bob Lutz, the vice-Chairman of General Motors. In the Jan. 31 Economist, we find him [...]
From Geert Mak’s visit to Sarajevo in 1999:
Batinic leans over and looks me straight in the eye. ‘Tell me, Geert, honestly: what kind of people are you sending us anyway? The ones at the top are usually fine. But otherwise, with only a few exceptions, the people I have to [...]
Describing some events in the last months of 1989:
Meanwhile, an unknown KGB agent in Dresden, Vladimir Putin, had tried to pile so many documents into a burning stove that the thing exploded
In Europe, by Geert Mak, p.718
I’m nearing the end of the book, and it’s living up to my [...]
This is the 3003rd post at A Fistful of Euros. An odd number for an observance, but things are coming fast and furious these days, and I just missed MMM.
That is all.
[...]North and south of the Caucasus mountains:
Azerbaijan’s air force commander was shot and killed as he left his home on the morning of February 11 … Lt-Gen. Rail Rzayev, the head of Azerbaijan’s Air Force and Anti-Aircraft Defense Force, was shot in the head as he was sitting in [...]
Dieter Wermuth, over at one of Die Zeit’s blogs:
Judging from December’s [2008] industrial production numbers, Germany’s social product will have shrunk by 1 percent to 2 percent, real and seasonally adjusted, in the fourth quarter compared with the third. That means that it retreated between 0.6 percent and 1.6 [...]
Because we can’t all be analyzing the economic crisis. (H/T Dispatches from France.) Discoveries like this are a pleasure of cleaning up the blogroll, bit by bit.
[...]Going to be an interesting year again here in the Caucasus.
Russia will start building a naval base this year in Georgia’s Black Sea separatist region of Abkhazia, Russian media reported on Monday, a step Tbilisi said would violate its sovereignty. …
Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency quoted an unnamed official at [...]
Over at English Russia, Sergei Larenkov has merged historic photos form the siege of Leningrad with contemporary pictures taken from the same vantage point. Flak balloons, protective scaffolding, ruins and dead bodies juxtaposed with SUVs, modern busses, restored facades. Fascinating work.
Don’t miss his links to other photo projects [...]
We’re about to find out whether the rest of the world is still dependent on demand in the US. If it is, better set those expectations down a bit further.
The U.S. economy contracted violently in the fourth quarter, with gross domestic product falling at its fastest pace in more [...]
The administration here isn’t changing, but we are doing a little cleaning up. At the moment, it’s confined to the blogroll. First, I’ll be pruning the blogs that have gone on hiatus. Then, probably some time next week, we will add new ones. We always want to hear about good [...]
The world my children (one, three and five) remember will always be one in which a black person has been President of the United States of America.
[...]“They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. … You have done [...]
“This Land is Your Land”
Verses four and five, as performed at the pre-inaugural concert:
A great high wall there tried to stop me
A great big sign there said “Private Property”
But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin!
That side was made for you and me!
Nobody [...]
He should have turned 80 last week.
On the other hand, he came within a sneeze of dying after being stabbed in 1961, and he achieved a thing or two in those seven years.
[...]A senior official from Germany’s ministry of defense was in Tbilisi on Tuesday, meeting counterparts and doing the things that senior defense officials do, including a reception put on by the German embassy. According to one person present at the reception, during his brief remarks he said the Georgia was [...]
A senior official from Germany’s ministry of defense was in Tbilisi on Tuesday, meeting counterparts and doing the things that senior defense officials do, including a reception put on by the German embassy. According to one person present at the reception, during his brief remarks he said the Georgia was [...]
Less than 10 percent of the way into the book (to be fair, my edition weighs in at just under 900 pages), I’m liking In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak a great deal, and looking forward to the rest.
In 1999, Mak was [...]
On April 16, 1947, the SS Grandcamp exploded in the harbor of Texas City, Texas. The ship was carrying ammonium nitrate as part of Marshall Plan relief for post-war Europe. Ammonium nitrate is both an effective fertilizer and a potent explosive, and the Grandcamp was carrying more [...]
An important story, very badly told.
Before and, more crucially, immediately after the American Civil War, African-Americans were widely dispersed throughout the country. By the 1940s, however, blacks living outside the South were concentrated in particular areas of the largest cities. In Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of [...]
Last week, some US-based bloggers were talking about their dissatisfaction with the term, “soft power.”
[C]an we retire the term “soft power” already? I always feel that it’s been popularized not so much by Professor Nye as by deranged warmongers who like the idea of [...]
More like a bag, or indeed several.
Armed robbers pulled off one of the world’s biggest jewellery heists at a famed Paris store, making off with 85 million euros (107 million dollars) in diamonds and valuables, officials said Friday.
A gang of four thieves — two of them disguised as women [...]
James Fallows points out an interesting perspective on Tim Geithner, Obama’s pick to be US Secretary of the Treasury: experience with Asia and at the IMF. Both will be very useful in the current crisis.
When I was with a DC finance firm about a decade ago, [...]
The US state of New Hampshire now has more female senators than male in the upper house of state government.
After [the November 4] election, thirteen of the twenty-four state Senate seats in New Hampshire are now occupied by women. Peggy Gilmore (District 12), Bette Lasky (District 13) and Amanda [...]
Two productivity-enhancing additions to the internet that at least a couple of our readers may not have noticed in the last 24 hours.
Google is putting the image archive of the American magazine LIFE online. Over the next few months, this will mean access to some 10 million images, the [...]
I’m beginning to think that our neighborhood grocery store here in Tbilisi could be an interesting source of stories about the politics and economics in the Second World. The tastiest corn chips come from Turkey, the cooking oil brands are almost all Russian (though with relations being what they [...]
The guns of Europe fell silent as the Armistice took hold.
Not everywhere, of course. Fighting continued in revolutionary Germany and Russia, in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and in other places whose history I don’t know well [...]
As if the time in power for Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party had not provided enough comedy, a backbencher has been quoted saying something so far out of the potato patch that even the party’s [...]
Apparently a great-great-great grandfather of his came from Ireland, and at least one visitor reports that this is all the rage right now.
From the chorus: “O’Leary, O’Reilly, O’Hare and O’Hara/There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.” The verses are pretty funny, too.
In America, “I’ll take my lane in the middle” is a figure of speech. In Georgia, it’s a way of life.
That is all.
As the BBC puts it
The new leader of the party previously headed by Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider has admitted the two men had a “special relationship”.
Stefan Petzner told Austrian radio that Mr Haider, whom he met five years ago, was “the man of my life”. …
Mr Petzner [...]
And somewhere between 52 and 53 in the popular vote. Florida and West Virginia because I’m feeling optimistic.
What do you all think?
What I think.
Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, has won the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize “for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts”.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has officially dissolved the parliament, and new elections are set for December 7. He made no secret of why he thought the coalition broke up:
The democratic coalition - I am convinced, deeply convinced - was destroyed with only one thing – personal ambition. The personal ambition [...]
When I asked, “Who’s next?” I neglected to post the answers which were Washington Mutual and Ukraine. Hope that I was only half-right.
One of the consequences of Montenegro’s split from Serbia was the country’s need for its own top level domain, following its departure from .yu and .cs. In September 2007, ICANN settled for .me, potentially setting up another odd, [...]
“It should be noted that AIG wrote its derivative contracts in London.” – Commenter Thomas, at Crooked Timber
And indeed, we see a report on Bloomberg, the wire service the financial folks use to communicate with each other, that Allianz was involved in a bid for AIG two days [...]
It isn’t working, and Ukraine’s parliament has 30 days to form a new ruling coalition. Good luck with that, too. If not, elections in December.
The long-simmering feud between Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko has, again, reached its breaking point. Tymoshenko, the current premier, has a month to [...]
Flight to quality is about the only thing I can say for sure about the ongoing Wall Street crisis that swallowed up a 158-year-old investment bank and forced Merrill (no-relation) Lynch to be sold to some outfit in North Carolina. (The $613+ billion that Lehman lists as [...]
Deference outlives ideology. If the Kremlin is for it, and Washington is against it, Ortega must be in favor.
From AFP, via
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega has revived Cold War ghosts by recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia, supporting Russia’s stance on the breakaway Georgian regions.
Ortega, a former Marxist guerilla leader who [...]
Central Tbilisi is filling up with people coming out for an officially sanctioned (and organized) but also popularly supported rally for Georgia and against Russia. In the main roads, a human chain is forming, one that takes in the main cathedral and Parliament, as well as business areas, residential neighborhoods [...]
It’s been a while since I mentioned it here, but I grew up in the southern part of Louisiana. Not terribly near the coast, but still way down south. Most folks have left the coastal areas now, and that’s a good thing. The next 12 to 24 hours are going [...]
At this week’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Russian president Medvedev was reportedly seeking support for his country’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. If that’s true, he can’t be the mastermind he’s sometimes alleged to be in the conflict between Russia [...]
There are a lot of bad things about the Georgia-Russia conflict, but this is just foolish: Nearly all Russia-based web sites seem to be blocked from Georgia, and by the Georgian side. Trying to surf to the Moscow Times gets me a domain-parking site, while Izvestiya.ru, just for example, yields [...]
At their meeting in Sochi — planned home of the 2014 Winter Olympics and just a hop, skip and APC ride from Abkhazia — Russia’s president Dmitri Medvedev warned Moldova’s president not to repeat the “Georgian mistake.”
Moldova, of course, claims Transnistria as part of its internationally recognized territory, [...]
We’re back after a happily uneventful, if hot and a bit long, drive from Yerevan. Went past one of the air bases that was bombed, and saw what looked like a burned field, but otherwise no damage visible from the public road.
The city itself is more difficult to judge, and [...]
Just one key part of the argument:
Russia sees the spread of democratization as a threat to its control of the ‘Near Abroad.’ It has been pushing quite deliberately for a redefinition of the norms of territorial integrity and intervention that would legitimate its continued presence in Georgia [...]
Not all of the reports are consistent, but they are increasingly consistent: Russian forces have reportedly taken the central Georgian city of Gori, essentially splitting the country in two and occupying the main east-west highway. Russian forces are reported to be in Zugdidi, a larger Georgian town near to [...]
Q: Hello Radio Yerevan, was it a good idea to leave Tbilisi on Sunday?
A: In principle, yes. Though it would be better if one of the vehicles in the caravan does not break down after the lunch break in northern Armenia.
Q: Dzien dobry Radio Yerevan, is it a good idea [...]
I’m writing this in advance, so things may change during the night, but my better half’s foundation made evacuation mandatory Saturday afternoon, so off we go. We’re on our way to Yerevan to see if things subside reasonably quickly. I hope so, as I really like Tbilisi and was enjoying [...]
