"Millions celebrate Christmas Day
Millions celebrate Christmas Day
Masses are held in Bethlehem and Rome as Christians worldwide mark the traditional birthday of Jesus Christ.WSJ/EU-Digest: European Retailing: "Achtung Christmas Shoppers! - While US Christmas season sales fall - by Cecilie Rohwedder
Note EU-Digest: "Meanwhile in the US Christmas season sales at U.S. stores fell for the fourth straight week as rising fuel and food prices threatened to hand retailers their worst holiday shopping season in five years. Spending fell 2.2 percent for the week through Dec. 22 from a year earlier, Chicago-based ShopperTrak RCT Corp. said in a statement today. Discounter Target Corp. said separately that sales at stores open at least a year may decline in December after customer visits slowed following the Thanksgiving holiday. A 7.6 percent increase on the Saturday before Christmas wasn't enough to lift retailers' revenue last week as shoppers grapple with $3-a-gallon gasoline and a deepening housing slump. This year's holiday shopping season may grow at the slowest pace since 2002 as stores struggle to recapture the gains they saw on the Friday after Thanksgiving".Late spending spree helps Europe's retailers
Europe's retailers are showing tentative signs of having overcome bleak expectations for consumer spending in the run-up to Christmas
First the Cartoon, then the War: Europe in 1870:
All was not well in Europe in 1870, the year the Franco-Prussian war would lead to a united German Empire and a humiliated France; one could call it the first of three European civil wars, the other two being World Wars One and Two.
This French satirical cartoon map (’Carte drôlatique d’Europe pour 1870‘) sought to get some laughs out of those tensions by showing an anthropomorphic map of Europe, where each country was represented by a caricature of its national ‘persona’.
• Prussia, made to look like its walrus-bearded ‘Iron Chancellor’ Otto von Bismarck, is haranguing its neighbours: kneeling on Austria, a sleeping soldier in undress; covering the Netherlands with its right hand.
• France, dressed as a fierce zouave soldier, is aiming a bayonet at the heart of the unwieldy Prussian military monster.
• Belgium, too small to be anthropomorphised, is being squeezed between France and Prussia (which would become its familiar, if uncomfortable lot in the First and Second World Wars).
• England is an old woman, struggling with Ireland, her rebellious lapdog on a leash (although it looks more like a small bear); Scotland is the old lady’s mobcap.
• Spain is a rotund senorita, smoking the day away while lying on her back and thus nearly crushing the small Portuguese soldier under her.
• Corsica and Sardinia are joined to show a leprechaun-like figure gleefully mooning the map-reader.
• Italy, possibly made to look like the great national leader Garibaldi, is holding off pressure from Prussia.
• Denmark is a small, swaggering soldier, no doubt hoping to recover Holstein, the territory it lost to Prussia in a war a few years earlier.
• Norway and Sweden are together turned into a ferocious dog.
• Switzerland is a closed cottage.
• Turkey in Europe is “an Oriental crushed by the superincumbent pressure of the other countries”.
• Turkey in Asia is a girl smoking a hookah pipe.
• Russia is a rag-collector in a patched coat, ‘Crimea’ written on the patch sewn on last.
E.U. Should Demand More from Israel – Donald Macintyre, The Independent
New Era in Transatlantic Economic Cooperation
By Günter Verheugen
The economic partnership between the European Union and the United States is the deepest and largest bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world. Trade flows across the Atlantic are running at around €1.7 billion a day. The EU is home to almost 70% of total outward US investment. In 2005, American companies invested four times as much in Belgium as they did in China the following year....
Hope and fear over Schengen
The expansion of the Schengen passport-free zone brings hopes and fears to a former frontier post where three EU states meet.Gulf states to be new target of Sarkozy's nuclear diplomacy
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France will next month step up his use of civil nuclear power as a diplomatic tool, with a visit to the Gulf states in which he will...Serbian MPs issue Kosovo warning
Serbian MPs vote to condemn any attempt by its troubled province of Kosovo to declare independence.Serbia rejects link between Kosovo and EU integration
DW: Slovenia Steps into European Spotlight
Germany: Home of the Kindergarten but Lacking in Children
Ulf Gartzke from the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University contends that educated couples have fewer children because of the welfare state, which is also to blame for the increase in child poverty.CER Preparing for the multipolar world: European foreign and security policy in 2020
essay by Charles Grant with Tomas Valasek
Anti-Islamic outsider is top Dutch politician
Geert Wilders' pithy and shocking soundbites against Muslims have dominated headlines while his parliamentary outbursts have brought an adversarial style of politicsIHT Europe's east-west border is at last wide open In Eastern Germany on a frontier that forks into Poland and the Czech Republic, four European leaders dismantled a passport-control point that symbolized the Cold War divide
Russia's December 2007 Legislative Election: Outcome and Implications CRS
High Stakes in the High North IFRI
This 26-page French paper analyses the developing Russo-Norwegian energy relationship
ERM Report 2007 - Restructuring and employment in the EU: The impact of globalisation
ERM Report 2007 - Restructuring and employment in the EU: The impact of globalisation
Source: Eurofound
This report provides some perspectives on the effects of trade liberalisation on the European labour market. For its analysis, it draws on data from the European Restructuring Monitor (ERM), the only EU-wide monitoring instrument available. The 2007 ERM report identifies some of the recent and emerging trends in the current phase of globalisation and provides suggestions on how policy should be re-oriented to address these new circumstances.
Industrial relations in the EU, Japan, US and other global economies, 2005–2006
Industrial relations in the EU, Japan, US and other global economies, 2005–2006
Source: Eurofound
In the context of global competition, it is increasingly relevant to look at Europe’s economic development in a wider perspective. This report gives an overview of the main industrial relations developments in the European Union, Japan and the US in 2005 and 2006. It charts the similarities and trends in industrial relations as well as the differences in basic structures and developments between these three major economies.
Foundation Findings: Work–life balance – Solving the dilemma
Source: Eurofound
This issue of Foundation Findings deals with work-life balance in Europe. The EU needs to increase employment rates to ensure continued economic growth and promote social inclusion. To do this, it needs to make it easier for individuals to combine their work and family commitments to facilitate people – women in particular – to enter the labour market. Foundation Findings provide pertinent background information and policy pointers for all actors and interested parties engaged in the current European debate on the future of social policy. The contents are based on Foundation research and reflect its autonomous and tripartite structure.
Housing and integration of migrants in Europe
Source: Eurofound
Housing is a fundamental issue that affects the quality of life of citizens as well as being an important indicator of the degree of integration. Successful housing policies play an important role in shaping social policymaking at the local level, affecting the future integration of migrants and their descendants. This report, published jointly with the Council of Europe, presents successful practices and strategies from 20 cities participating in the first module of the European Network of Cities for Local Integration Policies for Migrants (CLIP).
Europe's Eastern Promise
Ronald D. Asmus After the Cold War, NATO and the EU opened their doors to central and eastern Europe, making the continent safer and freer than ever before. Today, NATO and the EU must articulate a new rationale for enlarging still further, once again extending democracy and prosperity to the East, this time in the face of a more powerful and defiant Russia.
Europe has no Pakistan Policy, US has a Bad One
Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer writes in the Turkish paper Today’s Zaman:“US policy toward Pakistan is also dangerously shortsighted and reminiscent of the mistakes the US made in Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution. Nevertheless, the US at least has a Pakistan policy -- which is more than can be said about NATO and Europe. In fact, it is all but incomprehensible that while the future of NATO is being decided in the Hindu Kush Mountains, and while thousands of European soldiers stationed there are risking their lives, Pakistan is not given any role in NATO’s plans and calculations.”
Parliament tests web TV channel
European Parliament Vice-President Vidal-Quadras (EPP, Spain) today announced to members of the European Parliament via email that the new EP web-TV is open for testing via the Parliament’s intranet. We understand that if the test goes well, those behind the channel are hoping to launch to the channel to the rest of us in the New Year.
Review of 2007: A year that began with euphoria and ended with the spectre of recession
