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Friday, 30 May 2008 |
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The US State Department has slapped the French
government’s wrist for communicating with the Palestinian
group Hamas. The United States and the European Union
have ruled that Hamas are terrorists. France broke off
contact with Hamas after its members seized control of the
Gaza strip in June last year but, according to ‘Le Figaro’, a
top retired French diplomat Yves de la Messuzière,
formerly French ambassador in Iraq, paid a visit to Gaza in
April. Asked about it on Europe 1, French foreign Minister
Bernard Kouchner replied semantically: “These are not
relations, they are contacts.”
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Friday, 30 May 2008 |
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The German postal service had the ingenious idea of
allowing members of the public to design and order their
own stamps. The service came on line in February.
Naturally, the designs used are monitored but not carefully
enough to prevent an order for 20 stamps with a picture of
convicted Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess from slipping
through. The far-right magazine ‘Deutsche Stimme’
gloated: “The Hess stamp is out there”. Hess, who
committed suicide at the age of 93 in Berlin’s Spandau
prison in 1987, is a hero of the German Far Right.
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Friday, 30 May 2008 |
The remorseless rise in the price of oil and the re-election
of Silvio Berlusconi has finally brought about the end of
Italy’s non-nuclear policy. Announcing the decision, the
new energy minister Claudio Scajola said only nuclear
power stations can produce energy on a big scale, reliably,
competitively and at the same time respect the environment.
The minister said that it would still take between seven and
10 years before the first electricity came on line.
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Friday, 30 May 2008 |
The newly formed crossborder
political party,
Newropeans, is preparing for
the European parliamentary
elections in June next year.
Members describe
themselves as a “trans-
European political project”
aiming to “democratise the
European Union”.
They intend only to
operate on a European level
and will put up candidates in
all 27 member countries but
will not stand in any national
or regional elections.
So far their most striking
initiative is to support the
petition against Tony Blair
being made the first full-time
president of the EU’s Council
of Ministers.
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Friday, 30 May 2008 |
Irish voters will decide the fate of the Lisbon Treaty. The outcome
is crucial for the French President and how France begins its
presidency of the European Union on July 1.
The Irish referendum will decide
the fate of the Lisbon treaty. A win
for the Yes vote on June 16 means
Nicolas Sarkozy’s Lisbon constitutional
treaty passes smoothly into law and his
European policy succeeds just as France
takes over the EU presidency. Defeat
will break the spell cast by the French
president when he so adroitly negotiated
away the need for a referendum in
France, Holland and Britain.
In the past, a small country voting
No to a major new European measure
just meant that they were told to go back
and do it again, as with Denmark in
1993 and Ireland itself in 2001. The
threat was isolation. This time it will be
different. There has been too much talk
about the need for democracy in the
European Union to get away with such a
shoddy solution again.
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