Europe
Greekonomics
So what’s Greece’s problem, economically? And why is Greece’s problem also Europe’s? Hmm, how much time do you have? Here goes…Greece embarked on a decade-long borrowing and spending spree after it joined the eurozone in 2001. Membership of what was then a shiny, new, strength-in-numbers currency club — notionally … read more >>
It’s Time, Rupert
IN THE blue corner, there’s ‘Dave Snooty’ as Private Eye depicts the British Prime Minister; a privileged old Etonian, an embodiment of the elite. He’s a royalist, the glorified PR schmoozer with little actual qualification except a profound sense of entitlement. In the other, more Thatcherite, corner, there’s Rupert Murdoch; … read more >>
Murdoch: All The Truth That Fits
AFTER swearing on the Bible to begin a two-day interrogation in Court 73 of London’s Royal Courts of Justice last Wednesday, an octogenarian once feared as the world’s most powerful media mogul began taking questions, the first few being perhaps the only ones he answered with clear and indisputable truth. … read more >>
Does My Neo-Nazism Look Big In This?
IT’S NOT HARD to imagine this is how it went. Last July, in a boardroom in Germany, a group of executives are brainstorming ideas to lift sales of their youth-oriented clothing line, Thor Steinar. As they thrash concepts around, a TV airs its usual schlocky fare in the background, broadcasting … read more >>
The Stain on Spain
LAST July 1, in a sweltering greenhouse in southern Spain, a black man from Africa was shot by a white man from Europe. Allegedly. The black man was Dinantou Barbosa, a 29-year-old from the impoverished West African state of Guinea-Bissau, one of as many as 100,000 Africans living and labouring … read more >>
The Schlock of Gibraltar
THERE are eyesores, there’s urban blight, and then there is Gibraltar, Britain’s last colony in Europe, a carbuncle of ocean-going ghastliness that’s in a class all of its own. Next April, its 30,000 people will have been officially and determinedly British for 300 years. That’s the anniversary of the … read more >>
Braveheart’s Bomb
IT’S 7.30am in the tiny hamlet of Garelochhead, all 1,200 residents and no traffic lights of it. We’re well north of Glasgow, into the breathtaking foothills of Scotland’s remote loch-lined Highlands. The locals are friendly, the air is clean and sharp like the waters of Gare Loch; Scotland at its … read more >>
What’s Rupert’s Game in Scotland?
IT WAS a humble tweet, just 52 characters, one of around 300 million made on February 20 — initially little noticed in London but resonating across the bonny Caledonian highlands. “Let Scotland go and compete. Everyone would win,” tweeted one Rupert Murdoch last month. While that’s not how London … read more >>
Which Way Paradise?
TO MANY Glaswegians, particularly those of an independent, Catholic and Republican persuasion, Paradise is a football stadium in this tough city’s East End, where urban blight in Britain seems at its bleakest. Their idea of heaven is a drizzly winter’s Saturday, a gutful of lager and fish and chips, with … read more >>
Irish Eyes Are on Australia
IN Kilkee, a sleepy retreat from the stormy Atlantic on Ireland’s remote far west coast, they still talk about the day the West Clare Gaels Ladies Football Club won the 2010 All-Ireland Ladies Intermediate Final. It was, by all accounts, an incredible victory, a bright moment of glory that briefly … read more >>
Free The Billionaire! Would That Help President Putin?
IT’S unlikely that Forbes Magazine has too many subscribers in Segezha, a grim town of 35,000 in Russia’s wintry northwest at the edges of the Arctic Circle. But if by chance it did, the magazine would take some time to get there. Segezha is a train station that became a … read more >>
Viva O’Chevolución!
IN history’s pantheon of legendary revolutionaries, there’s Cromwell and Washington, there’s Lenin, Mao and Ho, there’s Gaddafi if you’re so inclined, and Mandela, too. And then there’s Ernie Lynch. Ernie Lynch? Now, there’s a name one doesn’t hear so much in such radical company. If the name doesn’t ring a … read more >>
The Anti Rupert Murdoch
ENGLAND can be confusing, and John Bird isn’t helping. Bird is the Anti-Rupert, a social entrepreneur who in 1991 founded – with Gordon Roddick, who also founded The Body Shop with his late wife, Anita – The Big Issue, that ubiquitous “street newspaper” distributed by homeless people from Brisbane to … read more >>
UK: The Bomb-Chucking Blogger
A DISCUSSION with Paul Staines develops not so much as conventional-journalist-interviews-gadfly-blogger-of-British-politics, as form dictates it should. Rather it mutates into an hour of grilling each other, as perhaps was destined to occur upon meeting the bomb-thrower better known as Guido Fawkes, named after the anarchist who plotted to blow up … read more >>
Top banker breaches FSA rules in £2 million share trade
A Standard Chartered plc director has breached Financial Services Authority regulations over millions of pounds of his personal share dealings in the bank’s stock. A joint investigation by Euromoney and The Global Mail into the share dealings of Stanchart’s Hong Kong-based group executive director and CEO for Asia, Jaspal Singh … read more >>
Room for Everyone at The Hague
MEET Kuniko Ozaki – 55, Japanese and, since 2009, international resident of The Hague. Ozaki-san is one of the current 19 judges of the International Criminal Court, which sits in The Hague with claims as the world’s most distinguished forum to transact criminal justice. With her untaxed, near €300,000-a-year … read more >>
Europe’s Leaders-In-Waiting Face The Mess Ahead
HINDSIGHT. It’s a wise and beautiful thing. And there’s a lot of it about Europe at the minute. In Britain, the Murdoch kids believe, with hindsight, that Rupert shouldn’t have handed Rebekah Brooks the reins at News International. Much of the rest of the country reckons, in hindsight, that Rupert … read more >>
Amsterdam: I’ve Been To Bali, Too
AMSTERDAM. Been here a year. Was concerned I’d find it boring after years absorbed by manic Asia, the last years in Indonesia, which used to be Dutch. But, neo-colonially, we’re now ensconced in the Netherlands, in an agreeably restored 18th century canal-house that once traded silks, pelts and spices shipped … read more >>
LONDON: Starbucks, Star Pupils and Protest
THE Starbucks on St Paul’s Church Yard is one of the chain’s biggest and busiest outlets in London. And no wonder, servicing disciples of two deities, The City and The Church, and myriad tourists too, at £3.50 per winter-warming, triple-shot venti latte. Worshippers of Mammon swing by here in their … read more >>
Why David Cameron is sounding a lot like Hosni Mubarak
CAIRO: David Cameron doesn’t look like Hosni Mubarak — hated scourge of Egyptians. That would be Robert De Niro. Nor does dapper Dave look like Tunisia’s ousted strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, or Syria’s aptly-onomatopoeaic Bashar al-Assad, or any other tyrant from Pyongyang to Minsk. But in making a … read more >>
Wendi Deng Murdoch: La Bella Ambiciosa Que Llegò de China
LONDRES: Fue en marzo de 2007 en Pekín, adonde yo había ido a ver un hermoso siheyuan —el patio tradicional de las casas chinas— al lado de la Ciudad Prohibida, cuando por primera vez noté que algo extra- ño pasaba con mis comunicaciones. Podía enviar correos electrónicos, pero no llegaban … read more >>
Behind Wendi Deng’s billion-dollar spike
TIGER WIFE or Trophy wife? Slam-down Sister or caring partner doing a Tammy Wynette? New York socialite or about-to-be global media mogul? When Wendi Deng soared on Tuesday, 42 and pretty-in-pink, left across our TV screens to clobber the idiot cream-pieing her struggling octogenarian billionaire husband, my first thought was … read more >>
Turks might not wait
TURKEY, with its strong economy and links to Asia, may not need to be part of the European Union ISTANBUL: Is it European? Asian? Both? Neither? It’s a millennia-old question; culturally, religiously, geographically and economically. And one that could be posed more and more of Australia and its embrace, if … read more >>
Gibraltar – Cracks in the Rock?
TINY Gibraltar is an ocean away from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but it doesn’t take much traversing of the Rock’s lanes to get a distinctly Groundhog Day feeling that Bill Murray might recognize read on…
Is Turkey Ready for the EU?
ISTANBUL: It was Kylie Minogue who made me think Turkey and Europe might just about be ready for each other. There was the pop poppet — well, life-size images of her — flaunting her curvaceous clunes at shoppers in the Agent Provocateur lingerie outlet at Istanbul’s Kanyon Mall. It was … read more >>