How do you present arguments for and against something while making sure it’s plain the reader should be for? One way to do it is to present the arguments against as being, in fact, opinions held by, for example, politicians. This is a method that Dean Baker has drawn attention to on numerous occasions. For […]
There really is no such thing as a cloud without a silver lining. The crisis is now being used as a stick to beat Poles into accepting the euro as their national currency. “Look at Slovakia,” they say. They do not say: Slovakia’s central bank has surrendered its say in how to deal with the […]
Following on from Berlusconi’s recent re-positioning of Italy as a developing country, aligning itself not with the industrial giants of Britain, France and Germany in relation to the EU’s 20-20-20 Climate Change initiative but with countries like Poland (and a further 8 nations which have yet to be named), there is speculation* that Italy, troubled […]
A popular arts show in Italy, Che tempo che fa, has appealed to viewers to write in to the show requesting books that, currently out-of-print, they’d like to see re-published by authors. Top of the list is Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. Another surprising entry is Alan Hollinghurst’s recent Booker winning novel The Line […]
In a bizarre mash-up, caught between Andy Warhol’s ‘famous for fifteen minutes’ dictum and the moment in Spartacus when Tony Curtis cries ‘No, I’m Spartacus’, Italy’s hugely unpopular Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini has confessed that she too is Obama – or rather that her ‘reforms’ are inspired by Barack Obama. Gelmini’s ‘reforms’, which are primarily cuts […]
Polish workers (among others) are required by law to play the stock market with at least part of their pension savings. I hardly need to go into what has happened to the stock markets of late. Gazeta Wyborcza had a cheerful lead story on Thursday: The Shares Slump is Devouring Pensioners (a very free translation […]
A friend once decided on a whiskey drinking project as a new year’s resolution. She decided she would sample a different whiskey each week through the year. More a gift than a resolution for many, but for her it was an arduous task, given that she didn’t particularly like whiskey. Her thinking was far from […]
Here are translated (badly – the Polish language has changed and I don’t have a historical dictionary), edited snippets of a letter from Catherine II to her Polish – ahem – subjects in 1768 after the Bar Confederation. “…Our army in the Commonwealth of Poland, for the keeping of peace … Our friendly, allied nation […]
The Lega Nord have often been accused of xenophobia – a charge that is too general to hold. The party, which is playing a legislative blinder at the moment, bludgeoning through various reforms as if they personally had the support of the majority of Italians (rather than their actual 8% in both the lower and […]