The financial news has been so intense this week that I’ve all but given up on trying to blog it. Twitter‘s where you’ll find most of my comments on the tumult in Europe and the US. Amid markets falling and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic flailing, one bit of rather shocking news did …
Category Archives: eu
Provoking the Unprovocative: Reactions to Norway
As Italy goes into total shutdown for August, I have so much work at the day job that it’s literally made me sick for the past three weeks, but spending more than four hours on the phone with lawyers every day should do that to anyone. Ironically, I have been working on a series of …
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Duomo & Sarpi: stories behind images
In an effort to provide a little context for Magdi’s provocative posters, some reading from the archives in order to illuminate exactly what happened: The praying at piazza Duomo was connected to protests against the Gaza War and happened on January 3, 2009. Organizers of the protests say that the prayer was spontaneous. Coverage in …
Friday AM Roundup
What’s great about Friday morning? Having the Economist placed at your feet. And even though this is a blog, sometimes it takes having the paper placed in your hands to do a good scan. Premesso’s not-quite week in review, drawn from the weekly of record: 1. On February 15, La Padania interviewed Pier Luigi Bersani, …
The Chains are Broken, the Knives are Sharpened, the Glock is Photographed
Morning roundup: Interesting times in Tunisia. Is it the Arab’s world Gdansk or is that too much to hope for? We’ll see. But it’s something. I was heartened to see that Yglesias also excused himself from blogging extensively on Tunisia for much the same reason that I did: ignorance. But he goes a bit further …
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Serbia, the EU and Muslims in the Balkans
The Dutch held out but Europe, as usual, wants to have its way so after a threat to ram Serbia’s EU ‘assessment’ through by majority vote, the Dutch folded. However, there is a provision that every step of Serbia’s accession will have to be subject to a unanimous vote. The Dutch, we can imagine, will …
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Soft on Mladic?
Thursday I was excited to see the photo of none other than Ratko Mladic on the cover of the IHT at the newsstand; “he’s been caught,” I thought, “just like Karadzic a few years ago.” Of course, he hasn’t, and the article spends far too much time on summarizing the case against the general, although there …
Swiss Intolerance
If you thought Lega Nord images stereotyping Southern Italians and immigrants were bad, check out this new poster against the opening of Swiss borders to Italian (and other European – presumably Romanian) workers. Given that hordes of Milanese commute to Ticino and vice versa and that, uh, Italian is one of Switzerland’s official languages, this …
Chermany
Bloomberg has a couple of excellent pieces out this week on what’s going on with the French and German economies. The story of how Germany lately managed to rally its growth and drive down its unemployment rate is of particular interest to the Italian observer, in that a lot of the success seems to have …
European Stereotypes Maps
European stereotypes have been entrenched since at least the time of the first Grand Tour. But as organizational tools, maps have the power to change the way one perceives the world. Personally, I’ve found alternate maps fascinated by maps ever since getting a Gall-Peters world map sometime in the eighties. So for a little Saturday …