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THE PAPER CLIP, 22 SEPTEMBER
European Voice
Monday 22 September 2008
Belgium
The financial crisis continues to dominate the headlines this
morning. France's Libération reports on the US government's decision
to inject $700 billion into the US financial system - the biggest
state intervention since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The paper
notes that Hank Paulson, the secretary of the US Treasury, has warned
that banks could still fail, notwithstanding the bailout. Britain's The
Guardian writes that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday said
he will draw up a package of measures designed to tackle the economic
crisis, including a drive for tighter international controls of the
global money markets and a crackdown on the culture of irresponsible
City bonuses. The Financial Times reports that Angela Merkel,
Germany's chancellor, this weekend vented public frustration at the
US and UK governments' previous opposition to the stronger regulation
of financial markets. In Russia, the Financial Times reports that
Russia's finance ministry yesterday widened the provision of emergency
budget funding to Russia's banking system on top of the â~B¬90 billion
injected into the country's financial markets last week.
>From Slovenia comes the news that Slovenia's largest governing party,
the centre-right Slovenian Democrats led by Prime Minister Janez
Janša, appears to have lost the general elections by the narrowest
of margins, one seat (30.5% versus 29.3%). The final results are due
later today. The victorious Social Democrat party is led by a member
of the European Parliament (and a former male model), Borut Pahor. The
result puts a party chiefly representing pensioners centre-stage:
its seven seats could determine whether a centre-right or centre-left
governing coalition is formed. El País and Bloomberg are among those
with reports.
Newspapers in Belgium are taken up with a further spasm in the
prolonged governmental crisis. The 'wise men' appointed by the king
in June to recommend the next steps submitted their report on Friday
and the weekend has been taken up with reaction and counter-reaction
from the various political parties. A party meeting of the Flemish
nationalist N-VA, which is in a cartel with CD&V, the Flemish Christian
Democrats, the party of Prime Minister Yves Leterme, voted yesterday
against the government. 'Leterme pris au piège de la N-VA' is how
the francophone La Libre Belgique puts it. De Standaard says that the
CD&V has to choose between the government and its cartel with N-VA,
thereby achieving a rare moment of agreement with Le Soir, whose
front-page headline is "Le CD&V doit choisir: le pays ou la N-VA".
The stability of another political system, Turkey's, is the subject of
a report in The Guardian, which writes about the Turkish government's
denial that the mass slaughter of Armenians in the last years of
the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide. Turkey risks a collapse
of its secular political system if it recognises the term genocide,
the paper says.
A car bomb exploded outside a police station in the Basque region in
north Spain yesterday morning wounding 10 people, the International
Herald Tribune reports. The blast came just hours after another bomb
exploded in the regional capital Vitoria, causing no injuries.
The EU has earmarked â~B¬1.5 million to developing the audiovisual
sector in the four countries of the Mercosur group - Argentina,
Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, El País reports.
Lastly, two articles to ponder as you do what you are doing now:
reading online. The US Chronicle of Higher Education (hat-tip:
Polymeme, a top-drawer aggregator) reports a study that finds, as
its headline writer puts it, that "online reading is of a lesser
kind" -- or, as the researcher says: "The web is too fast-paced for
big-picture learning... At the same time, the Web is perfect for
narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets -- so long as
the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make
sense of the facts." If that worries you, you might prefer a report
from Britain's Daily Telegraph, which writes that the web is helping
the popularity of poetry to soar (or, at least, the popularity of
the British site Poetry Archive).
--Boundary_(ID_lceP3+txO0MBWsh3YOIzrg)- -
European Voice
Monday 22 September 2008
Belgium
The financial crisis continues to dominate the headlines this
morning. France's Libération reports on the US government's decision
to inject $700 billion into the US financial system - the biggest
state intervention since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The paper
notes that Hank Paulson, the secretary of the US Treasury, has warned
that banks could still fail, notwithstanding the bailout. Britain's The
Guardian writes that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday said
he will draw up a package of measures designed to tackle the economic
crisis, including a drive for tighter international controls of the
global money markets and a crackdown on the culture of irresponsible
City bonuses. The Financial Times reports that Angela Merkel,
Germany's chancellor, this weekend vented public frustration at the
US and UK governments' previous opposition to the stronger regulation
of financial markets. In Russia, the Financial Times reports that
Russia's finance ministry yesterday widened the provision of emergency
budget funding to Russia's banking system on top of the â~B¬90 billion
injected into the country's financial markets last week.
>From Slovenia comes the news that Slovenia's largest governing party,
the centre-right Slovenian Democrats led by Prime Minister Janez
Janša, appears to have lost the general elections by the narrowest
of margins, one seat (30.5% versus 29.3%). The final results are due
later today. The victorious Social Democrat party is led by a member
of the European Parliament (and a former male model), Borut Pahor. The
result puts a party chiefly representing pensioners centre-stage:
its seven seats could determine whether a centre-right or centre-left
governing coalition is formed. El País and Bloomberg are among those
with reports.
Newspapers in Belgium are taken up with a further spasm in the
prolonged governmental crisis. The 'wise men' appointed by the king
in June to recommend the next steps submitted their report on Friday
and the weekend has been taken up with reaction and counter-reaction
from the various political parties. A party meeting of the Flemish
nationalist N-VA, which is in a cartel with CD&V, the Flemish Christian
Democrats, the party of Prime Minister Yves Leterme, voted yesterday
against the government. 'Leterme pris au piège de la N-VA' is how
the francophone La Libre Belgique puts it. De Standaard says that the
CD&V has to choose between the government and its cartel with N-VA,
thereby achieving a rare moment of agreement with Le Soir, whose
front-page headline is "Le CD&V doit choisir: le pays ou la N-VA".
The stability of another political system, Turkey's, is the subject of
a report in The Guardian, which writes about the Turkish government's
denial that the mass slaughter of Armenians in the last years of
the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide. Turkey risks a collapse
of its secular political system if it recognises the term genocide,
the paper says.
A car bomb exploded outside a police station in the Basque region in
north Spain yesterday morning wounding 10 people, the International
Herald Tribune reports. The blast came just hours after another bomb
exploded in the regional capital Vitoria, causing no injuries.
The EU has earmarked â~B¬1.5 million to developing the audiovisual
sector in the four countries of the Mercosur group - Argentina,
Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, El País reports.
Lastly, two articles to ponder as you do what you are doing now:
reading online. The US Chronicle of Higher Education (hat-tip:
Polymeme, a top-drawer aggregator) reports a study that finds, as
its headline writer puts it, that "online reading is of a lesser
kind" -- or, as the researcher says: "The web is too fast-paced for
big-picture learning... At the same time, the Web is perfect for
narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets -- so long as
the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make
sense of the facts." If that worries you, you might prefer a report
from Britain's Daily Telegraph, which writes that the web is helping
the popularity of poetry to soar (or, at least, the popularity of
the British site Poetry Archive).
--Boundary_(ID_lceP3+txO0MBWsh3YOIzrg)- -