Spain
Yesterday’s Gone: Euro Optimism Goes Flat and Here Comes 2012
As has become common during the nearly two years of Europe’s escalating debt crisis, reasons for guarded optimism that surfaced this week are being replaced with concern and doubt. In the wake of last week’s uplifting news …
As the Crisis Refuses to Calm, Scenarios of Euro Collapse Appear
Despite the distracting political drama over the UK’s outlier rejection at last week’s European Union agreement on fiscal and budgetary coordination, it’s now become clear that main objective of the collective effort–to ensure …
Should Foreign Residents Be Allowed to Vote in France? Sarkozy Flip-Flops
Even when opinions in the U.S. and France do manage to generally agree on certain subjects, meshing trans-Atlantic views often end up differing in some rather remarkable ways. Take immigration. The issue remains an equally high-temperature political flash point in both countries. So, too, does the conjoined challenge of integrating
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Europe’s Debt Tragicomedy: Horror Show Turns Into Shambolic Farce
There are occasions when even the scariest of movies will push the atmosphere of dread, danger, and doom a bit too far, and leave the scenario of improbable horror and panic feeling just stupid. That moment has arrived in Nightmare On Euro Street, as people who watched Europe’s escalating crisis through their fingers in terror begin …
Why Protest-Happy France Has Snubbed The Occupy Movement (For Now)
An excellent story by Reuters just went up today describing why it is a people known to be as siege-prone, strike-happy, and demonstration-loving as the French have not followed Greek, Spanish, American, British, Indian, and other protestors staging relatively successful Occupy movements these days. The piece notes how that docility …
From Europe With Love: U.S. ‘Indignados’ Occupy Wall Street
As the momentum surrounding the Occupy Wall Street protest grows, so too has the urge to frame it in the context of other struggles around the world. Already, Zuccotti Park, the patch of Lower Manhattan taken over for weeks now by the protesters, has been hailed as an American Tahrir Square, a font for a “U.S. autumn” as that …
The Merkel-Sarkozy Summit: A Minimalist Affair
It says a lot about the dramatic crisis facing the euro zone when the leaders of its two biggest economies go into a highly scrutinized summit amid promises, assurances, and even a form of hype stressing that nothing much will come from it. But that’s precisely the buzz surrounding this afternoon’s Paris meeting between German …
Why Greek Tumult Signals the Coming of Europe’s Own ‘Arab Spring’
Are the youth-led protests rocking Greece and other European countries a sign Arab Spring uprisings have jumped the Mediterranean? Kinda-sorta, say experts watching these movements. They warn that even if democratic systems in Europe can’t be compared with the brutally authoritarian regimes under fire in the Arab world, the angry …
Something’s Rotten in Europe
TIME’s Leo Cendrowicz writes from Brussels about what the controversy — and hysteria — over E.coli in vegetable produce is doing to the already fraying bonds of the European Union.
Originally the authorities in Hamburg identified the source of the outbreak as Spanish cucumbers. This was not only incorrect but led to an acrimonious
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Official Statistics Mock The Sarkozy-Berlusconi Offensive Against Schengen
As noted yesterday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi created headlines in responding to their bilateral Tunisian dilemma with their call Tuesday for revision and restriction of the entire Schengen treaty. Reworking that 26 year-old text, they made clear, will allow member nations to once again throw up …
NATO Members Feud While Gaddafi Forces Batter Misratah
It’s increasingly looking like the only factor capable of resolving the international community’s dilemma in Libya is also the one element to that will never cooperate in finding a solution: Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi himself. Because as the meetings, summits, and declarations of coalition partners come and go, it becomes …
France Recognizes Libyan Opposition Government
Props to French President Nicolas Sarkozy for becoming the first international leader to recognize the opposition battling Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi as the rightful representatives of their country. But should it have taken this long for someone to make such a no-brainer decision? And what’s taking Sarkozy’s peers so long in …